Showing posts with label Klaus Kinski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Klaus Kinski. Show all posts

Thursday, September 04, 2014

Beyond the Green Inferno: HERZOG: The Collection (16 film Blu-ray collection) - Review


Francis Ford Coppola's disastrous decision to cast Brando as Colonel Kurz for Apocalypse Now (1979) is by now a true Hollywood cautionary tale of amok ambition and dangers of trusting in the improv skills of titans: Coppola was losing his Godfather fortune, and sanity even before Brando finally showed up. Francis was already stretched past endurance by typhoon season, drugs, malaria, wayward helicopters, Martin Sheen's heart attack, and Dennis Hopper's gibbering mania. Brando arrived late, as the myth goes, and overweight. He appeared befuddled, acted irrationally, if at all, pissing away Coppola's millions while he mumbled incoherently along, utterly and in every way unprepared. This final straw took years off Coppola's life. The entire shoot dragged on for two years, and Brando wore Coppola's genius down to such a low point he's never gotten it back (he admits it). Francis's films have tended towards the safely set-bound ever since. Never in a million years would he work with Brando again, let alone bring him back to Philippines in ten years for Apocalypse Now 2. 

Herzog would. 

Let the woeful tale of Coppola's nonetheless undeniable masterpiece be testament not just to the dangers of jungle location shooting (when overlapping with monsoon season can be cataclysmic) and hiring temperamental egomaniacs as stars, but to the gonzo madness of Werner Herzog, who went back again and again to his jungle, and worked with his egotistical maniac, one who made Kurz-era Brando seem a model of professionalism, no less than five times. Such masochism is surely indicative of a personality that would have thrived in the very same madness that consumed Coppola on that woebegone shoot, would have welcomed the miseries, would have saw it all as a welcome relief from the terrifying existential crisis proffered by German 'sanity,' and maybe would have put a gun to Brando's head and said snap into it or die here, right here and now. Maybe Coppola needed to be German to find that heart of darkness, maybe he needed a German actor like Klaus Kinski as his Kurtz.

See, Kinski starts deep in the darkness heart, already deeper in the blackness that Brando could ever reach, not if he mumbled and hid in the shadows for ten thousand takes. And Klaus just goes deeper from there. Brando's Heart of Darkness is as a blazing sun by contrast.


In Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)--their first collaboration and the film that put Herzog on the map--Kinski plays a wayward conquistador searching for El Dorado. His Aguirre doesn't just usurp his royal commander on a side trip down the Amazon, he usurps the King of Spain himself, and sails ever onward into the jungle, eventually ruling over a raft full of gibbering monkeys after the rest of the expedition has been picked off by unseen natives or quietly run off while his crazy ass was sleepin'.

Insane or no, while the other actors make their marks and look around nervously, Kinski's Aguirre is making friends with the insects; he's imitating the movements of wind through the fronds in every little gesture; his giant frog eyes dilate, seething, and lolling back on a tide of bi-polar narcissism, Kinski seems eternally adrip and a-trip with the psychedelic madness of the messianic complex - the kind of psychosis you can't fake. It takes real wild man energy. Magnetic, tragic, and terrifying, it's almost like he can see us watching him, through the screen, while he's Aguirre, from back in 1972, from across time and media formatting, when his eyes meet ours and we shiver in our safety shadows as if he's right there in the room and could turn us to stone and steal our drink from our of our frozen hands. We feel his breathing in the clatter of trash cans and whir of sirens in the distance outside the window; he's in our blood like a fever, and somehow he knows it.

And now, thanks to a gorgeous and essential set from Shout Factory, we have the whole story of Herzog's existential sanity with and without Kinski's foam-at-the-mouth madness, whether colliding in the middle of the South American jungles and German hamlets of the mind and mud, it's all there: Herzog: The Collection gives us 16 films on stunning Blu-ray, covering a 30 year period--from his black and white cult slice of mayhem Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) to 1998's My Best Friend, Herzog's documentary about his five films with Kinski (all of which are included in the set). All in all, it's a three decade-spanning Götterdämmerung of low-key brilliance, ranging from fictional films to documentaries, cinéma vérités and even semi-faux documentaries. It's one of the most well-constructed sets I've ever seen, no annoying slipcase or crackable plastic, all beautiful thick pages with the DVDs fitting perfectly within thick paper pages, dark colors bled to the edges, all pulsing green photographs from the films. The dark images perfectly capture the moody existentialism, Germanic emotional Alpine peaks and harrowing crevasses of Herzog's style, the intentional blurring of the line between documentary-reality--with himself onscreen as narrator and shaper of action--and historical recreation and/or other fiction. And each fiction movie is likely to include a documentary of its making, it's own DVD extra in a matter of course, with commentary tracks abounding, the very least a death to nature.

Maybe like me you've seen some dusty PAL or VHS copies of these in the past, but these Blu-rays are a whole different world; we can now make out every blade of grass, every drop of flowing river, and every dirty fissure in Kinski's extraordinarily expressive face. Challenging, disturbing, beautiful, tragic, and sometimes downright boring, watch them all and feel your senses slow and widen and dilate to better behold God's all-seeing blindness.

And through all five of their collaborations, Kinski's willingness to throw himself off a cliff at the drop of a hat provides the perfect orbiting satellite for Herzog's implacable planetary sanity. There are also several documentaries and two films with his other insane star, Bruno S: 1974's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (a true story of an abused man with eerie parallels to Bruno's own dark childhood as subject of Nazi experiments), and Stroszek (1977). According to imdb: Bruno "was very difficult to work with... sometimes needing several hours of screaming before he could do a scene."

If anyone was going to be able to work with him, to wait out the screams and/or get them on film, it would be Herzog.

Bruno, you look the picture of health!
Needless to say, the extras are not all successful (Where the Green Ants Dream, for example, has a commentary track but it's in German mit out subtitles, was ist los mit dir, Shout?). But all the extras add to the self-reflective post-modern sense of dreaming and waking up into a dream far more vivid than localized reality. Herzog's films almost being commentaries of the films as they're happening, the sheer metatextuality of commentaries on commentaries adds one more rung on the ladder between screen and viewer consciousness, until the TV is as a giant fishbowl mirror where you can see yourself slowly drowning.

Brother, you said it
In addition to the stunning and essential Aguirre, and Fitzcarraldo (1982) and their final collaboration, Cobra Verde (1987), Herzog made two small scale masterpieces, shot in Germany, with Kinski in 1979. Wocyzek is an adaptation of a German play about a soldier who kills his wife after he's endured mind control experiments: claustrophobic, hypnotic, glacially slow and tragic, it provides the chance for Kinski to bounce off four walls for a change before caving in on himself in high Germanic style. It's also a more effective horror film for my money than Nosferatu, which seems airless and beery compared to most Herzog films, partly no doubt due to the uber-bland, soft-bellied somnambulism of Bruno Ganz's Harker. Though he's supposedly making a fantasy-horror film, a remake of a silent vampire classic, Herzog is unwilling to abandon his beloved docu-realism and uses found settings to replace the dream expressionism the tale so clearly demands (and Kinski's little baby doll fangs are ridiculous). Shooting on location in Bavaria and Carpathian towns in centuries old buildings seems a good idea on paper, but the budget wasn't there to paint things in cobwebs and Gothic air, so the slick white sealer lathered onto the brick walls of old inns and castle interiors (used to keep the dampness out) gives them a dead museum air. Put Herzog in the jungle and he comes alive, but on European soil he drowns in ghosts, the centuries of history strangling him in a Germanic noose he cannot film except through terrible period haircuts, beer-puffed German faces (nothing like the hardships of the jungle to strip that away) and costumes that seem fresh from the Oktoberfest peasant parade.

Adjani is--however--a great expressionistic Mina. With her darkened doll eyes, pale skin and jet black hair, she seems straight out of--not just Murnau's original, but Cabinet of Caligari or Lang's Mabuse -- a child of some Gothic Tim Burton does Weimar Marwen dollhouse.


Having only seen Herzog's Aguirre, Nosferatu, Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and At the Top of the World before diving into this set, I came in thinking Herzog's obsessions with dreams seemed a kind of knee-jerk raison d'être for his continued docu-wandering. Just the weirdly Germanic way he says "what are their dreams?" every five minutes in his voiceovers made me kind of want to throttle him, or go to sleep and have dreams and not tell him shit about them. I was however drawn to review this massive collection as some kind of masochistic indulgence (my own German heritage?) which I knew in the end would be soul transforming. Indeed, it has proven a soul-warping, awe inspiring, yet deeply troubling--sometimes even maddeningly boring but always insightful and deeply Herzogian--25+ hours of jungles and paranoia.


Another confession, in addition to the way he says "their dreams" I have always been put off by some of Herzog's more jokey titles, especially: Even Dwarfs Started Small and Little Dieter Needs to Fly may boisterous, very original, and life-affirming. Like Jodorowsky or a drunk Bunuel, filmed in black and white, Dwarfs is a bit like the end of Over the Edge stretched to feature length with little people playing the kids, only not as good. Little Dieter Needs to Fly turns out to be a deeply moving true story of the only POW pilot, shot down over Laos and held prisoner for two years, suffering terrible tortures at the hand of the Viet Cong until he made a great escape through the uncrossable jungles. With Herzog in tow, Dengler revisits the locations and some of his captors. In one unforgettable scene, Dengler puts his forgiving arm around a former torturer. The look in that ashamed Vietnamese guy's eyes is so profound, their connection so human, it almost makes the whole war worthwhile. Dengler is quite a character, his ever-present gratitude to be free and his continual fascination with planes and food and the joy of being able to open doors -all speak to the long term effects--negative and even positive--of surviving long-term captivity. It's catchy. You may never look at doors the same way.


As Herzog's camera follows, Dengler talks us through his ordeal in modulated perfect flow of English, words cascading over the rocks and trees, and he never seems to need to take a breath. Through it all, Herzog--a bastion of sanity begging to be eroded by the fertile fecund jungle--watches and learns of nature's bloody initiation. As Dengler goes on, one realizes he's a great writer --it's all facts, no wasting time with describing emotions or feelings, and when he mentions his dreams and hallucinations they're described in the same matter-of-fact style. When he tells of a near-death vision he had of horsemen angels rolling towards him through the clouds, signaling his death approaching from hunger, disease, and deprivation, Herzog doesn't need to do anything for us to feel the collective soul's thunderous nod.

It's through these moments that one discovers the root of Herzog's genius. Physical reality, to him, is just the eventual manifestation of the unconscious. Twisted up as we are, raw and full of mysteries, dreams have more in common with reality than our emotions or feelings. Herzog eventually filmed a more dramatized version of the story, Rescue Dawn (2006), starring Christian Bale, but it's Dieter that packs more punch for being such a gentle, forgiving film in image and speech, conveying at the same time such deep horrors and inhumanities on both sides, but never with judgments. It helps there's no actor like Bale there to bring the tortures vividly to life. Hearing about them rather than seeing them makes them bearable.


Another example of this unique documentary approach is Lessons of Darkness (1992), which shows the horrors of Kuwaiti oil fires in the weeks after the (first) Gulf War, the oil blackening the sky and pillars of flame illuminating everything in all directions. Using shots of fire alternating with faces of Kuwaitis, letting the amniotic droning of the music, and his infrequent moments of enigmatic narration, he guides our response only, as it were, to the precipice - not of emotion (there's no judgment one way or the other) but of Germanic awe at the weird intensity of life here. At the end, when the oil firefighters, having extinguished most of the fires and capped the wells, re-light one, Herzog doesn't concern himself with getting to the rationale behind it. He's only looking for his own answers to his own questions the nature of dreams, madness.

He describes the sight thus:
"Two figures are approaching an oil well.
One of them holds a lighted torch.
What are they up to?
Are they going to rekindle the blaze?
Has life without fire become unbearable for them?
Others, seized by madness, follow suit.
Now they are content
Now there is something to extinguish again."

In the end it's this kind ambivalence and moral ambiguity, that 'need to extinguish' that makes Herzog endure. His narration in the documentaries makes no plea for tolerance or recycling. He doesn't try to understand if there's a valid reason Dieter Dengler was bombing Laos or being starved by his captors; he doesn't judge the oil workers lighting the gushing untapped oil back up after working so hard to put it out; he doesn't judge the mining company finally winning the right to blast the green anthills apart in Where the Green Ants Dream. He knows any judgment would automatically reflect his own prejudice. He lets instead the camera finds its way to a zone where poetry and truth operate free of imposed meaning. Within these jungles and hellish landscapes, Herzog is like an astronaut letting his camera find some unknown new planet; the camera does the searching, he obediently follows, bringing only a gold record of Wagner's "Siegfried's Funeral March" along for company. Even if the planet is 400 degrees he will gamely step into the pyre, refusing to judge the flame as it consumes him. Get this set, then, and wade in to there with him. As your screaming ego melts down around you, you will see the light at the end of the dark tunnel, glorious and godly.... let go of that need to extinguish yourself... keep burning....

And if you keep melting and moving deeper, you will see a new, stranger darkness waiting behind the light, the darkest heart, the one Coppola's camera could never quite catch...


Friday, March 02, 2012

CinemArchetype #6: The Wanton


We've all heard the words that bags both dirt and douche have for sexually active women: skank, slut, and ho. You would think a girl who is generous with her sexuality would be respected and revered amongst such people, who presumably want to get laid one day. But any club that might want their membership is not only deigned but derogated. Phrases like 'suck my dick' and 'cocksucker' are instead the height of insult rather than gentle requests, reflecting deeply repressed sexophobic anxiety. In any sexually sane society they would be positives; "may your parts be fairly and gently sucked" could be a nice way of ending a letter to a friend, for example.  After all, most of all of us love oral sex... so why, forgive the expression, badmouth it?


The Nympho Ward (from top) La Notte, Shock Corridor
With the help of Freud, Jung, and Lacan, this strange dichotomy becomes clear: If the female one desires is passive and unsure, if she needs to be convinced and coaxed, then the sex is a matter of conquering and 'penetrating.' If the woman is aggressive and eager then the sex is a matter of being devoured, of disappearing. The metaphor might be the rocket that hopes to land on Venus, disembark and plant a nice US flag, but instead the ship lands in soft earth and is swallowed up, when it's spit out its been shorn of its fins and flattened into a nice Venusian tourism billboard. It's a rough but apt metaphor that saves us from getting too Freudian with phallic anxiety (i.e. our phallus may one day 'drop off' as our mother's did) while getting perhaps at the same murky truth: Sex is complicated. Just when we've figured out enough it's rules to get started on a game, the wanton comes in and upsets the board, cutting out 9 of the 10 steps and leaving one woozy with confusion, fear of the sudden proximity/availability of desire's object, and then shame and anger when a moment's hesitation is deemed pathetic by the wanton, who then twirls away laughing. If you can't go from civilized man to brutish savage in a split second, she wants nothing to do with you. But did she maybe pick you knowing you'd hesitate in just such a manner? Don't put it past her.

In the writing of Slavoj Zizek and Todd McGowan via Lacan, we can think of this in terms of the objet petit a, wherein sexual gratification with some ultimate hottie is the ultimate status symbol, which will in effect restore us to our status as mom's golden phallic replacement. And YET this enhanced completion is dependent on the eyes of the Big Other; therefore we must never 'get' that final puzzle piece because our need for the other's desire constructs our whole identity. Winning the hottie is only one part of it, the other part is the boasting to the friends, seeing their impressed faces as they see you leave the club with her. This is where the real objet petit a dwells: finding what the Other wants and getting it for ourselves, essentially becoming that which is wanted through having it.

But then comes the Lacanian kicker: after boasting and being laid and being seen leaving with the object of desire, the man is still disappointed: his friends don't really care beyond a few words of awe, they're too busy staring at the TV - your triumph was last night, today they're watching the game or worrying about the next party. Woe to you, the emptiness you felt before this conquest is still there. And now what? Without Lacan there's nothing but confused despair. With Lacan we can appreciate that it is exactly this very moment of disillusionment that is so valuable. Indeed it was what the illusion was reated for in the first place. In this moment of existential ennui we are like a perfect distillation of potential. We can hear the cover slam shut on the first volume of our adventures in some far off dimension where our life is being 'read' aloud to some class of angelic schoolchildren. In the space between that feeling of completion and the opening of volume 2, that dead space, is the zero point  - what sexually experienced swingers call 'the walk of shame' or 'post-coital depression' or, if they're married, 'guilt'. Yet it also sweet, a kind of empty triumph that, we have to achieve it to actually realize, may be the purest kind. We're set free, as Lou Reed once sang, "to find a new illusion." Choose well!

The temptation, of course, is to to do nothing with the opportunity presented by this moment of peak stasis (the moment at the top, right before the mountain climber must turn around and descend). And instead blame the girl. Her desire robbed ours! That is where the wanton as psychic vampire comes in. Me for example, I learned through experience that sex with a Taurus always leaves me psychically depleted and depressed. No other sign does so! Since I've been around the block you know I learned by experience. Not that it stops me, since I love Tauruses!! Still it is perhaps this ingrained fear of depletion, the need for sex to be a whole song and dance, that makes most men hesitate when the wanton pounces. We find female desire terrifying because it inflicts an external desire onto us rather than vice versa, and it's a trap we're only comfortable setting, and thus having it sprung in our face we're at least not blaming someone else.

However, since it's a man's world, the female orgasm is considered more traumatic and X-rated than if she's merely disemboweled, which is why the American ratings board is so screwed up (Check out This Film is Not Yet Rated), regularly giving NC-17s to any film where a girl is seen having an orgasm but gang rape and butchery may only garner an R. This shit's been making me super mad ever since Porky's introduced the misogynistic sex comedy deluge in the early 1980s, turning even my Sunday School Teacher into a snarky ass and me instantly into a 14 year-old misandric feminist.

But hey, I'm no hero; I too know the terror of recoiling from the terror generated by a truly desiring female: I had this gorgeous blue-eyed Taurus girlfriend in college and some nights while I was tripping intensely she'd come to me with her blue eyes lit up in longing, her loveliness vibrating, the combination of the purple flannel shirt I bought her for Xmas and her pale white skin, beautiful breasts, jet black Chrissie Hynde hair, those Alaska sky blue eyes drawing me to her with every shuddering breath, and I'd feel uncontrollable terror and revulsion, like her beauty and longing posed some monstrous challenge I was in no shape to meet. Once I was drunk and out of my skull on acid and having just watched Caligula for what seemed like 30 agonizing blood-soaked years in a single night. She was dressed in weird white make-up as a lizard girl that night (it was Halloween, 1988) and seemed like a terrifying demon. When the make-up came off after we got home (around 4 AM) her beauty hit me like an anchor in the gut. At dawn, after the Caligula taping,  I crept up and she was waiting in bed, to hold me to her and when I closed my eyes I saw bloody red roses and giant Caligula thresher blades running towards my buried neck as we fooled around. It got worse, later, after we watched Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS together. God help me, I couldn't have sex without seeing literally red behind my eyelids for weeks.

I lost my point back there somewhere, dude. I fell into an orbit of back-handed boasting again. Did you catch it? Shit runs deep, even down under the psychic scarring of watching CALIGULA over and over on too much LSD. Jeezus. Zappa was right, "the torture / never stops."

The Seduction
Another great cinematic example of how male desire hinges on female evasiveness is found in a largely forgotten 1982 Morgan Fairchild vehicle called The Seduction. Fairchild is a star being stalked by a sleazy creep (but he's good-looking Andrew Stevens) and by the end she has to do battle with him alone in her swanky mansion. He's crafty, relentless and won't take no for an answer. How will she fend him off? He stalks her around her mansion for awhile, and then, all out of options, she's finally fed up with a whole movie worth of his obsessive crap and turns the tables. How? By suddenly coming onto him. She turns around and demands he take his pants off, let's get this over with, Stud, see what you're packin' --so she starts pursuing him around the room, acting all needy, etc. It freaks him out and suddenly he can't get away fast enough. Genius!

I haven't seen it since, don't remember a damn thing about it other than that climactic role switch - but man, I never forgot it. It was a huge lesson to me in explaining my own adolescent fear/desire self-sabotage around girls who seemed more than willing to make out right there on the recess playground. Morgan Fairchild taught me more in that one move than a dozen  lovelorn obsessions might.

That's why I could only smile in recognition when a girl we'll call Karen did the same thing. Beautiful but empty-headed, she'd sleep with me one night or so a month and then ignore me altogether the rest of the time. I didn't get that, figuring only a man would be such a cad, that if you stay over we're in a relationship. When after a long day/night i finally felt I had won her over via my needy moping the night before, we met after class, and got drunk at the local bar happy hour. She sat in my lap and prattled like a vain idiot, and clung to my neck like a barnacle. She was incessantly hanging on me to the point I remembered The Seduction scene. Her prior aloofness made me pine like a black velvet puppy for months, and now I was fed up with her after merely a few hours. Genius. Not sure if she did it on purpose or not, but man, did it ever work.

We can see this switch in the public's eventual rejection of silent era siren Clara Bow, for example. In the 1920s Bow was a huge success; her sexuality was legend, a matter of national pride. But when the Great Depression and sound came along the public rejected her wild sexuality and renounced her altogether. Indirectly, I'm sure they blamed her promiscuity for the economic collapse; they rejected, not just her, but their own past obsession with her. They had made--en masse--the Seduction switch, running away like Fairchild's spooked stalker. A similar moment occurred right around 1980, after the the 1970s free love vibe succumbed to AIDS awareness, slasher movies, the rise of home video making a plethora of lurid unedited urban rape/revenge films easily rentable by childrenthe assassination of John Lennon, and various daycare sex scandals. As a child in the 1970s I'd basked in semi-erotic attention from cute babysitters and my dad's secretaries at late at night at drunken bridge games, marveled at the way parents were so physically affectionate with each other's spouses and it was all acceptable and fine and good. Nowadays all those girls would be jailed as pedophiles as would our teachers in elementary school for spanking us on our birthdays, one spank for every year, while the other kids cheered and counted along.

Oops, once again, sexual reverie has thrown me off track. So hard to stay objective. Let me conclude and just say I still resent that the 1980s stole my libidinal freedom, and now every time some dirt bag says words like 'slut' or 'skank' I feel the urge to go back in time and sabotage the filming of Porky's. Instead, I guess all I can do is round up some examples of super nymphs:

1. Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind (1956)

In their overview for Dorothy Malone, TCM notes she "made her first impact as a nymphomaniac entertaining Humphrey Bogart one thundery afternoon in 'The Big Sleep' (1946)." Nymphomaniac is a pretty strong word since we don't really know what goes on between them in the fade-out between their first drink and her spotting Geiger leaving the shop. Did someone at TCM get this role confused with her Oscar-winning turn in Written on the Wind? Or is it just that if a girl invites a man for a quick tryst in a 1946 detective movie she's a nymphomaniac? The peak, perhaps, of uninhibited dangerous female sexual heat in the movies can be found in the rapid editing between Malone's wild frenzied dancing in her room and her father dying downstairs of a heart attack - she unable to hear his distress over the wailing rock-and-roll. The association between the two is direct if oblique - she becomes in this dance a kind of Texas oil Kali, her sexual heat destroying the old generation and just begging for a spark of phallic fertilization to reap the new. She's a shamanistic shiva, the turntable her row of native congas, her thick orange 'fake tan' mascara and wild eye liner a hideous, wild fertility goddess mask.

I think the real nympho in the Big Sleep is Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood, but I mention the nympho reference as an indication of the casual offensiveness that goes unchecked in our American social codes vis-a-vis girls who are highly sexualized, and I assure you it's not that bad in countries like France, Argentina, and the UK. We're a nation of easily shocked sexophobic prudes! The genius of the bookstore scene is we simply don't know what goes on between them in that fade-out. In the 'code' a fade-out to some external shot, especially in the rain, is meant to denote coitus of one form or another, but it's also not necessarily that - and especially in afternoon tryst situations the line gets very fuzzy. Censors seemed to think all men became beasts if a woman even left her door unlocked at night but that sex could never happen in the afternoon or morning, thus all sorts of 'did they or didn't they' moments occur (as in Baby Doll, Red Desert, Love in the Afternoon, Lolita, etc. -see Cinq-au-sept vs. the Censors)

Malone's character in Written on the Wind is--on the other hand--a stellar example of the intimidating sexual woman. If Rock Hudson had a ball in his sac he'd throw the lady a sympathy f--k and then she could move on with her life, but instead he gets all stoic and takes her down by the river for a picnic to renew their vows of eternal besties-hood, leaving her stuck in a town where nothing ever happens so he can moon over Bacall (we know now why he prefers his women unavailable). The best she can do is get drunk and have flings with the poor locals (and a sorry married lot they are, too) to compensate, and he takes it on himself to get down there and cockblock even that! At least in the end she's assumed control of the company and there's an indication her sexual heat can find sublimation in big oily business, and then, now that Rock's away, she can lure handsome contractors home like she's Ruth Chatterton in Female (1933) --though hopefully none will be George Brent.

2. Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan (2007)

There is no condemnation or prudish judgment of Ricci's character in Moan and that's one of the reasons it's so moving and awesome. Meanwhile she is a nymphomaniac in the DSM-IV-style definition yet she's allowed to be still hot, vulnerable, and sympathetic. Never a caricature or an object, not even of pity --she's a fucking person. As my fellow pro-Moan preacher Kim Morgan notes when discussing the initial chaining of the Ricci's wanton to the radiator:
"...here's the movie's daring twist--she eventually wants to listen. But not because Lazarus is a strict prude, preaching the lord and imposing scripture, he's fractured himself, a depressed musician, still stung by his young wife who just left him for his younger brother, he understands Rae's problems. He's also wise to the wanton, something he can truly express through his music, especially when Rae is nearby. While he encourages her to go straight, she inspires him to let loose, culminating in a gloriously sweaty juke joint jaunt. Singing a wonderfully profane "Stagger Lee"/"Stacker Lee"/" (to a gorgeously gyrating Rae) Lazarus shows that sin, goodness and redemption aren't so (and this is perfectly suitable here) black and white." (more)
 
3. Jane Fonda in Klute (1971)
 One of the more disturbing cliche's in our modern lexicon is 'the dead hooker.' Even in comedies like 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, waking up with a the dead hooker in your hotel room (or trunk) is a handy signifier of black-out decadence, right up there with the face tattoo, and the exotic animal in the bathroom. Fonda as Bree in Klute gives you an idea why this threat is so deadly real and nothing to snicker about. Gorgeous and self-possessed she seems very cool, but languishing in the back of your mind while gazing at her awesome slinky body is something of the concern Klute (Donald Sutherland) seems to feel. Also, despite whatever amount of sexy ooh yeah, fantastic's she throws your way, there's a feeling you are not going to connect with her, ever. No matter what kinky shit you come up with, how deep you pour out your heart, she's not going to break character.

The man who turns out to be the killer is even complicit with our need to connect to her, to break through (to) her. He dared to feel that, in Bree, at last (as we hear on his tape recording of their first encounter), he'd found a woman whose wide tolerant / masochistic nature might even be able to handle his kinky needs without judging, that she might be 'the' one girl in a million who could clutch the burning blade, so to speak, and temper his violence. That she rejects him provokes his repressive shame. No matter what one does to her, sleeping with Bree is like sleeping with an echo, a ghost, like a waitress you think is super into you as she waits on you at breakfast but then you realize she's just angling for a tip; she doesn't even really see you.

If you kill her, maybe she'll finally notice you.

4. Asia Argento in Scarlet Diva (2000)

"Her bathroom masturbation leads to a flashback where she is five or six and spying through a keyhole on her brother making out with his girlfriend. The image of her eye in the keyhole serves as a gateway for all that is to follow: the young girl as Peeping Tom, her directorial eye looking in on whatever "dirty things" strike her fancy, daring to seize the reins of spectatorship back from the “male gaze.”  Anna as voyeur is turned on by her own lurid life, and as Asia she is turned on by making the viewer uncomfortable instead of turned on in turn. But again, if a man shocks the audience, he's cutting edge, if a woman does the same she's dirty (unless she's someone like Catherine Breillat, i.e. older, and not a sex symbol acting in her own films).

This double standard carries its own erotic charge, which Anna is addicted to. In the bath she shares with her brother she mentions to him she might be an actress when she grow up; he says actresses are "like mom" and "whores." This prompts little Anna to confess she "keeps her panties on" (when she masturbates) which prompts him to angrily dunk her head under water. Thus we see from this early age how Anna is addicted to "confessing" dirty to an authority (male) figure in order to then masochistically receive his violent reaction. This form of erotically-charged penance and provocation underwrites the progress of the film: First Asia invites us to identify with her character, and then she springs a shock on us so fast we don't have time to form a moderate response. She's like a police detective, tricking us believing her "mask" of innocence, or in this case, playing on the delusions of our own feminist liberal tolerance. Anna may get her head dunked, but all of her brother's fatherly scolding cannot change the fact that she made him lose control. This is where she takes her victories, such as they are, by proving the fallibility of those she unconsciously enslaves herself to. If we let her make us mad, she's already won. (How does it feel? Do you begin to understand what being used for someone else's pleasure feels like yet?)" (see Her Body, Her Ashtray - Acidemic #1 -2003)

5. Mae West
Unlike someone who just films raw sex or violence or other forms of transgression, Mae is genuinely subversive, something the Catholic Legion of Decency understood, which was why there were so quick to have her censored... It's nothing in her double entendres so much (there were plenty of those in other scripts) but the copious admiration and financial gain she shows herself getting, onscreen, for her unmarried sexual congress, the lack of guilt or public indignity she suffers. If Mae's characters had died alone and unloved, having sacrificed all for her illegitimate daughter, etc., she would have been fine with the censors. But daring to indulge in the forbidden fruits and end the film all the richer and with Cary Grant on your arm and no harm done? It was just too dangerous to go on.

Those moralists wanted sex to be served in little teacups to a temperate nation. Mae served it by spreading tea leaves on the floor and flooding the building with hot water. It was like showing the corruptible females of the world a magic faucet with which they could drown their men's precious capitalist system with a few flicks of their diamond-bespangled wrists.

What was more than a mere threat to the Christian status quo, though, was Mae's willingness to peek behind the magic curtain where the big deals are made, and to point out that regardless of how much they bellow and bluster, underneath the suits and uniforms men are just men - and any man can be had. Such knowledge was dangerous. The whole social ladder seemed to shake and buckle from the force of Mae's tsunami hips.(Desperation and Divinity- Bright Lights Film Journal #64, 2009)

6. Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein- A Dangerous Method (2011)

In a way I see the Jung-Spielren relationship as the analytical extension (with more genuine sex in it, for therapeutic purposes only) of the one between Jackson and Ricci in Black Snake Moan. You can say Jung violates ethical codes by sleeping with (and spanking) his patient but in my circle there's just two things you must never do: 1) intrude on someone's privacy (or cockblock), and 2) refuse the advances of a pretty girl (they're not used to rejection and don't handle it very well, but on the other hand they are used to keeping secrets). Truth is: men who are married and yet tempted by the advances of a hot young homewrecker are in a no-win situation. If you're a young Jung and the hot young thing is seminal nymphomaniacal masochist patient, you're bound to get a lot farther in treatment if you agree to a little rough trade spanking and sexual consummation. After all, as T.S. Eliot said, "the awful daring of a moment's surrender / which an age of prudence can never retract / for this and this alone have we existed." Man, I use that quote an awful lot. Maybe too much. It rationalizes just about everything. What am I trying to tell myself.

Oh well, tell me this then, would YOU risk your career and stable family for sexy, smart Keira Knightley? If you said no, thou art a pussy; if you said neindu bist ein hund!

7. Elizabeth Taylor
It's surely no accident that Liz Taylor frequently played women whose voracious sexual energy cowed the men around her, indirectly turning them gay: there's Brando's frustrated cavalryman in Reflections in a Golden Eye; Paul Newman as a guy who really misses showering with Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and the beach boy-feeding Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, to name just a few. Sex with Taylor seems very daunting, then, like climbing a mountain while falling off it at the same time. She's just too smart, too beautiful, too strong-willed, too assertive and too no-nonsense for a man to ever think of dominating. She could probably drive you to suicide if you failed to perform like a stud instead of a houseboy. That's what she did to poor Skipper! Poah... poah Skippuh

Sexually alive, braying from the battlements, melons bobbling, you'd best not call her a tramp --only she can do that, as when she dubs herself "the slut of all time!" in Butterfield 8. In that movie, alas, she has to reform and hate herself at the end, but most of the time Taylor's characters got home all right, dignity intact, no matter what kind of grass stains they may have trailed in from the front lawn of the Dueling Oaks. Even if they end up stuck with a houseboy too proud to fill the ice bucket while Georgie Boy staggers down the driveway with flores por la dia de los muertos. Taylor's sexual heat is so 'pure' it's pre-Christian, almost pre-Cambrian. All her targeted men can do to try and match her is get roaring drunk for courage, and like as not pass out while thinking of poor... poah Skippuh.

8. Clara Bow
"After a handful of years as the most desirable woman in America, Bow became its most abused punching bag. Of course, that’s how stardom works — contingent, as it is, upon our ever-shifting affections. But that doesn’t mean that the story of Bow isn’t a tragic one, or that we should forget what was done to a woman whose bliss was so clearly written all over her body." - Anne Helen Peterson
Yes Anne Helen Peterson, though I'd add that 'abused' and 'desirable' are, alas, more like the front and back of a very thin coin than opposite ends of a career. These extreme reactions go hand in hand: not just bliss being written on the body, but our collective guilt after reading it. It was enough to make us stop reading altogether - at any rate, we didn't need to. Sound was here, and man, that Barbara Stanwyck could talk.

9. Sue Lyon - Night of the Iguana (1964)

Richard Burton does his best to avoid the advances of hot-to-trot, under-age Charlotte (Sue Lyon) in Tennesee William's Night of the Iguana, but it's only because he's been burned once too often, via the opening of the film when he's hissed at in church for bedding down with one of the younger female parishioners. He wants to do good but, honey - he's only human. He later defines statutory rape as "when a man is seduced by a woman under twenty" and he means it. He's not laughing. As if to prove the point, after he throws Charlotte out one time too many she starts throwing tantrums, dancing with Maxine's beach boys, and finally hooking up with the bus tour's uber-bland second wheel, Hank. His heroic spurning does him no good - his job's still over thanks to a jealous harridan, but at least there's older women waiting their turn. In the end, I think he should maybe have gone for it, even knowing there was no way Maxine would want him afterwards. At least he'd have a nice memory to cool down from for the long swim!

I mean, how can you think he's just a louche guy with no control after he was able to throw Sue Lyon out of his room (in the above still)? Good thing I'm a drinking man, or was. As the bartender puts it, "we don't want our young men growing up to think women can be like you." and who can blame him? Their whole society would crumble in a matter of days... like it does in Bunuel's Susana.  On the other hand, what's the best Burton can hope for if he does give in? What was that T.S. Eliot quote (from #6) again? Or does wrecking your life only have cachet when you still have a life to wreck? (see also:  My Night of the Iguana)

10. Sharon Stone - Basic Instinct (1992)

 The famous leg crossing scene is a superb example of the threatening power the wanton female has over both individual men and patriarchal authority as a whole. The police have deliberately arranged the cross examination in their favor, with three men facing one woman, along with rows of men behind them and behind the two way mirror -- they have total confidence they'll be able to intimidate the hell out of her-- but one flash of her crotch and they are all reduced to gibbering baboons. Case in point, and career instantly made.

11. Ann Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson - The Graduate (1967)

I know this film is beloved as a classic but I've always been irked by its treatment of Mrs. Robinson. After all she's just a lonely wife trying to seduce her friend's son, cougar-style. The film doesn't blame Benjamin for eventually succumbing, but it sure blames her. In a way the film itself acts as a destructive hypocrite, first goading Ben into a hotel room with her (or even the bath at her place), judging him for being a prude, then later judging her for feeling outraged when Ben starts dating her daughter, considering him unworthy for a son-in-law (since she's already shagging him). Sure, that's a hypocritical response on her part, yet is her subsequent scorn any different from the film's own attitude towards her, or society's attitude towards female libertines in general? If Ben was a real man he'd keep his Robinson thing going and solicit her for a Rolex and a Ferrari like, say, Warren Beatty in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, and would have been nicer to her daughter Katherine Ross on their first date so she wouldn't have liked him so much, and then found himself someone from a different family to marry on the side. Doesn't he know there are other families in California? Instead we're supposed to boo Mrs. Robinson for daring to go cougar before the term was invented, yet Ben is innocent of all wrongdoing because he made a few lame attempts at stalling her, even as we're also supposed to laugh at his feeble attempts to goad her into conversation? Golly, you are sure groundbreaking, 'Graduate.' Too bad you can't stone adulteresses to death anymore! When Benjamin starts goading her into telling him what model car she got pregnant in you want to punch him in that big schnozz! Can't he see this woman is depressed and desperately unfulfilled and is probably married to a man so deep in the closet even he doesn't know he's gay? Have a little compassion, Ben. But he'd rather just get huffy when he encounters hypocrisy, never when he commits it. So groundbreaking... one almost can't believe it was only filmed in 1956.

12. The Vixens, Pussycats, and Dolls of Russ Meyer
Part of the ample charm of Russ Meyer's oeuvre is his fondness for big-busted, cartoonish, very very horny and strong-willed female characters. His amazonian nymphomaniac heroines aren't judged or derided for their appetites, rather it's the menfolk around them who are judged lacking. They are terrified of these women, and who wouldn't be without the safety of the screen to protect them? Sometimes a boy just likes to hold hands and take you to the movies first, or at least have time for the Cialis to kick in before the third date deed-gets-done deadline. The girls of Russ Meyer movies don't play it safe or wait for the third date. They see you pumping gas, they look you up and down, lick their lips and make a grab for your zipper. If you're a guy and a girl's ever come onto you like that then you know the score, it's something you always dreamed of and now it's happening 'too fast' for your drives to kick in... stuttering, blushing, panicked, you instinctively try to run away, muttering any excuse you can think of. Maybe later, once you're safely up in your own room with your comfort music or movie on, you can unpack what just happened. Then, the recriminations from your Id come rolling in.

Erica Gavin - Vixen
 Maybe that's why I hated all these coked-up orgiasts my old roommate used to bring over after I was already asleep. I'd have to step over them, weaving in and out of heads and limbs like a minefield, when I used to get up at five or six AM to use the bathroom, still shaky in my early weeks of sobriety. They reminded me--to my endless shame--that all a woman had to do was turn around and come onto me and I was fresh out of moves. And of course they can tease, flash come-on smiles, grab your junk over your jeans, and then push you away when you try to kiss them, shouting loud enough for Dave's mom to hear (since she's asleep on the other couch), "oh my god is that what you thought I was trying to do? I was just being friendly! Good God!" I mean the girl brought over champagne, strawberries, and Barbarella, then pulled that on me! Whoa, then I learned she's done that before, to other guys. Some girls do that shit just for kicks; I met a few in AA and they told me so!

Bottom line: Every man is a sex machine when there's no chance of having sex. Once it's inescapable it becomes a matter of getting it up, keeping it up, and delivering the goods. Maybe afterwards you can bask but until then you are on trial and your whole definition of your own prowess hangs in the shifting urges of a drunken wanton and your own fickle member! You should man up and go for it but if you feel dirty and guilty later (or worse, ashamed of your inadequacy) don't blame her! Any dog can be brave on the leash, barking and straining, but don't snap at a bitch if she wants to chew it off. She's just free, and you're not. So suck it, Benjamin!


Thursday, September 09, 2010

The Kinski Precipice: Herzog's MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

morte magis metuenda senectus...

Despite its wordy title and relative 'smallness' of scope, MY SON, MY SON is awful good. David Lynch produced (note the LOST HIGHWAY bathroom above), Herzog directed and it turns out they share a lot of sinthoms: deep woods, coffee, dwarfs, murder, Piper Laurie, transcending time and space; you can feel their collaborative heat shimmering on the horizon even when nothing else is happening, as it usually isn't.

I've loved David Lynch even when I hated him, but up until the awesome BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I admit I had a hard time with Werner Herzog. For example: I just couldn't 'get' AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (monkey armies? When?) and GRIZZLY MAN (there's audio of a fatal bear attack and you just show yourself listening to it on headphones and don't let us hear it? I made a whole movie savaging that decision) Then there's Herzog's titles, which like MY SON... are often whole sentences in length: LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY? Excuse me? Am I blocking the runway? EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL? Es tu serio? Do we expect them to be born larger than normal?! My Argentine ex-wife had an old moldy PAL tape of DWARFS on our shelf for years and just the spine filled me with horror at the thought she would one day force me to watch it. It was the title more than anything else, a dumb jokey pun supposedly underlying some kind of GUMMO reconstruction of JACKASS-style hooliganism. As a Herzog title might read, I THANK YOU VERY MUCH BUT I'D RATHER GET A ROOT CANAL).

But now that I'm old and wise and have a good DVD player, am divorced from that Argentine --the moldy PAL tapes are gone and I've grown to appreciate Herzog's hallucinatory nautra metus, his anthropological mysticism, his lysergucolic documentario-synclasticism, his willingness to let an eye for artistic composition and high strangeness give the impression his static panoramas are hurtling across time and space far faster than the rest of the planet,  which turns out to be the same thing as standing motionless while the planet revolves below. I can't help but admire his willingness to heedlessly plummet into the void of insanity alongside any character who happens to be going that way, rather than hanging around on the precipice making excuses like Barbet Schroeder, even if the result is sometimes the same.

Newly minted in my admiration, I went into MY SON MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009) with open arms... and came out opened, and exposed.


Based on a true story about a troubled California man who killed his own mother after getting too deep into his part in a local production of Elektra. Herzog takes that germ of police blotter headline and brings (of course) a journey to Peru into it and cranks the insanity til it floods every corner. Michael Shannon plays the matricide perp, Brad. A recording of long-dead and tres obscure traveling blind preacher Washington Phillips singing "I was Born to Preach the Gospel" plays the voice of God, while the Quaker Oats guy on the Oats tub in the pantry supplied God's beaming face (and it's an effective combination); Chloe Sevigny is Brad's patient girlfriend. She tries to channel his madness by bringing him into her theater group, but you can't exorcise holy madness with the Orestia... she should have waited til they covered Bye Bye Birdy. Better she should move on, there's nothing he has anyone could possibly want... She should, like, call me. Compared to Brad, I'm the picture of sanity.


do ya bend mighty low?
The cast overflows with stock regulars from both Lynch's and Herzog's collective oeuvre: Brad Dourif channels Jack Nance as Brad's ostrich-farming uncle; Willem Dafoe is the hostage negotiator; Udo Kier the theater director; Piper Laurie the sad, isolated micro-meddling mother who pushes her boy over the edge his own psychotic inner voice has led him to, the same voice that warned him at the last minute not to kayaking with his hippie friends (they all drown, offscreen).

Awakened and chastened by this near miss with fate, Brad takes the blinders off, cleanses his doors of perception and loses his shit tripping on all the old peasant faces along the Peruvian waterfront. He gets all Jeff Bridges FEARLESS and and throws aside the handlebars that would keep him from tumbling off his tricyclics into the broken glass streets of messianic schizophrenia.

Back at home his clinging mom thinks the answer to his madness is more Jello. And so what can a poor man do, once Orestes starts speaking to him from across the centuries, but carve his way to freedom? Well, most of us would just move out, as he should have long ago...

As Don Wilson of the Jack Benny show used to say, "there's only one Jello! Look for the big red letters on the box!"

On that note, I think the part of Herzog's quest to find the holy grail of pure charismatic messianic madness and capture it on film may be a smokescreen for his private worry he already found it and lost it, namely in the eyes of the late Klaus Kinski. For the recent BAD LIEUTENANT--of which MY SON is almost a sequel thanks to similar cinematic patina and supporting cast (Shannon, Brad Douriff, Imra P. Hall, and Michael Pena)--Nic Cage brought his own line of insanity, a hipster American Kinski with more of a gonzo sense of self-aware humor. There was little room left in BAD LIEUTENANT for Herzog to project his post-Kinski stress disorder -- Cage filled the void. But Shannon doesn't have that leading man glow. Without a strong lead to delimit his relentless naturalism, Herzog's liable to forget that it helps our appreciation of onscreen derangement if we first see someone else in the film act normal at least once or twice. This lets us get our bearings, gives us a direction in which to go.

In other words, watching Kinski go insane was watching Kinski, but you can tell Michael Shannon isn't really crazy --he's just a moderately reptilian-looking actor exploring the full scope of the manic-messianic complex. There's no charm to his insanity, no charisma, no reason we can see for anyone to put up with his ravings. Unlike, say, Robert Duvall in THE APOSTLE or Graham Faulkner in BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON or Gregory Peck in MOBY DICK, you don't want to throw down your breadcrumb sins and follow him outside the gates of Eden.

Someone like Kinski may have been unbearable to work with but we can see why Herzog kept going back to him. Remember when Klaus was a hunchback shot by Lee Van Cleef in A FEW DOLLARS MORE? I mean look at those eyes (below), they're worth enduring any amount of abuse, if you truly care about making archetypal myth, of capturing genuine madness which is the 'only performance that truly makes it." Michael Shannon just doesn't achieve it, he doesn't have that same unholy glint of mischief in his eyes. He can act crazy very well--he even looks crazy--but he's not crazy. You can't fake it that deep. You are or your aren't. God, when are they going to put Huston's FREUD out on DVD, so we can see Kinski make love to a wooden leg? I'm standing by, wad of bills in hand.

Other cast members of MY SON don't have the (lack of) madness problem: Willem Dafoe as the homicide detective and Udo Kier as the theater director are more terrifying trying to do 'straight' than Shannon is trying to do 'crazy.' But since the ensuing flashback episodes are all there to illustrate 'how it came to this,' they're all about Brad's 'increasingly unstable behavior' and that's the problem. Why didn't someone recognize he needed psychiatric care long before this? And the flashbacks require us to also wonder why anyone would endure him and his messianic madness if he's not funny, hot, magnetic or fascinating to be around? Was he ever normal? A contrast to a pre-crazy time would have made the crazy either tragic or positive.

This guy knows what I'm talking about. Sane Udo is crazy anyone else... and we love him for it.

As the Herzog stand-in to Shannon's mercurial Kinski, Udo Kier indulges his lead actor's tantrums and irrational mood swings with the resignation of a rich older gay man indulging the violent whims of his rough trade houseboy. It's an indulgence that only vaguely taps into he genuine fascination artists feel around those crazier than they are, nor does it illuminate the horrific toll of soul-emptying world weariness it takes to do a film or a play with someone who's completely delusional. Just to try and get even a little of that mercurial lightning on record one has to risk death, money and aggravation. But unable to connect to Shannon, Kier doesn't project the fascination and structuring talent that would possibly placate his star. Since their relationship never becomes vibrant or larger than life, we never really understand why they even bother hanging out with each other. Shannon's Brad doesn't need a man, he needs a doctor with a talent for convincing paranoid schizophrenics that anti-psychotic medication is oatmeal straight from God's loving farm.


Herzog's worked with other crazies besides Kinski, of course, many of them clinically insane, but since Shannon doesn't bring any of his own looney tunes baggage, he has to settle for whatever was left behind by past actors in the vine-covered boarding house of Herzog's fetid, fecund vision. And we sense--not by any mannerisms or tells on Shannon's part--Kinski is working ghostly machinations between the synapses, a matchmaker creating the space and then stepping back into the shadows, perhaps too far. One hungers to see Shannon give us just a little of, say, the primal scream commitment of Crispin Glover screaming in fear at the sight of a single black glove on the kitchen floor in Lynch's WILD AT HEART or Nic Cage babbling about his lucky crack pipe in BL2.

The collaboration between Cage and Herzog gave that film a reckless, exhilarating momentum, but the Lynch-Herzog -Shannon collaboration neglects the 'glue' of normal 'strong' grounding characters like Eva Mendez's prostitute in BL2, or a Lynchian warm maternal heroine like Naomi Watts or Laura Dern. Willem Dafoe tries to be grounded as the homicide detective on the scene, but Dafoe will never be able to play 'grounded' --the more he tries, the creepier he gets --and I mean that as a compliment. He's too nice and sweet a soul to play one on TV. He's warmer when he's colder.


In the end, what can we deduce about Herzog's pet motifs?  Hanging out with messianic schizophrenics keeps him sane, maybe, but he'd never get so many details of the devouring maternal Dionysian Kali goddess so very exactly right without firsthand witness to the giant mantis alien that sucks the psionic marrow out of every unopened third eye (which is why society is structured to keep the third eyes shut at all times.)

This mantis isn't actually a hallucination --it's the only real there is, and the ability to see the way blood runs in rivers just behind the thin adhesive bandage of temporal reality's aching skin--  hurtling in every car ride towards crushed oblivion-- is enough to make you gouge your eyes out, to no avail. (like that cut line "I can still see!" on THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES).


Enlightenment and spiritual awakening in the average individual leads to separation from the social order, which has no way to gauge or evaluate the sudden conversion of a once-normal 9-5 office drone into a state of 'holy madness.' The only difference between schizophrenia and holy spirit, then, is time and place, coherence of expression, and artistic outlet. For example, Brad's crazy mom spoils him, buys him instruments and art supplies and paper the moment he evinces a whim to try something artsy (music, painting, etc). He's thus blocked from doing any art because of her suffocating supportiveness. If she could just leave him alone, or provide him with rules to rebel against, his madness would have contours to call its own.

Seriously, didn't any of the people involved in this film ask themselves how or why someone so clearly suffering from latent schizophrenia brought on by survivor's guilt and an overbearing mother would manage to keep any friends or colleagues, let alone get to date Chloe Sevigny!? What's wrong with this land, this America refracted through the Herzo-Lynchian fantasmatic? I do not know. But here's what I did learn from MY SON MY SON:


1. The only way to channel holy madness without creating misery or your own crucifixion is to create art. BUT a true artist can get so deep into their character they can't get back out. Don't think it doesn't happen! The Joker killed Heath Ledger.

2. No matter how bad things get, old country blues and/or gospel can save you. They should play the blues round the clock in insane asylums. When I was deep in misery,  I used to sit around listening to old LPs of Blind Blake, John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and always felt better, and when things got really bad, Washington Phillips, whose "What a friend We have in Jesus" has been the closer on dozens of my mix tapes, perfect right after Zeppelin's "Achilles Last Stand." For Brad, it's Phillips' "I was Born to Preach the Gospel (and I sure do love my job)" which he takes literally as a cosmic message. Dude! I've so been there. Part of the reason the LSD San Francisco rock scene covered so many old blues songs becomes apparent (beyond the post-folk revival) in this context. Nothing gets you out of a bad trip head space faster.

3. To really escape the mantis and open the third eye, an artist/writer needs to break away from their urge to always write things down and reconfigure all experience in the terms of their art, to instead live in the moment in pure joy and unrestricted awareness. Art--though higher then most other forms of escape--is still escape, a way to break short of merging into the all-consuming flame of direct spiritual experience, i.e. complete surrender of ego, of self as different than other people and the world around you and the stars around that. Instead, we get really, really close and then remove ourselves from the moment in order to write it down, photograph it, draw it, record it... etc. Creating art may be what stops us from going over the edge of madness, but unless we let go of the rope once in awhile we'll never see the bottom, so what can we really talk about other than our own navels? We will never accept death, never leave our body, nor dissolve in the oceanic sea, and suddenly re-assemble as if every cell of our body had just been to the cleaners --unless we plunge, sans pen, sans camera, sans eyes, sans everything into the abyss and therefore back into ourselves, forever changed back to the same.

Perhaps this last idea is succinctly exemplified in the way we will spend a vacation in an exotic foreign land squinting through our cameras rather than soaking up the views with both eyes open. We find ourselves saying "isn't this fun?" or "Oh, look at that mountain, honey!" or "Caitlin, are you having a good time, Caitlin?" as if needing to constantly bring ourselves back from the abyss of pure egoless presence, preferring to work on solidifying the memory of joy via photos and talking rather than abandoning language and recording devices at the door, so to speak. Writing helps us remember moments that we never really had a chance to experience because we couldn't wait to get home and write about them. We think if we let go of the rope it will swing back our way, but it doesn't. A new and better one, electric, plugged right into mainline of God's flexed arm like a two-way morphine drip, comes instead, once it's too late... that's what faith is - that leap into the blackness on the chance someone's gonna swing out and grab you from the other side of the big tent.


4.  Freedom from Permanence: This is beautifully realized in a scene with Shannon hiding out in a dark Mexican hotel, raising and lowering a glowing bare light bulb down into the center of a ring of prescription eyeglasses, and then back up again, creating a flower/sun/Tiffany lamp/mandala pattern shadow on the table--a brilliant illustration of the freedom an artist has once they've let go of trying to record and preserve everything. Each raising and lowering of the bulb is a perfect mandala sun flower, unique and non-reproducible. Brad has no need to figure out how to film it, record it, or get it into a gallery or make money or gain fame from it. He's just in it for the beauty. Riveted. All else gone to shadow.


The moral of the story? Next time you're really in it for the beauty and you get that tap on the shoulder from the giant electric hand of your Quaker Oat God, try not announcing  to everyone how spiritual you, just 'be' in that space and come to terms with the value of your own direct experience. Keep it a secret that you can express only in anonymous good deeds.

The ego, like any lover, thrives on adversity --the longer you ignore the ego the sweeter its songs. It starts giving you more of its hoarded stash of dopamine when it feels you may no longer need it. You learn your ego's sitting on a huge cache of solar brilliance and spoon-feeding you muddy shadows to keep itself in power. The person who is deemed mad has managed somehow to knock his ego off its throne (be it by drugs, electro-shock, lack of sleep, meditation, etc.) and break open the cache and let all the dopamine sunlight flood the whole damned place. This person is labeled mad because he initially feels a huge urge to keep this holy state going as long as possible, and to help others get there too. That rarely works though. Better he should learn to let go off both those urges, to surrender even that goal. Instead of shaking the lapels of those still asleep, he should just pray and chant on his own time. Otherwise they just might have to burn him at the stake or crucify him.  He better keep the ego around, after all, in however a diminished form, to not upset the apple cart. He can balance that all out in art, express in art what would be madness expressed directly. He can bury all kinds of magnificent truths people aren't ready to hear any other way. As people in the world with our own egos to deal with, we dismiss ideas that challenge them outright, but the ego feels no threat from a good fiction. Let this art stealthily address ideas of madness and artistry and even tell tales of newly-minted holy men wondering where they're supposed to go now that they're selfless in a selfish world they themselves have made. Ain't that what this is?

 MY SON MY SON conveys the way spiritual enlightenment won too soon can let the ego in through the back door and turn one into a raving lunatic. When the house is only "almost" empty, it's really not empty at all. Roaches and rats lay claim to the podium. You can spot a rat messiah a mile off, and you should run quick away.

Unless of course, like Herzog, you like to make movies about rat messiahs. Ja? In that case better make sure you have at least one very magnetic, very charismatic rat. If you don't... you just might wind up adrift on a raft heading down the Amazon towards unseen rapids... and not a camera in sight.
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