SUSPIRIA for Men... ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

Lately when I meditate all that happens is my unconscious/anima rummages through forbidden memory drawers, exposing afresh long-buried shames as far back as ninth grade gym class. I'm all cool about it, of course--"oh thank you ma'am, for saving these precious memories"--and I believe once I accept them she's going to just toss 'em out. But I doubt she will, 'cuz my unconscious is a bitch, yo. Still, my unconsicous' scathing anima is nothing like the one pulling Julian (Ryan Gosling) apart in Nicolas Winding Refn's career-sabotaging follow-up to his career-making DRIVE: ONLY GOD FORGIVES.

Yeah, but She doesn't, Blanche!

The tale of an Oedipus complex writ large by white people across the dirty expanses of Bangkok, it's more of a Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch play exquisite corpse with an Argento hotel bar napkin than it is the kind of all-too-standard Asian action-revenge thriller it pretends to be.

Then again, everything is a Jim Jarmusch plays exquisite corpse with David Lynch on an Argento hotel bar napkin for Sweden's dark lord of the Seijun Suzuki-esque macho melt-down post-modernist gangster genre, Nicolas Winding Refn. GOD is his special love letter to those Angelica film snobs who saw VALHALLA RISING and said "very good, Sven, but maybe slow it down a bit. Maybe don't have a protagonist who's such a chatterbox." There has to be one such film snob... somewhere.

Maybe it's even me.

I'm keenly aware (since I'm Swedish) that to stand out from the legions of 'corrupt but honorable cop vs. redeemable but doomed Oedipissant' Asian vengeance-athons loitering sullenly along the neon- drenched "Dark Foreign Revenge Thriller" avenues of Netflix, Refn has to import his own brand of ice and snow onto the eternally wet floors of le Bangkok Dangereuse. We Swedes know that Thai swordsman cops can out-swing us, so we have to out-stare them and, more importantly, be willing to lose a limb without blinking. That's how you get their respect!

No, please, don't get up

Critics haven't been kind to ONLY GOD FORGIVES, though some have been maybe too kind and maybe they shouldn't be. It practically begs for a beat-down, craves it like William Devane's masochistic ex-POW in ROLLING THUNDER (1977). It promises to not even fight back, just proffer its hands for good severing (or garbage disposal grind).

But for a film with such ornate and original visual style it sure is shy about saying anything, or making a single unanalyzed move, unless it's to judge misogynist ex-pats for slapping frightened little Bangkok sex workers. Unlike Devane's more macho amputee masochism, there's some much more bizarrely Oedipal form of apotemnophilia going on here, associated with the fear of the vaginal void. As in: if I stick my hand into the darkness, into some stripper's inner gates of paradise, will I ever get it back, or just pull out a stump?

In a land of bare knuckle boxing and grim black dragon wallpaper, Gosling's hand bravely goes where only Jessica Harper doesn't fear to tread.

From Top: Suspiria / Only God Forgives

And there's this thing with brother Billy who is so mad about a Bangkok dad pimping his daughters he kills one of them to teach him a lesson. Some weird karaoke-singing cop first lets the dad kill Billy for revenge, then cuts off the guy's hand right to punish him for that right. Meanwhile Julian (Ryan Gosling, apparently now the Michael Fassbender to Refn's Steve McQueen) is getting his hands tied in a lap dance, and imagining his hand cut off by the same cop.

Dude, it's all connected.... by ligaments.

So the next week (or hour- there's no sense of time on the Bangkok streets) brings in on her sky chariot the brassy Clytemnestra of a devouring Mother (brilliantly essayed by Kristen Scott Thomas)with a typically Lady McBeth-ish streak of not thinking her dark deeds through to the end. She's clearly the evil instigator who made the boys so nutty and she has an incestuous love-hate bond with Julian, and who we learn eventually-- if our TV is on loud enough and there's no traffic outside our window to mask their fetid whispers---once ordered her boy to beat his father to death with his bare hands. And he did!

You know how hands are...

But all that stuff is minor. One of those exquisite corpse bar napkins could have covered more Freudian territory purely by chance. Though feature length, ONLY GOD reminds me a lot of my own small short films: there's no time for a plot so it all has to be delivered on the sly in expository fragments. No one leaves or arrives; they just appear in one of the many dark red-lit Chinese serpent dragon wallpapered rooms like clients at the bordello of the unconscious. When the mom lets down her long, sexy hair it contrasts dazzlingly with a silk dress that both blends her into and stands out against the hotel wallpaper. It's presumably a rose on the front )above) but looks more like the kind of hole an alien or baby (Julian) would burst out of (and where we will rather grotesquely return in the final act). When mom demands to know why her son hasn't killed the guy who killed his brother, (instead of letting the severed hand be enough of a warning), Julian mentions the dead son killed a sixteen year old girl. "Well, mom snaps. "I'm sure he had his reasons."

This old broad is a real pisser.

The film's been compared to the westerns of Sergio Leone, but in Leone all those long stares were connected to hands hovering over holsters. It was more about the eyes than the hands, and eyes are more apt for movies than hands. There's the adage in RED RIVER where John Wayne tells the kid who will soon be played by Monty Clift that he knew when the other guy was going to draw by "watching his eyes. Remember that." Flash forward a few decades and Clint Eastwood and his confederates no longer look anyhere but eyes. They no longer look at their gun or even aim it, or even blink, just stare. And then WHAM, one or more guys die - the guys who look at hands instead, one presumes. Hitchcock had that line about how the only difference between comedy and suspense at breakfast is that only the audience knows a bomb's under the table in the latter. in Leone, everyone knows everyone else has a bomb under the table, and that gives their every move meaning; they don't take their eyes off each other even as they pour the coffee, with one hand, super..... slowly. Each ready for the bomb in each other's laps. In ONLY GOD FORGIVES, Refn takes the coffee away, the table, and the bombs, and most of the hands too, by the end. If it's not suspense at least it's the first violent masculine deconstruction to feminize the macho staring contest, and dissociate vengeance from the minds of tortured heroes. Now, instead of being about facing death the action movie is about Sleeping Beauty, with Gosling spending the whole movie in a glass case, waiting for God's samurai sword to cleave him free, of both that outer (glass) shell, and the inner (body) too, so the nothing trapped within him can rise rise rise.

There's a great piece comparing the film with Lynch's FIRE WALK WITH ME over on Very Aware, with a Refn interview, wherein he says: the original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God."

Note the austere white Great Wall image behind him, a more logocentric version of Julian's twisted dark red wallpaper, setting off a contrast that's about far more than good vs. evil, or right vs. wrong

Hey, I know about that! That's why I love Moby Dick's Capatin Ahab so much, and all my college poetry was about it, like my classic "The Bug that Would Swat God" - but in my case it was drunken bravado and feeling inspired by Gregory Peck's twisted oratory (see here, shipmates). Here it's less about wanting to fight God and more about doing it just to get your awful mother off your back.

And then there's the "villain," the cop in the white collar doesn't just kill people straight up, he does it with a show of torture, hand slicing offery, etc. And for all his swift brutal gestures, our homicidal momma's boy Julian is not much of a fighter, it turns out. He gets his ass kicked by this little guy. It's embarassing. The mom's confidence, and our own action film expectations, have led us to believe that once he's given the signal, Julian is going to be as lethal as Clint Eastwood in the climax of UNFORGIVEN. He's going to be like Popeye given the 101 proof spinach. But instead he gets beaten down... by a middle-aged balding Thai cop! That's like Sly Stallone losing a fight to Burgess Meredith, and Refn knows we'll feel that way and Julian's losing seems somehow on purpose, to piss off his mom, and us by extension, to subvert our and her expectations in a passive revenge plan he probably isn't even conscious of. We know Ahab is going to lose in his battle with the white whale. That's kind of the whole point, that knowing this, on some deep level of the unconscious, he still goes for it anyway is why we love him.Such crazy fighting spirit is what the East is all about! And inner demon battling, trying to drink you're way sober, etc.

It seems absurd that mom should be so eager for vengeance that she'd go up against a supernatural cop like this but on the other hand, without her around to shake things up, everyone would still be sitting where we left them, motionless, like a flock of ventriloquist dummies after their owners have all gone to bed. Refn's out to do more with his dolly shots than deliver a mere Asian revenge thriller; he's gone way past the 1967 Seijun Suzuki deconstruction of BRANDED TO KILL (above; below) and exposed the hideous mom-hating apron string hacker under the hot skin of Ryan Gosling's new Action Figure persona.

It helps to learn that Refn shot in chronological order and kind of winged it for large stretches, with Ryan Gosling and Kristen Scott Thomas both having lots of input and collaboration in their characters' outcomes, and genius DP Larry Smith (who worked with Refn on BRONSON) seems to have been given free reign with the surreal gels. There's a feeling that comes across when submitting to that kind of spontaneity, Godardesque perhaps, but more open-ended, in the moment, from second to second. The drawback? It seldom builds to any satisfying catharsis or ending. It's like that stare of the Leone gunfighter with his hand over his gun has widened and lasts the entire film, and then no gun is drawn. And there are no hands left to pull a trigger. The first credit at the end is to announce the film is dedicated to Alejandro Jodorowsky, which is pretty steep company. The man is a God himself, a shaman first class, and tellingly has much armless symbolism and actors. Look ma, no hands, indeed.

from top: Only God Forgives, Santa Sangre

All we know is Julian was pretty twisted before all this revenge got started but he quickly loses it thereafter; watching his stripper girlfriend cry jeweled tears behind the strings of a crystal bird house he hears some laughter at the other end of the club. They could be laughing at anything, they're all deep in a conversation way down there, but Julian has had a vulnerable emotion and now he thinks they're laughing at him. Next thing you know he's smashing a glass in one of their faces and dragging him around by his upper palette. Dude, that's so paranoid!

From top: Buffalo 66, OGF, B66 OGF ,The Fighter, OGF, B66, The Fighter

So paranoid in fact it reminds me of two other movies about bruised masculinity: BUFFALO 66, THE FIGHTER. The great music by Cliff Martinez even becomes Angelo Badalamenti at times (the music from TWIN PEAKS was supposedly what Refn cut the film to), linking it as a kind of sequel to THE FIGHTER if Mickey Ward and his ma set up shop at a fight club down in Thailand, and she left to do various deals, but she still flies in like an avenging angel when son Dicky the crackhead is killed. Meanwhile there's some BUFFALO 66 meets THE WRESTLER nonsense as Julian's favorite crying stripper, who gives the drowsiest lap dances in history, is supposed to wear a dress and meet the foulmouthed Madea of a mom. Interesting too that the dead son is named Billy, and had a huge, enormous cock (according to the mom). If Gallo had played him (and if we saw BROWN BUNNY you know he could), oooh synchro-gorgeousity made flesh.

from top: B66, OGF, OGF, B66

And it's clear Billy and Julian both have some seriously warped misogyny going on with women as a result of their mom and--as in BUFFALO 66's strip club owner--father figures they've killed or are determined to kill in one way or another. The Billy in both films skulks around the periphery of slow motion druggy sex dens, forever denied the presumed pleasures of full psychic abandon. Both have way too many mother issues to permit anything approaching even a feint at that sort of enjoyment. They can only take it out on women who seem weaker and more submissive somehow even than themselves, to vicariously relive their primal scene in an attempt to rewritezzzzzz zzzzz

Zzz- eh? I nodded off.... or did I?

Did I miss anything? No --they're all still just staring.

Perfect.

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!