Just Whoa Stories: Guy Maddin, Canadian Amnesiac: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM (2015)

If you'd wondered casually where Guy Maddin's been all these weeks, months, years, then you haven't read the snootier cineaste tabloids that remind us he's traveled the world and the eighteen seas shooting weird shorts on weird soundstages with his cool (and/or literally cold) friends. Now he's slung all those shorts together in order to re-witness the allegorical birth of cinema: its slow crawl out of the silent fallopian Méliès ocular orifice, its uncooked bullet monocle pace as it crosscuts through Intolerance valleys, its slop to the dusty floor in time to find Jolson belting out "Mammy" as the heavy silence of his meshugginah papa offers naught but silent film barbed wire-rimmed be-spectacled reproach. Too late, old rabbi, wave, Harpo-like, into the collapsing iris as thou wilt, but thou shalt not not speak again! Cinema is born as howling amnesiac, its cries washed away in rhtythm of the celluloid train tracks. 

The tracks of the celluloid train's trip stop, sharply, suddenly, in 'real life' at a cliff overlooking 70mm Cinemascope and Technicolor. The train you were on ("when you left... Europa") sails off into the red, blue and yellow orbs of early color TV projectors, no longer track-bound, but on wings of surround sound. But Maddin has gotten off at the border. Maddin shuns everything except the old 2-Strip sprocket train trod by the Winnipeg forefathers. Down into the trackside gully trundles Guy, to pick up the undeveloped scraps of discontinued stock, the 'ends' tossed by wasteful cinematographers, the old combustible silver nitrate that boils and twists in the heat of the projector lamp, but cooks down real nice into twisty jewelry. 

Then, wondering what kind of Brakhage-based nonlinearity cinema might have grown up on had the silent-to-sound conversion gone differently, Maddin sets to wandering the largely unexplored land betwixt German expressionism and post-nouvelle vague hipster retro meta-narrative. Tip-toeing down the slope below the sprocket tracks and into the tulip beds of the unconsciousness, out the shutter, through the gate, and into the blackness beyond any flicker fusion threshold, he tallies the dreams of everyone who ever fell asleep on a speeding train (ala... Europa), and finds a new form of cinematic vision, one not so very moored to the speed of rotating locomotive reels, 24-frames per second, one that savors instead the speed bumps on the track, that savors flicker from the shutter that gives the illusion of a single moving image. The landscape, scrolling past outside the window, gets to keep its cigarette burns, its scratches and tape marks, its mismatched rear screen size ratios (waiting commuters seen the compartment window loom large as ogres). The passing scenery freezes and starts burning up under the blazing light of the projector until it's all bright white light. The house lights come on, the whiteness seems to spread all through the theater, and even out into the street outside (Winnipeg! Snow!) The audience groans like groggy nappers. They refuse to leave, or to fully wake, until the light burns so bright the hair on their arms singes. 

Maddin cures his characters of their psychiatric ills by showing them their inner children, hidden in closets, he gives them melted copper nitrate booster shots. He pays a visit to one of his favorite old Boards of Canada-produced pock-marked classroom instructional 16mm films; he has a dream that John Berryman was right.... there, in the fluoride, crossing the racing lines and looking both ways before learning how to take a bath. Here come mothers or actresses paid to wear motherly clothes, scrubbing us so thoroughly we can feel Liv Ullman's breathing on the screen of our thin skin. But in our shame we then notice the horrified rubes peeping through the sideshow curtains at our Oedipal naked soapy infant nakedness! 

A mere dissolve later and we're an old man doomed to die in an abyss of black tail leader. Mama, if we hadn't flinched at their rube-y gawking, would we still be young?

Infancy = Amnesia! 

A good dreamer doesn't know he's dreaming (for he'd wake), nor a character that he's fiction (for we'd wake, and only Brecht or Godard would want that). But in Maddin's world, consciousness extends beyond both waking and dreaming to a new third thing that's better than either, a kind of long great white northern slumbering. Winnipeg--as he notes in his previous film--has the most sleepwalkers of any city. Thus he is unusually bestowed with the gift of mixing film viewing with 'living' in a film as the ultimate in real viewing. Characters in most films are aware of the importance of keeping from the audience their full awareness of the mise-en-scene frame boundaries. They don't need a silver nitrate fireball held right against their mother's temple to keep them from squawking that it's all a gag. They don't want us to stir from our slumber because--to them--we are like the semi-slumbering couch potato titans in Cabin in the Woods, or the languid Red Wolves in the cave the lumberjack infiltrates to rescue Margot. One disgruntled click of a button and everyone on this 'train' will cease to exist.

But still these characters set about seeing you get that bath, scrubbed by that pretty maid. The rube at the roadshow remembers but you don't remember him at all. Future generations will see you in your bath, but now the colors will have all turned to rust. If you're in a Guy Maddin movie, that rust has happened ahead of time,  just far enough for your nightmare third-eye fevered brain to hallucinate patterns upon the bubbling Ektachrome shower curtain into which your silhouette dissolves. It's just enough to distract you, so the skeleton insurance defrauders can lull you into a gentle trance. Your worthless squirming signature on a piece of paper is all they need. Sign and they'll stop pestering you! Sign....shhhh... ine. Initial there and sleeep on....dream and slumber forward into the ever chugging night--sleep while moving faster than you could run. The track culls you forth like a ticking clock, scrubbing blackness from the pink skin of the sky by force of the tick-tock habit. What else does the world turn for, if not lack of other options? Has anyone convinced it to stop twirling like a mad idiot around the sun, to slow its roll and stop unwinding itself? They don't bother to try anymore. We're stuck 'orbiting' the sun like a moth around a light fixture, and it's all mom's fault. We get desperate to burn back up in the white heat of an empty projector, to drink from the sun like a mammary flame fountain and be reborn as an angel... on a new UV-ray disc, the new UV-ray players coming soon - 2034 at the latest.

Every moth who made it past that shade has never regretted it.

Even if their husks are swept up with the dropped popcorn at the end of the night, those moths had that one shining moment... and they're still here. We can smell their burnt impression on that mighty orb. The light's off now, the smell is gone, but the show goes on, repeating every two hours tomorrow starting at 11 AM, until the late show lets you out into a parking lot that's as still as a tomb. Gradually the smell fades, but the memory lingers, and the film won't decompose, not with so much cold. And so, to bed. The road home is waiting for you... come on, pal, fall.. asleep... so the orgy.. can begin, right under your sleeping nose.

Margot (Clara Furey) of the Ridden Red Wolves

Baffled Woodsman (Roy Dupuis)

The orgy is, Kafka and Lacan and De Mille all say, an act. It's performed not enjoyed, and it's performed only for you, the one who misses it. It exist only for you to feel you're missing something - that's your gift. The accident on the road that gives JG Ballard a bloody boner, that's why the road is there. It's your one consolation gift upon exiting the cinema of perfect oceanic union with Mother Night and her comforter abyss. No matter what happens here, whether you enter the sunshine and arbeit macht marks with daddy Sarastro and his golf monk posse, or just hang out at home like an idiot and watch another movie, know this: you will never get that blissful pre-egoic union back. Not until the next show, but even then, the show is about missing it. We can only wish we didn't know this sad fact, we men who aren't coke dealers, that the orgy is only ever, just now, over.

But with a little meditation-- and/or Lacan and/or addiction recovery--under our belts, we may one day accept the insider view: that the angst of missing the orgy is all that keeps me, you, us, it, whatever, from breaking down in abject torn-and-frayed pin scratch despair. Those who participate in every orgy, who live at the 'mansion' and drown each night in coke and bunnies, imagine their despair when they have to go home alone on a Greyhound full of obese tourists? Their sobs are heard three states away... Was it better to have not been to one at all? What does one bring back from the orgy, once one runs out of bros to boast to? Nothing but STDs and regrets, and longing for a feeling that maybe never existed, but nonetheless makes your forthcoming small normal joys seem like mockery. Hey, maybe... maybe you were there at the orgy, the one I missed, and you just don't remember.

If you remember me there, then you definitely weren't there, because I wasn't at the same one you were, cuz I don't remember seeing you there, or anyone. The ones I went to were.... how do we say... unter-attended? Yes, iss that the phrase?

Skeleton Insurance Defrauders (themselves)

If you started reading the above and thought, good god he's being awfully flighty, then just START READING HERE:

The stories of The Forbidden Room are seventeen or so of the shorts Maddin filmed at museums and historic sound stages around the world, woven together in a grand fusion of Brakhage-Decasia film decomposition and Freudian psychological disintegration. The stories enlarge and swallow each other so that one leads to the other and each new character in the last story has their own story they must tell, on and on and inward and inward until it finally hurls five crosscut D.W. Griffith's Intolerance climaxes into the Russian doll vortex of Jerzy Has Wojciech's The Saragossa Manuscript. Everything congeals and fuses itself back into an old man's bathtub submarine, full of compressed explosive jelly... to pancakes full of oxygen, and to the wild forest, to 'Canada' as it exists in the mind - the maple syrup and mounties to the USA's apple pie and baseball.

And there, in the endless forests of the Great White North, the woodsman forced to watch his Red Riding Hood luxuriating post-orgy (he missed it) amidst the wolf pack, like she's the hot Kurtz of 40s Jungle Jim lost tribes.

And like his best work and that of only a handful of other filmmakers--Lynch, Bunuel, Antonioni, Martel--Maddin's style defies easy description or analysis, and so falls into the collective amnesia of the 20th century, coming at us the closest thing yet to the baroque yet strangely cheap look of our own dreams. The only one who can tell us what it all means is a Freudian analyst, smoking in his train compartment (Forbidden Room includes a 'train psychiatrist' - like a ship's doctor, on the 'Berlin-Columbia' Express) while trying to seduce a young zombified girl through hypnosis, to cure her of

Amnesia!

Amnesia is, I explain to my students (when I have them - which is never), the key to understanding not just this film but all art films. This is not the search for small meanings, or even big ones, but nones, nones meanings. If film itself--the physical, ever-decaying reels of it, most of which are deteriorating in dark hidden chambers deep under long closed cinemas and Nazi bombing rubble--was to go into psychoanalysis, under the care of a licensed emulsion scratch that grew and shrank (fee-wise) according to the size of the epiphanies realized, then this film would be that breakthrough session. The result? Film has a message for us: Hey, it says, sorry for misleading you. You, my watchers, who choose to watch me, the cinema, instead of living some full dumb life playing sports or pursuing fame, money, power, altruism: sorry for leading you astray. It realizes now (that it's too late) it had no right to dominate us so completely. It took advantage of our vulnerability to the dark and glowing images, the bulb using its wattage to hypnotize a nation of moths, and it made certain deals with our unconscious we didn't even know about. We didn't know when we signed on that line, just what the contract entailed.

But now cinema is sorry, and so--here in Maddin-land--cinema self-flagellates with rust and emulsion scratches and cigarette burns, because it still wants you back! And you stay, because those burns are beautiful, hypnotic. They can't help but console and cajole and cosign your trust, which they will then defraud!! Drop that pen! Rust! Rust while you can!

The emulsion scratch shrink, now widened into a flickering blue-green band down the right side middle, smiles as the client image dissolves.

Coincidental double Amnesia: 

I started watching some Canadian sci-fi show on Netflix called Dark Matter after Forbidden Room ended, which tells the story crew who wakes up from frozen sleep on a space ship and don't know who they are or what they're supposed to be doing. But amnesia is not just Canada's identity crisis, it is the root of all film viewing. We come to each new character in any narrative as an amnesiac viewer, picking together details from the surroundings - i.e. a sketchy unshaven dude in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets walking down the street in the middle of the night while ominous music plays --all those signifiers tell you loads about him, none of which may be true; maybe he's just going to get milk for his mom's sick cat, and not to break into your house or sell crack to your infant daughter. (you could be reaching for "stand your ground" laws if you get too caught up in perceived signifiers rather than actual immediate threats). Artists like Maddin see right through the elusive reality of false signifiers by making them all opaque. We needn't pretend to know what's going on if we don't speak the language, talking the same English but in a foreign accent as if that will magically convey our wish to enter the tongue's forbidden chambers, to access the king's inner ear, each ossicle a connecting tunnel around a rickety carnival funhouse ride choo-choo track leading down into a roiling surf of lava and beer foam.

Playing around with speed and reversals, decomposing blobs around a lighted figure in a dark room seem to be breathing in and out of dissolving bubbling lava-like abstraction and--almost like free association--BOOM there's a volcano. And while each of the interlocked stories and subroutines feels familiar, there's no time or inclination to really identify or understand: a woodsman comes into the forbidden cave to rescue his lady love from a wolf pack in an inverted Red Riding Hood myth, he thinks. But they're all dead and she's shaking as if possessed, and then, what? Rather than speak on the crime of squid theft, the volcano lectures the gathered tribe on the impossibility of gaseous emissions speaking coherently.

I'm going to rear back and take a non-educated guess that the Canadian gift for portraying amnesia stems from its identity crisis as the middle child between louche America and stiff upper England.  "America" --as you see it today--no longer has a national fixed identity beyond our psychic conservative/liberal split, but at least we know who we aren't. Canada has niceness, pancakes, dry ginger ale, weird football rules, mounties, eskimos, woodsmen, better wax museums on their side of Niagara Falls... but it's too cold up there to have much else.  We in the US imagine Canada a bit like Alaska stretched out wide and got socialized health care. Cold and underpopulated, mostly forest, a kind of giant air pocket full of magical snowy sky over our heads, mappily speaking...

Until the movie starts...

by which I mean we trek with snow shoes and sled dogs between Leni Reifenstahl's alpine romances, baroque Russian coronation ceremonies, and South American mining accidents, until the sky falls below us like a blanket with a Buster Keaton hole in the center.


I'm an American but I still love most Maddin films, at least the first half, until their lack of coherent narrative onus leaves me drowsy, but it's helped me to have seen each one with a different girlfriend, and I've loved the ones I saw with girls from Europe or Buenos Aires, but not the ones with American girls - who don't get it. The last film of Maddin's I saw was with Branded on the Brain, with live orchestral accompaniment (with Cripsin Glover narrating in person) and it was okay, the (American) girl I was with was 'meh' about it. I enjoyed more the Saddest Music in the World at the Landmark in company of my Swiss-French mistress who was suitably impressed that I could even explain it. Before that I saw Tales of the Gimli Hospital at a midnight screening in Seattle circa 1990 with my girl from Carmel, NY. This was back before anyone knew anything about Maddin other than his film was a Canadian surrealist black and white homage ala Eraserhead. I liked the framing device with the radiator but I had a roaring headache and my girl was all pissed because I brought a flask and reeked of booze. I thought Careful was a masterpiece of psychosexual Freudian deep ice floe plunging that I saw with my Argentine ex-wife, and we swooned as one. Is there a connection?

I can't even wade a half our into Careful nowadays, though, it seems way too pleased with itself and there's one towhead too many.

Maybe this: Americans, even me, can become bored by alienation and Lost in Translation-style dissonance when there's nothing to grab onto. We're not used to having our desires toyed with. Our craving for some kind of narrative thread, some kind of familiar signifier, to orient ourselves by and lose ourselves in, is not something we admit is an addiction. We think movies should bring us out of our heads, to take us on a 'ride,' not bury the only escape route in avalanches of ice. When a European art movie toys with this desire (as in Godard or Antonioni) it eventually drive us half-mad and into boredom when not in the right mood or company.

This boredom speaks not so much to our diminished attention span as much as our addiction to reproduced images and sound. Our loss of contact with the real has become awkward, like that friend we should have called last week when they got out of the hospital, but we waited too long so now just thinking about calling them makes us break out in a cold sweat. We've alienated ourselves from the 'real' to the point we resent anyone who uses our beloved imaginary-symbolic realm as a tool to bring us back to it. As a result, we're burdened by the constant need to have the TV on, or the radio, or ear buds, or (for me) a white noise machine. Silence and emptiness are too tomb-like to endure. The existential lonesome nipping at our heels barks so quiet the blood flowing through our ears is deafening; we latch onto any promise of escape, any noise, long as its loud and/or steady. Up north they don't seem to need that. Maybe loneliness couldn't find them in all that forest and had given up. Or the wind howls constant like a lullaby.

FRAGMENT!

Maddin works in the realm of dreams and 'Kino,' but whose dreams? He picks some unconscious realm where Eisenstein and Oscar Micheaux crank out Klopstockian anti-war propaganda, a place connected directly to the zone where narrative identity shifts and bends and follows no clear linear path, or logical sense, but everything seems familiar... little signifiers that add up to little more than Jackie Treehorn's penis drawing in Big Lebowski ---phallically hip, but sans an address. So if you get hung up somewhere in this maze then your stuck for the duration, beating your head against a wall until that room of the game is 'passed' as if by some anguished miracle, and the detox can begin, level two (or '2').

Maddin's best moments, for me, always occur when he dares to go deep into the psychosexual, as in the mother-son/ father-daughter incest bonds amidst the isolated Reifenstahl-ish Alpine hamlet of Careful.  Existential frozen misery sagas like Gimli Hospital are burdened by too many scenes of fat guys eating or starving and so forth (as I recall, from 25 odd years ago, drunk in Seattle at midnight). When narrative expectations are thwarted, there needs to be someone or some place pretty to look at, something that won't demoralize our senses while we wait for our attention span to widen and our sanity to disgruntle itself. For example, in Red Desert there is the beauty of Monica Vitti; Catherine Deneuve beautifies the madness in Repulsion; Anna Karina has a giant head in My Life to Live.  In Maddin's best work there is always a good center to hold, ala Saddest Music in the World's Isabella Rossellini and her beer stein glass legs launching the switch to color, and there was the sad music competition, a familiar narrative we can become involved to the point we can rest our European 'art' eyes and flip over to our American 'entertainment' eyes. If we have to be weaned along the way, well we can at least see our mom as she was then, gorgeous and more than five times our height, towering above us like an Easter Island moai crossed with a fairy princess. When she leaves, we may be terrified, alone as soon as the light switch hits, pissing ourselves, afraid to go to the bathroom on our own, waiting for the all-absolving warm pink dawn to dispel the nightmare that is darkness and quiet (for there's always some tiny...scratching... little... noise deep in the muffling silence, and in the thick black of night, phantom grey shapes).


But soon we've learned to hold it in, like good little boys and girls who paid attention during that instructional film on potty training. And the figure we so venerated in our cribs starts getting smaller every year of our own growth, like Alice on a slow-slow-slowly kicking-in mushroom, from that towering Easter Island moai to little old lady with a paisley shawl.


That said, Forbidden Room zips by way too fast in parts. Maddin rushes to cram all the shorts in and give every actor he used during his long globe hop a shot or two. My favorite critic Kim Morgan has only a split second appearance with a wolf skin (that I saw); I imagine it would be quite worthwhile to get this on Blu-ray if it includes all the other short films from which this be culled and more. Because my favorite is still that short, Heart of the World, which my Buenos Aires girl and I saw on the big screen at Angelika before.... what the hell was the main feature? My Buenos Aires girl and I were so thrilled I don't think we even paid attention to the film that came after. I wish I could remember what it was...  but I can't even remember who I am except I'm an American.

Because even now I'm hearing the siren call of TCM behind me, in the other room, as I write this, left on, all the time, to beat back the silence. Hey! It's Joan Crawford bitching about losing some part, some romantic leading man cringing on his side of the Cinemascope screen...even that... even that terrifying Woman's Face of hers... hair coiled around her head, tight and butch, like a face hugger alien reaching out to the warmth of applause like plant tendrils to the sunlight, then retracting in curlers when it dies and she fades to scary coat hanger parody, even as her mask becomes a harsh severe horror, that flat dark pink lipstick and trowel grey foundation, even she is better than the abyss.

Also spracht der filmdose! 

The Film Cannister tells of his rich childhood: Udo Kier played his ghost dad and like all ghost dads is always erupting like burns in the emuslion, ja? He keeps making final farewells to his son, leaving him a can of fake mustaches with which to fool his blind wife in any Oedipal domestic clinches that might result after sufficient time has elapsed. Trouble is: Udo, with ghost beer and a friend he met in the afterlife, comes back again and again. Dad, thirty feet high, seen through a train window rear screen projection, passing us a can of mustaches to call our own, with Udo's soulful eyes to swim in. Are we not men, we who wake up from drunken black-outs? As children in the night? Wearing canned mustaches?

Every new viewing of any DVD comes with an FBI/Interpol warning -a sign you've slipped again, passed out, must begin anew. The trick: don't admit you don't remember. Just feel your way along, acting like you know every detail of last nights drunken boorishness. If people seem to know you, from Chicago, when you were in some sadomasochistic cabaret act, just sleep with them and let your razor speak on your behalf if they cannot please you sexually. God knows what else they saw you do, and in what aspect ratio. Better no witnesses. Jess Franco knows, for you. And you alone, in the dark, with a squid in your mouth, still struggling like that Korean Elektra complex en verso Oldboy. That's psychosexual mustache fraud, Charlotte Rampling, and the best present any man can give a woman is a sculpture of Janos, the god of doorways. Janos, the guiding spirit of The Forbidden Room! Janos: for there are many doorways to this Room and many beginnings and always the rewinding to the FBI warning and mustache-dabbed memory, and the black paint dripping in the dark corridor where memory was supposed to be.

Thinking about this movie is so close to watching the actual movie itself that both seem to dissolve when one does either: the rusted emulsion and dissolving nitrates breathe and pulsing like real lava, even when the pause button is on, like Ingrid Bergman gazing into the volcano...in STROMBOLI, either jump in or move to the left, honey, the line is all the way down the slope, and winding like an unspooling film roll snake.

Oh, and I almost forgot... It's HILARIOUS!

Death to Realism!! eXistenZ + Oculus Rift Vs. Marcel Duchamp + Al Texas Jazeera Chainsaw America Massacre

Cronenberg's 1999 mindbender eXistenZ grows in its many-tentacled relevance with every passing year, but this one's the cake-melter. Its initial release date, lest we forget, was the height of internet growth, right before the dot.com bubble burst; it was to us what 1928 was to capitalism. Virtual reality was just beginning to figure itself out and William Gibson cyberpunk adaptations or offshoot homages were popping off right and left: Donnie Mnemonic, Strange Days, New Rose Hotel. The big fear on the horizon was the turning of the century clock to year 2000. We worried the internet was going to explode and cripple the world. We stocked up on bottled water and duct tape; we were excited! We loved The Matrix but other virtual reality films were a bore --since nothing was ventured - it was just fiddling around in empty dream sequences unless the threat of actual physical death could be incorporated. We bought Morphius' sketchy "the body can't live without the mind" adage so that the hero's journey could have some consequence but that adage didn't hold true by the dull sequels. I remember seeing the first one, Reloaded, and walking out during the 'big' fight with a thousand cloning agents vs. Neo, as neither side was ever going to win or lose - so why were they bothering? I went out for a cigarette, came back, they were still at it... and the franchise died in its CGI black leather bootstraps.

Now, 16 years after it came and went in theaters, eXistenZ  seems the real sequel to The Matrix, or rather, the version of the virtual reality future that came true. The dot.com bubble burst long ago; nothing happened when the clocks ticked 1/1/00, or 12/21/12. The dew erased its data from the lily drive. What a bummer! But with disillusionment always comes enlightenment and an enhanced sense of seen-it-all savvy. So now the first The Matrix seems dated and naive. Its conception of the 'Real' as grungy and depressing (lots of grotty grey dreadlocks, cream of gruel ("everything the body needs"), leaky pipes, cold grates, robot threats (ala the Terminator) is as fake as the artificial reality (corporate skyscrapers, busted down telephone booths) its body needs to be believable as artifice (i.e. the fake real needs to seem more real than the 'real'). What worked before the crash now seems the most naive of tricks. This is because, in the past two months or so, the symbolic and imaginary are trumping the real to the point reality is at best a third class passenger to the symbolic and imaginary realms.

For examples of the way popular art (imaginary) usurps reality via the news (symbolic) consider: the storm of bad press over the all-white 2014 Oscar noms; the storm of pro-and-anti-American Sniper sentiment; the sheer weirdness of North Korea's cyber-attack on Sony over The Interview; the "Je suis Charlie" bloodbath. There is very little real left for us in the first world, saturated in screens as we are, but at the same time as we're losing our virtual reality because the third world is declaring war on it. Our symbolic and imaginary dimensions are being assaulted, leaving only the horrible misery of the unmediated real, one left too long untended. Imagine, for example, if Hitler declared war on a photo of Churchill, or tried and sentenced a newspaper to prison (not the editor or publisher, the actual paper). We are dealing with a whole new kind of radical Islamist reactionary --so anti-graven image that any kind of representational (non-decorative) art is destroyed once it falls within their purview. We're being forced to look at the mess we've left:

ALL REAL AND NO IMAGINARY/SYMBOLIC MAKES JACK A HOMICIDAL BOY

To most westerners, 'thou shalt not kill or steal' are the only commandments worth fussing over. Adultery, lying to your parents, bowing down to graven images, these are negligible sins at best, their potential for evil dispelled by a simple apology or late night prayer. But not everybody is as 'evolved' as we (think we) are. We, here in the USA, we, who seem never more than a swing state away from The Handmaid's Tale, we think we know best. But the bottom line is, if say you believe in your religion, how zealously do you cling to its tenets? Aren't freedom of thought, education, and expressions of independence merely rationalizing masks worn by the seven deadly sins?

Al Jazeera America welcomes you...

eXistenZ asks these kind of big questions, obliquely, of course, and in the process reverses the Matrix's covert pro-luddite terrorist endorsement.  Told as an immersive interactive virtual reality game that's interrupted by a terrorist threat on the life of the designer, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Cronenberg's film is a fine illustration of how western culture's ever-widening hall of virtual mirrors keeps edging out the 'Real' to the point images provoke real life threats just as much as vice versa. The terrorists even call themselves 'realists.' They seek to destroy the game and specifically Geller, in order to save our collective sanity. The game's artificial reality is so vivid that the realists worry our breadcrumb trail back to sanity will disappear altogether, resulting in a collective psychotic break.

And they're right. Man should never go so far out of consensual reality he snaps the cord and can't find his way back. It's dangerous work, even going out that far, and not for amateurs: creative thinkers are scouts and foragers, ambush-blockers, spies, counter-intelligence entrappers, stray rounder-uppers. Vacation from the real is the purpose of recreational drugs in a social sense, but they shouldn't fall into the hands of kids or lightweights or amateurs, dopes who can't take a wave of paranoia without cracking up or who are unable resist the momentary urge to jump out a window. If the drug taker just wants to escape and never return at all, they don't become a help to society's progress into the unknown, but an eventual threat, a burden on the mental health care industry. They wind up floating helplessly through space like Syd Barrett, or Brian Jones, or Don Birnim, or Dr. X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes.

Or you.

Ostracized by the social order, locked up in a psych ward and shot up with tranquilizers, you'll never make Madeline Stowe believe you're from the future when you're drooling, Bruce! So if Allegra's game gets too real, if it tries the Matrix trick of transcending the real through the performance of realness, then the entire world becomes a Brian Jones or Syd, lost in the windmills of their mind, maybe forever. "Is this still the game?" asks one bystander after all the presumed layers get peeled back. And of course, the worry is that no answer at this point can be ever be correct again. Indeed, perhaps it never could (outside of Canada).

Savvy Post-modernists could have saved these luddite terrorists the worry from the get-go, however, for they know reality's been slipping away since 1917, and already long gone, and what's more, letting it go has resulted in no great loss. If the realist terrorists wanted to smash something they should have started with 'R. Mutt's' "Fountain" (below) which won sufficient Parisian surprise to mark the date. Taking a pompously pronounced sip of their absinthe, the post-modern critics soon noted Duchamp's original point was drowned out in the bidding war over that urinal, and that eventually Duchamp had to hide his readymades in inconspicuous places around the gallery, so no collector could find them and thus their true artistic flowering occur.

This he did with "Trap (Trébuchet)" 1917 (intentionally unpictured), an unobtrusive coatrack that went unnoticed through the entirety of his show.  Success! Later, Andy Warhol turned lazy silkscreens (made by his assistants, signed by his double) into the height of overpriced post-Duchamp balderdash. And now, so many illusory moments later, it's not ask 'what post-modernism can do for reality', it's 'what can reality do for post-modernism?' The answer: it can only bow before the Marcel's urinal and drink deep from the milk of the prodigal golden calf returned from the mountaintop with a dozen teraflops of commandments, each one animated with a how-to instructional video that's right now writing its way right into your subconscious, deleting your once vibrant imagination to make room.

"Fountain" - Marcel Duchamp / eXistenZ gaming console

"(as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle." - Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

The Void/Real Thing, as Zizek extrapolates from Lacan above, is approachable only via the fake spectacle, the Perseus Medusa shield, i.e. TV is the only way reality can be. To confront the thing in itself means total annihilation - the terrorist bomb being the be-all end all critique.

But the mistake of the 'realist' terrorists is to think that by killing the fake spectacle they have aligned themselves with the power of the Real Thing/Void, that its tragic raw horror dimension will become their ally - that the bomb is 'theirs' (their group claiming credit for it to the papers as if worried some other movement will steal their work). It's a big mistake to identify with fire demons - they still won't like you - and they will bite your fingers off when you fail to connect their wires properly.

On the other hand, identifying purely with the spectacle, as most of America does, myself included, isn't good either, because the spectacle doesn't mirror the Void/Real at all, but its fictional potential, its imaginary 'rush'. We only notice the eruption of the actual real when we walk past armed soldiers in the train station or when we raise our arms for a scan at the airport. Aside from that, unless we happen to be caught in their blast radius, terrorists are just images on CNN, delivering anti-image violence to America through images. Like it or not (and really, it's the main reason they do it), the terrorist's actions are used by the news channels to sell air time for pharmaceuticals, cars, and investment brokers (the three keys to a long future).

This same formula mirrors the below chart illustrating the future and past of immersive video game tech, only with ISIS struggling to deliver the void of the real onto more than just CNN, to blow our walls and electricity clear away and force us to watch the slaughter of our kin in first person, up close, to essentially provide a feedback loop that erupts from news channel sound byte coherence and explodes our eyes and ear drums, paradoxically opening our senses to the real ' Real' before they're overloaded and extinguished.

Source: WIKI

the end product

 As the terrorists endeavor to widen the last remaining sliver of real' in our lives by breaking the input-output loop, we strive to narrow it still further by living totally within a comfortable cocoon of cables, letting our reality go all to seed from inattention and only considering the terrorists as any kind of actual threat to that cocoon, and with good reason. Perhaps it is because of their rejection of the imaginary and symbolic realms that fundamentalists mistake satire / humor for genuine attack, and why I become so disinclined to hear about either of them. I'm worse than anyone as far as not caring to see the suffering. I turn the channel at the first wide-eyed orphan or emaciated dog commercial, no matter how riveting the show surrounding it. CNN understands that need to escape, to not look into the sad suffering eyes of the puppy dog anti-Medusa. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, shows images like the ones above, of life in Syrian refugee camps, the carnage of bombings of Palestine, all the violence and despair which CNN doesn't show (and vice versa). Watch Al Jazeera and CNN in alternating segments and maybe you can get a proper idea of our whole fucked world, the Middle East as a petri dish microcosm but who wants that? That's too much real! We need smaller doses of horror, otherwise we're like Scarlett at the makeshift hospital before the intermission in Gone with the Wind: we just keep walking, the sheer magnitude of the 'real' overwhelming our empathy response past the point of ambivalence.

But the converse is true, too: not enough 'real' is just as corrosive, creating a 'real' image dysmorphia. If you ban harsh images, you give them power. Just ask any Brit who was denied Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) for 25 years due to Britain's ban on 'video nasties.' Those nasties became any Brit horror fan's obsession. Nothing gives an image power like enforcing its absence. No actual 'nasty' measured up to the dread associated with not seeing it.

Of all the nasties, though, Texas comes closest to capturing the pure horror of its absence. This is partly because it provides the extra 'real.' The "smash to the head" power it still holds today might have to do with the hell the cast and crew underwent to make it and that's a hard thing to intentionally duplicate. In a way, it rips the screen open to become a whole new thing, a once-in-a-million-tries 'true' horror. Even so, it can't measure up to the potentiality conjured by the image-starved imagination. It comes mighty close though. We see in that house sights beyond what we thought could exist in this country or any country - and all the attempts to recreate it by adding 'more' to its sequels and imitators have failed - more blood and grime only abstracts it, reveals the hand of someone trying too hard to be scary. The decor of the house in Hooper's original is far scarier for its comical attempts to be homey, artistic, genteel even.

Still, want and curiosity are powerful things; images have obscene amounts of power for those denied them, and as the Brit kid squinting to see some bootleg seventh generation dupe of Texas Chainsaw can tell you, the imagination never yet met a blank it couldn't fill in.

SUPERBESTFRIENDS: 

By contrast to the mostly unseen Mohammed, Jesus and the Buddha are omnipresent in figurative representations, providing both a comfort at odd moments and an excuse to keep us out of the real (as in we don't have to imagine anymore --every last bank is filled). Mohammed isn't supposed to be depicted for reasons not unlike what motivates the 'Realist' terrorists in Cronenberg's eXistenZ. I forget which of the Ten Commandments says not to bow down to graven images, but we've been bowing to that shizz for so long we can't stop without someone pulling the plug on the TV, or blowing up the station. I doubt Moses would be on the terrorist's side but, to his rheumy eyes, every animated billboard on Times Square might as well be for Golden Calf margarine. Moses knew you have to be quick and ruthless to maintain a holy order. Cut the advertisements down at the knee, sayeth the lord, Tivo and fast forward through all commercials. Because if you don't, even the Commandment tablets themselves will inevitably be worshipped as graven images, or at the very least bid on as collector's items, spiked with ads ("Citibank presents "Thou Shalt Not Kill") or removed from out in front of a Southern courthouse, not that it's the same thing as violating free speech (the atheists didn't try to kill the sculptor) but it shows us that the same confusion that motivates jihads on cartoonists and hacks on stoner comics also motivates alleged atheists.

Feedin' the masses... with the masses

'Now' back in 1999, newly sober and full of angst--uneducated in the tenets of Lacan--I loved The Matrix and thought eXistenZ was meandering and too much like a rehash of ideas Cronenberg worked over already in Videodrome and Naked Lunch. There's the same harvesting monsters for their organs or glandular secretions (for making drugs in Naked Lunch, biomorphic gaming consoles in Existenz); guns made of organic material (Videodrome); a bewildered protagonist shuffling along after a savvy, sexy woman who knows her way around the new paradigm (Judy Davis in Lunch, Deborah Harry in Videodrome, Jennifer O'Neill in Scanners), a maze of spies and counterspies where, as the talking fly's ass says in Lunch, the best agent is one who is unaware he is an agent at all (hence our hero is caught in the middle and never knows the score); the eXistenZ scene in the garage with Dafoe installing the portal in Jude Law's spine is a mirror to the Naked Lunch scene where the Moroccan man sticks the broken Martinelli in the forge and pulls it out as a giant Mugwump head. And on and on. And at least neither 'drome nor Lunch involved actual gross eating of weird monster things (the sight of which makes Leigh gag - and leaves a bad feeling in the digestive tract of sensitive viewers like myself).

But it's all come true since then. Hasn't it? eXistenZ, I mean? Once we get over the 'using living organic matter for data transmission' stigma and learn how to tap the inner recesses of the pineal gland and bypass the clumsy ear and eye, we'll be exactly there --using third eye visualization energy to craft something our brain can't distinguish from the reality it's used to--and we'll be able to restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, even if what they see and hear is just virtual reality.

 It's got to be coming! It's just too controversial to be public until it's ready. Either way, we've come a long way since The Matrix (1999) or Ralph Fiennes selling other people's bootleg sensory impressions in Strange Days (1995). Virtual reality isn't just for Michael Douglas breaking into a virtual safe in Disclosure (1994) or falling off a roof in The Game (1991), not no more it's not. Cuz this here's real. Unlike Matrix, though, you can't die in reality just because your avatar is killed by a World of Warcraft marauder. It's just a damned game after all and maybe that's part of the problem... there's very little at stake. But is it really so little? Really? Reealleeeee??

 We can't really tell. We just keep waking up out of one reality into another; is that death, or just finishing one more level on a video game with an infinite number of levels, all waiting for us to unlock them. Even if we never figure out how to access them they're all nonetheless on the same disc.

Some have argued that showing bloodshed and trauma repeatedly and sensationally can dull emotional understanding. But never showing these images in the first place guarantees that such an understanding will never develop. “Try to imagine, if only for a moment, what your intellectual, political, and ethical world would be like if you had never seen a photograph,” author Susie Linfield asks in The Cruel Radiance, her book on photography and political violence. Photos like Jarecke’s (above) not only show that bombs drop on real people; they also make the public feel accountable. As David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2003, war photography has “an ability not just to offend the viewer, but to implicate him or her as well.” (The Atlantic "The War Photo No One Would Publish")

STAGING DEATH AS SPECTACLE 

(PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT)

I haven't ever been shot or been in a war, or shot someone or been shot, but I was way into cap gun artillery and pre-paintball war games as a kid in the 70s-early 80s, which I now take to be a child's attempt to experience the moment of life and death even in effigy (the staging of the Real as spectacle). And I've had some profoundly spiritual Lovecraftian transdimensional horror/void plunges since I put guns away and picked up guitars and hookahs. And even after quitting booze I've had some roller coaster reptilian demon devouring soul cleanings that make my worst college acid experiences seem like mild disturbances in the force. And they have stripped my soul clean 'til all that was left was a glowing sunlit circle. And to dismiss these experiences as just manic episodes or a hallucinations is the same as presuming there's no subjective-imaginary component to the experience of death, to dismiss the most profound human experience (NDEs) as nothing more than 'mere hallucinations' of an oxygen-deprived malfunctioning brain. To me that's like saying getting shot in a war is nothing but a physical 3-D space-time event, a metallic sphere entering the organic body and disrupting some biological systems, rather than a terrifying crisis of mind-soul-body, your life flashing before you, things going dark, all in the middle of a confusing smoke-and-shrapnel firefight, i.e. a nightmare beyond the scope of the imagination. There's no atheist in a foxhole, or on a meditation cushion, or the 'Psych Ward' section of a Dead show - because in all three the distractions from the void/real are stripped away.

I don't mean to compare a meditation or a powerful psychedelic drug experience to being in combat but either experience can be pretty damned terrifying and traumatic, so to dismiss any of the three as 'mere hallucination' or 'mere reality' is to convey, clearly, you've never had that experience yourself. If you did then you'd know that what's going on is a deep drinking in of the pure intersubjective real. The horror of constant growth and decay that is our organic, physical world is suddenly grasped on a level that our unconscious barrier mechanism (or symbolic mediation) usually screens or filters out. Without these screens/filters we wind up either penniless spiritual wanderers, trapped in a cult, dead (from jumping off a building, setting ourselves on fire, etc.) or institutionally-committed. But by the same token, if those imaginary-symbolic filters aren't ever compromised or transcended, then we turn into pompous a-holes, didactic pragmatists without, as they say, a clue.

For example: A real sunflower beheld by someone with their imaginary-symbolic blinders on is merely a sunflower - identified against one's inner rolodex of flower names and then dismissed, its full elaborate mystery screened out since it's neither a source of fear (unless you're allergic) or desire (unless some sexy new lover gave it to you). But for someone without those blinders, like a yogi, Buddha, starving artist, tripper, child, or schizophrenic --that sunflower breathes and radiates light and is alive with the little yellow petals around the big stamen center like yellow flames from an eclipsed sun. This radiant crown image is not a 'mere hallucination' though a less enlightened friend might dismiss your enthusiasm, saying "dude, it's just a sunflower, chill out." In fact it is that idea --that the real is completely contained within its symbolic component, that it is 'just' its label--that is the hallucination!

You might tell your dismissive friend that he's trapped in a morass of the purely symbolic-imaginary; that he's traded in his rose-tinted shades so he can fit in with the social order, but as a consequence he'll never be in 'the moment.' You can tell him that what you feel for this flower he can only feel when he buys a very expensive item or paints the bedroom a new color, or gets a new girlfriend, and even then, the feeling is fleeting. Yours is, too, alas. As the signifier chains trap down all sensory impressions sooner or later.

You can tell your dismissive friend that he probably also paradoxically dismisses NDEs (Near Death Experiences) as just dying brain hallucinations, when the reverse is true. This same friend might look at a beautiful mountain vista and say aloud, "it's like a painting." Or, if they witness some eruption of strangeness, perhaps a Native American ceremony in progress as they walk back from the trail, they note that "it's like something out of a movie" i.e. the more 'real' things get, i.e. outside their language's dismissive pincers, the more things get "like a movie" or if some natural vista strikes their eye it must quickly be labeled "like a painting" - its beauty therefore contained and defined, and therefore 'safe.'

And for those on the outside of the purely symbolic-imaginary--the Islamic fundamentalists or eXistenZ's realists--the symbolic-imaginary prison of labels is taken as a real threat, hence the Parisian cartoonist massacre. These people might seem crazy to us but at least they recognize the hypnotic power of the image and do everything in their power to fight its narcotic effect. And yet, if a fundamentalist Islam terrorist considers the hallucinations of the atheist consumer to be a physical threat, then the purity of his conception of the real becomes its own hallucination! He goes to war 'in the real' over a purely symbolic representation (i.e. a cartoon of Mohammed) and through this enters the symbolic (via CNN). For us this would be, in a sense, like arresting Spielberg for depicting war crimes in Schindler's List or demand actors killed in a cannibal movie prove they're not dead.  Or stepping inside the screen of Sherlock Jr.. The Ring, or Purple Rose of Cairo, to blow up the cameraman so no one could follow you.
------

JUDE LAW = TOTAL WALLY

So NOW for my post-1999 eyes and ears, the idea that a newbie to the virtual reality game like Jude Law in eXistenZ would act all amateur hour "oh my god I'm tripping too hard" is not surprising or even that upsetting (it really annoyed me back in 1999). These are the types who have some serious resistance to the 'weird' - they hang out with us (the psychedelic surfers) latching onto some girl or guy they like, but fall prey to the first anxiety that comes along. We called them 'wallies' in the day (see: The Bleating of the Wallies) A voice in their head tells them they're drowning, so next thing you know they're clutching at your lapel, begging you to take them to the emergency room when a moment ago you were both fine and chilling out listening to Hendrix, man, and exploring the vast universe between your thumb and cigarette. They're the types who blab to the cops at the ER, disappear into a rehab or something for six months, and then suddenly show up as anti-drug sermonizers, or worse, narcs.

And who among us in that same situation hasn't heard that same voice in our head, the 'ohmigodi'mDYING' voice? We just know to ignore it, along with all the other panic triggers being pressed, to let them come and go along with the joy and rapture and spirits whispering in our ears. But if you're not prepared for the rush of contradictory signals--every new impression flooring the gas pedal and both fear and desire at once, to the point you want to make love to a candle flame or end table one second and then destroy them the next--then you're like the surfer hypnotized by the size of an approaching groundswell, who gets near-drowned when all he had to do was duck his head under the water for a few seconds.

As Ted (Jude Law) notes after spending a little time in the game:

"I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here."

It's silly to think that of course, even if it's true. No one forced him to play the game. He should stop being a little bitch, be more like Bill Burroughs and realize "the Zone takes care of its own."

There was a stretch of time in 2003 when every day after work I was leaving my physical body and hovering around on the ceiling over my bed, and what sometimes stopped me from merging fully into the next world was the dreaded feeling of suffocation: 'what if I stop breathing while I'm not in my body?' which is kind of dumb, since we don't worry much about that when we go to sleep at night - and in dreams we're just as outside ourselves as I was at the time, and that shit goes on for hours and hours. These excursions of mine only took a ten minutes or so of linear time, though they seemed to go on for hours. It's not like I couldn't snap out of it in a microsecond if my buzzer buzzed. I knew then that the body and mind are built for these excursions. Not all of us are meant to have them, the shamanic near-Brian Jones/Syd Barrett pack separations, but those of us who are, are. And we're meant to come back, and write about them nonstop. so viola! This blog is woven by machine spiders into exiStenCe.

Real (pre-symbolic)

So I came to realize Cronenberg's Naked Lunch's InterZone has always been true. When the majority of people have taken or are currently on powerful hallucinogens, a kind of group mind outside linear time and space becomes the new paradigm. Even if you haven't taken any substances, you too start seeing things 'as they really are' (i.e. really aren't) when in their company and the result is a profound existential nausea (Sartre was a big mescaline fan).

In this sense, trying to differentiate truth and illusion is like separating an orange from its peel and asking "which one is the true orange, the peel or the inside?" You might say the 'inside' is the orange and the skin and seeds are just compost, but the outer peel or skin is just as much 'the orange' and is what we see when see an orange not being eaten; and as such it will exist far longer than the rest of it, which you will eat and then it will cease to exist in that form. But it's only when the skin is ruptured that it finally becomes real. When it's ground up and cycled through your system before being expelled, then the real is occurring. Cronenberg has always known that biotech is the wave of the future as much as virtual reality. It's already beginning to happen, designers are learning to 'write' DNA. And new steps in virtual reality are always imminent. Imagine vast teraflops of data in a simple eye drop. "Right now we're at the pong stage" notes Reasonblast39, "but within ten years we'll be full circle." What the hell do you mean, Reasonblast? I axed. But he didn't exist anymore - just a glitch in the matrix of our lives. (See also Post-Sensory Pong).

Similarly, David Cronenberg's allegory for the collapse of the symbolic is now revealed as savvy enough to understand that only by denuding the lunch can the imaginary transcend the symbolic and become 'more real than reality'. It's also the realization that our human nervous system has long been an elaborate immersive experience for higher beings. These demons and angels plug into our delicate nervous system as video-audio immersive booths with which to experience all sorts of Hellraiser-esque masochistic pleasures. Jesus wept, but he wept our tears. We'll all soon be marching through the traumatic real of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre bone rooms and wind up impaled on Leatherface's meathooks, all just so some fourth dimensional burnout can feel a Batailles-esque sadomasochistic ecstasy via our shredded nerve endings.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as close to Traumatic Real as horror can get.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake) - the Re-Staging of the Re-Staging of the real becomes
unreal through excessive realness i.e. the art direction is so 'real'--
 thanks to the high contrast photography, elaborately stressed wood, and other 
art direction-- it becomes commercial jeans ad banal

But since in eXistenZ we're dealing with agents and counter-agents, spies, saboteurs called 'realists' who are worried--understandably as it turns out--that once games get too 'real' we'll lose our grip on reality (and yet are working within the game itself) it's clear that re-staging the staged real collapses any exit strategy back to our old symbolic-imaginary repressive mechanisms. So determined are they to be free of the Platonic cave of illusion that they create their own even smaller cave through a performance of non-caveness. Where do you draw the line between killing someone for drawing a a guy in a big hat with word 'Mohammed' on his chest and firing an NBC comedian for letting an 'F-bomb' slip during a live broadcast, or crucifying a sports team owner because his mistress leaks a private phone conversation where he uses the word 'nappy' or am I thinking of Don Imus, who was also fired 'in real life' for word use deemed unsavory?

I'm not justifying or denigrating any of it, you understand, just noting that everyone on both sides of the divide feels that their strong emotions demand action --the stronger their outrage the more punishment must be inflicted! Only those of us who've seen the limitations of our own judgement, been in therapy for years, or learned in AA that "feelings aren't facts," can step back and not send that angry e-mail. But I am just pointing out that if we as free speech defenders think we're beyond confusing our umbrage over symbolic representation --either in printed word, speech, or image--with legitimate real life retaliation, then we're blind to our own blindness. Destroying a man's standing in the real world because of what he said in a private conversation to his mistress is just a nonviolent first world cousin to the Charlie massacre, i.e. killing people because of marks on paper and remarks on the phone. Names hurt worse than sticks and stones, apparently, so the response is in proportion to the sense of hurt, rather than in proportion to the actual offense. In both cases, if we never heard the phone conversation, played obsessively on CNN, or if the terrorists never saw the offending Charlie cover, would they or we be any the worse for it? No. In these cases we can blame the messenger, but it's a messenger we can't live without. We created it, a giant amorphous amoeba blob of all our hopes and fears jammed within the 24-hour news cycle, the journalists like a bunch of snappy piranha orbiting the latest popular kid on the playground and heaping scorn on the unpopular, instigating each's rise and fall all during a single recess.

The minute / you let it under your skin....  

Ted: We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it's a game everybody's already playing.

It's a game everybody's already playing, it's just no one uses the same rules, and admitting that it's a game means they lose half their pieces. So shhhh, pretend you didn't read this. It's too long anyway, I been rambling. My mom died yesterday... very sudden, and far away.... and words are just fingers pointing to illusions and skittering away to the next schizoid dot connection... and this is a time for me when illusions don't work at all, and I'm forced, alas, to exit the Boar's Head Inn, Falstaff's woolen eye coverlets trailing behind me like the last few strands of my latest televisual cocoon. Adieu my mommy. You never fell for a single trick even if, heaven help us, you loved The Big Bang Theory. 

Natasha Henstridge versus the Coordinated Cockblock Quintet: SPECIES (1995)

If you're human, chances are you have sexual fantasies about the wrong people. Danger, plain and simple, is hot. But if true danger comes your way then watch as as an array of problems--cockblocking friends, early arriving parents, lack of a condom, no erection, sudden eruptions of crying, or your own latent good sense-- conspire to save you, in a sense, from yourself. Would knowing the truth about Sil, the half-alien sex machine played by Natasha Henstridge in the 1995 classic SPECIES, make any difference if she threw herself into my arms? Your arms, I mean. God, what is wrong with me?

Sil's allure is there for a particular set of reasons: a Venus Flytrap genetic con job CATFISH type, i.e. her hot model profile is a front for an ugly Bride of Frankenstein haired silver CGI mess of a mutant. CATFISH gets high praise, but SPECIES (1995) gets a bad rap just because it's got huge flaws and an overly sexy plot, but I never want to see CATFISH ever again... Once onscreen and six or seven times in my own life was enough.

The dialogue is laughable in spots, but it's good to laugh, sometimes, as those Catfish dates can really leave their scars. THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER, I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE, PLAN NINE --they are laughable too, and look at the love they get! From me! A film's unique badness DNA can sometimes touch on aspects of the human experience more mainstream 'better' films--chained up in groupthink second-guessing--cannot. A certain breed of science fiction and horror film can sneakily go where no one else can. They get deep into the reasons we, or at least I, love movies that seem like they're being told by an excited eight year-old.

She's drowning a man as we speak

Looking to breed with any man not encumbered by faulty genes, Sil is every straight teenage boy fantasy come to life, or rather death, the death drive desire made flesh, the kind of fantasy only boys who've never had a hot girl come violently onto them at a coke party would dare nurture. As the scientist who tried to gas her with cyanide before she bolted, Fitch (Ben Kingsley) would say, "She's... that fast."

 You would think such a dire threat would warrant a call out to the National Guard, or at least inspire proper tailoring, but Fitch moseys around Sil's bloody trail in an oversize suit jacket and black T-shirt combo already quite passé by 1995, with a 'hand-picked team' of four civilian consultants: sociologist Stephen (Alfred Molina); sweaty telepath, Dan (Forest Whitaker, mouthing profundities like "her eyes are in front... her eyes in front so she can judge the distance to her prey"); MILF-ish Dr. Laura (Marg Helgenberger); and tough guy Preston (Michael Madsen). He and Dr. Laura forge the only non-dysfunctional relationship in the film, or indeed in any other. They let you know it is possible.

For the unattractive nerd trio of Dan, Stephen, and Fitch, Sil's chosen killing floor, Los Angeles, is a hostile, uncaring place and, as they are all Oscar-nominated actors (two of them winners), that alienation and nerdy reticence is felt very keenly as they negotiate the big budget lowbrow byways of this 'sci fi' film. When Preston asks a club owner if anyone left with any hot blondes before they got there, he notes: "only prime players, no assholes." Suddenly the whole depressing shill is felt in their and our bones. The night seems to descend on them all; the inner lonesome here at this crowded club is stifling. By assholes, of course, Preston could easily mean himself, and particularly this nerd quintet he's with, a gaggle of merciless cockblockers with the power to call down air strikes on her car or trace her stolen credit cards before her current victim can even get, as they say, the tip in.

With its 'mobile population' and sun-baked facade of cheery affluence and anonymous isolation, Los Angeles bends and shifts to accommodate Sil's killing/sex spree, welcoming her based solely on her looks, which is all L.A. pretends to be about. The team of humans scrambling after her mimic the way the mainstream follows hipster artists into gentrified neighborhoods, eager to live in thriving artistic center, and in so doing turning said 'hood into just another overpriced chain store strip mall, then the strips close down except for a vacuum cleaner repair shop and a dollar store, forcing the young artists to be on the road again, ever searching for a sanctuary from the tedium of the country's cockblocking Fitches. Los Angeles not only hides Sil, it is Sil.

And damning the empty shell of L.A. is just one bomb dropped in SPECIES: subtextually it explores aspects of media saturation no high budget movie would dare to. Models smile blandly on every available screen and page, and unless we work in Soho or have friends who are rich with sound nasal passages and who still invite us to parties, we seldom see them in the flesh. This is only natural; our fantasies are never meant to come true, by definition. It's best to look that gift horse in the mouth and search for retractible fangs, but we never do since an actual horse is hard to find, let alone for free. In an age of digital surface only L.A. has depth, since it's where the beauty goes to be pixelated. It's the jumping in point, so naturally there's a big cavern below the streets where Sil eventually retreats. The zombie Angelinos Sil encounters never dare register themselves as more than easily dispatched cliches lest their humanity unnerve the system. In her aching beauty Henstridge's Sil embodies all the potential they lack. She breathes something into the emptiness. It's death, but at least it's something. With Sil you're seduced by the surface and then gutted by the ugly CGI banshee within, BUT you get a five minute window to mate with 3-D perfection before you're suffocated by that digital Giger tongue.

Henstridge has gone onto some dreadful things (see: She Spies, I Get Sad, one of my very first posts on this site) and has had children, which has removed some of her aching aloof draw, sloping out her gorgeous shape and removing her angular youth, but giving her other things instead--like a wry self-deprecation and maternal resonance. All that is clear, in fact, in the other classic Henstridge film, John Carpenter's GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), wherein Henstridge shines as the druggie cop who teams with Ice Cube to battle Goth zombie mutants. It's an underrated comedy masterpiece, GHOSTS OF MARS (2001) is, and one of my favorite sci fi-action-horror-comedy films. Check out my piece from Acidemic #1, Death-Driving Ms. Henstridge. As for SPECIES, if you've lived it, as I have, and lived to tell the tale, bully for you. Now keep quiet, in the shadows, as your grim past plays in endless loops, and slow death by age and disintegration reduces you to nothing but eyes and a mouth, you know, for the popcorn, and whiskey, and bong, and snoring.... you're already dead, but the tape can be rewound. SPECIES is built for it. My record is tewelve times in a row over a weekend bender. I never survived until the ending, just woke up from a nice black-out to find the tape rewound, I'd make another drink and press play, so grateful for this one stray ray of light in my NYC hell, I'd follow it anywhere but off the couch. Sil never asks for more. Not once.