The Shrouds of Soavi: CEMETERY MAN, THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER

Once upon a time in swingin' Italy there was such a deep merging of art with blood and beauty that a beautiful blonde in a fashionable dress could stand on a corner, petulantly smoking against a futuristic glass skyscraper reflecting the ancient bombed-out cathedral across the street, and just that image--coupled to the sounds of traffic and Nino Rota-could knock you into a state of modernist euphoria. The blood was her beauty; you could feel her pulse in the operatic contrapuntal score - she was history, the nail in the crossroad between ancient Rome, the Second World War and the sci-fi Age to come. You'd swoon from her beauty, reflected in the light and breeze.

And then in the same movie, a sun-browned hairy little gnome in an ugly peasant dress (Jeanne Moreau as Marcello's drag of a wife in LA NOTTE) could make your hand reach for a razor or noose on instinct, anything to escape her gravitic buzzkill 'wifey' aura. This was the flipside of the Monica Vitti's eternal sex-spontaneity promise: the vortex of maternal devouring, the endless Catholic maw of guilt and suffocation. Even gorgeous raven-eyed Yvonne Furneaux (below) could seem like an evil clutching graveyard drag, pulling us out of the DOLCE VITA and down below the domestic tedium tombstone, the quicksand tar pit from which no swinger returns. Run, Marcello! She's calling you with suicide threats again and you're just naive enough to believe her, to presume yourself at fault, yourself responsible - after all you had a suffocating mother, too - and still feel bad about having to pry her claws off you with a crowbar just to get out the door and go to school in the morning.

If you do the math however you realize (as I did), that sort of thing is a prime example of emotional terrorism, and you don't negotiate with terrorists. Me, I only figured that out thanks to shrooms, which armored me like Zarkov's memories when my old college (Italian-American) ex-girlfriend tried to keep me from going to one too many parties back in 1987. My own mom was Swedish, so I never had that problem, hence this girl's sticky needy 'mama mia' tentacles were a brand new thing. If the shrooms hadn't rescued me (whispering words of strength and guidance inside my head like the voice of Diana Love to Helene in The Undead).

But everyone's an emotional terrorist in mid-60s Rome. There's not a Swedish mom in sight, unless they're a murder suspect with their steely-eyed coldness. And there ain't a mushroom to be found, only knives; the only way to hear that escape-urging voice was to start slashing. Rome: a land of the lost, the adrift, where the half-built skeleton of an emptily decadent future and the ruins of a recently-bombed ancient demonic past stood literally on the same block like twin skeletons hanging on the wall at an inquisition waxworks. Rome, at the time when gender was juuust starting to slip its rocky encasement. Rome, where you couldn't tell the women from the effeminate men if they wore big black raincoats and gloves and lurked in shadows and all you could see was an outline and a flickering knife blade showing your screaming face reflected like that cathedral reflected in the windows of the modernist high rise. Is it sexist to presume the one in the raincoat was a man and the one in a dress a woman and not a drag queen? The reasoning, Agatha Christie simple - make the killer and all the male actors the same height and approx. weight of the women, to keep the suspects pool large, and to make for an extra twisted denouement. Gay stereotypes mincing at smoky bars may be for freak show frisson, but visibility is visibility. Gawking is the first step to acceptance.

Almost as a side effect to the giallo model, psychosexual freedom!

But... is it art? 

I refer of course to the bloody sexually perverse knife wound, the bleeding begun with Bava's ill-received Blood and Black Lace and finally turned into a virgin spring gusher after Antonioni's Blow-Up helped obliterate the distinction between high fashion, signification chain-disrupting ambiguity and 'maybe' murder. Argento took pages from both films, and swirled it all to a giddy new extreme that felt genuinely dangerous. He launched a whole new genre and suddenly he had 'a team' - a production organization centered around his two mentees, Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi.

No offense to Bava Jr., but the difference between these two disciples was like hacksaw and hawk, like comparing Ennio Morricone with Ermine N. Goborra, but they all worked on each other's things and years later, thanks to greater technological advances undreamt of in their era, we can appreciate their films as good as they could in their studio screening rooms at the time, more or less, and savor every corner of the widescreen frame and every glowing color. Far better looking than films made today which rely on HD cameras which give everything a wan, washed-out look, these Italian horrors pulse with restored giddy colors that intoxicate even when nothing's happening onscreen.

The diff again: Lamberto directs like a fifteen year-old burnout in art class, saved only by his stoner shop class graffiti touches as if passive-aggressively trying to prove to his father, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava that he should have been allowed to be a veterinarian or heavy metal bassist instead of a filmmaker. Still, if you've ever been a 13 year-old heavy metal album headphones-on bedroom heabanger, you can't help but love him.

Conversely, Soavi is a metatextual satirist who goes to the root source of Argento's work-- the subconscious--and picks the doors to the Antonioni tiger, the door brother Lamberto left untried. He finds the zone where Antonioni meets Bunuel, the same space from which David Lynch dances in a papier mache Bosch Wicker Man mask, there to fool Godard into thinking it's a safe spot for deadpan absurdist dissertations. Then, when Godard starts opening his little red book, Soavi sneaks off to run amok in the fields of cinema fantastique like a drunk dragon.  And there he finds the fissures in modernism's ideas of modern society and widens them to let the madness seep in like nitrous from an amok dentist.

DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE

("Cemetery Man" - 1994)

****

The idea of being trapped in love's absence--a big empty hole in the ground where a coffin goes, and only a fat dumb little brother or neighborhood dork for company--has never been so palpably felt as in Michele Soavi's great opus, DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, one of the best 80s horror comedies to ever come out in mid-90s. I remember the ads for it (small space) in the Voice when it came to NYC theaters, and thinking: yeesh, just what the world needs, yet another Pulp Fiction / Living Dead first person shooter game with an Italian narcissist hipster pretty boy shooting zombies all day in slow-mo, probably with a shrine to Elvis by his black tie collection and some karaoke in with the terrible dubbing and excessive gore. But this was years before DVD, back when I dismissed Argento as misogynistic and felt that Italian movies had to be in Italian to even think about (for dubbing was a sign of xenophobia and subtitle illiteracy) and so forth.

What a fool I was! DVD has so many taught things to us... to me... multiple language tracks let us know the Italian language track often looks even less synced than the English, and the restoration and beautiful transfers of widescreen HD help us to see at last 'what the fuss was about,' and to better appreciate such things as the jet black dry subtle cineaste termite wit of horror auteur Michele Soavi, and the rich textures and muted sunless palette of his mise en scene. 

Based on an Italian comic book, Soavi's masterpiece is a sensitive jet black satire on death, desire, and adolescent obsession all wrapped up in horror comic trappings. A kind of hipster Alessio nel Paese delle Meraviglie, its protagonist can stand proudly any decade next to Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey in Blue Velvet as far as fearless intrepid truth-seekers uncovering the rocks in his backyard to see what worms, pill bugs, and centipedes are thar. Charging into any mystery or romance that grabs him, even if it takes him over the edge deep into his own psychosexual dysfunctional core, our graveyard keeper hero takes what comes with a shrug and a soft weary moan.

Presented in a kind a tumble down overflow of macabre black humor romantic episodes, the film speeds so merrily along from event to event it could easily have been fleshed out into a full season of its own TV show. The overarching theme is how hot young things stay loyal to their rotting cannibal corpse lovers even as they're being eaten or beheaded (and vice versa) by said zombie lover, all in an effort to escalate the DSB of our young protagonist for some hell-centric reason. All told, while episodic and hard to pin down it's a sublimely dream-like odyssey into how death never dies and desire's fulfillment was never born.

And as a sublime anima, playing many roles, returning again and again in different guises, like Liz Taylor in Doctor Faustus (1967) or Isabelle Adjani in Possession, or Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, gorgeous Anna Falchi dies and comes back in numerous guises as his anima/object of desire. So gorgeous and sexy she could melt the 'thing' out of the Arctic all by herself, Soavi makes full use of the way such shocking hotness has an uncanny frisson to melt an already overheated mind. In true anima form, she's the sort of girl a young sexually frustrated young man dreams about almost  making it with, only for there to be some distraction or calling away before it starts or ends, leaving the man in a kind of exquisite frustration, loping after her as the backgrounds shift and envelop so that circumstance seems to use her allure as some horrifically just-out-of-reach carrot (her absence as the whip). At first she's a grieving young widow, seen in the corner of his eye, who comes alone every day to the cemetery to mourn her much older, goofy-looking husband (his picture's on the tombstone), whose love-making skills are constantly mentioned like a dagger in our hearts, mocking us in ways you may have to be a smitten lovelorn dude listening as the girl you like goes on an about how attractive some toothless scraggly idiot is, like you--in your finery and wit--don't even exist! Everett's Dellamorte is smitten of course, as would anyone be, and soon they have some great death-evoking moments, kissing with full protection (their lips and full heads wrapped in burial shrouds); when they do finally get into it, it's atop of the husband's grave, prompting the old man to reach up through the soil and take a bite out of her, thus interrupting things... again! Sprites fly around them as they make love, disembodied souls seeking moments of conception the way hermit crabs seek the right empty shell. It's always something.

Cross-addicted

Like his same-initialed Donnie Darko or Dylan Dog, Dellamorte doesn't deign to separate fact from fantasy, so why should we? Certainly the town's chief detective would never suspect him of murder, and later even outright refuses to, as when he stumbles on the mayor's daughter's severed head keeping house with Dellamorte's dummkopf assistant. That episode, and a hilarious bit between an undead biker and his haughty young deb ("I shall be eaten by whomever I choose!") are folded in between the many guises of Falchi, and her tragic death/s and Dellamorte's visits with the cryptic and strangely tolerant local detective.

Falchi is so gorgeous that after she's dead - and she goes early on- you feel the ache for her, a real sense of loss perfectly summed up in DD's rote distraction performing his dead killing duty, so that when Falchi comes back all wreathed in vines we're so glad to see her we don't even care if she rips him to shreds. It's more than beauty or her surprising gift for balancing dark dry deadpan drollery with a constantly shifting array of moods--from melancholy depth to necrophiliac ecstasy, from undead vindictive succubus to suicidal prostitute to local student (?), etc-- Falchi genuinely seems like an array of different people, all cursed as they may be by the kind of impossible beauty that makes normalized relationships with men almost impossible.

Funny, profound, surrealistic, deeply sad and subversive, DD gets over its lack of forward momentum through an endless parade of weird cool touches, such as Death appearing in broad daylight out of burned phone book ashes, all done in a very clever analog style, the sort of thing Terry Gilliam's tried all his life to achieve with the same nonchalant virtuosity but he ends up overthinking and spending too much money; or that Michel Gondry does with too much knitted nerd twee and not enough subversive darkness. Soavi tosses such bits off like riffs that always lead back to the graveyard, capturing that lonesome isolation we feel as virgin teenage boys living with our idiot little brother and clueless parents, all of them blind to the dead coming back everywhere, while we yearn for the phantom girl we keep seeing beckoning to us, and always from whichever window we're farthest from.

It's hard to believe this came out after CGI and Jurassic Park as it could easily be from the 70s or 80s. Its knowing winks to Evil Dead 2, Clockwork Orange, Polanski's The Tenant, and Zulawski's Possession put it in that category of cult cinema so packed with in-joke references that they will only appeal to the cult of weird cinema, leaving the banal and average filmgoer out of the loop, ensuring a very narrow demographic. But I do the same thing here in this blog - so what the fuck ever. If you're reading this, you are one of the "chosen few"  Soavi even refers to us, the chosen, in the next big classic of his we'll be discussing:

LA SETTA

(Aka THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER / Aka DEMONS 4 -1991)

***1/2

Among the other things that marks the quality difference between Lamberto Bava and Soavi is the dubbing. In Soavi, the voices match perfectly and the soundtrack pumps. To compare this as just a third Demons film is like calling Raiders of the Lost Ark a sequel to Treasure of the Four Crowns (1). As with so many of its ilk, good or bad, La Setta draws liberally from the Italian devil movie pool of "influences" and influenced - i.e. Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Exorcist, The Sentinel, the (real life) Manson murders, even Argento's own Phenomena and it even works as a sort of quasi-prequel to The Visitor. There's a Manson-esque desert canyon drifter named 'Damon' (Tomas Arana) who opens the film by freeloading a meal off a pair of traveling hippie families, and then sacrificing them all (kids included) to feed the need of a slowly gathering Satanic overthrow, but not before introducing himself via lyrics (spoken) from "Sympathy for the Devil" and assuring the blissfully unaware brood that the Stones' lyrics are profound and meant for "only a chosen few" as if angry one of the hippie dads would dare recognize his plagiarizing.

Forward ahead a bit and into Frankfurt (like Dellamorte this was filmed in Germany) and a killing or two and then we see old man Herbert Lom leave his Frankfurt hovel and take to the road with his mysterious package (you'll never in a million years guess what's in it). Soon he's standing in the small town in the heart of Black Forest road and nearly hit by Miriam (Kelly Curtis --Jamie Lee Curtis's sister), a sweet guileless young (single) elementary school teacher who ill-advisedly takes him and his strange package home to her cluttered little apartment, one of those little German townhouses split down the middle so she has an upstairs, basement access, and an attic but each floor is small and Soavi gets lots of cool shots bearing down the stairs at each floor like some guest taking the only seat left at party, on the stairs between floor, giving it all some terrarium look, mirrored--hilariously--in the POV of her white rabbit. In grand late-80s style, Miriam is kooky and single with no husbandly prospects (her wedding couple snow globe lets you know she's wishing for one) and a nagging best friend who's always trying to set her up on dates. For awhile it seems like she's following in the footsteps of Anita Skinner's character Dee-Dee in one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, Sole Survivor (1983) in that she hooks up with a young doctor who helps her even if he doesn't quite believe her crazy story... etc. And in Terminator echoes (which as I've said has Halloween echoes), the bunny equals Sarah Connor's iguana, and her slutty friend ends up dead (like Sarah's bouncy roommate with the headphones, or Dee-Dee's strip poker-playing neighbor, or Halloween's PJ Soles). And there's the Curtis sister connection... Dude, it's all connected.

At this point I'd say if you haven't seen it, stop reading and see it first. As it's got so many great WTF moments I don't want to spoil them for you. It's on youtube (for now) in a decent print (where I saw it) and so while we wait on a region 1 Blu-ray, maybe you can enjoy it now - it's manna,... for the chosen few, the type who geek out when they recognize one of the sleazy truck drivers (Richard Sammel) as the Wermacht soldat who gets his head beaten in by "ze Bear Jew" in Tarantino's Basterds.

Okay, whacked-out film, right? WRONG! It's grounded like a deep well, even the Satanic impregnation aspect has roots in ancient Greek myth: instead of bedding the devil (as in Soavi's previous film, 1989's THE CHURCH), we have an updating of Leda and the Swan, though instead of Zeus as a rapist swan, Curtis is impregnated by a Satanic (dig that malevolently intelligent black eye) pelican-ish creature at the bottom of a deep well underneath her house, but instead of sex it just pecks out the brain-eating bug larvae nesting in her neck. If taken alongside the Leda myth it's suddenly as if we're realizing Satanism is just the ancient Greek pantheon gone hopelessly shady from the lack of sun (after hiding out from Christian zealots for centuries).

What makes all the weird bug-up-nose strangeness work of course is that--and this is especially true as far as the score is concerned--this shit is serious. Composer Pino Donaggio merges sustained vocoder, funky bass underwriting great Satanic chanting, and abstract drumming as if summoning some ancient evil Lovecraftian behemoth. Little details accrue alongside the dark comedy--the main evil cult member brings his face ripping tools, but won't let anyone else touch them, like they're some high-toned guitar; the cult uses reflected full moon in vanity mirrors to light facial surgery down by the creek during one of their ceremonies. How or why a new (woman's) face would reanimate Herbert Lom. no sane person cam guess but the mundanity of the ceremony (if the placement in the flow of the river isn't aligned they'll be at it all night, notes the doctor wearily), the rabbit's final declaration of Satanic mischief --it's all absolutely deadpan termite. Once the bug goes up into her brain we get an interior view, into her dreams, as if the bugs POV includes access to her third eye subconscious like a two way radio. Bits of Antonioni-style alienation affect include the doctor risking his job leading her down into the morgue corridors deep in the antique hospital basements, a long hallway, the come to a doorway - he mentions the guards as if worried one will approach and then tries to kiss her against the wall so a passerby would think they're just down there for privacy and oblivious to the world.

That kind of set-up cover moment occurs a lot in cinema, as if danger itself is the key to busting the first move, but this time there's no security guard and she rears back from his ill-timed attempt. In true termite fashion it's just another knowing deadpan inside toss-away joke. Earlier the doctor mentions he's allergic to Miriam's rabbit and jokes about it being the devil, kinda ("There's nothing wrong with my rabbit," / "That's what he wants you to think!") but it turns out he's right, since it knows how to work a TV remote, and later nibbles his fingers at a key moment causing him to fall down the well; and when he opens the seal on the coffin, under the lid, it's sealed, like a sardine can (I guess they do that?), and in poking it open the doctor gets squirted in the eye. When Miriam's water isn't working we see her looking up into a mysterious pipe--and we get the water's journey from the poisoned well up through all the arcane old German Schwarzwald plumbing to her sink in a style way prefiguring Fincher's in Panic Room--Miriam barely misses getting squirted in the same way when she turns away at the last possible second.

Meanwhile old Herbert Lom stays totally inscrutable - is he good or bad? We don't know for half the film--he could be either a Castavet in ROSEMARY or a Merrin in EXORCIST. But either way, we worry about Miriam's boundaries. Avoiding bringing Herbert Lom home is the first thing parents teach children, so she's definitely an orphan and definitely missed a lot of key survival tips most kids glean before they graduate the sixth grade. Mockeries of things like the Shroud of Turin (a dirty hanky on his face later kills people through suffocation); a girl crucified, one frightened by a snake, the kids wearing weird WICKER MAN-style pagan masks, a mysterious Asian lady in red trying to steal the dirty shroud hankie and Curtis fighting to keep it with all her might, though she can't possibly want it, all proving if nothing else that like Argento, Soavi has seen BLOW-UP a dozen times, if one can really be said to have seen it, or anything, really....

As in ROSEMARY'S BABY there's a weird disconnect as it turns out this apartment has whole vast chambers Miriam never dreamed were there. Characters have cool names like Moebius and Martin Romero ("Martin" being that lesser known--and recommended if you can find it--Romero vampire flick), they're the kind of oblique in-jokes that someone like Joe Dante or John Landis would need to underline, but Soavi just buries them under everything... not unlike the elaborate ironwork that's clearly (presumably) merely found basement pre-war janitorial relics, though who the fuck knows?

The Black Forest atmosphere is sublime and Donaggio's moody score brings in everything Argento's films were totally lacking by then--laden as they were with Heavy Metal and ill-chosen composers like Rick Wakeman. Even Donaggio could be the wrong choice, sometimes, totally missing the tone of some American movies he worked on (like Tourist Trap- which he scored as if some childhood carnival whimsy) but maybe his not knowing English was part of that.

Stole many a man's soul and face

Meanwhile, what of Argento? He co-wrote this, and one wonders if he was just spreading himself thin. He'd lost, by '91, his most important collaborator, the Debra Hill to his Carpenter, the Gale Ann Hurd to his Cameron, wife Daria Nicolodi (and Asia's mother) and seemed to perk up only for the chases and hardcore misogynist killings and snoozed through the rest. In 1991, American horror movies had given up trying to be stylish and riffing on tropes and capturing that dusty gray sky, muted colors and strange textures (as opposed to Argento's preference for bold colors and slick modernism) and his wickedly subversive sense of deadpan humor. What makes it so very Soavi is the... whoa.. made myself dizzy.

Hope you guessed his name

After this, Soavi went onto Italian TV shows with unpromising names like "Anti-Drug Squad"- easier to finance and finish, he says, and no distribution headaches. I'm sure, but they'll never be STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS. This is the dawning of something all right, but it's not the age of anything but looking down the rabbit hole spiral into the infinite(ly recorded) past.... For the chosen few, this Stone's at you. 

Curtis family (L->R) Tony, Jamie Lee, Kelly, Janet Leigh

Kelly and Jamie Lee at father's funeral, a fraction of a millennia later

the before and after.....

NOTES:

1. no offense to the Demons, they're plenty meta, I just shy away from endless static camera gross outs, watching the pustules appear, swell up one after the other and drool fizzy food coloring leak from fanged mouths, it's like 7th grade lunch period all over again. 

Hell's Angels Vs. The Flower Child Dead: GIMME SHELTER (1970)

In the wake of Woodstock it was apparent to even the hardliners in political office that "relating" to the youth movement had become intrinsic to long-term survival. Where the rock stars went, young potential voters followed in legions, a city's worth of population literally on the move. If they stopped getting high long enough to realize the power they had, these kids could overrun the capital without firing a single shot. In true American fashion, these youths were an organized political force and a swarm of ravenous locusts: eating, drinking, and smoking everything in sight and leaving only cigarette butts, empty beer cans, broken tents, and excremental mud in their wake. When the big rock acts came to town they were like a band of bespangled reverse pied pipers; it was up to the village elders to make sure they led all the rats to the swamps way outside of town, instead of letting them camp on Main Street.

Today we roll our eyes in outrage that FBI had files on rock stars like John Lennon but Altamont shows the feds weren't all wrong in seeing him and his peacenik ilk as a threat to national security. No one at the time could have known how ably pills, pot, and potent potables could derail a protest movement. If they had, the powers that be would have been.... dispensing it.... importing... it. Oh my god! Conspiracy! LSD, tool of the CIA in keeping the kid nation pinned to the couch. Hey, they were just saying give peace a chance (i.e., if peace knocked on the door, Lennon would hear it out, like the pitch of a nervous  vacuum salesman). The kids would try to stop the war with a clap their hands, or stage sit-ins, but there was a reason they were sitting --they couldn't stand up. Vertigo, man.

The kids, it turned out, were no threat, unless they didn't get their drugs, their music, and their isolated acres.

So, as the Stones hadn't been at Woodstock, and were naturally jealous of those who had, Mick and Keith decided to stage Woodstock West, so to speak, out in San Francisco. The politicians and state leaders didn't try to talk any sense into them, or shut them down, or run them out of town on a rail, but instead rushed to accommodate with starstruck obsequiousness, as captured in Maysles' stunning documentary film. Legal superstar Mel Belli acts as the Stones' obstacle-remover, making sure local land owners and city sealers don't stand in their way. When he tells the contrarian owner of Altamont Speedway on speaker phone that "the Stones will be there tomorrow morning," it's with granite certainty. A platoon of cops would be as outnumbered as a skeleton UN peacekeeper force in the middle of a full scale Rwandan genocide.

If you don't know what happened, man, if you haven't seen the doc, I can sum up that the Stones didn't want a bunch of cops on their stage bumming folks out and they didn't want the stage too high up, as that implied inaccessibility or something (there hadn't been many security guards at Woodstock, but the stage was built so high they didn't need them). The compromise: the Stones got the Hell's Angels to do security and as there was no room for the Angels to lean on their bikes and drink their beer between the crushing rush of fans and the stage, dozens of people got bopped a little bit upon their sconces with traditional Angels accoutrements like chains, pool cues, and in one case, a knife.


I've seen this film dozens of times since the mid-1980s, when my punk rocker friends and I would watch it every day after school, to my hippy years in college and after, so it's managed to transcend several Erich phases. I've had lots of time to study the footage and see what went wrong and my sense of blame has shifted 380 degrees over the decades. As a punk teenager I was all terrified of the Angels and what I thought was random violence. Now I see the film in the context of the plethora of zombie films choking horrordom, and I think Altamont would make a great addition to Romero's series: Hell's Angels vs. the Flower Child Dead. 

I'm sure that it's what it felt like to the Angels, who were misled into thinking it would be a cakewalk of getting loaded and just keeping peaceful loving flower children from tripping over the stage, and were thus unprepared for a job that entailed controlling a crowd of hundreds of thousands of bad acid-guzzling, late-to-the-lovefest poseurs, lightweights, stalkers, jonesers, wallies, murfs, amateurs, perverts, and raging dillweeds -- all suddenly remembering they know Mick Jagger personally and Mick invited them onstage and... oh wow, man this shit is kicking in and... it's all cool so let me just bite... a chunk... off the band's shoulder and climb into Charlie's bass drum and sleep the glowing paisley handcuffs off.

The Angels were outnumbered and high as kites. Who can blame them for going a little Street Fightin' Man on the glazed-eyed, needy throngs trying to climb over them, treating their beloved bikes like stepladders. Maybe those people were unable to not trip over the bikes from people behind them frantically pushing as they were getting pushed, or maybe they were just idiots with no respect. I can't imagine getting to the front of that mess without being either some kind of pushy asshole with no regard for others or camped out in advance for so long you were practically dead, so I'm on the fence.  The whole Manson thing had, by then, occurred, so we knew west coast hippies weren't all folkie peacenik like the east coast, yeah I said it!


I mention this not to belittle the tragic events, but to illuminate how powerful and well-done the film is that, for all the times I've seen it, I never remember much of anything consistent, like RASHOMON, the "what happened" that's captured on film changes with every viewing. Mick's attempt to stay cool and happy onstage during the decent into a new level of violence emblematic of the fall of the movement as a whole. He can't see or tell what's going on with the lights in his eyes, but he knows something bad is happening, and the confidence and sense of artistic freedom leaks so fast out of his voice you can hear the whole world's optimism going with it.

"People always seems to get in some kind of a scuffle every time we start to play that number," he says. His sexy rockstar cocksuredness becoming a "let's all remain calm, children" kind of principal at the school assembly. "People, Cool out! Sisters! Brothers and Sisters! We don't want to fight, do we?" But he asked another rhetorical question just a few scenes/nights earlier: "You don't want my trousers to fall off, do you?" And in both cases the answer is the same inchoate howl from the keyed-up mob.

Rock stars asking for restraint? Hilarious and chilling to a faux-jaded teenager for whom it's all just yesterday's papers. But as I age into it, becoming the Stones' age in the film while being in a band in and after college, then dealing with the aftermath, the years of anguished pining for the lost sense of cool camaraderie and the afterglow from dancing, drugs, and fulfilled desire, watching movies like SHELTER, HEAD, YELLOW SUBMARINE, and MONTEREY POP over and over, like a heartbroken old maid reading and rereading love letters from a long-gone beau, now, the hurt is gone, a kind of jaded caustic stealth optimism remains, and seeing the film now is to look at people younger than myself, kids, their pandemonium and moments of quiet beauty, terror and despair all too real and too true to be merely glorified, worshipped, missed or condemned.

In the end, for all their peacenik lip service, GIMME SHELTER is the Stones as Circe's sirens bidding through their beguiling song the hippies swim through the crowd sea to be trampled under waves of biker jackboots, their brains dashed against the rocks on waves of Angel chains. Still coming, ceaselessly, the flower child dead horde ever trying to take a bite of Mick. How naive to think it would be anything else. The Stones weren't Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club but her Satanic Majesty's Request; they were never about peace and love in the cornball "this is called prana yoga, everybody. It gets you really high, okay?" way of (the restored footage of) WOODSTOCK, nor were they the working class yobbos like the Who. The Stones were dandies, art school and economics students, more concerned with their Carnaby Street clothes and chicks (or 'birds') and not going to jail for their Redlands scandal than protesting for peace.

As for the Angels --they had done good security for the Grateful Dead in the past, but nobody wants to rush the stage at a Dead show. Ain't no one pretty enough in that band for even the hungriest zombie to want to maim, much as Bob Weir liked to think otherwise. The Stones, however, were all very tasty. But they had already used a British chapter of the Angels at their Hyde Park Brian Jones memorial concert the previous July, but as Gadfly's David Dalton notes:

As security (for the Hyde Park performance) the (Stones) used Hell's Angels. Well, er, English Hell's Angels—the Stepney chapter. East End yobs playing at being in a motorcycle club. The Stones liked to flirt with pantomime violence—always fun and decorative, isn't it? And hadn't these rough lads given the show just that bit of Clockwork Orange frisson that the afternoon needed?

The Angel's methods may have been too brutal for the Altamont scene, but that was their common resort - it was expected that, when things get out of hand, they'd shut it down. There just wasn't good enough security otherwise all down in front of the stage and without the Angels, Mick and company would have been overrun, and possibly ripped to shreds like the very Mick-like Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer . (I bet Sebastian would have been glad to see the Angels rumble to his rescue, instead of Liz Taylor's hippie pacifist virgin, just standing by the wayside, wringing her lily white hands!!)

I remember a bouncer saving me once in a similar situation at a show in Trenton's City Gardens for the LA punk rock group X around 1984. Some guys were trying to turn the front of the stage into a mosh pit back when the days it was still called "slam-dancing" but was fast becoming far too violent for non-skinheads (thrash was ensuring bloody noses for all) and this big security guard--probably about seven feet tall--yanked me out of the way of a drunken fist flying right at my head through the melee while I stood there, lightheaded and dumbstruck. He pulled me behind him with one hand and held his own fist out and smashed it into the onrushing face of the guy who was coming right at me, halting his frame and forcing his fist to pull up inches from my face as if he'd run into a concrete wall. I got blood all over my shirt and if not for that one awesome bouncer, I'd have been knocked the fuck out and likely trampled! It was the coolest moment of my life up to then and when I looked up on stage, covered in nose blood (not mine) Exene Cervenka was smiling down at me like I'd just been baptized.

My point in recalling this anecdote is that violence is not always bad. It's just that, like the cops at the Democratic convention the previous year, the Angels do not practice "restrained" violence, especially in a situation where there's no "out" door to escort rowdy stage crashers through onto the street where they won't have to deal with the same stage crashing culprits just showing up again two minutes later. You can only try and move them back a bit, but there's no "EXIT" to dump them out to (we can follow the movements of most of the people down in front if we pick one head and keep an eye on it) and when the hippies are swarming all over you, it definitely is like Dawn of the freakin' Dead. I know. I've played block parties while tripping. Or tried to escape sold out Dead shows while tripping. Or been to the mall while tripping. Or the zoo.

The sight in GIMME SHELTER of all the crazies thinking if they stagger drunkenly enough they can just force their way to the front of the stage makes for a chilling comment on when the wrong people do drugs without observing the proper rules of set and setting. And man, Woodstock or Monterey may have been cool, but Altamont was no place to be dosing your face off, naked and insane, crawling over the tops of people. If you've seen the film you should right now be thinking of that big naked chick who shows up zonked out of her mind "down the front," near the end and just starts rubbing herself on anyone in her way, like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene, zonked and oblivious to how much discomfort she's causing, acting like the humanity before her is just so much warm loving ocean to swim through; she's a monstrous Titanic dreaming it's still afloat as the ice and waves try to shake her down off them. There's no defense; punch her and she won't even feel it, and try lifting her up and out of the crowd and see where it gets you.

And PS - there is no 'out' of the crowd, no ground on which to dump her. 

 You didn't see people crowding the stage in a mad rush over Ravi Shankar at Monterey! People were sitting in fucking chairs! There were big empty aisles... you could Exit easily... and that was only two years before Altamont. What happened?

The uncool masses, who shouldn't be given drugs, got some, is what happened. And they overdid it. Drugs aren't all good like Woodstock made it seem, nor all bad, like the sizzling eggs in the pan TV spots, but powerful, dangerous tools. Drugs might bring you enlightenment but you can't stay there in it forever, and that's a bum trip, so if you're an idiot, you try and take more and stay high, which never works. You end up trying to cut off your own hand at the gallery like Warren in PSYCH-OUT (1968).

One of the most beautiful love vibe sleepover parties I ever was at happened in a cabin in the mountains in Vermont in 1991 in the autumn: brotherly love, pure liquid LSD from Berkeley, dancing and discovery, everything became new and beautiful, the steam out of the next morning coffee cups like smoke signals from a far off mountain. It was so good, we bonded so completely, the host had a second party with all the same people, later that winter, and this time all the same "right" ingredients added up to something that was so depressing that the acid just amplified the unbearable feeling of cut-offedness. No way to claw my way out of the saran wrap of depression, short of literally clawing my way out of my own skin. Awful realization. That's GIMME SHELTER. Woodstock had been trying to be a normal concert, so enough expectations were in place that the communal vibe had the element of surprise. When you expect it to all just miraculously work, you're headed for a fall. When you expect it to be a disaster... who knows? Dionysus loves a lost cause and hates a sure thing.

As a rager tried and true, I hate to say this, but it's all about balance. You can try to redress a longstanding imbalance with drugs, but you can't "outwit" balance. All good times have a bad times bill at the end, and vice versa. No pain / no gain goes both ways. The marathon runner, the loyal worker and devoted soldier all demonstrate an intrinsic understanding of balance. In pursuing pain and avoiding lazy pleasure they find true bliss. The post-rave depression girl who pops one more hit because she just can't stand the pain, she's not helping redress the balance, just piling on the debt. You don't get a pendulum to stop swinging by pushing it harder. You have to wait.... shhhhhh. Calm down. That's what rehabs are for.... shhhh.... Fuck rehab... but... where were we? Oh yeah, when they messed with the Angels' bikes, man, they started it.

I wish I'd had a chance in this post to talk about how much I love seeing the Stones looking all hungover and adrift in the dirty south on their 1968 tour. The scene at Muscle Shoals listening to "Wild Horses," which Kim Morgan writes brilliantly about here, or the emotion-cracked voice of Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who becomes kind of the de facto soul of the band via his seat at Maysles' moviola framing device. It's all brilliant, and like all the best concert documentaries--and like the movement itself--over much too quickly. But thank the devil for the Maysles, who make sure what we do have is fuckin' awesome. GIMME SHELTER reminds us of how the biggest highs crash hardest, while giving us priceless fly on the wall glimpses of the Stones at the pinnacle of their greatness. Best of all, it captures the peak moment when the great Satanic majesty himself, Mick Jagger, realized he'd accidentally stirred up some elder god of chaos and destruction beyond his control, a juggernaut of self-absorbed drug-guzzling pain that time would dub "the Seventies." Not even Nixon could stop that all-consuming wave... what could he do but go on LAUGH-IN and say "sock it to me"?