The Metatextual Exorcist's Assistant: MAPS TO THE STARS, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Film as a medium isn't old enough that it has a set response as to how to handle the 'problem' of aging A-list actresses. But two 2014 films both recently released on DVD have shown the 'old' way can be made 'new' again through post-modern tweaks. The sexy young bitches of the 80s-90s have found work playing middle-aged actresses fighting to stay young and relevant, the way hot bitches of the 20s-40s did in the 50s-70s, by playing faded stars who go insane from being cooped up in their cobwebbed minds and mansions while the pictures (and cars) in the world outside get smaller, junkier, younger. Going 'Norma Desmond' allows for a kind of ageist exorcism which then makes the aging actress playing the unbalanced aging actress seem balanced by contrast. So Billy Wilder makes Gloria Swanson seem cool and Robert Aldrich makes Bette Davis seem fearless--they boldly go into the depths of their own potential madness as Hyde versions of their own personae. Skulking around their eerie mansions as theremins goose their every mirror-ward hiss, the well-aging actress playing the semi-well-aging actress playing the unwell (delusional) aged actress is cathartically freed from her own gerascophobia, exorcised with the help of a Chanel-scented strait-jacket (starring Jessica Lang as Joan Crawford). (1)

Maps and Clouds stars in an important drama about Alzheimer's

Now that we're all feminists again, the kind of lurid madness that made Baby Jane and Norma Desmond so indelible is too objectifying, too freakshow, for squeamish PC Hollywood. Age and narcissism mustn't be reduced to just another carny attraction-- not that Hollywood wouldn't make it so if we demanded, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. So the producers must instead paint a sensitive portrait of Alzheimer's or some real-life tragic figure's descent to madness. They must be educational, touching, and earnest instead of high-camp shock-value horrific. We associate aging with importance now, middle-aged actresses with serious drama. In this way, filmdom solemnly leads them out to pasture rather than letting them shred the walls of a cinematic padded cell. With all projects not good enough for a dame of their stature, they wither from underuse.

Sensing an opportunity to fill the gap, however, scrappy maverick independent filmmakers circle the wagons around the A-list divas with a little money saved up (or will work for scale to get their attached to a truly edgy and 'now' product) who want to sink their teeth into something bonkers for a change, to work with talents unafraid to plunge into new dark depths behind the camera, irregardless of the PC putsch that so paralyzes mainstream Hollywood when it comes to bitches over 40. Canadians like David Cronenberg and Frenchmen like Olivier Assayas, keep the luridly self-reflexive spirit of Billy Wilder and Robert Aldrich alive, for they know a secret denied the average Hollywood hack: the 50s-70s 'horror hag' spirit need only be taken one meta-level further to resonate in our new century's junk TV-addicted consciousness afresh and leave the stigma of exploitation behind in the process: Julianne Moore and Juliette Binoche shall play Gloria Swansons playing Norma Desmonds now, instead of just playing Norma Desmonds trying to play Salome. Brian Oblivion would be so proud! 

THE CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Dir Olivia Assayas (2014)

***

Olivier Assayas uses the post-modern lesbian corporate thriller the way Jean Pierre-Melville used the French New Wave gangster film, as a gateway between high art and low genre for anyone with a Gauloises and Steadicam to glide through behind him. In his Boarding Gate, for example, scenes of Asia Argento walking through a vast bustling Hong Kong mall-flea market--each booth/stall a vast tapestry of electronics, contrasting languages and music all whirling together one after the other--are perhaps the most ear-boggling use of post-modern affect in all cinema, but then... what is there to when from why? We're left feeling cheated, confused, even irked.Assayas' biggest weakness has always been his endings, since demonlover, even. His best works, like Irma Vep, end in pure abstraction. His worst endings feel like betrayals - like he led us on, like seducing us into bed then running away going "I forgot I'm married" and runs away last minute.

Before something like that happens, Clouds of Sils Maria covers several layers of a power trio of strong female leads ranging along the All about Eve axis, each playing versions of themselves and their personal assistants in screens-within-screens. The catsuit Les Vampyres S/M gone corporate bitch-in-the-boardroominess of his dEmonlover and Boarding Gate coalesce against Summer Hours pastorale realness as two women play characters studying to be themselves and each other; the same weird mix of back-stabbing and compassion with which younger executive assistants are shepherded by older female employers into the abyss of self-awareness and ambition, breaking them down and being broken in turn in some twisted--even if initially altruistic--identity merge/melt-down. They have youth; you have power. But they can get power, what can you get, except older?

From the ongoing discussion between Maria (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant Val (Kristen Stewart) about Maria's character in the play that made her famous (she's now shifting from the ingenue to the older lesbian mentor, and she ain't happy about it). Maria's nihilistic interpretation of the character during rehearsals and discussions jibes with Val's hip youthful (American) interpretation of Maria's interpretation, which Val sees as solipsistic, as glorifying youth based on one's rose-tinted memories and attacking her own aging dignity. And Val isn't backing down even against Maria's contemptuous laughter which might have worked on her when she was Val's age, but Val is somehow more grown up than that.

It makes sense then that Kristen Stewart steals the show as Val, handling her personal assistant duties with startling cool, knowing just how to rile, soothe or otherwise push Maria's buttons while juggling deals and cars and hotel rooms and interviews and meetings with photographers, all without ever seeming to break her detached stride or smash her incessantly ringing cell phone. Chloë Grace Moretz plays the rising star playing the younger part in the play (the superhero masochist in the comic book film they see) who Val and Maria meet with later for drinks, along with the young dumb boyfriend, a writer whose wife tries to commit suicide and...hmmm.

If that's confusing, it's my fault. Let's just say it's Bette Davis' The Star meets Petra Von Kant rehearsing a lesbian corporate boardroom version of The Blue Angel in the isolation of Faro (where Bergman filmed Persona) so hey, that's a lot a layers of reference. What makes it work even if you don't know those films is the way the pair of actresses connect with such quiet force (we understand immediately why Stewart won the César) and the dialogue of the play they're working on resembles their characters' own relationship--and perhaps Stewart's real-life relationship with PA Alicia Cargile (left)--so much it's (intentionally) impossible to tell where one (the lines they're running) ends and the other (their actual relationship) begins, except that the line-running they do feels real while their sudden lurches into directly discussing their own relationship--Val complaining as Maria laughs at her impressions of the play's subtext--seems sudden, hamfisted. It's as if direct confrontation would be too much, too theatrical, so they just endure all they can like it doesn't bother them until they just bail. It begs an interesting question: how does one deal with having acted all kinds of break-up scenes with someone when you're suddenly actually breaking up with them, without it feeling cliche? Atsa lotta layers, Olivier! Maybe ats too much...

Maybe yes, for then comes that terrible Assayas anticlimactic 'resolution.' As the Binoche-Stewart personae (see what I did there?) merges into itself like a sssnake. along with the two characters they're rehearsing (via the actress and personal assistant they're playing), there's a sudden mystical shift that... well.. it doesn't work. Oh Olivier, you just had to keep adding layers until the whole thing deflated like an overdone soufflé... again. 

Maybe I'm wrong or nitpicking --it's just that jibing to Stewart and Binoche's chemistry through most of the film as I was, I felt genuinely saddened by the sudden flight into Peter Weir-ish fourth act mysticism. The big comparisons critics have been making of course are to the endings of Bergman's Persona and Antonioni's L'Aventura, but the former was abstract from the get go, there the weird ending made sense and in the latter they at least talked about the disappearance --it even obsessed them for awhile, until they forgot about it, and we didn't much miss the missing girl anyway, since it was Monica Vitti we were collectively falling in love with even at the start. Here in Sils that love equation is reversed, like L'Aventura if Vitti just left without a note toward the end and we spent the rest of the damn movie with the smarmy Sandro (Gabriele Farzetti). Some critics hypothesize Val kind of morphs into Chloë Grace Moretz, playing the tabloid-branded scarlet letter marriage-wrecker of years ago (see: Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison), but to me they're making excuses on Assayas' behalf. Mention art cinema 'modernity' vs. vérité realism if you want --it just plum doesn't work... for me at least. In interviews Assayas says he wanted to give the audience something to think about, but it feels to me like all he did was take something we were thinking about away. 

The scenery is staggering. I love this mountainous zone where German loftiness, Nordic depression, and French intellectual aesthetics sizzle together and align like a constellation. I was imagining what if Bergman were directing, that he might go full-on post-modern and we'd maybe get an interview with Alice Cargile in between takes of the film within the play about a pair of women in a play. That might have worked, but whatever - the Melville of post-affect cinema transcends such things as satisfying destinations. As with Irma Vep, Boarding Gate, Carlos and demonlover, the trip is where he works his magic. Once arrived, he's all out of rabbits.

MAPS TO THE STARS

(2014) Dir. David Cronenberg

***1/2

One can't imagine either Hollywood or the Sils Maria European bourgeois "artist" community making a film like Maps to the Stars. A lurid, slow-burn haunted-Hollywood saga of pyromaniac schizophrenics, hot young ghosts, egomaniacal stars, and abusive life coaches, it could only come from a Canadian indie auteur who doesn't need pretentious vanishings to craft a Brechtian dissertations on aging actresses being intimidated by the endless incoming waves of amber ingenues. As in Sils, the idea of female 'performance' leads to meta-split mirroring, passive-aggressive sabotage by the older insecure actress against her younger personal assistant, the Twilight connection (Stewart in Sils, Pattinson Maps), Stewart co-starring with Maps star Julianne Moore in Still Alice the same year (top), like an eerie reflection across continents, genres, and post-modern layers. 

Thing is, of the two films, only one is genuinely subversive and ballsy. Only one goes to places the jugular didn't even know it led to.

In both Sils and Maps there's the idea of being subsumed by another's ego, of being a young female assistant, trying to have her own life while working for a solipsistic middle-aged actress who's going insane from dealing with the dwindling roles / loss of youth, and so bullying their younger incarnation in an attempt to exorcise their own inferiority complex. In Sils the assistant takes revenge in the must cowardly way possible, by merely vanishing without even two-weeks notice; in Maps, well.. I can't spoil it, but it's far more satisfying. There's a sense of unyielding magnetism in Cronenberg's film that Assayas' was too high in the Alps to feel: the inexorable magnetized streak of insanity running deep in the fault line crust of Los Angeles, and the most expedient, direct way to drill down into it.

Sordid show biz underbelly chronicler (and Castaneda mystic) Bruce Wagner (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) knows every inch of what his script is chronicling, and he can match the darkness, stab-for-stab. Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) arrives on Hollywood Boulevard by bus after being released from some juvenile mental hospital, and--like Melanie Daniels at Bodega Bay--her mere presence triggers the vengeful furies, here a series of ghosts: Her new employer, fading star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), is haunted by her crazy star mom Clarice, who set their house on fire when Havana was only a child; Agatha's estranged brother Benji (Evan Bird), a bratty child star, finds himself haunted by a girl who died before he could grant her Make-a-Wish Foundation request. Meanwhile, a new biopic is being made on Clarice's storied life and daughter Havana is  fighting to play her, even while claiming she was molested and abused. Ingeniously, the ghost of Clarice is played by luminous hottie Sara Gordon (above, in the bath),  and of course, it makes sense--why wouldn't a vain ghost want to appear younger than her own grown alive children? It's just the right kind of weird twist that shows a real subversive instinct that Maps has in abundance, the kind Assayas ultimately lacks even as it covers the same ground.

It's all in the genes.

With the kind of naive prepossession that does well in Hollywood, Agatha-- on meds and working the steps, tries make amends with her family, but that doesn't go over well with her bitter father (John Cusack) who still hates her for setting fire to their house as a child and feeding Benji a near-fatal overdose of pills. Since that ordeal, Cusack has risen to make a fortune as a platitude-spouting gestalt masseur (with clients including Havana whom he clearly hasn't told about Agatha or vice versa). He has demons of his own, clearly, exhibiting the typical violent denial self-help gurus often display towards their own hang-ups. 

Ultimately these two interlocked pyromaniac-and-narcissist-choked LA families crash into one another in a shocker climax so effective and satisfying it becomes the polar opposite to Assayas' Sils's (we saw them as a double feature this past Friday night - I'd recommend you do the same, in the order presented). We just don't expect such a shock because for awhile there Cronenberg made us forget we were watching a Cronenberg film and not some piece of Hollywood self-regard and near-whimsy about how all we need is a bus ticket and a dream. That's the Cronenberg touch at work, to be good enough at the one thing you forget it's the other. Stars has courage to go deep into the abyss from off a steep, high diving board, while Sils only splashes around a bit then crooks a finger towards Lars Von Trier's receding light. Even Maps' ghost appearances aren't trite or cliche. Although they're presumed to be just psychic projection, it's a movie first, so we understand that being actors anyway the haunted A-listers are conditioned to let their imagination get the better of them, to confuse their script with their life in ways only we were confused by in Sils Maria. In other words, even as actors playing characters who are actors, characters will mess themselves up in the name of a good performance, with the understanding that--above all--they're still in an "actual" film as well as a film about film, even when they know within the context of the (outer) film that the (inner) film is just their reality and not even a film-within-the-main film!

If that's confusing, consider the contrast: in Sils, Binoche is playing an aging Marlene Dietrich remaking The Blue Angel as a butch Emil Jannings, heading back to her classroom to sulk after her younger wife hooks up with the strongman. In Maps, the better option is finally presented: kill them both and burn the whole fucking cabaret to the ground! Clarice and Agatha, I tell they, by the power of Chuck D, Hollywood sur le feu!

NOTES:
1. PS - when I wrote this that AMC show FEUD hadn't even been announced! Was it ushered into existence because of this post? I like to think so (5-16-17). 

Summer of Streaming II: Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic la Netflix

Dream or Nightmare logic: a lazy way for European directors to run amok with free association non sequiturs and not have to worry about coherence, or a daring approach to the post-60s crashed jet set void de la Freud delving, based on the symbolist and surrealist movements of the early 20th century?

A: Yes
B: Magenta.
C: Hollyhocks
D. Mrs. Claypool
E. (......windshield wiper sounds)
F. Two of the above

2. European art cinema can be very boring and opaque if you're careful. But if you're not--if you're, say, dosed or delirious or bored into falling into a trance--its abstraction makes perfect 'sense.' Falling half-asleep while watching Rollin or Jess Franco's earlier work, for example, is a truly psychedelic experience, and in most cases almost inevitable. Would you agree?

A. No
B. Sax player shredding a picture of Lina Romay and dropping pieces in a ditch by the Autobahn.
C. Sax player shredding a picture of Maria Rohm and throwing pieces into the Bosphorus.
D. Trumpet player taping a picture of Soledad Miranda back together again, in vain.

3. There are five easy ways to understand Italian drive-in dream logic, all based on the Carnival of Souls principle:

a.) DEATH: The protagonist is already dead and/or stuck in an endless reincarnation loop stuck in the amber of hell/heaven time.
b.) AMNESIA: The protagonist/s have amnesia but don't even know it - they try to hide it, the way you don't want to admit you don't remember someone who comes up and knows your name. The result of lots of drinking in the swinging European 60s-70s.
c.)  DREAM: Dreaming while awake, caught in a web of true myth, where waking consciousness and unconsciousness have lined up perfectly, like two overhead transparencies.
d.) LSD: They're tripping or recovering and can't remember which is which (lots of acid in 60s-70s Europe)
e.) INSANITY - They're remembering or recounting narrative from a psych ward.
f.) All of the above, for in a way they are all the same, non?

Remember that in Europe the language barriers are more immediate and the past older than in America. In Europe, a 70s B-movie can take place in a real castle, or a condemned art nouveau mansion cheaper than building a single Hollywood set, so a modern French model in a turn-of-the-century vampire gown running loose amidst the Gothic spires is not only cheap to film, it has so much post-modern frisson it creates a truly 'all times all the time' dream logic loop all into itself. 

Beyond the Black Rainbow (top: The Strange Color of your Body's Tears; Berberian Sound Studio)

For this festival, we're talking of a return to the art of those pre-slasher death-poetic times, a time before the derelict fringe theaters at the edge of America closed. And before kids could just go to their rooms and watch tapes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead until they were numb, and pornography when they weren't. Compared to that madness, the razor slash black glove murders and surreal heavy breathing dream-rotica of what Mondo Macabro calls Eurosleaze seem almost quaint.

You and the Night

And so, full circle. New filmmakers falling in love with the old ways --trying to escape the numb overkill 'traumatize even a pre-Ludovico Alex' ultra-violence-- come to this old genre as if a wellspring. And the wellspring has never been clearer, cleaner, more beguiling: Many of these old films, available only as pan/scanned blurs on VHS if at all, bare now restored by to HD by loving homegrown labels. And so new films spring up paying homage to the post-modern psychedelic wellspring of experimentalism.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears

And atop the crest of the post-modern alienation resurgence lurks 'the Darionioni Nuovo' the New post-Dario Argento-Antonioni wave-- Peter Strickland, Helen Cattet and Bruno Forlanzi, Sebastian Silva, Nicolas Winding Refn, Panos Cosmatos, and the post-Carpenter/Morricone music of Sinoa Caves, M83, Tom Raybould, Cliff Martinez, and Rich Vreeland. It's a new setting sun; the alienation-cum-Freud dissociation style used together to explore red desert crimson rivers of pain and ecstasy, hills of post-modern disaffect that uses our need for a coherent linear narrative mapping, our presumed familiarity with exploitation and art film history, with fairy tales, David Lynch, and modern art, as a kind of metaphysical third heat paint brush. The result is what art cinema should always be striving for: an erasure of the line where narrative classical cinema ends and avant-garde experimentalism begins. Madness coheres like a boil atop modern alienation's callouses; our own vivid imagination becomes a finger pointing at how innate and irremovable is our compulsion to craft a frame, an order, a meaning, a reason, a psychosocial iconography, onto even the most elusive and elliptical of texts. 

But it's only when the symbols are there but we can't connect a single one that we're finally free --pure Joycean aesthetic arrest mingling with the erotic Batailles death drive at the same time. So line these up in your list, see them all in order, all at once--obey.... obey... and let go of that tightening noose around your mind called language. 

See also:
STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS 
Bad Acid 80: Italian Horror Drive-In Dream Logic

1. PASSION

(2012) Dir Brian De Palma

***

De Palma's Italian modernizing of the Hitchcock homage, an obsession he abandoned for a slew of blockbusters in the 80s-90s, has kicked back in for the 21st century, on more modest budgets, out in Europe where they still revere fading auteurs. He's been crafting old school returns to form like Femme Fatale and this loose remake of the French film Love Crimes, called Passion. Strangely, due to cast and content, it also functions as an unofficial sequel to Soderbergh's Side Effects (which as Alan Scherstuhl notes "ground that other girl with the dragon tattoo through something like the same pharmaceutical Hitchcockisms.") Even  with all that intertextuality, Passion--not unlike Fatale, --met with critical hostility from a knee-jerk press too busy sneering at the unrealistic excess and recessive misogyny to notice the sexy genius at work, condemning it have having almost no reference to anything other than Hithcock and Chabrol films. But if Passion came out in 1973, those same critics would be worshipping it today, since Pauline Kael would be around like a protective lioness for her dirty kick cub. She's gone, but here on Netflix Passion finds a new chance for resonance, since it can become part of a post-giallo festival list like mine! Always the downtown American twin/paisan to Argento (see: Two Hearts Stab as One: De Palma's and Argento's Reptile Dysfunction), De Palma is nothing if not savvy about the obsessive alienation caused by the endless proliferation of image, of titles binged in meta mirroring, instant festival curations (like this one). His films work best when they're situated between the art and low horror films on the theater 'coming soon' wall. And onscreen, the boardroom lesbian betrayals and seductions, the split screen, the ballet, all add up to a curious and sometimes titillating exercise in pure bravura style for style's sake. Pretend it's a futuristic thriller coming out in 1978 and that it's not a movie at all but a lesbian fantasy Catherine Zeta Jones is having while in jail during a Side Effects coda. Frickin' McAdams is the hottest thing ever, man, and brings so much duplicitous brio to her role she's like her old Mean Girl self grown up for the long con. And the gorgeous-if-sterile corporate imagery, hot sex, cold stalking, and ominous Pino Donaggio score are as perfectly interconnected as a fine Swiss watch.

 2. KISS OF THE DAMNED

 (2014) Dir Xan Cassavetes
***

Bearded screenwriter Paolo (Milo Ventimiglio) meets alluring but stand-offish Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) but they can only hook up if he becomes a vampire, cuz she gonna bite him. Love finds a way and five Twilight films are condensed to the opening act of a low budget but artsy and vivid retro-esque vamp tale from the daughter of John Cassavetes. Backed up with a sultry Steven Hufsteter score (with just enough vintage Morricone twang), the delicately low-key romantic chemistry of La Baume and Ventimiglio intoxicates so when Djuna's wild child sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida) shows up, needing a place to crash after laying waste to her last party town residence, we recoil in frustration like we're Gene Tierney cockblocked by apple-cheeked cherubs in Leave Her to Heaven. Kiss of the Damned isn't set in the past or anything but Cassavetes is clearly paying some homage to the sexy vampire films of swinging 60s-70s Europe, and she hooks us into loving them anew by filling us with the giddy high that comes from being welcomed into the in-crowd, and being cool enough that of course you fit right in, and get to stay young and gorgeous forever... 

3. BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO

(2012) Dir Peter Strickland 

***1/2

While we wait for his wildly acclaimed Duke of Burgundy to come to Blu-ray, the Argento stylistic anti-misogyny,Bergmanesque post-modern meltdowns and Lynchian "no hay banda"-ism of Strickland's memorable debut Berberian Sound Studio add up to a deeply unsettling visually (and most importantly aurally) seductive post-structuralist fantasia wherein a reserved Brit sound mixer (Toby Jones) works on a mysterious horror film in 70s Rome. We never actually see the film the's working on (just hear it), which just adds to the unsettling frisson of its imagery --no visual violence can really match our imagination, aptly mirrored in the sickening dead-inside feeling overtaking Jones as he rattles the chains, crunches heads of lettuce, and drenches it all in a dripping crypt echo (from the fractions of script and scenes the film seems one part Argento's Suspiria, one part Soavi's The Church, and one part Fulci's City of the Living Dead). Strickland trusts his expert blocking and cagey actors and actresses in and around the studio's tight places, and though the rudeness of some of the macho Italian filmmakers gets on one's nerves, it's supposed to, indicating the corrupt, decadent fucked-up misogyny of Italy runs thick as blood under the giallo genre's slick surface. A layered masterpiece of enigmatic self-reflexive horror, Berberian Sound Studio is like five different Italian horror and art film DVDs--the films and making of documentary  extras--all swirled together into a fantasia that puts broader self-reflexive stuff like Shadow of the Vampire to shame, and instead approaches the meta greatness of Irma Vep, StageFright, Contempt and The Stunt Man.

4. STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS

(2013) Dir. Helen Cattet y Bruno Forlanzi

***1/2

Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, cinema's first and only mixed gender / race / nationality directing couple have been setting my head on fire ever since their 2009 feature debut AMER. I was so blown away by their unique mix of modernist experimental and post-modern 70s Italian horror narrative that I even coined a term to describe them the Darionini Nuovo. Argento may not have made a decent film since the mid 90s, but this pair has taken his blazing primary color iconography farther than brother Salvatore would have e'er allowed. (I'd also argue Argento really needs Asia's mom, Daria Nicoldi to help him write and get the feminine fairy tale point of view, because without her--as in his last decade's worth of films--he just seems perversely misanthropic.) Granted Forlani / Cattet's unique looping style will no doubt prove alienating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know Suspiria, Red Desert, L'Eclisse and Bird with Crystal Plumage like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at gorgeous ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture or thrill to Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance, all slashed out before them like a blood bouquet against obsidian skies. Then again, even those of us who do might need a break halfway through. Don't worry, the joy of streaming is you can just stop and pick up later where you left off. Or start over. There's no difference. Maybe try playing ten minutes of it in between all these other films, like a connecting story to a horror anthology. Either way, essential viewing. 

5. BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW

2010 Dir. Panos Cosmatos

***1/2

Michael Rogers is a batshit crazy psychiatrist named Barry Nyle, who keeps the director's scanner-style acid-spawned only patient, Elena (Eva Bourne), under heavy sedation in a futuristic Rothko-cum-Kubrick orange or red or yellow room, and tries to analyze her through her a thick protective glass, while jotting down 'notes' and slow-as-molasses-style going even more insane. He also has special super tall robot-like guards called sentinauts and a weird white triangle device that can deliver sound vibrational (presumed) shockwaves to knock Elena to the ground and (presumably) jam her brainwaves if she tries to explode any heads or walk out the door. It's really a sight-sound spectacular, heightened by a great retro-futuristic synth score by Sinoia Caves which heats and throbs and pitch modulates around the bizarre retrofuturistic dome, going everywhere Barry goes, from the depressing nurse's break room, the office/drug den of the Buckminster Fuller-ish founder of their geodesic complex, his slick car. In a flashback to 1966 we see the Fuller-ish director as a younger man, taking Barry on his deep dish drug trip (LSD was legal then and being used by forward-thinking psychiatrists all around the world); his trip resembles the 'Beyond the Infinite' section of 2001 slowed to molasses and judging by the third eye drawn on his forehead and his patience with letting his face melt and dissolve, we figure he must be ready to transform... but into what? Then he's reborn in an oil slick, crawling out of a black circle like a reptile from its egg, and latching onto the woman, some woman... I don't know...his wife? Elena's mother? Does he kill her by ripping her throat out with his teeth, or is that an ejaculation? Is she coasting on an orgasm, or is the light going out of her eyes? Or is he remembering his birth? Does the director forgive him since he's legally insane due to his heavy trip? Dude, I've been beyond the black rainbow too and I didn't end up killing anyone, so what's this guy's deal? I do know how easy it seems at the time, but there's a difference.

We know Cosmatos's deal at any rate: he's made a glacial melding of Canadian retrofuturistic 70s horror (Scanners, Blue Sunshine) impossible to categorize masterpiece so far ahead of its time it's past hasn't even happened yet, and yet it's never left the 70s, why would it? The imagery and the music is the thing... is Cosmatos our new Kubrick? Time alone will tell, but it won't tell Barry. 

6. ROOM 237

(2014) Dir Rodney Ascher

****

Now we come to the dividing line between present-past and passed-past and pissed-drunk, a sideways crab-like moving from post-modern giallo to paranoid theorizing to proto-giallo to TV movie giallo and bizarro refractability. With Ascher's fascinating documentary we understand the impossibility of a text ever meaning anything, regardless of the author's intention. So freed of all understanding, we enter the realm of madness and all is illuminated, and terrifying. First because paranoid psychosis is very contagious so as we hear these crazy theories about what every little detail means we begin to get scared by the original movie all over again. Now we realize the insanity that appears when we lose all contact with the outside world. Artists try to work with it, theorists riff on it, and the writer drowns in it. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon through repetitive mantra makes a dull boy, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective. Good riddance, or rid...dle dense! (more)

7. LISA AND THE DEVIL

(1974) Dir. Mario Bava (1)

***1/2

Lisa (Elke Sommer) is on holiday; her tour bus stops at a maze-like little Spanish town and and Lisa sees a jolly demon in a Middle Ages fresco - it sticks in her mind; then she sees a man who looks just like the demon buying a mannequin at an antique shop she wigs out. So do we, for he's a bald, lollipop-sucking cigarette-voiced hipster named Telly Savalas. It's all too much for poor Lisa and she's thrown into what Carlos Castaneda might call 'non-ordinary reality' and what Bava might call purgatorio but what we call 'surreal 70s Euro-cult heaven.' Obsessed by a little musical carousel of macabre figures chronicling the endless cycle of life after life, Lisa begins to wake into that special nightmare where you turn around and suddenly everyone you know is gone and you're all alone and lost in an empty narrow streeted maze in a foreign land; you catch a ride in old car from a rich couple (the younger wife having an affair with the hot young chauffeur, the older man too world-weary to give a fuck, etc.) The car breaks down near a a weird old villa where you all run up against a cockblocking Hitchcockian matriarch played by Alida Vialli (the malignant future director of the Freiburg Dance Academy) and her cat-eyed son (Alessio Orano), who she won't let beyond the villa walls and who has been so....so lonely. Corpses accrue, and as they do, mannequins appear which Telly arranges in the 'funeral rehearsal'.

Naturally, Lisa looks just like Alessio's dead wife and--when he later makes love to her comatose form her by his dead wife's sleeping skeleton--his lonesome kinkiness gets so creepy on so many levels you just have to laugh.

Mario, you make Poe seem balanced.

Who pulls your strings, baby?

Anyway, it's all cool as this is all just a tape we played long ago underneath the carousel of time Lisa wanted at the antique store, which turns up here, with a tape player providing the music; Savalas' mannequins come to life and play the parts of long dead lovers or whomever is needed, and the killer kills them back to mannequins again. Funeral marches are held on the spot, as the latest body is wheeled around on a serving cart through the vast semi-decayed mansion; one lavish room is devoted solely to family funerals, which Alessio later tries to change into a marriage chapel by kicking wreaths over. If the (painted on clapboard) decaying trimmings and gaudy silver of this old villa begins to weigh on the mind like one has spent too much time 'antiquing' on a sunny afternoon in the country with mother.... always with mother. But murders come too fast for boredom, and necrophilia follows hot on the heels - a dozen viewings later and you appreciate it like you just learned to savor very old wine instead of wolfing it down for a quick escapist buzz.

Depending on your affection for the giant pointed 70s collar out over smoking jacket lapel look, the size of Alessio's collar at left might be just too much. The sickening key lime green of Elke Sommer's raincoat and shoes makes me, personally, ill and really brings out the greasy flatness of her gaudy cheap 60s make-up (as Audrey Hepburn says in CHARADE, certain shades of limelight can wreck a girl's complexion). But, even if you're sick like me, if you get to the end you finally get why she was wearing it in the beginning; because every color must match, pre-destined like a dream, and her horrible make-up is all gaudy and doll-like purely so she looks like a mannequin in profile. The film is full of things like that, so never doubt the maestro, baby (PS - I recently saw the HD remastered verision of this on Shudder and take back everything I say, she looks ravishing - it was the old transfer that made everyone look so waxy). I would be thoroughly a fan if the score was Morricone twang instead of Carla Savaina swank, but there is an interesting giallo-esque sing-song motif playing for all the broken clock shots (lots of 'x' symbolism) and whether ironically working a lollipop colored the same lime green as Elke's coat, dropping double meaning Satanic inferences like "nothing escapes me, madame") or wryly talking to himself while packing mannequins into coffins as part of a "dress rehearsal for a funeral"--he's divine, baby. Divino. I also love him as the Cossack officer in Horror Express ("who are the perpeatratazs?!") and he's my favorite Blofeldt ("you love chiggens.")

Selected Shorts:

KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER
(1975) "The Trevi Collection" (ep.14)

I never saw Kojack but Kolchak is different. Him I knew and loved. And it was even on early enough I could stay up to watch it. And in this episode we're reminded there's no cheaper yet creepier effect than casting and dressing humans to look like mannequins so you can interchange them with the actual mannequin in the background of shots for a very unnerving effect. Bava used this trick in Lisa and the Devil albeit more overtly. Like the 1979 Tourist Trap, Kolchak keeps the truth ambiguous. And this witchy episode is one of everyone's favorites from the era. Right up there with the lizard monster in the tunnels, the headless biker, and the ghostly Native American shaman. Dig man... canceled after one season... 'cuz he was getting too close to the truth!

"Danielle"Starring Jennifer Lawrence

Saturday Night Live - Season 38, Episode 11 Time: 43.52-47 - 47:08

The movies this four minute spot parodies are all-too familiar for anyone who remembers pay cable in the 80s. And the brains behind this (clearly Fred Armisen and Bill Hader) know their stuff and Lawrence is, as always game. Brilliantly capturing the flat but sonorous voice dubbing --clipping sentences together.... tofitthelips as they move... and the crushing banality of it all and sudden sharp laughter-- hahaha, look kids I'm a bufoon... It's priceless and worth taking the time to find, for it captures perfectly the icky sensation of watching Europeans try to act like Americans on vacation, and pretend orgy mongering is natural for all jet set lounge cadets outside the US. if you want to stick on this bent - check out Danger 5, the first season. 

8. THE IRON ROSE

"La Rose de Fer" (1972) Dir Jean Rollin

***

The French love their poets the way Americans love rock stars. This is normal, not something for your girlfriend's parents to passively sneer at. In other words, unlike Americans, the French love writers as well as performers, and understand that the actors aren't just making this stuff up on the spot. Most of all, though, they love French poets like Brittany's own Tristan Corbière, one the crowning jewels of the Symbolist 'dead before 30' dozen. I'm not sure which part of Françoise Pascal's final monologue/ voiceover during her nude cross-bearing is from him, but I do value that it's hard to tell. I also value that, aside from an ominously black train parked in the weeds in the middle of nowhere and an opening working class wedding feast (at which both characters seem to clearly not belong --as if already ghosts), the film takes place over one late afternoon-into-dawn trip to the overcast graveyard. As their pleasant and banal Rohmer-esque date turns first into a slow nightmare (they can't find the exit), then paranoia over each other's motives, and then a surreal mournful cry for death, the whole film becomes a love song, a longing for the loving embrace of la mortalité, finalité et l'éternité. 

And is there any image more quietly under-the-skin creepy than this image at right? Non.

Every student filmmaker knows that old cemeteries are the best places to shoot films cheap (superstition keeps most people away; the stones add artsy death drive heft), and a cast of just two actors walking through it is even cheaper. You don't even need a script! You can just shoot your actors frolicking or running or freaking out and figure out what the reasons are later via voiceover. It would be lazy in most directors (even I've done it -see the Buenos Aires section of The Lacan Hour) but that's just part of Rollin's charm, that pretentious art film iconography. There's already a morbid air to his Euro-sex films anyway, so it's no stretch going this dark, and Pascal's deranged and demure performance, slowly going crazy amidst the plethora of human bones scattered in the open crypts, is perfect.  

A purist might wonder how either this or the last film is truly post-giallo, but to that I shrug like a condescending French cabbie and note that it's short, so you might not even have time to wonder where the hell it's going before the ride is over. Just know the boy and girl are dressed in bold primary colors, so we can see them in the fading light. There's no glaring spotlights or day-for-night nonsense, making Jean-Jacques Renon's photography all the richer for being so dark without going murky. When the sun comes up and the the conqueror worm's snacktime looms you can feel your pupils contracting from the sudden light. It's glorious in its Corbière-sy darkness. Vive la morte!

9. YOU AND THE NIGHT

"Les rencontres d'après minuit" (2013) Dir Yann Gonzalez

***

You'll either like it or think it's too jejune, or--like me--both (in alternating currents of cringe and singe), but either way, if Radley Metzger and Jean Cocteau collaborated for some SoHo gallery after-hours 'happening' you'd get this.  Mme Jannings notes on imdb: "This is a movie that cannot be seen with the eyes of evasion. It is a movie that needs to be watch it (sic) with the eyes of the soul as well as the physical eyes, without prejudgments, and without taboos." Oui, mademoiselle! It may have that pleased-with-itself, breastfed-until-21 sense of presumptive Euro-entitlement (something most Americans have bullied out of them well before middle school), but it has a warm heart underneath its posturing, and if you wish to understand Cocteau, which is to understand France, and to understand Radley, which is to appreciate sex as no more dangerous underneath its leather studs than a frightened dog once it gets to know you, then you'd do well to watch, appreciate and understand You and the Night. 

I've written copy for a Paris music and movie review web site (now defunct), and maintained a 'cinq a sept' with a married Swiss-French businesswoman for three years, so I know what it is to love the French, biblically, aesthetically, tragically. This film will, if you are me, remind you of such things, of what Dietrich said about sex for Americans vs. Europeans. In fact it is better at what Greg Araki tries to do than Greg Araki (whose White Bird in a Blizzard almost made this list). It's also better--to my mind anyway--than anything by the sentiment-besotted Wong Kar Wai. Instead, its emotional lotus-like opening has something of that Apollonian Kenneth Anger-via-Max Reinhardt magic ritual-fairy dusting that amply compensates for its overall... ow you say, self-indulgent wankery? 

As with Cocteau, the boys are astonishingly gorgeous, the girls ruggedly handsome. As in Argento, there are bold striking colors. There are elegant tableaux compositions, a great M83 score, and a nicely ravaged cameo by the ever-feral Beatrice Dalle as a whip-wielding commissar. If it all adds up to a nice bunch of parts rather than a movie, well, what of it? Love leaves a new hole for every old one it fills (that's mine, but you can use it.)

Even more importantly, thanks to this curated-by-Acidemic orgie de fête, it's a unique film that doesn't need to stand alone, not anymore, which is good since it's a film all about how the most oversexed are often the most alone, and for learning to stand together as a group may be the first time they experience real connection (i.e., like crying at a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting if it was held at midnight in the rehearsal room of the Suspiria ballet school) 

What we learn is: if you are young and gorgeous, sex is easy; it's bonding that is hard. It's every loner's dream, to find a readymade clique of like-minded outcasts. It's a love far rarer than the carnal or romantic; you have to drop everything and run with it, to the grave, and--especially if you're a debauched French poet--even beyond. 

The film provides a chance for a lot of monologues set to flashback dream theater tableaux ('the Star's' obsessive sexual love for her beautiful son is a decadent meta-highlight), and it's all followed by a feeling of warm togetherness that we in the audience may or may not feel part of, depending on our mood, attention span, and the year on our AA chip. 

Best of all it's not whiplash edited, morose, uncouth, violent, or abusive (Dalle's commissar aside). Like AA, it's a safe enough that flights of Cocteau-esque fancy can flourish without fear of ridicule or persecution (presuming you're watching it by yourself). It's the kind of film where--as an American--if you were in the room with someone else you'd have to roll your eyes and sigh. For all these people do, sexually, is talk -some orgy! Rather than doing lines off each other's bellies and swilling wine like a pack of HBO Scorsese rutters before going home alone to take a hot bath and cry their mascara down into the bubbles (as we have all so often done, we lost revelers of the night), each of the assembled sexual stereotypes confesses, and talks to each other and go on group astral travels to beaches and theaters. And thus, it ignites slow-to-start hearts, proves to a champagne fit to ressurrect jet set languors everywhere, to heal even those American middle school wounds. 

There's always, as Countess Bathory in Daughters of Darkness might say, always another beautiful young person in need of money and a place to crash. We shall be young forever. Yeeesh, what a thought. 

10. THE CALENDAR GIRL MURDERS

(1984) Dir William A. Graham (TVM)

**1/2

Here's a different kind of pre-pre-post-giallo: a prime time major network's watered-down version of the lurid 'hot girls endangered by the viewer's own twisted obsession' giallo. As Lt. Stoner (great name!), cop Tom Skerritt does his usual low-key thing on the hunt for a serial killer of 'calendar girls' (an approximation of Playboy playmates mixed up with the fashion world in ways that, like the 70s in general, refuse to become clear). Sharon Stone is one of the models, though she seems to have some other job in an office. All sort of remotely televised events involving swimsuits, fire, aerobics, and track meets (lest we forget about Personal Best) provide perfect opportunities for stake-outs, security lapses, car chases, and binoculars; the killer siezes every opportunity to make Stoner look like an idiot by killing the girls he's guarding right under his nose. There solidly familiar music score that at times passes Deep Red-era Goblin in the night. Robert Morse (Bert Cooper from Mad Men) is a deranged emcee in terrible blonde toupee, one of many red herring weirdos in the fringes. 

Calendar Girl Murders

It's '84, not '75, alas, so the fashion shoots are full of horrifying 80s spandex and tacky post-no wave punk-lite make-up, but things are still 'open' in that medallion over turtleneck Cali kind of way, so Tom Skerritt is still able to make us realize it was him, not Sigourney Weaver or Ridley Scott, who really made the interaction amongst the Nostromo crew so low-key and naturalistic in Alien, which explains why that kind of chill cigarette ambient naturalism is lacking in subsequent sequels. And Sharon Stone plays a kind of foreshadowing prelude to her suspicious author in Basic Instinct. The only way it could be better would be if they kept the VHS streaks. I'm a fan of any detective named "Dan Stoner" with Stone calling him Stoner all the time, "Hey, Stoner" especially hilarious. And Stone treats this major role like the creme de la creme.

Basic Instinct

Of course,  In prime TV movie style, Calendar delivers the 'jiggle factor' even as it critiques the morality of its delivery system; the clues are all discoverable via fashion photographs, and TV recordings, and Skerritt's cop regularly uses people as bait to flush out the killer but then he fucks up his monitoring strategy and so they're killed, one after the other. What a moron.

Of special note is the weird frisson of Stone answering the door with wet hair in a white terrycloth rob to talk to the cop who suspects her but is too turned on to care (above, left), almost the exact same scene occurs in Basic Instinct, right down the robe and wet hair. Basic Instinct was itself a post-modern giallo twister (i..e all the 'real' murders were in Stone's book as was her romance with that film's Stoner, Mike Douglas) so the two provide a nice infinite loop of reflections with the first movie in the schedule here, De Palma's Obsession which is a very loose remake of a French film Love Crime.

And here's a real twist, Skerritt's Stoner is married with kids, i.e. still married so not showing up late for joint custody hearings like every other cop on TV! But he's tempted, mightily by Stone. Who wouldn't be? Seduced by his son's pin-up crush? It's right on so many levels. And in true 70s form, cops and killers hug it out at the end and there's a great 'wrap-up' scene back at the station, where Michael C. Guinn as Stoner's chief magically lifts the entire film right out the path of an approaching Martin Balsam denouement and into a gritty-but-funny 70s cop show Barney Miller meets Fassbinder epilogue.  It may be nothing new (or old) but The Calendar Girls still exists trapped in time, and Netflix reminds us of that every day... til it's gone.

Fin

NOTES:

1. it's cinema history that Lisa bombed and producer Alfredo Leone tried to recoup his losses by jumping on the Exorcist bandwagon and asking Bava to shoot a few reels of Exorcist ripoff footage with Elke Sommer coming back to play possessed and a priest doubting his faith while they flash back to the events in the film. Re-released as House of Exorcism, Leone recouped his losses! Hurrah. And naysayers hate it, but I can't blame Leone for not wanting to go broke so Bava can make art that won't be appreciated for at least 30 years. And it is! They kept the original cut, thank God (if you'll forgive the expression) and even House of Exorcism has its points; there's some added footage not used in Bava's film that makes it an interesting addendum... I think. 

And since it is also on Netflix streaming here I'd recommend playing them both, maybe at the same time kind of like playing Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon together, if you get my drift. Here's what you do: put Exorcism on your laptop or phone with the volume low but audible and Lisa on the main screen. Set the laptop/phone down somewhere it's just obtrusive enough, like on the coffee table and let the overlap, duplications, and occasional switches to added footage of Elke being possessed make it all seem like a concurrent sixth dimensional reality. After all, Lisa and the Devil is like one long dream some young woman afraid of sex and mannequins might have after an Ugetsu -Wild Strawberries double feature, but stretched to a film length with no 'waking' in the normal sense. But with House on at the same time, Elke occasionally wakes up in an Exorcist 'second level' Inception style dream reality, and then the exorcist himself wakes up to being forced to walk in Father Karras's and I don't know how many others' shoes... back to that accursed villa, just like the end of Exorcist II. (NOTE: Right as I was finishing this post, House of Exorcism disappeared on Netflix.... coincidence? 

FURTHER NETFLIX RECS:

Summer of my Netflix Streaming I: A Psychedelic Odyssey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Al Jazeera America welcomes you...

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

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

Or you.

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

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

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

"Fountain" - Marcel Duchamp / eXistenZ gaming console

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

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

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

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

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

Source: WIKI

the end product

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

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

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

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

SUPERBESTFRIENDS: 

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

Feedin' the masses... with the masses

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

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

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

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

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

STAGING DEATH AS SPECTACLE 

(PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

JUDE LAW = TOTAL WALLY

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real (pre-symbolic)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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