The Gummo Marx Way: INHERENT VICE (2014)

With glazed eyes and a suspicious tan, Shasta (Katherine Waterston) began languidly gyrating atop our semi-supine and stoned hero (Joaquin Phoenix); her slow deep rhythmic breathing began sending twisty second chakra waves out from the screen into my own shattered nervous system like a hot shower in the reverse direction, kicking the little dusty stem I'd eaten during the previews into slow un/coiling kundalini life at last. The barnyard pungency of the leather coat on the hulk in the seat to my left became--through this Shasta-breathing kundalini awakening--no longer overbearing but reassuring, earthy. A few more deep Shasta breaths and the whole theater of imperfect Brooklyn specimens glowed and merged as one--ever-more rhythmically frenzied-- grinding energy vortex. Each shadowy spiderweb sketch line filament of Inherent's cinematographic glow was now a haunted hazy amnesia-curing brushstroke, framing two lovers against the darkening afternoon of a "Gordita Beach" apartment in the early evening. Shasta's Tropic of Capricorn-style twisted sexual power trip extended single take monologue slowly drove us all into a sympathetic breathing response, and our hero into a ferocious rutting frenzy. 

"You're moaning again," my girl next to me whispered. Apparently this was a thing I did in such moments, quietly I hope, at any rate unbeknownst to me.

I've felt the glowing anguish that results when a a tripping male is suddenly placed in close quarters with some random hottie wearing intoxicating perfume with low cut blouses and short skirts. The intensity can buckle you to your knees. Not being able to just attack her like you're some cameo-making midlife crisis male in CANDY is like having to explain to your children why you're getting divorced, only instead of kids it's a seething sacral chakra. I've felt it a dozen times, but seen it captured in a film only once: Terry Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, when just being in an elevator with a laughing Cameron Diaz is enough to send Benicio del Toro's acidhead lawyer into a slow-building howl of pain that infects his mind and body for the rest of the film and results in him even pulling a knife on her friend. I'd never felt it over a movie scene before though, until this moment in VICE, on that one dusty stem... 

Benicio is a very attentive lawyer for both Hunter and Doc (from top: FEAR, VICE)

Everything else, every other trip I'd take later in college and after, never equalled that one perfect moment, it was all just more of the same, but less effective, like 99% of horror movie sequels. Well, that Katherine Waterston scene in director Paul Thomas Anderson's crowded canvas VICE does deliver something new, something PTA's sorely needed, a damned good femme fatale anima for all his damaged fathers and sons.  There's even a holy ghost this time, via a moving and very weird scene with the great Eric Roberts, and a spirit operating a drug dealership via Ouija board.

And most of all, VICE is set in 1970, California, via the literary tripper's choice, based on the book by Thomas Pynchon.  I wanted to hang onto everything--being such a PTA fan--but most of it is a blur of names and faces and places. What resonated for me: a stray streak of sunshine on Doc's face during a drive to the beach, a sunrise reunion of a reformed junky family (the glow of the doorway and the horizon line behind matching in perfect transcendentally lucid pink), and that Waterston 2nd chakra-activation monologue --that's what I remember most. Just a stem and a cap to heighten the gorgeous golden magic hour moments, just a little Gordita Beach Turkey Ranch, that's all I got. Just a couple of acres. Groucho looking out from the ANIMAL proscenium CRACKERS arch, talking to Doc like a most gnarly cross-mediated platform surfer? Stuff was on TVs back when everything was thrice the magic for being so ephemeral. The only screenshot you could make was to take a photo of the TV screen. Always is that magic of the untaped TV-chronicity in a Pynchon; he'd be a great film critic if he wasn't so regular falutin'. Knows his pop culture  but spikes it with post-modern glug glug glug, like a drowning submariner crying Lot 49. And if those strange figgers, mysterious figgers (Anaconda 148) don't add up, neither does life, it's just time lapping into seahorses, and for my sins, they gave me some. And neither does BIG LEBOWSKI. Make sense, I mean. But that's okay, it's not from a book, and so it doesn't fall into that over-reverent, 'trust the meaning is there in the lit' white elephant manicuring that, for example, pulls a bit of the stream-of-madness energy from John Huston's UNDER THE VOLCANO and flattens it out into detailed 'giving the cinematographer and art director way too much money and time' sumptuous over-thinking. There's no extended dream sequences or surreal "it had no bottom" odysseys for Doc Sportello. He's nailed to the events occurring in ways more significant to a detective yarn where it all makes sense and the paranoid 'maybe connections' are meant to add up. No scene can go off into its own little termite dream realm because there's the 'book' to honor and it is a work of literature not a lean mean skeleton on which to hang an array of detours. Yet neither Pynchon nor Lowry are very 'exterior' writers, and to nail their florid dense text to a single narrative film and expect it--due to its literature pedigree--to make 'narrative sense' is rather silly, like expecting Holly Martins will be able to pontificate on Joyce's Ulysses just because he's an American and an author. 

But Shasta adds up. Those legs sprawled naked and soaking in a storefront alcove, Phoenix's scroungy Marxist professor from the 70s look, from back when professors bedded co-eds with sanctioned impunity, and Nazi bikers worked as Aquarius Age bodyguards, and nymphomanic maids screwed everything that wasn't nailed down in her madame's boudoir. Or is that just priapic fantasy?

Mystified mainstream critics have reasoned English major Generation X stoners like myself who remember the 70s from a wide-eyed childhood perspective, aren't seeing the 'real' thing. Our parents are disillusioned with that decade, just as we are with ours (the 80s). I still get weirded out when I hear the Y generation venerate the 80s like it had some mystic power, when for my generation that power faded in the anguished morass of puberty and puerile sex comedies and misogynist slasher movies. For my generation we feel connected to the mystical 'truth' of 70s-style Fleetwood Mac/Sonny and Cher California consciousness raising. We see the Aquarius high water mark with a glowing rose tint. We remember an orgy we saw from afar but never experienced, and that orgy--our expectation of attending it later--being what formed our psyches. But we let the distance between that peace sign-sticker flanked scene and our own embarrassed shyness widen until the distance until our longing soured into bitter frigidity of the slasher movie, feeling our last shred of innocence die at the hands of David Mark Chapman, moaning in pain as the AIDS 80s slammed the door shut right on all future orgies right as we were approaching the 'right' age.

We, these mainstream critics have noted, will probably dig INHERENT VICE more than the bourgeois top critics on our more mainstream newspapers, the "Top Editors" who keep us second stringers reviewing Tyler Perry and Veggie Tales movies. They grab the Paul Thomas Anderson film for themselves, alpha dogs grabbing for the chew toy just because they sense we want it. For these top dogs, the decade's Aquarian tommyrot is just an embarrassing reminder of the month they tried to wife-swap with their bridge club. Paul Thomas Anderson, as far as they're concerned, hasn't made a decent movie since HARD EIGHT. La dee dah.

The Gen X-ed of us love everything but HARD EIGHT, and now, or yet, THE MASTER had thrown us for a loop. Speaking for myself, I dutifully saw THE MASTER twice thinking it would cohere into genius a second time, but no, it was still just gorgeously photographed acting of no more lasting effect than being made to chop wood at my buddy Al's grandparents' house, and liking it despite grousing before during and after. Seeing it again, I can smell the wood burning. But it doesn't get me high anymore

I'm not sure I like INHERENT VICE, at least after one cinema viewing -- high expectations? The only moment of THERE WILL BE BLOOD-level badass Babe and Bunyan truth in either of his last films is when Hoffman shouts "Pig Fuck" with a coiled unresolved adolescent fury any frustrated enlightened charlatan knows all too well. The more spiritual drivel you speak, the surlier your squirming toad cortex seethes below, til that wicked tongue snaps forth and puts someone's eye out. But it was hard to buy the idea that Seymour Hoffman, for all his towering talent, could ever be a cult leader--his fingers were too stubby. Neither he nor Phoenix is the sort, for example, you'd want a bedroom poster of, or to pray to on an altar, the way say we would James Dean, or Daniel Plainview, or "Bob" Dobbs. Phoenix also seems all wrong for a detective, or cop or skip-tracer. He's way to tiny. He seems the type you could just brush away with a strong broom like sweeping motion.

Luckily, in VICE we have the sexual power of Sam Waterson's daughter. She seems legit --the real thing. Her vaguely cat-like face and ease with her body, that sweet sad wistful 'already gone'-ness cracking in her voice, the sort of real no amount of acting workshopping can fake. Her Shasta isn't hung up on Mother Jones sermonizing or slumming Edie-ism. She's complex, and you can believe she doesn't show anyone her full self, and those who come close to getting the big picture are just as likely to lose her with their first inauthentic breath.

Keep your eye on the red bullseye - Lucky Strikes means fine tobacco (LSMFT)

But this is INHERENT VICE: Ultimately, as the narrating Joanna Newsom notes, a nameless eternal evil has seeped like a vapor out from the ancient opium Pacific and co-opted the Age of Aquarius. But just where has the vapor condensed? It's a hard thing to trace in a 1970 California where hippie-dom is apparently so very near becoming the dominant culture that cops don't even bat an eye when you spark up a joint in their presence. They do beat you up for having long hair though - even if they're  your friends. Ain't no gettin' around that. So just assume the passive stance of protecting head and fingers and groin and let the billy clubs fall where they may.

Milk

Thus the strange ancient frenemies relationship with Josh Brolin's cop Bigfoot. And Brolin's character invoking hazy memories of the 'Twinky Defense'-copping assassin Dan White in MILK (2008), connecting with Newsom's debut album (The MILK-eyed Mender). Coincidence?

PTA's always been first and foremost a filmmaker for de facto cool older brother relationships, and part of what BLOOD's power emerged from was the relative lack of a feminine element. Certainly, to my memory, no female character has a line of dialogue in the film, aside from maybe Mrs. Sunday. Instead there was this boy scout-cum-capitalist narrative nursing on the crude oil teat of the Paul Bunyan masculine John Henry Steel Driving consciousness, drawing from it as if a deep well from which to dredge up the dark oil-slicked father of modern oil-based economy. THE MASTER tried to do the same, but Amy Adams' as Hoffman's wife snaked forward with more power perhaps than even Hoffman (as his Clinton-esque hand job indicates). Now, in VICE, it's even narrated by a woman, and not a Spacek in BADLANDS blank slate woman but a savvy all-knowing Cali free spirit shamaness of no small wit, harp expertise and mystic acumen. Her albums are rich with great existential lines that would stagger Whitman and leave my iPod devastated--"and though our bodies recoil / from the grip of the soil / why the long face?" She and Waterson are not stealth buzzkills like Amy Adams, but wild untamed goddesses of strange alliance, orbiting men in motion like moons or cats but belonging to no single planet or territory or direction.

Then there's Joaquin as old Doc, the hippie detective. His office lurks deep in a medical suite, Anderson's ex-girlfriend Maya Rudolph as his doctor office receptionist; Doc in his gynecology chair, a xone for smoking weed and staring at the window, huffing laughing gas when the myriad threads get too much for a single viewing. Seeing double somehow allows the plot to come into focus for old Doc. Not me. I do know that it's Maya Rudolph's mother, Minnie Ripperton, singing the song that rises triumphantly from the soundtrack during Doc's mosey back to his office:

Ring all the bells /sing and tell 

the people everywhere that the flower has come
Light up the sky with your prayers of gladness 

and rejoice for the darkness is gone... 

Of course 1970 it was still possible to be idealistic enough to believe that darkness would one day be gone, or even had gone once and come back. And it's Anderson's genius that he can recreate not only our Gen-X collective memory of that era, wherein he and I were children of similar age, but to make it a source of lasting mythic resonance. For me, every strand of long blonde straight hair I see reflects the gossamer shimmer of Anita Louise's as Titania, queen of the fairies--my anima! If it's over a denim jacket, I'm agog. Why? My mom volunteered part time at a runaway shelter, which was basically a typical suburban house with a big porch. I remember one Xmas my dad's company bought them a coffee percolator. They were part of the Jaycees, my parents, so fell into stuff like that. My mom brought this girl named Toots home for Xmas -- a gorgeous 16 year-old thing in a jean jacket and perfectly pressed long blonde hair. My mom gave her two packs of Marlboros as an Xmas present, maybe some other stuff - I only remember the cigarettes. It left me forever a-swoon for her type, and dying to be a smoker. That was the 70s, you'd take in runaways and give them cigarettes and it wasn't considered a felony or 'suspect' or 'corrupting the morals of a minor." Don't get me started!

For Xmas, my rapture over her every movement paralyzed me so I still remember how hard it was to croak, "Hey Toots, want to do Doodle Art?" Those words etched into my brain with some small shame, the way my voice broke on the word "Doodle" and made it seem somehow scatalogical.

It was the 'Mythology' one (left -but w/different colors)- and ten years later it hung in my college friend's drug den living room -- it's the circle of life. Mythology. Coincidence.

But it was mainly that fate had deposited her there, on my orange shag rug, like an Xmas gift from the karmic wheel. In the safety of my family, she let it all hang out. And it's a family affair of adopted and actual sibling cinema in camp PTA too: Sam Waterston's sexy daughter Katherine is the femme fatale; Martin Donovan is the angry dad of a runaway, the stand-in for Col. "I enjoyed that drink as much as you did" Rutledge in THE BIG SLEEP; Elaine May's daughter Jeannie Berlin is Doc's savvy New Yorker Aunt Reet; James Brolin's son Josh is the cop; Eric Roberts is Julia's brother; Serena Scott Thomas is Kristen's sister; Jena Malone is a reformed heroine user looking for her man.

And some of us remember Joaquin didn't come up the ladder to fame so much as be revealed standing there after brother River died (sister Summer's also in movies); Joanna Newsom is married to Andy Samberg who later that same night (that we saw VICE) showed up on ERIC ANDRE SHOW uncredited as Eric's double and their schtick together evoked the mirror scene 1933's DUCK SOUP, starring the Marx Brothers, and the street name Gummo Marx Way--Gummo famously the only Marx Brother never to appear on film--is on one of the files looked over by Doc at the Hall of Top Secret Records in VICE.

And what about GUMMO? It's by Harmony Korine, who also made SPRING BREAKERS, set also on a beach involving pretty people doing crimes while engaging in deep druggy binaural second chakra breathing. Of course that film was set in Florida, where Elmore Leonard set so much of his oeuvre, and that oeuvre a clear inspiration for Pynchon's source novel, along with Hunter S. Thompson (Doc and Duke sharing Benicio del Toro as an eccentric lawyer) and The Firesign Theater's How Can you be Two Places at Once when You're not anywhere at all? And back around again. Gummo Marx's film oeuvre, a study through which someone in some Allen film obtained some film doctorate... which brings me back to VICE yet again, and Martin Short's obscene corrupting uncut Cockaine dentist love... with Shasta an underage girl ("But it did happen."), a wild child ala Camen Sternwood, falling onto Sam's lap while she's standing up.

And back to that wow of a super sexy girlfriend free spirit played by Katherine Waterston (Sam's daughter) named Shasta Fay Hepworth. She basically owns the movie, no mean feat considering the heavy hitters in all directions. She's the mystery, and by the end we can understand why this stoner detective is so crazy about her, and why he's ultimately so frustrated being unable to find any clues as to her whereabouts when she decides to be gone. Like Lebowski is about that rug, or Gould's Marlowe about that vanished wrong guy friend, or Hackman for poor Melanie in Night Moves, it's the obsession that guides him, the film, us. Woke last night to the sound of thunder / how far off I sat and wondered / started gummin' a song from 1970... was it Minnie Ripperton's "Les Fleurs?" Yo, Minnie's daughter Maya Rudolph was that fleur? She was born two years after that song came out. So no. She wasn't even a gleam in her father's eye. But in Hindustani texts Maya means illusion and is eternally beguiling. No coating of black enamel could hide her value from his eyes. Maya is the woods we must hack our way clear of towards the clear-cut riverside of Nirvana, with no Excalibur machete or golden ankh to wave. And let's just take a look at this fabulous Yucatan Blue! Price: only what the traffic will allow, delivered to me, Ralph Icebag, by a brown-shoed square in the dead of night. Now of course PTA and I are too old for such things - to fantasize about young hotties in the 20s is to feel slightly skeevy, the line of parental concern sneaking in to kabosh lewd longings, that coupled to desire's gradual dimming. We've been fantasizing about and desiring girls in Shasta's age group since we were seven. Are we supposed to magically stop just because we're now enlightened? Can we really put the social awareness genie back up the bottle? Now in middle age, men are only desirable if they do not desire. It's in accepting this awful compromise that an ex-swinger earns his only chance at long-term respect. Sportello in his quest for justice or whatever he's after winds up with no magic credit card full of money for his labors, that goes to Coy Harlin - who also gets his family back. What does Doc get as this agent of Borgesian karma? I can't tell you but it's also the name of a short-lived 70s soda brand. Give up? Even then, there's bound to be hurt feelings with a certain assistant-DA (below, right). This is the ever-evolving world Doc navigates. Riding one paranoid clue to the other. The final reward being a great bit of acting tough during the Martin Donovan talk where he momentarily seems somewhat scary, before sinking into his stoner fog once more.

I had no control over it, but I watched, and then I read about it, so I know that by the mid-80s, when I became a hippie and besties with Toots-like hippie blondes, America had already given up on the utopian ideal for a united and very hip America - only in certain pockets of California, Colorado, Connecticut and upstate NY maybe did it all still thrive. The alternate reality of Pynchon's LA can't decide if the counterculture infiltrated the mainstream and tools of government to any degree. I was too naive at the time to realize how much the 'free love' grubbers from the raincoat 'burbs had trashed the Hashbury Ideal until it hit me personally: Maybe you experienced it: townie and/or frat cokehead troglodytes dropping by your intimate ego-dissolving LSD party at four AM and you realizing you need your ego after all because you need to get aggressive enough to kick them out. All you can do instead is try, vainly, to formulate a coherent sentence without contradicting the love vibes you've vouchsafed. So it was wherever clement outdoor park service did thrive. Hordes of long haired peaceful but filthy barefoot hippies clogging ever last public bathroom, everyone being too cool to work or pay money, just presuming they'll be taken care of by the very social order they spit on.  The center cannot hold. Communes go unglued as psychedelic unity and the blazing tribal consciousness that had emerged from the primitive inner rolodex for the first time in 1,000 years gives way to petty squabbles, malnourished infants of uncertain parentage, filthy sinks (the water turned off for no one paid the bill) and squalor enough to reduce even the most enlightened of near-Buddhacatholichrists back down to grouchy adolescent Earth, craving the comfort of mom's clean sheets and the now-weakened capitalist behemoth's car keys.

But they had brought all the trappings of the counterculture with us back to our home suburbs, and 1970 signaled the beginning of that smooth Laurel Canyon sound on the FM dial. The radio lit up with songs that managed to be sexy and vaguely dangerous to us kids without seeming to offend or challenge in any way. Parents and children in unison swooned from the emotional connection of "American Pie" or "Go Your Own Way" or "You Light Up My Life." Vietnam still sulked around but there were bridge games, wife swapping, martinis, and above all we kids. Our parents gave up total freedom but we were unleashed, freed by Jaycees' many parenting lectures all hip on Buscaglia, Spock, and EST - all attended and talked about and the methods "tried out" on us to great success.

I took advantage of that 70s freedom. I stole every cent I could. We kids ran loose like dogs. It was okay with us that we could still get spanked or slapped in public by people not our parents and no one would bat an eye. One whack for every year on our birthday in front of the whole class by the teacher. At home, indoors, we towered like Godzilla over wood block towers we'd smash again and again before sloughing back into the depths. No mom objected to us playing with realistic looking cap guns unchaperoned wild in the woods and streets for days at a time. Vertical wood paneling was our rec room horizon; orange shag carpet our jungle canopy; couch cushions laid in a line on the floor our Bridge of Toome in County Antrim, Ireland. We'd march up and down it in time and pretend to be hung like Roddy McCorley. PTA was there, I was there. Were were you? Where were you? Which war? Which side or drug were you on?

I don't know how many times I've seen BIG LEBOWSKI. A dozen?  I don't even like it but it's endlessly re-watchable; some part is always just right for the moment I stumble onto it during, and its always on some channel or other.. Sooner or later though, it grates on my nerves. But it's never the same film twice, until now. Jackie Treehorn's shoe prints are all over the Pynchon PTA's lovingly detailed semi-sordidness. VICE even uses the same Les Baxter-Yma Sumac Tropicalia vibe that was Treehorn's leitmotif to conjure the same crossroads between the Jack Horner nurturing free love spirit and the Treehorn mobbed-up porno-decadence. But that's just one of a thousand twuggy-druggy twiggy-wiggy branches. You can dig it. I can dig it. Cyrus, the one and only.... But most of all, Paul Thomas Anderson has exhumed himself from beneath THE MASTER's weighty muck to re-dig it.

Who knows what would have been the result if Welles made a 70s stoner detective film. Would it have been INHERENT VICE? Or is there just no character titanic enough within the story to hold his interest? There's no core or center to VICE, no 'hurrah' moment like the pool party in BOOGIE NIGHTS or the bowling alley climax of BLOOD. Phoenix is a great actor, but he's a scrawny shell of a thing, a short wiry little weirdo. We don't gravitate to him like we do to Warren William or Bogart in similar roles, or even Dick Powell or big Jeff Bridges (or his father, Lloyd Bridges, for that matter). As for VICE's detective narrative, it's more coherent than some, but trying to explain the plot to my underwhelmed partner last night, all I could do is relate the anecdote about Hawks calling Raymond Chandler from the BIG SLEEP set to ask who actually killed Owen Taylor and Chandler not knowing the answer either. It doesn't matter.

She thought it should.

I've seen BIG SLEEP a dozen times at least, and I'm almost ready to blame Joe Brody, but Joe's saying he just sapped him for the incriminating picture from the back of the head of Krishna, So don't even draw the connections, baby. Just soak in Eric Roberts' brilliant monologue that rips the guts out of capitalism with an LSD trowel and reveals nothing but jewelry-coated vultures beneath the black enamel topsoil, the breathing aurae of cinematographer Robert Elswit, the spiderweb lines of light and shadow haloing around every actor; the great clothes and cars like some old analog album came to life, Phoenix a little monkey wiggling free of his angel dust entrapment cuffs and every drug you have ever done shivering to your DNA surfaces.

You're home, if you're like me, comfortable, almost amniotically sound, in this murky mythic din of countercurrent flashbacks. Every time you smoked angel dust it was because some dirtbag laced his joint and didn't tell you til it was too late. You were only three but you well remember the morning when every TV channel showed only the streaky continuous feed of astronauts bouncing around the moon in molasses air, like they were underwater, the audio just transmitted astronaut chatter and space interference, hour after hour, the usual old science fiction movies of the morning pre-empted, their futuristic fiction now outmoded into ancient fact.

"Ain't been high since '69"

In some strange way that was true love, that one stretch of continuous time --no commercials, no political dissent or grandstanding or fear-mongering, no sponsor, no agenda. Just community, finally. Harper Valley, we didn't know how much you meant to us until we thought we'd lost you.

But a new time has come: your cosmic Maya has given birth to a new generation of Rippertons. We're free to love movies like those mythic moon moments again, free to see you and me in the same slow motion bouncing astronaut ground zero persona-dissolving mythic glow. A new go-to comfort food bible is born, if you care to blast for it. It's the Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective, brought to you by Wild Root Cream Oil Hair tonic. Yeah, it tastes electric... crimson... almost like fire. Almost. But were real 70s cars ever this collector clean? Or ever a humor in this Woman One? Take this lozenge from my tongue, this quill from out my heart, this pink and blue Tab (languette) of / Purple Barrel Plums / Untie from me the TruCoat, Ralph Spoilsport. Though our bodies may break and our souls separate, why the long face? We don't need no sealant, not anymore. No salt coheres along an ever-moving shoreline. Arise for the darkness has come / back! Remember Les Fleurs, Walter! Ils brillent dans le noir. And most of all... Rejoice, sisters and brothers and siblings transgendered: there's finally a movie where being a stoner isn't the same thing as being an idiot. I never in a million addled years thought we'd overcome that dopey stigma, let alone Washington and Colorado, let alone, baby.  Let alone.

Dirty up that car, Paul. This ain't no expo

Al Shean Presents: Vice Grip of the PYNCHON

RIFF INDEX: 1. Jackie Treehorn -(Big Lebowski) Pornographer played by Ben Gazzara (a riff on Eddie Mars in Arthur Gwyn Geiger + Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep) - "I'll Say She Is" - title of the last (unfilmed) Marx Bros. Broadway revue / Jack Horner - Pornographer played by Burt Reynolds (Boogie Nights) 3. "when the drugs began to hold..." - opening lines from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing... Vegas  4. "Turkey Ranch... that's all I got" - Hank Quinlan - Touch of Evil (1959) / "lapping into seahorses" - Patti Smith, "Horses" / "Steel Anaconda," etc. - Animal Crackers, Pynchon - Crying of Lot 49 5. "Spoilsport Motors," "Where were you, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Smith" - Firesign Theater (How Can you be Two Places at Once...) / IV. "Communiss" - Confederacy of Dunces / 7. "Roddy McCorley" - Irish drinking traditional (via Clancy Brothers album we had as a child) 6. "like the Andalusion girls used..." -"crimson... almost life fire" -  James Joyce, Ulysses  7. Trucoat - protective coating / sealant - scam extra Lundergaard tries to sell - Fargo (Coen Bro.s) 12. Wildroot Cream Oil Hair Tonic - "Again and again the choice for men who put good grooming first" Squaresville, in short. (Sponsor for old radio show "The Adventures of Sam Spade"  / Walter - (John Goodman in Big Lebowski; also Dick Miller in Bucket of Blood) 9. "Take this Longing..." - Leonard Cohen / "quill from out.... my heart" - Poe, The Raven  42. Tab - common 70s slang for square from a sheet of blotter acid, also one of the earlier Diet colas: the latter of which I am now hopelessly addicted, and for which I blame past use of the former - ya dig? ii. ".... Why the long face?" - lyrics from "Sawdust and Diamonds" by Joanna Newsom / "make you lasagna' - Clerks iv. Purple Barrel... - play on a common form of mescaline from the 80s 87. "Holly Martins..." - Third Man, The  xx. "If you care to blast for it" - Ben Hecht - Nothing Sacred (1937) 17. Harper Valley - Cockney-ish slang for Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) - re: "Harper Valley PTA" 21. Al Shean - AKA Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg (Marx Brothers' uncle, credited for coming up with their names and schtick) 

All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS (2010)

From a very pedestrian viewpoint, the Runaways were a scruffy pre-packaged all-girl rock L.A. version of that original pre-fab/anti-fab combo, the Sex Pistols. The Runaways were aimed at a fucked-up demographic by nutcase impresario, Kim Fowley, just as Malcolm McLaren aimed the Pistols. But then there's the 'enlightened' viewpoint which was like whoa, these chicks rawk! And they did lots of drugs, and were lesbians! And broke up mere minutes after reaching stardom, like true fucked-up badasses. With both pedestrian cynicism and fanboy admiration, then, THE RUNAWAYS remains kind of confused about whether its a tired meditation on girl's voices LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS, sisterhood via semi-edited lesbian attraction ala, TIMES SQUARE or drugs, phoniness and flame-outs on the pursuit to one's own original artistic voice after being moulded, like ROCK STAR. What it is, well, is a little of all that, a film well-crafted to tell its tale, and maybe that's the problem.

It starts well enough as far as the rise: Joan's first guitar lesson; the band learning to deflecting tossed beer cans (a punk show problem) with their guitar necks thanks to manager Fowley's extensive training; cramming into small hotel rooms, dealing with hostile club managers, etc. In short, the girls pay their dues. Then, soon enough, they're on top of the world, then Cherie throws a hissy fit tantrum and the band is over. Little things add up to an uneasy feeling throughout. It's CROSSROADS if they welded on THE DOORS and FOXES and clanged the loosey-goosey 70s 'kids are all wrong' bell of OVER THE EDGE (still the greatest kids amok film after all these years) before running back to rehab.

Too bad about Dakota, though... tick-tock. RUNAWAYS misses some grittier possible marks in order to coddle blonde "Cherry Bomb" lead singer Curie's bratty myopia, a bad decision considering Fanning's half-hearted blank slate interpretation. Or is it just that Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett rocks so much harder and mopes so much mopier that the movie grows lopsided? See that picture above, of the real Cherie? She may be acting as coy as Carmen Sternwood but those eyes are feral and dangerous, like a wild tigress I have known, like Carmen Sternwood (the nymphomaniac druggy sister in The Big Sleep) in fact.

Now look at poor Dakota below, blank as the freshly fallen snow. Carmen Sternwood wouldn't even waste a bullet on her.

I say this as someone who loves Dakota, or loved (past tense). Despite the cliche-bound script I was touched by her gut wrenching a capella "Hound Dog" in 2007 (my review here), but here she's just a shell of a phoned-in blank nothing, snarling on cue and looking cute but lacking any kind of self-assertion. There are 16 year-olds out there who are going on 23 and there are 20 year-olds out there going on eleven. Dakota was an eleven year-old going on 30 but now the age of twelve seems to have caught up with her. Maybe the studio hoped Fanning would mature during the filming, that maybe she wouldgrow into the role, but there are ways that girls can delay womanhood's onset. I shudder to think that Dakota's following in so many young girls' DSM IV-certified child actor anorexic stunted growth footsteps, but in THE RUNAWAYS she's still just a half-starved deer in the headlights, not yet a she-wolf, eating that deer, as nature intended. Fanning lets Kristen Stewart do all the eating while she sits in the corner, sucks her thumb, and looks coy. Is she even having fun? Does she still like to pull the wings off flies? Are you getting all these super-droll BIG SLEEP references?

Despite the Dakota handicap, THE RUNAWAYS has things going for it, like an awesome soundtrack dialed cleverly to the left of cliche'd expectation, opening up on Curie's first menstrual period, reddening in a gas station bathroom to the tune of Nick Gilder's "Roxy Roller." Meanwhile Joan Jett's jamming to Suzy Quatro's "All my life I wanted to be somebody now here I am! I'm the wild one," and huffing glue with her less-than-Cherie-level-hot girlfriend. Now that's rock and roll. Cherie, meanwhile. is cutting her own bangs and punking out her lingerie before hitting the high school talent show in a glam rock Bowie lip sync, getting cheered on by the sisters and booed by the fellas. But hey, all she's doing is lip syncing and posing, Joan at least learns guitar, though her first teacher is a clumpety old man who wants to teach her "On Top of Old Smokey." Which alas impels a walk through the empty parking lot as "This is a Man's World" nods sympathetically from the soundtrack, and not the James Brown version, but MC5!

Again, cliche' sidestepped, by a sole-scrape.

But, even though Cherie lights a cigarette at the wrong end and dances around dressed as Stevie Nicks, we're still never quite sure what drugs she's doing or what kind of rock star she really wants to be, if any, or what kind of actress Dakota wants to be, for that matter. Stewart's Joan fills her squirt gun with vodka and urinates on the douche bag headliner's guitars --she really is the wild one, and you hope some of that wild stuff might rub off on Fanning's Currie, and eventually...  for awhile... it does. When their plane's about to land in Japan, the pair quickly wolf down their coke and pills in the airplane bathroom to avoid trouble with customs and suddenly the film speeds up for the butterfly stomach sweaty-palmed high of being cranked-up onstage, twirling under the hot blazing lights, merging like a playback pitchshift melt with the slow-downs of their first kisses in the dark of post-show euphoria, drenched in crimson light and scored to a slowed, druggy  "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that makes you ache in rock and roll remembrance of the first trip on acid or the first trip on ecstasy, the first kiss backstage or first time on stage on acid playing and singing while the microphone spreads out before you like an insect highway --the blazing red stage lights in your face forming a fiery Bosch triptych funnel around the microphone and your mouth becomes the size of a black hole in outer space, spewing flaming lyrics into the clenched alien insect fangs of the hatched web of the microphone, and outwards in waves of pink that wash over the melting-faced fans. It's a first kiss that starts as a gentle shotgun from a joint and slowly tentatively becomes a supernova of blinding white light. From their first gig all the way to Cherie finally passing out in Japan, the film is alive with pleasure.

Fanning's good in these moments of stoned triumph and good much later as a zonked junky in the grocery store, using her cart for support as she glides through the aisles, trying to buy two large onions and a liter of vodka from a skeptical cashier who looks distrustfully down at her blank eyes, bruised arms and shitty ID. We like that she steals her dying aunt's medication, and that she plays mind games with her copycat sister, but it's one thing to be believably fucked-up, another to turn that fucked-uppedness into rock and roll gold. Brando was a believable working class slob in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, for example, but that's not why the role made him an icon. He brought ferocious animal grace, he made the brute sexy in his savagery. Fanning needs that kind of ferocity. She's still eerily mature like she was in I AM SAM, but now she's clinging to a blank DARIA-style po-faced apathy. She's the FUGITIVE KIND Brando, trying to stare down adulthood in the mirror while passive-aggressively parodying her character's archetypal punk oomph.

Well, who can blame her, considering the horrors she's seen herself go through on film? Speed, anorexia and self-loathing keeps a girl 'forever young' until one day she just turns to dust or goes to rehab, or is saved by rock and roll. Yeah baby, rock and roll.

But Dakota: if rock is to save your life you have to at least give a shit about it. You have to thank it, bathe in it, love it unconditionally. Otherwise you're just a poseur looking for a validation hand-out, the addictive high of adulation is an excuse that prevents you from actually interacting with lesser (and everyone else is lesser) mortals.

In the end, Kristen Stewart pulls off being a rock and roll survivor just like the real Joan Jett because she taps into that feeling of how passion and genuine interest in something (getting better at guitar, for example) is a lifelong pursuit that saves you from all self-defeating distraction. Fanning / Currie never learns this, never deigns to look outside the mirror for her raison d'etre.  But in Joan Jett/Kristen Stewart's case it's a love of one's craft that I call the Keith Richards life preserver. She has her guitar, and she'll never need to look farther than its strings to find her own backyard.

No this same guitar playing focus is what keeps death at a respectful bay for Keith Richards. It's what lifts him above the druggy waves that drown lesser rock mortals, that lets him soar past the trials of bad trip overdose and grubby hangers-on that drag other rock stars down. His guitar is his magic charm, like Tamino's Magic Flute in Mozart's same-name opera, steadying him through trials that would panic and drown rock stars whose focus drifts to groupies, money, fame, or the terrors of bad trips and relentless dehumanizing crowd adoration. Joan loses all her fame and rep when the band crashes and she burns, and she's so young and overwhelmed she can't pull herself out. BUT once she's suffered and lost her mind and got it back through writing "I Love Rock and Roll," she has found her Keith Richard life preserver and earned the right to be a rock goddess, the way she hadn't while on the fast track through Fowley's hype machine thresher in the Runaways. She suffers and survives by grabbing onto the Keith Richards life preserver, focusing on her guitar and the craft, the playing. It keeps her afloat above the AOR sharks, big money, fame's rises and falls (and the only thing more jarring than sudden fame is its sudden absence), romantic love (which women are taught should be their 'ultimate'), and drug abuse. Guitar - it's a creative outlet she can practice and play on forever and never stop improving, a focus that keeps her head down and her attention rooted on the next step ahead, instead of all the side distractions. She can bring it everywhere and never stop playing. That guitar lifts her from both sinking into the mire, and from floating away into space. It's like a crack in a prison wall and you know that the more you scrape at that hole, the wider your glimpse of daylight 'til one day you can just walk right out (just don't forget your trowel).

Alas, there is no 'out' to escape to, but you can take comfort in the fact that you'll never run out of scraping; the scraping becomes the spiritual practice --that's the Robert Johnson crossroad devil's bargain. Joan Jett and Kristen Stewart signed the Satanic contract (Stewart with acting - continually seeking out good directors, scripts and new challenges) but Cherie and Dakota (through phoning it in) just fold the devil's contact up and ask the devil if they can hold onto it and "think about it"...  until indecision becomes their whole persona, and that's death if you're in a rock band. You may as well bring your mother along on tour, like Cameron Crowe in fucking ALMOST FAMOUS. Yeccch!

As a child actress coming into adulthood, Dakota's heading into some treacherous waters... she needs a Keith Richards life preserver. She seems to have forgotten she used to have one in acting. She's a lost little girl and making personal lostness part of the role isn't the same as playing a lost little girl in such a way as to make us swoon from the cinematic complexity of your acted lostness and thus to recognize cathartically our own lostness. Instead, it's not just Cherie throwing a tantrum of indecision, it's Dakota throwing a tantrum by draining Cherie's tantrum of cinematic resonance.  She's become like another child star whose precocious genius has seemed to fade, Christina Ricci (as Nathan R. writes about on Film Experience). If moviedom was their parents, Christina and Dakota would be going through a phase, a kind of passive aggressive tantrum, like Richard Burton in EXORCIST II. Sometimes too, as with Burton, if you have a rep of being a great actor, directors are skittish about telling you how bad you're sucking. And you go on auto-pilot, not realizing future generations will be cringing over your hammy bad vibe hangover of a performance for eons to come.

Since we never see the Currie spark in Fanning, we never really see what it is she lost, or if she even lost it. We can only discern that that some people were born to rock, and others to fold napkins at a gift shop and occasionally dress like Stevie Nicks. I'm not knocking napkin folding or Stevie Nicks. Most of us--myself included--leave the rock world for folding napkins sooner or later. Maybe napkins are all we can handle. Only a few go the distance like Joan and Keith, for whom no drug will ever supplant their rooted allegiance to rock, which is why they're free to do as much of them as they want. The rest of us may have rocked and had a good time, but love of rock never really supplanted our love of drugs, our love of the stage, fans, and jamming out never supplanted our longing for creature comfort. We'd rather stay home and listen to music and get high than go out on the road and deal with afternoon sound checks in barrooms still reeking of smoke, booze, sweat and vomit from the night before. We'd rather not have to worry about staying more or less sober until after the first set, which means approximately five hours in some bohunk town with nothing to do and nowhere to go except wait in a smelly bar that reeks of booze and you're not allowed to drink until a half an hour before the first set, so you sit there in the corner and the pre-show jitters and last night's hangover make every hour stretch like days.

But then, Boom! A double shot of tequila, lemon, hit the stage and it's all worth it. That's the rock and roll experience, or it was for me. So I quit, because a beer-soaked, cigarette and vomit-scented bar is a terrible thing for a sober person to have to smell for hours on end, with nothing to do and nowhere to go until the set starts (a bass is pretty easy to set up), just forced to just hang out in a bar and not drink while coping with the twin anxieties of a) what if no one shows up? and b) what if a lot of people do and you suck? It's a nerve-wracking strain that has your whole psyche screaming, hour after hour, smelling that stale beer/puke/urine/sawdust smell, staring at the shelves behind the bar, shivering in the cold caused by the wet-mopped floors.

All worth it with that first flush of the double shot before the show starts, sure, but the strain!

Man, it's hell getting up to heaven. For me it wasn't worth it, so here I am. I hope Dakota doesn't cop out if acting is her passion, but if not, well, you can't hang in the doorway forever deciding if you want to endure that horrid 5-hour wait in the vomit-and-beer smelling soundstage, all made up and clutching a sweat-stained script like the hand of your mother when being led to the doctor's office for your first shot.

As for the real Cherie Curie, she finally found her own Keith Richards life preserver... chainsaw sculpture!

Saw strong, big sister! Saw that shit STRONG!