Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. - 

Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice. 

"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt" --Vigilante Citizen

“This is no dream, this is really happening!” - Rosemary Woodhouse

The first film perhaps ever to exploit our deep dread of old folks, 1968's Rosemary's Baby gazes deep and diabolically into the murky waters wherefrom skeletal hands of grandparents reach up to pat their captive breeders' kicking bellies. With real life abominations against women, like the 2012 male-only hearing on women's reproductive freedom in the US, and the stoning to death of women whose hair is accidentally exposed at fundamentalist Muslim markets (so I hear), it's ever-trenchant--and the end goal, conscious or not, is the same: co-opt the womb, destroy the chthonic Kali Durga shell around it before it expands wide enough to envelop you and grind you to pussy-whipped vagina dentata oblivion. At a certain depth, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Satanism become indistinguishable, the same old testament wrath of the 'jealous' god (Moloch disguised as Yaweh), the same flood called in to wipe out the old advanced civilizations and leave us collectively barefoot and pregnant, unable to change a lightbulb for centuries to come, in other words, we learned how to repress the feminine from God his self. Read the Old Testament and it's pretty clear that God, back in those days, was a monster, demanding ever greater blood sacrifices and burnt offerings, thousands of doves nailed to the wall of the church, one of each of the animals on the ark burned alive after waiting a whole extra year in the Ark even though it was dry outside, that kind of thing. Comparatively, Satan seems pretty cool, the Prometheus who turned us onto mind expanding drugs when our creator just wanted our brains docile and unquestioning. 

And that version of God, the old one, had a wife. The Old Testament had female characters like Lillith and Asherah--AKA Mrs. God, Yaweh's female counterpart, all excised from the record.  A million witch burnings had to happen to restore male supremacy, and even then it's in doubt. So who can blame the devil worshippers for being so well-hidden from the public eye?  To the long extinct Asherah worshippers, matriarchal pagans or just women in general, Christianity is as the KKK is to African-Americans, or Nazis to the Jews, Andrew Jackson to the Native American Nation, proof that if you go too far in any direction you become your own opposite. 

A typical early Christian demolishing an Asherah pole (by Dakota O'Leary)

To reach a perspective high enough to see these patterns clearly, let us overlay over the pre-biblical murk of the past, a snapshot of NYC in 1968, a time and place, if there ever was one, for the ashes of Asherah to reform into our realm. Rosemary generated real uncanny paranoia that made the collective unconscious a dangerous place, and finally broke through into the collective consciousness in the Satanic panic of the early-80s. 

But no matter who many women go under man's thumb, Woman, Asherah, Mrs. Old Testament God, never can or will. She can, on the other hand, become a vengeful Medea for being locked out of the men's club Illuminati narrative; are we the brood she bashes for revenge? This feeling of being excluded from knowledge has leaked out into her children too -- if there is an Illuminati they never asked us to join. Like Rosemary with the cult, no one even asks if she wants to be a member. She has to literally break through her own hidden exit to find out what's going on in her own womb. And since we see the entirety of the film from Rosemary's point of view, we have to guess, just as she does, until the very end, where babies really come from. The entirety of the film is absent direct visualization of any devil practices (dream aside), the paintings at the Castavets are removed when Rosemary comes over, like she's a child kept in the dark about why she came from her mother but has her father's features, until she's old enough, or distraught enough, to break through.

Understandably, that paranoid hallucination conspiracy angle was jettisoned for most of Rosemary's imitators, to be replaced by external signifiers like robes, horns, pentagrams, possession, smoke and mirrors and screaming naked virgins. Far from being scarier, this external projection and performative evil came as a great relief, like Hammer's Devil Rides Out (also from 1968). Those films are for more fun than Polanski's. Those are the ones we return to again and again on Halloween. Once we see the horns and the licentious ceremonial dancing, the fear stops, replaced by fond amusement. 

 

Polanski knew to never show such iconography or mindless externalized malice, and even the "this is really happening" dream sequence is kept surreal and strange. Polanski knew a Satanist with a gentle smile and a natty bow-tie and no real malice in his eyes could be far scarier than one that 'looked' scary, i.e. with a goat horn cowl and black cloak. We're never allowed (not old enough?) to see Rosemary's unholy baby, or the rapist devil (a hand and yellow eyes aside); the old people chanting around her in the dream are naked, no robes (a motif repeated with the witches in Polanski's Macbeth); and no horns or forked tail can compare in uncanny dead to the mystery and horror of the human reproductive system, or a flock of naked old folks standing around your bed while you're writhing in a drugged stupor. It's so creepy it's almost never been repeated in these imitations, yet it's all right there - no wardrobe budget needed.

If you know this blog you know I've had my own drugged demon visitations (see here) -- I believe the boundary line between the real and the vividly imagined is traversable in ways our minds as yet cannot consciously grasp, but who knows if certain ancient cults haven't figured out how to do just that, to creep in through the basement of our psyches and partially manifest? They can't all have been wiped out by the flood and then Attilla the Hun, then Genghis Kahn and then the Christians. 

For instance just last night on Late Night with Craig Ferguson he was talking with an author about how characters sometimes break away from you when you're writing them - they show up in places and do things you don't consciously expect as you're writing - as if they notice you writing about them. I had that happen to me writing my first novel wherein my character realizes some people he met the other night at a coke party are Yaqui crow trickster shamans, and right at that moment I could feel real Yaqui crow trickster shamans sensing me writing about them, and they began to begin to stir in their far-off nests, sending psychic representations forth through the gossamer tubeways of thought to climb out of the page to get me, like they could blind me or destroy me with their unified field of chant just as the coven had done to Tony Curtis in RB. Were these the same shaman who guided Carlos Castaneda? That you only had to start writing about them and they'd flutter up through the interdimensional tubeways into your unconscious and take over the typewriter?

But there's more to the story of Rosemary's Baby than just combined creative unconscious drives commingling to blind God long enough that a dream lover spawn might sneak across the uterine expanse of Mother Gaia's unburnt-at-stake dimensional dividers (after all, souls, even those of non-devil babies, have to come from somewhere). 

It wasn't just Polanski's film /cross to bear, and his wasn't the only life it allegedly destroyed. Rosemary had as a producer the legendary master of ballyhoo, William Castle, and, by 1968, Emergo just wasn't gonna cut it. He needed to go deep for a new signature gimmick, one for the turbulent times. He decided to do as the Castavet cult does in the film, to stop with the cardboard horns and skeletons, the axes and insurance politics, and go right for the unconscious, the power of paranoia, of conspiracy and curses. I'm not saying, 'mind' you, that he made up a Macbeth-style curse hanging over the film's production, that his linking of strange on-set accidents and tragedies to the film's subject matter was straight up Castle ballyhoo for the age of Aquarius. But if he did do that, if he started the rumor up, in the vein of Tut's tomb opening curse, then maybe the daemonic tricksters of alternate dimensions noticed him weaving a paranoid associative rumor nexus and sent their Satanic kidney stone calling card across the gossamer web that connects myth, dream, mind, soul, and nerve endings... to 'help' Castle along, as it were. 

David Parkinson writes about the hate mail Castle received for the film, the curses leveled at him, and how Castle and composer Krystof Komeda were both struck down with crippling, painful ailments shortly after the film premiered, and then the murder of Polanski's real-life wife Sharon Tate (who co-starred in Eye of the Devil, see: The Blonde Devils of '66,) and the untimely womb ripping of their child, (he omits the eerie similarity to the violation of Rosemary in the film and Polanski's own rape charges), to end with a link to John Lennon's death in 1980:

John Lennon had spent the spring of 1968 with Mia Farrow at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India. During their stay, Lennon had written "Dear Prudence" for Farrow's sister (who shared a name with Sharon Tate's Yorkshire terrier) and it featured on The Beatles' White Album that November. Charles Manson claimed that the LP contained coded messages about the impending race war he hoped to provoke with the Cielo Drive slayings. Lennon himself met a violent end in December 1980 when he was gunned down in New York — outside the Dakota apartments." (more) 

For Polanski, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, the coven aspect of Levin's novel surely tapped into the paranoia of his childhood hardship. Part of the Nazi's rationale for their homicidal anti-Semitism was that Jews were a mystical black magic Protocols of the Elders of Zion cabal, and just as educated women had to lay low for centuries lest they be burned at stake, so too this feeling of a secret conspiracy lingered in the Jewish intellectual community, creating separateness, enforced perhaps by Aryan rivals for Jewish business (or property disputes--as in Salem), or disgruntled employees getting passed over for promotion in favor of some kid fresh out of Yeshiva school, or ghettoization (as in Merchant of Venice), or--if you're goy-learning your Jewish fiancee was being pressured not to marry you by the mother of one of your Jewish friends. So which came first? The secrecy and elitism, or the goy intolerance necessitating a strength in numbers that must be hidden from the non-Jewish population, lets they believe the anti-semitic conspiracy theorists? 

In America, we can't imagine what it's like to be invaded, to have an openly evil and oppressive system turn human compassion and morality upside down, to obliterate all traces of rhyme and reason, to be persecuted for something done centuries before we were even born, all our possessions confiscated or destroyed, starved and beaten. But for Polansk,i this is a formative experience. He knows all we see and hear of 'reality' as Americans constitutes only the tip of a black iceberg. Behind closed doors, who knows what monsters sit, working spells and deals to ensure they win all the marbles before the game is even started? If we knew those spells, wouldn't we use them, too? Didn't we, in a way, already? (we in this case being SWM Christians like myself).

Between 1933-1941, America benefitted indirectly from the Nazi's intolerance. Most of Europe's intellectual Jews, gays, physicists, artists, and filmmakers fled to our shores, bringing their strange occult customs, their atomic bomb formulas and expressionistic lighting designs.

But after the war, America turned away from seances and toward atomic age anxiety, less devil cults and more giant bugs and rockets to the moon. Then the suburbs were born (they didn't exist before WW2), a place where junior could play catch in the back yard and parents with rakes smiled from cross the street and cheered the space race on to the moon. Occasionally a dad could go insane (as in Nicolas Ray's Bigger than Life) or kids could grow up into spoiled brats (as in Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows), but childbirth was holy... and the country club was 'restricted.' 

Babies, housewives, and old people could never be, you know, evil --not in the straight white Anglo-Christian suburbs. 

A few exceptions came and went. There was The Bad Seed, and a spate of crazy old broad movies launched by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jane and Rhoda were psychotic, flash-frozen at childhood, before their brains developed the foundations of the empathetic response --we knew this from the get-go. They might be terrifying in theory, but it was an understandable evil, the suspense was waiting for the rest of the characters to realize it. But they were lone gunmen. And we knew where they lived.

But what about the sane, gentle sweethearts bringing you vitamin shakes to help your pregnancy, or the 'no arguments, young lady' condescension of top shelf pediatricians played by stalwart salts like Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein (who tells Rosemary "And please don't read books. Don't listen to your friends either.") Sapirstein could be espousing the Muslin fundamentalist sexist line, or America's before the dawn of the sixties. He might as well add "and for the love of Mike, don't vote or wear slacks." Rosemary's only form of revolt against this trap is her short hair-cut, an expensive 'very chic' affront, which to Guy is tantamount to her drawing on the wall in crayon, defacing his valuable property. As she's getting dangerously thin, pale, and pain-wracked, the effect of the short hair is to evoke the camps all over again... even right there on the UWS.....they're always there. 

In conveying Rosemary's gradual awakening from compliance ("you're gonna think I really flipped,") Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, almost as if it's in our DNA to do so (and maybe it is). The link between paranoia and pregnancy is made unilateral, and with Polanski's film we see how patriarchal 'big city' condescension and secrecy can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, "Rome's" story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by pregnancy-related estrogen surges) and the physical arrival, up from the subconscious realm, of an actual devil ("Hail Satan!") Like in a Lovecraft story, the womb functions as an interdimensional airport with connecting flights from unconscious hell to conscious reality, on the wings of combined chanting and herb-spiked dreams. Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is about a dream incarnated into reality. It happens all the time, like when writing a novel or something and you realize 'you' are really dictating your unconscious's voice, so that the finished product might get that voice's owner, your shadowed anima, closer to actual merging with your daylight consciousness (if only your ego wasn't always in the way, waving its rosary and uttering empty prayers).

HIDING MAKES YOU UNKNOWABLE.

When we sense something is being kept from us, that thing gains in power as our conscious fears project onto it (trying to pre-program our response) and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's nervous system. This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in. It's an ocean wherein all dreamers are linked together, like fish, drowning sailors, whales, swimmers, and dolphins are all connected via an oceanic matrix of nonlocal conductive consciousness ('salt water'). 

But not everyone swims, drowns, or paddles. The Satanist sails on the surface of this sea (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a Naval officer, like Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control). The psychedelic shamans surf until they're wiped out (whoa bro, you rode that wave?!); unconscious dreamers snorkel or bob in the waves, and the schizophrenics drown, and the mystic swims. (to paraphrase Joseph Campbell). Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing in the waves, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end, she joins with the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. The secret passage behind the cupboard at the end of the hall is like a mirror of the interdimensional womb/chanting gateway by which the horny devil entered her boudoir. "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes," Castavet answers. And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven. The oceanic matrix connects all parts of all things. They should name the child after the blinded rival actor, and close the circuit.

It's interesting to note that in both Rosemary and the Exorcist there is a mother alone with her child and an absentee father (allowing room for a 'new' one), and a kindly older male friend who dies in mysterious circumstances. The males are all either dysfunctional, absent, or very old and full of strange oaths and bearded like the bard. Is God Dead? so trumpets Time Magazine!

The last proper dad we see in the film, played by Maurice Evens, is the proper authority figure of the old school of monster movies, the backstory exposition scientist, the merry fire-toasted Van Helsing type, outlying some grim history: "Adrian Marcata lived there, so did the Trent sisters." It turns out of course that Marcata / Mocata, it's all the same old man in the painting above the Castavet's mantle. 

The name Adrian Marcata should of course remind Hammer fans of The Devil Rides Out and its villain Bob Adrian Mocata, played by Charles Gray (below left), which came out the exact same year but, compared the resonant contemporary realism of Polanski's film, seems to be from a much earlier era. Even Rosemary's utterance "Hey, let's make love," while they're eating dinner on the floor in their empty apartment, is straight out of the 70s, while in Devil Christopher Lee is throwing magic beans at giant spiders. Yet the two evil patriarchs - the same, just manifesting different powers. The devil may be thwarted in Rides but he wins in Baby -- and he does so by keeping a low profile, hiding his deeds even from the camera. 

Mocata / Marcata 

The first time we see Roman Castavet AKA Steven Marcata, he is wearing a Satanic dark red velour shit that contrasts sharply (especially in the recent brilliant hi-def version) with the dark surroundings. He sits off by himself, in a big chair far enough away from the couch whereon Rosemary, Guy, and Minnie are squeezed together to indicate his mastery over them, as if he's on stage, and just his talk about having been all around, every town on earth, makes him seem ageless, omnipresent (even as its folded into his folksy homilies) his ability to seem familiar with Guy's work is standard suggestive manipulation ala fortune tellers at the carnival. And if you've ever been in rich people's parlors where the furniture is all the way across the room, you may may have noted that they don't shout; it's kind of up to you to sharpen your hearing enough to comprehend what they're saying, amazed, perhaps, that you can. You realize you're so used to boorish loud people you've forgotten how to talk in a low voice to someone whose ten or 20 feet away. 

The cynical self-serving unconscious bluster of Guy is apparently sensed by the Castavets, which is why he's brought into their fold and not Rosemary. They sense in her a deep goodness that he--self serving prick that he is--lacks. What she is, on the other hand, is naive and easily smitten - the common thread associated with 'goodness' as mere lack of experience (otherwise she'd wise up to his snake oil charms) When the news announces "Pope Paul VI arrived at 9:47 AM" - he excitedly shouts, "that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial!" as if he has some say in media buying or that the pope doesn't exist outside the TV, he's just trying to weasel in to anywhere he'll get exposure. We later hear some of his true vitriol come out while he's rehearsing with his crutch, shouting the line "I'm in love with no one, especially not your goddamned fat wife!" as if anticipating Rosemary's swollen belly. He's bad at hiding things, and such a weak actor he can't even commit to the part of the concerned doting husband.

 It's a part that also shows Cassavettes' limits as an artist and actor which fits the character he plays and which would typecast him for decades: the charming swine who genuinely thinks we were all awed by his projected street savvy warmth.(1) Polanski nails all that down around Guy so all Cassavettes can do is squirm and pace the room and seem utterly confused by the fact that Rosemary's growing less and less charmed by his patronizing grin. She's growing out of him, while he doesn't change his act. His is a kind of evil we're familiar with, for it stems from vanity, like the fallout of getting by on your charisma for so long you're no longer able to function without it. When your looks fade, you find yourself without the one thing that masked your dysfunction. Such a person is so ripe for Satan's book it's easy to imagine Satan helped make him attractive to begin with. Any relapsed alcoholic knows too well how the devil is patient, willing to work a long con, planting a seed then coming back when it's a tree and chopping it down. 

But that kind of paranoia leads to madness. As we let ourselves get obsessive over the obscure elements of the film, it begins to take its place in the 'evidence' of a global Satanic conspiracy (for realsies). Take the central dream/rape sequence, a benchmark in how surreal dream sequences can enhance reality rather than diminish it. Most films' dream sequences are cop-outs, places to dump the sexy weird shots or artsy ideas that don't fit the story but which the producers want so they can use them in the poster and coming attractions. Only great surrealists like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel understand that dreams are the real part, it's life that's the mirage. When Rosemary momentarily comes out of her trance to note that "this is really happening" it's terrifying in a way no film has been before or since, because suddenly we can't really fathom which parts of what we see and hear are the dreams and which are reality. Polanski knows the power of the mind and the flexible nature of space and time and that in these areas lurk real horrors.

The blue laser eyes and telekinetic devil children of later films are just the opposite, which is not necessarily bad. In externalizing and materializing the threat, we can laugh at our own fears and so in some small way, allay them (i.e the smiling black man with the yellow eyes in The Devil Rides Out). But with no monster in sight, no matter how far we look, and no 'seen murders' (no blood), there's actually a crisper sense of dread in Rosemary. Of all the horror films of the last 20 years, only The Blair Witch Project has fully exploited this same murky power. 

"death is no dream..." - Rezső Seress

The conspiracy theories of authors like David Icke, re: the Illuminati and Zionist banking cabals, work on a similar level to these terrifying ambiguous dreams, all suffused with strange symbols and meanings. Irregardless of its authenticity, the Illuminati-Zionist-Rothschild-Bildenberg banking conspiracy is a vibrant, fascinating myth, operating between truth and fiction, allowing us to see through reality until it dissolves into a a series of stages, mirror reflections, or stereograms. As Peter Tork once said: "the mind can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." He said that in HEAD, also from 1968. And the reverse is also true - the mind cannot see itself except through hallucination, and what's the difference between a graphic artist working with a computer to create a hidden 3D pattern in a stereogram and a shaman chanting a spirit into existence? Nada. Just try doing eye surgery on yourself without a mirror, or cubism with one eye shut. This is why we have therapists -- to show us what we really are under all the bluster, make-up, and pageantry.

But there is also the 'anti-therapist;' filmmakers and SRA inflictors --who understand the significance  of performative or mimetic rituals we see today only in indigenous tribes or at Burning Man. It is the ultimate power of self-deception. 

HERS IS THE POWERLESSNESS, THE AGONY & THE GORY for Eve-a and Eva-a

There's a practical reason, apparently, why Satanists and CIA brainwashers inflict sexual abuse and physical torture on their children, The intense trauma creates in their growing minds a dissociative state, resulting in split personalities, where the daytime conscious one has no memory of these rituals. 

I myself noticed the way intense agony creates a split in one's consciousness when I dislocated my knee cap. The extreme sensory pain launched my perspective into a split where one side of me in agony at the slightest movement, screaming involuntarily, on the other me standing slightly back, floating over my prostrate form, hearing my own screams but muffled, as if I had earplugs in. The greater my body's physical distress the more the contemplative serenity increased. 

Surely the breathing exercises of Lamaze also tap into this, as well as Stockholm syndrome: the agony of childbirth shifts the consciousness of a woman into that of 'an' expectant mother to 'the" Mother-- her triumph for enduring the unbearable pain the flush rapture of being finally free of all that weight, floating like an angel in your own loving arms. Torturous initiations for boys becoming men; menstruation for girls; hazing for frat guys--all coincides with the journey from mythic third eye visualization, 'the becoming', the five senses perceiving 'the becomed' sixth in a kind of recoil motion, vomiting the soul up into the mythic outsider "observer" position, the subject moving from being a Rosemary-style child guest, kept out of the adult swim, to being initiated into a cosmic truth too ambivalent and full of surface hostility and danger (such as Christian persecution) for children and innocent Iowa girls to grasp without first heating up their rigidly naive flyover state consciousness through pain and tribulation.

Most devil movies end with the coven being swallowed up in flames (ala Suspiria, Inferno, The Devil's Rain, Ride with the Devil, etc.) which is mocked in Babt bywhy the burning church painting Rosemary finds when she finally breaks through the hidden door into the Castavet's apartment is so wry (and which she recognizes from when it was "really happening" below decks in her dream). There are no flames for the devils, the fiery climax is frozen in amber and it's the Christian church that burns down therein. When Marcata declares that God is dead you feel that he just might be right. At any rate, now that they're in charge, he advises them to accept Rosemary's outmoded belief (her "oh my god" outburst) in order to not become as barbaric as the Christians before them. The party Rosemary bursts in on is, after all, hardly threatening. They're eccentrics - they're funny - such as the miffed old lady trying to rock the cradle, and the weird guy from Japan. In finally solving the mystery, of merging into the unconscious realm, inverse to the way her baby has broken through into consciousness, Rosemary doesn't trigger the usual inferno that burns down the devil's house in all the other devil films, she just realizes God's church is already burned down, metaphysically, in reality, and in memory. Enlightenment isn't always a matter of restoring patriarchal supremacy, or conquering evil on behalf of good, it can also be about finally telling your husband to fuck off, and recognizing no amount of negativity has ever killed a devil yet. But slowly rocking it back to sleep, with a loving, forgiving gaze? Momma, that's murder. 

NOTES:

1.  (He's magnetic as the jazz scene beatnik TV detective Johnny Staccato in 59-60).

The Satanic Blondes of '66: INCUBUS, EYE OF THE DEVIL

Ah 1966, what an excellent year for an animal or human sacrifice, what with any worry about an EXORCIST still eight years away. Hell, even two years off from ROSEMARY'S BABY and the sudden hipster clout it engendered, '66's twin devil offerings, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL are polar opposite heralds to Polanski's influential hit: one co-stars Polanski's then-wife (he helped get her the gig) and mirrors Rosemary's feeling of being a wife shut out of some grand conspiracy; the other is off on some crazy hipster dream in a language all its own (literally, since it's the only film ever made in that forgotten 'experimental' language, Esperanto, at least the only one that anyone's ever seen). Soon the fangs would be properly installed in the balls of horror cinema, but for now it was all just rumors and poetry and urban legend. There are those in insider circles who say it was Roman's getting wife Sharon Tate the EYE role that caused the devil to stir from his liquid slumber and languorously stretch through time to snatch her at the prime two-souls-in-one moment via his extra-dimensional Manson hook.

In case you are not up on your Hollywood Satanic conspiracy theories, some say the strange accidents and macabre coincidences during ROSEMARY's production originate in producer William Castle's imagination. Some say he took his gimmickry to a whole new level, way way past his usual chair buzzers and skeletons on strings, instead he went psychologically nefarious, going for the paranoia seed-planting that can spread like wildfire from a single cocktail party to infect the collective unconscious in ways deeper than any normal 'fiction' ever can. As Sutter Kane might say, when everyone believes the legend, the truth warps to accommodate. 

Reality is as susceptible to insanity as anyone. 

We know it's relatively unlikely a real skeleton is going to come flying through the screen during a revival showing of HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, that's why we love Emergo! so much. It's not really scary-scary, it's Boo! Ahahah scary. The devil doesn't need skeletons to be scary. An old lady neighbor who baked you cookies for some reason and keeps wanting to be invited in - that's genuinely scary.

Besides, maybe there's a reason superstitions began that does have scientific validity. Maybe not walking under a ladder prevents paint can concussion, and people made shitty ladders back when that superstition began, so they just told everyone not to walk underneath them (the guy making ladders was really mean so they didn't want to suggest he tighten the screws); maybe salt thrown over the shoulder absorbs negative ions; maybe Castle didn't mean to create a real curse by starting the rumor going, but rumors do tend to zero back in, like a curved sacrificial karmic arrow, on the one who started them, even if he himself didn't believe it.. at first. (1)

Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar because, if you don't know yet, I'm afraid it's going to be... you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.

So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position: where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation. Only those who revere repression need fear him. And they're likely the ones bound to be caught up in a sex scandal sooner or later. Sexual repression is the devil's distillery. And its release in an evil act is the devil's drunk tank. He gets them going up and gets them going down.

If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, wife Sharon Tate is doomed the moment husband Roman Polanski helps her get the part in EYE (just how did he get it for her?); Polanski is doomed to exile the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. It all connects, from the devil's murky fatalistic machinations within the story--recreating itself through helping Guy get the part in that play (by blinding the EYEs of rival Tony Curtis)--to the reality of its makers (Castle's kidney stones, etc). The devil's happy to crib off your paper, so to speak, to make reality out of the image you made of him. It's as if film was little more than a halfway point, the equivalent of a pie cooling on the windowsill before its opened up and devoured, except the windowsill is a mirror, and the pie sliced open is a young and lovely actress. And the devourer is always... Moloch.

On the other hand, even if for the moment we believe all this fateful 'nonsense,' it's mighty fuzzy logic. Impossible to confirm by any one set of truths, its also impossible to deny--and thus like all fiction that explores this realm, dangerous. The best way to approach it is as a true skeptic, which means you don't scoff at either side, because unlike the pragmatist, you know your own eyes and ears are easily fooled. Thus, a Satanist who believes in an actual physical devil is as rigidly dogmatic as the rationalist who denies the devil's existence, even as a metaphysical concept. When corporeal reality tries to limit itself to expression within either set of parameters, there's always nightmare overflow. Satan never singles out the open-minded for his mischief. It's always the sure and pious ones who draw him, their unsullied souls sticking out like bleached whites in a soiled soul sea, and the ones who are so sure he's a living being succeed in--as far as their own direct experience is concerned--making him one. Eventually every conception of good and evil comes 'literally' true. Especially if you do lots of drugs, are schizophrenic, or have a really bad fever.

I mention all this to eat up the time because when Sharon Tate's not onscreen, EYE OF THE DEVIL is a grand bore. And she's not on an awful lot. The tale of some grand ancient sacrificial rite that ensures good grape harvest at a sprawling South of France winery, it draws us in as outsiders through the eyes of a prim and overbearing wife played by Deborah Kerr. She spends the whole movie trying to get her half-asleep nonentity husband, the marquis (David Niven) of the area to come back to London so she can resume boring him to death with dreary classical music salons. Here in France he's being prepared for some even worse fate (she thinks); it's some some kind of diabolical ceremony and he's being prepared to participate somehow, but how? She must know, so she can stop it, like a nanny no one invited, still chasing after old charges, trying to make them go to bed at nine and drink their milk,long after they've grown up and filed restraining orders.

Tate and David Hemming are sublime, meanwhile, as a pair of magical blonde twins doing all sorts of macabre arcane prepwork, but they're barely in the film at all. Even Niven's angry flogging of a sexy black turtlenecked Tate makes it onto the poster and opens new chamber doors in our telltale hearts but it's just another joyless punitive measure. The film would rather focus in on Kerr's prim outrage over David Hemmings shooting down a white dove with his little bow and arrow. After she first spies him and his equally strange blonde sister, Odille (Tate) as they bring said dove on a pillow into a weird looking Satanic ceremony, Kerr orders them off the property. Like who put this dame in charge? Intentional or not, Kerr is as irritating a nosey parker as Dustin Hoffman in STRAW DOGS or Jessica Biel in the 2003 remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (see my op here). Inviting herself in to take charge of a situation she doesn't understand, she's a mutton-headed missionary enforcing a hypocritically "Christian" concept of law and order wherever she goes, never thinking to examine her own mess or to just go home and resume micro-managing her servants. As her colonialist animus-dominated sense of superiority clouds her awareness of what's actually going on, we begin to understand both Niven's passivity and his eagerness to complete the ceremony to come Every husband in the world stuck with a wife this much of a buzzkill would gladly cut off his own arm to escape her. Soon we're rooting for Niven to pursue the one avenue of escape she leaves open... the one avenue even she dares not follow.

I don't mean to slight Kerr - or this kind of weird set-up. As a kind of unwittingly dosed quasi-pedophile Mary Poppins in THE INNOCENTS (right), Kerr was amazing in a similar role. Destroying the lives of two children through wicked hallucinations of a groundskeeper animus, or else trying to save them from incestuous possession --either way she was invited, hired for the job; she was assigned the position and expected to take full charge. DEVIL is different; if those two weird kids in INNOCENTS grew up to be blonde Satanists, stalking their ample mansion grounds like Warhol superstars able to turn doves into lizards, then Kerr's meddling would just seem petty and aggravating but still it would be nowhere near as depressingy mundane as in EYE. In INNOCENTS, the three of them--or four with the maid--are so cut off from the rest of the world, we sympathize with how lack of connection to the social order can allow things to spin way way out of control.

The animus-incubus-like Peter Quint was the corrupting voluptuary shadow to Kerr's 'proud, white governess, driving her like a flaming hearse into the heart of their young charge's budding darkness. In EYE there can be no psychosexual kinks because all she wants to do is rescue her full-grown husband and bring him back to her tedious London social orbit. We just want to ride with the twins on their weird evil errands, but instead our camera follows Kerr everywhere, like a priest trying to score a fat donation: she lopes after Niven as he lurches hither and yon, as stricken by his impending doom as a bones-tossed Queequeg. She judges and condemns the wicked, wicked twins as they loiter in black turtlenecks; they drive poor Flora Robson to tears because... oh no, the nightmare--it's all happening again... Sign, Robson's always great, and if we can't run amok with the twins we'd be happy hanging around her for awhile, but noooo, on this endless bucolic French vacation we're stuck with the most boring character in a 60-km radius, and meanwhile all this cool stuff is going on behind our backs. She's like my mom used to be, forcing me to hide all my insidious soul-killing vices from her over the holidays because she doesn't understand why anyone would do anything bad for their health. And then wondering why I need to just sleep the day away and then stay up all night.. where she can't get me. 

Luckily, the weird devil 'becoming'-ness I mentioned earlier is all over EYE: the music played during the local festival sounds eerily similar to Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" --we'd think it a homage or even rip-off had it not come first--and after that just imagine the film as a vision of what ROSEMARY'S BABY 2 might be like if Rosemary had twins and 18 years later she's still in denial about who their father was, chasing after them with mittens and rubbers as they burn churches and slaughter priests.

All that said, if not for Tate's real life fate lending EYE even more of the eerie black magic ballyhoo synchronicity that plagued ROSEMARY and THE EXORCIST, it would be worthless. But in its eerie prescience it's Tate's equivalent to James Dean's Highway Safety promo film. She's the bizarro super sexy Satanic Virgin Mary that would beget Rosemary Woodhouse and Regan MacNeil, as they in turn would beget a period of widespread Ouija abuse. And that black outfit with the hypnotic pendant or whatever is damn sexy, especially with her bright blonde hair as contrast. It shows us just how far ahead of us England was at celebrating the eerie self-confidence of badass babes in black (Mrs. Peel, we're needed) rather than ever trying to shoehorn them into pretty dresses and tie their hair back in a cruel mirthless bun.

Working our way back out of the EYE, it should be clear now that the devil is alive and well in any representation of his evil influence. His name is a kind of interactive tarot deck wherein having the cards read is what kills you. Believing precedes seeing; the moment your focus settles on a shadow, that shadow begins to spring to life, the way William Castle's rumor mill ballyhoo about mysterious accidents on set could be said to have indirectly led to the Manson murders.

But... even then, man oh man -- there any more boring sacrificial murder weapon than a bow and arrow? Do British schoolchildren stay up at night listening to tales of the haunted archer? Nein! It's too impersonal. It lacks the fears we harbor for the knife. And another thing: if there's anything a drunk like me hates, it's a buzzkill. Everyone else wants whatever is going to happen to Niven to happen, including us. We didn't start watching a movie called EYE OF THE DEVIL so we could see Deborah Kerr scold us for our curiosity about such things. We're going to root for Sharon Tate, no matter what, evil or not, because she's gorgeous, young, and confident. And it doesn't take long before we're fully invested in whatever evil is going on, hoping the devil gets the job done before Kerr comes barging in like mom tromping down to the basement to complain about the noise you kids are making and what's that smell? Smoke? Let me see your eyes!

Mom, go back to bed!

If the devil's eye offends thee, Kerr, pluck it from its hottie roost!

It's hard to believe that EYE, this weird little Satan's Little Helper edition of BONJOUR TRISTESSE came out two years before the relatively old school DEVIL RIDE'S OUT (AKA BRIDE OF THE DEVIL), a rousing, full-blooded Hammer film that seems decades younger in spirit if not in form than the new wave-y EYE. There's no occult real life ballyhoo associated with RIDES, and it doesn't needy any, because it has at least two characters with ample wit and sparkle: Charles Gray as Mataxa and Christopher Lee as the Van Helsing / Quatermass / Sherlock Holmes- type Devil hunter. Dennis Wheatley's original novel was set in the South of France, too, I think -- another connection and proof the area's rife with possibility! Is it some secret knowledge that the south of France is devil cult country?).

RIDE understands--the way few devil movies do--that the trick to defeating pure evil is not to confront it with pure good, but with balance, and a sense of humor to help you roll with the absurdity of it all, but not to the point you kill the atmosphere. That would be truly uncharitable.

Onwards then to the other Satanic offering of 1966 -- INCUBUS.

INCUBUS.... the only film ever shot in Esperanto.... the language of the Satanic mass! Invented by the UN coven to bedevil the globe!

Put your feet up

Wondrously pretentious, like a beatnik open mic jazz dance performance if it was shot by Dennis Hopper as an ONIBABA-style psychosexual folk tale for Roger Corman over a single Big Sur weekend, INCBUS would make a good double bill with THE TERROR and/or THE SEVENTH SEAL (as it no doubt intends). The Esperanto angle adds just the right dash of weirdness to the already weird story of a succubus hanging around a healing spring, corrupting infirm male travelers and then hastening their deaths so big daddy Satan can devour their souls. She longs to corrupt a good pure soul instead of just offing the already stained, but her older sister advises against it. Sis is right (I tried it once and look at me - I lost the fight and now am pure as snow.) Then William Shatner shows up, and he's not there for the waters, baby, but to play a variation of Jack Nicholson's lost Napoleonic solider in THE TERROR: sick of war, wandering the Big Sur coast, so noble he can't be beat. Luckily the sisters have a back-up plan when things go south: unleash the Incubus (their brother) on the good soul's equally good (i.e. virginal) sister!

Second thought, scratch the other two, this would actually make a good double bill with the 1961 Liz-and-Dick semi-camp classic, THE SANDPIPER. Both concern a mythic 'impossible love' story between a paragon of virtue and a slutty mankiller who loves lolling in the Big Sur surf and spouting beatnik profundities. One is a studio-backed Vincente Minnelli opus, the other a low-budget concoction from Leslie "Ed Wood on a dime bag of Bergman" Stevens, but both love the Big Sur surf as much as we all do, if we've been there. And if we haven't been, what are we waiting for?

Sure, I know what your saying, man: INCUBUS sounds over-baked... but a succubus feeling sexually violated because Kirk brought her into a church to get out of the sun while she was asleep? Senpreza!  

In conclusion, INCUBUS and EYE OF THE DEVIL share a lot more than their date. They're burdened by similar faults: EYE is way too dry and disdainful of its subject; INCUBUS is way too singleminded and didactic. Yet, they share a strength, too: a unique ambiguity about which 'side' they're on, as films. There's an association of good with boring and safe in both. In ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST, the heroines--Chris (Ellen Burstyn) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) are hip enough that we don't wince at their every word, and the evil spirits--Pazuzu, Guy--vile enough that we don't want to go party with them. But in both these 1966 films, the 'average' voice, the establishment figure, so to speak, is an unshakable bore. He or She is as a fruit tree ripe for shaking. Every second of screen time they are not being shaken to the core is nigh unbearable to us, the hip post-67 viewer. Maybe it was still dangerous in 1966 to feel ourselves rooting for Tate and Hemmings in EYE. That we feared for their plan to be interrupted because of Kerr's imperialist meddling must have felt transgressive in that more innocent, staid era; and in INCUBUS not to spoil the ending, but did we really need to see some old church / patriarchy win out for 665th time against the feminine darkness? No one goes to a devil movie to root for the very thing they went to the movies to escape from, mom! Satano, liberigu miajn malbonajn junajn knabinojn!

NOTES:
1. William Castle got painful kidney stones right as the film was released - didn't you hear? 

Waiting for Katelbach, Dorleac, CUL-DE-SAC

Roman Polanski's awe-inspiring CUL-DE-SAC (1966) is free from the moths and Americans can now fully appreciate the wobbly genius of Catherine Deneuve's sister, Francois Dorleac, and the way this amazing film links the male posturing of KNIFE IN THE WATER with the cold-eyed sexual hysterics of REPULSION, and even connects highbrow small-group isolation studies like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, with lowbrow like SPIDER BABY; PERFORMANCE with THE ADDAMS FAMILY; Samuel Beckett's WAITING FOR GODOT x Strindberg's DANCE OF DEATH all under a slinky jazz black and white sky

The plot line is more like a series of events that spiral in and out of tight isolationist control, making 'plot' per se merely something to confuse and bait the viewer: Donald Pleasance is a neurotic retired business owner named George, who's had an apparent mid-life crisis, sold everything to buy an isolated castle fortress (where Sir Walter Scott lived: "Look there's his original quill!") and stock it with his restless, much younger French bride, Teresa (Francois Dorleac). They share an obsessive, weird private headspace, part Mick and Anita in PERFORMANCE, part the Merrye Family in SPIDER BABY (with a sullen blonde pretty boy neighbor who boats over for trysts with Teresa) until a desperate, wounded American criminal, Richard (Lional Stander) breaks in to steal eggs and demand their help in rescuing his gut-shot partner, Albie (the Joyce-ish Jack McGowran).

Though the stage seems set for tense DESPERATE HOURS, KEY LARGO, HE RAN ALL THE WAY, or PETRIFIED FOREST-style tension, Polanski deliberately skews it, pretending like he's about to fall into gangster-noir cliche, then righting himself back up, and winking at us like we were chumps to think he'd ever fall into genre expectations. After dealing with endless unwelcome drop-in guests--including a very rotten child (the closest thing the film has to a true villain) and an aloof Jacquelin Bissett--George finds the relative humanity and grounded 'realness' of Brooklyn-accented yank thug Richard almost a relief. By the end of the night, Richard has bonded, kinda, with both Teresa and George over over homemade vodka and it all begins to seem like a weird metaphor for western-allied relations in WW2 and one of those unhinged lower class invigorating the ennui-ridden jet set kind of thing, ala PERFORMANCE, THE CABLE GUY, RULES OF THE GAME, SWEPT AWAY or even BARTON FINK. The keen observations and brute good-nature of Richard make him less threatening, which only makes his outbursts of violence that much more traumatic and scary.

As with so many of his 60's films, Polanski seems to draw on his experiences as a Jewish child struggling for survival in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi occupation; Pleasance his tortured tenure in a Japanese POW camp. Polanski makes use of his first-hand witnessing of true inhumanity to man, and where other directors would speed up and simplify -- good guys vs. bad, winning vs. losing, with Polanski it's all about shifting power and the way reality is fluidly structured by whomever's in charge (the war again, with history written as the Allies see fit). The narrative coheres, Polanski slows down and muddies the water. At which point do hostages become complicit- is it the moment they miss the chance to slit his throat shaving him? Can contact with gangsters help a 'civilized' man finally shed his veneer and start throwing out unwanted guests like a rabid maniac? Mmmmaybe.

With its groovy Ronald Stein-ish score (attributed to Komeda), the CUL DE SAC vibe recalls the uneasy luncheon centerpiece in Russ Meyer's masterpiece, FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL! or the arrival of unwanted guests in Jack Hill's 1968 cult classic SPIDER BABY. KNIFE IN THE WATER devotees will recognize themes, as will REPULSION fans, of which of course all cineastes are both. The ease with which Polanski dispenses with a singular point of view or any 'reliable' perspective of reality, removing any indication that any one character is 'right' in the perception of events over any other, no matter how warped, it's pure cinema at its most bluntly witty.

Then there's the tale of two sisters: As opposed to Catherine Deneuve, who allows us to gaze lengthily at her spider-watching-the-fly features in Polanski's REPULSION, her sister Dorleac is always in motion, long lovely Francois Hardy hair in face, dark rings around her eyes hinting at little sleep, less sanity, probably drugs, to the point where it's hard to get a full beam on her features. This is not meant as a critique, merely an observation that puts her in the same warper class as Anita Pallenberg in PERFORMANCE, who also plays a crazy cross-dressing hermit's companion and nutball butterfly of shifting allegiances and facial features. (Check here for my 'many faces of Pallenberg' post)

Though both Dorleac and Pleasance are fine and even have subtle but real rapport, the true stand-out in the film is gangster character actor Lionel Stander. His big pug-ugly mug and gravely voice belie a great charm and its heartwarming to see him get to 'steal' a whole movie. Stander was one of those unlucky victims of the blacklist, which probably explains his presence in so many European films in the 1950's through 70's (such as this one). Luckily he came back to the U.S. once the hysteria died down, and became memorable for his role in the long-lived Hart to Hart TV series.  Huge and menacing but comic and jovial in a salt-of-the-earth fashion, with that awesome gravel truck voice, Stander is heavy as a chunk of lead but light on his feet as a feather, able to go from menacing to sweet and good-natured on 1/19 of a dime. The weariness of a long day and night on the lam, worrying over his partner, and his deep-rooted fear of getting caught, all oscillate back and forth on his mug's face, even as he projects an in-the-moment kineticism that the more intellectual Pleasance lacks (but like Turner in PERFORMANCE, recognizes and longs to absorb).

As the film progresses, Richard develops a fine, borderline respectful rapport/borderline misogynist rapport with the equally mercurial Teresa: she brings him a vodka after his partner dies, but then later a hotfoot while he's napping in the sun ("that's called a bicycle!") and he responds by whipping her with his belt (!) then punching her in the side of the head ("that's called a 'klomp'!) Clearly, such kinky discipline is not something George would ever muster, so, like the love triangle of KNIFE and the real and imagined rapist/suitors that come to call and get dispatched in REPULSION, it becomes very difficult (intentionally one presumes) to chalk out a line between what goes 'too far' in trying to appease the contrary aspects of feminine sexual desire. Women want to be dominated, possessed utterly, ravished, but only when, where and with whom their whim dictates.

Men struggle with this all the time: when does Fabio-style ravishing become sexual assault? Do women really 'need' to get slapped or choked once in awhile or is it just the fantasy, some genetic memory going back thousands of years into the past, grappling the same slippery slope by which Stockholm syndrome helped ensure the survival of her DNA, via her ancient relative becoming wife to the man who's tribe overrode her village and killed her previous husband? Does this all stem (for Polanski) from the Nazis, the way, say, 95% of pedophiles were themselves abused as children? Or is it all just Polanski's deep-seated (as some claim, re: his rape charges) misogyny? Here I defer to Paglia-versed female film critics, like Kim Morgan:

...stuck in the house like a more spirited, extra primal Virgin Suicide sister, (Teresa) engages in childlike activities to amuse herself. She tears around the house barefoot, applies exaggerated eyeliner (or helps her husband with his), messes with rifles and, the best, most hilarious, lights a sleeping Stander's feet on fire with burning pieces of newspaper between his toes ("It's called a bicycle" she taunts). Oh...you just don't do that to Lionel Stander. Or perhaps, you do. Between these two mismatched misfits, it's disarmingly sexy. These characters don't establish things like "safe" words nor do they understand the concept of such a thing, so the perversity, stark beauty, the isolation, the bleakness, the menacing sexuality and the insanity make the whole experience a strangely good time.

In addition to raising chickens for their eggs, Teresa makes her own vodka, and proceeds to get both men drunk later that night and into the morning. This very strong alcohol serves to utterly confound all sense of allegiance and purpose and soon George and Richard are bonding, then fighting again, then rambling off in their own directions. The feeling that this is all happening in real time over the course of a night and into the dawn into afternoon is awesome (the way the red lines are forming on Doloreac's legs seems like she's really being whipped.

Extending and collapsing moment-by-moment experience, Polanski captures some special magic with CUL-DE-SAC. Then again I love films where characters drink and party past sunrise, when the photography is black and white and the music slinky jazz with lots of bass and funky sax. Oh and there's smoking! How retro! Who in 1966 could have imagined that in just 40 years booze, modernist ambiguity, psychosexual sadism, and cigarettes would be considered 'old-timey'?

Hallowed be thy Shakes: A Tale of 3 Great Macbeths, Drunk (Saucy Doubts and Fears Edition)

It's got witches mixing psychedelic medicine in basements of wrecked rectories, real Hunter S. Thompson-esque fear and loathing as dysfunctional husbands get DTs at the banquet in front of the guests, and the wife can't tell whether its 6 AM or 6 PM ("which is which!?"), it's got maybe the best 'sudden horror' of the reformed alcoholic realizing he has relapsed' (the whole first part of the play leads up to the inevitable murder, building to it, the way the drink demon in your sober mind is always reconfiguring the events of your current moment into a depressive spiral to the inevitable shot at 'just drinking beer or 'just this once") and then what's done is done, the simple deed, the drink/murder plunges Macbeth into an instant soul-crushing depressive horror, leading to needing to stay further drunk to find salvation from the realization, leading to windswept obsidian towers ranted from, and beheadings, child murder, and oblivion. It's Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor!  And there are three great film versions by three titans of cinema - Orson Welles, Roman Polanski, and Akira Kurosawa. Each film in its way spectacular, and in each, further, a druggy odyssey to warm the cold wretches puking their way 'til sickness relents enough to enable to purchase of more alcohol, their boss's vain demands and threats and concerns creeping in only when one is too out of it to remember not to answer the phone, the answering machine piling up with escalating concern.

But it's more than that, it's a tale of universal, woe, blind ambition, remorse, hallucinations, insanity, power couple goading, archetypal psychology (Lady Macbeth is a great paranoid/inner critic anima), magical spells, ghosts, floating daggers, cold-blooded regicide. Macbeth captures the 'wait until your dad gets home' dread, that feeling of coming out of a three-day black-out, alone in bed, with one shoe still on, glasses MIA but a bruise on your nose signifying you may have fallen or passed out with them still on, And there's magic marker all over your face, "wherein one may read strange matters" - and, consumed by bottomless regret, you reach for the one friend still with you in the universe, that secret whiskey flask under the bed. You hope, beyond hope, it's still there.

Sure, Erich, thou villain, thou Patch!, Sure, the play itself is cursed. Notorious for wreaking Tut-tomb-ish havoc on its cast and crew, Macbeth carries a meta aftershock that stretches even into the Manson hills. Those damned witches all but call you on the phone after the final curtain and let you know it's time to meet your promised doom.

Lady Macbeth and Mr. Macbeth, are--I always thought--the most fucked up yet strangely beautiful couple in all Shakespeare, one much more vivid and real to me than, say, the overwrought impatient hamminess of Romeo and Juliet. The Macbeths are perhaps most like the real evil parents we all know, the dysfunctional libertines who flicker to life only when pondering murder on behalf of corporate advancement. This loving couple knows that to diligently work within the system and trade on love of thy courage in loyalty (rather than use thy courage to scourge loyalty and love from the land itself), is the game of suckers. Did the witches not foresee thy greatness? That Macbeth sends a message on ahead to his lady, alerting her to the the witches' freaky prophecy, and he barely gets off his horse and kisses her hello before they're conspiring in hushed whispers, speaks to their odd proto-yuppie love. Maybe their sex life isn't so hot. That would explain her cold insistence that she'd smash her own baby against a rock before letting her man chicken out of making her queen. And whose baby did she give suck to, since their union's fruitless?

Say what you will about that kind of attitude, their plotting and consensual villainy, they're way cooler than mopey Hamlet's, or self-loathing Othello. From evil to guilt to tumbling madly into the abyss, Lady Macbeth and her man never waiver in their devotion to each other, even if they may hesitate before their nasty deed or regret it after. Wracked by guilt, paranoia and regret as they both are, they never rat each other out, but when the jig is up, each face their own demises with brave and wild-eyed willingness (or madness). In short, they're the UK's first Syd and Nancy!

There's three really stellar Macbeths in cinema thus far: Orson Welles' Republic studio-bound western-on-acid watching IVAN THE TERRIBLE version from 1948, which is my favorite, even though it's nowhere near as technically ornate as Polanski's 1971 naturalistic sex and gore and pretty people version, with the most psychedelic of all second witch visits wherein they give him a psychedelic potion that sends him deep into an alternate reality dreamscape (wherein Satan consoles him with promises that no man of woman born, etc.) and leaves him feeling--temporarily at peace. (We've all been there. Drinking ground up mushrooms or datura root--"that takes the senses prisoner"--leading to a great freak-out with a bunch of naked witches.)

And perhaps the best of all, if the farthest from the original language, Akira Kurosawas's heavy yet delightfully weird THRONE OF BLOOD (1957). Even if the whole butoh theater thing is not new to you, BLOOD's sheer ghostly otherness puts you in a high art trance, occurring mostly in wooden box rooms and across terrifyingly strange landscapes of volcanic ash, it's Kurosawa's great triumph that his windblown images cut straight through all their age and culture barriers like a sword through a paper wall. Toshiro Mifune, in Satanic beard and crazy black hat, born to look stricken by ghosts and guilt. Well do I love how he stands there in these wacky butoh poses, his eyes bugging out, his crazy mascara eyes alight with that 'holy shit' waking up from a three-day black-out expression.  We can read every thought that passes across his brow from thirty yards off. Meanwhile, Kurosawa is artfully arranging his shot like a moody, foggy, rock garden but one laden not with Zen wooden flute tranquility but with heavy yet ethereal serpentine guilty dream menace.

As Lady Macbeth, with her horn-antennae eyebrow paint and scale-evoking pattern on her full puffy kimono slithering after her, Isuzu Yamada looks and moves like some slow, graceful but landlocked sea serpent. Her reasoning is what's so scary here, slowly poisoning her man's mind with inescapable logic (if the emperor knew of the spirit's prophecy he'd slay him in advance of it coming true, etc., just to be on the safe side, so the witch's prophecy is itself a death sentence unless he strikes first) and declaring that the ominous bird cries in the night are providence itself bidding him forth to greatness. Her emotionless, measured speech makes it seem, too, as if she's more in the spirit world than that of flesh and time, an extension of the 'weird sisters' (though here replaced by an androgynous old spinner).

In other versions she goads the murders into existence but then falls into madness for most of the last half; here she never relents in her bloodthirsty craft. While Mifune's Washizu is ever-trying to emulate Duncan, to cultivate loyalty in their peers and not kill everyone who poses even a tiny threat, she's right there, behind him, whispering in his ear like paranoia itself, saying in that bone-chillingly lifeless clockwork way, "I do not agree."

And lastly, who cannot love that sad beginning: the castle and surrounding forest now gone and bathed in treeless volcanic ash --a telling warrant against deforestation. The mossy hills of Scotland, the volcanic black sooted slopes of Japan have--alas--enough in common to make cutting down entire forests to merely help mask one's attacking numbers seem the height of global warming-inducing short term imprudence. Human strife comes and goes, but the major long-lasting trauma of this tragedy is one done to the land! And all the little flowers and all the little birdies robbed of nests. And fickle armies who shoot real arrows at their actors in whole volleys, making it seem almost like it's Mifune, not just Washizu, terrified with the realization of immanent harm.

Derek Malcom at the Guardian on THRONE OF BLOOD: 

"It was, for what it's worth, TS Eliot's favourite film. The drama is presented with stark economy, its words subservient to the slow exposition of its plot, and the characterization admittedly less subtle than Shakespeare's. But I doubt the Bard would have turned in his grave. Kurosawa's parallel eloquence matches Shakespeare's so completely that it even outshines that of Verdi's musical version."

So I love THRONE OF BLOOD, but wish the English version had kept the original title, "Spiderweb Castle," I probably would have seen it sooner, imagining giant spider rampages offset with Gothic cobwebbed stonework. As it is I've grown comfortable with Orson Welles version and that's surely my favorite. I dream of being able to go back in time and see his voodoo stage version of the 1930s that made him a star in Harlem. But he didn't star in that (all-black) production, and if e'er an Illinois ham war born to play Macbeth, drunkenly unspooling vast gusts of Shakespearean wind, Welles war.

The main set for Welles' version is a great sprawling indoor/outdoor maze of Republic's western scenery soundstages, with the side of a rocky cliff with trails for the horses propped up by columns,  like some Escheresque mind trap. Welles' sweaty face foregrounded against the processionals of horses makes them drip like ghost cops from a SHOCK CORRIDOR dream sequence drainpipe. Dig this perceptive piece from a professor named KJ:

Part of its mastery is its use of voiceover for most of the speech. That, combined with Welles' magnificent camera work (including angles, shadows, and focus—or out-of-focus—effects) give us a Macbeth who is more disoriented than evil. Welles seems to have taken Macbeth's inability to sleep and extended it into all aspects of the character. At first, he appears to be playing Macbeth drunk. Upon consideration, he's playing Macbeth as sleep-deprived. As a college teacher, I recognize this as method acting worth of Stanislavski himself!

Polanski's is my most recent, as it is too the most recent of the three in earthly release date. Here, in colors muted with torchlight oranges of perpetual sunset, outdoor vistas wherein the treeless Scottish moors stretch so relentless and rolling we can see Banquo's horse through the sunlight glow a few miles off, offset by majestic sweeps of black sandy shore at low tide and muddy, rain-streaked cesspool floored but clean-walled castles ever-ominous in their quietude; while below the treeless wet moors stretch on and dwarf and muffle the filthy figures trekking across it, running into one another to deliver messages and tidings of battle; the gorgeous Satanic Druid folk album auburn hair of Lady Macbeth at magic hour, praying for demonic guidance against setbacks to her grim resolute regicidal purpose (i.e. I hope I don't get my period; if so, let promise of greater bloodshed to come be my tampon); the sudden gathering of rain outside the castle walls and the lonesome pipes of approach or cry of a raven granted more heady weight than her taut beguiling whispered prayers; much of the poetic dialogue is internalized--festive castle night interiors with people all crashing in hay and by torch light glowing over all with a cheery orange that seems to beat back but only just the shadows and the ever-looming rain and dampness; Macbeth ever trying to make it back in to the warmth, amidst the saved and friendly but his sexy wife's lust for power overriding his, and the jealousy wrought by seeing younger boys inherit via birth alone heady mantles of power enough to drop the faintest splotch of poison in a mind that soon replicates it like a spreading fractal fever.

I've seen it but a few times. I've seen Orson's countless times. Over and over again once while convulsing alone in my apartment after an alcoholic relapse (Nov. 1998, my sober anniversary), savoring the application to my own twisted state as akin to the madness of his horrific guilt, and the way the gathered lords humoring him, changing sides, etc., the friends and family who make it possible for the alcoholic to have his problem become the white elephant invisible. It's also the closest Orson got to making a horror movie, which is too damn bad. But Polanski made a horror movie or two before doing his Macbeth, so there's a kind of crossroads of Polanski themes a lurking: the madness of beautiful women (Repulsion); the meta connection to brutal, sudden cult-related violence (there's no music or amplified sound accompanying the stabbings and smashings - we barely hear the knives go in; horrible violence might be seen only in passing a hallway, with no herald, making it all that much more real and sickening; Polanski brings us deep within the inviting communal living, (the king's visit like a merry slumber party) ala Manson and the Nazis (including a repulsive bear-dog fight); and the all-consuming horror... of the elderly. (Rosemary's Baby), who--if this film be any indication cannot exist without spectral help (the oldest any non-witch seems to be in the whole film is Duncan in his forties). The additions not seen in other versions include the coterie of disreputable lords who stay with him up until the woods start moving, then grab what loot they can and flee, all sans voice save the hoofs clodding upon stones; and the quiet of the final battle with MacDuff, the sounds of armor, as if each combatant is in a sardine can buffering against castle walls while throngs gather at the sides, with Polanski's camera weaving amidst them like a wary referee as they go smashing around it's a bloody, brilliant climax, making up for in lack of extras in its quiet almost Malick-esque mix of muddy pastoral ambivalence and peerless sound effects (we get the sense these guys are really bashing at each other, their swords perhaps dulled but otherwise leaving solid dents in each other's cans.

When the electric guitar finally comes up at the end you feel you've been somewhere soggily majestic where affairs of men make only the smallest ripple, whereas with Welles and Kurosawa one feels it's all largely some mad dream, a Universal horror movie's own laudanum nightmare of foreboding and existential dread. This sense of the surreal occurs in Polanski only during the big period-appropriate psychedelic trip, when Macbeth gulps the potion prepared by the witches that shows Macbeth that which will put his heart at ease (Birnim Wood come to Dunsinane; no man of woman born, etc). Naturally one conjectures what might cause such visions that was available in the area, "the root that takes the senses prisoner" mentioned by Banquo in the earlier sequence (only mentioned in the Polanski version), psilocybin cubensis mushrooms, which grow wild in portions of the UK,  tannis root, mandrake root, jimson weed, aka 'witches' root', or graveyard toad secretions, or all. It would make sense, as I've found Shakespeare intensely accessible while tripping, the dense oratory and quadruple meanings and prosaic speech all help the enhanced brain stay rooted and enlightened by the nadir of language's capability, rather than leaving it twisting impatiently around the general banalities--suddenly made absurd by chemical blinder-erasure--of normal 'sober' idiots.

Welles might not know of such things, but he takes his horror at Banquo's ghost and turns it into a whole big melt-down of thunder, like a freshmen freaking out at dinner with his parents, thinking he'd be 'down' from his first shroom trip by now, and instead rants and raves at the twitching of the forlorn pot roast as it screams from each unkind cut, while for the seasoned doser such things would raise barely an eyebrow. So it is with Polanski's Macbeth, though there the banquet of Banquo scene is with most lifeless calm dispatched anon, I like after everyone's left and he and Lady M are sitting at the long table and --his tantrum subsided and they alone again-- he calms down and changes the subject to McDuff.

It is thus that, while Welles' and Kurosawa's versions find psychedelic madness through style, Finch's Macbeth--being of the age when such things dwelled in pop culture consciousness (replete with a Playboy production company credit) dost drink deep of the witch's brew and smash mirrors and run wild through trippy wood of the mind while Lady MacBeth (Francesca Annis) slithers between the cracks of social propriety with the effortless cool of a hippie hottie used to being the only pretty, unsullied creature in a ten-mile radius (i.e. the ideal Manson girl plant). In Welles she used belittlement; in Kurosawa, paranoia; for Polanski, Lady M eschews unconscious mind clockwork manipulation in favor of gentle hypnotic seduction/beguilement, and the witches--when revisited--are three no longer but expanded to coven-strength. It's as if the bloodlust that wells up in the breast of our MacBeth (Jon Finch), occasionally bad bangs or no, seems more a madness born of Apollonian narcissism (he has more yes men then in Welles or Kurosawa) and flipside paranoia rather than sleep deprivation and budding alcoholism (as it in Welles) or, in the Kurosawa case, supernatural fatalism and schizophrenia. Take your pick, or pick 'em all, you can't go wrong. Just kill the king and try to play it cool when the suspicious eyes invariably turn to thee... when I draw the Queen of Hearts, my dear breast-nursed serpent, there is no cooler name to say while drunk than... Banquo. Fail not our feast!

Stand not upon the order of your going!

This is what my first intervention was like