They Shoot Horsemen: HUNGER GAMES, SERIES 7

The idea of obtaining instant celebrity is a fantasy we all share, especially in the 'blogosphere' --and why not? It comes true for random people who don't deserve it, like viral video stars, and it's this fantasy that's explored in The Hunger Games. If idiots can win it all, then why not we, who are the biggest idiots of all? Killing people to get there? No problem. Long as it's on camera butt legal. Heheh. (That's my idiot proof). Poof!

 This fantasy is dramatically different than the usual hook of teen franchises like Twlight and Harry Potter, which offer a return to a pre-egoic sense of safety in cozy confines with numerous friends and attractive protectors, i.e. Hogwarts or the Cullen house, or the Starship Enterprise. In Games there is no safety, no 'base' in the future's lifelong game of tag. The only way to find any kind of fantasy fulfillment with Hunger is through unease, and the idea that one day a whole world will see you, on TV, all the time. Your very lack of a secure space is the fantasy. Omnipresent cameras depict your struggle for survival as you navigate the bully-strewn way to gym class. In Games there's not even a Coney Island to bop all the way back to and say "We fought all night to come back to this?" There's just a frail little sister who's lost without you, producing the very opposite of 'security' in your anguished teen heart.

Imagine it, though: every time you smiled into a mirror and raised a punk rock salute to the sky, you'd know a million viewers were bursting into unheard applause? The pain of Truman was that he was unaware he was adored by the unseen masses. He didn't feel it. The triumph of Jennifer Lawrence is that she knows... and she learns fast how to milk it. Never smile, for one thing.

This here's serious.

Over on Bright Lights, C. Jerry Kutner has dropped an awesome post about Hunger Games' science fiction ancestors, including: Battle Royale, the 10th Victim, The Year of the Sex Olympics and an Outer Limits ep, which he presents in its entirety. I would also add Series 7: The Contender, a well-received but ultimately ignored 2001 indie of which I saw the first 2/3, but had to stop when the last two survivors, one of whom is the other's ex-boyfriend and is dying of cancer, and oh man, is that supposed to be a twist? Or is that a workshopped 'feel'? Click.

Ooops, did I spoil Series 7? No, of course not, every one of these movies ends that way. There's always a last bullet jumping up and down in its chamber like young boy hopping around anxiously waiting for his sister to get out of the bathroom. I haven't a bit of use for it! Let my bullets go!

Series 7: The Contenders

Kill like a woman, Contender! It's your one big chance for immortality vs. eternal pussydom, and if your wounded boyfriend wants  you to win, cuz yr carrying his baby or whatnot, and puts your gun to his temple, just press the trigger! Feel bad later, after the lights have come up and we've forgotten your whole 15 minutes ever clicked past. Everyone deserves their shot.

I say that when you let civilized decency stop you from pulling that trigger when the ratings demand it, then the terrorists win.

What some detractors decry about the Games, but those in the know appreciate, is Lawrence's character's relative moral aloofness (she makes Bella Swan seem bubbly) coupled to her her ability to feign love and caring to gain sponsors, to the point where even she no longer seems to know if she's sincere. Certainly we at home or in the theater don't ever learn whether her romance with her short guy partner in the games is something she genuinely wants to happen, and I like that ambiguity. It's classy. It's the kind of thing that earns the big bucks, that brings you from ordinary high-end call-girl to platinum credit line-gifted Pretty Woman.  Detractors probably resent it because they don't want to admit they feign their own lives for an invisible audience too. What if Jennifer only pretended to like, for example, us?

And on that level Lawrence's characterization is a sublime modern metatextualization, illuminating the way actors who pretend to love one another onscreen are no different than those 'in love' in the 'real' world down below in the theater, holding sweaty teenage hands, each desperate to either be seen with the other person by gossipy girlfriends or to pass unnoticed by smirking bros. Each make believes with vengeance what they know deep down not to be true. What Fleetwood Mac forgot was that players believe they love you when they're playin' -- only in the deep, deep down can they admit  it's all just Liaisons Dangereuses-style seductions undertaken to impress our Marquise de Mateuil-du jour. Only later does it dawn on them that the Marquise was playing them, too, the whole time. That hottie is never going to reward your scorecard, Valmont! If she does, the sex will be awkward and stiff - for no one has told her half the things she's doing are painful, because she's so damned hot we figure we're just feeling it wrong.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959)

Now kids, let me break the fourth wall and give you a little sinse and sin's ability: if you ever want to break free of the chain, stop being one of those love-starved idiots chasing each other through the enchanted Summer Night's fairlyland woods, pursued by a 6 as you chase an 8, as they say, well, not to sound like some preachy therapist--you have to start actually loving, for realsies, even if you're the only one who knows you're not faking. Those who hold out for the one perfect love, chasing some girl way out of their league, rather than loving the one they're with, eventually fall into the Groucho club membership abyss (1). The media, alas, gives most morons an inflated idea of themselves, it promises them--like a strutting pimp--they'll get hot babes even if they're odious to look at, Girls don't want to get them mad so they try to let them down gently, but the media says, don't give up! Play Peter Gabriel outside her window, leave her notes on her locker from chewing gum wrappers, and meanwhile the girl for you sits at home binging on brownies and rom-coms. She aint' gettin' any less dumpy, bro. Better call her before she opens another pack. Take her jogging and introduce her to Godard. See if you can help her become a butterfly! It won't work but who cares? You ain't exactly a monarch yourself, you caterpillar bitch.

This is the secret of life: the unwanted lover, pining away, is doomed, while the deisred swinger knows that pretending to love someone who adores you is always a smart bet. Fuck the world if they think you should act in some other way than pretense. In Falsum Veritas! Pretend to love 'earnest'-ly enough and even you don't know the difference. When the world has proven it can't be trusted, only a fool is honest. It's called 'being a whore'- yea- or an actor, who woos onstage so well he marries his co-star (and vice versa). It's this aspect of Lawrence's character that resonates with writers such as Laura Bogart:

These [Hunger Games] books illustrate why PTSD is—as my former shrink once put it—the gift that keeps on giving: Nobody will be trustworthy, not entirely. Not when our parents and our governments, the very people who were supposed to protect us (or at least not cause us harm) are the ones who’ve thrown us in the midst of swinging fists and tracker jacker stings. How can we ever believe in anyone, even when we know (intellectually, at least) that we should? And if we can’t believe in anyone, why should we be anyone worth believing in?  The Hunger Games trilogy gives an arrow-strike of a pulse to what Genet called “the irreducibility of terror.”.  (The Nervous Breakdown, 3/12)

This level of absolute failure of trust in authority makes Games more than a metaphor for Vietnam and/or school bullying. When I first heard about Hunger Games I instantly got mad that something could get so popular without me knowing about it beforehand, and also I thought it was a ripoff of Battle Royale. Now I'm okay with all that, because what the film's endurance test grind most reminded me of wasn't that, but Sydney Pollack's existential period pain-a-thon, They Shoot Horses Don't They? (1969, an earlier post on it here).

Like Hunger Games, Horses involves average, starving, broke-ass poor citizens entering a grueling but possibly lucrative Depression-era dance competition as couples, two-by-two, as if upon a massive, hellish ark. The film records their signing-in, health check-ups, coaching, etc, before the competition begins, so by the time it starts we're already antsy for the inevitable pain-a-thon. As the cruel hours of the competition drag into weeks, sponsors are courted from amongst the gathered gawkers. In Games, Jennifer Lawrence feigns reciprocation for her less agile fellow entrant Josh Hutcherson because the rubes love a romance (her real boyfriend wasn't picked in the lottery); in Horses, dancing couple Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin--who barely met before signing up--get married right on the dance floor for the same reason, even though at that point they no longer even like each other, they do it just for presents from the rubes, pots and pans they can hock once the contest ends. In both films, after many torturous days and nights, the final survivors are so exhausted they're barely recognizable to themselves or us, and of course that's just what the ghoulish audience loves to gawk at... in both worlds. (2)

As in Hunger Games, Horses is keen on issues of food and starvation and the ample servings available to the participants vs. the starving cheap seat audience. Hunger's blue-haired (ugh) emcee (Stanley Tucci) compares poorly against Gig Young's award-winning dance marathon host. Both films don't really end so much as drift away from us, giving us the sense our hero is just heading off into the next nerve-wracking scenario, and we're heading back to ours, already in progress.

In short, fellow kids, if you're looking for something cool and weird that will illustrate your own life anxiety in a profound and sexy way, something that fits the dog-eat-cat mentality of Hunger Games, Netflix the '69 Horses, and ponder the eerie similarity.... to your own cursed existence, in your own cursed country, and your own cursed show, in your own accursed mind.

(1) Groucho's famous telegram to Friar's Club: "PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION. I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB THAT WILL ACCEPT PEOPLE LIKE ME AS A MEMBER".
2. Depression era dance competitions were eventually banned as inhumane - but--this being the age before welfare and food stamps-- at least they were fed between rounds.

The Incredible Melting Marlon (REFLECTION IN A GOLDEN EYE)

"It just occurred to me, you don't believe I want to repent, is that it? Did it ever occur to you that some people might be all repentance and no sin? I may start a mission to help your kind. Come all ye repentants and let us bring a little sin into your lives." -- Sky Masterson (Guys and Dolls)

It's hard to believe the same actor who played Sky Masterson so nimbly in the film version of GUY AND DOLLS would want to suffer through something so repressed as the role of Major Pendleton in REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967). Psychosexually Freudian in the extremis, it's from a time (McCullers wrote it in the 1940s) when there was no 'out' of the closet without beatings and jail time. Repression cooked our great American literature in its egg. The sorrows of life are the joys of art, as Oscar Jaffe would say, and now that we're a lot more socially evolved as a nation, are there really any authors who can crack it wide open like Carson and Tennessee? 

I'd love to love the GOLDEN EYE, as I love most of John Huston's work and it has so many things going for it, but not all Southern Gothic Freudian hothouse pulp has aged as well as as others. The difference between Carson McCullers and her roster of closeted social misfits vs. those of her friend, the great Tennessee Williams, is as sweaty summer when it's too hot to move vs. a cool evening with mint julep and minimal mosquitoes. I'd rather watch Richard Burton swill his way through the scenery in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA for the 37th time than watch Brando soak up the masochistic vapors while his wild stallion wife Liz Taylor (her best line, whispered into Marlon's ear: "Son, were you ever taken out in the street and thrashed by a naked woman?") cavorts with (an equally-unhappily) married (to a bonkers Julie Harris) Lt. Colonel (Brian Keith). Meanwhile a doe-eyed private (Robert Forster) rides naked on her horse and breaks into her room to smell to paw through her underwear while she sleeps. Brando is (of course) in a separate bedroom but he's noticed Forster, and--in his repressed, isolated, sexually frustrated funk, Brando's Major Pendleton mistakes the stalker private's attentions as queer signals towards his own sweaty, obsessive self. Tragedy, of course, ensues. 

There's lots of flustered, coded triangles with old McCullers and her tales of sweaty misbegotten love-starved obsessives, yet for all its litany of perversions and Baby's First Freud symbolism, GOLDEN EYE all rawther airless. The title refers to an idol, unmoving, dead, but all-seeing. Such is the major, or maybe the sun, or, well, you know how dirty double entendres are the very core and existence of the South. Maybe I just don't like it because I was forced to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in high school and it skeeved, depressed, and annoyed me throughout. I felt a great thirst, as if all my senses had dulled so everything tasted like sulfur-vinegar and there was no air conditioning, and maybe I was depressed and skeeved by my English teacher's weird teeth as she made us all read. But maybe aside from that Pavlovian association, I dislike McCullers because there's never an ecstatic, crazy release-- no urinating on Ms. Fellowe's luggage or iguanas, or cathartic moments where all the masks come off, ala Williams' work.

I guess that's probably my bias because I lurve lurve lurve Tennessee Williams, He would have flushed out the mythic connections for Huston, made the thing a wee clearer, so that the mythic dimension vibrant, relevant, alive with cognizance of mortality and archetypal forces kick down a door and let in in a kind of truth beyond reality. For GOLDEN, the mythic 'eye' component seems like an afterthought, something already dead and only briefly unburied before paraded listlessly around the pasture. The story seems to be content with a through-line of horsey-riding sex symbolism that's almost as overwrought and existentially nauseating as EQUUS. 

Any similarity to the hindquarters of a horse is strictly intentional.

It behooves us to remember how the whole Freud analysis thing had swelled to super hugeness in the 50s,  thanks to the the dawn of suburbia, the space race, and the Kinsey Report. Thanks to freedom from their old world parents, the soldiers and wives in the burbs experienced a robust sexual unbridling, as if a field of horses were un-broken and kicked out the fence to run free and trample any cowboy in the way (or so it seems, I wasn't there). Huston embodied that unbridling in real life before but he loved literature and as a director, depended on the kind of writers (like Williams) who had, as he himself had done, faced oblivion via a war, or bullfighting, or whaling, hunting tigers, or guzzling booze, with a careless shrug. Huston needed a soul able to write the kind of gutsy harpoon-in-the-eye-of-god prose for his own wings to come out. McCullers may have suffered terrible illnesses and a lavender marriage but--if you're all closeted and repressed and horny and sober and sweaty in your little Filipino houseboy-molesting, nipple-mutilating, cocktails-and-hysteria fashion--why even bother setting your mess in a military school at all? And if it's not going to heat to a boil and runneth over into lurid murders and mob violence, why stage it in the deep South? Even Lillian Hellman knew to include those touchstones. For EYE, there's not much to suggest more than a low simmer of surface kinkiness, and-- immediately upon boiling--the film concludes with a weird camera movement and the last lines of the novel (I guess?) plastered over everything. 

And why put Marlon Brando in a role that wastes his talents? Where be his thunderous Marc Antony monologue moment? If you go to the Preakness, do you want to see the best horse just stand still and stare longingly at a carrot? Not that Brando's sad little bits of business at the big 'finally, some gay sex' climax aren't brilliantly underplayed, deeply sad, and bitterly hilarious, but they come too late. And then it ends abruptly with a ghastly bit of repetitive panning camera and onscreen text from the book that tries to be horrific and ironic but is just clumsy.

The eye offends thee, no?

The side cast tries their best to humanize these lurid stock types: Julie Harris, a constant scenery-nibbler, plays the wife who cut off her nipples with garden shears (awhile before the film begins), and who engages in god knows what with her weird Filipino houseboy; together they have turned against her cuckolding military husband (but which came first, the infidelity or the reason?). Brian Keith does okay as the indulgent witness and victim of the conspiratorial bond between this female Prospero and her gay Filipino Ariel (he's fine with it as it allows him to scamper off to rendezvous in the hay with Liz). Forster is appropriately inscrutable and smokin' hot as the underwear-sniffing (straight) bareback rider. 

Brando does have one great termite moment: when he's about to give a lecture on Patton to his gathered cavalry cadets. Suddenly the romance and resonance attached to a great cavalryman like Patton sinks into him and he almost cries, right there in class. For a minute it looks like his whole head is melting down like golden psychedelic spiral sludge. His eyes and lips spread out in a horizontal puddle of darkness and his lips pour over the sides like Donald Duck through a very gradual...  steam....   roller.

Oh Sky, if only you opened that mission....