Drug of Choice: 4:44 - LAST DAY ON EARTH (2012)

The apocalypse, or at any rate the end of the Mayan... thing... is Friday. Some preparation may be in order, and if you're reading this blog that means movie choices. What's the ideal apocalypse film you want to be watching at the very moment of apocalypse? I've already seen mine. Just the other night. Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth. It couldn't be more timely! In other words, if you live in New York City, and are a permanently drug-addled middle-aged artist in recovery and share a loft apartment with a younger or older partner and you've always looked forward to the end of the world as an ideal excuse to relapse, 4:44 - Last Day on Earth belongs to you as much as it does me. And man it belongs to me. If you substitute whiskey for heroin, and make the guy slightly less famous, the apartment slightly less cool, Dafoe is me! Either way, fuck it. Just don't forget the weird numeric title and to set your clocks back. Way back. To zero.

Of course television figures prominently in the film. How else would we know for sure the world is ending? We see the main character Cisco (Willem Dafoe) watch Al Gore talk about the truth of global warming with a knowing smirk; We see him watch the Dali Lama with a big old grin; and finally he watches NY1's Pat Kiernan with concern. Cisco's younger girlfriend, Skye (Shanyn Leigh) meanwhile paints a grim ouroboros figure on a big piece of paper on the floor at the other end of the loft. As artistic couples do, Cisco and Skye fool around, fight, putter, try to break each other's concentration out of sublimated creative jealousy, and so forth. It may take some extra dirt in your nails to identify with the part where Dafoe almost does some heroin (or meth or something) even after six months clean (or whatever),  but it's the last day on earth, and in an Abel Ferrara film it's always the last day on earth --so this is double your pleasure day, and never a better time than whenever to do the mortal coil shuffle sensitive bluesy minor key melancholy madness munchies malaise trip.

 

Top: 4:44 / Bottom: Seeking a Friend

Ferrara's druggy Catholic kinetics have been in short supply stateside of late due to, apparently, fucked-up deals with French producers at Studio-Canal. His tale of the virgin Mary was supposed to be pretty heavy, and there was Go-Go Tales, both MIA.  It don't matter --4:44 is as perfect a career and global autobiographical capstone as we're likely to get. And as such it functions fine as a skewed sequel to his very first film, Driller Killer (1979), which, we may recall, ends on a very similar, under-the-sheets apocalyptic fade. Driller gets a bad rap because it was banned in Britain during the whole 'video nasty' 80s, but it's really just a good mix of grit, grime and druggy Catholic anti-punk punk energy, with some drill killings thrown in to keep you from dozing off. The killer targets older male derelicts rather than foxy young women (probably on account of his fear of failure, and growing up to be just like them - failed artists-turned-homeless-junkies living on park benches. More than these sporadic and half-heartedly-filmed murders (marred by terrible blood the consistency and color of rusty tap water), Ferrara seems preoccupied with his central character, played by himself. He's slowly going crazy, maybe because downstairs from his loft is a loud, terrible glam-punk band and they practice constantly. His two girlfriends end up hanging out there and when the band finally gets a date at Max's Kansas City, even Abel gets shoehorned into going. All of which which both drives his character insane as he tries to concentrate on painting his buffalo canvas (a picture of a buffalo, I mean, on a regular canvas) and provides a way to pad the running time (as both of his girlfriends end up preferring to rock out down there rather than watch him paint and curse the fates - and he's smart enough to understand why they would).

Both Driller and 4:44  are apocalyptic in their own way. In Driller, the artist exorcises his terror and madness by drilling old homeless guys instead of Skyping or almost relapsing like Dafoe does here. Both end the same way - with a couple in bed and a fade out (to white and red respectively) while the girl whispers soothing gentle words in OS voiceover. And Ferrara doesn't star in the latter film, but there's little doubt that Dafoe is playing Abel, right down to casting Shanyn Leigh, Abel's real life girlfriend.

Ferrara is Driller Killer

Ferrara's longtime screenwriter Nicholas St. John isn't billed on 4:44 and based on the hesitant weirdness of it all, I'm betting a lot of the dialogue and action was improvised, which I totally get. What are you going to do during the last 24 hours on earth, fumble through scripts? Most of all, the characters are really just avatars of ourselves as we watch TV on the last day of the world. We take a break and look out the window and dig on how empty the city seems. We try a lot of things to grant our lives some last-minute meaning. And then our addiction shows up out of the emotional blue with a hastily scrawled IOU note you gave it back when you got sober. In return for not crippling you with the horrors you promised that--if the world ever came to an end--you would relapse. You figured why not- you'd be spared the hangover or the St. Vitus or whatever came after. And you forgot about it, but your Addiction never did. And it's come to collect.

I know mine would, I promised it that if the eternal thirst would just back off I'd relapse when the apocalypse came. And it's coming!

Is this why Ferrara made this film in the first place? To deal with "that" issue in a way that hasn't really been dealt with? Because 4:44 more than any other apocalypse film I know brings us to the crystalline point imagined by every recovering alcoholic or addict, the 'if you know the world is about to end, is it okay to relapse?' point. I wrote about it a bit in a discussion of the film 2012, which I called "Day of a Million Relapses!" There's a character in that named Harry (Blu Mankuma), the beautiful old African American jazz man father of one of the main characters, the bleeding heart geologist (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The two have a nice farewell via ship-to-shore phone (Harry's a pianist in residence on a cruise liner) and upon hanging up--his responsibility to his son completed--Harry grabs a Jack Daniels off a passing waiter's tray.

His old sax man (George Segal) remarks: "Harry, you haven't had a drink in 25 years!"  Harry doesn't even answer, just takes a big swig and sits back down. Damn that's cool. He's doomed and relapsed and doesn't give a shit! As someone with only half his 'time served,' I can't help but cheer!! Someone in that scriptwriting pool knows the score! Finally --a disaster movie actually put in what every sober alcoholic waits for--the unshakable excuse to relapse. (fulll)

But as it turns out it's just not that easy for poor Cisco. Spurred on after a hilarious fight between Skye, and his ex-wife on Skype --trying to break it up and protect his computer from being slapped shut by Skye while the wife jeers and curses onscreen -- Cisco goes out onto the street, to his old dealer's house and climbs in through the fire escape window, like the old days.... all right. Now things are going to perk up, you think. Now, we shall return to Ferrara's druggy urban Steadicam rhythms. The mood in here is jovial, sexy, intelligent. These are believably his cool downtown friends and their interaction feels natural and real, the way only Abel could really conjure back in the day.

But Cisco's plan is blocked because his NA sponsor, Noah (Greenwich Village musician Paul Hipp), happens to be there, canoodling but not getting high, and instead reveling in the freedom of choice. His choice. He's totally cool with other people doing it in front of him though, he says. Noah 'chooses' to just hang out with his old user buddies but face the end with clear open eyes. He tells Cisco it's his choice too, but he should choose not to pick up. It's a bizarre moment that few who are not addicts will probably truly understand.... we've been waiting, after all, for this. It's the night of a million relapses! Those of us who are in recovery will have mixed emotions. On the one hand, good for him, on the other that's not his sponsor's business --let the man do his thing! He has an IOU to pay. It's like if you're Jekyll and you make a deal with Hyde that he will go away on the condition he gets to come back for the end of the world. Even though it's just you making deals with yourself, it's still a valid contract, my brother!

 
In the end, as it always does, the only thing that saves the artist is the art. The drugs are either a means to that end or a hindrance. Nothing else matters. Skye spreads great puddles of color all over the floor and makes a giant protective circle ouroboros for them to lie in (shades of the cave made of sticks in Von Trier's Melancholia. (meinen posten hier )and of course Dafoe was in Von Trier's previous film, Antichrist, so there you are, the web of genius is all connected...

Dafoe is the key, and art, and it's all about to end, so get inside this circle before the snake swallows up the world. Dafoe has no one to act with, no audience with whom to perform (except us, in the shadows, of course) while she works, so he watches TV.

This is another interesting aspect since Skye never doubts how she wants to spend her last hours, painting. She has what I've referred to as the addict's Keith Richards life preserver, wherein you have that one thing you're good at so you just do it, constantly, either practicing, composing, creating or jamming - and that's what keeps you from freaking out, succumbing to depression, addiction, suicidal thoughts, bad decisions, killing yourself, metaphysically drowning, and so forth. Their guitars--always at hand--are what saves the life of Richards, Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) in The Runaways (see my post here).

Of course Ferrara's limited budget doesn't allow for real world-swallowing, so its conveyed via stock footage and newscasts which is fine with me. I enjoy the tense energy of the mixture, the camera following Dafoe around wondering when he's going to go off. The film feels padded even at 74 minutes, but Ferrara spares us the rerunning of previous footage in his similarly multi-media / post-modern adaptation of William Gibson's New Rose Hotel (which starred Dafoe with Christopher Walken and Asia Argento) and like in that underrated film, Ferrara allows the action to unfold as it would in real life, i.e. mostly somewhere else, watched by the characters from their secluded den of druggy, sex-boosted comfort. With so many screens onscreen, the post-modern affect has completely subsumed the real. The only way to stay above the multimedia din is via sex, meditation or art, and in Ferrara's film all finally three merge into the simulacrum so it's all as it should be. After all, in the final count, you and the TV are two snakes, facing each other, but they're One! 
 

Even if you can't relate to the addict stuff, it's worth seeing just to soak up Ferrara's legendary fly-on-the-wall NYC authenticity, with such great details as NY1's Pat Kiernan, an inescapable presence in most New Yorkers' frenzied mornings, delivering a professional sign off indicating he's been happy to have been a part of your life and now he and his co-workers are going home to their families. Kiernan plays these moments with beautiful grace: angry, poetic and always stoic. As Frank Lovece of Film Review International notes:

In a nice surprise, given how lame most TV and movie news anchors sound, Kiernan, of the local-news channel New York 1, offers onscreen reports that sound like a broadcast journalist; perhaps he himself actually wrote them. His final signoff is dignified and humane without becoming sentimental or overwrought in the least.

It's interesting that this journal of international cinema sees nothing offensive in Kiernan's statement in the film that "Al Gore was right,"  and that global warming will take us out in a blinding solar flash at exactly 4:44 AM. Meanwhile condemnation of the same line comes from Will Leitch something called Deadspin: 

In 4:44 Last Day on Earth, what gets us is the ozone layer, i.e. not caring about it. (Writer-director Abel Ferrara actually makes poor Kiernan say, "Al Gore ... was right." Ferrara should be arrested for that.) This is the lamest possible reason for the world to end in a movie, because what kills us should be a metaphor for the sins of man, not the actual sins of man. Of course, most of the movie involves Willem Dafoe in his apartment doing yoga, muttering to himself and playing around on Skype, so whatever it is that hastens the end of our suffering, as far as I'm concerned, will suffice.

Man, it's easy to tell which writers are American, sometimes. Naturally such a fellow would want the world to end as soon as possible, cuz he's tired of looking for a real job. Haw Haw! Just kidding my man, hey man, what's your name?

As I say, your mileage may vary. Let me give you some tips: a good way to watch 4:44 is while calling loved ones and chatting idly with friends on the phone, with laptops and Kindles all playing different documentaries and TV shows. Put Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, or The Quantum Activist or 10 Questions for the Dali Lama on your laptop, with the sound off, and position it about 10 feet away from your main TV screen but still in view, tilted towards the other screen so it looks like they're watching each other. That way you can feel the erosion of the screen membrane and make it all more urgent. A brilliant little moment indicative of this--what Steven Shaviro calls "post-modern affect"-- occurs when Skye looks across the length of the loft from the floor by the window, and the lof is pitch dark, as Cisco is out scoring, and she's startled to see an old black man sitting in a chair staring at her. How did he get in and what does he want? As she starts moving trepidatiously towards him he suddenly vanishes into a square white static. He was just on TV, a big flatscreen that was left on in the dark and is now off. It was just a coincidence that he was framed on the TV and the TV was off the ground in such a way to look like a chair. The sudden change is jarring, funny, and brilliant, the coolest post-modern goodnight ghost set-up since The Ring. These are the kinds of things Godard and Antonioni fans look for but most Americans don't expect from one of our own. In an earlier post I wrote that, in a post-cinematic affect you're neither safe nor in danger, neither an actor nor an extra, neither on TV or in front of it. The way man and space merge into one dream consciousness in 2001 is the way man and TV merge into one dream consciousness in 2012 at 4:44 - no accident they're both number titled.

More ways to metatextualize your experience: If you meditate, do so when Dafoe does, assume his poses as if he's a yoga instructor. Counterpoint your own movements with those of the camera as it paces around the loft. Dig that Anita Pallenberg plays Skye's mother and remember fondly her insane work in Performance (1968) as part of a threesome living in a big hippy house (ala the Ferrara and the two girls in Driller Killer). Here she looks pretty haggard, speaking over Skype to give daughter the fare thee well in a deep, gravelly voice, and to let her know she's proud of her artistic drive. You can bet that Anita Pallenberg would be fine with you dating her daughter -  no matter how old or poor you were - as long as you were cool and artistic. You can feel her benign indifference to the mundanity of bourgeois morals in the Teutonic depth of her voice. This is a film with no villains, no purpose, it just waits, it has the guts to stand still and let the finish line come roaring.

An ideal movie to see while you're alone or with your lover and if they don't like the film as much as you do and so are on their iPhone or browsing the web while you're watching, so much the better. I never saw this in the theater but I can't imagine liking it nearly as much outside the safety of my own NYC artist loft-ish bunker. Of course if you're a materialist who's never had any addiction problems and is not an artist or struggling with a contempt for mainstream society that keeps you isolated like Max Von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters, then good for you! For the rest of us, who've felt the oroborous tightening the last few years and feel it's now reaching its zero reset black hole point, for better or worse, I say congratulations for making it this far. Even if nothing tangible 'happens' - no meteors or alien invasion or super volcano eruption or massive chain reaction tectonic plate shift or pole reversal or planet wave or solar storm -- you have already felt the apocalypse, the eruption of fire and Gomorrah in your thirsty veins. Some of us have shot a million dollars worth of white powder and wood onto the logs to keep that star alive within our pulsing systems. Some of us have almost drowned our nebulae with whiskey just so we could drag our moldy carcasses to this one beautiful point in history. Some of us have felt the hot pink fuzzy warmth of God or the white light ticking us down to our soul, and felt our heart chakras opening up now. Breathe in with me now children, ooooommm, all together now ommmmm like spiral antennae picking up the cosmic frequencies beaming right into our planet from the galactic alignment.

All I ask for myself, oh wonderful Quetzlcoatl of Machu Pichu, is some ruby slippers, so I can clack them three times, chant "no place like Hommmmmm" and then wake up back in the spring of Syracuse 1987, when I was 20 and in a locally popular hippie band, surrounded by gorgeous everything, had the world by the tail, and could drink like nothing you've ever seen. How I wish I could go back! And yet... how glad I am to know for almost certain I won't have to.

 To rest assured even without assurance, is this not the highest wisdom?

The Kinski Precipice: Herzog's MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2009)

morte magis metuenda senectus...

Despite its wordy title and relative 'smallness' of scope, MY SON, MY SON is awful good. David Lynch produced (note the LOST HIGHWAY bathroom above), Herzog directed and it turns out they share a lot of sinthoms: deep woods, coffee, dwarfs, murder, Piper Laurie, transcending time and space; you can feel their collaborative heat shimmering on the horizon even when nothing else is happening, as it usually isn't.

I've loved David Lynch even when I hated him, but up until the awesome BAD LIEUTENANT 2: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS, I admit I had a hard time with Werner Herzog. For example: I just couldn't 'get' AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD (monkey armies? When?) and GRIZZLY MAN (there's audio of a fatal bear attack and you just show yourself listening to it on headphones and don't let us hear it? I made a whole movie savaging that decision) Then there's Herzog's titles, which like MY SON... are often whole sentences in length: LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY? Excuse me? Am I blocking the runway? EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL? Es tu serio? Do we expect them to be born larger than normal?! My Argentine ex-wife had an old moldy PAL tape of DWARFS on our shelf for years and just the spine filled me with horror at the thought she would one day force me to watch it. It was the title more than anything else, a dumb jokey pun supposedly underlying some kind of GUMMO reconstruction of JACKASS-style hooliganism. As a Herzog title might read, I THANK YOU VERY MUCH BUT I'D RATHER GET A ROOT CANAL).

But now that I'm old and wise and have a good DVD player, am divorced from that Argentine --the moldy PAL tapes are gone and I've grown to appreciate Herzog's hallucinatory nautra metus, his anthropological mysticism, his lysergucolic documentario-synclasticism, his willingness to let an eye for artistic composition and high strangeness give the impression his static panoramas are hurtling across time and space far faster than the rest of the planet,  which turns out to be the same thing as standing motionless while the planet revolves below. I can't help but admire his willingness to heedlessly plummet into the void of insanity alongside any character who happens to be going that way, rather than hanging around on the precipice making excuses like Barbet Schroeder, even if the result is sometimes the same.

Newly minted in my admiration, I went into MY SON MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE (2009) with open arms... and came out opened, and exposed.

Based on a true story about a troubled California man who killed his own mother after getting too deep into his part in a local production of Elektra. Herzog takes that germ of police blotter headline and brings (of course) a journey to Peru into it and cranks the insanity til it floods every corner. Michael Shannon plays the matricide perp, Brad. A recording of long-dead and tres obscure traveling blind preacher Washington Phillips singing "I was Born to Preach the Gospel" plays the voice of God, while the Quaker Oats guy on the Oats tub in the pantry supplied God's beaming face (and it's an effective combination); Chloe Sevigny is Brad's patient girlfriend. She tries to channel his madness by bringing him into her theater group, but you can't exorcise holy madness with the Orestia... she should have waited til they covered Bye Bye Birdy. Better she should move on, there's nothing he has anyone could possibly want... She should, like, call me. Compared to Brad, I'm the picture of sanity.

do ya bend mighty low?

The cast overflows with stock regulars from both Lynch's and Herzog's collective oeuvre: Brad Dourif channels Jack Nance as Brad's ostrich-farming uncle; Willem Dafoe is the hostage negotiator; Udo Kier the theater director; Piper Laurie the sad, isolated micro-meddling mother who pushes her boy over the edge his own psychotic inner voice has led him to, the same voice that warned him at the last minute not to kayaking with his hippie friends (they all drown, offscreen).

Awakened and chastened by this near miss with fate, Brad takes the blinders off, cleanses his doors of perception and loses his shit tripping on all the old peasant faces along the Peruvian waterfront. He gets all Jeff Bridges FEARLESS and and throws aside the handlebars that would keep him from tumbling off his tricyclics into the broken glass streets of messianic schizophrenia.

Back at home his clinging mom thinks the answer to his madness is more Jello. And so what can a poor man do, once Orestes starts speaking to him from across the centuries, but carve his way to freedom? Well, most of us would just move out, as he should have long ago...

As Don Wilson of the Jack Benny show used to say, "there's only one Jello! Look for the big red letters on the box!"

On that note, I think the part of Herzog's quest to find the holy grail of pure charismatic messianic madness and capture it on film may be a smokescreen for his private worry he already found it and lost it, namely in the eyes of the late Klaus Kinski. For the recent BAD LIEUTENANT--of which MY SON is almost a sequel thanks to similar cinematic patina and supporting cast (Shannon, Brad Douriff, Imra P. Hall, and Michael Pena)--Nic Cage brought his own line of insanity, a hipster American Kinski with more of a gonzo sense of self-aware humor. There was little room left in BAD LIEUTENANT for Herzog to project his post-Kinski stress disorder -- Cage filled the void. But Shannon doesn't have that leading man glow. Without a strong lead to delimit his relentless naturalism, Herzog's liable to forget that it helps our appreciation of onscreen derangement if we first see someone else in the film act normal at least once or twice. This lets us get our bearings, gives us a direction in which to go.

In other words, watching Kinski go insane was watching Kinski, but you can tell Michael Shannon isn't really crazy --he's just a moderately reptilian-looking actor exploring the full scope of the manic-messianic complex. There's no charm to his insanity, no charisma, no reason we can see for anyone to put up with his ravings. Unlike, say, Robert Duvall in THE APOSTLE or Graham Faulkner in BROTHER SUN SISTER MOON or Gregory Peck in MOBY DICK, you don't want to throw down your breadcrumb sins and follow him outside the gates of Eden.

Someone like Kinski may have been unbearable to work with but we can see why Herzog kept going back to him. Remember when Klaus was a hunchback shot by Lee Van Cleef in A FEW DOLLARS MORE? I mean look at those eyes (below), they're worth enduring any amount of abuse, if you truly care about making archetypal myth, of capturing genuine madness which is the 'only performance that truly makes it." Michael Shannon just doesn't achieve it, he doesn't have that same unholy glint of mischief in his eyes. He can act crazy very well--he even looks crazy--but he's not crazy. You can't fake it that deep. You are or your aren't. God, when are they going to put Huston's FREUD out on DVD, so we can see Kinski make love to a wooden leg? I'm standing by, wad of bills in hand.

Other cast members of MY SON don't have the (lack of) madness problem: Willem Dafoe as the homicide detective and Udo Kier as the theater director are more terrifying trying to do 'straight' than Shannon is trying to do 'crazy.' But since the ensuing flashback episodes are all there to illustrate 'how it came to this,' they're all about Brad's 'increasingly unstable behavior' and that's the problem. Why didn't someone recognize he needed psychiatric care long before this? And the flashbacks require us to also wonder why anyone would endure him and his messianic madness if he's not funny, hot, magnetic or fascinating to be around? Was he ever normal? A contrast to a pre-crazy time would have made the crazy either tragic or positive.

This guy knows what I'm talking about. Sane Udo is crazy anyone else... and we love him for it.

As the Herzog stand-in to Shannon's mercurial Kinski, Udo Kier indulges his lead actor's tantrums and irrational mood swings with the resignation of a rich older gay man indulging the violent whims of his rough trade houseboy. It's an indulgence that only vaguely taps into he genuine fascination artists feel around those crazier than they are, nor does it illuminate the horrific toll of soul-emptying world weariness it takes to do a film or a play with someone who's completely delusional. Just to try and get even a little of that mercurial lightning on record one has to risk death, money and aggravation. But unable to connect to Shannon, Kier doesn't project the fascination and structuring talent that would possibly placate his star. Since their relationship never becomes vibrant or larger than life, we never really understand why they even bother hanging out with each other. Shannon's Brad doesn't need a man, he needs a doctor with a talent for convincing paranoid schizophrenics that anti-psychotic medication is oatmeal straight from God's loving farm.

Herzog's worked with other crazies besides Kinski, of course, many of them clinically insane, but since Shannon doesn't bring any of his own looney tunes baggage, he has to settle for whatever was left behind by past actors in the vine-covered boarding house of Herzog's fetid, fecund vision. And we sense--not by any mannerisms or tells on Shannon's part--Kinski is working ghostly machinations between the synapses, a matchmaker creating the space and then stepping back into the shadows, perhaps too far. One hungers to see Shannon give us just a little of, say, the primal scream commitment of Crispin Glover screaming in fear at the sight of a single black glove on the kitchen floor in Lynch's WILD AT HEART or Nic Cage babbling about his lucky crack pipe in BL2.

The collaboration between Cage and Herzog gave that film a reckless, exhilarating momentum, but the Lynch-Herzog -Shannon collaboration neglects the 'glue' of normal 'strong' grounding characters like Eva Mendez's prostitute in BL2, or a Lynchian warm maternal heroine like Naomi Watts or Laura Dern. Willem Dafoe tries to be grounded as the homicide detective on the scene, but Dafoe will never be able to play 'grounded' --the more he tries, the creepier he gets --and I mean that as a compliment. He's too nice and sweet a soul to play one on TV. He's warmer when he's colder.

In the end, what can we deduce about Herzog's pet motifs?  Hanging out with messianic schizophrenics keeps him sane, maybe, but he'd never get so many details of the devouring maternal Dionysian Kali goddess so very exactly right without firsthand witness to the giant mantis alien that sucks the psionic marrow out of every unopened third eye (which is why society is structured to keep the third eyes shut at all times.)

This mantis isn't actually a hallucination --it's the only real there is, and the ability to see the way blood runs in rivers just behind the thin adhesive bandage of temporal reality's aching skin--  hurtling in every car ride towards crushed oblivion-- is enough to make you gouge your eyes out, to no avail. (like that cut line "I can still see!" on THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES).

Enlightenment and spiritual awakening in the average individual leads to separation from the social order, which has no way to gauge or evaluate the sudden conversion of a once-normal 9-5 office drone into a state of 'holy madness.' The only difference between schizophrenia and holy spirit, then, is time and place, coherence of expression, and artistic outlet. For example, Brad's crazy mom spoils him, buys him instruments and art supplies and paper the moment he evinces a whim to try something artsy (music, painting, etc). He's thus blocked from doing any art because of her suffocating supportiveness. If she could just leave him alone, or provide him with rules to rebel against, his madness would have contours to call its own.

Seriously, didn't any of the people involved in this film ask themselves how or why someone so clearly suffering from latent schizophrenia brought on by survivor's guilt and an overbearing mother would manage to keep any friends or colleagues, let alone get to date Chloe Sevigny!? What's wrong with this land, this America refracted through the Herzo-Lynchian fantasmatic? I do not know. But here's what I did learn from MY SON MY SON:

1. The only way to channel holy madness without creating misery or your own crucifixion is to create art. BUT a true artist can get so deep into their character they can't get back out. Don't think it doesn't happen! The Joker killed Heath Ledger.

2. No matter how bad things get, old country blues and/or gospel can save you. They should play the blues round the clock in insane asylums. When I was deep in misery,  I used to sit around listening to old LPs of Blind Blake, John Lee Hooker, Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and always felt better, and when things got really bad, Washington Phillips, whose "What a friend We have in Jesus" has been the closer on dozens of my mix tapes, perfect right after Zeppelin's "Achilles Last Stand." For Brad, it's Phillips' "I was Born to Preach the Gospel (and I sure do love my job)" which he takes literally as a cosmic message. Dude! I've so been there. Part of the reason the LSD San Francisco rock scene covered so many old blues songs becomes apparent (beyond the post-folk revival) in this context. Nothing gets you out of a bad trip head space faster.

3. To really escape the mantis and open the third eye, an artist/writer needs to break away from their urge to always write things down and reconfigure all experience in the terms of their art, to instead live in the moment in pure joy and unrestricted awareness. Art--though higher then most other forms of escape--is still escape, a way to break short of merging into the all-consuming flame of direct spiritual experience, i.e. complete surrender of ego, of self as different than other people and the world around you and the stars around that. Instead, we get really, really close and then remove ourselves from the moment in order to write it down, photograph it, draw it, record it... etc. Creating art may be what stops us from going over the edge of madness, but unless we let go of the rope once in awhile we'll never see the bottom, so what can we really talk about other than our own navels? We will never accept death, never leave our body, nor dissolve in the oceanic sea, and suddenly re-assemble as if every cell of our body had just been to the cleaners --unless we plunge, sans pen, sans camera, sans eyes, sans everything into the abyss and therefore back into ourselves, forever changed back to the same.

Perhaps this last idea is succinctly exemplified in the way we will spend a vacation in an exotic foreign land squinting through our cameras rather than soaking up the views with both eyes open. We find ourselves saying "isn't this fun?" or "Oh, look at that mountain, honey!" or "Caitlin, are you having a good time, Caitlin?" as if needing to constantly bring ourselves back from the abyss of pure egoless presence, preferring to work on solidifying the memory of joy via photos and talking rather than abandoning language and recording devices at the door, so to speak. Writing helps us remember moments that we never really had a chance to experience because we couldn't wait to get home and write about them. We think if we let go of the rope it will swing back our way, but it doesn't. A new and better one, electric, plugged right into mainline of God's flexed arm like a two-way morphine drip, comes instead, once it's too late... that's what faith is - that leap into the blackness on the chance someone's gonna swing out and grab you from the other side of the big tent.

4.  Freedom from Permanence: This is beautifully realized in a scene with Shannon hiding out in a dark Mexican hotel, raising and lowering a glowing bare light bulb down into the center of a ring of prescription eyeglasses, and then back up again, creating a flower/sun/Tiffany lamp/mandala pattern shadow on the table--a brilliant illustration of the freedom an artist has once they've let go of trying to record and preserve everything. Each raising and lowering of the bulb is a perfect mandala sun flower, unique and non-reproducible. Brad has no need to figure out how to film it, record it, or get it into a gallery or make money or gain fame from it. He's just in it for the beauty. Riveted. All else gone to shadow.

 

The moral of the story? Next time you're really in it for the beauty and you get that tap on the shoulder from the giant electric hand of your Quaker Oat God, try not announcing  to everyone how spiritual you, just 'be' in that space and come to terms with the value of your own direct experience. Keep it a secret that you can express only in anonymous good deeds.

The ego, like any lover, thrives on adversity --the longer you ignore the ego the sweeter its songs. It starts giving you more of its hoarded stash of dopamine when it feels you may no longer need it. You learn your ego's sitting on a huge cache of solar brilliance and spoon-feeding you muddy shadows to keep itself in power. The person who is deemed mad has managed somehow to knock his ego off its throne (be it by drugs, electro-shock, lack of sleep, meditation, etc.) and break open the cache and let all the dopamine sunlight flood the whole damned place. This person is labeled mad because he initially feels a huge urge to keep this holy state going as long as possible, and to help others get there too. That rarely works though. Better he should learn to let go off both those urges, to surrender even that goal. Instead of shaking the lapels of those still asleep, he should just pray and chant on his own time. Otherwise they just might have to burn him at the stake or crucify him.  He better keep the ego around, after all, in however a diminished form, to not upset the apple cart. He can balance that all out in art, express in art what would be madness expressed directly. He can bury all kinds of magnificent truths people aren't ready to hear any other way. As people in the world with our own egos to deal with, we dismiss ideas that challenge them outright, but the ego feels no threat from a good fiction. Let this art stealthily address ideas of madness and artistry and even tell tales of newly-minted holy men wondering where they're supposed to go now that they're selfless in a selfish world they themselves have made. Ain't that what this is?

 MY SON MY SON conveys the way spiritual enlightenment won too soon can let the ego in through the back door and turn one into a raving lunatic. When the house is only "almost" empty, it's really not empty at all. Roaches and rats lay claim to the podium. You can spot a rat messiah a mile off, and you should run quick away.

Unless of course, like Herzog, you like to make movies about rat messiahs. Ja? In that case better make sure you have at least one very magnetic, very charismatic rat. If you don't... you just might wind up adrift on a raft heading down the Amazon towards unseen rapids... and not a camera in sight.

Acid's Greatest Horror #1: ANTICHRIST (2009)

My original conception of a #1 one horror acid movie has hovered between THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, THE WICKER MAN and HOUR OF THE WOLF. How awesome then, that Lars Von Trier's ANTICHRIST should come along and perfectly encompass all three, and work almost as a remake of POSSESSION besides?

Anyone who ever wondered what ZABRISKIE POINT would be like if done by David Lynch, and if he was a bigger fan of David Cronenberg and D.W. Griffith, would be wise to brave it. Don't let the frightened critics spook you just because there's some genital mutilation and shocking sexuality. You can handle it. If you're like me and a lifelong victim of anxiety and depression, then you'll really handle it. In fact, you'll dig into it so deep you may just decide to lie in it like a deep root coffin, hoping for your own Charlotte Gainsbourg to come fill the hole above you with comforting black dirt, while you wait for the comforting kiss of the conqueror worm!

Though a toddler figures into it, and some talking forest animals (!) this is a two person piece, which is fine when the people are Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg and the man behind the scenes is the public depressive Von Trier (and even the illiterate can relax since it's in English!) The story is simplicity itself: a pair of screwed up marrieds head to a cabin in the woods after their child dies, there to "face her fears" mainly because he doesn't want to sleep with her. Charlotte goes insane from grief and her man's constant self-righteous attempts to "cure" her crippling anxiety (he's a behavioral therapist). Along the way, ye olde link between psychiatry and witch burning is exhumed, but mainly the landscape warps and weaves just like its wont to do when one is... warped. If you've ever been on major psychedelic drugs in the woods and gotten lost and wound up having a six hour conversation with a tree root about your impending death by starvation and exposure, only to find out you've been sitting in the petrified remains of a half-eaten fox and--oh wait, it's just some leaves--and anyway you've only been outside two minutes, and you're just a yard from the house where your friends are inside laughing hysterically while watching WAY DOWN EAST, then you'll know why this movie rocks so bad!

It's always amazing to see how many apparently normal people think Von Trier (like Neil LaBute) is a misogynist just because he makes films that address misogyny. In his films misogyny is a warping factor in archetypal cinema-psychology, not just an unconsciously endorsed lifestyle ala every "rom-com." If you want a list of real misogynists in cinema, just look at: Michael Bay, Cameron Crowe, or the geniuses behind PORKY'S, LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN and/or any stupid sex comedy or most of the slasher films to come along in the early 1980s.

Can I venture to say that the label "misogyny" is in this context only a detriment if its clearly unconscious on the part of the director and the film is marred by a subtextual contempt/hostility for the feminine? Von Trier's film may be partially about the "misogynistic response" but it in no way condones that response, and in fact rejects it. Yet the same critics who hate ANTICHRIST undoubtedly are rejecting the right of femininity to show its true warts-and-all self, its ambiguity over desire and fear, creation and destruction. For many supposedly enlightened critics, to see this thing is to automatically have to throw a rock at it, like a snake in the woods. And yet, it's Von Trier that they then accuse of hating snakes.


Compare ANTICHRIST to a Michael Bay movie such as TRANSFORMERS, wherein the fear of the feminine means every chick in the film (the few) have to be stunningly gorgeous, in form-fitting slutty clothes, walking in slow motion to an Aerosmith song and men in the audience are encouraged to leer from the safety of the dark and their pack of dudes, or basements. This snarkiness stems from a fear of the "other" that hinges on the sociopathic. Since there's not enough access to full understanding of female oppression vs. the barrage of sensationalistic media that assaults the average American every day, it's not surprising a pampered/sheltered American auteur sees so shallowly into the murky waters of the female psyche. The film adaptation of Margaret Atwood's HANDMAID'S TALE (1990), by contrast, shows misogyny as a widespread institution, yet what feminist would dare accuse Margaret Atwood of misogyny? And the genital mutilation shown in ANTICHRIST is forced upon many girls--even today--as they reach puberty, so who is more a misogynist, Lars, or those who just ignore/deny the barbaric practices of some of our extremely fundamentalist Muslim brethren? To me, that act itself means war! We should invade, and rescue these girls before it's too late!

May I venture to take a page from the book of Camille Paglia and suggest that if someone is afraid to look head on into the wild devouring Dionysian oceanic dissolution represented by pure unleashed feminine sexual drive then it is they who are the misogynists, not the artists who at least have the cajones to face such a deluge? Women get knocked around in the films of Von Trier, Peckinpah, Polanski, Hitchcock, but they don't fall down. In a lot of more conventional movies women never even get to stand up. Those directors who--rather than wade into the vaginal sea-- just scoop out a handful of muck from off the bank and then parade it around on a stick, or wrap it in tight spandex and shoot it out of a wet t-shirt canon, then wait to film it after the threat has been "subdued", i.e. objectified, crashed, burned at the stake, and/or mangled --they are the enemies! Is there a difference between silicone and sawdust when it comes to Norman's mommy's smothering breasts?

Ding-dong the witch is dead, but when the witch in OZ melts it's no more a permanent defeat than it would be for Medusa losing a single snake of her hair. Norman knows this all too well; he must kill and display his trophies over and over again. Their hair keeps growing long after their bodies have withered to bone and parchment skin. Death not ends it, only castration... old Teiresius with his dugs, wandering off into the Led Zeppelin wasteland night.

But enough of my deftly Eliot-alluding tirade, I've gone way off-path; let's wander back to the wild of the woods, where there's Charlotte Gainsbourg--raw and feral--as a castrating lunatic, digging deep into warrens to hunt her smug, covertly gynocidal therapist husband...

Gainsbourg, even as a child showed, she gave not a crap about social taboo, just by being sired by reprobate Serge (they sang "Lemon Incest" together on her teen pop debut) and here she is, acting it up in a string of solid Gallic hits (and albums) and now this performance, which is the gutsiest, rawest thing I've seen since Isablle Adjani in POSSESSION or Isabelle Huppert in THE PIANO TEACHER, and if the Oscars had any chutzpah she'd win next March, but there you go, more proof who really is the misogynist here - c'est Oscar!!

FURTHER VIEWINGS:

If ANTICHRIST confuses thee even after this sterling review, forget about the last 40 years of cinema, and compare it to 1960s and late 1950s Freudian Gothics like SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE and WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF... You might also bring in Tarkovsky's SOLARIS and NOSTALGIA. Lastly, of course, you should compare it to IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES and every other good movie about castration. Aint nothing wrong with sparagmos and genital mutilation if it's done with clear-eyed awareness of the symbolic associations thereto, and by the mutilatee's own choice, not by some barbaric institutionalized misogyny. Second to lastly, dig up some moldy wet dirt-encrusted comparisons to the Japanese horror film, MATANGO and of course FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41.
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In the end, just keep repeating "No sexual organs or appendages were harmed during the making of this movie." It's all a dream. All just stuff that transpires in that murky woods that exists between the unconscious symbolic and the ambiguity of the real, all just what the tree root says while you're outside, lost and tripping, a mere 20 feet from the front door. And if you're going / to San Fran / cisco / be sure to wear / some flowers in your hair... otherwise the loving people there will rip you to shreds and eat you alive, until all that's left is just a mouth, still screaming down the wind... for pusss-ay.