Caretaker Sparkle: ROOM 237

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from top: "Autobiographical Nexusplation" (Erich collage), ROOM 237, THE SHINING.

ROOM 237, Rodney Ascher's documentary about THE SHINING's many interpretations, is a lightning crack to the head, the rush of oxygen into the brain via such sudden trepanation is invigorating even as your reality fades. Paranoid psychosis is very contagious and even more terrifying than the film itself, it mirrors all our film deconstruction / analysis any piece of art, especially one that taps as many deep murky subconscious aquifers as THE SHINING. From the dry Bordwellian breakdowns (as in "before getting started, we all have to agree what we mean by a film") to the ultimately meaningless doctoral theses of professors caught in publish-or-perish bid for tenure, to the gonzo freaks like me who see what we want to see through magic glasses, it's all valid, regardless those who consider every Rorshach blot solvable might think. Those of us who aren't nailed to the cross of reductionism, we know the truth - the blot is fluid in its interpretation, the more it starts to move around on the page, to animate itself. To fix it to one meaning is death, or boredom, which is worse.

'See,' he entertainment PR gods have conditioned us to 'recall' movies with an ever-dwindling series of studio-sanctioned iconic images and quotes that work as 'touchstones' - "Say hello to my leedle fren" or "Frankly, Scarlet..." . In  THE SHINING's case it means the grinning Jack Nicholson Torrance peering through his bathroom axe crack exclaiming "Heee-rree's Johnny!" The more it's reduced to that, the fewer interpretations our left-hand sides of the brain allow. But hey, the SHINING's power is that it's just crazy enough to survive and resist any chance to dumb it down, to reduce it to a few fun quotes ("and a nice chianti"). The more we try to reduce it to grinning Jack T-shirts the less we remember the actual details of a film that seems to lose all contact with the outside world. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, Mr. Torrance. the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective, and even Shelly Duvall starts seeing the ghosts. 

In ROOM 237 however, we get as close as we are likely to in quantifying at least some aspects of madness, the madness of obsessive fans, likely loners with a good liberal arts education, enhanced by some wild psychedelic experiences along the way ("ahem"), making them 'legally insane' (as they used to think tripping more than seven times did to you).  Ascher has taken the kind of patient intellectual time a paranoiac collage demands, showing the same thoughtful approach to the subjective nature of human analytic perception that Kubrick did with the source material. As a result, the madness of cabin fever within Kubrick's film (the death of consensual reality when the 'real' world is cut off) becomes refracted into a dozen different facets of meaning. These theories are gold, far too shiny to take seriously (even Jack Torrance roll his eyes at some of the theories-via the constant editing collage, blooming with chance or otheer synchronicity), but you have to wonder at touches like the decal of Dopey from SNOW WHITE on Danny's closet that is visible on his door before his first 'shine' of the bloody torrent (torrent-torrance) but gone afterwards, reflecting, perhaps, Danny's getting wise to what horrors are in store and taking his first steps towards his inevitable survival.

Hey, if Kubrick did put in that little touch intentionally, how nice it was finally recognized. I like to imagine that one day my own weird details will be recognized--even if they were put there purely by unconscious 'accident' (as in the Kubrick fashionista above, for whom I added an axe which I thought at first would look like it was just a real axe coming out of her chest, but then noticed to my surprise it looks like part of her fur coat--does it make it less valid if I didn't 'intend' that?). Artists do intentionally odd touches for just such a reason, like messages in a bottle tossed seaward. If it turns out the bottle reaches someone across the ocean, then you succeeded, even if the wrong person found it. Maybe it will take a hundred years, but there's a strange satisfaction, a hope, that sooner or later even the most arcane and oblique subliminal messages we leave in our art or writing will be found by someone, or something, after it crosses time's ocean, and that the one who finds it will recognize they are not alone in being obsessive and reading way too much into everything they see. 

But the really trippy moments, for me, come when one fan talks about playing the film twice at the same time with two projectors, one running the film backwards, and overlaying the images (below). The effect is so perfect  -- at least in the parts they show us --- that it seems intentional on Kubrick's part. Who knows? any rate, Ascher clearly uses the idea of subliminal strange messages to heart, and with it the understanding perhaps of the joys to be found when when signifiers-signified chains are finally broken in the mind. When we no longer know what is coincidence, intentional, what you see vs. what there is, when symbols no longer point to one thing, then the true ambiguous freedom created by our super ego's surrender becomes electric.

Backwards and forwards - makes Wendy an alert girl

PART 2:

In which the ROOM 237 Strategem is employed by me for all of the Kub's films. 

In other words, even if it's not intentional, if it's there it has meaning. In the ingenious editing schemata of ROOM 237, images we forgot from the film are taken out of context and highlighted for their otherworldly brilliance - and they connect perfectly to shots from Kubrick's other masterpieces. 2001, CLOCKWORK ORANGE, even DR. STRANGELOVE all bring home the vibe of pure murderous madness that most war footage cannot capture (1). Hence as illustrations here, some of my own collages, mixing THE SHINING with the films 2001 and CLOCKWORK which were his preceding best films, and one can argue SHINING is his last great one, unless you dare to count EYES WIDE SHUT, which in my mind is the work of a man having a nervous breakdown from trying to crack open Tom Cruise's hard nut candy shell (PS - I recently reviewed EYES with the ROOM 237 mind control enhancement vision, and if I don't quite love it any more than I used to, I am now more unnerved by it, truly).

The mission of Acidemic - inherent in the title - stems from the original phrase of Aldous Huxley, "if the doors of perception were cleansed everything, would appear as it really is, infinite."  I mention this because cleansing the doors of cinematic perception is Kubrick's chosen task in all his films, though in this case he's using beauty and formal design to shine light on the darker truths we'd prefer to keep hidden (and perhaps when we find his films boring it is because our subconscious is doing just that, refusing to recognize itself in the mirror, so intentionally misreading the symbols, dismissing that which would incriminate it), but for better or worse or much, much worser, the dark heart is in there. The obelisk in 2001 teaches apes how to use his first tool, not for constructive purposes, but crush their enemies skulls in, so they--the chosen, the apes who dared touch it--can vanquish and destroy those who refused this knowledge, who listened to God and didn't eat from the forbidden tree. It is who we are the aggressors. Our genes survived centuries because our ancestors killed the meek competitors for the bread of the earth. The strong apes procreate and endure, the weak die and are killed --or endure only as food for the living. We can judge the evil of the Nazis all we want, but what makes America 'great' in the end is that we wiped out millions of people and got away with it, and they didn't. We were lucky - we were were massacring a people with no relatives in the legal profession, or with friends in high places. No sense of the mad colonial game that had caught on over the 'civilized' European nations, we just walked right in and took their shit. And when they squawked, killed them down to the infants.

And above all, there were no video cameras. No Twitter. No UN. No witnesses = no crime. At any rate, we got what we wanted, and now we're really sorry. Not enough that we'd give anything back, though.

"We're going to make a new rule" 

That kind of genocide seems barbaric now, to us, but part of that is because it is so far away in the past, or so it seems. Kubrick is maybe telling us that the old growth trees and stark Donner Party mountains may have taken pictures as durable as any Panaflex. At any rate, it may feel that way to Kurbick, for if he studied history what other determination could he arrive at? The Gandhis are few and far between and they suffer well but hardly cinematically. A Kubrick hunger strike film would be unbearable. We want to see the crimes behind our fortunes, what outside/alien force, its technology 'indistinguishable from magic' - gave our parents the evil cajones to pay for our schooling and grad present Jaguar? The nice guy parents spend money on funerals and bail bonds, and anything left over goes to the church plate, or lottery tickets. The guys who get 'help' are the killers, the parents with smart investments.

The behavioral modification techniques of CLOCKWORK and FULL METAL JACKET are examples of dehumanizing conditioning that has backfired, and then the last minute rescue of Tom Cruise in EYES as if some patient girl plucked the ape's hand from that obelisk at the last minute, keeping us, as it were, blind forever. Through evil parents only does a child has the luxury to be good. The ape-like violence may be what holds us back, keeps us in a continual loop of paranoia and hostility, but it fuels our drive forward. Where would our moon landing be without the Russians snapping at our heels (as in Floyd's stonewalling the Russians in 2001)? War without a divided self is impossible. Jack is told he must kill his family because the boy has contacted an 'outside party' (Jack has made contact with the 'inside party' which is fine - he's white). In other words, the boy has 'talked' to the Russians; he's betrayed the trust of the big other...  He's "disclosed."

"Maisie Squared" 

Hence I made the collages in this post from images taken not only from THE SHINING but 2001 and CLOCKWORK ORANGE, to tie them all in together the better perhaps to illuminate continuing themes on the nature of perception, the manipulation of consciousness for external purposes, and the dawning of madness almost as a stage of advanced hyper-evolution.

"He went and did a very silly thing" 

Still, even half one of my fish doesn't buy everything. And ROOM 237 itself seems to be snickering at some of these more loco ideas, such as the singing of The 3 Little Pigs refrain ("I'll huff and I'll puff") as a link to the Holocaust.

The ever-didactic The Onion AV Club spoke to Kubrick's assistant to see if the insane theories on the film were 'correct' mainly:

"The suggestions that Kubrick was commenting on the Holocaust by having Jack Nicholson echo an old, anti-Semitic Disney cartoon by reciting “Three Little Pigs” (it was improvised in the moment) or do his writing on a German Adler typewriter (it was Kubrick’s and it looked good). Or the theory that briefly glimpsed cans of Calumet baking powder are supposed to be reminiscent of the Native American genocide (the cans had pretty colors). Or that Kubrick was actually retelling Greek myth by featuring a poster of a Minotaur (“It’s a downhill skier,” Vitali says. “It’s not a Minotaur”). Or that Kubrick was admitting complicity in faking the moon landing by having Danny wear an Apollo 11 sweater (a friend of the costume designer knitted it, and Kubrick wanted something handmade (more)

"A few extra foot-pounds of energy per second" 

It is course contrary to purpose to ask the assistant if Kubrick intended any of this as a secret code. ROOM 237 itself avoids all contact with the actual filmmakers. It's rare filmmakers are as able to deconstruct their unconscious' secret code as obsessive viewers who see the thing in itself, as divested of authorial post-release meaning-assignation as a patient trying to argue what his dreams mean with a therapist. When a baseball flies at your head out of nowhere do you call your assistant and let him know you plan to duck? No, then how can you say you really ducked the baseball? Our unconscious is where real art comes from, without it all you have is cold, dead craftsmanship. And, while the craft is solid in THE SHINING, if any film can be said to exist almost entirely in the unconscious it's this one. The Onion article backtracks on that to point out that Of course, all of Vitali’s protests ignore the separating of authorial intent that is key to any deconstruction of a work of art, as well as the fact that Nazis are still clearly watching Vitali from their secret, Indian blood-powered moon base. So take this all with a grain of salt. Yeah but which part? Using the phrase 'grain of salt' to describe both your inane moon vest anecdote AND Vitali's assertions is very slippery. In the end, the only one who looks untrustworthy is.... you, AV Club!

That'll teach you to ignore my letters!

"Forever and ever and ever"

Call the critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenic on some level. At least theyknow how to look deeply into the crystal ball, and as long as it’s well written I’ll read good crazy over banal sane any day, To the average bore, a crazy person is merely one who really sees just how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface of our skin-thin reality at every given moment. The problem is, the schizophrenic goes crazy because he can’t shut it out of his mind; it doesn’t go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper. Maybe our teeth really are used by someone as crystal sets to receive our thoughts…Stranger things are used for stranger purposes every day.

It’s only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses. As the Yogi says, any man who only trusts his five sense, who only believes what he can see right in front of him, is a truly gullible idiot, and should be fleeced immediately.

One bar chocolate Beyond

"Pull it Together"  (note phallus fingers)

PART II: THE RIGHT MADNESS FOR AN OVERSANE WORLD

Shelly Duvall's stretchy face used to really bother me as Wendy until ROOM 237 'corrected' my perceptions. Now I know why her mouth gets as wide and long as the Munch figure, for this isn't a film about fighting back and acting logically and the audience shouting at the screen "bitch don't open that door!" For there is nowhere to run. Help will not be coming. Sheer overwhelming horror is the only 'sane' response when one sees that life is just a transparent overlay on death. Lift off the transparency and boom- there they are--the corpses and ancient evils.

Apparently one of Kubrick's quickest shoots was CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which came out a mere four years after 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. This was apparently, largely, because of Malcolm McDowell, who said Kubrick was easy to work with "if he trusted you." If he didn't trust you, as he didn't trust Shelly Duvall or Scatman Cruthers, he puts actors through living hell, with torturous exercises like filming one walk from a car into a hotel like 40 times over and over, for no other real reason than to maybe to 'achieve madness" the hard way, or maybe to just be a sadist, or maybe because Kubrick actually was looking for something he couldn't explain. Hitchcock apparently did this when his hot ice queens invariably spurned his grubby advances, such as forcing Tippi Hedren into that bird-filled room over and over for two straight days, or making Kim Novak jump into the freezing San Francisco bay over and over after getting his take in the first shot (or Von Sternberg forcing Marlene to ride the steps up to the bell for the final scene of THE SCARLET EMPRESS until she looks as crazy as her late ex-husband) Are the great artists of our time all just naturally screwed up bully sadists, punishing actresses who won't sleep with them? Is that all art is?

Hitchcock certainly got his insanity money's worth out of Hedren in that climactic final bird scene, and to my mind that's what Kubrick is trying to do with Duvall, because by SHINING's climax Wendy doesn't even look human anymore, she's just giant eyes on a stalk of crazy. Malcolm seems to tap into that kind of berserk madness for CLOCKWORK, as does Nicholson, (and Peter Sellers, of course) all of whom  apparently got favorite treatment.

No wonder Kubrick was so contemptuous of Stephen King's claims that in Nicholson's interpretation of Jack starts out crazy he has nowhere to go, crazy-wise (I paraphrase). For Kubrick there is always father to go crazy-wise. Starting out at a Nicholson-smarm level crazy is as far sane as Kubrick wants to ever get. I personally think it's just fine - he's clearly an average idiot in the early stages of alcoholism aspiring to write, but really just a bum. He married Wendy probably because he likes feeling superior to her. He's canny enough though to tap into frequencies that entice him. He has no problem seeing the ghosts and delving into madness. He's all in. 

"Grady's Correction"

In EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) it's clear that the one with the effortless crazy, the 'caretaker sparkle' in Kubrick's next married couple depiction is Nicole Kidman. Kubrick's first genuinely sexy yet complex female character (i.e not a sex object but a woman who likes sex and men and has no problem fantasizing about men other than her narcissist husband and then torturing him by telling him those fantasies. She plays a woman who likes she likes to have sex; husband Tom Cruise only likes to imagine himself having sex, because he could then see his sculpted body in the full length mirror. In SHUT, Cruise is a cipher trying to break into a a social circle that sees through his facile front in ways he cannot. His sexual life is built on jealousy and a kind of abashed tourism. Even driven by jealousy into the mire of sexual perversion and high strangeness he still is never able, except maybe by the very end, to see the world except in reverse angle, the 'selfie side' of the camera app; but he's finally trying to see rather than just be seen seeing. One wonders the extent to which this role reflects Kubrick's distrust of Cruise, who has a habit of trying to take over shoots with his intense energy.

The actors with the shine in his eyes, the one who can do both: who can be seen actually 'seeing' the world outside the mirror: Malcolm. Jack. Nicole. Hayden. Sellers... As Mick Jagger says in PERFORMANCE, "the only performance that truly makes it is the performance that achieves madness." It's this madness Kubrick aims to achieve, that he seeks in his performances. He knows there can be no falseness in madness. It's either there or it isn't. If it's not there, maybe 40 straight takes of the same scene will help the actor find it. 

Kubrick gets a clinical reputation but it's only because he is going places that would collapse into complete subjection without cold mathematical logic. All of his films are about the weird liminal space that reveals itself when one is cut off, in effect, from a consensual reality--the inner self and outer reality merge. Even BARRY LYNDON touches on this, via the maze of presumed identities played by Ryan O'Neal, the blank canvas of a soul whose life is never the same after killing a man in a duel, so needing to flee town, and being robbed of all his possessions on the way by a highwayman (a scary, very eerie moment that functions as a kind of herald / guardian of the next reality (doorkeepers abound in Kubrick: Lloyd, the debonair dance partner of Nicole Kidman in EYES). PATHS OF GLORY finds it in the transitions between men suffering in the trenches and the pampered cluelessness of the generals in their lofty mansion toasting the glories of war amongst themselves --each side clueless about the other to the point of contempt. The generals essentially are like the ghosts of the Overlook, Grady's urging of Jack to 'deal with' his family mirrors General Ripper's unauthorized military air strike, or the Highwayman's cold, terrifying instructions, or the ordered execution of the three soldiers in PATHS. Kubrick brings this cold, clinical reason deep into the murky homicidal core of man's decision-making skills, the unconscious self-sabotaging core, the center of the bouncy rubber center of the conscious personality's tennis ball. When the system that controls consensual reality is highjacked by a figure from the unconscious, the result is... well... violence, armageddon, and occasionally a light show. 

But along the way, the system breaks down: Jack continually lets his family get away from him, the troops refuse to charge into certain death, HAL goes insane, Lyndon refuses the call to bravery, Kidman escapes the devilish dance partner and Tom is rescued from his trip "over the rainbow" in EYES.

Only our isolated flying boys have what it takes to get the job done, because only Slim Pickens is high enough to see they're all just ants.

 Gimme the bat!

Kubrick became a recluse towards the end of his life, and its easy to read that his whole career was one long planning out of reclusiveness. Did the stress of 'faking the moon landings' lead to his being terrified and weirded out by the reptillian illuminati ceremonies he witnessed amongst the paperclip Nazi/NASA/Illuminati elite, so that he feared for his life if he ever returned to America? Or is the idea that only in deep solitude can one's inner demons really manifest in the external, that reality is only as sick as your secrets, and that when your secrets come out its usually because everyone else has gone to bed.

Writing is like that, when you get deep into your work, time stands still and then vanishes, and the best work always occurs between 3 AM and dawn. The real genius fiction can only occur when this deep break with conventional sanity is possible and this deep break with conventional sanity can only occur when the cops, kids, and parents, the normies, have all gone to bed, as it were, and taken the tiresome curtain of tedious convention with them. We can drop our sanity, or decency and normality, at last, and get a better view of the yawning void outside the window. This sanity (such as it is) is borne bravely by such long-suffering foils as Peter Sellers' Captain Mandrake and the president in STRANGELOVE, Kirk Douglas in GLORY, Shelly Duvall in THE SHINING, Alex's parents in CLOCKWORK. They struggle to carry the torch of conventional reality into the deep troughs of true madness and are suddenly made into the thing that doesn't belong. For the truly mad, it is the ultimate revenge-served-cold satisfaction of our collective unconscious. The sane are now the insane ones, the outsiders are now free to unleash their full potential... and oh how they danced... at Stonehenge.

NOTES:

1. One of the theorists, a photojournalist, notes most newsreel war footage is faked after the fact
2. Thinking on Full Metal Jacket - the whole film being about the process by which that madness is achieved, 
I don't think any of the actors convincingly achieved it the way, say, Kevin Dillon did in Platoon..

More Erich on Kubrick:

SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (from 10/11)

EYES WIDE SHUT: Paters Horribilis: Harvey, Hookers, and a Man Called Pollack (from 3/10) 

Mid-Life Crisis Superstar Humbert, Lo, and the Bait-Switch Cycle

All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives: Stanley Kubrick's LOLITA

Dubious Comforts: PET SEMATARY, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD and the RNC

"The person you put there isn't the person who comes back" 

- Jud Crandall (Pet Sematary)

Aunt Cecily: "Do you believe...the dead can come back to life?
Bob Hope: "You mean like the Republicans?"
- The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Like a bad dream of Republican 'small government,' Pet Sematary (1989) depicts the return to a simpler, more 'Christian' lifestyle, marred by slight problems like the non-regulation of big business, i.e. Paul Ryan's ideas of 'limited government' is behind, no doubt, the unregulated road in front of the family house, whereon trucks go speeding past sidewalkless residential streets without speed limit signs, cops, or punishment. The heavy toll in run-over pets and children is a small price to pay when the alternative is welfare socialism! Limits mean sacrifice: once you're run over, mutilated in war, deformed from disease, or otherwise unassimilable into the Norman Rockwell ideal it's only natural that you become abject and ostracized, shoveled under the loamy carpet or kept hidden in a back room and spoon-fed oatmeal by the terrified child who will grow up to be the mom in Pet Sematary. This is the deal of small government, warts and all means, inevitably, all warts.

Boys do love trucks...

Like the bankrupting of Medicare and Social Security via ever-longer life spans, Pet Sematary shows how the idealization of a 'real' America is continually undone through denial of death. King's motifs come tumbling out of America's chock full-o-skeletons closet in this film way more so than in most all other adaptations of his novels: population control (here in the form of animal spaying issues --the run-over cat is unable to get to heaven as he's 'incomplete'); child mortality (the run-over infant comes back to gleefully kill off the cast, all because dad can't handle the pain of losing him again); assisted suicide (that old invalid aunt twisted up on spinal meningitis, praying for a death which the doctors prevent); lynchings (neighbors once torched the house of a zombie and its dad); Native Americans (burial site desecration), and so on. The graveyard bringing whatever you bury there back to life, but with a demonic streak of voracious homicidal ill will, makes a nice right wing nutjob analogy to sending your good Christian-raised kid off to college and having him come back an angry vegetarian pothead feminist.

All this deep red state subtext doesn't mean (the film) Pet Sematary is somehow not bad. It is truly bad. But its badness is perhaps why it's able to deal with these skeletons straight on. If the film were any better it would have to deep-six the abject subtexts, simply because too many guys in suits would be watching, ensuring nothing controversial came back to bite them. Instead it seems like even the director wasn't paying much attention, so all the gooey truth stays intact, a bit like one of my favorite awful films Godsend, which is also about the horrid deals grieving parents might be willing to make in order to allay their grief. When there's nothing you can possibly to do to bring your dead son back, you can relax and know that--funeral expenses aside--no one's going to drain your bank account in for monkey's paw resurrection service. Since it's impossible to raise the dead, we can surrender to grief's kiln-like heat and be suddenly made pliable. If we have any other alternative we have to take it, and thus the medical community and its ancient burial ground kin make wheel-of-life spoke-jammers of us all.

As in Godsend, Sematary's small cast, low budget, bad acting, poor spelling, flat lighting, unimaginative camera movements, and clunky dialogue swirl combine to help the movie achieve "the sort of shallowness that brings depth" (1). And while in Godsend it was the shrill over-and-underacting of Robert De Niro and Greg Kinnear that made it all so unintentionally Ed Woodsian, in Pet it's the culminating glory of seeing a zombie demon kid attacking an old man like a rabid Baby New Year at the stroke of midnight (above). Any horror is leavened as the kid is clearly just having fun making mean faces. Grrr. 

"President Obama's promise is to begin to slow the rise of the oceans (pause for laughter) and to heal the planet (more laughter). My promise is to help you and your family."  --Mitt Romney (RNC 2012 acceptance speech)

The bodies must be burned immediately. People will have to forego the dubious comforts a funeral service will give." - Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead (1968)

When I heard the above unabashedly anti-environmental attitude from presidential candidate Mitt Romney, I instantly thought of it as the inverse of the announcer in the original Night of the Living Dead, telling viewers to "forego the dubious comforts a funeral will give." Romney would be announcing the reverse: "The health office insists we forego the comforts of funerals in order to halt the spread of this epidemic, but I say your deceased family comes first!" It matters not if Mother Earth dies while we're eating her, as long as we get a big enough piece before its all gone, because we have to share that piece with our family. Unwashed hordes of illegal Mexican zombies are already gnawing upwards from Mother's toes! Arabs are pulling out her entrails! The Asian markets are scooping up her brains. If we don't drag the carcass away from them fast we'll end up not just hungry but looking weak to our enemies, which is far worse. Don't they know we're tough? Grrrr!

For all our strength we're still a very, very young country

Not to say that's what the Republican ticket and Paul Ryan's Ayn Randiness necessarily represent. One must make allowances for bloc baiting, but it's interesting because we have to go back to the Monkey's Paw's 'careful what you say' word choice of our wishes, and avoid 'getting everything we want' which would mean either (for them) a return to a Handmaid's Tale kind of fundamentalist American patriarchal religious oppression or (for us), an overly permissive socialist Welfare State. Neither side really wants either of those options and so we must preserve our state of conflict at all costs. The trick is to realize this and move into a state of conscious awareness, like the Buddha of professional wrestling - it's just a fight. We need to remember that the fight is just for show, that we need the fight, need the show, for balance. A total victory would mean the end of the match, and riots in the crowded streets, so drag on, lads, drag on...

Both sides have forgotten that the real enemy is the media, whose obsession with repetition and bottom lines and computer game tie-ins has led to the idea that zombie movies are just heads blowing up and armies shambling through stairwells ala RESIDENT EVIL. Romero's films, and King's, on the other hand, understand that without the issue of family and the 'right to undie' or the 'right to unlife' there's no 'meat' to the story, which is why RES EVIL is--for all its mega budget and gloss and nonstop action--so uninvolving, and PET SEM is--for all its low budget badness--so trenchant. We have the mom letting her daughter gut her with a trowel in Romero's first film; the girl in the ghetto protecting her zombie husband from 'the man' and getting bit for her trouble in DAWN; and in Romero's most recent installment SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, an old patriarch fighting for the idea that life is sacred even in death, that every dead baby has the right to crawl out of the earth and hunt its parents. These aspects are what matter, what lingers after the endless shots of exploding heads have faded from our minds, and which is why 99% of non-Romero zombie films suck so bad. 

Shot in 2009, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is less a sequel than a 'concurrent' story to the first two films: it takes place several weeks into the original zombie epidemic, and society is still in the midst of its collapse. Two crotchety Irish-American landowners occupy a small farm-based island off the New England coast, wrestling over the abortion-encoded issue of whether to shoot the undead or to just chain and train them to deliver mail or rake leaves. The poster girl for it all (above) is Kathleen Munroe, a hot Irish brogue-sporting lass in sexy black riding coat with sexy black riding gloves, long flowing hair and blazing blue eyes staggering around a lush green corral with a beautiful black steed she's supposed to eat instead of peoples --and both sides of the argument watching her, hoping she'll take a bite out of this gorgeous black creature. It's a great, twisted National Velvet of the Living Dead moment. The zombie movie has evolved here into something a bit more aesthetically pleasing than we expected, at least in this one image, until the bites start.

Another key in SURVIVAL and PET SEMATARY is the use of intertextual imagery - namely portraits and paintings which 'come to 'life' like the once-buried loved ones now unburied. Portraits are, as we learn from John Berger's "Way of Seeing," the proprietary gaze writ large, the establishment of a permanent record of one's existence and property, meant to last beyond death and age, the way stars in films of the 1930s still look vibrant and young even after their corporeal forms have long since turned to ash or moldering bones. There's a fine line between wanting to return to past glory and mere fear of death, and zombie movies are that fine line's ultimate erasure, the frozen preservation of impermanent flux. Cinematic mortality's dawning self-awareness is the ultimate compromise between the 'undead' photograph of a loved one coming to get you (Barbara) across the graveyard of memory and the real of our cursed plane with its spatial existence ever-threatened both from interior growth-decay and exterior dangers. To live you need to kill and eat smaller creatures and avoid being killed and eaten by bigger ones. But, in the movies, all death goes up onscreen, and so we, floating in the cheap seats, can live, even if for just this 90 minutes, in perfect freedom from bodily concern, bathroom breaks aside.

A key scene marking Romero's film as a critique of the conservative mindset involves the 'mixed race lesbian' from the National Guard who winds up abducted and forced to have dinner (prepared by a zombie wife [below left] literally chained barefoot to the kitchen stove) with the pro-(undead) life patriarch, who poses next to his John Wayne-ish portrait and end table filled with old photos of dead relatives (the old school tradition of 'post-mortem photography') and tries to woo her and her niche demographic over to his side, so maybe she'll extend an ankle for a shackle all her own one day. The dead people in the photos are great metaphors for the conservative slavishness to past cultural mores, the PET SEMATARY-ish longing to return to the land of rose-tinted exhumation. The patriarch here has almost no room in his heart for any living person at all. In death they are infinitely more receptive to the message of reverse-progress. Necrophilia is, in the end, all about control. An alive girl is nice and all that but...

"Sometimes death is better."

And yet, if once it all goes black you can go back, what returns? Babies, zombies, remakes, sequels --is that all there is? "Corporations are people, my friend," and corporations ruthlessly pursue self-interest, therefore successful films must be remade, and man must kill again and again just to eat the same meal he enjoyed last week. That's understandable. What's not is the assumption that grabbing it all for yourself is somehow a good thing for America. Demanding to be adored by the masses for your greedy self interest only seems ironic if you're not a rich insecure scion who's mad because he still lacks the nerve to tell the ghost of his dead father how much he hated him. That may be the ultimate irony of bipartisanship, that both sides are really angry at someone else, who's gone, and only their damned vampire photograph remains, and it can't bite back.

NOTES:
1. a compliment Godard once paid to 40s poverty row films from Monogram and PRC, which this film resembles -- See my piece on Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944)

Tony Curtis makes THE MANITOU (1978), Shire a PROPHECY (1979)

When I was growing up in the 70s,  back in Lansdale, PA, if I used my kid's telescope out my bedroom window on a dark clear night I could see the glow from one of the Montgomeryville Drive-In screens, down the hill, the bottom obstructed by tall fir trees, the top by the screen's roof awning.  away as they may be, the lurid drive-in ads in the daily paper (above the comics and puzzles) were coming to life right down the hill. This left me continually spooked all through the 70s, but I especially remember being especially so spooked by the ads for THE MANITOU, a film that promised (via the damning newspaper reviews), an Indian medicine man dwarf growing out from a lump on a woman's back and people getting skinned alive! I couldn't imagine the series of seizures and nightmares that would afflict me to see more than the faraway corner of such a thing... really I couldn't.

I was also riveted by the commercials, ads, and reviews for PROPHECY, a year later, an eco-horror film starring Talia Shire and with even more Native American mysticism. It was a time for eco-awareness and nothing said eco like the PSA chief (left) on the litter-strewn highway shedding a tear. Man, that image really worked. We stopped throwing our fast food trash out the window and everything! But there was still the hole in the ozone layer, so we had to stop using aerosol cans. And aluminum ripped up pelican feet so we had to stopped having pull tabs on our beer cans. Few of us even remember when these things were around now. Combine this dawning mainstream eco consciousness with JAWS' breakout appeal and it all congealed into a late 1970s horror cinema landscape of white industrialists cutting corners and eventually (hopefully) being devoured by the fruit of their shoddy clean-up methods.

And in these two 'tail end of the cycle' efforts, the shaman sees it all, and shakes his rattle 'til it all goes away.

Every review I read at the time about either PROPHECY or THE MANITOU said they were pretty bad, and that's what kept me waiting all this time, over 30 years, to see them. It took the death of Tony Curtis to finally put down my telescope and head down the hill, so to speak. Here I am!

In MANITOU, Curtis plays one of those semi-phony 'frisco spiritualists who've been fleecing lonely Nob Hill widows since the 20s. Though he wears a wizard robe when 'consulting' in his tricked-out apartment, his alleged mystical air is undone by a greying buzzcut. That aside, he moves and acts a lot like I do now. We both entertain older ladies in our flats and seldom leave to put on 'outdoor' attire. We're both on good accord with our ex-wives--his has a slowly forming dwarf Native American medicine men roused from a 400 year sleep on her back, waking to wreak havoc on the white man's world (and mine has an Argentine socialist education); we both have cool stereo systems and we dance with a hard-won sense of existential jubilation the way Jean Paul Belmondo does in Pierrot le Fou. Now you know something about me. Now, madame, let me tell you something about... you.

As the plot matures, the western doctors try and cut off Curtis's ex-wife's shamanic growth. It fights back by making the doctor cut his own wrist.  Next they use lasers, but the laser goes Star Wars nutso, slicing off limbs and halving valuable laser equipment. Finally Curtis sends for a cool Native American medicine man, John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara, who underplays beautifully).

Now, maybe it was because my expectations were so rock bottom, but I really liked the laid-back edge and rousing frozen hospital wing sci fi-vibe of THE MANITOU. It's almost like an extended episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker with a climax at the Fortress of Solitude. In its touch all-bases round of influence-tag, it bounds past 2001, THE OMEN and even prefigures ALTERED STATES and I especially like that there is remarkably little antagonism between the Native American shaman and western medicinal culture. Usually half the film is spent with boring subplots of medical injunctions and the AMA throwing up its hands. Here, suspicion turns quickly to vague interest from the white doctor as he gives up the reigns of treatment to John Singing Rock and eventually they even work together, like a medicinal version of THE DEFIANT ONES. 

Giving the film some staunch method cred, Susan Strasberg plays the afflicted ex-wife, spending the bulk of the film in bed with Blair hair and EXORCIST oxygen tube but returning in time to go topless for the finale, grinning like a maniac while shooting laser beams at the cosmic cyclops, or something, and of course riding some of the far-out visuals that Srasberg's big STP trip in PSYCH-OUT sadly failed to deliver. The spirit of the 70s shines, through, as Curtis and Strasberg lack any of the overwrought drama that would sink an amicable divorce like theirs today.

In other words, MANITOU is a low budget yet ambitious balls-to-the-wall hack job that leans on Tony Curtis to carry it the way the Monogram horror films of the 1940s used to lean on Bela Lugosi. In both instances they made a good choice. Curtis plays it like an Italian working class Bob Hope in taking-it-serious-but-not-inordinately-so CAT AND THE CANARY mode and carries the ball just as well as Darren McGavin in THE NIGHT STALKER, and that's no faint praise.

The following year's PROPHECY (directed by John Frankenheimer!) is much better as far as photography and music, maybe even acting... but it's nowhere near the ditzy fun of MANITOU. With its ALTERED STATES-cum-2001 visuals, Godsquatches, lizard demons, lasers, and Native American 'old' magic vs. machine age magic ("the typewriter has its own manitou!"), MANITOU is a blast, and, not to worry - the torn flesh of Strasberg's back (presumably) makes it looks like she's wearing a pink shower curtain liner. That's just fine with me. I've already imagined far worse, all through the 70s. (i.e. as with any William Girdler film, you need to bring some detail-filling in imagination and expectation).

PROPHECY meanwhile is too busy looking scared and preaching to an imagined audience of gluttonous white capitalists to remember if and when it should be scary or funny or anything else monster movies are supposed to be until almost 1/3 of the way into the film. Until then, Oscars are strove for in scenes involving pregnant Talia Shire listening to her sanctimonious bearded EPA mouthpiece of a husband express outrage at the poverty of the ghetto he visits early in the film, and then double outrage up in Vermont at the mercury leakage that's made tadpoles grow two feet long and an old medicine man go blind. So no, he doesn't want to bring a child into this fucked-up world right now, honey!

She hears all this while waiting to tell him the 'good' news (she's pregnant) as he plays back his dictation elaborating on all the horrible mutations that afflict fetuses subjected to mercury poisoned salmon, which of course they ate only the night before. The scene unspools slowly enough that we don't need to be told what she's thinking about her baby's chromosomes. This is a pretty great scene, full of unspoken dread and drama, all but building a six foot-long tadpole mutant baby human monster in our imagination, but it still drags on forever. Frankenheimer wants to make sure we get every last goddamned nuance (you got she ate the salmon, right?)

Supplying the Native American voice of crying-at-litter enviro-reason, Armand Assante smolders his way through a turn as the local 'Original People' chief. Rather than a real Native American he reminds us of , how you say? Ah yes. Antonio Banderas. In a good... 'way'? Reminding us that method acting, somber mood and low key lighting reigned supreme in the 1970s, PROPHECY broods like it wants to be the horror version of THE GODFATHER, also with Shire (Francis Ford's sister), which lest us forget started out just another adaptation of a drugstore best seller.

So while THE MANITOU is gaudy like those great early Marvel monster comics, PROPHECY is more GRIZZLY meets TAXI DRIVER this side of DELIVERANCE, with gloomy photography, tiny children thrown against trees while still in their star-shaped sleeping bags; heads bitten off; humans waiting and listening in tunnels as the monster trashes the camp above; detailed tours through the paper milling process at a factory downriver of an unseen Maine lumber camp (entry point of the mercury). However, after about the third self-righteous tantrum of our EPA doctor, and the endless caterwauling of the eventually forgotten mutant baby (not Shire's), you just want to press the button on all of humanity and get it over with. Dude, we gave at the office.

Finally deciding to balance its interests, PROPHECY becomes like the windbag at the bar who senses he's going to finally have to let you talk and so he bails out the door on some hurried excuse (there's a lot of them in Al-Anon, too). Compared to the merry everything-but-the kitchen sink Space Exorcist Odyssey-ish whizzbangery of THE MANITOU, PROPHECY's solemn messages about man's polluting the wilderness with his toxic runoff seems punitively bleak. One crying Native American by the highway was enough to seriously change America's garbage-tossing habit, but some bearded leftie guilt-tripping his wife for forty minutes is enough to change it back. Nobody goes to a monster movie for a glum environmentalist harangue.

That said- there's a few good things afoot in the PROPHECY: thee sustained wide shots of the monster trudging inexorably across the lake towards the cut-off survivors adds something genuinely new and strange to horror.

Despite the similarities in the end these two films are like the polarity of only choices for an alcoholic when the truth is too unbearable to ignore: go to AA and get sober or go to the bar and pass out underneath the stools. Do you want to clean up the mess of your polluted life, give the forest back to the Native Americans and ask the mountains for forgiveness? Or do you want to throw typewriters at dwarf medicine men and watch with agog wonder as your ex-wife shoot lasers at giant space eyeballs?

I thought so.

Then again, you could do like I did, make 'em a double (feature that is). Just remember to keep that nonjudgmental childhood telescope trained on the partially obstructed drive-in screen of bemused tolerance and low expectations rather than the 'big picture'. Sometimes the complete picture can be downright detrimental.