Harpo Out of Hell: MIAMI BLUES (1990)

There's a time to play Monopoly and a time to kick over the board and throw the play money in the air like we're motherfuckin' Scarface (i.e. when we're losing). The Alec Baldwin-goes-nutzoid "Florida Noir" classic, Miami Blues (1990) is for that time. Those of us who've done that, we may be normally sane, but we have our moments, and we get how liberating it can be to kick back and watch your unrestrained id run amok. We can only really do that when we 'wake up' in a dream. But what is film if not a dream and yet how few are those characters who 'waken up.'  That's why Junior (Baldwin) is so precious, the herald of the mid-90s id, the missing link between Harpo Marx and Mickey and Mallory Knox, Wendy Kroy, Hannibal Lecter, Tommy in Goodfellas, Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, Lisa in Girl, Interrupted. Before they all popped up from our moldy floorboards to kick the cobwebs of moralistic 80s self-censorship from our sleepy heads, there be Junior. He spooked some critics at the time. I remember reading a savage condemnation of it in the Syracuse student newspaper (I guess the uptight journalism major was taking it on himself to nip an amoral/openly violent cinema in the bud) but for those of us who saw it, especially we of the drinking class of 1989, we loved it. We needed it. Tarantino needed it. Paul Thomas Anderson needed it. Abel Ferrara needed it. Blues was the herald of their brand of amoral, violence-positive cinema, the kind that trusted the audience not to riot in an orgy of bloodlust just because the lesbians got away with murder.

That manic early 90s phase is long gone now, but for awhile cinema was a bonfire full of toothsome, fanged chestnuts. And way up atop the flickering flames there was Junior... blazing extra white before cracking open and spattering nut bits all over the living room. Sure it makes a mess and doesn't really thrill you (since you're the one who has to clean up), but damn wasn't that a fine bang?!

Adapted from the Charles Willeford novel, and directed by that shaggy dog beachcomber director George Armitage, Miami Blues is a violent Marx Brothers opus writ large in the Miami pastels of the post-Miami Vice era. The book is one of a series chronicling the adventures of hangdog cop Hank Moseley (here played by a perfectly-cast Fred Ward), loping after Junior for a bullshit manslaughter charge after he breaks a Moonie's finger at the airport. Jennifer Jason Leigh co-stars as the dimwitted prostitute Junior plays house with, and the trail Junior leads Mosley on features random crimes of utmost ballsiness, especially after Junior breaks into Mosely's bedroom and steals his dentures, gun, and badge. 

Thus begins Junior's deadpan adventures in cop impersonation. Even going so far as to stop crimes when he stumbles on them (there's nary a store not being held-up when Junior is not in earshot), Junior shows that in some cockeyed way he has ethics. He robs crack dealers with a miniature plastic Uzi; rolls pickpockets for the wallets they just stole; knocks over bookies by playing cop with Mosely's stolen badge, and so forth. There's no visible rhyme or reason to Junior's actions, but everything is logical because he acts on our expectations, based on what we see him see. If we see him in a convenience store during a robbery in progress, we naturally assume he'll try to stop it, as most heroes do in these kind of movies, so he does, even if all he has for a weapon is a jar of spaghetti sauce. If the security guard seems a little too cocky with his shotgun at the pawn shop, it's natural Junior will shoot him as soon as his back is turned, even if there's no real motive except to stay in the playful Joker/Marx-like fluidity of the moment, regardless of consequences.

There's no other way to contextualize the anarchy at work here--the only precedent is the Marx Brothers, which the author/s are well aware of, signaled by the in-joke of Junior's initial alias, Herman Gottlieb. i.e. Sig Ruman's ever-fuming, Mrs. Claypool-courting Baroni-signer in MGM's Night at the Opera (1935), a film I saw so many times as a kid that its textures and rhythms cloak me still in a kind of cinephile temple garment. And it's that very same garment that holds the secret to the madness of Baldwin's maniacal character, his crazy Marxian "life is but a dream so row-row yer way straight out the Truman Show" way of being. Forever caught in an old world (pre-WW2) bourgeois slow burn harrumph as Groucho dances verbal circles around him and Harpo sets his shoes on fire, it's only natural that old Mr. Gottlieb would eventually get his wallet lifted and identity stolen by a light-fingered Harpo out of Hell. How else might we measure the high crusting curves of the madness at work?

The real Herman Gottlieb (Sig Ruman) center, and driving the bus top right

 

But Armitage doesn't rely on this id-fulfillment to the point his film ceases to be entertaining or to function successfully as Leonrard-esque (*) Florida noir comedic crime thriller. He knows that if Junior's unleashed id is too self-serving, or sadistic, the result will cease to be fun and become instead merely lurid and disturbing (Killer's Moon, Clockwork Orange);  if too anarchic, the result would derail our narrative immersion (Daisies, Weekend). If it's juuuust right, then you got the Marx Brothers (in their first seven films), Bela Lugosi in The Raven, Timothy Carey (in everything)... then... who else is left?

Then the answer come a-back: Alec Baldwin. He's left. And now that Blues is on a crisp, gorgeous Shout Blu-ray it's not just a chance to remember how goddamned charismatic and hirsute old Alec used to be, it's a comforting sign that true anarchic Harpo Marx madness shall not perish from the screen... Baldwin--a classic film lover (and TCM regular commentator), he clearly gets it.

HERE'S TO DEAR OLD BALDWIN:

Most guys as good looking as Alec are, let's face it, dull as chalk; they never had to develop a personality, so never did. Occupied with making sure their hair is perfect, their best angle facing the camera, their neck long and their eyes twinkly, they forget to accrue depth. No emotion registers on their face lest wrinkles appear. As a result, they come across often as drugged narcissist automatons drained of all wit and regular guy who-gives-a-fuckitude. They become empty aquariums, dusty with the kind of self-righteous petulance they're convinced is the height of butch charisma. The only time they come alive is when they see a mirror. 

Not our Baldwin.

With his balanced Irish-American boxer stance, Baldwin comes off as real, a real guy, even when he's acting the part of a charming actor who knows he's fake. No easy feat, he makes Junior a true a cipher without being a bore about it; charming without being cocky, crazy without being aggravating, cool without being pretentious, beyond the need for phony sentiment but brave enough not to run from a real emotion should it ever breezes past. Best of all, he has the glint of real madness in his eyes, the kind you can't fake.

The SHOUT BLU-RAY:

A lot of us kids who grew up obsessively watching all the Marx Brothers and the Lugosi movies we could tape in the early 80s, naturally fell in love with Repo Man in 1984, but were left in the cold at the end of the 80s. In the pre-Tarantino-verse of 1990, Blues stood alone. We fans had a tracking-issue VHS dupe of it, taped off cable, and we had long grown used to the blurry pastel streaks of the decor and sky the fuzzy short hair cuts of both Junior and Susie reduced to a blurry halo. With the new Shout Blu-ray its all sharp and clear, with a nice lovely sparkle to the sea and sky and deep 3-D blacks to every sun-dappled shadow. The 80s pastels are darker, more textured,  and the transfer is so sharp you can smell the salt of the sea. The extras include recent interviews with Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who both admit really enjoying themselves with the project, the characters, and each other, and it shows then and now.

As I said earlier, the film had its detractors, some of whom declared it emblematic of a rise in nonsensical nihilism. Those critics were clearly pretentious twits, the type who mistakes bitterness for acumen, their minds hardened with dogmatic readings of western dialectical philosophy. Today they're probably going to see the flaccid remake of Far From the Maddening Crowd at some UWS theater with their embittered wives. Fuckin' A.

In other words, the average petit-bourgeois New York Times-perusing filmgoer will not approve of Miami Blues, which seems like an open invitation to the underclasses to rise up and boot them out of their condos. But it's the reverse, really: Junior lets us release our anger vicariously. Out it comes in gushing waves of joy, an air pocket of tyrannical childhood, that playing Godzilla rampaging the building block city catharsis, that which lies beyond good and evil now rising like an oil gusher, lifting us up off the surface of our becalmed flat stoned moviegoing consciousness.

One wild man performance is worth three movies worth of 'importance' or 'meaning.'

We see Junior's kind of kinetic free-form insanity so seldom, especially in today's nanny state clime, that when it comes along in the form of dear old Baldwin it's like a precious little match in the Hans Christian Anderson blizzard of sanctified sanity His is the flammable madness that takes that fluttery match and lights up the sky for just long enough to let us see the vastness of heaven. And then the match is out, the sky is dark, the house lights come back up, the veil of paralyzing self-consciousness descends once more like a clingy Psycho shower curtain, and not even Fred Ward can be held accountable for what we do to try and get that fire back. We wind up in rehab, or as deranged loners, buried deep in our bomb shelters, watching our Night of the Opera tape over and over 'til the tracking button can fix the worn streaks no more... and the last packet of powdered bourbon is long ago thrice soaked.
--

* (I haven't read Willeford's work so I keep referencing Leonard, as the style seems similar, forgive me, Charles

ADDENDUM:

And if you know you're in a dream, that nothing is real, why wouldn't you do all the things you never had the nerve to do in reality? An old friend of mine (through another friend) from the Princeton Blues Traveler days, Fisher (not his real name), lived that way. He was living legend amongst the local mix of debauched upper dregs at the 80s hippie-music-Princeton Record Exchange / Hoagie Haven / searching the ground and trash outside the Princeton Reunion parties for admission badges to crash in and drain their kegs and dig their Dixieland bands / pre-fame Blues Traveler (next time you see them, say hello from "Boot in his Hair!" --the name they gave me the morning after Max's 1988 New Years party ( I don't remember anything about that night between around 11 PM and the next morning but I woke up with dried vomit in my hair, then drove them all home) / Althea gave me her last double purple barrel (call me, Althea! I love you xoxo)- contingent. Princeton!! 

That 'Fisher' he a some boy all right.

I thought they were just making Percheur up, like Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan until I finally met him at a big outdoor bonfire keg party somewhere in the wilds of Princeton towards the back end of my 'tenure', so to speak. He seemed pretty normal, drinking, as we all did, talking about people I didn't know to people I sort of knew, but as the night wore on he spied some other dude he kind of didn't like from the other side of the bonfire. 

The party was kind of relaxing and dull but, at one point, suddenly Percheur fell to his knees and in an overhand pinwheel motion, his head down, facing down (looking in the opposite direction of his target), in a seamless falling motion as if the bottle was released accidentally--his half full Bud tall boy soared high into the air out of sight into the darkness.

If you've ever flung a half-full tall boy straight up in the air backwards you know it's not easy to get either distance or accuracy and this toss seemed like he just lost balance (no one but me was even watching him), upon releasing it he fell forwards, rolled and hid behind a car fender. The ca landed with pinpoint accuracy, face up, straight atop the guy's head, and-- with a thonk-- bounced off onto the ground, and landed face up. I don't even think a drop was spilled. 

I pretended not to notice and refrained from looking directly at either Percheur or the guy on the other side of the fire once he got hit, but I clocked him as this huge motherfucker in a frat jersey, who looked right over in Percheur's direction, and walking angrily, almost through the fire, right towards where he hid. But when I turned to look, Percheur had disappeared; the guy ran past me, and took off after him into the dark surrounding forest. Fisher spent the rest of the party on the run, coming back to the keg periodically for a refill, suddenly glancing past me and running off; the guy entering frame a moment later in pursuit - not friendly pursuit, either, but seriously aching for a huge party-crashing bad vibe fight. Not sure if he ever caught him, but to this day it's the single most amazing throw I've ever seen.

But that story is nothing, Max shrugged it off as but lesser Percheur amidst the man's storied mythic annals. I asked about him recently (20 years or so later). and Max said last time he heard of him was when--inspired by Miami Blues, which by then had become a huge cult favorite down there--he stole a fireman's badge and was pulling over cars on the road to fuck with them and/or steal their drugs. 

And from then on they called him 'Princeton Blues.'
---

Soon after of course the neighborhood was altered by Blues Traveller's success, and while they were on tour, the rest of the crowd would be smoking crack and watching pre-code WB gangster movies on TCM, which I respected. I still have the tape their manager Dave Martin they made me of Two Seconds, Picture Snatcher and Beast of the City. (TCM was rarity back then - my neighborhood didn't have it - few did - so he hooked me up). But where are any of them now? Who knows. My buddy got married. Drugs, fame, motorcycle accidents, and age took the rest. But hey, like they do in pre-code Warner's gangster films and like Junior does in Miami Blues, the free man alone may soar to the heights the burdened only dream of, until

Oops he fell. 

As we all did. 

But hey, you have to be high before you can splat --that's the arc of a gangster. It ends and it's time for teeth to be returned to the ground floor Mosleys. Walter Brennan in Red River asking for them back 'come grub' after losing them in a poker game to Chief Yowlachie, now called 2-Jaw Quo.

Detective Gummo, your teeth had never ground so free as they did in this man's hand; he carried them above the clouds, atop the spirit sky frog he could not refrain from biting.

"come chow, you get"

Strangers / with wet hair: TREE OF LIFE (2011) and EMA's Past-Life Martyred Saints

There was an annoying commercial awhile ago with a cute 'brother and sister' ordering movie tickets on their cell phone while pretentiously announcing in that Madison Avenue version of Williamsburg Daria hipster flatline voiceover that "images are important to us." Because they're photographers. So they go to a lot of movies together, which is about $25 per film between them, not including popcorn or bedbug removal. If nothing else, THE TREE OF LIFE proves that images are important to Terrence Malick too - he is a cinematographer...

Malick even acknowledges this weakness in a perhaps autobiographical scene where a child or his sibling finds a sheer nightgown in a neighbor's drawer and steals it. One might imagine he does something icky with the garment, but Malick has never cared about sex, onanistic or otherwise. His Texas is not the Texas of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and its coming-of-age deviant cataloging or of GIANT and its lustful Deans. For Malick, women are symbols meant to glisten with beauty, particularly if they have long red hair that looks good in the setting sunlight (Chastain could be Sissy Spacek, after Martin Sheen's been sent up the river of life), and if they're wearing shimmering sheer nightgowns it's so the light can send a lace shadow over the lawn. Malick brooks no pornographic, only the Joycean aesthetic arrest, so the theft of the nightgown is the first guilty moment of a future cinematographer--the 'capturing' of a gorgeous ephemerality-- the nailing of butterflies to celluloid ala Stan Brakhage. But without a film to bury the image in, there's no reliable 'container.' The kid notably tries first to bury the nightgown under some mud (too much like sending it to the editor) then decides to release it into the stream, into the flowing fleetingness; the cinema he can't himself witness without a helicopter shot (and there are many); the night gown so ephemeral the only eye that can possess it is the fleeting eye of the all-seeing viewer, the 'God' eye-view. The little river/stream itself is something like a long band of film, and each nightgown tossed onto the waves is a little baby Moses of possible meaning and interpretation before it goes over the falls only to return in the next full rotation of the astral take-up reels in time for the next show, and it's never the last... til it's the end of the run.

Unrepentantly personal as Malick's TREE is, so inflated yet intimate are its emotions, it may help to be on substances or dealing with a recent or impending death in the family while viewing. My dad is very sick after chemo-therapy, so a combination with that and other things made these tight little catalogs of instances between Brad Pitt and his tykes extra pronounced for me. And I grew up with a younger brother who I felt the need to dominate via fake wrestling and we were into war, and violence, but with fake punches always and always treated like real punches in scope and dynamic chin swings and dying falls. If TREE was about girls growing up, I can imagine being bored. Real bored, or if I didn't have a little brother, or was on so many drugs and grief and guilt, bored, real bored.

There's no reason to analyze my deep connection too closely, except that if I made too light of death in past posts, I'm sorry now. Preparing for the possibility (which means also, acknowledging the inevitability) you are going to lose your father is like you're going off a slow motion clockwork cliff and realizing you don't even know how deep is the gorge and no one really cares if you scream all the way down - a fall that could take seconds or decades. There's no way they can stave your fall, so they won't try. Malick is Christian enough to know that guilt is the quickest route to humility, which is the quickest route to God. I know I wasn't the only one amidst the sacrosanct BAM audience breaking down in free-flowing tears once or twice, but then a few scenes later, sighs of exasperation and douche chills at trite symbolism; even at the mighty BAM, cell phone blue lights came on like rows of stars below the screen. For shame!

So it's arty, but is it art? Getting the special effects guy from 2001 and BLADERUNNER (Douglas Turnbull) to work on your big bangs might make you cool but Kubrick and Scott were making science fiction not 'mere' student art film abstraction. Kubrick and Scott were showing what might be, stressing the banal aspects of space travel. Making Texas seem to hurtle through space and turn on an axis is only to reveal that which is already is, to undo the tinny illusion of how we seem to be standing still as we whirl around like a mad spinning top across the infinite playroom floor of space-time. Since you are, then, just revealing the real, why presume you're saying anything other than the trite science bombs of a freshman first-time pot smoker? The image of Sean Penn walking through a mysterious desert door frame is the sort of thing they wince at in hip student film festivals, but it still made me cry, not least of reasons being seeing an A-list thesp like Spicoli really commit to such an old trope. Hasn't everyone who ever visited that splotch of desert shot film of themselves going through that door? Only Sean and Terence have returned, dared to bring their experience and weight back to the idealistic naivete of their BFA years.

Malick's going for 'the big fish' as David Lynch would say, and when an artist goes for the big fish they have to get pretentious as a matter of course, lest their spiritual aims get obscured by plot or drive or other tricks of attention getting, or else become boring like Ozu. But in the end, the little bits of character development undo their own seriousness - Brad Pitt's playing the organ at church is undone by the fact he only plays Bach onscreen and we're not subject to tired hymns sung by dusty congregations in fitful slow starts. This isn't the world we're seeing--or even memory with all its weird time images--but an uneasy combo of both, with a biology textbook and Hallmark birthday card stacked on top. I'm amazed I even remembered the dinosaur name 'Ornitholestes' while watching this -- the word coming to me as if from a lost dream of a five year old who learned to spell dinosaur names before he learned how to tie his shoes but hasn't articulated the word 'ornitholestes' in at least three decades - thanks, TREE!

Jessica Chastain as the mother certainly helps redress this Iron John blood poisoning. She reminds me of a girl I wronged, adding all sorts of psilocybic resonance to her wounded dove close-ups, which are so well shot that you can see the 'signature' stamps of alien DNA in her Celtic pale skin, that fair-haired mossy coastline fairness that if you look closely reveals blue webs of capillaries just below the translucent skin, flushing with blood when hot emotions come across her face.

Another plus is the Texas apocalypse angle, which I've written about as far back as 2007, 'the year of the Texas Apocalypse Cinema,' since then we've also had SOUTHLAND TALES (apocalypse-dependent), and Tarantino's DEATH-PROOF (see: The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier), all of which are Texas-style apocalyptic if you know how to dig. And for THE TREE OF LIFE, you don't need even need a shovel, as meaning is excavated and then spread upon the bread of the earth. And the earth is without crust, as Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, who was the cinemographer, likes it, as noted by co-producer Nicolas Gonda, “Chivo Lubezki is a vital part of Terry’s process.  In a sense he had to be as much a writer as a D.P. because when the two of them are on the set, things can change in the moment.  It’s a dance between the two of them riffing creatively off each other.”

It's certainly interesting to read the accounts of how they came up with the trippy visual effects in the film--pouring milk through funnels--but who came up with the soundtrack? Better they should have gone with the guy who did the amazing score for THERE WILL BE BLOOD, or Wendy Carlos, or The Stooges' "We Will Fall."  You can get by with being spiritual and non-alienating to atheists. But pick a hymn and you pick a fight.



There's other moments here, like when you see Sean Penn wandering through the steel and glass structures where we works, that conjure Antonioni and his captains of industry striding around glass offices with their manly scrolled-up blueprints -- Rod Taylor in ZABRISKIE POINT; Richard Harris and Carlo Chianetti in RED DESERT. In the equations of Malick, God, Mary Jane, and the theater audience are ultimately indistinguishable, so is Malick referencing Antonioni, or just recreating him, ala Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote?

I can't help but feel that Malick's searching through the miasma of time and evolution, in dopey whisper-overs, is not for God, or his true Dad, or Brecht, but for an ideal art film audience, the kind that 'got' Antonioni and didn't fall asleep or walk out halfway through. He wants a human mind's eye gallery for his photographs, which slowly move--ala Bill Viola--so slow down and weep along or kindly check your messages with your hand over the blue screen. Images are important to us. If the film says anything, it may be "I Am a cinematographer. But is this stuff Tarkovsky, Eisenstein? Ain't no Russians, ain't even any atomic age. I was kind of shocked the mushroom cloud wasn't even addressed, when surely the age of atomic anxiety was at least worth mentioning, or television. Can a family really get along on nothing but prayers and piano lessons? No wonder Brad Pitt's cranky! No wonder that poor son is so starved for images he has to steal female undergarments and hold them up to the light. Unlike the rest of us, he didn't grow up bombarded with TV and in-class movies and filmstrips, and comic books. That lack has made him hot for images the way a reformed Mormon is hot for the pleasures of the flesh. If you've ever made it with an ex-Mormon you know what I mean. They take to your body like someone dying of thirst to an ice cold beer. This is how Malick takes to the image --guilelessly and openly.


But even here trouble arises, for that Mormon might then decide she loves you, and here you're just a no-good tomcat on the prowl, hardly worthy and never intending to stay. Now you have to live with the secret guilt of the dirty Mack every time an actress reminds you of her. Malick's image-worship justifies his lack of familiarity with the lure of scopophilia, or the pornographic, so we never get the idea he's had to lay his tomcat cards on the table. As that old SNL Freud sketch put it: "sometimes a banana is just a banana, Anna." Or in this case, a tree is still a tree, a sigh is just a sigh. A fundamental thing that doesn't apply is that omnipotent POV: What 'eye' is watching the earth form from clouds and dust? What viewer can there be who would have such a correct view of the unfolding universe? Before there were eyes to see, this stuff didn't exist at all. What Malick knows and has seen is brilliantly reproduced: a younger child watching the in-fighting of parents well captured from low, cringing camera angles, and in these scenes culled from foggy memory, flashes of stuff we remember from our own childhood are unearthed and dislodged, relentless as the search for lost keys, or remotes, all that sense of 'fleeting' works devastatingly well. But is that 'lost eye' ever addressed?

2001 has reaction shots: we know who's seeing what for the most part. When David Lynch shows us images where no eyes can be, we shudder with uncanny frisson: a traffic light changing from green to red at a deserted night crossroads, a phone ringing and no one answering, or maybe even calling. We get even with Antonioni this sense of scary freedom when no one is around to see what we see, as in the amazing ending of L'ECLISSE. Gaspar Noe shot an entire film like this in ENTER THE VOID. But the frisson of the disembodied spectator is one sense of the scopophilic gaze that Malick hogs for himself. He's already seen 'deeper' into these images than we ever will.

In its way BIRTH (here) said far more on this subject and aped Kubrick slightly better, and even had another translucent redhead in long lysergic close-ups (Nicole Kidman). For the cosmic journey of TREE we see some in utero light shows, some random arrests, a death at the community pool, the telegram of the older son's death (never explained or seen), mourning, early childhood; glimmers of a dad whose misgivings about the fairness of his business leads him to inflict violence on his kids and their ultimate refusal of that violence. After two hours or so, Malick seems to realize he needs to wrap it all up so pulls a Fellini with an ending on the beach that Woody Allen would make a cliche back in the 1970s.

But perhaps your own parents and children are ultimately strangers, and no amount of reconciliation can change the fundamental separateness unless you all meet in jazz heaven. Perhaps we are all unknowable even to ourselves, and the closest thing to paternal union may be acknowledging the sad frailty at the core of our once-invulnerable father - that precious moment, never really explored in this film, where you and your dad get drunk together and he suddenly seems so painfully vulnerable, and he's suddenly just another dude you hang with, more like you than you dared admit before. Or you can turn back through the whiskey mist and see him having wrestled with everything you've wrestled with, made dumb mistakes, but found in you--maybe, if only for a little while--something to be proud of, a one certain time when he could say this I did right, even if shortly thereafter you were busted for pot, or guns, or car theft.

For the last few years I've lived my life according to the myth of A Star is Born, with me the boozy has-been author, my ward the younger ascendant star in blogging. Then, a couple weeks ago, while listening to my iPod on random shuffle and flipping through TV with the sound off, I stumbled onto TCM in the midst of the long scene of James Mason gearing up for his suicide in the George Cukor-directed 1954 version of A STAR IS BORN. Now, I've seen this version only up to the intermission, but I knew, because of the song on the shuffle, "The Grey Ship" by EMA what the long shots of Mason looking out to sea, saying tearful goodbyes to Judy and friends really meant, what was going to happen. As sometimes happens, the editing and beats matched so perfectly that I knew it was a cosmic message as I thought "Look a ghost grey ship is coming my way," And it didn't even have to stop.It just kept on going. My intermission was over, and the long voyage into the infinite was now underway, like back when I stumbled onto FLATLINERS in 1991 (see here)

I've had other weird synchronicity moments but this was another symbolic death, a substitute for an actual death imagined in my chosen Star is Born mythos. Norman Maine did the long swim so I wouldn't have to. Either way, old personal myths are inevitably shed like a snake's old skin, like a snake of life, and you die for real  many many skins down the line - but as TREE shows, your skins come fast... and furious.



I mention this for several reasons, not least is to credit BORN's director Minnelli with achieving in this scene (with EMA's scoring) what it takes TREE over two hours to do -- to see the way cosmic myths descend on us during key moments in our life - and that every moment, in a sense, can be seen in heavenly hindsight as profound, every breath and touch as vast as a 2001 obelisk, and yet a yellow filmy fog descends on this sense of wonder and dread just so we can get on with business and not waste the day away being awed at a sunflower. And if our every action isn't awash in mythic resonance, whose fault is that? It's the fault of the cinematographer, dictating the direction we look, and how long we look there, and when we decide to walk away, and look again, from farther off, until the final screen recedes and the credits rain down from heaven like an unstoppable flood, and the tree of life is buried once again in a flood of flood footage.

The Fury of a Thousand Bronsons!

In honor of Moon in the Gutter's Paul Thomas Anderson blogathon, here's one of my early from the 2007 Academy Award era... a bold pronouncement that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD indicated a return of the repressed wild man archetype, i.e. the force sought by the Men's Movement:

(originally posted in Bright Lights After Dark 3/08)

We’ve had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we’ve had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I’d say 2007 Oscar Night heralds the Age of the Wildman.

We’ve got two movies up for big awards that seem of wed together already by primal masculine force: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THERE WILL BE BLOOD. Both have been supplying many men who have seen them with some missing nutrient in their diets.. they’ve been starving for it without even knowing it was missing.

What is this wild man force and how did we lose it? We had it in Jim Morrison, Robert Bly, Ken Kesey, Nicholson, Brando, Robards– we lost it in the blinding Tom Cruise flash and lo, there was pouffy hair and loud jackets and closeted queers confusing straight dudes into thinking wearing eye liner was punk rock. Then came the 1990s, dot-coms and a crushing need to stay edgy even with two kids and six figures. But let’s face it, the masculine archetype fisher king is going to lie around in defeat eventually, it’s the nature of the seasons. The only difference is in the spring-back -- how far down you hold the Nerf ball under the water before it shoots up again. The longer man festers in his cubicle the louder the explosion when the Iron John yang energy comes hammering up out of the ground in great black oil sperm of my vengeance-style bit torrents and old-testament oratory.

It should have been the year of Josh Brolin as well as Daniel Day Lewis tonight at Oscar time, but I think Brolin has those old and comfortable voters a little confused; he’s like an accusatory ghost from a time the academy had thought long dead and buried in a Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson VHS clamshell boxfire.

Men who have grown soft with unearned privilege will probably not like Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD and are probably the reason Brolin’s not even nominated. The return of the true king is never welcomed by the pretender to the throne. The haters thought this sort of mustachioed hombre long vanished. Now he’s back, covered in the dirt used to bury him, but his eyes are burning through the dust with the fire of a thousand Bronsons!

I guess part of it for both Brolin and Lewis is that they’ve been away from Hollywood for awhile, Lewis cobbling in Italy and Brolin wandering through Ireland with his young 'uns. Stay in Tinseltown too long and even the noblest of men can turn into needy eaters in need of a good Camille Paglia-style beatdown. Lewis and Brolin have the sense to wander out into the desert when they sense themselves growing soft with money and fame. This wandering away from civilization and its tiresome trappings for communion with the wildness of nature — this was once part of something known as the Men’s Movement, around the late 1980s--early 1990s. It was a time when men went into the woods to beat drums and howl and shed their tired sad sack personae; a time before the age of Irony, before changing times made masculinity and fatherhood something to hide the way witches had to hide from the inquisition. Well, we see now that the wildman was just in orbit – he’s returned with the tick-tock precision of Daniel Plainview’s oil pumps!

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as you can tell by my vigorous enthusiasm, I was totally hoping for something that actually did happen the following year with films like THE WRESTLER and has since vanished as the Coens went back to torturing wusses and the Rom-Coms and Cera-Eisenbergs have flooded the gates, but they're out there.... come back wildmen! So later in 2008 I wrote a piece riffing on Manny Farber's White Elephant art vs. Termite Art: THE TERMITES OF PLAINVIEW:

The few critics and artists who dismiss THERE WILL BE BLOOD as undeserving of its hype–due to story weaknesses or hammy acting, usually–tend to be the ones who are “trying” to be different, and so would pay less respect to the fearless soul searchers, explorers, depth-sounders and kamikaze love hipsters like Welles and Godard, Gondry, Ray, Hawks, Tarantino, Baumbach and Martel, and more to the “workmanlike” mapper precision of the Coen Brothers, Kubrick, Spielberg, Ford, Truffaut, Hitchcock, Payne–those who perfect the lines and feel out new fissures in the rock that the explorers have excavated, that Manny Farber’s termites have eaten through. For fans of the mappers, the gaping plot holes, inconsistencies of style and meaning and haphazard story construction of the explorers–the ungodly mess, in short–can be unforgivable. For we lovers of the explorers, any story holes can be stepped over without the smallest break in our stride as we follow the brave deep into the cinematic danger zone; we'd rather get lost in the woods than a lovely elaborate hedge maze.  There’s some that try to control it, quench it, put it out, and there’s some that go wild-eyed and giggling, cooing and tittering like the late beloved Richard Widmark.

A unique example to discuss of a mapper and explorer rolled into one would be John Huston. His films tend to be adaptations of classic “explorer” works: UNDER THE VOLCANO is a fine example of Huston being too busy getting period details of 1933 Mexico down, polishing up the quaint old cars and setting his actors to staggering just so, that he misses the thrust of Lowry’s novel, which is as an apocalyptic mirage of one man’s drunken dying soul bleeding into those around him and its reflection in the tide of fascism and blah blah. One mustn’t put modern in with the classical, or must one?


A “classic” example of the explorer vs. mapper would be Welles’ MACBETH vs. Olivier’s HAMLET (both 1948). Olivier’s film (left) is a stunning masterwork with each line of text lovingly orated and the deep shadow lines visible all the way in the back of the cavernous sets. There’s plenty of deep focus expressionism for those who like that sort of thing, but not enough to drown the bard in Ophelia’s bathwater, so to speak. Welles’ MACBETH on the other hand is a roaring, sweaty delirious fever dream-catastrophe where a good chunk of the dialogue tends to be inaudible under scratchy recording and thick brogues (Welles famously pre-recorded the dialogue and monologues and made his actors lip-sync). Just take a look below at that outrageous hat!

Welles plays Macbeth like someone just waking up in the drunk tank after a three-day meth binge. Soldiers cast in hand-me-downs from Republic studios old serials seem to drip down from their weird cavern pathways onto him, like expressionist maggots from a Polanski skyway. Welles shivers with horror like he's hoping if he acts like its a nightmare he'll wake up and have blood-free hands. His Macbeth bellows great lungfuls of melodious brogue, hallucinating Banquos hither an yon. He chews so much scenery he gets woozy and seems about to fall over into the witches’ bubbling pot at any second, but I’ll order Ham on Welles over Hamlet Olivier any day. There’s mad genius power with Welles; his is the termite art that never stops to count the receipts or weigh the meanings but rather plunges reckless through the walls until all is black and sweet silence. Daniel Plainview and THERE WILL BE BLOOD are like that, and for the Olivier loving mappers of the world, that's just too long-haired, indulgent, and reckless.

And God do I hate Olivier's short bangs in all his Shakespeare stuff. He looks like Sting's queer older brother, but not in a good way. HAMLET's photography is brilliant however and every word spoken goes down like a hundred dollar bottle of anything. If Victor Mature as Doc Holliday were here, good Sirs, then perhaps he could finish. I can't remember the rest!