Butterfly Moanin' (DUKE OF BURGUNDY and Faerie Bower Cinema)

DUKE OF BURGUNDY

(2014) Dir. Peter Strickland

"The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility." - Georges Batailles 

Emerging from its cocoon as a beautiful Shout Factory Blu-ray, Peter Strickland's Duke of Burgundy is a nod to the 60s erotic reveries of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin, only without the vampires and knife-wielding sadists. Snaking forward in a steady hypnotic rhythm, it instead examines the BDSM head games played by a pair of lesbian lepidopterists living in a dream world where it's always autumn, men don't exist, and the Gothic architecture is ever-fecund with overgrowth. The beautiful dusky purples and oranges of the butterflies and lush Victorian interiors match the women's clothes and skin textures as they come and go along their whispered cloistered flight paths, an endless repetition wherein love may be hidden somewhere, but everything else needs a safe word. 

As a throwback to the 'Eurosleaze' genre, only without the sleaze, Duke's dreamlike mood is at once boring and fascinating, eros and thanatos inextricably linked. Like Franco's and Rollin's films, it's best seen while falling half asleep (which its slow pace is guaranteed to help with). It's less a forward marching phallic arc (and its post-orgasmic snooze) and more a repeated lullaby, or the same storybook read over and over to a child in its crib by the giant mommy goddess; the feeling of giant arms and a beaming loving face the size of a large stone idol (relative to our infant height) couple to the terror of being put down, and the lights turned off--but that terror maybe preferable to the suffocating feeling of that giant mom never putting us down at all. Wanting more of mom's love than one gets is as important as having it.

Chanting and ritual create a sense of tranquility by, amongst other things, driving the ego from the microphone of the mind by boring it into surrender. Once it realizes nobody is listening to its alarmist cries, that he's getting nothing from the crowd, like a dying comedian, he finally gives up the mic and vanishing from the room, the way a cigarette snuffs itself out once dropped in an empty bottle. For the ego to deliberately court this annihilation is the secret, spiritual core of masochism, at least on an intellectual / spiritual level! That's why spiritual warriors always accept ask for the most debasing job at the ashram, the one no one else wants. Submersion into 'group' mind, the giddy rush of rioting or delirious dance floor orgies, leads to a kind of open-hearted faith in the power of us vs. them--the trick of all effective cults. The mom's giant arms restored! 

Scarlet Empress, The

That kind of repetition is found best in the films of Josef Von Sternberg with their fetishistic veils, mirrors, and inert momentum; or the ritual hypnotism of Kenneth Anger; or--especially as its so clearly referenced in Strickland's film--the 1963 Stan Brakhage experimental minute-long Mothlight.

I'm a confirmed proponent of the masochistic gaze theory posited by Gaylyn Studlar and Steven Shaviro, so I knew what to look for in Darionioni Nuovo tremolare Strickland's Duke. That's good, otherwise I wouldn't have known my boredom was a valid artistic response. I would have just rolled my eyes and said "this sucks" like my poor girlfriend watching with me said. According to his interview in the Blu-ray extra, Pete Tombs (of Mondo Macabro fame), commissioned the film, wanting a remake of Lorna the Exorcist (a very long awaited Jess Franco title, for those who've learned to wait). Me, I've learned the only way to enjoy Franco (for me at least) is while alone at dusk, falling asleep in my easy chair as the sun sets. In all other ways, certainly as narrative, or any kind of genuine erotica, his films are not very good. But in the right half-asleep or nonjudgmental state, the alpha wave receptivity of deep relaxation or illness, they're genius.

Time and again I've found a masterpiece in the same place I found an unwatchable softcore piece of crap only days before. That place - Jess Franco. 

Here's an example: I recently screened Franco's SUCCUBUS (1967) for a bunch of half-asleep kids at a European horror film class. I hadn't realized just how sex-drenched it was until they shifted uncomfortably at their desks. They hated it. So I explained my secret to enjoying it: amnesia. 

The jet-setting European sixties swinger well knew of it, that mix of language and cultural barriers and the memory-damaging effects of booze and too many parties with too many lovers. When someone comes up to you and says hello again, you don't think they're gaslighting you, you think you were probably drunk or stoned and just don't remember them. So you play it cool, take the social cues their behavior offers, don't let them know you don't remember them, that would reflect badly on you, and alienate them. So you roll with it, trying to suss out what anecdotal facts you can.  

This can even extend to a strange woman climbing into your bed in the dead of night. Maybe she's your lover and you just forgot? Can't kick her out now - it would be so rude. After all, it's the 60s.

from Jess Franco's Succubus (1967)

Maybe we're even married! Best to play it cool and act like I know who she is, and am just playing I don't - add some meta layers on it. 

This viewing strategy ties in with the post-war modernist frisson born of French-speaking critics watching liberated Hollywood films sans dubbing or subtitles in the years immediately following the 1945 liberation, in the gap between Hollywood once again releasing films with French, German, Dutch, Italian, and probably Norwegian subtitles. Starved for film of any kind, French intellectuals made a game of not understanding anything that was going on in the plot. It allowed the critics the freedom from language's structuring of the images and sounds, leading to original conception of the phrase mise-en-scène. What is going on in a film when we can't speak its language? How does it still 'talk' to us, using imagery and sound alone?

Anyway, my Succubus exercise worked. The students imagined the character/s had amnesia and now they loved it. They 'got' it this time, the modernist frisson. That's the kind of magic Franco's (and Antonioni's) best films provide. They're meant for an international audience who needs a freedom from conventional semiotics. And within that anecdote lies the paradox of how a boring film can get better with repeat viewings, especially when your ego is shut off due to repetition or sleepiness (or drugs), or not knowing the language being spoken. We can't 'turn off' into hypnotic narrative when we don't know what's going on. We're free of the burden of interpretation, and the judgments that implies. 

That's the key to Franco, and maybe Strickland too. It's cinema aimed at the unconscious mind, the place where plots and dialogue never add up, and no one speaks in their actual voice, they're dubbed in way too many languages to ever do an 'original' language track In the end that's perhaps why Fritz Lang 'got' it, as did Welles, when most critics sneered at or ignored Franco's work, unable to see past the tawdriness and terrible dubbing. Both are valid responses, and indeed, may criss cross.

This was Europe in the 1960s-70s, the time of commercial jet travel opening all borders to well-dressed imports and varying strength X-rated inserts. Western Europe became the Capital of Amnesia and Babalon Working, a time when a producer, actor, and director may easily have no language in common other than that they all found in Antonioni's Blow-Up, and drugs and alcohol were ubiquitous and there was only one rule: don't say no to psychedelics offered at a groovy party and don't ever demand to go the ER if things get too hairy. When you can't remember how you got somewhere, or the walls are bleeding, or you wake up with a stranger in a strange bed, you can't make a big deal about it. If you freak out and go all egoically clutching for the handrails, you might end up in the sanitarium or prison; worse, you might draw attention to yourself as a square, a tourist, a rube, a wally, and get everyone arrested.

That's the one rule: if things get weird you can't wimp out. There is no safe word in swinging 1967. Ride the snake. And as the mannequins assemble for the sacrifice, presume that your unbridled arrogance will convince them that you're not the designated victim.

And masochistic cinema is really about that very same modernist frisson, the enslavement to the Other that finds true fulfillment only in dreams.

Dreams that they know will end.

For fans of Franco, or Von Sternberg's Dietrich films, the repetition is what cements the film into a favorite. Seen the first time it may be well unsatisfying, dull, irritating. Seen thirty times, it's the voice of a cherished mommy goddess and her absence, the absence that makes the presence bearable. We can want to see it again because we've seen it already.

I know the drill like the back of my molar. Like the older lady in Strickland's film, I--though no sadist--have been called onto to play one in a romantic tryst, many times, and always, each time it was really the verbal descriptions of what I would do--dictated by my lover in very specific details and then repeated in slight variations each time thereafter--that got them off. Experienced that way one realizes that, for most kinks, it's about the show, the whispered declarations of power vs. humiliation rather than the practice, which seems a trite gaudy and ridiculous (maybe I'm a prude?) But I like the JVS/Dietrich films as thye ascribe to the Gaylyn Studlar masochistic filmgoer theory vs. the Laura Mulvey sadistic proprietary male gaze theory, as Z sums it up:

"Where Mulvey views the female as having no power, in a masochist reading, the woman is powerful due to possessing what the male lacks, so pleasure is not gained by “mastery of the female but submission to her” (1985:782). This is in direct contrast to Mulvey’s view, which centres on voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia being a defense mechanism to castration anxiety." (Z- Mediated Musings)

Strickland understands these confusions of gaze; his film delves inwards to where the segmentation of a pupae abdomen circles into a set of winding fecund autumnal purple steps linking the look with the looked upon. Along with his post-giallo contemporaries, Strickland brings the modernist shiver of experimentalism into a head-on collision with the tenets of conventional narrative, letting their momentum derail each other and making something new from the train wreck, something that's neither formal/classical narrative nor avant garde/experimental, but a hybrid at once both invigorating and stultifying. In what could easily be the story of Mulvey and Studlar forever locked in a death/love staring contest, this wreck of a film shakes every pair bond to the core not through any particular eroticism but through the deconstruction of the kind of hermetic universe a loving couple creates within their shared space, a feeling of magic and second childhood, their honeymoon suite becoming an overgrown forest, a private world free of the constraints of time and outside responsibility. The stultifying comes once the outside has been ignored too long, the overgrowth chokes itself into mulch and dead leaves, leaving the stench of plant decay, what was once felt as protection and safety is now a prison, not through some shift of power, but through its own endless repetition.

In that and other senses of course it mirrors the fragmented masochistic obsessiveness of the films of Josef Von Sternberg (all those long slow meditative takes as Marlene walks around rooms, playing with this doll or that and shooting coy looks over her shoulder--as if stalling perpetually for time)--or even Bergman films like Persona (with the young boy in the experimental opening, trapped in the morgue as if reborn and tracing the blurry projection of Liv Ullman's jaw). And from there of course, The Ring and The Birds , i.e. Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child, i.e. the merging of the screen and the eye, the speakers and the ear, the dialogue between one's unconscious and conscious mind finally becoming audible; recognizing the monstrous absurdity of one's own masochistic sex fantasies once translated into action. (See Taming the Tittering Tourists).

Color coding, From Top: Lips of Blood (Rollin, 75); Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay (Gantillon, 71); Cries and Whispers (Bergman, 72)

In short, from my own perspective, I don't see a Mulveyan fear of castration in cine-masochism at all in these Eurorotica time capsules- but rather a longing for it, a longing which underwrites my own theory behind the (straight) male's fascination with an all female or matriarchal world (ala Persona, The Girl Slaves of Morgana Le Fay), one that doesn't 'include' the male figure or allow for even a projection of one's own gender based locus into the narrative. If a male figure somehow gets a toehold into this special universe, it's only as a eunuch servant, a blind man at the door who is not invited in, or an outmaneuvered future blood sacrifice ala Daughters of Darkness, the Blood-Spattered Bride, The Velvet Vampire, Girly and Vampyres.

This woman-centric film universe reflects the opposite of male-orgasm-based pornography, for the typical male sex fantasy doesn't last beyond the point of le petit mort. Men's sexuality, unless they are extraordinarily virile, dissipates immediately and drastically after orgasm; the fulfillment of the phallic hero's journey always ends in symbolic castration. This is why he begs and pleads but then, when there's no more barriers, hesitates; each orgasm is a sort of suicide, and the male knows it - once he's able to attain it, it comes too soon. The lesbian erotic scene, on the other hand, goes on and on, stopping time in its fairy tale tracks. There's no worry about premature ejaculations or flaccid impotence. The fairy bower's chthonic overgrowth ensnares and subdues narrative phallic linearity. It's something men just don't get to (or want to) see --we've already left the bed and headed for the kitchen to find a snack.

And so it is that these films show us a variation of sex we are, as single perspective organisms, forever denied in real life. We get to, in a sense, find out what our moms were like before we were born. It's something we'll just never know in real life, except through keyholes, screens (projections, paintings, pictures) dreams, and rebirth. In these films we finally understand, perhaps, why the patriarchy, the male gaze as per Mulvey, is so terrified of the female orgasm. I don't mean the little 'sneeze' or even the cherished involuntary vaginal contraction versions, but the one eternal female orgasm that comes later, and lasts forever, and increases and increases, feeding its own orgone energy flame until activating the alchemical awakening of the Kali destroyer / creator goddess. A withering force as devastating to the phallic tower as a great flood, is achieved; the male gaze is blinded in the flash, and not even Oedipus' stiff braille guide rope can help him find the door, let alone the keyhole.

Elsie Wright -w/ Cottingley Fairies

Rose Bower (Burne-Jones)

The lesbian fantasias of Franco and Rollin aren’t really meant for the chthonic dead end of fairy bower lesbian stasis, but they do draw on the same chthonic morass torpor, the way Antonioni draws on Monica Vitti’s beauty, or Fellini on circus pageantry or Welles on Welles – as a thing fulfilling in and of itself that precludes or prefigures egoic detachment from the mother. The sexuality of Fellini is--as in his best work-8 ½ and La Dolce Vita--exposed and recognized as infantile narcissism even while it's being indulged; Antonioni’s sexuality is like a dangerous ledge over the abyss and Welles’ balloon of titanic ego is inevitably punctured by the realization he can post-dub anyone in his films but a woman. Theirs are not the orgasm moments, the money shots, theirs are reminders that epiphanies, like male orgasms, are short and cheap and then life grinds on, oblivious. The trick with European reverie cinema is that this egoic puncturing never happens nor needs to. In a Rollin film, if a male character shows up who fancies himself the hunter-rescuer of the scene (as in one of Rollin’s endless string of jewel robbers) he’s peripheral --we’re invited to scorn him even as he tries to organize or tame the matriarchal nonlinear experimentalism of the hermetic female fairy bower. Like the forbidding father at the nursery he tries to shatter the fantasy of our total reunion with the mother, the memory of being an infant surrounded by gigantic adoring women, hearing their conversations as strange enigmatic words we do not understand, formatting the blank hard drive of self via the ebb and flow of mom’s attention. He tries to whip the women into linear order, but they of course devour him, like a phallic sandcastle in an incoming tide.

At this pre-egoic stage, we don’t identify ourselves as separate from mother and are therefore ‘female’ regardless of biological gender. The need to differentiate and establish oneself as male and separate from mom is a traumatizing initiation these films undo. Their drawback is their lack of dramatic arc, their inability to finish the initiation and begin journey. The butterfly motif in Duke is the ultimate irony - the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, flies off and dies (male linearity) but here, with these lesbian lepidopterists, the butterfly stays fixed in time, punned on the board, etherized on the fairy bower table– the life cycle interrupted at its peak moment...

My favorite game to play with babysitters in the 70s

Maybe I'm keen on this subject because as a child I was never very coordinated or confident on the kickball field (and hence always picked last for teams, a daily humiliation). I always just wanted to hang out with the girls; I was in love with girls in general, no real sexual desire had cohered along my polymorphic jouissance ley lines, but girls made me feel electric nonetheless. I despised boys on principle. I had one little brother and no sisters, which might explain some of it. When some girl's evil mom didn't approve of my attention, tried to force me outside into the mud with their wild obnoxious dirty foul-mouthed boys instead of upstairs with the girls it aggravated my delicate nerves. I hated those boys! The girls were pretty and sweet and I was enthralled. I also adored all my female babysitters, like they were giant idols; there were these three cool female cousins who coddled me all through my infancy, and then --boom, they weren't around anymore. Never having had a lot of physical affection from my (Swedish) mother after, say, five, I longed for three giant cute girls (relative to my size) and I didn't feel their protective young girl maternal energy again until stumbling on the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park (see my first film Erich Kuersten: A Poet's Journey)

Just the right size

As a child in the arms of a girl Alice size, I didn't need to exist, or get affection, or conquer any other phallic arc. I was, in other words, absorbed totally into the state of the passive masochist spectator. Of course this came back to haunt me later as I was often paralyzed when it came to busting the first move, afraid the girls I fancied would flutter away with some spiel about how 'I thought we were just friends.' And also the closer I got to said move the more my knees buckled and I felt I'd pass out. In short, sex and desire were too intense, I wanted to orbit the star, not crash into it - that was for the boys good at kickball.

Duke of Burgundy in a way operates on the same principle. The one hot sex scene is merely spoken, with the mistress struggling to keep her partner supplied with her custom-tailored erotic dom-sub fantasia. But again there's no ego formed, no linear thrust, which is why the film is so boring. But hey, that's part of the masochistic current, the Warholian love of boredom --the result of undoing the need for ego and therefore lacking a narrative arc to guide and hone in our focus the way a child's polymorphous perversity gradually 'settling' in a space beyond the narrative; the love of repetition and ritual (as in the repetitive alchemical rites in Anger's films). The oceanic experience, which the masochistic gaze in cinema mirrors, is the compromise against what the Studlar's theory of masochism admits from the beginning is hopelessly unattainable. To attain the male orgasm, or even to permit the male involvement, would break the spell.

The prince's kiss wakes us up from our dreamy slumber, the opiated medicines of the witch leading us to a sweet stasis which is broken by the kiss that whisks us back into space and time, for better and worse.

The ending is the same either way. Death is just the sign on the door through which the audience exits the theater into the lobby. The only way to avoid going in our out of that door is to become etherized, frozen and pinned to your seat. Either way, the cinema is the same; if you stay for the next show, prepare to be bored. The movie playing never changes. And its that element of inert sameness, the repetition, that works to make Duke of Burgundy both boring and artsy, maybe proves that calling something boring and artsy is redundant, and maybe it even proves that calling a film the realization of the insatiable appetite for repetition is to damn it with high praise, something only fellow post-giallo filmmakers like Helena and Bruno understand (as in the endless variations of the same scene in The Strange Color of your Body's Tears). But who likes it? Almost no one, for longer than 10 minutes at a crack. Still, in this inert symbolic re-death eroticism, Studlar's masochistic gaze is spot-welded to a Crash-style car and sent over a cliff into to the kind of Jungian ego annihilation, liberating the libidinal desires that formulate the structure of the differentiated self, which is really just a nice way of saying it's boring as fuck-all. Don't miss it. Oops you all ready did.

Stung by the Belle: FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

No one "beats" the Japanese when it comes to sadomasochism in cinema: They whip each other right out in public; they rape everyone in sight while grunting and frothing at the mouth; they engage in uninhibited gang violence, glue-sniffing and arson. In American exploitation film we seem to be at a loss to "ahem" measure up, perhaps due to our (relative) lack of repression. Even our recent torture porn phase is really offshot/borrowed from 'J' (and 'K') in style and substance. We can do sleazy (the OLGAs and ILSAs) and we can do titillating (the Tweeds and Mundaes) and we can do violent, but but the Japanese know to turn over the apple cart and start humping it like a dog. Their films transcend words like 'transfigur-titiliation,' 'pop-arterial' and 'hypno-dermal,' and FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION series remains a stellar example. It leaves you dazed, disturbed, clammy, depressed and worn out, even strangely exhilarated. Its sexual fever cruelty opens up your cranial shell, and then the pop art color patterns come in and blow out the previous contents until all that's left are nerve endings. And yet, the Japanese are often terrified of body hair. Hilarious!

With their over-the-top butoh style acting ever diffusing any sense of adult sexual reality, Japan's Scorpion series becomes strangely cathartic, and undeniably artsy. The suffering of post-war prostitutes in 1950s Suzuki films merges with the Sergio Leone western's sense of surreal absurdism and subtextual anti-authority, with Scorpion's ability to "take it"--her capacity for suffering without ever 'breaking'--so astounding in its deadpan feminist disaffect that it becomes its own form of dishing it out.

I've always been in awe of Japan's Sadean way to wrap prurient transgression in candy-coated shells of guilt, feminism, deadpan drollery, and existential despair. When the French do S/M, you can tell they're clutching onto their copies of Bataille as defense against Catholic-school guilt, and as a result a creeping bourgeois airlessness sometimes suffocates the sleeping beast of voyeuristic-Gallic masochism in its cradle, but the Japanese crank the Masoch-volume down to minus-eleven and get you laughing in delight at the sheer absurdity of all human expression, from grimaces of ecstasy to grimaces of agony, showing that our deepest most profane desires, fears and unendurable pains all look the same from far away, and are as ridiculous as anything else when exposed to light--even fake pink cinema light-- and so the Japanese find their way to Bataille almost by accident, and that has made all the difference.

Nowhere in my experience is this more balls-out perfect than in FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41 (1972). It takes the cake because its candy crazy colors suggest that intense prolonged pain and incarceration--indeed that being a female unwilling to bow her head to the rutting Japanese male's petty tyranny--might lead to pop art candy color satori. As the title arachnid, Meiko Kaji has such a firm nail on her world-weary but mercilessly resolved "Girl with No Voice" type of avenging dark angel, even in a role that's mostly nonspeaking and barely moving, that we feel her menace. Just standing there, waiting to strike, we're wary and--if feminst by temperament--also hopeful that this perennial victim of double crosses, sexual harassment and unjust incarceration will get some balls in her treasure sack and crimson on her hatchet, as no saying goes. No matter how much humiliation and brutality she endures, her Scorpion never flinches or weeps, and her hair is perfect. Freshly washed and combed, it blows from her own private offscreen fan.

Kaji also sings the theme song in that great bluesy lounge pop style of the movie's moment and there's some great surreal interludes, including a  Japanese kind of "Biwa" (the ancient Japanese folk ballad tradition) version of "Cell Block Tango (He Had it Comin')" from Fosse's Chicago. The musical score itself is a constant Greek chorus-style counter-response of swelling, trombone-heavy crime jazz; Jew's harp "boing boing" western leitfmotifs, bassoon and reed sustains over close-up staring contests, all suggesting the Sino-Morricone-Leone connection courses throughout... or did Leone borrow the bold comic book style from the era's films or both from manga?

Thankfully, though it's certainly traumatic to watch, the sexual violence is highly symbolized, even abstracted. There's no doubt these Japanese filmmakers are on the feminist side as they so keenly convey the level of sexual enslavement most American males deny exists. They help it go down smoother with a huge dose of self-conscious satire, a complete capitulation of all sympathy and dignity on the parts of all males and most females-- both cops and prisoners--everyone in fact, but our protagonist antihero. She keeps her dignity to the bitter end. The roaches will have inherited the earth and the stone Buddhas will crumble before her stony glance softens to a bearable g/cm3.

If you've ever been an alienated self-conscious new kid in school you know what it's like to suffer. Humiliated and horrified as you try and find your home room; no one notices or cares about you and yet you feel them judging you anyway. At lunch they resemble pigs at the trough and simian brutes in gym class. Well, if you still perceive your fellow man that way then Japanese pinku films are your revenge. Just as "the final girl" survives the horrors of slasher-filled cabins and lakefronts by her rejection of sex and gender differentiation, so we are encouraged to take a final girl approach to the entirety of Japanese patriarchal society and regard human contact itself as inherently corrupting. We're better off without sex, alone in our little trichophobic apartments. We had no idea, going into these films, that--as intentionally turning away from patriarchal social mores to become fledgling hikikomori--we were doing something noble. Isn't this what cult movies do, after all, validate our not going out to play with others and commune with nature?

Thus, we see and participate in a kind of Technicolor ritual where sexual violence--revealed to be a tool for subjugating and demoralizing women in order to strengthen patriarchal rule--is itself subjugated. The more violence is done to her and her fellow women the more karma weaves its spell and Matsu waits like the patient spider-scorpion for the karma wheel to slowly turn her way. Sooner or later she'll get a chance to strike. She won't miss.

There is only one pair of eyes whose gaze she seems to profit from: ours. She never addresses the camera directly, as, say, her 2009 British male counterpart, Bronson (from the 2009 film of the same name) does, but the effect is the same. As purely cinematic subjects, they each represent a distilled essence of masochistic cinema viewing. Without our gaze, their suffering would become unendurable. It's as if she senses our eyes and is trying to illustrate how she feels about school, work, and family in a ritualized distinctly-Japanese feminist performance art.

It's good sometimes to remember "it's only a movie," and this comic over-doing it also does much to undercut any potential over-identification with either side, so we can realize that at the core of these films lurks a deep revulsion for one's secret shame/desire; a need to pull out at the last minute from over-identification; the shame and guilt contorting their bodies even as the crime is being committed. Only in the later Scorpion films is the violence highly sexualized in a less academically applaudable state, as if the initial shock of seeing your most debased primal fantasies played out has worn down to a hollow numbness, requiring ever more dangerous dissolving of the boundary between the masochistic (ala Steven Shaviro) and sadistic (ala Laura Mulvey).

One's opinion is bound to be personal, but to me, Jailhouse 41 isn't misogynist but misandric, and overall just pure masochistic fantasy. If soap opera martyr movie emotions had their own pornography, this would be it, a protracted defiance of death, Antigone caught in a Fujicolor prism. The western Gallic-influenced torture porn of SAW and company tends more towards the fearful anticipation of pain/gore and self-conducted limb amputations, but the frisson in the Scorpion films comes more from existential weariness as garishly violent beatings--replete with amplified, echoed whacking noises--stretch into abstraction, and we begin to re-imagine our whole earthly existence as one long stretch of watching someone get fake whipped on TV (i.e Videodrome). The Scorpion films project this as the ultimate reflection of a bad acid trip, where every event, color, action, word, gesture, even act of shifting weather patterns, seems geared to illustrate that modern life is a smokescreen for eternal hell, a boot camp of agony designed to either break our spirits or turn us into cold-blooded scorpions.

The only deciding factor is our ego -- the more we cling to ego the more the pain hurts, but if we release ego and surrender to our higher self, we can endure the suffering and wreak a vengeance made all the sweeter by the cauterizing flames that have cored us like an apple or the insides of a junky taking an opiate receptor blocker to hasten (and hopefully shorten) the inevitable stretch of agonizing withdrawal, the 'crucifixion cruise' all alcoholics and junkies inevitably suffer, either intentionally or not.

In a scene filmed atop and around a recently-erupted volcano, Matsu and her fellow escaped female convicts run and creep around the ashy slopes, dressed in gray cape/shawls, all while bassoon and Jew's harp twang and moan, making us expect Macbeth and Banquo to come riding past, or a dinosaur to come roaring down from the sky. It's important to realize this innate sense of connection with primal, tribal forces is much more pervasive in the Japanese mindset than in, say, USA's melting pot blood-splatter. With their insane eyes and gnashing teeth, the other women convicts are representations of a pure, undistilled feminine animism. Presocialized erotic apparitions pummeled by Apollonian logic into barely recognizable caricatures of longing and fear, they are personifications of the chthonic stain that endures no matter how much carbolic acid and electroshock bleach beatings are poured onto it. The volcano itself is a perfect metaphor for this Dionysian primordial archetyping and while the female prisoners seem perfectly part of the landscape, the cops and dogs are out of their element, both menacing alien others and buffoons, easily stuck in the ash or falling victim to Matsu's booby traps. These figures of law and order seem to sense that they've been led to a place where patriarchal law has no jurisdiction, and that their whole purpose in the film is to be swallowed up by the unconquerable feminine force that Matsu embodies.

At any rate, SCORPION suffers from a very limited emotional palette including passages of death throe squeak-speak and screaming contests that drag on for minutes. I envy those who can watch these films on a regular basis and not become warped and misanthropic, or at least not get a headache. The color coordinated trash dump scenes are pretty awesome, at any rate, and when she slashes at the bad guys, she tears the celluloid itself in half... it's artsy like that!

If there was a line between life and death, it's where Matsu, Sgt. James (HURT LOCKER) and Bronson all dwell. For some warriors, it's bleached Iraqi deserts; for others, dank prisons and heaps of volcanic ash and garbage; for an unhappy few, even their own household has become a battleground. The question is, when will they stop cringing in fear rise up as fearless, unfazeable warriors beyond the illusions of life/death duality? Or as they die, die, die, die, when will they scream, in slow mo pitch shift squeakspeak, instead: MATSUUUUUUUUUO!?!?!?!?!

(Thanks Aria at Muse's Garden, from whom I ripped some of the above beauteous screenshots - read her insightful and much more expositional review here)