Isles of Löwensohn: THE WILD BOYS, LET THE CORPSES TAN

Funny that after decades of seeing her only hither or yon, I find Elina Löwensohn (NADJA herself!) in two new auteur-driven super weird movies (both en français), which I happened to watch, back-to-back, on two consecutive nights. In each film she plays a semi-insane ruler of a gorgeous but remote location wherein she presides like some kind of perverted Ms. Roarke over a Fantasy Island gone horribly wrong, and R-rated. Owning her masculine side with a cigar chomping swagger. In THE WILD BOYS and LET THEIR CORPSES TAN alike, this Romanian-American actress (just one year older than me and she's handling it way better) sure can swing a wild dick, if you'll pardon my French. N'cest pas? Both films just arrived in the US via streaming; both are shot in blazing Super-16mm celluloid. Both are so surreal they make Buñuel seem like di Sica. Coïncidence? Non, mon ami, Absolument oui

Wait, has she ever been in a movie that's not surrealist? The last time I saw her was The Forbidden Room (and before that, Nadja), and she looked, frankly, like a different person in each those. She was gamin-esque. Gone is that gamin! La gamin est parti... She has surrendered even late-inning Delpy/Huppert-style mature Parisian hotness in favor of a stogie and a laugh throaty enough to choke the communism out of Lionel Stander. Wagging her sun-browned body around like a Bowery-born scrapper, bounding over piles of enemy corpses with Patton-esque gusto, breasts bared with the 'who cares?' haughtiness that marks European women as the superior to all other genders and continents. Rocking punk rock bangs and a stare that could freeze the blood of a drowsy, sun-basking tiger, Löwensohn poses and shifts around on the rocks and beaches with the short guy beatnik cool of Dick Miller and the existential ambivalence of Warner Herzog. 

Yet those breasts are young and full-still, as if eternal. Shall you not try to swing the same?

8 THE WILD BOYS

(Les garçons sauvages)

Dir Bertrand Mandico

***1/2

Gender-bending a Clockwork Orange / Captains Courageous bad boy rehab adventure into erotic surrealist shapes not unlike like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve,  comes Mandico's Les garçons sauvages. Five over-privileged boys are pressed aboard a rough trade reform school rehab fishing boat after Trevor (a malicious spiritual force envisioned by the boys as dog with a jeweled mask) incites them to violence against their indulgent lit teacher during a masked drunken Macbeth performance. A kind of 'scared straight at sea' adventure, the ship is helmed by a very salty sadistic captain with a map tattooed on his penis--one of many we'll see, though they all seem rough, uncircumcised and woven from burlap--results. Collared and tied to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the salty captain's whim, (most of) the boys gradually become submissive, the rough living snapping them out of their entitled sadistic prep school funk...

But that's just the beginning of this bizarro odyssey! The destination of the ship is a mysterious island with sexually active vegetation (which the boys are encouraged to take relentless advantage of). Oysters, oozing tree sap, pollen, the salty sea, and other island fragrances infise a strange hormonal magic in the air, enough to slowly turn these rough trade specimens into girls (their penises drop off and are swept away in the uncaring surf, suddenly no more relevant than land crabs). Meanwhile trees and rocks become giant asses and mocking breasts. "Luckily," a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Löwensohn) arrives to take them under her wing; together they will eventually start sexually devouring and killing randy sailors, committing high seas mutiny, and surrendering to the intoxicating touch and taste of the local plant life. For the in-cahoots captain and the doctor, it's a living. 

Announcing Mandico as a vital new presence in the international film scene (there should be dozens more like him), Les garçons sauvages is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies, drinking manna-jaculate from phallic tubers, screwing between leafy legs, sleeping deep in the shrubbery, Uranus' severed testicles foaming into Venus, then back to foam again. There are signs of other unclassifiable movies, everything from Naked Lunch to Matango to Valhalla Rising in its hallucinatory amok Robinson Crusoe wanderings... but there's only Batailles and Carter's fiction and maybe moments in the films fellow French provocatuers Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noe, but they never quite go this far into the Cocteau mirror. 

 The great twist though is that these boys are all played by girls, to start with, and the freedom accorded these already free French actresses allows them to swagger and strut in ways that do a heart good to see. Female sexual aggression isn't, apparently, the same existential threat in France as it is here in the US. It's merely recognized as performance, one the girls-as-boys are all keen to embody, strutting and making lewd gestures and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, their fair feminine features actually make them perfect as teenage boys. While their burlap members fall off, they behold their new breasts like they just earned their team colors. It's quite revealing when deconstructing the postures and posing of performative manly mannishness ala Beau Travail  (with which it would make a wild double feature), all swivel-hipped sailors and grabby crotch-forward surrender --the way letting your unconscious anima/animus stretch out in drag brings all sorts of in-the-moment awareness and mojo. It's twice as sexy as it should be, really, no  matter what your persuasion.

What does it all mean? Why don't you read some Batailles, Huysmanns and Angela Carter and learn something about just how precarious your own sexuality is. Words on a page can reorganize the molecular structure of your private parts! Read the wrong book and get aroused in places you didn't even know were there, and maybe weren't before you read it. Suddenly buried infant memories sweep up onto the rocks as gender's social constructs are surrendered to the lapping oyster-rich waves.

--

LET THE CORPSES TAN

(Laissez bronzer les cadavres)

Dirs. Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani

**1/2

My expectations ran mighty high for this. Too high, perhaps. being such a gigantic fan of Belgian writer/director/producer team Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani's 2009 debut, Amer, and their sophomore effort, The Strange Color of Her Body's Tears. It's been a case of too much early promise to keep up with. This, their third feature is still suffused with their signature style (gorgeous 35mm photography, tastefully-recycled Ennio Morricone music, lots of feverish close-ups of eyes, hands, knives, guns, mouths, wild clothing, dissociative nonlinear editing, stylized violence) but there's no room in a traditional crime thriller (adopted from a potboiler French novel) for the kind of psychosexual or post-structuralist departures that made their earlier more giallo/Argento-inspired work so delectably artsy. They make some feints towards that level of giddy experimentation, like early Dario Argento and Maya Deren fighting with Stan Brakhage and Luis Bunuel in a phone both kind of style, but the result is that neither element quite gels. Maybe the bottom line is, there are just too many sunbeated old French male actor faces that look too much alike; with all the Leone eye close-ups and mouths and arms and all that they seem quite interchangeable.

The terrain though is lovely. Blazingly shot almost all outdoors--church ruins, filled with winding passages and cold rock interiors, an artist enclave high on a hill overlooking the crashing Mediterranean surf: clear deep blue sky, blazing sun --you can feel how hot the stones are where the sun hits them; you can feel how cold it is in the shade. It's run by a crazy middle-aged artist (Elina Löwensohn, still smoking those stogies) and her has-been writer lover played by the indefatigable Marc Barbé (they were last paired together as killer and final girl/lady in Sombre) and at the moment mostly inhabited by shady character. Stephane Ferrara is a guy named Rhino, but he's not the big bald bruiser you'd think was named Rhino --that guy's in the cold storage cave, humping the roast lamb hanging there (that lamb gets pretty gross and shot up by the end of the film--in slo motion). At least I think that's true. Who can keep all these craggy old man faces straight?

Anyway, it's a perfect location. Who wouldn't want to shoot a movie there, or hide out after a crime, even without air conditioning, phone or electricity? Even the the has-been writer's young black wife comes there, uninvited, with her kid (stolen from her ex-husband who has sole custody), a cute young maid. Complications! The father might get the law on the place now, so the crooks will have to kill everyone. And then two motorcycle cops show up. Oy, it's going to be a long afternoon. 

The cast dwindles out like ticker tape as visions of everything from Point Blank to Django Kill... If you Live, Shoot cohere amidst the coronas, vaginal solar flares, Brocken spectres, fata Morgana, and sun dogs cohere amidst the lacatatin tied-up breasts and flying bullets. A cliche'd close-ups of ants crawling on an arial photo of the ruins may pass with only mild groans. Ask not when deconstructed homage becomes cliche! We just know.

Alas, sometimes Forzani and Cattet have such devotion to their startling compositions and deep colors that the big picture falls away. They cram in surreal details like afterthoughts that take away rather than add: when one man is shot the gold he's carrying is hit and explodes as if liquid, splashing all over him (art... from Django Kill!) but aside from a very cool skull-headed hobby horse, and a painting Elina makes in the beginning by shooting paint pellets at a canvas and burning holes in it with her cigar, there's not much art on the scene to make the splashing gold have relevant context. It all has to be made up on the spot by the filmmakers who showed keen awareness of Jungian archetypes and surrealism in Amer, but here when they resort weirdly sexual or death driven tableaux (below) it doesn't signify much beyond its own ephemerality.  Should have been watching Bernardo Bertolucci and Ingmar Bergman the same time you be watching them giallos and westerns but maybe school is out, so they watch what they want rather than what the teacher assigns... and as Merlin says in Excalibur, it is mens' nature to forget.

I think.

But hey -shock value abounds and there's nothing wrong with that (aside from its desensitizing long-term effects). In what are either fantasies or flashbacks, a young silhouetted anima figure (presumably Löwensohn's character in her younger artist muse days), stands over a group of men and pees on them as the Morricone guitar stings bray. In another she's tied to a cross; cruel tight ropes over her breasts cause them to lactate in great rivers down her body (evoking similar imagery with the lit teacher in the early portion of The Wild Boys! What's up with Lowenson and rope-forced lactatio?). Later still she jams her heel into the mouth of one of the men  intercut with the use of a gun in a similar orifice, ala the 'dying primal scene reverie' images in Argento's Tenebrae. 

And yet, the synergy that made Amer so magnificently Antonioni-meets-Argento-esque (dialoguing with Lucretia Martel's paranoia and Claire Denis' butch sexuality as well as Argento's psychosexual post-modernism) is missing. Aside from the snarky obviousness of "gold"-en showering, or the commerce/art compromise when gold coins become liquid gold paint, the twin voices--the feminine avant garde experimental non-narrative lovingly ying/yanged with the masculine/Apollonian linea narrative--so indicative of the Cattet/Forzani union in the past--don't connect like one would hope. We end up admiring the lovely location, the photography, the range of styles, the great use of classic Italian film music, but eventually we lose any idea of which craggy middle-aged heavy is shooting which, or if we're supposed to care who gets the gold or not.

The reason those new wave crime movies (which Corpses clearly pay homage to) worked back in the day was their pro-crime attack on cultural norms of the time. Censorship and big budgets made mainstream fare so tedious and conventional that unusual angles, splurges of sex and giddy violence, the bad getting off free from their crimes, was fresh and new. The usual plots were subverted, even rendered meaningless; the crime was the style. Outlaw culture was born, leading directly from Breathless to Bonnie to Badlands. I'll definitely see Corpses again and hope my feelings change but as of now, I'm just left confused by the plot and disappointed by the mismatched Franco-esque asides.

Another weird connection: seeing this film the same year as the release of Other Side of the Wind, for Welles' artsy film-within-the-film is the Cattet-Forzani film I was hoping for. Welles keeps all the surrealism connecting properly, the colors and imagery are trippy relevant because they connect. You know what it all means even if what it means isn't clear. The part of you that 'gets' weird art knows what it means and if that part doesn't tell you, it's because it's saving it for your dreams. He keeps it simple, allowing the style and symbolism to directly link. He taps into the myth. He was doing psychedelic modernism back in the goddamned 40s so he doesn't need to underline Big Messages (his message is always the same anyway: having a massive ego and the confidence to flim-flam people eventually backfires. It's that message every time with Welles. But hey, along the way he points to the eternal truths as they pass by in parade, like an excited kid at the reptile house who knows all their Latin names.

,

In the same way Amer worked. It had form and unity of modern and post-modern in a tale of one girl's evolving relationship to her parents and animus. Three-vignettes of sexual awakening in a girl's life are told in three distinct retro styles, allowing for true new wave energy, giving us the modernist frisson of slip-sliding signifiers we find in the best of Antonioni. We didn't need a narrative in Amer because we saw the common thread through it all, as if all the movies made in Europe about woman's sexuality suddenly rearranged themselves into a completed puzzle. Amer didn't have to make sense, it was sense. Forzani and Cattet's sophomore effort, Strange Color of Her Body's Tear, on the other hand, was more like an exercise in bravura style, but with enough enticingly lovely actors and such a gorgeous art nouveau hotel setting it didn't matter if the story got monotonous and incoherent. With Corpses though, what do we have? Bronzed Mediterranean fifty-somethings lounging amidst the cloudless blazing blue sky and groovy ruins? Up close shots of eyes, guns and gross mouths stuffed with food and bad teeth? One is tempted to recall Hitchcock's line about how some directors make slices of life, while he mades slices of cake. Alas, Cattet and Forlani have tried to make a slice of a slice of a slice of a slice and we're left with nothing but an empty fork.

Anyway, it's worth the trip, just for the view.

And the balls.

----

Dipsomaniac Amore: FALSTAFF (aka CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT)

We fans of Welles and of his boozy expressionist MACBETH (1948) dreamt long and loudly of one day seeing a CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT (1966) DVD, ideally on Criterion of course, or even a damned Kino VHS, if you want to reach deep back (it's been in legal limbo forever). Orson Welles' culling of Falstaff bits from several Shakespeare plays--put in a larger English history (circa early 1400s) context via Hollinshed's Chronicles--was damned hard to appreciate on graymarket shit dupes, the only way we could see it outside of a revival house. The handful of critics who'd seen it on the big screen assured us it was a masterpiece, but with the muddy image of a dupe and Welles' glaringly obvious lip sync re-dubbing already alienating us first-time viewers, Welles' complex expressionist camera angles--all running cross odds against the verbal parrying and cross-cross against the odd editing schemata--"functioned" together so badly it was impossible to wade more than ten minutes in before running from the room. The effect was so busy and discordant that it seemed to us that the only way to appreciate Chimes of Midnight on the small screen was to perhaps to have edited it oneself, or to have worked on the editing. The only other avenue to appreciating its ceaseless cascade of intricate movement, overlaps of drama, history arrestingly grotesque woodcut- expressionistic deep focus frames, discordant distorted perspectives, bawdy double entendre, and poetry was perhaps to be drunk, tripping, and an actor or scholar who knew the plays and history by heart. Enough forgotten words and slang phrases were used that we needed subtitles and a period English dictionary to unscramble it otherwise, and we didn't have either. What's worse, the whole cast within the film were laughing uproariously at every little movement of old Jack Falstaff, before we even got a chance to see him or get the joke, and that's an alienating effect, intentional or not. The character of Falstaff himself seems hardly fit material for such guffawing. We're trying our best to keep track of what's going on but end up only worried we're not 'enjoying' it right -- their laughter becomes at us for being dimwitted philistines.

The last hard-to-overcome element was Welles himself, looking so ballooned and decayed it felt as if he might bust or drop a sandbag out of his purse and float away out of the Mad magazine-meets-Bruegel frame. Thanks to the overdub, his voice sounded like a ventriloquist throwing his voice back in time across vast sound mixing chasms. And now, time has made us sensitive. Welles looks so bloated as to be quite sick - his obesity is not a laughing matter, sir!

I tried to watch the whole thing once or twice but gave up, decreeing I'd wait for the Criterion Blu-ray to come along and deliver it in a remastered form with English subtitles. Maybe if the full scope and glory of the cinematography could be appreciated, the sound fixed up, this mountain of aforementioned icy qualms could into flattened puddles melt? Well, the Criterion has come. No more excuses. Dive in, that puddle is deep! Sure it's taken me months to finish it, to find at last the right mindset for its odious savors, but I did, though it almost killed me, I did.

Now allow me to suggest the ways I did it might for you too work, for why else would one watch it if not to boast later that one has and imply in doing so one is, what is the word? a cultured aesthete? 'Hiccup'

It's not rocket science, man. I relapsed over Xmas. Yea, for other reasons than Percy's scourge, yet I pray thee --judge me not. Because if nothing else, my cups grew so cracked by mid-February that, by contrast, Don Birnim would seem a lordly Dunsinane.

And so I 'finished' the Chimes at last. In glorium intoxicado.

I'd learned from my last relapse (1998) that Welles and Shakespeare are the ultimate bender companions. I spent days watching and re-watching an old tape of Welles' Macbeth, swooning and laughing, following along in my gigantic red 'Complete Shakespeare' book from college, and scribbling incoherent journal entries as Orson ranted under gloomy painted skies, swilled from his drinking horn, servant ready in the wings with the jug for refills. Welles soothed the saucy doubts and fears of a lost weekend-into-next bender.

And it all made sense. The obtuse Elizabethan language was as clear as a bell. For when the brain is bobbing merrily in the amniotic surf, Shakespeare's language comes into delirious focus. And Macbeth and his guilty conscience is the perfect partner for when you know your bender has spilled into the work week, the boss's unanswered voicemails like an accusing blinking digit Banquo. I still have the pages of almost illegible, whiskey-stained, hand-written notes I took from that last bender, to the effect it was the ideal relapse play, the fall from sober workaday Eden and into the opiate-womb where three meals a day and a job as Thane of Cawdor are as unattainable as even getting up off your knees to add ice to your highball. (see: Hallowed be thy Shakes: Three Macbeths). Into that morass, Welles' deep booming voice, his mastery of Shakespeare's poetry, came a-rolling like a harmonizing deep bass chord, vibrating through the rapidly misfiring chakras and aligning them, shaking off some of the toxic fluoride crystal buildup from thy third eye pineal 'til it vibrates like a tuned electric tamboura.

The best analogy I can think of for that feeling is the dread one might feel when alone on a rudderless raft being swept out to sea and looking back at the receding shore (knowing the only way back to sobriety is acute alcohol withdrawal, which is like being eaten by a shark in slow motion over a week-long period as you swim vainly against the outgoing tide). At such a moment of quite desperation/resignation, Welles' thunderous oratory fills the sail of Shakespeare's words like a westerly gale into the canvas sail of one's no longer-becalmed heart, not towards the ever-thinner mirage of the eastern shore, but upwards, via a cloud passing low one can climb onto to the cozy confines of the Republic soundstage and sail straight to olde Scotland. The full measure of Welles' resonant voice and the poetry of the dialogue cohere across moody expressionist compositions to make all of Scotland feel like one gloomy haunted house ride up in the cumulonimbus woods, the marching figures with their tall flags and hanging corpses, ghosts, silhouettes of falling axes and men ("let it come down"); and Welles staggering around in his papier-mâché crown and furs like some drunken glorious fool at a masquerade. The court in attendance eye him with concern and useless suspicion, the way my own friend coterie was eyeing me as they prepared for another impromptu intervention, as I screamed at phantasms in the middle of Sunday potluck.

So this time, because of a horrible Xmas, after 19 years of not drinking, back in that bender apartment,and after running through my usual suspects (including, because it was on TCM, High Society which stuck in my head like a broken record once I ran out of whiskey), I found Chimes and remembered how Macbeth had so grounded me in its repeatable coil of brilliance 19 years earlier.

I did so hope Chimes might at last make sense, and that all that High Society suffering wasn't for naught. 

A German translator friend of my dad's told me one Christmas long long ago that all Europeans have a drink before a foreign language class, that it's like running a stuck jar lid under hot water; our language center yields its tight latch to let us think outside the parameters of sober syntax. Drinks (plural) weren't enough for me to learn French, I found that out (never studied), but they are enough to finally get and think in Shakespeare's old world pun-filled English (which I did). The loosening of the deeply-whetted brain's linear grip enables a kind of twisty tongue-tripping free-fall that the bard's hyper-articulate eloquence catches in mid-air and swings around as if a glowing orange between two high-wire acrobats, and Welles' resonant voice reaches into the bones of the rattled skeleton Calloway drummer and harmonizes them like so many low note Tibetan monk chant xylophone bars.

That's good, because while Chimes is filling thy hitherto becalmed sails, you're still out on that raft with no paddle, being sucked out to the open ocean without a soul around to notice (if you're lucky enough to live alone). Soon you're realizing you really need to jump off the raft and start swimming towards shore before it's too late --but you're tired and the current is against you, and sharks and the undertow, and you'll jump in a minute you're just trying to get ready; and then, presto, it's too late even for jumping. The shore is gone. Then you can't remember which direction the shoreline even is, so you realize the next song you hear will be the sweet lure of the sirens to your exhausted cabin fever dehydration death. Water! Water!

What this means in relapse terms is not water, of course, but it's just as desperate. You wake up--usually on the floor or couch--in agony and unable to move your head to see what time it is, or what day. Finally, moving your head by tiny increments you notice it says either 6 or 9 o-clock on your VCR. But you can't tell if it's AM or PM by the thin gray light outside; if it's AM you're fucked: the liquor store wont be open for hours (I realize I'm paraphrasing Lost Weekend here, but it's from experience). Worse, you can't tell if it's AM on a weekday. I mean, if it is, you're going to have to go to work soon. If its PM on a weekday you're fucked, as you forgot to call in sick to work... again. You'd try to call now, or sit up, or make coffee, but just turning the channel to the weather/time is hard enough you get the dry heaves. Find that bottle... fast, before the DTs get you. If no bottle is left, oh lordy.

See, while you're drinking - ooh lah lah, hallucinations and sheer ecstasy, laughing with joy as Hal and Falstaff trade off on their impressions of Gielgud's dry air oratory as the king. Even if his officers hammer at the tavern door like Monday morning's rail-thin skeleton, their phone calls go straight to voice-mail. Away to the wars with you, they probably say, or the equivalent: "Where are you? If you're there, pick up. Hal, the war looms," they say. Being unable to even the find the phone, you declare pacifism and defy unemployment's looming shame to the empty air. You grab the bottle, still half-full, and a few minutes later, the magic is already working. The pain melts away, replaced by swirling ecstasy.

To go from such withdrawal-based misery that you can't stand up or even move your head to see the clock without retching, to such narcotized bliss that you float beyond time and space in so short a time, is worth all the suffering. The swimmer, pushing off from the bottom, swims faster upwards, breaching like a porpoise at the thought of a tossed fish. Hitting "bottom" is just the Phoenician sailor corpse's word for "a whole new worrrrld." Those are pearls that were his eyes. You can't even find your glasses, maybe they're all bent and broken under foot somewhere. You can find your glass, though, of course. You're king!

So... hit play, clink-clink the ice and pour the cure that makes a heaven of hell, (add grapefruit juice - repeat as needed). Feeling better now, you realize, to your infinite joy, that it's only 6PM on a Saturday.You have all the time in the world to get straight. Feeling good enough to mix another drink, to steady your wobbly raft as it were, you sit down with newly-minted drink for Chimes of Midnight. Ah yes, it barely matters that you've seen it three times in a row. It's still so complex, strange, alien, that you often have no idea what's going on. But you know it must be art, because your soul feels so good.

This is because really, in a sense, like the demon in the whiskey that unites with the demon in your soul, Welles' Falstaff is the ultimate bad influence friend, both diegetically and metatextually. We know the analogy, every alcoholic English lit major does. We're Hal, and John Falstaff is the booze, and he has got to go, and so we vow to shun him upon our ascendancy to a full time job, but might we not put that off awhile?

Certainly there's little love for the father in Falstaff. Though Sir John Gielgud the actor is himself a poster child for charm and wit in the service of base dissolution, his sober King is such a square and so ignobly come to crown (and blanketed by paranoia and guilt about it) that his road there carries its own sort of Macbathean self-fulfilling prophecy: the bad boy behavior of his princely son Hal with that fat rogue knight Falstaff approximates the shimmering accusatory finger of his own private Banquo ghost. He'd rather wish that some night-tripping fairy would go into the past and swap out louche Harry with noble Hotspur in their cradles than try to understand his own culpable odium in the equation. Of course he already does understand it, not even lying to himself eases the pain, just as I wince to see my young wild magic repeated in the youngsters of today, all the same mistakes and illusions they won't be dissuaded from making and falling under... and to see my own hand in it by making it all look so damned cool, and so on down the line (even this essay could count), and then knowing my dad felt the same thing for my brother and I, as my dad watched but said nothing as his 1.75 Early Times Bourbon water line dipped and rose like a ship in a hurricane when e'er we were home.

That's why, for all its robust glory and rich language, Chimes is really a kind of Adam Sandler movie. Half the film is just compilations of elaborate insults, pranks, bad boy behavior, and real job shirking, and then---finally and with much (literal) trumpetfare--the turn to sobriety, AA- compelled to kick the jonesers, townies and mooches out of your life. The sun shines and the clouds part. Adam Sandler grows up, gets a job and a nice girl; Hal gets a crown; you get "some help" and a sponsor; Master Shallow goes back to his own ruddy taverns to boast of knowing the man who knew you when, and then they forget you - for more naive and hitherto-sheltered freshmen are coming into town every fall. The things they have seen, Master "Shallow" indeed.

RECEPTION

It might have been pitched like that and done well at the box office--the violence of the battle and the lusty sex of the tavern with Jeanne Moreau's Doll Tearsheet played up, but instead, alas, Falstaff AKA Chimes at Midnight was paradoxically too old-fashioned and too sophomoric-- for swingin' '66. It proved yet another of Welles' art house flops, the equivalent of Oscar Jaffe's Valerie Whitehouse vehicle Joan of Arc. The art crowd of 1966 were flocking to see stuff like Blow-Up and Repulsion. A Shakespeare film starring a grotesquely fat malcontent with loads of overdubbing and complicated history, overlapping ornate dialogue that would be difficult enough to understand if read, let alone blurted in a post-dub rush over rapidfire grotesqueries and complexly interwoven fields of bawdy, profound, and historically-specific action, it was just too much johnson.

The first row is an array of successful art films from 1965-66 (for releases traveled slowly across country in a few prints) one might see in a row displayed before the local art house cinema.  Looking at the top row and imagining seeing all those posters in a row outside the theater, any promoter can see the subliminal issue why the lower row wouldn't fill many seats. Those movies have beautiful blondes; Falstaff has a grotesquely rotund brainiac nerd in full armor. Seeing it instead of, say, Persona is like admitting you're some wobbling bookish unlaid square with elbow patches on your tweed jacket and ink stains on your fingers from years of note-taking and running from the giddy, druggy thrill of svelte or buxom babes in shimmering mod clothes frugging to the latest psych rock jam or grooving down at the coffee shop to some bongo and guitar folk poetry until the (acid was still legal) drugs kick in. 

As you can see, there's no Janet Leigh or Rita Hayworth to put on the poster, no Edie or Catherine Deneuve nor Jane Fonda nor Raquel Welch. There's no 'sizzle' of the sort tarting up concurrent releases of similar length and film stock, like Fellini's La Dolce Vita or Antonioni's L'Aventura. There's not even any guns, or knives, or cars. All Chimes could promise was Welles--deep into his fake noses and rotund grotesquery phase--and some passing glances at Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet as far as sweet young things. There's a few wives on the opposing side (like Hotspur's lady, played by Marina Vlady who's vivacious and interesting) and gorgeous "seamstresses" up in the rafters, but they're seen only when they're needed to wave good-bye, engage in folk dances, run from the sheriff, or laugh obediently for Hal and Falstaff's impromptu plays. One or two are cute enough we hope to see more of them, but Welles gives us less than a few seconds at a time, so we come to rely on the random shots of Moreau's face for our respite from the rustic manliness of the blood vessel-woodcut old faces, Margaret Rutherford's pestering for money, and the inn's expressionistic rafters (Welles loves ceilings). Too bad, for with every strand of wild hair brilliantly captured in Edmond Richard's dusky Haxan-ish photography, her face wreathed in spiderweb lines, Moreau's Doll pulls doting delight from deep within Sir John's sack-and-gout plagued corpulence, but one shudders to think the abysmal state of his 'bait and tackle' after this long and chancrous life, and Shakespeare's bawdy double entendres on STDs, cleanliness of drawers, and full chamber pots ("empty the jason")--are all kept in to make sure we do, indeed, so shudder.

For a long time this was the only picture we could find of Chimes at Midnight
and it raised a lot of questions as to the age/relationship here, especially since, when I saw it first,
Welles' was in the news for allegedly bathing Pia Zadora (who was having her
Bardot-80s / Brooke Shields-70s x Zsa Zsa Gabor 60s / Charro- 70s  moment) in Butterfly (1982)

I mention this aspect only since it reflects the more elaborate expressionist approach of Welles vs. the psychedelic art house hit makers of the day, whose iconography moves intrepidly beyond signifier language, their focus on youth and psychedelic drugs provoking a post-modernist new aesthetic arrest that runs opposite to Welles' bellowing boozy poetics/ While booze dilates the mind's language center so it might easily swallow up Shakespeare's dense archaic language, acid eliminates words altogether, transcends them, to arrive at a kind-of 'impossibility-of-truth' with image and sound in and of themselves--the psychedelic impact on the senses is so amplified an intense that Wellesian intentional ugliness can create a bad trip panic - thus youthful beauty becomes essential to the point of compulsion. And music is the key...(3)

If Wine be the Music of War, Drink On...

In addition to the lack of sex and beauty, a problem with Chimes lies in the merry olde score by Francesco Lavagnino. Far too repetitive and jaunty in its main theme, it's as if he was so enthralled with Nino Rota's work on La Dolce Vita (1960) he forgot to bring in an actual mood of his own.

Then again, Lavagnino comes alive, or finds his own, for the celebrated battle, adding wordless female chanting and military drums so that the score becomes an ominous liturgy, heralding of the giallo eeriness to come in the work of Ennio Morricone or Mario Nascimbe's work on One Million Years BC, the following year. Deservedly at the top of cinema's best battle scenes (fitting perfectly between Potemkin's and Duck Soup's), the main battle sequence is a whirlwind of Eisensteinian movement-based editing: horse's stabbed, clangs of metal on metal, bodies in armor falling, charging lances and waving morning stars, waves of soldiers riding in and archers letting fly. From organized symbolic nationality and cavalry card shuffling we gradually get down to the pain and muddy brawling of the up close soldiers, no recognizable insignia to tell them apart visible below the mud and blood, as if starting out a Riefenstahl equestrian Olympiad montage and ending a muddy massive rugby riot filmed on a bunch of GoPros worn by the central rioters. There's almost no gore, just a gradual erosion of imagery--there's not even any judgment or polemic - just a real-time example of how men like to get dirty and deadly. It's also a master class is making a hundred extras seem like thousands and of staging battle, without condemnation or celebration. Instead Welles offers an in-between recognition of war's necessity for man's esteem and a sad realizing of his mortal frailty. In other words, Welles' battle is not a head-shaking "what a waste" dove polemic or a chest-thumping hawk call, but something more profound and important: he finds a sense of nobility and grace achieved through mud, crying widows, and grievous wounds. Only Conan and Patton have maybe come close since to tapping the same unspoken vein of true courage.

And naturally, I most adore that--after the field is won-- Falstaff turns his section of the front into a massive tailgate by pulling his rotund girth up to a big keg on the field of victory, and pouring out a measure of "sherri-sack." Chilling around it with a coterie of the surviving unkempt countrymen he pricked earlier, this is clearly a post-battle ritual he's experienced before, declaring his love of sherri-sack for it makes normal men both brave and droll, "apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of fiery, nimble shapes, which delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue... becomes excellent wit." Adding, that sobriety thins men's blood, he claims that's why Hotspur fell, and that "if I had a thousand sons, I would make them foreswear thin potations and addict themselves... to sack!" At that point of course, being drunk and feeling guilty about thy sack addiction, thou mayest cheer. In Falstaff's sanctioned view, your vice is a noble endeavor!

That's the rub of the nutshell, the full measure of Chimes' glory. We all wish it could go on forever, but war and the bender alike must end. A wild free-for-all is over in a flash, followed by months of recovery, limb mending, meeting attendance, and TV watching. Drinking speeds up time and the hang-over slows it, so eventually--as in The Lost Weekend--the only 'conscious' part of drinking is the pain of withdrawal. Pain is the only thing we remember, the only time we're conscious, aware of time's passage, plagued by saucy doubts and fears. If we get six whiskey bottles at the store, the misery will be postponed a week or so, but that week won't be remembered - it will pass in an instant. The joy of the plentiful glass may have been quite wondrous, but our takeaway is but a dim blur, a black space on the tape, a sweet narcotic black out, which is itself by shame and dread book-ended. We only have the evidence we must have had a blast -- cryptic clues: broken mirrors, ripped up pages, cracked DVDs--the vacuum cleaner left on, roaring away inches from our head on the carpet (true story) when we wake, or the stove left on, a pot of pasta reduced to scorched resin, empties galore, some bottles broken and jagged with chunks in our foot now crusted over with blood; the TV showing a patient DVD menu on eternal repeat (or in the old days, static), black bruises on our legs or arms, more empties-- all the battle fray equivalent of the dead bodies,  like unfinished vulture meals left to rot 'til the frozen winter stops the stench.

Sooner or later, the bodies and the empties must be cleared from the field for the next big show; the booze gone, the wounded too messed up to even call downstairs for delivery, or Seamless, or an ambulance. The show finally doesn't go on, and in that--freedom. We just had a sample of what suicide was aiming for. We skipped the earthly record.

Me, after my recent relapse left me too messed up even to call and order a liquor delivery, I quietly convulsed on the floor from alcoholic withdrawal and/or a bad reaction with my SSRI meds. Sinatra's slightly buzzed-flat reading of the line "She got pinched in the Ass- / tor Bar" from "Yes, Indeedy" kept repeating over and over in my head like a skipped record, ensuring I'll never be able to watch High Society again. That is my grievous battle scar. I have its big indoor shimmering poolside Apollonian temple for lovely Grace Kelly (who seems rail-thin) and the big central foyer in Logan's Run blurred together like a fusion of the mall (where I spent my formative years' depression) and the hospital (where I'd be shortly). I can't watch that one again either. For awhile anyway.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, unless it doesn't know what you're laughing at --then it feels paranoid, like you're laughing AT it. 

Getting back to Falstaff- if you're new, let me assure you of this: getting past the first twenty minutes is hardest, for the film just plunges in and doesn't endear itself to anyone: the voices seem mismatched to the actors, the words a muddle, and Hal and Poins laugh and cavort through and around interwoven camera movements with such hearty dubbed relish at Falstaff's cumbersome knavery before we even see him, that we're automatically alienated and thinking we made a mistake coming here. After all, it's no easy thing getting up, finding a disc, opening the machine, taking the current one out and putting the new one in, all without falling over, smashing the tray, breaking or dropping or losing either disc, and putting the old one away before it's scratched. The whole operation requires a finesse ill-served by a bender. We're putting a lot of hope on old Jack Falstaff, but before he even has a chance to stir from his mountainous slumber, Poins and Hal are rolling around on the ground, laughing, planning all sorts of teasing jests and bringing up older ones, that they--at least-find side-splitting, it leaves a bad taste in our mouths (Hal being royalty who thinks he's being a rebel by robbing from the middle class - sound familiar?). Meanwhile the landlady bustles about demanding payment and reciting Sir John's bill, which the boys think is guffaw-worthy, but gets me mad. I hate the whole concept of credit and when people give credit to a rogue like Sir John or that terrible fisherman Mr. Johnson in To Have and Have Not  -- I lose respect for them! And it hurts.

At the same time we're thrown into the political intrigue with Henry's father King Henry VI, who's sort of held onto a temporary king appointment and left the rightful ruler (by his brothers' decree) rotting in some faraway French jail, refusing to pay the ransom. In this sense, Welles keeps our alliance divided -- we actually do like Hotspur more than Hal on some level, as he at least has a young wife he loves and a sense of fun in honor rather than reveling in juvenile vulgarity and deadbeat debauches. The best Hal can do as far as restoring honor to his name is the kind of half-hearted declaration of the prodigal son, who promises to straighten up after his dad bails him out on his second offense. And is this not the claim made by addicts, drunks and slumming socialites, that this rough company is an example of the sun permitting "the base, contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world," so that, when he pleases, he can shine again and be "all the more wondered at"? What a rationalization! "If all the year were playing holiday to sport would be as tedious as work" (and therefore vice versa). Haha, I wish I'd known that line when my dad was alive. Hotspur, on the other hand, clearly finds time for both sport and work, and has grown a far healthier landscape. Harry's not wrong to want some night-tripping fairy to redistribute the pair. And it's Hal's killing of Harry in the duel that makes this truth all the more painful. Truly, the better man has lost. We like Hal for the first time only then, as he admits it.

"The day is wasted if you're not" - La Greco

VALUABLE ONLY WHEN LOST
But really, the most offensive thing, what should have turned the tide for good, is that Falstaff takes credit for the death of Hotspur; since he's after all a key part of Hal's base company it doesn't matter if the king believes him or not, it's enough to sully the victory. For me, in that scene, Falstaff goes too far - and it makes me like the man even less than before. Maybe the problem lies in positioning along the scale between Welles' gruff but decent rascals ( Will Varner) vs. the charming but horrible villains. My favorite Welles characters--Quinlan, Macbeth, Harry Lime--aren't supposed to be o'er lovable. They aren't kept in the company of guffaws and loving looks. In fact it's only at the moment of his profound realization that his thing with Hal is kaput, that he's out in the cold and that he deserves it and it's the way of the world, and he wouldn't fit in anyway -- that Welles' Falstaff actually seems to become warmly human. It's a powerful, haunting moment for being so long coming and Welles carries it sublimely. It's one of those rare persona breaks that major stars sometimes perform in films, that are all the more valuable for their rarity--Cary Grant's breakdown before the child services director in Pennies from Heaven, for example, or Robert Redford choking up despite himself after bumping into Barbara Streisand at the end of The Way We Were. It's probably Welles best moment as an actor, and worth enduring the slog of his roguery to get there - suddenly we get that Welles maybe never intended us to think him as lovable as Falstaff thinks he is -  but how could we resist with that voice? It's always there, that larger than life ego with the genius to back it up.  But here Welles does one better.

If we get this far into these films, we're already primed for these sudden changes, which take advantage of the previous reels of cool detachment to hook us. By this point in Chimes, we've figured out Welles' unique rhythm and can comfortably let the words we don't know slide clear away. And, too, Criterion's disc has subtitles and audio commentary by James Naremore. He's good at keeping the historical background front and center rather than getting too lost in production history (which comes out more in the extras). This is essential for understanding as is (I found this very useful), the English subtitles, since so many of the words are forgotten slang anyway (which most adaptations would subtly modernize) and so casually tossed off, being able to look them up if needed helps greatly. Also, the more we watch the less the dubbing aspect becomes noticeable. Especially as the film goes on it seems to all but disappear as a problem.

In short, if ever a disc was worth owning and studying and watching obsessively while drunk, this is it. Welles' Macbeth for your first big relapse; Falstaff for your last.

The last, you have heard me. Never say never but we have heard the chimes. All things must end - and if we're lucky they end in an Ativan drip and Librium dispensed by beautiful young nurses in powder blue scrubs bathed in the nighttime glow of their mobile medicine tray computer screens like shimmering valkyrie. If not, god help us. Let no man stand alone in that dark and dingy hour. With no Welles, art thy cups abused.
Though his mud-and-blood besotted gravity swallows up thy trapped and troubled shoes,
in his boozy expressionistic poetry art thou art lifted,
shoeless... through.

Lifted, drunk and truly through.
For two hours.

1. NOTES:
 Bright Lights -'Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day blackout. .."
2. Corman imported so many of these and one wonders just how much his genius with marketing had to do with the entirety of the art house movement. Sex sells the first ticket and art keeps the word of mouth high. 
3. PS 12/18: Welles--it turns out--explores the youth-psychedelic/sex angle in his film-within-a-film in the unseen The Other Side of the Wind).

SEE ALSO:
Shrooms, for Remembrance: Mel Gibson's HAMLET (1990) in Psychedelic Context

Shrooms, for Remembrance: Mel Gibson's HAMLET (1990) in Psychedelic Context

The recent discovery of cannabis traces in Shakespeare's old pipes only confirms it: old William was 'experienced.' It takes weird alchemical magic to write as potently as he did, which means mind altering heights not dreamt of in your dusty professor's tenure-sanctioned philosophy. My high pot-a-this? Will was experienced via the potent psilocybe cubensis mushroom which--lest we forget--grows naturally in the foggy climate of merrye England. Thanks to an obscure but enduring law stretching way back to the ancient times, it's always been an inalienable British right to grow, harvest, sell, and ingest all shrooms. I even saw some for sale at the Portobello Street Fair around 2003-4 right out in the open!!. I thought I'd stepped into an alternate dimension, the Notting Hill Interzone! Then a year or ten later came Ben Wheatley's A Field in England a shroomy old gloaming of a thing, and I knew at last how the Elizabethan Golden Age got its space cadet glow. No matter how adamantly they clench their jaws, trippers of today can't hold a candle to that Elizabethan lot: druid hold-outs, alchemists, astronomers, other alchemists, poets, plants and pie-eyed poppinscrabblers, a party so groovy even God got involved, to wipe out the evil Spanish armada as seen in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. God hates buzzkills, Phillip!

And God-sanctioned explorations of the druggy British psyche have been flourishing ever since. Unlike America with it's tendency to overdo things, get lazy, then demonizes, trusty Europe just moderates and keeps all its potent herbs handy in its bag of collective tricks. In this they have seldom wavered up through the centuries, from the metaphysical poets to seances and fairy photography, ghosts haunting ancient castles, Crowley to Jimi Page, to ravers, love thugs, post-druids, neo-alchemists --a vast forward rolling spore network visible only through magical pupil dilation. In making them illegal, the 20th Century tried to induce a whole second Dark Age, to wreak the belated King Phillip's Inquisitor equivalent upon our young stoned psyches, but Elizabeth's tide-altering magic still sinks all narcs.

In the words of Peter Tosh, "let them be melted, Jahjah."

Some bedraagled Inquisitors squiggle ashore though, and take shelter deep inside the culture itself, and from there infects the psyche, which is perhaps that's why today's shroomer is seldom as full of fiery oratory as his forebears. Being on massive amounts of drugs seems to invalidate any insight or artistic breakthrough. Trained by pop culture to think he's 'just high' he never considers trying to transcribe his all-cylinders firing psychedelic madness or record it in coherently poetic dialogue. Lapsing into either incoherence or abstraction (a 'good trip' or a bad trip') with no grasp that art lies in between, these fledgling Boswells fall either into the bad trip asylum (Poe, Lovecraft, Thompson) or the good trip monastery (Ram Dass, Ginsberg), or worse, fake their way along in a kind of faux hip sandalwood snap (Eric Robbins, Robert Hunter).

Only the truly far-out there--too far perhaps, to ever just come rolling back all prodigal once their oats are sewn--can see the shadow of the devil even in the blinding light of God, and vice vera (Yeats, Huxley, Joyce). Only the truly far out--but not so far out they can't keep it together long enough to dodge the ambulance, prison and the strait-jacket--can hold off on an emotional reaction of love or fear, a 'this or that', a 'good or bad' duality trap; only the very few. can hold off on judgment until all duality is burned away and a whole second spectrum of shadow and light emerges (Blake, Shakespeare).

Shakespeare brings that layer of madness into perfect visibility for even sober audiences. They don't need the magical dilated pupils to see the fungal network when his language is there to bring that second spectrum up through the depths. Not all Shakespeare's plays are trippy, but they all have a Sgt. Pepper-type of playfulness when it comes to hip wordplay, continually doubling and tripling meanings, each quip laden containing ornate insults and bodily humor on one end and mercilessly accurate piercings of callow folly on the other. The ability to temper lacerating self-awareness with 'fuck it let's party' kind of gallows' humor wit is the most vital skill in the psychedelic arsenal, and there's no Shakespeare play more layered with this overlapping tide of meaning and counter meaning--none more taken over the edge into full night-tripping weirdness without lapsing into histrionics and babbling brooks--than Hamlet.

And no filmed Hamlet is more attuned to the druggy aspects than Zeffirelli's. No more vibrant, wild-eyed appropriately bonkers Hamlet than Mel.

What a supporting cast: Glenn Close is the queen mother, Paul Scofield the ghost dad, and a 23 year-old saucer-eyed tarot card come to life is Helena Bonham Carter as Ophelia. I had forgotten all about how awesome she was was until the film poked up through on EPIX the other day. How did I forget? And why didn't I see the shroom connection back in the early 90s when I taped it and watched it around the clock? I was too drunk, too young, Shakespeare too dried in my mind from boring professors and white elephant productions, to fully soak it up. Not even sure why I watched it so often, except that it was great to watch drunk.

Oh yeah, Mad Max Mel Gibson in the lead was the reason, and ironically he's also the main reason today it's not more highly regarded compared to Olivier or Branagh versions. Mel was at the height of his action stardom in 1990, and typecasting being what it was/is, his valiant performance became merely a talk show punchline rather than a cause célèbre. It was a vanity project, they said. Vanity, Horatio? Didn't they mean frailty?

Frailty thy name is Mel. For he hath from the high horse fallen, and the wild-eyed craziness we always knew was really there under the wild-eyed crazy acting is now exposed. But doesn't that make this then the exact right time to re-evaluate his performance as one of the rare truly crazy Hamlets? Now we can taste the tang of acid in Zeffirelli's glowing air, can feel it twist and burn in our saliva, feel it slithering across the decades towards us like a dead king-eating, fractal-spewing, black hole wurm. We see now that Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet didn't just hit big with the free love generation because it tapped the war protest zeitgeist and was gorgeous to look at but because Zeffirelli bore down to the lysergically venomous poetry in it, so that time seemed to stop as heady madness cracked open the world's mean heart and set-a the dove-a free, and then it was shot down by an embittered, jealous Cupid.

Youth politics has changed since 1968 but you can still feel the psychedelic pulse in all Zeffirelli's subsequent work. Maybe he was always hoping, like so many of us, that his next film might strike the match that lights the fuse that blows his legend back to life. I reviewed the entire Zeffirelli canon for the Muze while I was newly sober, and seeing his long version Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972) over the same weekend made me a blissed-out, converted Christian for three days, and I wasn't on anything on but the 'pink cloud' of early sobriety - and acid flashbacks. I almost got my own bible or went to church before the spell wore off. So I feel, in a sense, Franco was my first AA sponsor, which might seem at odds with the psychedelic pulse motif I just talked about, but not if you've experienced both the pink cloud of sobriety AND the 'religious experience' that is a psychedelic "peak"--take it from me, there's not too much difference.

But what Zeffierelli really has is the painter's eye: the classical beautiful dusky painterly style that's almost cliched shorthand for 'art house.' His films pulse with a genuine connection to real Italian painting, stretching back to Michelangelo and the Renaissance; a sublime mix of natural light craftsmanship and genuine artistic-spiritual feeling seethes serpent-in-Eden-like and, from this mighty bulb, psychedelic illumination arises --the dilated pupil third eye point where death and transfiguration meet above the eyes of the tripped-out painter. He's the Italian William Blake! His films create the full spiritual potency of the religious experience, the Stendahl syndrome.

Mel Gibson's great genius in the lead is to use all his star wattage and (real life, it turns out) 'crazy eyes' Martin Riggs Mad Max Aussie wildman energy to bear on Hamlet's mood swings, rather than bury that wattage in some stilted bowing to the pillars of 'important' art (like a Brit or American would). He's fully aware that stuffed shirt critics are going to roll their eyes and--almost to spite them--rolls his own. Ranting and frothing like the dark bad trip cross between Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx's paranoid schizophrenic shadow, his Hamlet brings terrifyingly concise coherence to a miasma of late night drug dealer paranoia and the way the fear of death--normally down to a manageable abstraction--becomes terrifyingly vivid during the peak of a trip, compelling you to either get your war face on, like Braveheart, or cower and plead for your annoyed friend to drive you to the ER, like a wally. And then when morning finally breaks, you wonder, "is that the sun or a cop?" And when the band finally comes on after all that standing around, and the players finally arrive to catch the king's conscience, you rush to their holy fool distraction like a drowning man to scorched and dusty desert.

It's not for everyone, that kind of 'high strangeness.' You have to be drawn to it, called by an inner voice. Most people fear letting go to the extent such a journey involves (and not without good reason). They stammer excuses that they read LSD damages chromosomes and they want to have children with only ten fingers; or that they're afraid of going legally insane. What it really is, man, is fear of flying, and it appears in Hamlet courtesy of those men who lead Hamlet to the battlements where his father's ghost walks, then urge him not to follow where it beckons, as even seemingly benevolent spirits can turn into demons and lead off the parapet. How often have dumbass wallies on one too many hits jumped out a window thinking they could fly? Hard to say, as that sort of detail doesn't get reported in general, except through the grapevine--it's just another college student suicide otherwise. The kids who didn't jump are certainly going to be too cool to rat him out to the cops, even if he was a wally.

The thing with psychedelic drugs though, is dosage. A drop gets you high, but drink the whole vial and your psych ward-bound. Your only chance to avoid the bughouse is to get very, very drunk and/or gobble many Thorazine. And as far as I know they haven't made Thorazine for 20 years. That's why any good and responsible dealer takes care in prescribing. Give a sober nerd the same dose as a Woodstock-era Wavy Gravy and you've got either a complete breakdown (like that naked chick trying to crowd surf in Gimme Shelter) or worse, a guy who's not nearly as high as he needs to be (like Marty Ballin).

Thus the detailed caution of Horatio and the rest of Hamlet's entourage, that the father's spirit might be a trickster, the type who tells you three truths so that you believe the fourth (which is the lie) suggests that cognizance of this kind night-tripping trickster was common knowledge of the day --while in our current society it's known only by a very few maligned and scoffed-at fringe dwellers. That Shakespeare had this level of foresight in dealing with such bedevilment (a priest cautions the same thing re: the witches in Macbeth) indicates this was a time when people encountered supernatural trickster advisers frequently (I've encountered them too, been burned in the exact way Horatio worries about).

Black magic is all over Hamlet, as if Elsinore was Page's/Crowley's castle or NASA, i.e. the deep 'rottenness' in Denmark stems from Satanic root blight. We never see the odious Claudius given evil ideas by spirits himself--there's no three witches pronouncing him King of Denmark--but if they did, off camera, maybe it was a trickster spirit's a priori move-countermove to spur Hamlet's rash ghost-fueled frenzy of revenge just so he'd strike amiss and kills doltish Polonious instead, setting off a whole second arc of vengeance this time from Laertes on Hamlet, thus inaugurating one of those chains of sorrow that evil tricksters live for

All that said, Zefflrelli's Hamlet is not all supernatueal druggy madness, this film: it takes him a few beats for Gibson's Hamlet to snap out of his wan funk so the first few scenes are drippy dull, but bear with it for once dad's ghost lures our Mel up to the dangerous heights of the Stonehenge-tower battlements, shit gets real. When Mel comes back down he's like Moses glowing from his mountaintop. It's then Mel's genius madness kicks in, and it remains for the rest of his film. Just like Mel plays a great crazy person because he really is crazy, he performs Hamlet performing his madness as a way to hide his true insanity by conveying it openly (the way two negatives make a positive) a trick most seasoned trippers practice when forced to deal with (alive, sober) parents unexpectedly. Because after seeing his dead dad's ghost, Hamlet's already past the point of no return, no Thorazine will bring him back: arguing with himself, stalling, procrastinating, hallucinating dad wherever he looks, paralyzed with dread, he acts as we all would (hopefully) when compelled to kill our uncle in cold blood. 

Ophelia (her "young woman's wits mortal as an old man's life") follows in his lysergic wake; she's the girlfriend you convince to shroom with you but it's soon clear she's not going to handle it well at all, and you're too far gone yourself to talk her down. Soon she's taking them nonstop and babbling to herself, singing and dancing up and down the parapets. And then, rather than stand firm against her son's spittle-flecked lunacy, soon his mom, too, going mad--as if it's a contagious disease spread by Pontypool-style oratory.  



And as that dame of Denmark, a 23 year-old Helena Bonham Carter, is the most dosed of all Ophelias: super duper young and fetching, able to oscillate brilliantly between innocent, confused, thrilled, blessed, sexually aroused, distracted, crushed, and round-the-bend wavelengths, all in a single bounding wave of a chicken bone she thinks is a flower (but could even more easily be a thick psilocybe cubensis stem), Carter's game for whatever. Like all the best young saucy acting natural blue bloods of England (she's related to baronesses and prime ministers), she's got the kind of class that goes so deep she doesn't ever deign to be merely ladylike. Architecture of the era was designed to compliment her inherited genes, the rarefied poeticism of her cheeks and eyes. Unlike American actors who, alas, get stuck in the white elephant tar pits of bourgeois loftiness when doing Shakespeare, their bodies and tongues forced into all manner of unnatural poses, Carter swims in the language like an undulating fish. It's like that Hawks line: she's so good she doesn't feel she needs to prove it.

A lifetime of decadence and recovery has left me with a sharp eye for who's "been to the mountaintop," i.e. who's ever been 'experienced' in the Hendrixian sense. Gibson, Zeffirelli and Bonham Carter have all been up there, clearly, so when they plunge into heedless madness they do it way better than, say, the sober classical-minded Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh or Olivier or Leigh could (1).

That said, as far as the people who go to Shakespeare plays in America (i.e. the bourgeoisie) are concerned, the more classically highbrow the player, the better, for to them Shakespearean acting must at all times strive for white elephant underlined 'importance' and lofty carriage.

But Shakespeare doesn't need their protection; his work spits openly on such lionization and in doing so elevates itself higher than its forebears --as long as the actors and directors have been to that mountaintop, of course. It can also be as deadly dull as dusty death when that highbrow approach embraces the stilted and draggy as what the 'swells' came to see.

In 1948, mountaintop-been-to madman Welles' termite art Macbeth came to artier theaters but was overshadowed by Olivier's white elephant Hamlet the same year. Olivier's was how Shakespeare should be done, so the bourgeois critical body proclaimed. For Welles, 'done' was the key word. His Shakespeare writhed and pulsed but was never done, as eternal as madness itself. There was the feeling the stage-bound world he created was continuing after the credits rolled, that the next viewing might show a whole different film. Much as I revere Olivier's Hamlet, the best moments are with the ghost dad, who looms in full and weird armor enshrouded by fog and speaking in an echoing boom whisper, a ghost seeming to be flowing right out of Hamlet's fog machine brain. But Welles' entire film flows that way. (See Hallowed be thy Shakes).

Pssst, those stones in the moonlight look like me in about 20 years, i.e. rock, star-crossed, stoned dead - but an experienced space cowboy would just eye this specter and presume it's a hallucination... even if it's real, isn't it safer? 

Zeffirelli's dad ghost (Paul Scofield) flows farther than them all. Hamlet's woeful shattered superego, Scofield is like a bad shroom hallucination. Neither showy or surreal, he's allowed to blend into the darkness so that he may be the moonlight reflected on the mineral veins in the stone of the battlements. Up to the challenge of embodying that most horrified of souls, forbidden by some unseen master specter from spilling the secrets of just how fucked the other side is, Scofield makes the father both horrifying and horrified, the passer of the torch of mortality's great horror - the Medusa shield reflection of the fires of stonework hell.

And when Hamlet comes down from the parapet he's alight like that annoying kid who comes back from Burning Man or the Rainbow Gathering with dreadlocks, a dour but smokin' hot activist girl's phone number, and the feeling he's been chosen to keep the world green. For one semester's stretch he doth berate unreceptive ears with facts gleaned from phone calls with his allegedly corporeal Greenpeace girlfriend. Mel's Hamlet, crying "like a whore" and unpacking his heart with words (and pamphlets) rather than direct and violent action (blowing up a factory), is the woeful midnight tantrum of a lad who realizes no amount of feeling-- poured into his angry young poetry slam soliloquy notebook even unto whiskey stained margin--will undo the catastrophic damage his already crumbling American white male legacy hath wrought upon the whales of the world. Even if he pounds his plodding pen to plastique it would explode no illusion beyond popping the proud bubble of his own inchoate solipsism.

And in this analogy: the college drug dealer, drinking his way towards some chimera self-assurance, his each whiskey shot a fleeting but blessed deliverance from the dead father's terrible injunction, onus comes at a terrible price. He can't even make out with his mother in her bed for a hot sec before ghost dad's ghost pops up, dismayed at this halting of his son's bloody path. But dad, it's smokey!


In order for this all to become psychedelic though, it can't be told by the British, for the Royal Shakespeare Compan are too established and respectful (albeit not quite as drab or 'experimental' as America). Having nothing to prove, neither Italian Zeffirelli or Australian Gibson are inclined to be at all pious and restrained with this material. Their Hamlet is a raving but hyper-eloquent lunatic, the type to smash phones in hotel lobbies, leave anti-Semitic rants on answering machines, and trash hotel rooms in fits of manic pique, stabbing at the rats he sees in the walls and behind the paisley tapestries of his college dorm (but what about the Poloniuses hiding inside your skin, broh?). In typical Zeffirelli style, the dusky David Watkin cinematography uses natural light streaks sparkling with floating castle dust in real, dusky straw and stone locations.

Then, even better, maybe best of all, the at-first-unrecognizable, Ennio Morricone comes laying down a score that only becomes clearly his own (via wordless swooping Marni Nixon-esque top notes) only in mom's boudoir, which makes sense as it's such a giallo miasma of murder (stabbing through works of art), Freudian Oedipal insanity, vows of secrecy, maternal guilt, ghostly accusing, and existential alienation. It's a great scene: Glenn Close--despite the tightness of her hippy braids--makes a subtly unhinged queen, following her son's madness like a light off a cliff in the dark, her voice dropping octaves as the horror of the thought her dead husband is in the room, or that her son is about to kill her, or make out with her. Like Ophelia, she follows Hamlet into that blessedly cracked and melted mirror which--through the totality of its warp--undoes sanity's merciful blurring and throws the horror of the real into unyielding focus.

Author at left -Oakwood Cmty, Syracuse NY 1986

STRANGE ASIDE:

The graveyard, Syracuse's Oakwood Cemetery, is where I and my clique of fellow SU sophomores first shroomed (and then shroomed regularly) as college kids in the late 80s, and where we too found a skull, but it wasn't of poor Yorik, but H.B. Crouse one of the trustees of one of the lecture halls... and later on that week we read that some idiot freshman took it back to his dorm and started boiling the skin off (in the communal Flint Hall kitchen) so he could use the skull in an art project. Yeah man, eerie similarities. The morning/afternoon after we first hooked up (me still high on shrooms, natch), me and this gorgeous Italian-American crystal blue-eyed girl who shall be nameless (though I talk about her endlessly on this blog) saw the broken-in tomb and HB Crouse's skull sticking out, and I thought about climbing through the bars to get it (which the more limber of us could do and regularly did, that mausoleum being on the hill we all hung out on). but then she stopped me... and a day later we read about this idiot (above) getting kicked out of school.  I had thought the same thing, get in there, get the skull, boil the parchment skin and long thin gray hair (for hair really does keep growing after death) off in a big pot, and have the coolest of all skull tchotchkes. I was glad I'd listened to her though, then. For it would have no doubt cooled our budding love if naught else.

Man, that nameless crystal blue-eyed girl really did a number on me... so hot, so cool, ultimately so dumb... she could kill a big swinging group conversation stone dead with a single interjection. I didn't realize at the time how really pretty women are often damaged from excessive male attention, that they act like idiots almost as an unconscious passive aggressive dude repellant. And since they never need to develop the wits (frail as an old man's life) by which the lesser mortals up their appeal, they don't. It wasn't a stretch for me to realize her attraction to me, then in my the first flower of my alcoholism, paunchy and bloated, was part and parcel of this idiocy. Her beauty was such I could barely look at her without it hurting. Those clear light blue eyes with flawless white skin and wild jet black hair, I still feel my electric blood up its voltage just in thinking about her. She and I went westward after graduation to seek our fortunes, to Seattle. Shrooms told us we were broken up on afternoon at the Seattle aquarium after about a year. I moved back east to my rotten Jersey Denmark basement, my parents shaking their heads over my erratic drunken unemployment. And only then (as you know from my incessant mentioning) I realized I loved her. If it wasn't for Night of the Iguana who knows where i might be today?

And when this version of Hamlet came out, the same year, I taped it and watched it over and over, though at first it wrankled, for it was painful seeing Max Max so hampered by conscience against a foe so worthy of his usual unthinking vengeance. He should have chained Claudius's foot to a car about to explode and left him with a hacksaw and five minutes on the clock, like he done did to the Toecutter!

In between TV access (my dad watched a lot of golf, baseball, and football), I smoked and drank in my parents' dark cellar and wrote this girl endless letters. Only decades later did I realize how easy true love is when so one-sided and far away. On Facebook, I see she's married, she's old, her hair gone wild gray; she's dowdy like an Anna Magnani. But in 1990--ah, she was still so hot--I wrote her such letters from my boomerang ensconcement down in that troll king basement as would wilt the most iron rose to mulch. I got a phone call one afternoon whilst half asleep in a dopey drunkard funk--twas her new husband! He promised to kill me should I ere I write again. I was furious and hurt, but obeyed, my love wounded gravely until my own insanely jealous wife, ten years later, forced me to make a similar call, to a girl in Seattle-- a different one--ah, and then I had my first and only 'white-hot rage' moment - which is like you literally go blind - it's like your eyes become a TV that goes to popcorn static. I felt myself lunge towards her as if to strangle her, and then snapped out of it. Funny how you hear these phrases 'temporary insanity', 'white-out', 'white-hot rage' and just think they're prosaic.

Ah life, like Shakespeare, never offers one absurd staged scene-within-a-scene lest its dark twin later appear, warped and ill-woven as if to mock the first, hence the conscience of the king-catching drama Hamlet writes (the artist's version of vengeance?) mirrors the scene Ophelia is forced to play to lure Hamlet into confessing his love and intent while their fathers watch from without. Polonius's strategy here is eerily similar to when I first had dinner with the aforementioned hot girl's Italian-American parents in Carmel, NY; after dinner the dad plied me with wine, drinking along as I downed a giant bottle and got more and more wasted. I thought we were bonding, but they were testing me, the mom counting my drinks on a note pad. They worried I was a drunk... or rather, they 'found out'. The dad though, was delighted as well, to have an excuse to drink so much. His father had a problem too, and when that old man would do shots with me later at our graduation party, I'd catch shade about it, as grandma had to clean the sheets the next morning, for his bladder was not strong as a young man's wits.

I mention all this, why? For it all climaxed in 1990 --a magical year - the big hair 80s disappearing into the past. As if a herald, Zeffirelli's Hamlet arrived, and symbolizing the death of the home perm, Gibson's hair was legions better than Olivier's super short and creepy uber-short blonde bangs. Mel has bangs too, but they fit cuzza the beard, and his wild man eyes.

As for the recent anti-Semitic deep end of Mel; well one can't play crazy as well as he does unless one is crazy to start with, which is the problem with so many British interpretations--Brits ain't crazy like Australians, even those born, like Mel, in the U.S. As if the role's too much for him, normal Gibson--early Mel--seems overwhelmed and weakened by the flowery language, but then the deep end beckons, when it's time to go big, Mel dives in. Splash. His Hamlet's obnoxious, the type you never want to go out and see movies in the theater with, because he's always shouting "this is the part where..." But he's brilliant and legit crazy, and a man who can be legit crazy onscreen is worth a thousand spoilers off it.

And there it ends... I refuse to give away the ending, or influence your findings. I will say that all enduring works tend to be universal, organizing one's own history like a transparent overlay, and so it has done the same to mine. See it on an ergot-encrusted rye cracker and peanut butter and think of me as I used to be in our old rooms at Allen Street, pacing to and fro with my bong and bass, and driving the neighbors to the point of sad distraction. Oh wait, that's Sherlock Holmes, not susceptible to the gibbering unspeakable elder god things in heaven and earth, more ghosts and machine elves, and absinthe demons-- than are dreamt of in fairy photography! Watson, the needle... is dusty. The charm's unwound, so wind it up, and patch thy wounds with wondrous strange sounds. We will speak further... in the past.

NOTES
1, I rag on Olivier a lot - BUT he does deliver a great termite Shakespeare on film//video performance, and that's, strangely enough, while in disguise of blackface and a voice lowered a full octave as OTHELLO (1965). Though shot on video, it pulses with an off-the-cuff energy that makes it feel like it's all happening in real time, with a great 'go on forever' settting sun orange sky and a superlative Iago in Frank Finlay; though Welles' OTHELLO finally looks good on a remaster which will be on Blu-ray hopefully soon, he's almost out-Wellesed by Olivier here, acting-wise.