The Little Mescalito that Couldn't: CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS, MAGIC MAGIC

Psychedelic awakening, madness, and tonto re forro puta madre yankee nonsense is afoot in Chile, and a beady-eyed, hawk-nosed, blonde-tousled Michael Cera is there, a-swooping down from El Cóndor Pasa with jellied arms akimbo, fulfilling the soul-deadening norteamericano tourist promise even into the ego-dissolving mescaline maw. Luckily (or unfortunately, depending on your tolerance for smug yankee nonsense), the beautiful locals are so chill they don't even tell him to go take a flying leap. Enlightened by socialist higher education and lax taxation, the Chileans accept him despite his inability to accept himself. And so it is that--over the course of Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva's shot-back-to-back 2013 films, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus--our jittery ectomorph trips, trails, shoots, swims, jumps, screams, freaks out, titters, ducks, snarks, whines, twists, and wakes with his face in the bush. He wants maybe to be a psychedelic icon, but he's not handsome enough to be Peter Fonda, loco enough to be Dennis Hopper, menacing enough to be Bruce Den, or devilish enough to be Jack Nicholson. Cera does have a dash of Dern skeeviness, a peck of Jack loucheness, a minor case of Hopper dementia, and Fonda's penchant for self-aware narcissist feedback loop deafness, and that's a start. Separated like Pyramus and Thisbe by a lean ridge of a nose they're forever trying to peer around, Cera's beady eyes are in front to judge the distance to his prey, but can he swoop down on the bunny before creeping self-awareness blinds him to everything but his own black hole navel?

It doesn't even matter. Because today we'll be using Dali's 'paranoiac-critical method' to pick at this pair of films' paisley scabs:

According to Dali, by simulating paranoia one can systematically undermine one's rational view of the world, which becomes continually subjected to associative transformations, "For instance, one can see, or persuade others to see, all sorts of shapes in a cloud: a horse, a human body, a dragon, a face, a palace, and so on. Any prospect or object of the Physical world can be treated in this manner, from which the proposed conclusion is that it is impossible to concede any value whatsoever to immediate reality, since it may represent or mean anything at all" (Marcel Jean). The point is to persuade oneself or others of the authenticity of these transformations in such a way that the 'real' world from which they arise loses its validity. The mad logic of Dali's method leads to a world seen in continuous flux, as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form. -- Language is a Virus

With Magic Magic especially, we can count Sebastián Silva part of what I've dubbed the Darionioni Nuovo, an emerging international school of filmmakers picking up the breadcrumb trail left by 70s Argento that connects back to 60s Antonioni and Polanski, 50s Hitchcock, and 30s Cocteau, in the process conjuring up a beast with Tennessee Williams' sparagmostically flayed wings, Jung's mythically fluid manticore "tail," and a single-first-person peeping tom keyhole crystal ball eye (passed amongst its three gorgon/hydra acidheads). Berberian Sound Studio, Amer, Boarding Gate, Scarlet Diva, The Headless Woman are some of the other films that fit this unique niche --a style too paranoid to be acknowledged even by its originators. Each daring auteur is devoted in their own fashion to the paranoid-critical dissolution of sexual mores and the unsettling irrational paranoia that erupts in even the sanest mind when the comfort of steady signifier-signified connectedness disappears and the "real" emerges, like a strange tropical fruit that becomes--with a blink of the eye--a dead parrot. It's a feeling Europeans and globe-trotting hippies know very well, since language and culture barriers can sometimes make--especially if they're jet-lagged, alienated, or fucked-up on weird drugs which they gulped down in burst of irrational paranoia en route to the airport customs window. For these experienced travelers, freed of the unconscious signifiers that might otherwise guide them safe and unconscious through a same-language environment, once familiar signposts and objects become strange unassimilable things, pregnant with a unique menace all their own. One of the chief benefits of being asleep in the symbolic realm, a loss of fear. Upon waking into the real, death and vividly-imagined pain is felt breathing down our necks. 

Magic Magic --the better of the two films in my mind--taps into the spirit of  60s-70s 'female mind buckling under the weight of the male gaze' films: it's got the same vibe as Repulsion's rabbit rotting-on-the-plate, Antonioni's Red Desert Vitti closing closet doors in mid-tryst paranoia. The Crystal Fairy film by contrast is--for all its mystic leanings-- more or less a conventional 'shitheel learns to respect others' moral tale (Rohmer on Roybal) as well as a very good look at what it's like to have a bad trip where your head's so far up your own ass that maybe you're depending far too much on the psychedelic drug trip you've been pining for. If you expect it will cure all your crippling self-conscious depressive hangups in a single flash, think again, Cera! I know from a zillion bad trips (circa 1988-98) it doesn't work like that. Not to get all Burning Mannish, but the Ancient Mescaline Gods demand full existential dissolution before they lift your egoic agonies. The farther we are from this baseline mortality awareness, the less 'alive' we feel, the more violent the breaking out of the faerie bower has to be, until the whole self splinters like a glass goblin back into its red, green, and blue component cables, back into the awareness/terror/impermanence of unprocessed signal.  If you're not ready for that dissolution of self, the Mescaline Gods' mystical awakening is really more of a reverse keelhauling, as your squirmy psyche is lifted out of its comfy depths and exposed to the sun's superegoic jeering in a northerly clockwork motion, and the comfort of the dark, murky underside of the ship is longed for like a Linus blanket that's no buried at the bottom of the sea.

Crystal Fairy manages to get this exactly right, but in the process it reminds us that even if we're nowhere near as obnoxious as Cera or Crystal Fairy (the equally obnoxious American girl he runs into), compared to the easygoing balanced chill of bros and ladies of South America, we're all hinchapelotas.

At any rate, the photography is lovely. By the end we're managing to hallucinate into the beachfront rocks the way Dali used to do along the Costa Brava and if you've ever been stuck tripping with (or been) the Crystal Fairy type (patchouli, unshaven armpits, ratty faux-dreads, acting the PC den mother no one remembers asking for) or the Cera type (can't shut off their motormouth solipsism for five minutes, their "I'm getting off, are you getting off yet?" babble trying to turn the wordless experience of the divine into a Disney ride), you may wince from painful recognition (these types can leave deep scars of Pavlovian annoyance in your deep/soft psychedelic tissue), but at least you know Silva feels your pain. Question is, is that art or entertainment or just a pained groan of remembrance, like when you recognize your own younger self's bullshit with a groan of pain when some first-trip youngster starts knowingly babbling to you about the truth behind reality.

Apparently cast members did ingest the San Pedro cactus being depicted which may explain the lacksy-daisy narrative progression. I can imagine freaking out grandly, with a big camera crew following me around as I frolicked on the beach, thinking I was making Citizen Kane but really making Hearts of Age. (I've done the same thing, albeit on a smaller scale). I would hate to be in that frame of mind and have to play an obnoxious twerp like Cera's comeuppance-craving Mr. "Magnificent" Anderson of a red pill psychedelic seeker as much as I would hate to trip with him. Forsooth, methinks he is a wally. 

Cera handles the abuse well - but is there really a point? In its way, my problem with Crystal Fairy is the same as with Welles' Ambersons, i.e. a fatal misjudging of audience empathy for a particular actor that makes the film hard to watch, like a cookie filled with arsenic where they forgot the Sidney Falco sugar --so what's there to eat without the ice cream face? I have the same problem with both Ambersons and Lady from Shanghai -- in each case the entire point of both films seems to be to allow Welles the chance to play a larger-than-life egotistical swine but at the last minute he gives the plum role to someone else - and neither Tim Holt or Everett Sloane can fill Welles' mighty big shoes --and isn't that precisely why, unconsciously, he cast them?  

Magic Magic is the better of the films because Cera is only a side player, so his horrible lesion of a self-conscious shitheel matrix doesn't pollute our minds. Instead we have Alicia, an American tourist even crazier than Crystal Fairy, but less obnoxious, substantially cuter, and played by the great Juno Temple. She's on a Blanche Dubois-goes-on-a-Repulsion vacation to Chile, where, instead of isolation (with just a dead rabbit and rapist hallucinations), it's the lack of privacy that drives her mad. Expecting to have a restful visit with her American college exchange student buddy Sara (Emily Browning) only to find her plans hijacked by a car full of other--irritatingly spontaneous--people, including: Sara's novio Augustin (Agustín Silva), his sister Bábara (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Cera, the Ugly American (speaking Spanish with ease but still unbearable). Before she can even unpack, she's off on a long car ride to some remote island. It would be annoying under any circumstances, but after an exhausting ten-hour flight it's just bound to kickstart your bi-polar disorder. 

And it gets worse, a straw too far: suddenly Sara is called away for an enigmatic 'test' and so Alicia is alone with these weirdos. Cera is her designated friend, since Alicia speaks no Spanish, which is worse than not speaking at all. And it's miles to go before she can sleep. Alicia's got to deal with all this life-affirming Chilean ease-in-their-own skin nonsense and it drives her mad like all the rustic Americana did  Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven.

Things go downhill faster and faster, for poor Alicia, even though the island is pretty. Eventually we go from feeling her pain to that of her strange companions, because she can't blame it all on the bad cell phone reception, fear of water, alienation, insomnia, and being more-or-less a captive audience to any dumb animal that won't stop humping her leg.

I know well the feeling of this one too. Tired from the trip, staying with a bunch of relaxed, groovy people who want to party all day and all night, thus preventing you from getting the 12 hours sleep you need to recover from an overnight flight, everyone seems to taunt you with their niceness. As the moody irritable lack-of-sleep depression kicks in, you begin to hate your fellow revelers for rubbing your lack of joie d'esprit in your face.

For me this was visiting friends up in Syracuse for the weekend, after I'd graduated. The people I stayed with invariably had cats and I'm allergic and would be wheezing and gasping all night, depressed by lack of sleep and too much speedy Sudafed which made me intensely paranoid and didn't even really work. And then the auditory hallucinations started: some girl in the kitchen might say to her cute single friend "can you pass the Pepsi?" I'd overhear it as something like "Erich has hep-C."  Which I don't, and I totally would have slept with her, too. That other bitch be cockblocking. See? It's already too late - I now hate that girl who asked for a Pepsi! Even though I, being a psychedelic veteran, KNEW I was having auditory hallucinations, I still had to restrain myself from running into the kitchen and declaring myself fit for duty. 

Such cranky, crazy oddness is what Dali's paranoid-criticism is all about. If you cultivate it instead of trying to escape from it --dive into the madness rather than run from it--the world is yours. Once Carol takes up the razor in Repulsion she's no longer scared, see? She's hacked her way clear, carving a wall of human flesh, dragging the canoe behind her, beyond Ulmer's time barrier.

For the full effect of the paranoid-critique you need to see the preview for Magic Magic before you see the film because the preview makes it seem like a 'Most Dangerous Game meets Welcome to Arrow Beach meets Svengali' horror movie instead of the 'Red Desert-style modernist melt-down mixed with I Walked with a Zombie-style poetic ambiguity' it is. Anyone can do the former, but the latter is a hard thing to pull off and Silva aces it. The photography by the amazing (Wong Kar Wai's go-to) DP Christopher Doyle makes stunning use saturated color (stark yellow raincoat against a purple-blue sea), helping the film look how one might imagine the Polanski mid-60s trilogy: Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Cul-de-Sac would look if shot today.

Hell yeah, Polanski and Val Lewton (and Dali) would love Magic Magic.

Lastly, I know I've been mean to Cera as well as annoyed by him. I spent agonizing tours desperately hoping a psychedelic trip might bring me out of my self-absorbed depression. I wanted to feel as happy and interconnected as everyone around me seemed, but not being able to get there no matter how high I got, was maddening. Only in AA did I learn that everyone feels that way, just not as painfully so they just muddle past it rather than overdoing it in a vain hope some old magic will return. Then you learn that ego can't be burned off by taking too much of anything. You can't fight it, only coax it into giving up on its own via being nice to other people, through empathy, through service, sharing your story, honestly, therapy, 12-steps and self-expression. Oh yeah, OR you can do antidepressants. 

Or art.

Drugs may not always work, writing about how drugs don't always work does, which brings us to this moment: Back in the 90s, the downtown Manhattan lounge scene, flitting from one exotic storefront lounge to the next in my tuxedo jacket and feather boa, wondering if the ketamine I'd snorted was working, struggling vainly towards feeling spontaneous and free, and failing even when ecstasy was flowing in bumps right off the table and I was dancing with lovely ladies while Moby and Fancy spun away and the city beamed up at us from Windows on the World vantage-- even with all that, it was as if some heavy blanket of strained artificiality was choking the joi de vivre right out of me. Every August my roommate would jet off to Ibiza leaving me to try vainly one more time to drink myself to death (my boss, being French, closed the gallery for the whole month), and then in October---when New York City is the best place to be on Earth--whomever my roommate had crashed with there would come visit NYC and stay at our place, and suddenly the clouds of despair would lift - these Brits or Venezuelans or Germans could get all of us united, dancing, alive, happy, in love with the scene, joyous. Feeling so real, at last.

Then they'd be gone again... The same alien disconnect denial malaise would descend. 

I guess it could have been worse. What if we didn't even know how in despair we'd been?

We might have been Michael Cera.  

Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of the RED DESERT

Crazy gorgeous, crazy mental, highly unstable, reckless, spontaneous--today they'd be called bi-polar, but at the time just post-modernly alienated--there's a lot going on with modernist European art cinema's women of the 60s. Even now, more than ever, maybe, we love them and they love us back, with a kind of scathing distaff ambivalence. Though how do they see us, sitting there, in the future, jaws agape? Somehow, due to their madness-sharpened psychic senses, they seem to feel a future history of eyes all over them. Somehow these ladies 'accidentally' peak behind the curtain to realize how trapped they are by the confines of male (directorial) desire--especially if they're in super sexist Italy, where half the male population freely whistle and howl like lunching construction workers with total immunity. We see their pain, we want to be their unseen child spirit trying whisper words of comfort across time and media platforms into their forlorn fossil ossicles. We're like the tiny human figures little girls commonly dream they give birth to in great numbers, like a plankton flood from the netherworld oceans. Sometimes you'd swear-- as you gaze up at their gigantic faces--that no matter how far away and small you are in perspective to them--they can read your mind. They know whether you're actually sympathetic to their pain, or just using it as an excuse to drool a little closer... sigh. But in that dress, how can you not?

No wonder these girls went mad. Any hot babe in Italy would feel just the same, all that pawing and leering anytime they enter the public sphere, like hungry jackals nipping at a dying calf. Come, cry on Erich's shoulder, sweeties--he's an "ally". He'll keep all the other jackals at bay better than a wedding ring and screaming baby. But does he even know his own heart? Is this all just a sly jackal's long con?

Women like the one played by Yvonne Furneaux in La Dolce Vita (1960, below, right), or Monica Vitti in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964 - above, below/left) are forever reaching for a 'real' connection with the men inside their film's mise-en-scene, trying to trap them into a full commitment, to devour them through hydra hair anemone tendrils. The men all just want to pollinate, whet their probosces and split. They feel trapped and suffocated the minute their feet stick to the stamen.

These poor harassed, molested, objectified and leered-at ladies need more than just assurances from some pretty boy trying to get them into bed --they need a champion, a little man they can keep it their cinematic pocket! You should be small, so you can look up to her, so she can be your ideal.

But is she the sort of girl the "ideal" you would want? I mean, she's fucking crazy! And too hot for words, and isn't it strange how they go together?

Not really, if you realize the toxic effect of a lifetime of endured leering by the inevitable drunk uncles. Even a sensitive intellectual like Antonioni may fall into the dress-leering trap as he endeavors to sympathize with his female character's neurotic condition. We hope his star can eclipse the confines of this Red Desert - this Mussolini-period architecture, this minimalist gallery space--and escape out some momentarily open corner of the screen. Whether it's into his/our arms, or, to some character we actually like, someone mature, rich, and debonair, who loves her for her, and can somehow survive her maternal maenad devouring need for constant love.

Alas, there is only one Marcello Mastroianni, and he spreads himself thin. All other men in Italy are ten times worse. He's the best bet, but only suicide threats seem to get him to come home anymore.

Even if she just shrinks by running away from the camera, then crawls out of the screen and out through the 'Exit' door so boldly marked below the screen, anything to be free - free!

In this, Antonioni is much more of a nice guy to his women than Fellini is -- who seems eternally trapped in an apron string latticework of webbed denial (lying to both wife and mistress, neither of whom believe him but somehow he believes himself). In the past Antonioni's madwomen could find solace and escape from modern life via breathtaking island views (as in L'Aventura), mysterious boat engines on the other side of the island that spirit her away; in piquant vacant lots (ala La Notte), or even the quiet of a glider over the countryside (L'Eclisse), but for Red Desert all these avenues are blocked by condemned roads and marshes, or gone altogether. Yellow poisons give the air a red speckled hazy hue; the waters of the river are choked a dull coal black above an almost Star Trek alien worldly sky. Vitti's post-modern apartment seems like just a different wing of the same factory her husband works in. This time she needs a different escape avenue, She has to go all the way through the looking glass, into post-modernism metatextual refraction, until her persona finally shatters like a Lady from Shanghai funhouse mirror. '

Only thing is, we in the dark Chinese theater are stuck being Welles' sleeping pill-sloshed Irish sailor dupe. Maybe in a few more movies, we'll finally lern ta fergetter.

Twelve years ago Dr. Paul Narkunas (the skeptical professor in The Lacan Hour if you're keeping score) lent me his DVD of The Red Desert, painting it in my mind as a lurid desert odyssey that went dark places he knew I'd been to, neurochemically. And he said it was funny, too.

But twelve years ago I was a different person--I didn't know Spinoza from Shitfaccia and the DVD Paul had was a far-off cry from the gorgeous Criterion Blu-ray I have seen thricefold since, weeping with joylessness as my throat pouch widens to encompass more and more hot, psychotropic gas with every viewing because sooner or later I shall 'ribbit' with realizaccione.

But the Narkunas disc was a bust. My TV was smaller and farther away and back then DVDs used letterboxing; even my socialist art filmmaker then-wife was bored after twenty minutes. The story's vagueness and incoherence weren't recognized as intentional even by her from so great a distance. We saw it as just the result of language barriers and our own modernist post-work headaches. I fell into a half-sleep for the rest, and coasted through to the end, one eye open, unwilling to turn it off lest I have to admit defeat to Narkunas, or that I was not man enough or intellectual enough to 'get it' - that my psychotropic throat pouch was.... tadpole-ish.

My problem was not uncommon for an American of my posture, sloth, social conditioning, and drunk-English Lit bachelor degree education. Now I realize my initial response of boredom was intellectual, was correct. French critics labor for years to reach such complete disinterest! And how can a film that bores you stiff the first time get better with repeat viewings? That makes no sense, and no sense is very Antonioni. But Criterion's Blu-ray is gorgeous and now my TV is larger and wider and flatter with deeper blacks. The purple pollution diegetic fog is 3-D now, pulsazione como veleno deliziosa. The purple and dark blue flecks taste like cotton candy to my long-since shattered senses.

Naturally as a result, my outer (or 'real') life has gotten sparser, less anamorphic, to accommodate the balance shift as I merge with the televisual HD clarity. My glasses are dirtier, my mind shrunken and blessedly polluted with rivers of pharmacological run-off. My lily pad is littered with empties (or emptiness). But even as this world fades to a dull scream, the screen breathes and grows, ever sharper, deeper, vaster.

Speaking of psychotropically inflated throat pouches, let us vault into the future for the new post-modern comic mini-series, Eric Jonrosh's Spoils of Babylon, a recently de-vaulted 70s miniseries deconstruction from IFC. Here, at last, is high camp trash deconstructed past the point of being genuinely funny, and more like Godardian abstraction. Somewhere between Ed Wood (1994) and an actual Ed Wood movie, between intentional failure and unintentional result, Real et Surreal, just as Guiliana (Vitti), the crushingly alone and confused wife in Red Desert lets modern alienation vault her into madness, for Eric Jonrosh, the madness is already there, itself, as a whole. Locked in a deadpan absurdity ouroboros, it is madness' final destination.

In both, the acting and writing are intentionally 'off,' with no grounding in anything approaching reality, reaching a heightened abstraction that makes even Sirk's Written on the Wind seem like kitchen sink realism (see here on Splitsider for a shot-by-shot comparison). While Red Desert achieves post-modern affect through mixed signals and ambiguity (in short, art), Spoils achieves it through specific soap signals which are then delocated to the point of abstraction. Giuliana doesn't know what kind of movie she's in -- comedy, tragedy, horror, sexual soap, clinical study of depression --she has no idea what the right response to any situation is and the movie never gives her a signifier without contradicting it a moment later. In Spoils, the link between signifier and signified is forever broken. Meaning spills out everywhere, adding up to nothing through its sheer abundance.

Spoils' story, for example, apes the 70s mini-series and 50s soap only for the first two episodes. By the end there's no longer a sense of being in any one style (though probably it's meant to be the late 60s). The story of foundling adventurer Devon Morehouse (Tobey MacGuire), his capitalist amok sister Cynthia (Kristin Wiig), and their forbidden love begining in the Dust Bowl Depression before rising up in Rink-like plumes of oil, WW2, beatnik junkiedom, hipster underwater observatories and into a climactic shoot-out in front of a bemused Shah of Iran. Just as the core of Red Desert comes from Giuliana's--and therefore our--inability to decode the social signifiers around her, the six-part series' deadpan humor comes less from jokes and more from signifier collapse as a result of inept direction, dialogue, framing, mismatched rear projection and obvious miniatures, all threatening and challenging any attempt at genunine narrative immersion. Carey Mulligan's voice shows up inside a mannequin playing a British wife brought home by Devon when he the war from home comes a-marchin' - and that's the order they would use those words in France (and thus maybe under the sloshy pen of trash novelist Eric Jonrosh, played with windy Paul Masson-era Welles-ishness by Will Ferrell). The idea of a mannequin as a legit rival for Cynthia is both oddly foreboding - a Stepford wife moment - and funny, depicting the dehumanized interchangeability of characters when stripped to the bones of meaning (ala the son's erector set robot in Red Desert). The iconography of the mini-series becomes a tattered yard sale as easily as a red velvet smoking jacket might sell for $500,000. if it was owned by Errol Flynn, or tossed into a rummage pile for four bucks if owned by Errol Flynn's stand-in, and yet it's the exact same jacket - and in fact, it was the same jacket (or a Jeff Beck guitar neck), because the two got switched at the cleaner years earlier or later. Deal with it.

The idea of stand-ins, and a deep ambiguity illuminating the arbitrariness of place, value, and ownership, courses through Antonioni's work constantly in both micro- and macro-, cosms and chasms. In Spoils madness is prevented via an arbitrary dividing line, incest. In actuality--not related by blood---their extramarital affair is the ultimate unimportance, just as the disappearance in L'Aventura turns out to be. Neither Vitti nor Wiig can consummate their desire due to loyalty to missing or dead signifiers -- the dead father, the missing friend). The forbidden love of Cynthia and Devon is made so only in the sense of social propriety --they are not related by blood -- but soap opera cannot function without such refusals, such sacrifices of love in the name of propriety; this sense of sacrifice helped found the Italian film industry, stemming in part from floridly romantic opera and verse, Verdi and Dante, and the realities of the post-war post-class economy and censorship which also factors in Red Desert: man's willful exile from an Eden that exists only in the memory (being in Eden is impossible by definition); one can't be an impassioned sensualist and a 9-5 captain of industry, yet one without the other is not freedom. Operatic soapy romantic signifiers are cinema's way of mourning the loss of sensuality, the sacrifice of sexuality and romantic love in the name of victory --in war, commerce, and construction -- and the way the rise of provincial conservative censorship is intrinsically tied into that industrial age commerce, and how grand actress gestures of selfless sacrifice are the icing that sells the workers this bogus cake. I shouldn't say it's bogus when all other cakes are even more ephemeral. "Real" cakes are eaten and forgotten (or, in weddings, flash-frozen for decades in some pointless loyalty to soon-frosted-over frozen sludge); the 'bogus' cake, never having been eaten (due to not being real) is always 'there.'

the answer, my friend

It's these gestures of sacrifice--of renouncing the cake altogether--that Antonioni subverts, just as the Cinq au sept movies subvert the censor's limited imagination and inability to to comprehend the naughty bits in the center of a quadruple entendre. Codes and the symbolic structure of language point towards specifics; did they or did they not have sex? Sexually frustrated moral ethics guardians insist on knowing! Whole presidencies have been endangered over these nagging questions! But the code can be skirted, the censors stymied by symbolic references that point back only to themselves, forcing the prurient and the narrow-minded literalists into a tizzy... on purpose! And creating modernism... by accident!

"Ooops, I post-moderned. "

Spoils' Cynthia further mirrors Giuliana in Red Desert in that they both need to to waken from the idealized Edenic fantasy their persona embodies. They represent the objet petit a (for a man) and yet seek it without (for any other man). The only resolution is renouncement, sacrificing love on the alter of propriety. Each has an idealized Edenic space to retreat to (i.e. the riverside picnic tree in Written on the Wind), but the difference is that Giuliana knows hers no longer exists, it's been cut-off and blackened by toxic sludge, and that even thinking some new man understands her isn't even a pipe dream (unless the pipe is 'exhaust'). If we've been presuming the signs in the film point towards it being one of Italy's countless 'red telephone' dramas of forbidden extramarital affairs, we're as confused as she is. The signifiers pointing in that direction don't add up; they're more like one of those Salvador Dali dream sequences from the late 40s, only using smokestacks instead of scissors. We 'get it' kind of, since that's how it is with mutual attraction. You can easily forget you don't know the first thing about the other person, and that's dangerous.

Similarly, Cynthia pursues Devon because forbidden love is dangerous and sexy and befits the very rich, for whom the only thing they can't have is the only thing worth having (hence the proliferation of incest in rich people houses, i.e. Chinatown). But whether genetically inadvisable or not, incest is very detrimental to the organization of one's unconscious language syntax. The whole psyche explodes like a house of cards hurled smashed flat between two mirrors. Signifiers no longer have any space to 'mean' anything. In Spoils though, it's less out of that, or out of seeing the world through the eyes of a crazy person, and more seeing it through the eyes of an Ed Wood-meets-Harold Robbins-style windbag.

I think being American is a distinct disadvantage to getting the modernist alienation affect. Europeans and South Americans all sneer at us for not tolerating subtitles, or for learning languages (other than our own) and yet they admire our innocence, knowing it is born out of a single language system that frees us to dwell in isolationism and therefore think more elaborately (taller houses of cards) since we're not constantly having to translate our every utterance three times at the same dinner conversation (until all but the most airy bon mot sink).

The closest thing Americans might have to being 'continental' is if we imagine seeing a foreign film in a high school foreign language class (hence without subtitles) and not being able to understand because we haven't paid attention ever in class, but we're struggling to read facial cues and other signs as it will be on the test, maybe we too can get the modern alienation effect so coveted by the Cahiers du Cinema set. And if, after twenty minutes or so, bored and restless, we start to notice how silly and strange the people onscreen seem when language isn't there to contextualize their behavior, then we can feel the spirit of Bazin rise within us like an excited Harpo Marx pounding enthusiastically on his seat and whistling. Antonioni helps us realize how we're bound up in signifiers even without language - for we have been to the cinema enough times that: if we see--on the movie screen--a woman at a child's bedside, and the child looks pale, and the bed is against a stark, institution white plaster wall, and the kid in the bed has what looks like a thermometer in his mouth, we would totally believe that the kid is sick and the mom is concerned. But then we pan back and the thermometer is revealed to be a cigarette and it's not a hospital room but a post-modern apartment. So who is the woman? Suddenly an orderly comes in to take her away and you think she's insane and this is a mental hospital, but how did we know it was an orderly? Did he have a white lab coat on? That was no orderly! And it's not a kid at all! It's a pile of clothes she drew a face on. It's not even a cigarette, it's just some steam from the fresh laundry.

Now we can either get the post-structuralist leaning tower of Babel alienation effect.

The Americans and censors don't want this aha! moment to ever happen for US audineces. They already demand a certain kind of code of conduct and a secret code to imply sex has occurred --if you're adult enough to read it, and hasn't if you're not. For snazzy post-modernists though it's a small step from the code adherence to leading that crazy Jack Torrance dirty-minded censor on a wild goose chase through the Overlook maze of contradictory signifiers while oh, how you laugh and laugh. To take Americans outside the prison walls of language takes a great deal of this laughing. It's important to realize that Antonioni arrives at his 'plain as the nose on a plane twirling like top' effect through serious artistry, while the three layers of intentional-accidental post-modern intention in Spoils of Babylon occur through the accidental-intentional. It's the difference between acting the role of a guy leaving a half-eaten doughnut on a park bench and realizing there is no audience, or camera, or script around you, and so you were really just a dude leaving a doughnut on a park bench, like, for real.

Did anyone in the park see you leave that donut there? If no one saw you leave it, how do you know it was even yours? Maybe you should quick pick it up and eat it before they notice! After all, maybe you're hungry! If only you could tell... someone. You go up to some strange-looking old lady on a bench and ask her discreetly if you're rolling and if so where the cameras are. You honestly don't know whether she'll point and shrug, or avoid eye contact and edge over to the traffic cop without making any sudden moves.

An example of a similarly dry refracted modernism in Spoils of Babylon is right there in the name of one of the characters: Seymour Lutz, a variation of course on the name 'Seymour Butz,' an old Bart Simpson prank phone call favorite ("Is there a Butz here? I wanna Seymour Butz!")

This joke in its unaltered form would be far too crass for Jonrosh--a great Falstaffian bargain of a man--so, in Babylon, the name is abstracted, mispronounced by Cynthia constantly, leaving him to finally shout "it's pronounced Lutz! LUTZ!" 

Now of course any comedy lover reading this set up will presume Wiig's calling him Seymour Butz instead of Seymour Lutz, which is where the joke would be if it was only once refracted. But Cynthia keeps calling him "Seymour Lund." Quintessential Jonrosh (that Falstaffian, etc.). Hardcore fans of classic surrealist comedy will note he is, in these scenes, invoking the tone and delivery of W.C. Fields in 1933's International House saying "Nuts! Nuts!" while fixing a loosened nut on his autogyro) starddled to Moe Sizlak in a loop of meta-modernist Fatlstaff Ozzymandia. 

Look upon my DVD collection and despair! 

One similar favorite moment, late in Red Desert, made me finally understand why Paul Narkunas recommended it so very... very long ago: Feeling guilty about the affair--even before it has begun--  when she's finally alone with Corrado (Richard Harris) in his swanky hotel room, Giuliana looks up from the bed, sees the door is open, and--worried neighbors or husband or the porter might barge in any minute--guiltily closes the doors and windows, but the ones she's closing aren't doors or windows where neighbors could see in, but drawers and cabinets, bathroom door, and etc. She sees, meta-correctly, eyes and ears looking in from every signifier of orifice, passage, doorway, window, camera, screen, viewer's eyeball, etc. -If she could she'd crawl off the screen, slide down the angle of our eyes watching, slip inside our ocular orifices, and start pulling down the shades, turning off the juice, smashing the aperture, anything she could for a minute's respite from our scalding gaze. 

Another key earlier moment of this meta-breakdown is when she runs off from the group (post-'orgy') down the dock after him towards a ship that's been quarantined, carrying cargo he's connected with, to stop him from what she thinks is him risking his life by going aboard to help with the sick. Then she catches herself and tuns around, realizing everyone is left behind in the fog' when they come out of the mist, Corrado is at her side; the others look at them as if they've been caught red handed in an affair; but are they really feeling that, or is it just another passing wave of paranoia? (a classic Antonioni guilt trip fake-out ala outside the hospital in the nymphomaniac aftermath in La Notte). Now she thinks she's the one who needs to go rescue the sick on the ship (one might recall similar moods affecting guilty heroines in W. Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil and its imitators.

Either way, both impulses are forgotten by the next distraction, just like they would be for someone on strong acid, or sane enough not to hold onto crazy impressions when no one else around them is. ( like when you make some racist or sexist slip no one seems to notice, so. don't call attention to it--like you'd be more racist to apologize for it than to have said it). Maybe it's just our expectations for these mature Italian post-neorealist doctrines, but everyone drrmd always about to start an orgy or come onto her or stop one from happening, or doesn't remind her they already had an orgy if she announces she's ready to 'make love. Is this what being a hot mess in sex-crazed Italy is like? Or are they just more ghost Repulsion wall arms? You can read more from the audience who automatically assumes the orgy happened, either in that little shack, or the Big Sleep bookstore, or Baby Doll's crib with Eli Wallach. If they want to believe it, fine, as long as they keep it to themselves with a knowing 'worldly' nod. If they have to know, they show themselves up as repressed hysterics more than they 'out' their quarry. 

In truth, we wonder if Harris' architect is even seducing her, or just simpatico, bound up in this archaic social model of behavior. They're the only ones in town with nothing to do, and all the time in the world to do it, and are remotely young, attractive and lonely. Naturally they'd hang out together. The issue is, how much does a physical affair mean to either of them. Aren't they, perhaps, mature enough to realize how seldom that act is rewarding, a fleeting gratification, permanent guilt, awkwardness, and special simpatico lonely heart connection sundered by nature's dunderheaded impulse towards crudity.  

Finally, let's examine the cart selling apples in Red Desert, all of which are strangely painted silver-grayish, on the Ravenna street (above). Who would buy gray apples? Are they some kind of decoration? Are the apples poison? Then why the gray paint buckets? Is this art or pollution? We can't tell, but when Giuliana sits by the cart for a minute she becomes a post-modern portrait of an apple/art peddler. Still, we can't deduce what's up with this cart, or her relationship to it, anymore than we can deduce if an orgy happens later, or after that a cheap affair, tortured bonding, or none of the above. Like the censor we might be driven into a tizzy, or like some child, dead with boredom, but if we don't fight the surreal de-signification domino effect then not knowing is like waking up from a dream within a dream. The hidden puppeteer hand is clumsily pulled down onto the stage and the mind's tendency to lose itself in green smoke and booming voices finds itself challenged by the sudden sight of an old man wizard in his underwear, without a testimonial or diploma to his name.

But there's a reason we like that puppeteer hand offstage, our wizards clothed and behind curtains hidden: once we no longer fall for the illusion then we have to face our own lady death and her poison apple. And she speaks to us, as always, through a collage of remembered movie lines, song lyrics, and poetry, in a voice like Veronica Lake's in This Gun for Hire, patient, but grown surly with waiting, and burdened by concern, like she just rescued one right guy from another bad orphanage, and her legs are lovely, but they're squeezing the life out of us like an anaconda. We will not leer.... We will not leer.