Ride the Snake: Boris Karloff's HEART OF DARKNESS (1958)

Recently discovered hiding deep in the Amazon Prime--an interior so vast and tangled one never knows what serpent jewel is coiled below the most innocent flower thumbnail cover: a 1958 TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS starring Boris Karloff as Kurtz. For a fan of both the actor and the tale, it's quite a find: Archetypal, potent, pungent, primitive in every definition of the word (picture quality as savage as the setting), acted in a kind of beatnik cafe dream poetry shorthand, following streams far indeed from Conrad's estuary, it nonetheless sings the masculine psyche electric, turning the journey of Marlow upriver to Kurtz into a kind gone-rogue Boy's Life anti-colonialist/pro-incest version of Alice in Wonderland as performed by the residents of some remote mental institution. Some might consider it unwatchable due to terrible image quality and stagy overacting, but for those of us "in the know," one look into Boris Karloff's wild eyes as he dances  shirtless in a jungle leaf crown while a circle of cannibals thump on drums, shake skull rattles, stab goats, and wiggle long feather or vine skirts that look up close in the unshaded video quality like fire (or radar-jamming window), and we know we're home. Add a shirtless wild-eyed Roddy McDowell as Marlow, demanding the whip and being branded with a hot "K", feeding off Karloff's crazy energy, matching his performance art hysteria beat-for-beat, like if Page and Plant dueling high notes in "Dazed and Confused" was mixed with a family trying to be heard on the tarmac of a busy airport. "I celebrate my cruelty!," they shout. "I celebrate my hatred!"

Been there, bro. I hereby claim this HEART as wild and true. "I celebrate my lust!"

I celebrate the generosity of Amazon Prime and this great deal they seem to have made with 'Sprockets,' a vast library of long-neglected (unrestored) exploitation movies from the 50s-70s, many of them too damaged to even be on a Something Weird compilation. I celebrate the genius of mixing the potted plant jungle lurid sadism and miscegenation fantasy of Kongo, and White Woman with O'Neill's folk play existentialism (Emperor Jones), undergraduate avant garde theatricality (ala the old Pratt Institutionalized Theater, here) and Greek-myth analyst-couch bird-swarm beach-boy maenad rending ala Tennessee Williams / Hitchcock. I celebrate this Heart's mix of Shavian satire, Kafka-esque double talk, Maugham 'Victorian morality dissolving in the jungle heat'-ism, and expressionist dream poem segues. This isn't the Congo of Conrad, with its firsthand observed landscape and anthropological detail, but an inner Oz/Wonderland for sexually repressed British sailors desperately praying away their incestuous desires. And no matter how intense things get, the magic coins in Marlow's pocket can whisk him home as fast as ruby slipper Thorazine.

I'll confess, growing up watching Shelly Duvall's Fairy Tale Theater with my parents, then studying Jung in college, (and finding my own magic doorways to weird worlds, if you know what I mean), have perhaps left me predisposed to love something as woebegone as this old Heart. It's similar to the way I love The Love Witch or Valerie and her Week of Wonders, or Lemorra: A child's Tale of the Supernatural. as much for the flaws and seams as their sense of wonder and mythic resonance. I love the Disney fairy tales too, but they're so well done we don't get the ceremonial magick element, the Brechtian disconnect that lets you think, hmm next solstice maybe I'll get asked to play the Wicked Son, or white witch, or the God of spring harvest. In these films' crude staginess comes the surreal element of dreams, which often appear slightly 'off' as if your unconscious couldn't afford a real art director.

Unlike those feminine-based myths, reflecting anxiety about marriage and sex, this is the repressed hammy male version, reflecting going off to college and having your first acid trip and orgiastic sex experience in the same night and feeling like you just opened up from a black and white cocoon to a prismatic Technicolor butterfly. That said, this stays black and white, down in the basement mythic landscape of the 1933 Paramount live action Alice (see: Reeling and Writhing) rather than Disney. It's about going off on safari and expecting to find the good father (maybe even dead), and finding instead the primal father, the jungle devolving him along a mythic reverse axis, from Zeus back to Cronus, from color back to black, from HD to fuzzy primordial analog fuzziness, bounced across the arial dupes of time like a leaden skipping stone.

Subtle, pretty color shit wouldn't work in this jungle --dreams are often in black and white anyway, and of poor quality image-wise, as your third eye antenna can't always get a good picture. I can handle poor quality black and white much better than poor quality color, which tends to be washed out and depressing. In this case the rough signal works: there's an Everclear-smudge stained charcoal sketch madness at play, brought out by the ancient tape artifacts (the grayscale has become... unsound). The weird distortions and deep black outlining give it all a ghostly inked-in appearance as if from some spy camera left in a cavern on the moon crossed with a smudgy courtroom sketch witnessed by a drunk in the throes of DTs. The result: neither 50s TV playhouse drama nor beatnik theater improv, but a mix of both, as if witnessed by another planet who don't quite get that we're only 'pretending' and really aren't this savage. Maybe far-away aliens are viewing this from sixty odd light years away (it was broadcast in 1958 as part of Playhouse 90). Their enthralled anthropologists will wonder whether this is some ritualistic indigenous ceremony, a filmed inauguration, live, like an Olympics ceremony re-enacting of ancient rites, on ancient video equipment, as valuable a relic as a cave drawing or Sumerian tablet. 

The late-80s men's movement, ala Iron John, pointed out that initiation rites, from boy to man, such a key part of all indigenous tribe mythologies, being so absent from our own (outside of the military and frat hazing) has contributed greatly to our national crisis of arrested male development. We don't televise wild initiations into the terrors of the unconscious self, but Heart of Darkness suggests maybe we should. After all, like any other televised event, the trials of the masculine initiation rite are mostly all show. We only get to find that out, if we put on the masks and do the dance, and face the idea that immanent torture via antler piercing, beer chugging, paddling, or soap-pillow case midnight beating, might soon be upon us.

As in the Off-Off Broadway dream poetry tradition, scenes in this Heart of Darkness are connected by childhood nursery rhymes ("Bobby Shafto's / gone to sea"), further making this all seem like a long LSD trip back in the day when it was legal and done on a psychiatrist's couch surrounded by giant potted African fronds. Maybe the sound of children playing outside the shrink's window became like tribal chanting reflecting the ebb and flow of inner psychosis, the old neuroses dissolving off the patient's soul like a serpent's old skin. It that skin isn't shed, a very bad trip can result, as it does for Marlow, for quite a spell. McDowell's repressed and unhinged character, in refusing to open himself to his (adopted!) sister's carnal desire, becomes a hurricane eye around which scenes revolve in ever tighter loops of madness. Each new encounter is with a stranger than the last, until Marlow slowly peels his 'false Buddhist' monk robe skin off until all that's left is a wild overacting, shirtless, bug-eyed loon, cracking a whip to keep time.

Starting with a ship's hold wherein he's forced to crush a rat in his bare hands (like salty shipmates always be making faux-Buddhists do), through to his returning home alive and reborn to his lady love/sister Maria (Inga Swenson), McDowell's acting is either terrible or brilliant or both, holding the whole thing together with a kind of magical foot-to-the-gas madness, reminding me how deft, charismatic and hilarious he was as Tuesday Weld's manager in Lord Love a Duck (there, as here, never stealing a scene but rather using and reflecting the energy of the actors around him, then mirroring it back and raising it again, forming a slow burn duel of ham mania).

Inga Swenson's Nordic alien DNA captured via early TV signal
being non-receptive to the alien cover signal (as seen in THEY LIVE)

Indeed in addition to the Conrad text (we do get some of the original dialogue, including "the horror, the horror") there's almost a greatest hits of dissolving theatrical sanity going on. For example, when we first meet Maria, she's running drunk and barefoot through the snow trying to join a throng of passing holiday carolers, conjuring an array of booze and/or loneliness-wracked Tennessee Williams heroines ranging from those of the Glass Menagerie all the way up to The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone ("I have to keep reminding myself you're my brother," she purrs after a long welcome home kiss on Marlow's neck). Though he's clearly into it, Marlow feels compelled to run off and find Kurtz (her dad / his guardian) before he winds up in bed with his own adopted sister. She gives him some coins for the bus home, and they become his magical talisman, the breadcrumb trail ruby slipper. It seems rather forced but it does reflect the realization pulsing through the production that this is mythic freestyle, not a faithful adaptation of the text. There's a parallel in the coins too with the 'parachute' of the psychedelic trip, i.e. a handy Thorazine or--failing that--a Xanax, or--failing that--lots of alcohol or Nyquil. "Pull the string!" The rip cord, the umbilical deep sea diver oxygen line.


The rest of the film is a progression of weird archetypal energies: a 'Before the Law'-esque wife of a disappeared trading company envoy; a blind 'crone' (Cathleen Nesbitt - left) in Queen Victoria /Virgin Mary headdress, signs Marlow up while loudly encouraging him to also join "The Society for the Repression of Savage Custom"; the company doctor (Oscar Homolka - below) measures Marlow's skull against those of previous trading company representatives for comparison (he thinks head size changes after "you go out there to that frenzy, that solitude, that swamp of obscene temptation where there's no policeman, where no voice of a kind neighbor can whisper a public opinion, (ala "don't touch the B in room 237").

The transitions are telling in capturing the beatnik theatricality at the heart of darkness and psychedelic transfiguration: the doctor pushes Marlow through a door into what seems like a storage closet but is actually the jungle, so that he and the old woman seem to be looking down at Marlow from the safety of a small window in a tree, like parents dumping their freshman son out of a passing car onto the campus lawn at the start of fall semester, then speeding off.

Now, in the jungle, things devolve quick: cannibals almost eat him alive before he's saved by the estimable Mr. Robertson (Richard Haydn), the Trading Company 'accountant.' The complete opposite of repressed Marlow, and without a shred of the humanity left, Robertson has embraced the moral twilight and encourages Marlow to do the same: "I don't judge anything, so I don't suffer." He offers Marlow a chance to get out his aggression with a proffered whip, and notes that he'll have to whip the native slaves all the way back inland to Kurtz's compound anyway, that he should give into the madness of the place, but Marlow--his resolve ever weakening--cannot, refusing even a Pim's cup with homegrown cucumber. We can feel the ghost of W.S. Burroughs stir sluggishly like an opium ghost in our bloodstream with the appearance of this Benway-esque character: "No drinking, no violence - you're really quite an example of something or other aren't you?" Robertson says. Assuring Marlow he has nothing but admiration for Kurtz's methods in dealing with his cannibal slaves ("he sends them off all fat and saucy with a meal of two-legged pig, which I think is a charming way of describing what they eat. [1]"), Robertson is our first example of a man who's kept his British detachment by surrendering fully to madness. Marlow cannot, he'd rather hang the chain on himself and beg to be whipped like an anguished penitent.  He's combusting from the inside out, being devoured by the Congo, while Robertson isn't even bothered by flies. 

Eartha Kitt (left) shows up as Kurtz's silken feline queen, Maria, as (we learn) all Kurtz's women are named, reflecting his own incestuous obsession, she's ordered to get the coins from him, as if a holy grail relic that might free him from his own trap. Give me those slippers!

Of course in this surrealism-on-the sleeve riffing, it's not necessary to glean whether or not there's actual incest or desire between Kurtz and his daughter --this is pure psychosexual dream theater, laying its surrealistic tells far more bluntly than Conrad (in the jungle there's no time for subtlety). Writer Stewart Stern clearly uses the source text as diving board rather than a podium, he's interested in accessing certain deep Medea / devouring mothers, diving for coins tossed in by long ago Phoenician sailors, swallowed by the depths of the Kali-tentacled maternal behemoth. It's Conrad the way Coltrane's "Favorite Things" is Rogers and Hammerstein.

As we get closer and closer upriver to Kurtz the mythic resonance gets more and more abstract, the acting hammier, the jungle blurred, static-outlined by the primitive video which makes people's eyes and teeth seemed outlined in thick magic marker. When we finally do get to Karloff's Kurtz, his eyes are wild - sticking through the sludge of the image, fitting perfectly the madness of his character, hideously distorted and blurred, like the final freeze frame of James Caan victorious and subhuman in Rollerball, or a Francis Bacon portrait that's been left out in the rain. He looks like he's been brushing with charcoal, eyes bugging on acid, flesh dissolving into the skin-shedding aura only the very high can see. Flanked by leopard skins doubling as shotgun holes through copper plates, he's a scarier children's book monster than Maurice Sendak could e'er imagine. Following him to the sacred circle for a wild man dance seems akin to jumping through a giant thresher machine. 

Putting other Kurtz's to shame (Welles' radio show version included, Brando of course being the worst), Karloff seizes the chance to really ham it to the rafters and thank god he did, for anything less would have been lost in the splotchy Bacon/rain smudginess of the distorted video image. As it is, both his and Roddy's eyes--seemingly outlined in black magic marker--really pop out, like mad scientists in the peak of a DOM trip, that bold 13-hour mouth at the froth from which no traveler returns sanely without a jingling secret pocket coin, Xanax, or a ("welcome to Annexia") silver bullet for the Emperor Jones' William Tell routine.

It's worth comparing this unique Heart alongside two other mythopoetically dense Stern screenplays: Rebel without a Cause (for Nicholas Ray) and The Last Movie (for Ray's friend Dennis Hopper). Each has a special fascination with ancient tribal initiation rites finding root in the modern era. There's the Rebel 'chickee run', or the way the Bolivian natives in Movie actually hurt each other and jump off roofs in literalized imitation of movie stuntmen; and the terror conjured by a sexually voracious female on the male psyche (Natalie Wood's daddy issues; Julia Adams' cougar in Last Movie). 

That last theme is turned into a fairy tale magic talisman for both Kurtz in Marlow, both the impetus for their escape to the Congo and the magic key for their return. The yearning of voracious, unbalanced Maria reaches out to both men at all times, holding them in a loose orbit around her via symbolic totems: her coins for Marlow, her portrait medallion for Kurtz (like a pagan charm -her image becomes the yin in the center of all this frantic performance art yang). Both men are driven to flee home to escape her, only to find representatives with her same name (the queen). Their pronouncement "I celebrate my lust!"-- in conjunction with the talk of 'cutting loose' in a land far from the prying eyes of puritanical neighbors--serves as a reminder that the 'repression of savage instincts abroad' (as in the Puritans, Rev. Davison in Rain) always fail, the heat and lack of options devolve the men into sex tourists: "Behold my surrender! Behold my marriage with abomination!" Marlow snaps the whip;  Kurtz leads the chant; the drums pound; the flames heating the "K" brand and the wiggling feather/taffeta skirts and headdresses all overlap and become one blurry rain of braided energy. The way the natives clatter their homemade percussion instruments and wave their crude knives evokes Suddenly Last Summer (released the same year) and anticipates The Birds,  which attack as per Mrs. Brenner's unconscious bidding, just as Suddenly's beach boys as per Violet Venable's (rather than their sons slip out from under their wings). Kurtz represents the male equivalent of this Madea/ devouring mother, he's the primal father writ large- mirroring our modern cult leaders like David Koresh or Jim Jones, preferring to wipe out his flock rather than be taken back to civilization, ruling with violence and keeping all the women to himself, like a lion.

I should note that, as with the source text, there's a rampant racism at work here: all the African natives--except the queen--are depicted as savage childlike cannibals who respect only brute force (the whip). At the same time, we should always remember that this jungle is in the mind of a repressed virgin white man who's never been, and so projected his id onto its exotic natives. Well, isn't that what racism is, you say? True, I retort, but it's even a theme of this weird adaptation that only by expressing it can we exorcise it. Openly celebrating his racist evil and insane lust frees Marlow from its toxic grip. Once made conscious and expressed--as in art therapy--the repressed desire evaporates, the way lust evaporates in the minutes after orgasm. Finally, he can give himself a hug (above) and look, through his dilated pupils, towards the finally-revealed heaven. The repressive force within him is spent, the vile racist worldview can dissolve with a ruby slipper heel-tap.

At the same time, it wouldn't suit Marlow's character is to get all preachy and self-righteously racial activist now that he's seen some sort of light. What can even the most liberal of white authors know of blackness? To try and Stanley Kramer it up would kill the larger-than-life messiness of myth. Myth needs to be neither believable nor logical, true or safe, (nor -as here - even in focus or frame), PC or un-PC, what it needs to do is resonate below the line of consciousness, go deeper than mere truth can reach, provide a kind of trapdoor access to the basement of the mind, to open up the vents and allow for temperature equilibrium. Just as the African tribesmen surrounding Kurtz use ceremonial masks to express their demons rather than bury them, this primitive TV broadcast of Heart of Darkness spews forth an admission of racist evil and in the process exorcises it, temporarily at least, even though it can't really do anything with its liberated outlook.

That's why it helps in a way too that this production is so poor and overwrought --the totemic demon mask need not seem real, but almost something to laugh at, a cathartic confession rather than denial, the head of Medusa reflected in the Perseus shield of satire. So let us celebrate our evil and above all celebrate the ability to revisit weird-ass shit like Playhouse 60's Heart of Darkness, celebrate a humanity that would allow this dark plumbing of its darkest depths. It exhibits bravery in going--as my friends and I used to say--"for distance" rather than polish, decorum or clarity, for "riding the snake" rather than scorching it in terror, or containing it a terrarium. By contrast to its messy brilliance, our live TV events today are tepid musicals, toothless as a long-caged rheumy lion. We won't see the like of rough unhinged dream theater 'interpretations' like this Heart again, outside perhaps of "Le Bad Theater" on SNL reruns (2) and we will continue to suffer for its absence, just as the lack of male initiation trauma (3) it so resonantly depicts inevitably outs in everything from school shootings to alt-right trolling, and all the other sad last ditch gasps of boys who never found their hideous dark father's compound, and so never saw the sad end game of their own dark hypocrisy, or tasted the ecstasy of feeling their anxious flesh rendered by a thousand little beaks, until all that's left is skybound.

"even the jungle wanted him dead"

It's also on youtube!

NOTES:

1. "two-legged pig" also known as "long pig" =  human flesh. 

2.  though there was a TV movie version in 1993 with John Malkovich and Tim Roth,  it was faithful to the text to the point of sterility.

3. Initiation rites do exist in some modern organizations (frats, etc.) but outside of, say, the Navy Seals, they lack sufficient prolonged traumatic endurance for the facilitation of a true psychic change. The agony of child birth makes a mother of a woman, the agony of the initiation rite 'second' birth makes a boy a man. "No pain, no gain" is no mere gym mantra but a sad underwriter of all human maturity. Would it were otherwise!!

"Come and get your yarbles!" ZARDOZ: British Acid Cinema v. 1

Once upon a distant UK future, or stretch of its past long buried in the bog and/or under small beach pebbles of Stonehenge-y time, savages in maskies roamed and rode, shooting and raping all they may survey, and worshipping a giant stone head that floated gamely o'er the rolling green Irish hills and occasionally spat them new guns and ammo in exchange for bags of wheat. And when it could get no weirder, the head would sprachen in a booming manly voice a kind of population control mantra, about how shooting semen from your gunny cock is bad and shooting death from a cocked gun is good, or raping must come with killing, lest more bullets in the future from thy future gun expend, and all like something passionately scrawled on the bathroom wall by a horny sophomore who'd just read Jung's "Man and his Symbols" while watching Wizard of Oz on acid. 

One of these masked savages, Zed (Sean Connery), is smarter and more dangerous than the others --rather than bowing to the head, gamely sneaks into its agape mouth, to go for a ride, killing the 'man behind the curtain' inside it, thus having the whole head to his own, only to have it touch down behind a force field and land him in the presence of a group of intellectually advanced immortals, eternally young and smart, living off the land in a perfect encounter group breathing exercise one-mind mime troupe sense of order.

Adorned only in taffeta robes (so clearly demarked 'Eloi' as to affront any rambling Bevin Boys' morlock-ish cognizance of couth), these fey libertines don't quite know what to make of our young thug from the other side of the bubble. Zed's mind has, it seems, been wiped in advance by some unknown power, so they can't "scan" him for what happened to their friend (the guy Zed killed). They have the psychic power to play a person's memories back like rewound tape and show them on the wall screen (very Black Mirror). They suspect the worst, but that part of Zed's tape has been erased!

They must investigate. Some of the girls--especially in the scientist ladies, and particularly lovely Consuella (Charlotte Rampling)--react with hostility to Zed's sexy shirtlessness. His pheromone-and-hair dye musky musk has upset the zero point population growth balance (no children for thousands of years) and gotten their eggs started all up again. Conseulla demands his immediate destruction, but other head scientist, May (Sara Kestleman) wants to probe his, ahem, "mind" first in case some part of the memory is still retrievable, so to speak.

To access this information, May may need to take Zed literally under the sheets. Shall we go then, you and I?

If, on paper, all this sounds randy and oh so 60s-early 70s sci-fi, with its mix of pulpy lurid adult sexuality and high-concept speculation, what's wrong with that? Unlike the smirky post-Porky's 80s and the inevitable feel-bad-about-smirking 90s, ZARDOZ is from an era all about psychedelic openings (especially concerning free love and eastern philosophy, the far-out writings of Castaneda, Jung, Leary, Watts, Dass, and Burroughs). If, after awhile, these free love soul openings became reduced to a giant universal mouth of macho hungry ghost gimme gimme, it's not to say it wasn't a noble experiment. For a time, when sex was plentiful, man--at his best--could finally move beyond sex. Before the hordes of leprous joneser seagulls descended, for a glistening period of around fifteen or so years, this beautiful eastern openness led to a form of macho beyond Freud's "one direction" sense of phallic symbolism, a kind of Jungian Arthurian 'good' macho, exemplified by Sean Connery's manly chest, Charlton Heston, James Bond, Don Draper, and Billy Jack. Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces led to Iron John and the men's movement. Yeah, the real men's movement, not dopey Alt-right trolls gone pale and blind and hunched over from too much time clicking in mom's basement, but hairy bigfoot-style dudes banging drums in the woods. Ugh. Maybe even then, it was a little lame, but man, did man need it.

Our psychology lacks even today, we're mired in Freud, not enough Jung. To Freud, a gun was just a penis, but Jung's break with Freud went the opposite way too, stating that the penis was also 'just' a gun (or a sword), i.e. neither was the be-all-end all, any more than a Tarot card is only paper and ink. "You can't fool me, this card isn't a Hierophant, it's paper and ink!" More than Freud's, Jung's symbolism is more enlightened, a less sex-obsessed frame of thinking. Jung's idea of "the phallus" wasn't necessarily tied to some infantile anxiety formed at the first sight of mom's "missing" genitals, but something truly mythic down to the DNA of life itself, the phallus as pure signifier, en par with the yoni / circle / zero, i.e the phallus was the '1' and the yoni the '0' of a binary symbolic code.

You can tell John Boorman knew and was heavy into all Jungian archetypal psychology. More than any other Arthurian filmmaker, he felt the connection; he was spearheading a new self-aware sexist macho psychedelia, one beyond the duality of shame/pride; lust/disgust, and even death/life. In fact, Boorman was so badass about it he'd even adorn Sean Connery in an orange diaper! He didn't give a shit, bro.

ZARDOZ, Zardoz, King of the emasculated Brittons!

 From top: Zardoz, Monty Python, Wizard of Oz, Zardoz, Tron

Clearly, Boorman understood, deep down, some of Zardoz was plain crazy. Yet it's stood the test of time. A loopy satire on the vanity at the heart of masculine identity, this fuck-all fractured crystal light show has proven mad prescient. Had anyone been listening to it at the time, instead of snickering at that diaper, Zardoz may have woken us up to the value of death as the only key to life.

But at the time, which was 1974, we weren't necessarily ready to have our yarbles handed to us with a stern warning and an extra magazine cartridge. We just saw Sean Connery with his black ponytail and traffic cone orange diaper riding a horse and a big stone head flying around, and--unless we were stoned--rolled our eyes in embarrassment. Of course, Connery would play the only fertile still-erect male in an isolated society of enlightened hot chick immortals --his big red bulges gazed upon lustily- flanked by a sparse sprinkling of symbolically neutered male elders and Bellamy-ish escorts. Of course the immortals stand around him, like buyers at a boat show, all in multi-colored robes that evoke one of those planets on Star Trek where some alien Aeschylus reads poetry aloud and the wardrobe person has a chance to air out the studio togas (in mothballs since the 50s biblical epic heyday). Add to that the kind of randy tosser pulp premise used already in everything from Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier, to Queen of Outer Space, Cat-Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon, Invasion of the Star Creatures, and so forth. Not that I'm complainin!

But time has shown us that what really spooks us (in the US especially) about ZARDOZ is that it delves deep into zones that castration anxiety has deemed verboten --and it's perhaps that anxiety that kept us (okay, me) away from the film so long in the first place. Emasculated in jumpers, "them panties", or even (below) wedding dresses, the Boorman male protagonist never shies from (figurative) crotch shots (as in Walker's final punch to the gangster's crotch in Point Blank [1967]) or squealing like a pig. In facing the dread of castration anxiety so astutely, Boorman's films have Freudian breakthroughs right there on the screen, but first one must endure the squirming: before Burt gets a chance to shoot arrows at rednecks--or Richard Burton gets to throw Linda Blair against a wall and start to strangle her while half-molesting her at the same time-- there must be all sorts of humiliation and threats, from demons, rapists, and immortal hotties with brain freezing crystal rings. Running from the problem just gives it more juice--you got to clamp down hard and don't let go, like a pit bull on the schvonce.



Taken as an infantilizing hybrid of anal phase fixations then, Zed's macho hairy chest and that orange outfit might somehow tap into into the kind of revulsion most children feel for their own diapers by the age of three -- I know it turned me off at the time (I was seven in 1974). But now, grown into middle-age, Zed's infantile garb is as bemusing and unthreatening as it is for the immortals within the sanctuary. SSRIs have removed 95% of my sex drive and I couldn't be happier about it. Maybe that's why now I understand how the UK's weird macho fey switcheroo makes boys into men: by first making them women. Connery's Zed is somehow now all the more masculine for being so feminized, so objectified. Cleaning up the table and setting out dishes as the 'adults' discuss his fate at lunch (whether they should ice him or let him live), he's like disaffected puppy, his sexual heat is the equivalent of soft black velvet painting sad eyes. He doesn't have to do anything--he's like a woman on a pirate ship where only half the crew are 'gentlemen.'

DEATH BEFORE DISHES

Watching nature shows as a kid I remember I regarded all the death as merely fascinating. It seemed remote and cool (my friends and I 'playing dead' all the time), but now the endless stream of fear, hunger, death and birth that is the ecosystem of the ocean--my poor krill--makes Earth seem a brutal prison, one that takes hundreds of thousands of lifetimes to escape--if we ever do. With every gulp some whale is devouring enough little lives to populate a country. But it doesn't end there, for gobs of krill come alive in little eggs again, just to be eaten by something that will itself be eaten. How many times have we all died as tiny little krill or shrimp or plesiosaurs? How billions of deaths have we experienced? How many traumatic rebirths, all within that same salty gross ocean?

ZARDOZ helps us indirectly wonder whether our slow poisoning of the seas has been something the sea (as in the collective consciousness continuum of all marine life along the vast, endless food chain) wished upon itself, programmed into us back in our squid years and which has remained dormant in our DNA, moving us unconsciously towards our rabid pollution and destruction of our accursed, death-ridden ecosystem. Is man's pollution is the sea's reverse-Zed deliverer from endless centuries of fear, pain, heartbreak and hunger? Zed is named thus for a reason. Man is here, screams the ocean, there shall be no more arrivals! Our pollution is a liberator that will free the blighted hungry, scared, and dying from any more than another century of endlessly reincarnating woe.

HOOLIGANS OF SATURNALIA

If the male fantasy (BARBARELLA-ish) pulp aspect makes ZARDOZ too camp for the Kubrick set, what keeps it too Kubrick for the camp set might be the very things that hamstring Britain's past attempts to mine the same male fantasy vein (DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS and FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE). Here in Boorman's future, the 'eternals' are way past such tired schticks as reproduction, death, or presumably genital-based ejaculatory orgasm. Neither aging or reproducing, the only wrinkle is when one of them disagrees with their unified mind's opinion and refuses to acquiesce. He or she cast out, sent to some kind of eternal wedding/Princeton Reunion pavilion out by the stables, forced to endure old age (and the same scratchy old big band records they'd play in the Overlook's Gold Room) for all eternity rather than die peaceably. These "renegade" immortals are sometimes guilty of nothing more than bad vibes (which unnerve their 'group mind) and who could avoid feeling them in such a place, for so damned long? No matter how lovely it is in this little garden villa-all around a lake with an old castle commons, inflated dry-cleaning bags around various bushes to denote a kind of oblique The Prisoner vibe--staying longer than a few years must be Hell.

Luckily, the hour of their deliverance is at hand. The specter in Masque of the Red Death  fuses with Conan the Barbarian and Alex in Clockwork Orange to bring a needed violence to paradise. Zed is a tool that frees these liberals from their own peace, returning them to a time when hedonistic amphetamine-amped savagery simplified all our decisions. Fracturing itself along fault lines that fuse the grim black humor of Dr. Strangelove to the horny camp of Barbarella, Zardoz has endured as a continually renewing announcement to the world that he, Boorman, can be as much a macho priapic/cold misanthropic--less geometrically precise-but-still bonkers to the point of mind expansion/Dark Heart of Conradian consciousness--"genius" as Kubrick.

Can't he?

Maybe not, but you can tell he 'gets' it, and he gets down into the same deep well of repressed shit Kubrick made so indelible. Boorman doesn't peer over the fence into Kubrick's backyard well so much as borrowing a shovel to dig his own. He doesn't need to peek at his neighbor's work, the testicular vein is deep and connects all men. He doesn't even need Terru Southern to come over and point out the lewd savagery. Boorman's the sole writer of Zardoz.  Boorman follows his own drummer and if that drummer should veer of a cliff, Boorman's macho enough to beat him all the way down

We're all hooligans in the pre-empathic nursery

But, despite Boorman's savvy about the 'viral' nature of overpopulation and the paradoxical nature of symbolic castration, labeling ZARDOZ a masterpiece is bound to cause concern to those who trust your masterpiece-labeling competence. Boorman's themes and social concerns are largely forgotten, ignored, even maligned. To me that's weird, the elephant in the room as we wring our hands (when anyone's around to see) over global warming. The population of our planet has doubled from when I was a kid in 70s elementary school. In those groovy 70s classes our cool teachers warned about the dangers of overpopulation from the get-go. There were 3.5 billion people and that was too much, if we got any bigger the planet was doomed. Today we're at at 7 billion (and rising) and supposed to solve global warming. A massive plague may be our planet's only salvation.

Soylent Green had come out the year before Zardoz and fared better, made a lasting impression et al, but that film was American, with Chuck 'Moses' NRA Heston as the star--so even your bible-thumping aunt couldn't argue against it - and it had a 'gotcha' ending as potent as the Statue of Liberty in Heston's big Apes. Zardoz was far too much of too many things--too intellectual for the pulp crowd, too comic book priapic for the intellectual crowd, and it came out too late to catch the acidheaded 'enhanced' midnight movie crowd (PS - see comment at end of this post!), yet was too trippy for the pop dystopia pre-Star Wars crowd (Logan's Run, Omega Man).

Well, it's still a film without a double-digit cult, but it's found a fan in me, at last --it only took me ten tries, over the years. I guess I was waiting... for the key moment--I finally made it to the livin' end--not even noticing Sean's ill-advised dyed-black chest hairs and douche pony tail. I just had to be in the other room for the first half, listening while it played on TCM, writing and folding laundry. Not fully paying attention, not seeing the diaper. Just absorbing my way inward, like a louche amoeba.

What I noticed most this time was the spirited fey death drive of John Alderton (future star of Wodehouse Playhouse) as 'Friend' (who takes a shine to Zed and winds up ostracized to the Pavilion as a result) and the limpid mouth and layered freckles of Sara Kestleman as May (left). The chakral intensity of her lysergic breathing really got to me. Regarded with some suspicion (and veiled jealousy) by Rampling as she inhales Zed's pheromones, I knew this was gonna be great, almost Spring Breakers ASMR style. When she and Zed head under the sheets for a special investigation of his memories I finally knew I loved Zardoz. Kestleman's freckles and big eyes and mouth alive with lysergic breathwork under the colored sheet, generating cozy-sexy womb-ish magical sci-fi energy from little more than what looks like a faded tie-dye on an old queen-size 100 thread-count. Taking May's lusty cue, her cadre loyal lady 'scientists' line up to get laid by old Sean, and in exchange give him an Alexus-voiced crystal computer ring, which--like Google--contains all their combined knowledge (so he'll know how to destroy the thing that binds them to eternal life). Lo and behold, the similarity between that ring and an iPhone are almost insane!

And lo and behold, I really relate to a lot of the crazy split-subjectives and all the mass mind meditation and heavy breathing. I mean I really REALLY relate. (Imagine me saying that last part while pulling hungrily at your collar). The Immortals' whole vibe is one of those 70s theater encounter groups, or any tight-knit acting class or troupe that does little weird everyone vocalizing and waving their arms in unison outcasting or accepting one of their number into the group mind via encounter group touching exercises. It's soooo 1970s.  It doesn't get any better.

DON'T DERIDE YOUR MAN'S ARCHAIC REVERIE

And for all its juvenile wish fulfillment, the one rooster in a big henhouse fantasy ultimately SHOULDN'T BE DERIDED as it stems from a very real archaic programming that nowadays is expressed only by splinter group Mormons, sheiks and walruses. To be the virile heterosexual male alpha specimen in some cool utopian colony -- all the women young and nubile and easily put under the sway of your fresh pheromones-- all competition sidelined, no virile male for miles... ah, what a dream. For lonesome men on the prowl, hunting in pairs--as young male lions often do in between the time the alpha male kicks them out of 'his' pride and the time they take over another's-- this fantasy sustains them. We don't act on it: we know it's too much work just dating one girl; two or more always find out about each other sooner or later and get pissed and you lose them all, and they and their friends and future friends spread shit about you forever more --you become untouchable. Hardly worth it. So in the end, the smart fella knows that if you're a straight male in a 'normal' community, it can only ever be a fantasy, a way to placate the archaic male drive without doing any real damage.

Zardoz expresses it, while at the same time undoing it, and that's maybe the thing that keeps audiences away. Our secret memories of those old sci-fi tales and Heavy Metal comics mustn't be exposed to the air and sniffed over by super intelligent women who could kill us with a wink.

On the other hand, if we don't flinch from their stinging gaze, we just might get lucky. Biology is a peculiar thing.

Dig this groovy statement by the iRing (their male version of Siri or Alexa) when discussing Zed's propensity for laying around in his cage, dreaming, a hobby which the Immortals find to be a huge waste of time: "Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated." Any artist or writer or filmmaker longs to be free of sleep --inspiration always comes at bedtime, and in the morning it's gone. For the Immortals, their longevity is a clear explanation for their enormous power, their group mind telepathy enables them live in a life of perfect order and balance.

This utopia is the dream of every loving group of 'awakened' individuals who've ever collectively fallen in love over a psychedelic outdoor weekend together (set and setting being so crucial). If they have achieved 'total consciousness," then meditation takes the place of sleep and almost every other need. "Second Level" as the Immortals call it seems to be a communal shared alpha state of bliss. Upsetting this bliss through bad vibes can lead to your arrest and aging of up to five years. Ah laddie, there's always one wally or murph trying to drag the zeppelin down. If only my tribe back in the 80s could have spooked them off with collective humming, I might be immortal to this day. Unless of course, my own bad vibes leaked out. They often did... sigh.

I've told you about those glorious stretches of time I've experienced (this much later in my fisher king solitude) when unconscious and conscious lined up perfectly, as if in sublime eclipse, and I could see with my eyes closed or open, all was illuminated and inseparable. It's clearly what Boorman was going for that total consciousness of dreaming third eye / consciousness two eyes - all open at the same time. Of course, too much of that leads straight to the psych-ward unless you're so charismatic you're covered head-to-toe in protective cult underlings who make sure your every step is strewn with roses... and if that happens just try and keep your ego from running amok and becoming 'that' type of cult leader, the male lion who boots the young men out of the tribe so he can marry all the young hotties. Boom, his clarity is gone in a smoke cloud of self-adoration.

Either way, no eclipse lasts forever, not in our short life spans, surrounded on all sides by petty droogies and dimwit doctors. Such openness of mind relies on a complete suspension of all judgment, fear, and avoidance. This leaves you very vulnerable to oncoming traffic.

(Clockwork, Goldfinger: Paradoxically, these Brit cock-and-ball stories are way

more macho than Leo avenging (yet again) his murdered child and/or wife (below)

in The Revenant:

YARBLES, AND HOW TO LOSE THEM

Let's return to the subject at hand, castration or fear thereof. Successfully completed reproduction, from the 'gleam' in your father's eye to your firs sharp inhale, spanked by a hand almost as big as you are, kick-started into the world like a wonky television-- it's one looong castration. The schlong goes in, bur it don't come out. Welcome to the rat race, sonny.

Emasculation and neutering affect our British macho man at every turn, from the laser coming right at Bond's crotch in 'ahem' Goldfinger to Clockwork's Aubrey Morris clasping hard down on Alex's niblik back at the house where he's spatchka-accruing to be right as dodgers for this after. In America, home of the wee narcissist manchildren who need to stand on crates hidden under the frame and have ramps built for them to kiss their willowy ginger co-stars, our balls are so precious that we refuse to even mention castration, as if the word is serrated-edged. Puer aeternus complexes rouse Maria von Franz from a stone sleep; the ginger beer equation, set up by half-dead spouses, advocates a tired guilt over rowdy strutting. Just making flirty eye contact dooms a girl either to smash cut to foreplay-less rutting (on HBO or AMC) or stalking (HAIR, FEAR and whatever's on Lifetime). The only guys badass enough to 'go there' as in castration are Tarantino and Rodriguez (as in RR's Planet Terror). (2) 

As Leland says Mesa of the Lost Women, this is my order: The good I will protect. Be nice unto all ages, and sans sexual advances. Believe me man, if the girl likes you that way, she'll let you know. If not - presume she doesn't. The problem facing most guys is that when they're most desirable is when they're less likely to realize it, but also that--thanks to media--they confuse being attracted with being attractive, and the first problem invades the second, so that hearing a girl you like doesn't like you the same way makes you furious, for it forces you to be aware you're misreading signals. In other words, your ego is such a bitch it uses your own insecurity to turn you into a persistent douchebag. It makes it harder for every other guy and girl to get together when genuine attraction is constantly misconstrued and confused with random 'hitting on' girls by guys who just figure they'll play the numbers.

That this extends to middle age is what's most perverse, for filmmaker and artist males often have younger women mentees/assistants/lovers. My theory is that there's the person who says no to his drive to go cavort with the younger generation, and the guy who trusts the inherent goodness within himself and is willing to ridiculous to his wife and every other girl his own age in pursuit of artistic and aesthetic realness. He'll see the sour bitches his own age sulking on the sidelines, glaring from behind strollers as he walks with a girl young enough to be his daughter if he'd had kids at 20. Who does that old dude want to be with, a sulky harridan berating and belittling his every word and missed dish dirt spot, or some starry-eyed waif who thinks he's charming and sexy, even if it's only because she has an unresolved Elektra complex? The kitchen sink Leighs and the Loaches trundle home, not forgetting to pick up bread and the Guardian--reading in bed to the knots that they keep in a jar by the door, pursuing the 'reality' of the situation like good little aging males, while Kubricks and Boormans stay up 'til all hours dropping acid with these precocious hot geniuses and contemplating not their crags and sags and graying hair,--but their eternal faces--neither old nor young, neither virile nor withered, neither growing nor shrinking, nor strutting nor cringing, but the eternal face, as frozen as the angry godhead in Zardoz as blank and meaningless as the Godhead in you know what (I shan't spoil it if you haven't seen it.)

We in America don't have it, but we need it - DR. WHO and his companions --all much younger and cute but he's got no interest in sex. He's too old. But older women are a drag - their bones can't handle time travel. Is he a snake because of this? Or just free?
--

And when the going gets too weird and all the older women get out their claws, Zed eats a single leaf from Mama Mcree's psychedelic flower. One thing leads to another by a kind of parenthetical association that would be lost on American viewers the way it was me if I hadn't just seen High-Rise. But since I had, I felt awareness of some kind of weird British shared secret, the sort where psychedelic mind expansion, socialized education, and the BBC merge together to help the male psyche shatter, so that the phallus becomes the devouring vagina dentata instead of just being devoured by it, and this is truly the union. For your casual bullet had picked its immortal's brain pan destination before you were even born, my son.

IMMORTALITY, A CHUMPS' TICKET

The first thing the old man looking at his ageless self in the young reflection (and vice versa) realizes--be he the old codger played by Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run or the old Bowman looking at himself in the mirror in 2001 and seeing a young astronaut staring back--is that all of his ages are segments of a long, single organism--the head and tail of an ouroboros serpent; the young and very old are closer to each other than they are to the middle (which is why grandparents and grandchildren have more in common than the parents). There's no escape from the void of devouring, and no one shares that certainty more than the old man's soul energy entering the maw of the unborn child. No escape, for nothing to escape to, and nothing to escape in/with... no body, no memory, no persona, just I AM.

Once inside its scaly tunnels, the 'I AM' part of the surviving soul realizes that even death itself is just a chimera, a tunnel on the endless looping track. Familiarity with acid's perspective allows this 'we are one thing, split into infinity to get a better look at itself' as almost a side effect to the experience of 'frisson.' We get to see how different it would all go down were we unfastened from the signifier-signified chain of structural indemnity and allowed to float free and easy in the zero gravity of Mad Hatter tea party disruption, where word association no longer has any relevance as a game or trick or strategy. 

For example, in a game of word-association, the word 'chair' might provoke a 'sit' response, but the insane/hatter response would be "melon") / and 'milk' doesn't provoke "cow" but a terrified scream of "gloves!" (1) resulting from an archaic memory of touching Bessie's fleshy warm udder once with bare hands at the 4H Fair and how you cried and cried.

Half the time, they're not even real words, but two or three words Frankensteined together in a kind of accelerated overlapping wave collision between free association, bad puns wrapped into themselves like Russian dolls, and scrabble befuddlement. When given full controls of the voice, the subconscious can be terribly glib and--to a sober man--incoherent. To an incoherent idiot, however, cogent indeed, for the first time - he can understand. 

If you can breech that structuralist surf, I'd say Zardoz is a film that's the story of a male psyche having a split dialogue with itself and its own adult sci-fi pulp roots--the kind of 'adult sci-fi' that's long gone but was all the 70s science fiction you could ever see, prior to Star Wars. Of course its a dialogue that has no ending. It goes on in the hearts of coded dykes struggling in the heavy mantle layers of some giddy fake-Earth ending to some mid-70s episode of Charlie's Angels (the girl football team episode). (3)

COLLUSION: 

Why and why not are inevitably so linked as to be indistinguishable. Are you going to buy the next world a cup of coffee or are you going to act sulky, alone at the counter like a little bitch, until you're so old that it's considered obscene just for you to even hit on people your own age? A 990 year old in a 20 year old body we call a vampire, but a hit from the side -- end of knee -- end of career. We call that the 80s.

Are you 'winning' or are you awake? You can't be both.

Humility or cock swagger? That's a fine duality. But humble cock swagger? Now I know you're British.

NOTES:
1. Of course that's a reference to Crispin Glover in Wild at Heart!
2.We've already talked about this when I attacked the copouts in Hard Candy and Teeth. 
3. I apologize that this ramble ends with a discussion of the dyke presence in a girl football team episode of Chaelie's Angels episode 41 (season 2), "Angels in the Backfield" but it seemed trenchant at the time, to merge a discussion of men evolving into a male/female whole soul into a female-starring detective series from the 70s chronicling the struggles of a female football team (entering a predominately masculine arena) and one of those rare, rudimentary appearances of lesbians on prime time TV. Alas, while liberated in some areas, it was still very much in to consider gays and lesbians as freaks, deviants, easy targets for stereotyping. It was only the mixture of Anita Bryant's hateful rhetoric (which so turned most of us off we became sympathetic to the gay cause) and AIDs / Rock Hudson, that turned us around more or less for (hopefully) keeps.
4.  I love for example the party scene in Arthur Marks' The RoomMates, where the faculty and co-eds at a groovy college mix together, drinking and flirting but with no harm done, even when it gets down to the underwear. That scene would never play today - there'd have to be a sexual harassment or drug/date rape or some other sordid thing. But here in the 70s (and some of the 80s) sex wasn't so bi-polar, where it's either saintliness or demeaning rutting. Flirting and highbrow theoretics could mix over cocktails as everyone was adults, nothing had to lead anywhere. It was gorgeous. 

Great 70s WarDads: Brad Pitt in FURY and WORLD WAR Z

I started writing this post a few months ago during the 2014 Golden Globes, prepared for the usual mawkish acceptance speeches and self-congratulatory montages, but I was shocked instead by how much blubbering was occurring over, of all things, kids. On and on these winners went about how they love their kids, how their kids are shining stars that transport them safely across the deserts of artistic blocks and emotional meltdowns and give their lives' meaning.

It was appalling.

Sure, I'm being a curmudgeon, but I have nothing against the kids themselves. I feel for them. Imagine being one of the children of those Globe winners, staying over at a slumber party and everyone's watching of course on TV and noticing your dad is a wussy crybaby who's totally bound to you hand and foot. Christ, I would have packed my sleeping bag and bailed on the spot. Kids have honor, a code! In order to grow into decent human beings these kids need to know dad isn't going to fall apart on them, crying and clinging and making them fight for every second of privacy. They want to know that they can move out one day and while mom might cry, dad will sigh in relief.

Maybe instead of their kids, these dads should thank Brad Pitt, for showing the way a great 70s dad behaves, during World War Z (2013). Maybe the first film to actively redress the Dads of Great Adventure complex that's befouled our decade's disaster movies (you know the type: the widowed, divorced or absentee workaholic/slacker dads who wind up with custody of the kids during the apocalypse because it strikes on the weekend--and his biggest fear is they'll die on his watch, and he'll look like a bad parent), Pitt's dad is competent and responsible for the world outside his immediate family as well as for said family, without showing any strain. All under his watch are taken care of, all without his sanctimonious belittling, clinging, or simpering (or on the other side, ignoring, spacing, procrastinating, stalling).

Pitt's professional compassion exonerates his apocalypse dad from the usual sense of proximal guilt that trips up rubes like Cage in Knowing, Viggo in The Road, Cruise in War of the Worlds and Cusak in 2012. More than all of them, World War Z makes a genuine manly effort to show male viewers a kind of post-Fight Club code they can live by without feeling like second class citizens in their own home. UN troubleshooter Gerry Lane and family (including urchin collected en route) are choppered off to an aircraft carrier packed with refugees so he can jet off to locate Patient Zero somewhere on the other side of the world. His global nation-hopping journey takes him from South Korea to Israel to a remote medical testing facility in Wales, and finally to a refugee camp in the one place savvy doomsday preppers have eyeballed since 1999, Nova Scotia!

The real-life world-savin' pair of Jolie and Pitt got started on their global betterment tour when Jolie starred in Beyond Borders. She really brought her work home with her. As if continuing that film's message, Brad's UN agent has already survived in some of the most harrowing third world hotspots. so the disasters of this zombie plague don't stress him out the way they do other dads. He has a strong, supportive wife, two glowing children, and great fun family rapport. Over the course of the movie these kids and wife are never really in danger, or at any rate, they don't panic because they trust in their heavenly-faced father. We sense that-- even when the zombie spittle is flying fast and furious--no harm will come to any of them. In fact those who stay super close to Pitt miraculously survive even as everyone else around them are infected and/or dead. The concern is solely as to where and how Pitt's UN unfazable superdad will solve the zombie problem, not if.

One of the tricks Pitt's Lane knows is something that the earlier dads of great adventure never mastered: triage. Even if he should make eye contact with people being bitten and devoured, he refrains from stopping to help them if it means risking his life or the lives of those he's with. You can imagine a lesser dad shouting 'somebody do something!' every time he sees a lost kid in a corner, but not Brad. He knows when to cut and run. There's something reassuring about how Lane's status with the UN gets him driven all around the world without need for check-in or bag search. His ability to think globally and survive locally rather than thinking locally like the dads of great adventure is what earns him this first class status.

On the other hand, telling moments in Z reveal a savvy about the proximal responsibility issue: the grateful singing of the Palestinians being let into Israel to avoid the plague excites the zombies and drives them over the impregnable wall; the one moment of true Brad danger comes when his wife's phone call rings as he's trying to sneak around sleeping zombies. This is a movie that knows how any glimmer of empathy, proximal responsibility, etc. can set off a chain reaction. Only Brad's compassionate but survival-based mojo manages to know when to run in true triage fashion.

Fury (2014) finds "Wardaddy" (Pitt) not saving the world per se, but blasting the hell out of the German homeland defenses with a tank crew of uncouth but loyal brigands. A clean-shaven newbie from the typing pool is 'daddy's' latest adopted son (Logan Lerman): he quivers and quakes and resents papa Pitt forces him to shoot an unarmed German prisoner (to toughen him up) and--as in Saving Private Ryan--there's some of that distasteful anachronism where he's the nerdy typist character (played by squirmy Jeremy Davies in Ryan) is too wussy for 1945, hell, even for 1975, but wussy like they only started to make 'em in the post-PC 'declawing' of masculinity, beginning around the early 80s. Wardaddy does the right thing in forcing him to kill an unarmed soldier --it's a matter of Pitt and crew's on personal survival that the kid be forced to surrender his squeamish morality. This suggests all sensitive typists (like myself) could use a few months on the front lines of a war with a guy like Wardaddy to toughen us up to the point we can turn compassion into an asset rather than a liability, so that we don't hesitate on the trigger when its time to kill or be killed, and that we know when to run past someone in danger, even if they make soulful eye contact with us, if it means certain death.

Pitt had proved he could be wild and liberated even whilst a young scrap of a fella, back in Thelma and Louise, so that's never been in doubt, but even so, here we got some extra layers of toughness as borne out by his scarred and diesel oil-stained face. We see him get kind of cleaned up when a nice little breakfast served up by a couple of frauleins in a little second floor apartment that's gone un-bombed, but when it's invaded by the rest of his motley tank corp, we see Pitt forced into a weird no-win zone between solidarity with his rapey crew and an innate gentlemanly spirit. It's the most tiresome scene in the film, it stretches on and on, and I'll confess I FF-ed part of the way, but it's almost worth it for the brutal pay-off, which finally brings things to bear for our milquetoast. Eventually the lad even learns when to let a kraut fry to death and when to chop him in half.  Hell yeah, Sgt. Rock loves this movie, wherever he is.

And if the whole last stand thing means that yet again the Saving Private similarities come too close to call, what is so important about Fury is what's not there: no balderdash bullshit about needing to ask a goddamned woman whether or not you 'earned it' and all that trying to find some greatest generation noble cause lollipop at the center of the severed head tootsie roll. It's finding your manliness in the company of men and smoke grenades --that's what it's for, war. David Ayers supposedly had a fight club thing going on each morning with the cast: each man fighting the other. It's true, as many of us know (but moms, wives, and soft-handed typists never have): the fastest way for men to become friends is to fight each other.

We all knew Pitt could bring the nihilistic badassitude, as could Michael Pena (Observe and Report), the real surprises in the crew are Jon Bernthal as the unkempt creep whose Iron John energy finally connects with Lerman after the fraulein incident and--most amazingly--Shia LaBeouf, whom I've always regarded with some level of contempt, but his work here completely changed my mind. When it comes down to the nitty gritty, of sharing last cigarettes and drinks before almost certain doom, it's Shia who really brought it home for me. I felt his clear-eyed look at mortality deep in my socks. I felt in his suppressed quiver of finality the feeling of being fully cognizant of imminent extinction, how one's death is pressed right up on the glass and always just a tap away --and of standing firm, fully in thrall of the only thing that can transcend the overwhelming instinct towards self-preservation: devotion to one's team. The crew, the captain, and the Pitt, the Wardaddy, the king. It's something that, for all its greatness, the entirety of Band of Brothers was never able to achieve as it lacked an actor of Pitt's unique combination of toughness and charisma, the combination of the great 70s dad. We feel the love for that combination in Shia, who gets his voice down a full octave and takes swigs of booze so believably we're made intolerant of all the lesser actors who betray their lack of experience as boozers by drinking straight whiskey like it was iced tea). With this crew's clear wincing we feel we're really in there with them, in that tank. We can smell the diesel fumes, mixed with the tang of explosives, dried blood, sweat, burnt oil, and cigarettes. It's the tang of the great 70s dad.

There's no voiceover in Fury, either, which also sets it above so many of its 'mother, am I a good man?' counterparts. And the ending credits are some of the coolest I've seen, with Steven Price's great A Silver Mt. Zion-esque soundtrack blasting over high contrast color-res images of the rest of the war. Any idea that  the war was already won by the time we crossed the Rhine is put to rest. A whole lot of pointless killing and destruction is left undone. The soldiers that were just kids and old men still are dangerous if they have ein panzerfaust (and most of them did). Yet, knowing the war is lost, all the fighting becomes somehow robbed of the honor it had when the outcome wasn't certain. Now it's not a matte of survival against evil but a delaying action waste of property, architecture, and lives rather than a noble cause. All that's left, then, is loyalty and brotherhood.

Ask the guys in Afghanistan and Iraq what they're fighting for and the answer's always the same: the guy next to them in the foxhole, their buddy, their brother by fire, they fight to keep each other alive. That's the kind of thing that would sound trite in a voiceover but if a movie like Fury can show that rather than tell (or ask for meaning from teary wives), then maybe the senselessness itself can make sense. War is hell right up to the end but so is life when the unimportant stuff's stripped away. More so in Fury than most war films (since maybe the 1930s) if you're going to survive, you need to become Hell's chosen badass. So here we finally learn what Spielberg only hinted at in his clutching for decency: that every milquetoast has it in him to face death with both barrels blazing if it comes to that, to let go of burdensome humanity and at the same time find a whole new Nietzsche paradigm.

Patton knew it. Kubrick knew it. Pitt's Tyler Durden knows it. Sgt. Aldo Raine knows it. "Wardaddy" knows it, and director David Ayers knows it. In filmmaking, as in war, the comfort of phony personae is the first thing that must go. The fastest way to shuck it is in a bare knuckle brawl with someone you're not even mad at. Even since the 90s, the Pitt persona has never wavered from that punchy code. He is our tousled lord, our approximate Arthur, our Kalifornia king.

He's all that's still standing between us and the terrible apron string hydra we choose to call mother.