Mendacity A-Go-Go: Liz vs. the Little Monsters

 

I'll never forgive Richard Brooks for the Gaspar Noe-ish ending of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977, my review here), but his unflinching eye comes in handy when dealing with  the mythic component of Tennessee Williams, and his dispassionate objectification of Paul Newman's unnerving sexuality and Roman statue profile has a unique fetishistic kick perfectly in line with Williams' rough trade tendencies. In CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958) and in the undervalued SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962), Brooks finds in Newman the gay eye candy grand prize of Williams' hard drinking man-children, then lets genius character actors bounce off the bronze.

But the big early scene in ROOF of Maggie chattering away and Brick just drinking and laying around, muttering passive-aggressive things like "Do they, Maggie?" infuriates me, every time, and keeps me from loving the film like I love NIGHT OF THE IGUANA or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Newman seems neither drunk nor closeted, and Taylor seems too poised and mannered to be really in heat. By comparison, dig up the old Showtime production with Jessica Lange (above) and Tommy Lee Jones! I haven't seen it since it premiered on cable in the 80s--but I watched it a peck of times back then: a young, pre-celebrity Lange is damn hot in the negligee dress, and Jones mixes it up with Lang and Rip Torn's Big Daddy with a cagey weariness that Newman lacks in Brooks' version.

I know it's sacrilege but Liz and Paul seem to lack connective chemistry; it's strange to me that the long Brick-Maggie bedroom scene is the most famous and recognized part of ROOF (not so strange perhaps considering how hot Liz looks straining at the seams of her white negligee) yet easily the weakest. Maybe I'm off the mark but for me this isn't a boozy romantic drama with closet undertones as much as tale of masculine redemption: Newman and Burl Ives slay me every time in the heavy showdown in the troll king basement that comes towards the end, and the real scene-stealer is Jack Carson who--when he finally lets some tears show in his voice, some realness instead of this 'boomer' good son-facade--levies such a gentle shock to the film it sheds its whole other skin. Carson seems so honestly frail in this one moment, warts and all, that the rest of the film fades around him suddenly in a mendaciously artificial overacting haze.

Fault it as you may for the now family therapy 101 moments of dialogue and symbolism (the crutch and alcohol, stairs, the ice cream, the unending shrillness of Boomer's one-note wife), but it's the kind of film that holds your hand and invites you to peer--without maudlin weepiness--deep into the harrowing void of mortality the way few films have done before or since. And if you have a dad with cancer who you all call 'Big Daddy' who has a bit of a Welles or Ives gravitas then you will, like me, be devastated down in that basement. The upstairs may be artificial and stifling, burdened with half-assed southern accents and shrill bombast, but down in that basement cobwebs and Cooks' Tour souvenirs, we're privy to something truly titanic: the bloody, pugnacious, tenacious process by which father and son help each other shed their stifling masks and genuinely connect. The sudden coherence of Brick, as if he went through ten years of therapy on his way down the stairs, may not be realistic, but Newman has never been realistic, he'd too godlike for that. It works. Why bother with realism down in the troll king basement? No women are there with their brassy monotone drawls, nor screeching kids. 

Thanks to an ingenious piece of art direction which magically takes cobwebs and antiques and weaves a dense stalactite-bedecked underworld for them to stagger in, what could be just a cliche'd rendition of Charles Foster Kane's big ole statue depository becomes truly mythic in all six senses of the word, with Burl Ives as a kind of pot-bellied troll king and Newman down there with a hypodermic torch to beseech some magic exchange. There's moments for Burl and Paul to each smash stuff in a clutching heart attack way as their illusions of immortality and glory are dashed on the altar of passing time, irrelevance, the horror of all existence, and then are redeemed, sweaty and wrecked, by the icky area they fear and recoil from the most --genuine feeling and human love.  And you know that, in the drug-hip universe of Williams, a hypodermic full of morphine resting on a crate isn't just a symbol; it's something to drool over. Even if neither dad nor son ever finally shoots it, the drugs do their magic.
Drugs don't help you escape from reality in a Williams effort, they help you confront it head on.

Wait, which reality are we talking about? Not the 9-5 family values no-neck monster reality--it helps turn down the volume on that--but the 'holy shit here comes the scythe' mortal coil shuffle reality. In Williams' plays, its the whole mindless reproductive Christian-patriarchal family dynamic that's an escape from the inescapable gravity of death. And if you don't make amends and whatever else you have to do to prepare of it, and do it now, you're fucked. 

And incessant off-key renditions of "Dixie" are not amends. 

I've had those breakthroughs before with my own big daddy, maybe you have too -- the late night boozy moments of truth when you can look at him and suddenly see--instead of a paragon or symbol of authority--a frail, aging human like yourself, not a reflection of you, but a version of the same creature you are --ever trying to escape his lack of future by ignoring his foggy present. And if alcoholism runs in your veins you can bond quite well until the hungover morning when you scarcely remember the progress you made --but hey, you made it. Deep down, behind the veil of mist, you know it happened.  Like many of Williams' plays, it seems made for me, made for a brooding drunk writer by a brooding drunk writer - with booze as the thing that both gives you the brio to stare into that void, and at the same time shorten the distance to the bottom, where the teeth are, in the base of the Sebastian's Venus fly trap garden. Click!

I wonder if the whole first half is intentionally shrill for just this purpose, meant to wear you down with the constant songs sung by the no-neck monsters to welcome Big Daddy home. We identify totally with Brick hiding out in the bedroom, as Taylor's Maggie rants on and on in her flat, mannered drawl. And we identify with Big Daddy when he rejects the ugly brood of Gooper for Maggie's hip convertible, and his irritation with the non-stop dinner songs which his wife makes such a show of enjoying. There's also no accident that the ROOF is in the title, as the different levels of the family estate are packed with meaning, from the elevation of the bedroom and its deceptive luxury (Big Daddy wants a son but momma "hates locks on doors") to the lowest ebb of the basement and the killing floor living room and the convertible quicksand driveway. And when the children go off to bed, and the drama starts in earnest, we above all note the the quietude like a weight removed from our shoulders when their no-neck noise caterwauling ceases at last. It's that 'click' Brick was waiting for. And now we realize we too were waiting for it.

The rejection of messy children is one of the few things I connect with in the Apollonian, as per Camille Paglia, vs. the chthonic. Gayness has been one-note in the media since Williams' day, and thanks to PC indoctrination, homosexuals are now depicted as just the opposite of the fey aesthetes they were in the 1950s; now they're just saintly victims longing to become legally-wed adoptive parents. Either/or but on no level are homosexuals allowed to be properly ambiguous: mercurial, both good and bad, like everything else on this fucked-up planet. A negative portrayal will get you a sack full of angry letters; a positive portrayal a snoozing audience and bizarre Christian right wing protests. Can you win? Williams, even back here in the 50s, wins easily, by giving us complexity.

Few artists today bother to try, to plumb the depths that Camille Paglia writes about in her Sexual Personae, to explore gayness as the rejection of the feminine body, the denial of procreation and all the messy morasses and fairy bower quicksand pits that slow time to a crawl. For me and a very few others, the whole media portrayal in things like TV's American Family and The L Word are deeply offensive because they are a betrayal of all that was good and pure about the Williams' aesthetic. Now everyone's a breeder, queer eye or no, and kids are saints by default, suffocated in round-the-clock hyper-monitoring even as their parents aren't home (they have to work overtime to afford nannies and after-pre-school sewing lessons).

In that sense, it's illuminating that Brick--who may or may not have fooled around with his late pal Skipper-- is the only one to ask "why!?" in relation to Big Daddy's edict to reproduce. He has a point and it's a harrowing one: why bother to procreate just so some idiotic legacy of wealth and possessions can go on? Where's the meaning?

As someone who reacts with  mute horror to the surplus of children in my Park Slope neighborhood, I relate to Brick's question; and as someone who, because he has no kids, I get to stare into the terrifying mortal mirror without the worry being channeled into anxiety about providing for the kids after I'm gone; and as an alcoholic writer aware of the repulsion aspect of sexuality on a visceral level,  I relate to Liz's scheming to keep the no-neck monsters off that nice piece of land. Like her I want to drown them in ice cream, choke them on their own stupid toy guns..

Looking at the film in relation to Williams' other works we see a running theme of the grabby, uncouth, poor relations who breed willy nilly and are a pox upon the land. Against this grain, this unceasing flow of children into the future, stand a few 'whole' souls, beautiful people, like Maggie and Brick, Blanche Dubois, Mrs. Stone, Violet Venable, Rev. T.L. Shannon, and a boozy actress named Alexandra Del Lago.
 

God bless this old era,when Tennessee Williams was as hot onscreen and stage as pocket edition Freud was in the bookstores. A time when cigarettes, the Kinsey Report, whiskey highballs, and contract bridge made a nation more alive to the truth and ambivalent about the blind procreative drive.  Maybe one day we will once again have another Tennessee Williams to steer us into some actual dialogue with our own tragic genetic imperatives, to embrace the terrifying gaze of the Apollonian eye instead of just aping the most banal of suburban values. Until then, mendacity will remain so common as to be unnoticed, and sexual risk takers will die, whether by AIDS, psychopathic hustlers, or terminal big daddy cancer. Won't someone not think of the children, just for a couple hours, and smoke a goddamned cigarette, or stoke that morphine shot Big Daddy doesn't seem to want, so we can talk like high adults?

Bright Lights #71 Now Live!

There are two of my latest long pieces in the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal (#71) so do check them out:
Dads of Great Aventure: A Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Cinema's Hyper-Parent

"Nervous producers, it seems, feel obligated to insert moral hand-wringing as if we might just use the fantasy of escape to actually escape, like we're too stupid to remember that the world is, like, important. It's almost in defiance of that phony liberal piousness then, perhaps, that writers add these ambiguous subtexts about this proximal hyper-parenting, much the way snarky Broadway wits would subtextually send up Christian moral hypocrisy in their production code-enforced scripts..."

The Last American Ruffalo: Lisa Cholodenko's Lesbian "Homespun" Family Values

"The heat of genuine subversion may be more destructive than positive, but at least it has heat. It has the guts to trash the existing structure rather than just toying with the idea of moving the furniture, then ostracizing the moving company."

I've only begun to read the rest of it, but it looks like one of the best issues ever! Congrats Gary Morris and company on another swell job! His editor's note mentions Bright Lights got a lot of clandestine Wikileaked angry mail from high up politicians, would-be Eberts, armchair punters, and Ford Beebians (I xxxed out words I found offensive, you can read the full editorial here): 

We had no idea that these writers — who were supposed to be in their cubicles reading old issues of Cahiers du cinema and Positif and diligently revising and updating Sarris's American Cinema categories — were in such a tizzy. Their words were indeed mutinous: "Sarris's 'canon' is more like a xxx gun!'" asserted one. "...xxxx....  "xxxx mise-en-scene!" said a third. Neither directors nor actors were spared. "All directors should be at the nearest xxx getting xxxxxx for the real auteur: the screenwriter!" "Bresson is a boring hack! My xxxx xxxxx could give a better performance than Balthazar!" and "Orson Welles isn't a patch on Ford Beebe's xxx!" (For some reason, the writers seemed particularly obsessed with Ford Beebe, auteur of 1940s and '50s programmers like Bomba and the Hidden City and many others.)

Now, this wikileaked mail is rather horrid, reflecting a lack of understanding about just what 'mise-en-scene' truly is. As for Bresson, I agree, and yet Balthazar is an amazing actor, conveying more 'animal' magnetism with a single dumbstruck glance than Mr. Ed ever could with pages of dialogue. And of course I agree about Ford Beebe. Let's never forget he's the man who gave us the awesome and unforgettable Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe serial, as well as Bela Lugosi's PRC triumph, MONSTRE DE NUIT (1942). Also, he has one of the greatest names in show business history.

I like Joseph Aisenberg's trashing/celebrating of Peter Biskind's STAR, the story Warren Beatty. Aisenberg eloquently sums up Biskind's current solidified association as chronicler of the 1970s New Hollywood decadence, what Eddie Muller is to film noir, or David Skal to classic horror, but on a larger attention-grabbing NY Times book list scale. Aisenberg notes Biskind's book as evincing a kind of semi-intellectual gossip hound: "it's all trashy gossip but kind of, sort of about culture." As someone who can't make it past a paragraph of Biskind's Gods and Monsters without getting irked at his politicized sanctimony (I devoured Bulls, though!), I appreciate Joseph's spot-on analysis

I really want to see CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM EATER before I delve deeper into Sean Nortz's quote-packed pipeful of chrystaline thoughts and pungent, smoky theories on the film, 'Could You Spare me a Nightmare?' How on earth did it fall off the radar!? Vincent Price!! Nortz notes the film's many trashings in the press, and seems determined to salvage it's reputation, and his cursory overview of Price's career and appeal is vividly rendered:

Price's previous roles — in the now-forgotten comedy Service de Luxe (1938), in a forgettable performance as Sir Walter Raleigh in Michael Curtiz's The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and as the as the Duke of Clarence Tower of London (1939) — did not serve to highlight either his talents or his latent spectrality (though the latter saw his first bout of intoxication and his first brush with classic literature: it is loosely based on Richard III. Clarence is the one who drowns in a vat of malmsey). 

Drown in a vat of malmsey... death where is thy sting? (to paraphrase William Claude Field's oration in NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK). And I especially like the phrase 'latent spectrality' - good album name! The images in the review however, indicate this title is gray market only, not unlike the substance it depicts. Earth is all about irony. Down with the Draconian/Reptilian overlords that would stop from smoking our way to freedom!!

Lyon in Winters: LOLITA and Immortal Porpoises

Where I come from, home for the holidays means dying lawns, cloudy suburban skies, foil-covered crock pots brought unwillingly from the car to the front door; chattering hellos from perfumed relatives; ceilings slick with condensation from ever-baking turkeys and boiling rutabagas; football and the voice of Sam Elliott extolling guts, glory, Ram, from the living room; a barrage of women nattering from the kitchen. It's a time to go to school reunions and movies just to get out of the house. Hometowns leave their mark, like a lash of sameness, slash of lameness you'll never paint over... but is it that bad? What if you come from a family rife with divorce, guilt, skeletons, incest? Pedophile freaks subverting the family dynamic? Lolita cousins coming onto you while aunts and uncles look at you harshly but you're too drunk to resist? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

I had a fine podcast discussion with Jamey DuVall at Movie Geeks United for The Kubrick Series' -- and so I've been thinking of LOLITA all day. Let me share it with you as we close the holiday down:

Laws dealing with minors and corruption are tricky things. A kid (under 18) who rapes his cousin can get off with just a flick on the wrist, but a guy who sends one of his prostitutes home for Xmas on a train can go to jail, just for buying her a ticket that takes her across state lines. This all goes back to 1910 and a law meant to catch white slavers that was amended as the Mann Act in 1948 largely due to the newspaper headline case of Frank LaSalle, a an old pervert dragging a naive shoplifting minor named Florence Sally Horner, off on a two-year cross-country spree. The constant travel making it hard to discern the unkosher relationship kept in place by blackmail (he saw her steal a notebook from a five and dime and played copper). This was a vile case, a shot heard by journalists around the world, and the headlines have never been the same, for better and for worse. They made laws designed specifically to catch evil men like Frank (and Humbert). Good for them. I'm not kicking about it. I'm super skeeved by this topic. On the other hand, my own super skeeve response fascinates me. I know I'm not alone in it, I know its origin in the Freudian Totem and Taboo root cellar of the unconscious, but what is it, really?

Kubrick's film LOLITA, as well as Nabokov's original book, seems to take the Horner outrage and subsequent law as a challenge to depict the corruption of a minor in a non-hysterical manner, with trans state-line travel galore. I've seen the film and read the book numerous times, but never thought of that strange but valuable (if abusable) law... suddenly, this past viewing, it was all I thought about.

My dad has a terribly long and ornate joke dealing with this law, involving transporting immortal porpoises over staid lions, or something --which I heard him tell other adults at drunken dinners all through my childhood--and I never understood why it was even funny or what the hell they were talking abou. The point is, it's a law designed specifically to counteract the moves of people like Humbert, himself an evil user of pretend morality. Humbert's flabbergasted relationship with Quilty is an ultra-cool mirror of the guilt-wracked hypocrite censors challenging lysergic intellectual Kubrick to both adhere to and defy the "How could they ever make a movie of Lolita?" marketing catchphrase.

Over the passing decades this film's been many things to me, but this last viewing it seemed to be about art vs. censorship and the way the promoters of 'childhood wonderment' and the Peter Pan 'if you can dream' aesthetic--the Norman Rockwell fishing boy logo of Dreamworks and the mouth agape wonderment of E.T.-- are the both the exploiters of children and culprits who bring us the hyper-awareness of the dangers of pedophilia. The two are entwined, a double exposure of exposing, like a cobra with the head of a tail-eating mongoose. The more you pine for and prize a 'perfect family' the more pressure-cooker force you put on those latent incestuous, pedophile dark desires. Pedophilia is the ultimate evil, after all, the one crime even the other prisoners in jail will kill you for (in jail); it goes deeper than Oedipus, down into the murky swamp behind the Bates Motel, and it is embedded in the fabric of our modern trend towards the deification of children and their 'innocence.' Is it any accident that the two main architects of this hypocritical saintly children-izing in the early 1980s were Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg?

The difference in the pre-ET 70s was that no one wanted the Norman Rockwell 50s 'childhood wonderment' thing anymore, so there was less to repress, and what you don't repress you don't have to 'act' out in sexual transgression. The pedophiles and flashers were still around in the 70s--the rate of crime in this area has not risen--but parents' intense fear for their children's safety wasn't as ubiquitous. The Don Draper cultural rubric didn't include constant monitoring of playdates. The kids were left to roam the house, yard, or neighborhood while parents smoked, drank, swapped, played bridge, and carried on. We kids knew not to get into cars with strangers or take their candy, and above all we knew when to stay out of our parents' way and when was the right time to creep downstairs and steal from the cabdt dishes. We knew when the bridge games would devolve to the point that our presence would be greeted with welcome instead of stern reprimand; we knew the tartness of our parents' whiskey sours and Tom Collins' kisses; we learned to mix drinks with the powdered packets of whiskey sour mix and play bartender. Adulthood was a virile open-shirted marvel in the 70s... there was no clear line to cross. Sometimes, it just reached out and grabbed you. You felt safe around it, yet knew that it was, itself, unsafe. You know, like life?

The sad thing now for an old rager like me watching LOLITA is to see the inexorable passage from mom to daughter to daughter-mom in Sue Lyon, as it so preternaturally predicts the arc of America's cultural mores, from repressive 50s-early 60s, (Shelly Winters) to liberated late 1960s-70s (Sue Lyon) to repressive 80s (Lyon-in-Winters). Elaborating the transformation is Sellers as the liberal trickster elite and James Mason as the outflanked conservative imposter. Just as the most vocally anti-gay politician is inevitably found drunk in a gay nightclub, so does Humbert Humbert hide, like a scoundrel at his last refuge, behind the outrage of conservative wagon-circling.

The message was clear and simple to a generation for whom Freud was like Oprah: the more concerned you are over your child's well being the more suspect you are. I was more or less Lolita's age when I first saw LOLITA, and my perspective and identification with it has changed a bit now that I'm Humbert's age, or rather Quilty's. It's the Quilty character who dominates now, more, for me. The vantage point from which art--through its transparency and deliberate digging for dirty truth--looks down upon dull, corporeal expression of desire. To paint a nymphet, like Degas with his ballerinas; to film a nymphet like Rollin with his vampire women; to write of one, like Nabokov, is to effectively sublimate the desire to corrupt them in the real. The artist has 'already' tasted such forbidden fruit in this sense and found he much prefers using the desire and rapture as a inspiration, a springboard into art. rather than actual tawdry seduction --a dead end. Artists understand that sexual gratification means an end to the dance, a sudden return to shame and self-consciousness, a hasty, guilty retreat through the parking lot. Instead of making art, you made a 'situation', a guilt trip, a baby, or a messy crime scene.  Compared to the divine rapture of creation, which is eternal, it's just a negative chalk mark on your karmic blackboard. In other words, there's those who are inspired by the muses to create and those who just want to mount the muses in their trophy room. The last ones are the evil who may or may not know what they do oh lord.

Lolita in this instance if of course the muse, dragged down too soon into the tedious abyss of mortality (i.e. getting knocked up, moving to Alaska, where maybe she'll grow up to be Sarah Palin!), and Humbert the bourgeois authority that proclaims things art or pornography according to his own licentiousness (he makes things -- Lolita herself -- forbidden to the masses [not letting her in the play] so he may enjoy en toto under the pretense of protecting her morals) and Sellers is the artist, the Bugs Bunny who actually controls the stuff of 'real' art, for he knows what's really going on... and that is the primordial jazz of constant persona dissolution.

The moral to all this? Family ain't perfect, but you can trust its imperfection a lot better than you can trust the TV that tells you a true family is like the one they show. TV gets its messages from the Humbert elite and they don't have your best interests at heart, and never did. In the 1980s, before SSRIs were popular, some of us had to successfully kill ourselves just to convince our parents we needed therapy. In the 1990s it's reversed, but the same principle of fear and gray flannel blending applies. Therapy was once taboo, as in 'people would talk' - they'd think you were bad parents if your kid had to go to a therapist. Now that once 'moral' attitude that therapy is taboo is itself taboo. We've got to get the Lyons back out of the Winters and lift the immortal porpoises across staid lions if we're ever to wise up to the fact that our desire is inherently unfulfillable. Only then we can wise up to the double-edged sword of desire, and just hang it on the wall rather than wield it-- for we only ever cut our soul to ribbons. The only exorcism of desire that truly fulfills and heals that soul is art. Humbert can shoot up the Quilty art museum all he wants (in the beginning), but he's already lost the war... he's already given the surest sign he's a dirty old man: he's a prude.