Wither the Verve Pipe Coke-Cross? THE CANYONS (2013)

Deep in the liason dangereuse-drenched Canyons dwells the only reason we'd want to see it (unless we were Paul Schrader devotees), Lohan's voluptuous, bruised body --on full display, and marvelously curvy, yet never teetering over the edge into zaftig. In between shots of her or other pretty youths on their cell phones and/or in underwear, Schrader cuts to abandoned west coast cinemas to remind us we're not seeing this movie there, but on our iPads or TVs. At one point a character even takes a long Van Sant-like (i.e. back-of-the-head Steadicam) stroll through Amoeba Video to remind us it still exists. Still, it's odd: who goes there in the age of streaming? Only the ghosts, haunting places they once loved to linger... but can barely remember why.

Meanwhile a nonstarter slasher film role is coveted by a hunky rent boy looking to 'make a dolla in dis business' before he blows it all for the love of the evil producer's swing partner (Lohan). But that film never materializes and if there's a meaning to the media echo chamber it doesn't track. Only Lindsay's coming-and-going older girl curves, her various minor hard living bruises, remain when this dull meta-business melts away. It is the last thing standing, or lying, in a field of vision that's slowly being sucked into a tiny glowing square. In a film about vanishing media, only Lohan's spectacular 'real' body has the clout to stay un-airbrushed.

Which means I care enough to spend $4.99 on Lindsay Lohan, to do my small part in resuscitating her career from its woozy downward spiral, approving with my 'vote' her plan of launching herself off the bottom of the vice pool back up to the A-list surface. And what bottom could be baser than a coked-up sin parade led by Paul Schrader and Bret Easton Ellis? It's a time-honored Hollywood fallen young person tradition, the way Robert Downey Jr. launched off similarly debauched-and-guilty-about-it James Toback's Two Girls and a Guy in 1997. It's a chance for mutual symbiosis: two established-but-exiled old chroniclers of artsy and druggie youth find backing via their casting of a genuine drug-addled youth, recently shook off her A-list perch. Whether or not their collaborative effort makes a lasting dent in the popular consciousness is immaterial. It already achieved its goal of media attention. 

Though long since fallen from the front room coke tray pecking order, Schrader's more on his game  today than most of his old Raging Bull buddies, his lacerating spirituality perhaps coming to his emotional rescue. When the others forget even what they were using sex, drugs, and intrigue to escape from, Schrader remembers. He never managed to succeed in self-deprogramming from his crushing Calvinist guilt, but never stopped trying, and now that persistence pays off. When lesser mortals OD, get sober, or move to television, Schrader holds God's hand, descends into the crevasse and climbs out the other side. Maybe Jesus is down there, or a dropped Xanax bottle, or a viable self-distribution pipeline for self-made digital movies. Or at least a cool dark coffin to rest until Netflix reruns night. Either way, he'll still ply his smut and denounce it too. My god isn't life sexier to when you lack a moral compass? And depressing?  

Old man Schrader's been subjecting us to this post-Calvinist morality slip-and-sliding for a long time: Taxi Driver (1974), Hardcore (1978), American Gigolo (1980) and Auto Focus (2002) were each in their own way about the evil lure of pornography: runaway daughters being sucked into the trade; Cybil Shepherd losing her cool at a screening of Sometimes Sweet Susan; Bob Crane's molasses slip from beloved TV star to amateur pornographer; a preening narcissist who sells his body to rich older ladies in American Gigolo -he judges them all, pumps up the surface arousal factor, as in his remake of Cat People, gives lust a sparagmostic flaying. Coke whore novelist Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, and Less than Zero, which collectively chronicle 80-90s preppie drug addict made sociopathic as a side-effect of cocaine and meth addiction, awash in casual sex, trust fund, nepotism-fueled fast track success, suicide, murder, and scopophilia. Together with the scarlet letter-branded Lohan these two old reprobates span three generations of LA elitist degeneracy. As Schrader said in a Salon interview:

My generation — we thought we could make a difference and make the world better. Bret’s generation thought they could make money. I don’t think that this current generation has any real aspirations. They’re making money, but I don’t think they’re that crazy about money. The characters make movies and they don’t like movies that much. They’re hooking up and they don’t like that much. The difference is, my parents and I always believed life would be better for the next generation. The current generation believes life is going to be worse for the next generation. It’s such a change for the future of humanity — the future is not something, now, that guarantees a better life."

That's pertinent of course, but might also be prurient, like the old pastor who works himself up into a sexual froth ranting about the devil as he ogles some girl's halter top; or using disaffection as a back door justification for having sex with every jaded hottie who bums a key bump.

I remember a film very similar to The Canyons, by Bernardo Bertolucci, The Dreamers (2003), wherein you had to wonder who old Bernardo thought he was fooling by having these gorgeous naked young entwined beings haunting the la Cinémathèque Française and pretending to understand Cahiers du Cinema so he could feel he was getting away with something naughty, stapling art film posters on the naked poles, so to speak. As in Canyons, Bernardo gave equal shrift to shirtless boys; as befits the semi-invisible hand of boymonger film geniuses like Gus Van Sant (who appears in The Canyons as a therapist) and Larry Clark (Kids) who have both made some great films about their boy obsessions because they have bothered to plumb the depths, such as they are, of the skater, drug, and homeless kid cultures the way most rent-boy-cruising Sebastian Venable auteurs do not. I have to say though, in a way, I admire Schrader and Ellis more for not plumbing in this instance. Why should we do their heavy lifting for them? Let them fail on their own. It's the only way they'll earn.

Lohan is only 27 at the time this film was made, but the constant hounding of the paparazzi furies have left her as scarred as a hot bitch Orestes. Even so, Lindsay, by 27 your character should be beyond letting yourself get sucked into menage-a-quatres just to flatter the closeted vanity of your rich cretin of a boyfriend. If Lohan likes that scene she should let us know, instead of moping through apathetic drugged ennui in search of a new bon-bon to distract her from all the strewn, messy wrappers. Such lurid behavior should either be a turn-on or turn-off (Two Girls and a Guy, for example, was both) or far enough over the line of sexual additction to be either profound or traumatic (Two Girls was neither, but it did achieve the same function). Instead Canyons strives for meta resonance with those empty cinema shot connectors. One presumes them to be comments about how nobody goes to see movies in the theater anymore ("premieres don't count" - LL says), and the subterfuge clogged airways when characters are so busy arranging intrigues on the cell phones they don't see the car right in front of them. They even watch their own messages on "Text TV." Do they even intend to watch their own film? I can imagine the crew and cast all at the screening room, barely looking up from the cell phones except when they're onscreen, to make sure their hair looks right.

James Deen, and a portrait of... Herbert Marshall?

The lead rich kid douche opposite LL is a porn star named James Deen, and he does a grand job of playing an insecure shit --of course you can't really do a bad job of acting badly 'on purpose.' The film's best scenes are strained bouts of he and Lindsay lying about where they've each been, as we're meant to muse on how sharing each other with strangers is okay but actually falling in love with someone else is unforgivable, and lying about it is grounds for psychotic tantrums. I guess that's understandable for porn stars, as any long term relationship they have must come with a complete lack of sexual possessiveness, naturally overcompensating on the emotional 'love.'  But this is nothing new, insightful, or particularly traumatic. It was a similar weakness that brought Valmont/Sebastian played by Ryan Phillipe down in Cruel Intentions, but here there's not even a cathartic Verve Pipe-scored coke-cross bust!

I remember partying with these sorts of pretty-stylish-vacant people in the 90s; I could feign a strained pose of Adonis disaffect with the best of them--my every pithy comment a dying faux-carefree butterfly, my clothes always signature shabby-chic--but just because you can capture that misery doesn't mean you're inventing it. Meanwhile even Lindsay is too old to know if kids are still putting out for bracelets, or ever did. Everyone's hiding something, even in this film. Did LL's court order ensure we only see one little coke bump snorted over the course of the whole film? Take it from me, orgies are impossible without either coke or ecstasy. Did I already mention the thing about the coke thing maybeyouknowherewecangetsomeIknowI knowcallthisnumberokayokaythisisgoing
tobegood butweshareitonlywiththoseofuswhoputin, okay?

I was always too uptight to ever fall into orgiastic abandon, no matter how much I tried. No matter how drunk I got or how much coke or ecstasy I did, I was invariably a gallant gentlemen; my body would just run away no matter how much I wanted to stay and get group naked. And I don't miss stepping over the myriad entwined forms on my loft floor on my way to the bathroom at four in the morning during the days I was detoxing, trying to sleep to the incessant thud of terrible electroclash or 'jungle' from my roommate's in-house turntables at his 'back to mine' chill-out orgies. Coming down out of my bedroom loft to plead for mercy--the sun mere minutes from coming up to signal the dawn--and seeing only his coke-black shark eyes looking back at me without a shred of empathic connection explaining that this was "fun", OK? As if fun precluded such thing as politeness or compassion. It was, I'm sure, fun, and still is, for him. But unless you have a tolerance and money for coke, as well as a loose sensual disposition, a tactile calm born of being good on guitar and appealing to men or women or whatever you're into, then you're just a bystander. Even when deep in the orgy, just a bystander.

I don't miss it, and so I feel sorry for everyone involved, even as I applaud their freedom and cheer them over the edge. Luckily the music in Canyons is amazing, full-on retrolectro-tryptahol courtesy Broken Social Scene's Brendan Canning, moodily pretending like the 00s never happened.

I don't miss the 00s, or 90s orgies, but I do miss places like Amoeba and Kim's Video and the time when theaters had no bedbugs or blue square texting-addicts. But since I tended to go to music and video stores when I was lonesome and agitated, I associate them now with the depression that Effexor took away for good back in '03, and now I have Amazon Prime, and cinemas these days give off an unsettling feeling of a shared dream with deformed fellow earthlings who have lives and bodies and gastrointestinal problems which they now carelessly reveal to their fellow audience members, accentuating how we here in the trenches of Manhattan are vastly different from the gods and goddesses out in LA, especially in The Canyons. And there's the issue of bedbugs.

Luckily there are still a few demographics who go to the movies: packs of single ladies at a chick flick on Friday night (+ one or two spooked straight guys on dates), and kids who can drive and who consider any hour spent not in school or at home to be pure bliss. So, as you sit down as a family to rent The Canyons, be glad you don't have to live without access to every movie ever made. There is no other solution to the emptiness. Theaters have become a reminder of what we're trying to escape from, our sad aging husks, our burdensome bathroom-bound humanity. our inability to pause and rewind.

So though the perfect goddess we once sold our soul for still works on new films every damn day, no amount of Vaseline on the lens can save her from growing old and cheap and sad. Johnnnyyy Johnnnny come back to me she says as her once firm and upright fan club dissolves into million nonstop texting blue lighted wrinkles and blemishes, all scattered in the upholstered rows like a blanket of frumpy stars. She once helped us escape from the hell of life --even if only for two hours at a crack. We swallowed her whole then, with no regrets, but she had a hook deep in her feathery bustier. When we tried to leave, we tore a hole in the screen. And it's never been mended. She can be as frumpy as nature dictates now, we're hooked. 

Well, there's no need to struggle on the line, little fishy. You've already evolved as far as you could go in such shallow surf. Time to belly up, or else go deep.

Russian Orthodox Roulette: Lindsay Lohan, THE DEER HUNTER, TROUBLE FOR TWO

"It's a cursed life where even death has become a luxury." 

- Prince Florizel (Robert Montgomery), Trouble for Two (1936)

ADDENDUM  PREFACE (6/8):
I had been working on the below post for almost six months, until finally publishing it mainly because I had nothing else more 'relevant' to put out... then, the very next day, or the same day, these sad, twisted photos come out of our dear Lindsay. Of course, it's coincidence... or is it? Just look up into her false-colored eyes above; if anyone in the media would join a suicide club like in THE DEER HUNTER or TROUBLE FOR TWO, it's Lindsay.

Let me tell you, to be FORCED to stop drinking and doing drugs when you don't really want to, either by court order or just your almost dying too many times from your escalating addiction (for me, well, alcohol withdrawal will kill you, unmedicated DTs are dangerous; opiate withdrawal just causes you pain but isn't fatal), and to have your every vulnerable misstep chronicled by hyena pack press photographers, well, I can truly understand the pain in her eyes... and I've seen it before, in the pictures of Kurt Cobain, who would be my age were he alive today. It's like your last escape from the insanity of your mind / life / reality / is locked and your stuck in Hell with only one way out.

All I can say is, just hang on, LL --keep your powder dry and your pecker hard... and the Earth will turn.(that's from PLATOON)
-----

Over the years I've seen Michael Cimino's tale of small PA town Russian Orthodox churchgoing / hard drinking steelworkers going to 'Nam, THE DEER HUNTER (1978), in a lot of different situations, but the weirdest was via Betamax in high school Social Science class, where it was supposed educate us on the Vietnam war (and allow the hung-over teacher--and some students--a nice nap in the dark). I can still remember the collective sigh of relief at the sight of some AV geek dragging in the big old TV stand, killing the lights and drawing the blinds against the 11 AM sunshine, knowing this meant there would be no test or class discussion, just VC goons and Pittsburgh drunks.  Each class period was only 45 minutes, so we saw HUNTER in daily installments, the Social Science teacher rewinding and forwarding trying to find the right spot (since each class the teacher had was watching the same tape, but left off in different spots), so it seemed to stretch on for weeks, until it seemed half my junior year of HS was spent watching Asians slap around Bobby De Niro and Chris Walken.

Not a lot of the film made sense, especially back then (1983), a land before internet could put us wise to some things. The film's central group of buddies for example never need to sleep. They work the late shift at a steel mill, clock out at dawn, drop by the local bar on their way home to breakfast, then get dolled up for a wedding reception that afternoon into the evening. They party all through the early morning hours then drive out to their cabin in the mountains to go deer hunting, drinking all the while. Until finally -- after being awake for 24 hours at least -- they're back in the bar, playing piano and standing around. BAM! Vietnam. Well, no wonder shit was so fucked up over there!

And so it came to pass that everyone in Bridgewater-Raritan HS West thought Russian roulette was the cool game to play overseas. Russian roulette was simply what one did in Vietnam, the way bridge and shuffleboard are what one does on a cruise ship. Sitting there, even in 10th grade, we knew the law of averages made prolonged play of the game impossible, but to point out its absurdity required raising your hand, and the teacher would label you a smartass and hand out a quiz, the same one he was supposed to give us a quiz last week.

And hey, man, no one had studied for that quiz, or knew what it would be about, that was why hearing those squeaky TV stand wheels coming down the hall every day was like hearing the empty chamber click on that roulette pistol. We knew we were safe for one more round.

"Click."

Sometimes, Mike, when I dream, I'm back in class, still unprepared for that quiz, hoping against hope those TV wheels are going to come squeaking down the hallway.

And of course we were too cool even after it was too late for the test to be administered to ask the teacher why Christopher Walken's character, Nick, becomes addicted to Russian roulette, why--even after escaping the VC--he plays it of his own free will in sordid back alley games; nor could we dare point out the sheer absurdity of the idea that anyone could work an eight-hour steel mill shift followed by 24+ hours of partying, or last more than a week on a suicide circuit, not to mention months. It all was accepted without comment. After all, this was a modern American classic, with something to say about our national identity. It must be because these guys are from Russian immigrant stock (the wedding is at a Russian Orthodox church), we figured. Russian are fearless and disturbed. Violence is in their blood like vodka; that's why it was called Russian roulette instead of, say, Polish roulette, or Jersey roulette. (Russians didn't invent it I later heard, nor has it ever been a thing outside fiction - it's based on a rumor of one angry moment in the life of an old Cossack general.)

Don't try this at home

Since those HS screenings, I've seen the HUNTER dozens of times, each time thinking it's both better and worse than I remembered. And despite the yawning chasm of illogic in its actual prolonged practice, the ambiguity of Walken's motivations on 'the RR circuit' has over the years forced a nation of film lovers to contemplate macho self-annihilation at its most terrifyingly nihilistic. Here's what one helpful scholar notes of the film:

The roulette stands for the horror, the abjection, the repetition-compulsion, the split of subjectivity and the male body, the unwilling fratricide, the collapse of otherness and of the symbolic order. Negating the sexual gaze, the Russian roulette image transforms the Corpse into the subject of the history of defeat (Peter Lang, Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War, p. 187)

But according to the actual vets and POWs, that whole RR aspect of the story was total bullshit: there never was no such suicide circuit, either in or out of POW camps. While seeing the film in the sacred situation of high school Social Science class may have planted seeds of sexual gaze negation and defeat in our eggshell minds, it did nothing to actually tell us anything about Vietnam, which negated why it was in Social Science class to begin with.

Here's what a Vietnam war correspondent says:

I am now discovering that increasing numbers of Americans believe that the last act of the war took place in a sinister back room somewhere in Saigon, where greedy Chinese gamblers were exhorting a glazed-eyed American GI to blow his head off. Had I as a working reporter missed such a vivid human-interest story on the last day of the war, I might have opted for a similar fate.

I have found that enthusiasts are genuinely hurt when I tell them that while Vietnam had all manners of violence, including self-immolating Buddhist monks, fire-bombings, rape, deception, and massacres like My Lai in its 20 years of war, there was not a single recorded case of Russian roulette, not in the voluminous files of the Associated Press anyway, or in my experience either. The central metaphor of the movie is simply a bloody lie....

But Cimino defends his creative rights. During the filming in Thailand, he told reporters: "War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades. It's a question of survival, friendship and courage, and what happens to these things in people under stress." But they didn't play Russian roulette in the Crusades either. (Peter Arnett - LA Times, via The Veteran)

Creative rights or no, it's hard to believe Nick has been playing the game nonstop through the time it takes Michael to come home from the war, hang around their steel mill town awhile, move in on Nick's girl, visit folks, hunt deer, feel guilty, fly back and search for him while Saigon falls. The odds of surviving that long are probably the same as Nick winning the national lottery five times in a row. Further going unmentioned for good reason is that, after being released from the hospital in Saigon, Michael first spies Nick at an RR game which Michael himself is attending! How many roulette matches are going on all over Saigon that, well, fancy meeting you here! Is the yen for competitive suicide so unshakable, or is there just nothing else to do in Saigon? Have they tried heroin? It's soo much safer! Instead both Nick and Michael, independent of each other, find the same French promoter in a convertible parked behind the 'Mississippi' club, like he's just waiting for traumatized soldiers too zonked to care about booze, drugs and/or hookers to wander through the rear exit and get in the game, following the irregular sound of gunshots like zombies following the sound of human screams. That Frenchman must go through dozens of these shell-shocked soldiers a day, like Warren Oates with his cocks in Cockfighter.

The idea of competitive suicide is of course fascinating to the minions of places like Central Jersey, and though it wasn't 'real' in any way before The Deer Hunter, it sure is now.

TROUBLE FOR TWO (1936) features a kind of Russian roulette (It's based on Robert Louis Stevenson's story, "The Suicide Club"), wherein a group of people gather around a long table and the emcee deals cards instead of a gun. The one who draws the ace of spades kills the one who draws the jack of diamonds (not at the club, but later). Set in Victorian London, the club is more of a response to the stigma of suicide as well as a condemnation of jaded thrill-seeking. Rich young scoundrels join the club, apparently because it's the only thing left that's new under the sun and they've already gambled up their inheritance and are left with nothing but shame -- a shame they've no wish to expound with suicide, which was then a 'crime' punishable by jail time or even execution (what irony  - being hung for trying to hang yourself) as well as a permanent blight on your family's honor. Old people with terminal illnesses are there too, at the table every night for the dealer to pass them a tasty card.

Robert Montgomery stars as a royal prince from the continent visiting London who stumbles on the club and goes just for thrills (as a baby he once played with a lit bomb tossed in his crib by an anarchist and has been unafraid of anything since). Rosalind Russell goes to the club also, because she's spying on him. Love ensues, but the next night she draws the ace of spades and he the jack of diamonds, so they better do some declaring, fast.

Of course there turns out to be reasons for all this suicide clubbing: it seems royal persons must prove their worthiness through regular bouts of courage. Luckily a gentlemen can always call on the aid of other gentlemen when it comes to scourging anarchists. And at any rate, duels, wars, rebels and horse-related hunting accidents were common enough at the time that a young man of honor probably had a one bullet / six chambers chance of surviving into his thirties anyway. Chances for bravery came close to home, with gentlemanly pauses while the other guy picks up his dropped rapier, and a doctor standing by, having a cigar with the seconds, instead of a lot of chain-smoking VC slapping one around.

In other words, for all its old world Queensberry rules Col. Blimpishness, Trouble is more realistic to its time than The Deer Hunter. The roulette angle works as a metaphor for courage-proving in general, i.e. if you were on the front line, you probably had a Russian roulette trigger pull chance of surviving....but that's for the entire war. If you're going to do a huge budget historical recreation, though, you don't need metaphors. After WW2, guys didn't need to hang around the backs of German and Japanese saloons huffing flame thrower exhaust to feel alive (though Dana Andrews did return to the nose of a bomber in Best Years of Our Lives, the effect was created just through sound and a nap).

Cimino perhaps makes the mistake of putting the masculine critique before the horse and sacrificing coherence for intensity, of trying to make it all super authentic and true by focusing on something that never actually happened. His vast crowd scenes, all brilliant and complicated, are suffused with such realism and vivid detail that we're automatically put in the position of assuming historical sweep and accuracy might be the same thing.

There's nothing wrong with adding fantasy / fictional elements into war films, ala, say INGLORIOUS BASTERDS but we know from the beginning that BASTERDS isn't about war but about war films. We presume from the beginning that THE DEER HUNTER is about war's victims, 'real people' from small American towns who play with fire and get burned, but it turns out it's not about them at all. It's about Cimino's desire to morph blue collar alcoholics into Slavic mountain gods who are then consumed and brought low by gibbering Asian devils and their own thousand yard staring contests. Suicide may be painless, but make a habit of it and you become a pain... in the ass... of valor.

LL/LL: Through the Peeping Glass

Mining a bit of the sleazy tabloid feel of STAR 80 and WONDERLAND with the lost Lenore/Laura Palmer surrealism of FIRE WALK WITH ME, the images from the "last of Lindsay" photo shoot (see below video) for the in-development INFERNO are disturbing in their implications of an as-yet innocent Linda Lovelace being roped into a hotel g-bang by her rough trade husband, Chuck Traynor. When you consider that poor Lindsay was on her way to jail when this photo shoot occurred, prior to any actual filming of the story, and that scraps of the sexually turgid script are apparently all over the internet, I get uneasy, doomed, wretched feeling we're all going to hell, just from a video about a photo shoot! In its own way, this little video teaser is already a perfect slice of Hollywood at its most self-reflexively turned-on and remorseful about it at the same time.

Considering he's done only one other film, 2008's YOUR NAME HERE, its perhaps unintentionally revealing that the first thing on the poster you read is "Mathew Wilder's Inferno," as if implying he's the impresario-exploiter of the piece, the Chuck Traynor to Lindsay's Linda. And what does that entail? Maybe he's just distinguishing the film from Dario Argento's INFERNO; I hear the script's good, but does that earn Wilder his headliner marquee status?

The big star of the video of course is Lindsay; her expressions in the photos betray a staggering talent and a wounded soul: regret, excitement, ambivalence, and even disinterest in her own welfare. Anyone who's ever been in love with beautiful, young, tragically self-destructive woman will inevitably have that familiar feeling of their heart dropping to the floor and breaking into a million shards. It's almost enough to make you go and sin no more.

Life imitates and heals art as, right in the middle of a photo shoot re-creating this ground zero of lost innocence, two smart, talented ladies sit and talk, capable lionesses in a den of wannabe poachers and hyenas, the sidelines a blur of slavering and snapping paparazzi. Supplying the light to the shadow, the always amazing Kim Morgan does the interviewing as Lindsay--her voice raspy and thoughtful-- explains how she reads the character of porn star Linda Lovelace. On her own blog, Sunset Gun, Morgan notes of the experience:

Thoughtful, funny and good, Lohan depicted her shoot, which were essentially, stills from the movie (written and to be directed by Matthew Wilder), with impressive, shifting emotions, gritty strength and intense poignancy. As photographer Tyler Shields snapped the dramatic pictures, based on an especially sad moment in  Lovelace's life, it was fascinating to watch her go in and out of character.

When it was all done, Lindsay sat on the bed with me while I asked questions (and here, simply listened, like a therapist), and she talked quite easily about the sadomasochist relationship of Lovelace and Chuck Traynor, at one point saying the script reminded her of her parents. Yes. She has been through some things. (Read full piece here)

Like myself, Kim Morgan is a staunch defender of Lohan's right to be wild, pointing out that the same bad behavior in men (like Colin Farrell, for example) only gets a winky smirk from the press, while a girl like Lindsay is crucified and condemned as if by a nation of tut-tutting moral committee matrons:

I don't care what so-and-so movie writer from whatever newspaper or Web site feels about Lindsay's partying or sexy lifestyle (there's a strong strain of misogyny in this kind of critique), the real question is, can she act? If critics assessed Jack Nicholson for his off-screen behavior, he might not have the Oscars he so richly deserves. (KM)

That's a good point, and the answer is yes, she can act up a storm. The misogyny thing is tragically true. In her own way Lindsay is the Richard Burton of her hour, but girls aren't allowed to be bedrunken titans, only coy and pretty and if they want Oscars they have to wear false teeth and shoot skeevy Florida johns; they have to bow and suffer before the pervy desires of evil men rather than looming tall and true and as fucked up as they wanna be. All phoenixes must first be ashes and these days they use special phoenix-retardant urns to keep the vengeance from spuming forth.

Thus INFERNO could be Lindsay's THE WRESTLER, or it could be her I KNOW WHO KILLED ME PART TWO, and maybe a lot of that will depend on sexist preemptive judgment and maybe not. Either way, Lindsay's due some respect from the sneering hordes, whatever the role. And who will play Lindsay playing Linda and re-enact this photo shoot in 40 years? Will the self-reflexive merry-go-round of glamorously tawdry recreations of scuzzy moments in adult film history ever come to its crashing halt or will it just get more dizzying? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

Revenge of the Lohan

Hearing poor LL's Rehab of Doom options being bounced around by all the bitches in the country ("We just want to be sure it's going to be very, very strict and tough with her," yes yes, and will there be much "ahem" spanking?), it's clear they've made LL the Joan of Arc of our day, the Frances Farmer, the scapegoat absentee parent proxy lamb to the mediated slaughter.

Dudes, she's just a hot fucked-up chick in L.A., capital of hot fucked up chicks! Why can't they just let her make her movies and party, as god intended!? By the time that rehab lets her go, she'll not only be burnt at the shock treatment stake, she'll have discovered Jesus and gained 20 pounds and they'll lead her to the set in chains like Grace towards the end of DOGVILLE. Is that you want, America? Then America, it is YOU are who not a true Christian!

Kim Morgan has written a beautiful piece on LL's ancestor in LA glamor-system face spitting and well-deserved court contempt, Frances Farmer, "Come Back as Fire and Burn all the Liars."

Speaking of Nirvana, I wrote a defense of Lindsay back in May called "Lindsay Lohan will Have her Revenge on Seattle."

Kurt, wherever you are I'm sure we don't have to tell you. Ain't a damned thing changed. You stay up there and we'll let you know when the flames start falling from the wings of the FF/LL phoenix! We wouldn't want to see Seattle burn to the ground with anyone else's ghost at our side.

Lindsay Lohan will Have her Revenge on Seattle

The public in its infinite judgmental prurience loves to symbolically burn witches at the stake via their tabloids, and if you don't count bimbos like Nicole or Paris or Britney as being really "in the game" as far as stretching the boundaries of public eye debauchery to crucifixion-ready levels (and you shouldn't) then that leaves just one knife-wielding bi-sexual hot mess incarnate to drool fire over, Lindsay Lohan. She's a lot of things, but nobody's bimbo... now.

I don't need to regale you with what she's been up to. How can you not know? It's all over the place, it infects and informs our entire tele-cine-visual-trasho-wunderland! So then, what's the deal? Is she gonna go to jail? Or is it all just a fantastic wonderful show? Even if it's real, what is reality, anyway? Beautiful starlets like Frances Farmer (above) getting the rough treatment from a brutally repressive patriarchy that punishes beautiful, brilliant women when they get out of line, that's sure real enough. But can even that be made into kind of a show, like pro-wrestling?

Consider Andy Kaufman and the way he would stage big battles, say against the wrestler Bill Blassie, and make it seem like they couldn't get through a talk show without trying to kill each other. Consider Andy's alter ego, the bullying lounge singer Tony Clifton (left). Was it just an act. for shock value, or something more artistic and genuinely subversive? To call attention to the way media hypnotizes us into believing and feeling things and having opinions on issues where we don't even know 90% of the story, this is to show us the way to freedom. Is this not the appeal of professional wrestling? We love to remember fake fighting as a child, the cathartic freedom and love that develops when you "pretend" to be mad, to fight, or to otherwise expose negativity as a fraud. Unlike the brutish mugs on wrestlers and thug mechanics, we believe the person with the cutest face and most pleading voice, unaware they could be the killer the whole time --as if noir taught us nothing. But just from our cliche'd expectations, we'd be willing to attack a giant dude in red spandex tights and a black mask if we saw him chasing her in the forest, when in fact he's just a one-trick Mickey and we're unaware she's setting us up for MURDER!

If you go back in time even earlier you have the famous feud between Fred Allen and Jack Benny, or WC Fields and Charlie McCarthy -- fights that basically provided writers with material and made great press and headlines, and no one ever thought they really were going to kill each other or anything. Then Take Mr. Fields' drinking. Since he was old and a man it became a source of much comical merriment his booze problem found a home in the cultural canon. Lindsay's drunkenness has no place in that context, because why? She was once a Disney girl? Oh come on! 

Before you judge, try hanging out with those kids sober, see how long you hold out.  Have we become even more repressive a society than we were in the 1930's, when Mae West was banned from radio for daring to play Eve in a saucy Adam and Eve sketch? The man who wrote the sketch, Arch Obler, wasn't banned, he was later praised for his show Light's Out, and even then was one of the first to regularly get on air credit for his work.

But instead of Mae or Fields we have LL, and her downward spiral. Well, I've downward spiraled many times and I can tell you this: she'll either die or she won't, but unless you're a traffic cop and she's swerving down the road, or you're a relative--or a producer who's already paid her an advance on an upcoming role and the insurance company is making 'glug glug' gestures behind her back--then it's really none of your frickin' business if she wants to drink herself into an early grave, sneak off to Cannes and promote a film barely in the preliminary stages of casting instead of going to out-patient rehab, or blow holes in her own car with a shotgun like Nina Simone, or set herself on fire like Richard Pryor. It has nothing to do with you directly, or your appreciation or lack thereof for her music and movies - unless the flames of fires she starts singe your hem or your property or otherwise effect your actual physical space directly. If your only connection to her is via screen or print then your reactions are due to a director or journalist pushing your buttons to get you to 'hooked.' If it takes getting you into a self-righteously indignant "burn the witch!" tizzy to keep you reading, then you should look at your own self in the mirror and realize that all you need is a pitchfork, a tri-cornered hat, and a lit torch and you could go chase the monsters and virgins around with the rest of the frightened peasants.

What's the difference between a middle-aged mom of five getting all schadenfreude excited over reading Lindsay might serve jail time vs. say, Ken Starr making Monica Lewinsky describe every hand motion she makes during fellatio or the hysteria of Salem and the early 1980s that led to my great x 8 aunt Mary Easty being hung as a witch? Is this not just a macro-version of the bratty sister who can't wait to tell mom how you got in trouble at school? Are we a nation of tattle-tales?

My friends, why not stop projecting your inner worm squirm guilt and fear and desire onto brave little Lindsay and just grab that vodka bottle out of your husband's or parents' cabinet and down a huge shot and then start hitting golf balls off the roof, or flicking cigarettes out the window at the passers-by beneath your second floor West Village apartment (like Courtney Love was recently observed to be doing)? Be the sibling who helps the in-trouble brother deal with the parents; be the Barney Frank who patiently talks the Lewinsky affair into a non-issue; be the breath of sanity in an insane world; see the light at the end of the tunnel and stop--as they say in AA--confusing your insides with other people's outsides.

It's a nice zeitgeist coincidence that the Stone's kickass classic, Exile on Main Street, gets re-released this week. When the Stones nod off and light themselves on fire it's art - when someone like Lindsay goes for it--gives the social order the finger and goes careening through life with a cigarette and Jack Daniels bottle it's not art, it's a shame. Burn the witch! You want to destroy the person who's free in order to reinforce your decision to stay cowering in your cubicle, to show Lindsay that cowering in the cubicle is the only way to avoid being burned! I'm right to cower, see, LL! Taste the fire!!

The thing is, when you live vicariously through, say, the excesses of Tony Montana then you revere him as a genuine badass even after he's shotgunned in the back by that bald guy in sunglasses. But since LL is a cute waif-type, you want to throw stones and bedeck her in a burka. It's not entirely your fault- her kind of cuteness taps into a protective instinct, so we want to follow her around picking up her messes, paying her bar tabs, and scaring off tattooed suitors and shady dealers. She makes it damn hard for us to take our villainous mustache finger away and shout bravely "I'll pay the rent!"

 There's a saying in AA about when you're a down and out drunk there's only three outcomes: Locked up, sobered up or covered up, i.e. with a sheet in the morgue. Like any true drunk, LL is taking her time to decide which of the three her roulette ball will her rest upon. She's been spinning that wheel for awhile but the mind has great ways of hiding the harsher truths from itself. Whatever path she takes, we will lose a great rager and we will miss these days of crazy headlines and shocking paparazzi booze pics. While she's alive we should celebrate her every self-destructive moment as if she had been dead 20 years and become a James Dean-Monroe-Presley-style dorm poster icon, a rebel at a disease and despair-infused time that compares only to the 1950s as far as hysteria-driven moral conformity.

For Lindsay is more than another ditzy sheep in fake tanning oil and peroxide, moving from one dumb boy to another, she's way cooler than Britney or Paris. Lindsay is a titan of self-destruction, like Keith "Just one drink / and I fall down drunk" Richards.  Lindsay is a queen of drunken coke-whoring righteousness; she's Courtney Love with a better singing voice, and she's cuter too, and doesn't have a Frances Bean around to create any real concern about the safety of a minor; I say rock on, little Lindsay! Rock on! And when you want to come in from the cold, call me and I'll show you the best beginner's AA meetings in NYC and hold your hand during the serenity prayer!! As Long John Silver said to young Jim Hawkins: Certain we will!

Meanwhile, for the haters out there, I wouldn't worry too much about the social order toppling under her wobbly heel. The constrictive force of our quasi-repressive society wont weaken from a single millionaire wretch peeing on it. But... if the rest of us can rise up and follow in her wake... if we can show the same casual disrespect of our national system of constraints and punishments she has, what dirty victories we might achieve! The 1970s shall return at that time, and instead of WC Fields, the kids will have Lindsay Lohan up on their walls, not for her music or acting, but because she's the hot thin female Richard Burton / Keith Richards of a new era. She's Queen Jippo! Top of the world, Ma! KABOOOOM!! God bless the button-cute hammerhead, while we can.

Alba and her Bow

This is a still from Jessica Alba's new movie, THE EYE. It's the story of a blind violinist (Alba, pictured) who gets second sight when she gets an eye transplant, courtesy a dead grown-up version of the Osment boy in 6TH SENSE.

Yeah it's not supposed to be very good and yeah, I have no intention of seeing it, but there's something very "acidemic" about this picture above. It's no big mystery how foxy violin virtuosos all put themselves on their classical album covers in order to sell more more more! What is it about the mix of bombshell sex appeal and high-fallutin' classical music chops that makes for such a dizzying high-low combo of attraction and art?

Here's a confession: I'm incredibly attracted to these foxy violinists. I don't buy their albums, but when I see their CD covers as I walk past a display, I have to make a concerted effort not to fall to my knees in a mix of envy, adoration, longing and resentment.

Be that as it may... we know Alba is no real life virtuoso violinist, but I would willingly hush hush and tut tut the bloggers who relish badmouthing her. She's perfectly fine as a b-movie actress, and that in itself is not an easy stunt to keep pulling off. Movie sets can be hurtful, dull, maddening places. It takes more discipline and patience than most of us have to keep your head above water. Alba's no worse than most and better than quite a few bombshells in Tinseltown's bombshell busting history. What she is, I'd guess, is consistent and reliable, and that's not easy. Sometimes having less acting talent may mean survival as opposed to psychotic druggie breakdowns ala the underused and misunderstood bombshell geniuses like the Monroes and Lohans we are so collectively fond of stoning with our bloodthirsty tabloid righteousness.

Of course that's all easy for me to say, since the only film I've seen that Alba has appeared in was 2005's INTO THE BLUE, but that was at a press screening on a hot summer's day, and need I add that film has JOSH BROLIN?!?!?!?!?! I LOVED IT! And If it wasn't for Scott Walker I might even watch it again... but I wont, not ever, because he dumps a whole kilo of cocaine into the water rather than let Scott Caan have it. What a douche. (2010 Postscript - Turns out I bought the blu-ray after all, so there you go!)

Lindsay Lohan, the Rev. Lawrence T. Shannon of Our Age

So poor Lindsay is arrested again after just getting back in rehab and now everyone's circled the wagons and has their tongues all out to be clucked. Well excuse me if I stand tall in her defense, brandishing a flaming piece of lumber from your witchy bonfire as I clear the area for some Richard Burton-style oration.

My resistance is probably partially due to being a fucked up alcoholic myself, partially it's my genuine distaste for mob mentality, but mainly I just think there's a Norman Bates-ish thing about it: persecute the young and beautiful and fucked up for the crime of stirring our hackles. Does Dreyer or Bergman or Russell make films about unattractive older women being burned alive as witches? No. Lindsay Lohan, you were made to be sacrificed on their altar of petty scandal.

And that brings me to one of my all-time favorite movies, which I just had the chance to revisit during a long summer cold, THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964).

The story concerns the lusty, boozy reverend Lawrence T. Shannon (Burton), whose taken a job as a tour guide in Mexico for a bunch of pinched old Southern Baptist Sunday School teachers. Among the group is no less an icon of jail-bait than Sue Lyon, Kubrick's LOLITA from two years earlier. The leader of the sunday school teachers is a closeted dyke named Miss Fellows (Grayson Hall) who pours all her tangled up rage out at Burton for daring to act on feelings she's too repressed to even admit exist in herself. When Miss Fellows catches Sue Lyon up in Burton's room, his goose is cooked as she can't wait to get on the first available phone to her brother, a judge. In a last ditch attempt to save his job, the poor rev strands their tour bus at the foot of a hill leading up to the hotel run by a dressed-down Ava Gardener. Soon the poor rev is running from one co-dependent seductress to another, all the while spouting great gobs of philosophic brilliance.

Watching the film now, in the age of Lindsay-on-the-cross, it's pretty clear that those damn Sunday schoolteachers have won; they've spread their mundanity across the earth and man has been, in Burton's words in the film, "stamped, stacked... and canned." The sort of devils Burton wrestles with here have long since closed-up shop, been made to holler uncle by the sheer tedium of our allegedly less repressive society.

Well I thank the dark gods that daring, alcoholic visionaries like John Huston, Richard Burton and Tennesee Williams were able to leave such lovely relics of a bygone age behind. For NIGHT OF THE IGUANA is a film that pisses on the luggage of our mundane contemporary social mores. I can just imagine a wild-eyed Lindsay Lohan running up to Ava Gardner's hotel on the hill and hiding out in one of the bungalows, while the foaming-at-the mouthed Miss Fellows of the world come climbing up after, seething with their righteous contempt, brandishing cameras, tabloids, torches, and pitchforks.