Finger the Moon and Quaff Mad Laudanum: GOTHIC (1986)

Readers know I look askance upon adoring fetishistic biopics, the auteur often covertly trying to align their own stars with their heroes whether its conscious or not, and in the process making, as they say, a movie about--to borrow Zen koan-- a pointing finger rather than about the moon. Ignoramuses! What do they know about great art and suffering? They love to make a gorgeous finger and presume the moon will magically appear. Well, for Ken Russell, it may be thrice as true as for others but he at least goes for broke - he's all in. He'll show you the moon, and then stick that finger in its deepest crater. Such a crater is GOTHIC, the 1987 all-out wild night in during a storm with Percy and the future Mary Shelly and her swinging mystical half-sister Claire at Lord Byron's 19th century Swiss chalet while quaffing laudanum, indulging in rock star sensuality and wordplay, conducting a seance, trying to contact Mary's dead baby, etc. and conducting a ghost story writing contest. Mary winning in the long term with Frankenstein (with Percy's help) but Byron's personal physician Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre (with Byron's help), creating the first work of vampire fiction. So you could cite this long druggy night as the birth of the gothic style of horror fiction and the first salvo towards the Universal pantheon. BUT here we're a long way from normal narrative, more like a creative lunatic ground zero, reminiscent of what an intimate group sex acid trip might be if held at a swanky mansion done up with creepy haunted house carnival ride tableaux and wild sound effects.

Russell's pre-MTV yen for adding surreal pre-music video imagery to musician, artist and film star biopics suffuses his whole 70s output: Valentino, Lisztomania, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah, Mahler, and Oscar Wilde attending a performance of his Salome's Last Dance at a high-class brothel. The results err all-too-often on the side of the bawdy and grotesque, often leading to pretentious and unwieldy dialogue, with a louche subject and an authorial taste for bizarre imagery bashing into each other without any real way to make them cohesively match. It's not to say Ken cann't deliver, especially when given an actor able to actually sound natural in his artsy waxing, like William Hurt in Altered States or Oliver Reed in The Devils. Russell needs a handsome, brooding star to keep his orgiastic infernos on some kind of firm axis.

Don't you fuckin' look at me!

For Gothic we almost get that. There's Natasha Richardson as Mary, very good in the tense agonized sweat-sheen fear states, but upstaged in the looney-tunes Anita and Marianne-style cool glimmer twin reflection department by Miriam Cyr as her nympho-mystical half-sister Claire. Shagging Lord Byron (who isn't) and pregnant with his child, she steals all her big scenes; Julian Sands comes off probably the best of them all as strung-out Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), totally haunted by a terror of death coupled to regular bouts of opiate withdrawal (though based on the plentitude of laudanum that would seem unlikely). Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron comes of just so-so. One expects a little more as far as leaning into the madness rather than seeming like merely a smooth-talking cad using the occult as an excuse for philandering. His demons seem to consist of dimly realizing the damage his bisexual orgiastic take no prisoners approach does to his long-term partners. Lastly, in ever way, there's Timothy Spall, overacting the roof off as Dr. Polidori, gamely keeping everyone high off their asses while eschewing the orgy in favor of banging his hand on the nail that holds the cross over his bed (presumably to keep himself from masturbating -- a mortal sin!)

Since this is a Russell movie, the sex and drugs are all urgently leading to something, that old devil moon again. Here they maybe accidentally summon a vampire spirit into the chalet during a seance (guided by Claire, a medium). It howls from without, laughs from within and mocks them from the next room, whichever room they're in, driving each character deeper into the strange bowels of the villa, and into their own labyrinthine minds.

The main thing is, though, in a house stocked with servants and guests all in different rooms, who would be surprised to see a shadow or hear a voice laughing in another room while they're trying to sleep? These things are where Russell shows a surprisingly tenderfoot lack of awareness (exhibited in his earlier Altered States) of the effects of the drugs he shows being taken. No one really high on laudanum is going to give a shit about someone laughing at them from another room, nor would they get the heebie jeebies about death - that's for the next night, after the laudanum runs out. It's the same sort of confused thinking that leads some writers to confuse the DTs with drinking instead of with not drinking. The DTs being the result of alcohol withdrawal (once you've become hopelessly physically addicted) rather than from overuse.

The wild unhinged supernatural whooping might have been easier borne with a better druggier sound mix (ala recent works like Climax and Spring Breakers), but as is there's the feeling none of these actors might have done drugs except maybe Julian Sands, who has a kind of kinetic sexy madness with his poesy lines. One must never forget how perfect he was in Naked Lunch! This is a guy who knows how to seem like he's being seen through a psychedelic prism. He can be full of creepy come-ons, where you find yourself being led by him into strange alleyways when part of you is screaming to run but another part is enthralled. Here he's an opium addict who needs higher and higher doses to keep the poetic madness and fear of the grave from reducing him to a howling, gibbering (but still shockingly loquacious) thing. Luckily Sands makes it very sexy and has a fine moment standing naked in the storm atop the roof shouting about electricity. Cyr, for her part, a muse not a writer (the Anita Pallenberg of the group), does a bang-up job as the one with a mind more open to the supernatural forces. She ends up the movie on all fours, covered in mud with a dead rat in her jaws. She's the only sane on in the group.

Still. no one in the grips of full bore withdrawal or laudanum intoxication can say complicated mouthfuls like "I was almost conscious when the smell of the damp earth hit me! There was an oppressive weight on my chest!" without slurring or jumbling the words. And if you compare their rantings to other 'all in a night and one house' dialogue-driven movies about a small coterie of intoxicated artists, such as Performance, one comes away with the same impression of Russell one gleans watching Altered States. If he has done psychedelics, he hasn't done enough.

Certainly they all make a good foursome, grinding against each other. But there is also Timothy Spall's sexually frustrated, closeted Dr. Milidori who keeps them all high as a kite with his ministering. Good grief. By the end of the night he's bathed in sweat, head shaved, bloody and babbling -- sigh, anything for attention. I know this type well. The same acid trip that lifts the rest of us up to a higher plane leaves them an insecure wreck, needing everyone to pay attention to their nervous breakdown performance. We can feel the crippling self conscious emanating out of them like an uncouth discharge. It really creates a damper on any 'happening.'

Russell films with a lot of fisheye lenses as character run in and out of mostly empty rooms, the kind with clean wooden floors and maybe one old piece of furniture in a corner covered with white linens, evoking any number of Kate Bush videos. Another issue is that, this being the age before electricity, this huge mansion is way too brightly lit for the circumstances. It's not flat TV lighting per se, but it's a far cry from the gorgeous use of blacks we get in other, similar candle and oil lamp-lit movies. Russell has a gift with setting up good actors in wild sets with florid dialogue, but falls apart in the pacing element. While compulsively watchable, Gothic is wildly disjointed and ridiculous. Horrors merely tumble on upon the other with no rhyme or reason. We never get a sense of where anyone is in relation to anyone else. It all ends with an unborn baby floating beneath the depths, as close in head shape to Karloff in Pearce's makeup as the lawyers will bear.

One interesting note is the way homosexuality is handled. Though there are the two ladies, both available for whatever, the terror of the (female) vampire spirit they conjured steeps the latter half in a kind of unbridled horror of the female body. Byron continually makes his female lovers wear gender neutral masks  (including his housemaid) or cover their faces with sheets (even Mary), and Percy's big fear is a woman's breast with eyes for nipples. Cyr's Claire is regularly deemed a kind of combination coquette and animalistic shaman: "She's locked in sleep! Trapped like a dreaming human form." Meow!

Since I've had wild night like this, and indeed first saw this film via a rental watched around 3 AM during an acid trip with my bandmates and girlfriends, I have a kind of proximal responsibility towards Gothic, as if it's a page in my late 80s memory scrapbook. It's so almost great. I wonder what wildness might have resulted in its stead if, before setting down to write the script, Russell could have taken a bunch of shrooms with some cool artsy college kids and then taken them to a double feature of Suspiria and Performance. Dude, it might have changed his whole perspective. But instead, with Gothic, it seems he's taking the long way around. Instead there's exchanges like this:

"But God is dead!" - Percy
"But haven't we raised the dead?" - Mary

It's nice that these decadents do gaily grind to each other but the problem is that these relationships never develop nor give us much of an arc: they start at a 9 and go up to 10 and stay there for the bulk of the film. Mary isn't a fan of Byron's strange hold over Percy and her sister Claire. She tells him Claire is pregnant (in real life she'd have his child) and Byron's response is a flippant "I'm sure even Polidori can perform a simple abortion" which seems so needlessly cruel and anachronistic it takes us out of the vibe. Mary grieves for her own dead child (thus the submerged baby brought back by electricity that will be you-know-who). We learn she's the least into the ghost story challenge, and, in a sly, backhanded way, the film almost robs her of sole authorship of Frankenstein, implying it is just as much the product of her lovers' frustrated homosexual drives, the repressions of the time giving birth to monsters as gay artistes force themselves into heterosexual pair bonding and bring the wife to a lot of weekends with other brooding "Byronic" artistes like themselves (and what goes on in the Alps stays in the Alps).

The good part is the intended similarity between this magic night and the correct way to take LSD, i.e. in the right set and setting, in a big safe space full of cool rooms to run through, with a bunch of cool artists who aren't going to take advantage of your dislocated mind, at least not anymore than they have already. To do it right you need plenty of space to run around facing your own demons, having wild sex with phantoms, and/or taking a shower with your clothes on. To that end, there's plenty of well staged weird little scenes, not unlike as if God or the chalet's decorator had arranged it all to evoke a haunted attraction, where each room has some bizarre sculpture that moves (there's someone inside it!) or has a boa constrictor coiling around its neck, or whatever.  

As for Halloween it's the perfect party movie, as I remember from seeing it really drunk with a bunch of people, all of whom were cool and high and able to spout poetry without it sounding much too measured, scripted and aware of its immortal importance. Yet here we are.  The moon is just as far away as ever. Maybe the gift of memory is that one is free not see how it all may have looked from the outside, from the aghast dorm room neighbor trying to study while you run shrieking down the hall raving about eternal life, dripping beer and rain water, e feeling yourself as a blessed holy madman, dripping sunshine and brilliant wordplay down upon a grateful continent. 

---SPECIAL NOTE:
-- Sorry if this is rambling - my cat Olive died in the middle of the night last night. I'm still in shock. There's a huge Prime list of films for Halloween coming my next post, but I had to give you a taste. If you're still there. The stream of consciousness writing eases my tortured brain. She was the best cat in the world, and watching her die in my girlfriend's arms after her death moans woke us at 3 AM will haunt me the rest of my days, so much like nightmares and dreaded thoughts I'd had lying there with her between us, basking in her magic unifying love. But I think of her goodness. The good times. And let her spirit depart for whatever cool cushion may wait for her in the next realm. Death is a fuckin' nightmare to watch happen. I'd never seen a being I dearly love gasping in a seizure of fear and pain then going totally dead before you even fully wake up, panicked but irrational, unable to even read the phone in a frantic scroll for help, glasses off, seeing double on the screen and then --a living cat changes to dead tissue with a silent gasp, before we could even... 

Powerless, dreaming of a way to just shock her back to life via the thunderbolt of a compassionate Zeus or Franklin, like Shelley with her dead child in the sea. Remember the good times. That dewey look she gave. We love you Olive. xoxoxo Thank you so much for being with us.

Erich K's HEREDITARY Witchcraft Conspiracy DSM-IV Reader

I'd forgotten about all about conspiracies, Saturn, Satan and schizophrenia until I finally saw HEREDITARY, which brought it all cascading back, buckling the thin walls of sanity I'd set barely nailed up after exiting the paranoid conspiracy zone writing some of the posts linked below. Not that this amazing new horror movie is just conspiracy paranoia-tingling, no, no no! It's also a deep character study that takes its time to get going and, true to the name, rides the raft of inherited mental illness all the down the DNA river into the tributary to the sea of true madness. There's a recently deceased mother with "a lot of secrets" and a whole family tree of suicides and despair and then Toni Collette, the daughter, and also the scariest yet most sympathetic mother in a horror film since Essie Davis in The Babadook, coming to terms with things like her son not trusting her just because he once woke up one night to find himself and his sister covered with turpentine and mom standing over them while they slept with a book of matches in her hand. She was sleepwalking! He doesn't believe her, not even now. We don't see it, but it's a haunting slow burn image that ranks with those moments in Paranormal Activity as far as making all our unconscious eight-hour stretches in bed suddenly seem so unsafe we wonder how we ever managed to sleep at all. (If you've ever encountered a sleepwalker, then you know how terrifying it is, that flat dilated black pupil look in their eyes). This movie does what great horror movies do, it takes these nuggets of forgotten uncanny everyday living and slowly compiles them alongside enough sudden calamities and random bits of disturbing 'accident' that it's much more than a mere thrill ride, it's something that slowly builds until it turns by extension your life into a horror movie, like a virus. While you were distracted by one narrative, it snuck around behind you with another, and pushed you out of your safe viewing distance into something like terrified rapture.

The debut feature from young Ari Aster, the film successfully gets the whole "there is no difference between inherited paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression, and witchcraft" route (the kind mastered in Rosemary's Baby and duplicated almost nowhere else since... until now). Treading so close on our actual fears it crosses the line where imagination becomes insanity, like that normal-seeming friend confiding in you all sorts of paranoid-sounding statements, like someone is breaking in at night to move boxes around in her closet (am I the only one with weird friends like these?). This is the kind of film wherein a roster of DSM IV-spiked beliefs start to dovetail with the Old Testament, making us wonder if the ultimate conspiracy theory paranoid schizophrenic manifesto might be the Bible. Is it so hard to believe that, once the blinders on our perceptions are opened through chanting, stress, sleepiness, magical potions, or prolonged trauma conditioning (PTC), the witchcraft can begin in earnest. Maybe we can only fly when no one who doesn't believe we can is watching. Maybe if we can let go of our bodies we don't need a broomstick; when no one is around to listen, the sound a tree falling in the woods makes is like music in the eye of a screaming demon.

Here lie some links to past conspiracy writing should you be a glutton for madness, or need more ideas for similar mind-benders afterwards:

The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist Hole: THE WITCH
(March 2nd, 2016)

"So see the movie and understand at last why patriarchal science and religion are both such hardheaded dicks about the unknown and supernatural, and why Christian zealotry has never not been on the rise and why women are always considered a zone outside of western rational objectivity. Only in one or two other films have we seen beautiful women materialize out of the darkness of the woods or the gleam of the bathtub, as irresistible as a warm slug of whiskey in an unfriendly wilderness, our willpower long gone, we lower our lips towards their hearth and then suddenly these figures grab onto us as if with clawed tentacles and thorny paws. They are not hot and young at all, but decomposing and very old. You've been tricked, son of Adam! The distance of time between that first kiss, the wedding bells, funeral chimes, cold ground worms boring through rotten pine box walls collapses into a single Donald Sutherland death rattle.

This powerful motif, the 'young-old predatory woman' reflects the tradition of the sidpa bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the level of purgatory where you see and notice only undulating lovers like flames in an otherwise all-consuming darkness. If you let yourself be drawn too close to them you run the risk of finding yourself stuck like a fly in the frozen web of the woman's newly-fertilized embryo, like being sucked over a waterfall. Then devouring demon rock below shreds your current construct of self into a million pieces which sink or scatter in the rapid current below; only the core I AM remains trapped in that sticky embryonic web- and soon you've forgotten you were ever anywhere else-- the 'you' you believed yourself to be is shaved away like your hippie hair under the electric razor of a FULL METAL JACKET barber." (more)

The Illuminati, Hypnosis, Paranoia, Schizophrenia, Kubrick, and Tom Cruise 
(DP - May 2016)

As per Zizek via Lacan (or vice versa), the Big Other's whole purpose is to remove the 'constituent anxiety," to make sure there is no "traversing" the fantasy which would dislocate the subject from its void-circumscribing orbit. In EYES WIDE SHUT, Ziegler's positing Dr. Bill as an outsider who will never be a member of this exclusive shadow society, no matter what mask he dons, is doing him a massive favor, because this forbidden society exists solely in order to exclude him, and thus perpetuate constituted (rather than constituent) anxiety. It's a gift, son! This lack of a gift is the best gift he can give.

A similar effect occurs with UFO crash sightings wherein the military steps in, harasses and bullies witnesses into silence, and reports it was a weather balloon or crashed satellite, then hauls it away never to be seen again. In doing this they perpetuate the revolution around the desire. They fan the flames of the need to know, and so perpetuate the illusion that they have this thing well in hand. If they announced a spacecraft was found, the world press would swamp them and create panic, but by simultaneously threatening witnesses and lying to the press they create a subliminal consolation. Instead of worrying about aliens (which is terrifying - coming with a sense of total powerlessness and vulnerability) we're angry at the government for not telling us the truth. We always feel protected when denied knowledge. It brings us full circle back to the feeling of invulnerability we had as five year-olds bugging our mom about where babies come from, free from any worry she might actually find out, that she'd lie to protect us from the whole bloody-terrible besital truth. (full)

Genealogy of Flies: LORDS OF SALEM (2013), HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2008) + My own Salem Witch Connections

(September 2013)

 I have to mention, as always when discussing Salem and genealogy (characters here are descendants of the hung witches and/or judges and executioners) that all these descendant movies are fascinating on a personal level for me because the one side of my family tree that kept immaculate records is from Salem, having arrived in Boston in 1631 (with fellow passenger Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island): This side of my tree includes nuggets like these (copied direct):

The family of John Perkins 1583-1654 - freeman 18th May 1631
Married Judith Gates, born Newent, Gloucestershire, England
Children: 

1. "Quartermaster" John - b. 1614 0 d. Dec, 14, 1686
2. "Deacon" Thomas 1616-1686 (not the witch hunter, he died before that)
3.  Elizabeth 1618-1700 / married William Sargent (5 children)
4. Mary 1620-1700 - "She was accused of witchcraft, sentenced, but the execution delayed and the citizens recovered from the delusion." (+5 more)

The Family of Elisha Perkins (born - 1656 - Topfield) died - 1741 in Methuen
Married Catherine Towne - 1680
--
Children:
(9 total), including: John (third son) born Aug. 12, 1685 - died June 22, 1750
married Mary Easty (whose mother Mary Easty and Aunt Rebecca Towne Nurse were hanged for witchcraft) --etc.

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

(May 2014)

"In conveying Rosemary's gradual awakening from compliance ("you're gonna think I really flipped,") Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, and thus allows us to see the link between paranoia and pregnancy, and how the patriarchal condescension in the big city can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, her story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by hormonal surges due to pregnancy) and the physical arrival, up from the subconscious realm, of a devil ("Hail Satan!"), in other words, Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is about a dream incarnated into living tissue, the rip in time is the rip in Rosemary's womb from which out claws the Elder God.

When we sense something is being kept from us, whatever it is gains in power as our fears project onto it and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's nervous system (like following a DNA print through space the way a cell phone signal follows a chip). This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in (tiny microphones in their teeth, men following them in brown town cars, etc); it's an ocean wherein all dreamers are linked together, are as fish, surfers, sailors, drowners, whales, or dolphins, in a matrix of nonlocal consciousness. The Satanist sails on the surface (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a Naval officer, like Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control); the psychedelic shamans surf until they're wiped out or transcend the ocean altogether; unconscious dreamers bob in the waves; and the schizophrenics drown but do not die, just hover in that agitated drowning panic until medicated or the spell subsides. Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end she joins with the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. (Besides, she wasn't even invited before - that's what stings, being left out, when she's the most important part, like not inviting the kid with the fake ID who bought the booze to your party. But now, no one even has to ask her to come now - it's really her party, whether they like it or not). "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes," Castavet answers. And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven - the windows to the soul. No one has their own eyes anymore, the souls are long since funneled. (more)

The Satanic Blondes of '66: EYE OF THE DEVIL, INCUBUS

(October- 2013)

Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar, because if no one told you else it's going to be, then it's you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.

So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position --where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation.

If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, wife Sharon Tate is doomed the moment husband Roman Polanski helps her get the part in EYE; Polanski is doomed to exile the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. It all connects, from the devil's murky fatalistic machinations within the story--recreating itself through helping Guy get the part in that play (as, fittingly enough, a cripple)--to the reality of its makers (Castle's kidney stones, etc). The devil's happy to crib off your paper, so to speak, to make reality out of the image you made of him. It's as if film was little more than a halfway point, the equivalent of a pie cooling on the windowsill before its opened up and devoured, except the windowsill is a mirror, and the pie sliced open is a young and lovely actress -- an accident that becomes a rupture in the fabric of pop culture history. (More)

Make up your mind control: 33.3 Ways of Reading EYES WIDE SHUT

(October 2013)

CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is on TCM in the background as I write about mind control, totally by chance. Onscreen: an audience of power elite have assembled to watch a demonstration. An automaton girl in German peasant attire is standing before a series of mirrors (which I've just learned they use in Monarch mind control programming mere minutes before this comes on), singing that she's under a spell and delivering an almost exact description of sexually subjugating mind control techniques (including having the demonstration occur before an assembled audience, which mirrors our standard dreams of being exposed naked at a school exam). Coincidence?

Maybe nyoets, for if there was a blueprint for mind control it would probably be geared to work towards reproducing--as close as possible--synchronicity, the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, and the mechanics of sexual repression, allowing the programmers to tap into the unconscious' control state with maximum ease, 'speaking its language' so to speak. Programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend, these girls wouldn't even know they had microphones in their teeth to record any business secrets that might get spilled in pillow talk, or which could be used for blackmail. They wouldn't even remember being there. Or suffocating him with a pillow and making it look like a heart attack.

I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dishwater dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference. (full)

Caretake Sparkle: ROOM 237
October 1, 2013

Call the critics in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps mildly schizophrenic, but at least they know how to look deeply.... deeply... into the Kubrick's crystal ball. And as long as it’s well written I’ll read good crazy film deconstructive analysis over lifeless, if intellectually advanced, Bordwell style 'post-theory' any day. To the average academic, a crazy person is someone whose words must by definition have no meaning; to Acidemic, a crazy person is someone uniquely aware of how awfully close death and blood and pain is to the surface of our skin-thin reality at every given moment -- he goes crazy because he can’t shut it out of his mind; it doesn’t go away after eight hours like it does for the humble tripper, or fade with some deep breaths like it does for the anxiety attack sufferer. So if it makes him unusually aware of how everything is connected, to the point he even sees connections where there aren't any, well, maybe we're not digging deep enough. Maybe our teeth really do contain hidden microphones, but the dimension where that happens is far beyond ours. Somewhere advanced 8th dimensional beings are recording every human word and sigh for some massive Akashic library, using the teeth like crystal sets…. (full)

Daze of our Lies (or "As the Reichstag Burns"): SECRET HONOR, HITLER (1962), UFO HUNTERS, Lord Lhus!
(September '11)

If you surrender to Hall/Nixon's fever dream rant (and you may as well since there's nothing else going on in the film) you enter a pretty spooky world, a U.S. with the curtains ripped back to reveal giant white owls devouring a pile of gutted mice and money. Presidents like Nixon (and now Obama) are just straw dogs set up to take all the shit the manipulated American public cares to volley after being robbed and deluded by the previous office holders (who conveniently step down right before it hits the podium). Watergate was Nixon's way of reversing the straw dog parabolic mirror. Instead of the plan to throw Nixon to the wolves so his puppeteer overlords could sneak off to the inky darkness of the Bohemian Grove's towering redwoods, Dick snags up the strings by pretending to fall off the stage, derailing their entire evil plan... for now.

Meanwhile we see the paintings of Eisenhower, Lincoln, Jefferson on the oval office walls, and they all seem twisted and arcane, as if swirling reptilian pan-dimensional aliens were, even now, within the confines of a portrait on television on television, writhing and breathing and corrupting the deepest tissue of man's democracy with Martian spider eggs. (full)

CinemArchetype V: The Human Sacrifice

(Feb. 28, 2012)

In the movies the sacrificial subject creates a great unease because it hits so close to home; the death is intrinsically tied into the act of viewing itself. The tribe always gathers to watch the sacrifice, otherwise what's the point? Watching these sacrifices now (i.e. slasher film killings, etc.) stirs up deep archetypal responses from our past lives still seeing through the two-way crystal ball eye. If the film is clever about it, the whole process sneaks up on us and suddenly, too late to do back out, we feel the big black body bag suddenly close over our heads and the credits roll us right into the cremation furnace; to our horror, our friends regard our anguished pleas with the same ambivalent mix of compassion, gratitude (better us than them), and morbid curiosity, we felt looking at all the other victims. Sometimes we're led by the nose ring of desire, sometimes we're manacled unwillingly to the Satanic altar, either way it's like a spin the bottle game where sooner or later the bottle is going to point to us... and then when it does we're always hoping for that last minute rescue and when that last minute's up we try one last gambit: take my wife, please. If that doesn't work, we try to substitute our children, our friends, anyone! And all those members we would have so willingly held down had the bottle not pointed at us now hold us down. We can't even complain it's not fair, since we've already killed so many in just this same way to avoid being killed ourselves. Every cult member knows this truth - every innocent drop of blood spilled is just another interest payment on the massive carnivorous debt we owe that dark insatiable thing below.
  (full)

The Primal Scenesters: TWIN PEAKS
Nov. 2016

Consider the implication in a lot of these stories (THE INNOCENTS and THE HAUNTING in particular) that deep cover memory repression of dark events provides the current that activates the dark ghost 'residual energy' captured in the walls, so that traumatic moments in the past keep repeating. That energy stays there, up for grabs to anyone with the right wireless router to tap into. And who has that router? Free-floating demonic spirits--formless and powerless initially, like inactive ions or dried-up flies in the corners and basement doorways--the trauma recorded in the stone provides the energy jolt back into corporeal existence (on some higher or lower frequency from the spectrum of most human's perception). Be the energy coming from the trauma of past dark crimes or--in the case of poltergeists--boys or girls hitting puberty, the huge amount of psychic disturbance shocks the inert magnetic anomaly some choose to call Satan into our dimensional spectrum.

In other words, incest or similarly abominable crimes are like a wave generator that gets the boat of consciousness bobbing, allowing the usually unseen barnacles on the lower hull to rise above sea level. Thus the unseen barnacles whisper to sleeping seamen above them through the wood, bidding them to obscenely vile doings. (full)

Dentist Chair Don Juan: Love Radio and the Scaly Father
(C-Influence - March 21st, 2011)
...mystical visions can trick you... In September of 2006 I was meditating one afternoon after work, when I felt the sky and wall dilate open behind me an a giant electromagnetic hand touched my shoulder, enlightening me instantly in a profound holy 'beyond duality' glow. For two months I was completely egoless and in tune with love for my fellow man. But I got carried away, got cocky as  cult leader, and would up making a pass at this girl I was infatuated with, too soon, and who--rather expertly-- rejected me, depositing me in a vast swarm of subway commuters so that I couldn't get over her to try and kiss her goodbye--I saw her wry smile (though she was too deft to reject me directly to the point I might get violent or sullen-- a real pro!) and I felt that inner God voice I'd been following (and which had led me to all sorts of secret gifts prior to) sneering and laughing at me the whole subway ride home. I was so shaken and abashed I missed my stop and rode it to the end of the line. That laughter was heartless and terrifying. It was as if everything from the hand of God moment had been a way of conning me into risking my soul for this girl and getting shot down -  it was Trickster God 101 shit - and I'd fallen right into it (Hamlet's friends were, you may remember, worried the king's ghost was just such a trickster). Now that I was in such heartsick misery, I felt the god feeding off me, like I was a slot machine that he'd been rigging up and now was paying off big time - all that holy soul energy he'd cultivated he now stripped off me like he was expertly rolling a sleeping drunk.

Now maybe I was just 'imagining' all this - it was 'magical thinking' my shrink would say; but at the same time, so what? If she'd done any LSD she'd know it's all magical thinking, the whole damned show of 'perception' -- we have to go on what feels more than real, especially if we're writers and artists who want to depict more than the boring surface of the world. Whole months can go by these days that don't seem as real as that godly hand on my shoulder, or the glowing demon in the bookshelf. There's a certain assumption among left-brained scientists that hallucinations are somehow 'less' than reality, but it's the opposite: they're more. They spill through when our perceptions overheat and dilate, letting in more information than our egoic inhibitors would like - it's like we're five and our mom passed out drunk and left out her pornography stash all over the floor so as we wake up and go downstairs we see things we were never meant to, by her, that is, until we're much older. Our senses have built-in 'blinders' on them that filter out up to 90% or so of all the information coming at us. Our visible world is just a swath on a spectrum. Hallucinations and visions could be said to be moments when the blinders fail and dreams and reality leak into one another-- but isn't this in a way a much more 'real' situation? What about dreams, then? As we spend 1/3 of our life sleeping aren't we rather too quick to dismiss everything we experience with our eyes closed as just fluffy nothing? Are Van Gogh's electric color bands considered hallucinations since 'sane' normal people don't see them? Matter is just vibrating energy waves. The image of them as solid, permanent objects is what is the illusion. Meanwhile memory and reflection change even the most concrete experiences, shrouding and distorting the more we record, write, and relay them. (full)

Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition
(Oct. 2009)

Made at a time when psychedelic drugs had changed the face of American culture, LET'S SCARE .... DEATH (or LSD!) is nothing short of elegant in the way it blurs the line between subjective and the “real" to demonstrate how paranoia can bend the nature of reality itself, exposing even the most realistic objectivity as a paranoid conspiracy. Polanski set the bar high for this in ROSEMARY, by having Mia Farrow's paranoia be utilized to cast doubt on the reality of her situation, even though at the same time as we know the supernatural is behind it all. Rosemary and Jessica prove you can unsplit the difference between the real and the delusional, and that in fact, the difference is--as quantum physics proves--all in your head. (full)

Great and Wonderful Acid Cinema: WIZARD OF OZ 

(July 10, 2010)

Take it from me, the first time you run into 'The Lollipop Guild' (while astrally traveling the psychedeli-brick road) is enough to give even the gutsiest space cowboys the yips. They're like those little weird demon guys in the bottom corners of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which scared me as a four year-old (back when first hearing the full alien weirdness of Harrison's sitar on side B, was terrifying beyond any palpable physical threat). When in college I began to read the work of the pioneering psychonaut Terence McKenna on 'the machine elves' -- common mushroom and DMT hallucinations-- small, elvin beings that exist in alternate dimensions but are nonetheless real, dancing in lockstep unison as they paint the plurality of worlds onto the time/space canvas like a curtain of slow motion paint bristle soft shoe that's hilarious yet terrifying, joyous yet disturbing. When I saw them during my own travels in college (and after), they were even wearing plaid, just like the Guild (which came first, is of course your immediate question - did I see them like that because of the movie or did the movie costume designers dress them based on patterns from their unconscious?!!) Mine had garden hoes instead of lollipops and lacked that terrible gold hair, but otherwise - yeesh. Good thing I'm a drinking man. Or was. I'd nah go down that road again unarmed. 

--

Thus as an LSD-quaffing college kid I found the living link wherein Eastern mysticism, indigenous shamanic vision quests, and Western schizo paranoia are all linked. When I learned that the Monarch 7 program used Oz imagery during their hypnotic programming, I wasn't a bit surprised. But in thinking about it, I also wonder where the line between hypnotic programming and mythic archetypal psychology intersect. Saying the iconography of Oz is used in a ritual that is itself possibly fiction, makes it the definition of myth (in my mind) come into focus as a narrative both true and untrue, a 'possible fiction' or a reflection of some truth so large normal reality cannot encompass it (full)

ALSO - OSLA -

Blue Testament: History Channel's Hot Hot Hell. 
(DV, 2011)

Occult Streams of the Amazon: 13 Prime Witchcraft-y Recommendations:
Blood-Orgy of the She-Devils (1973), Haxan (1922), Southbound (2015), Witchouse (1999), Satan's School for Girls (1973), The Church (1989), Burn, Witch, Burn (1962), Voodoo Man (1944), Chandu and Magic Island (1934), Little Witches (1999), Mark of the Witch (2014), The Eternal (1998), etc.
(Oct. 2016)

Guide to Cable's Paranormal / Ghost-Hunting TV Shows

(DP - August 2012)

Rite of Passage - the Archons begin their Feb 2013 chi/soul energy harvest

The Flower People Screaming: DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1967)

Richard Burton's semi-forgotten directorial debut/swan song, DOCTOR FAUSTUS came out in swingin' 1967 and it's too bad it didn't know there was a whole summer of love going on outside the halls of Oxford, because with a few tweaks, thanks to all its Satanic, Illuminati, 'interiority-hallucination' and horror film iconography, FAUSTUS could have been a nice psychedelic midnight movie. All it needed was the right poster (and a younger, sexier lead actress as Helen of Troy). Like BOOM, it's a film undone by wrong casting, since Burton and Taylor were so big, you couldn't get one without the other. Thus characters meant for younger actors are burdened with someone never meant for the part. The reason: because one didn't want to anger them. Burton and Liz, cockblocking each other from the May-December nectar. (a young stud with haunting eyes, like John Phillip Law or Terence Stamp for Liz in BOOM; an ethereal beauty like Marianne Faithful or Julie Christie for Dick in FAUSTUS). But hey, that's show biz. 

An adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan play, made by Burton to raise funds for his alma mater, the Oxford Dramatic Societ. And man, it can drag a bit, until you can barely wait for hell to roar up and get its claws and fangs sunk into our ranting antihero, so class can end and you can race out into the quad and smoke grass or drop acid. 

But, dig man, see it again the next night, brain and pupils still expanded, and you may find there's a sensationalist, existential, trippy drug fantasia in its margins. It's there, I swear! So drop a micro-dose an hour before class starts, then mosey in and see where things land.

Oh but the trepidation of taking one's first trip, one's first big lysergic step. There's no going back. I remember the hysteria and hype in the 80s that kept me from doing it for the longest time: you could go insane permanently! Chromosomes damaged! In other words, damned, so the newbie's trepidation is mirrored in Faustus' second thought, needing to egged on by his cronies.

And so it is, whether intentionally or not, Burton susses out the commonality between Faust's devil bargain, Marlowe's sub-Shakesepearean prose, and the "lay down all thought / surrender to the void" philosophy of the flower people singing in the street. Both are in the sway of the beyond (sunflower petals glowing like flames in the dilated pupils of the dosed), and between all the psychedelics in the wind and Burton's own alcoholism and habit of disappearing into a fog with Liz (those drunken bender weekends), it's as if any kind of normal baseline by which to measure the bizarre in a British/Italian vanity production has been permanently eroded.

Like Roger Corman in the US that same sunshiny year, Burton was quick to make use of already-available props and sets from Italy's early-60s glut of Gothic horror films. All the macabre symbols and colors and imagery carry over from schlock to art, serving as hallucinational markers through the Jungian birth/rebirth Hell-initiation / the 'it is not dying / it is knowing' nirvana being over one side (the good trip) and the thousand rending talons of self-centered fear that shred your resistant ego to ribbons (the bad). In the end, while it's better to experience the former, the latter is much more cinematic.

Filmed in Italy and England, there's a lot of painterly craftsmanship at work in Faustus that few critics are in the mood to mention. The lighting evokes Bava's Black Sabbath (the gold standard) in its stunning use of colored gel spots. turning cobwebs and walls all sorts of ghoulish, unnatural, but strangely cozy colors. The subject -- a seeker who finds and realizes he was better off not knowing -- evokes Roger Corman's very California The Trip (from the same year, 1967 - above) and Corman's earlier, yet still highly-psychedelic horror films Masque of the Red Death (1964) and X-The Man with X-Ray Eyes (1963), even 1966's Wild Angels in a way. These Corman films ten towards sidpa bardo-aping hallucinations that subsume our seeker in 'careful what you look for' ironic comeuppance: kaleidoscopic images of painted women writhing in delight that change to withered crones the closer you get to them, monstrous orgies smeared on all sides by vaseline for trippy distortions, time lapse dissolves; the descent to madness kickstarted via dungeons, caves, cobwebbed skulls under cozy purple gel spots, sudden strange juxtapositional overlaps, and copious occult symbolism.

That the story's parallels to drug use are never overtly emphasized by Burton doesn't matter. He can't escape the tenor of the times, and drunks like he and Liz fit right in with acidheads, for both--sooner or later--get the honor of taking a Dante-style tour through the depths of hell. Both the high art of Burton and Marlowe and the drive-in sensationalism of Corman are centered around this savvy of the well of woe waiting right outside the blinders of our world. We would know more, like Faust, like Peter Fonda in The Trip or Prospero in Masque or Xavier in X-The Man with X-Ray Eyes. We seek to attain enlightenment, not through aeons of meditation and work with a guru, but the fast way... via a little tab on the tongue.

And should you disregard the warning label on Medusa's chintzy veil, don't whine when you're too stoned to write anything down, even though you dropped all that acid to improve your poetry. How ironic! That's the devil's bargain - he gives you endless inspiration but then--oops--no ink for your pen. The stores are closed; your car doesn't work and you shouldn't drive anyway. Everyone else is asleep, and there's no way to write down your flights of genius. How the devil doth laugh and laugh! Even if you had a pen it would take you years just to stop staring at it in quiet awe. 

The Trip

The books and drug pamphlets and 12-step meetings, and theaters, are all full of tales of those fools who'd ignore the 'caution' signs to "sound the depth of that they would profess" (as Faustus puts it), who live it up and order everything on the menu, still they aren't full nor satisfied; comes the devil's check they try to stave it off by ordering more and more. But finally they may order no more. the check must be paid. And so it is, by screaming, psych wards, rehabs, withdrawal, and suicide. These days psychedelics are being de-demonized but in 1967 they were still being blamed for anti-Vietnam protests so made illegal by a spooked Nixon. Thus even in The Trip there is the disclaimer in the beginning and 'cracked glass' ending, both forced on the film by the nervous producers who wanted to make sure the psychedelic experience was portrayed, ultimately, as causing calamitous long-term brain damage. More than governmental censure, I'm wagering James Nicholson was worried about lawsuits, suing AIP for endorsing a drug that convinced cousin Timmy he could fly out a sixth-story window.

In Faustus, however it's even more bleak and final than a cracked head or a splat on the concrete:  the voyage to Hell being paved with eternal DTs is represented by an evil Liz Taylor in green body paint, her hair a bed of snakes, laughing evilly.

Dude, I've been there. The ghost demon girls all laughing at me after luring me into a no-exit trap. It's like you wake up with a hangover so screaming you know it's going to turn into DTs in a few hours if you can't find your last Librium, or secret whiskey stash. You can't because you can't even get of the couch without shaking, dry-heaving. and hyperventilating. the visions and shakes consume you so bad all you can do is scream, a scream without end... Close your eyes / Close your Eyes / Relax, think of nothing / tonight" - as Mary sings in Jesus Christ Superstar. But that does nothing to dispel the visions, and time slows to a crawl. Your hangover shakes don't get better as the hour click by, the way they would for a non-alcoholic (i.e. someone who hasn't signed that infernal contract). The longer you wait before getting high or drunk again, the worse the shakes get, exponentially, lower and lower, until perdtion's flame licks your culo. 

"Heyyy, Swamp! Hey Swampyyy!")

It's ironic then that Burton and Taylor--then married and still tabloid gold--are the weakest parts of the film. Like many towering drunk titans of the stage and screen, each could rely on a bag of tricks to mask their various hangover and bloated periods for only so long. Burton, especially, as he'd later prove in nearly every role he took, uses tortured booming depth of voice and harrowed stare of beady eye to mask his doleful hangover; ever gazing past the camera, he's presumably looking at cue cards, or the clock, waiting..... waiting.... for cocktail hour (1).

That's not to say great genius couldn't be wrung from such sad states! Burton and Taylor had just made their two--by far--best films--Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Taming of the Shrew--right before doing Faustus. They were on their career-defining roll, making up for their inert chemistry in Cleopatra with a vengeance. 

But it's all gone for Faust -- and it's clear right away what the problem is: Burton needs a playmate of equal stature, someone to provoke and challenge him, or he loses his energetic madness X-factor. He needs to plays off Liz's energy, making full use of their Pisces-Scorpio dynamic. BUT her character in Doctor Faustus never speaks, or appears as anything but a Ligeia/Rebecca-style anima (with an initially haunting but eventually tiresome Yma Sumac-ish leitmotif following her around like a ghostly herald). In short, she is simply miscast. She overflows the boundaries of a mute object role/phantom role. It's like casting Bette Davis as Jessica in I Walked with a Zombie or Anna Magnani as Lolita. To put it bluntly, she is simply way too old, too regal, too grand, too tremendous, to play a cipher role like this. Clearly these interludes where she sashays through the scene were not in Marlowe's play. They're written for her, so they can put her name on. the marquee while at the same time freeing her from having to memorize any of the fancy-pants Elizabethan dialogue. In one groan-worthy scne Faustus beholds her beauty and asks "is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" you feel like raising your hand to give the obvious answer. If you loved the brawling Liz in Shrew and Woolf, and were hoping for more of the same, you too might be inevitably weirded-out to see that same sexy-buy-clearly-aging force of nature posited as the ultimate silent objet-d'art of youthful ephemera, especially when she's competing with an array of young, sexy British models, all bravely clad in nothing but the glow from the OS hellfire.

Every straight male in the world knows this scene (above) from their fantasies and nightmares, the odalisques lounging in the flames of the fever / bad trip / vision of fear/desire/hell/heaven rolled together. They're always there, deep in our straight male DNA, judging all we see and do with scathing insolence. Their silence speaks volumes to our frenzied bloodstream.  Liz's silence in Faustus speaks only to the gay sensibility's love of high camp, a kind of pre-Madonna plays Mona Lisa on a Tracy Lord pedestal. (2) She's neither terrifying or beguiling, while the above scene is both. These girls above are the maenads from the sidpa bardo. One wrong move, one flinch of fear, and they change from seducing you to rending you to pieces and devouring the remains. They are the demon reflections of our anima.  To put it in Jungian archetypal terms, Taylor is simply not a blank enough canvas for our inner woman to project on. She's already fully filled in. 

Another particular flaw with the film is the mythic-reference-choked language of the text, recited by Burton with great oratory declarations unto heaven but without much fire or oomph. I'm sure Marlowe is a genius but he's no Shakespeare. His fancy words resonate far less cosmically than the smaller more personal oratory we find in Franco Zeffirelli's Shrew and Mike Nichol's  Woof, where the mythic resonance cracked through even the most banal of situations. Wth Marlowe it's the reverse: even the most mythically resonant scenes have a king of core banality dampening the mantle.

Maybe that has to do with Burton's lack of directorial experience? Nichols and Zeffirelli both know that true mythic grandeur comes from sharply observed small moments, not big declarations. Awareness of this paradox (specifics are universal; generalities are alienating) separates windbags from geniuses.  Thus, when Burton is playing a middle-aged history professor shouting at his wife, he's as vivid and mythic as the cosmos; when he's a mythic figure shouting at the cosmos, he's as dull as a middle-aged history professor. When he kisses Liz as Helen and talks about her kiss sending his soul flying around the room, it's hard not to roll your eyes and think of that old adage of acting class, "you're telling us not showing us, and we don't believe it."

He should have pretended he was saying that to a dry triple martini. We'd be able to feel that passion in our toe tips! Burton comes alive!

"the fruits of lunacy"

Consider how how both Welles in his self-directed Macbeth and Olivier in his self-directed Hamlet (both 1948) give you the impression they love every minute of their character's tortured guilt and suffering. No matter what dour calamity their characters wallow in, they--- the director/actors-- revel in the poetry and mythic undertones, capturing the essence of art in small perfect little gestures. Director/star Burton on the other hand, can't even revel during Faustus' moments of revelry, let alone in his dour calamities. One must wonder if the demands of directing, the essence-draining demands of marriage, the endless intrusion of paparazzi, and staying sober long enough each day to stay on schedule-- tanked his energy. 

Maybe he let his brown-nosing reverence for 'the classics' undo his natural crazy Wagnerian oomph? Unlike Olivier and Welles, both of whom swim in Shakespeare like it's the literary equivalent of 100 proof whiskey (which it is), there's a 'mustn't spook the dean of letters' kind of respectfulness with Burton's performance. Sure Burton was a vibrant earthy Petruchio in Shrew, but that was under Zeffirelli's direction, far from any dean of letters' stern looks. Like Welles and Olivier, Zeffirell is a director who swims in the poetry of Shakespeare (see his definitive Romeo and Juliet, and the shamefully underrated Mel Gibson Hamlet -see my review here) amongst others. Though Shakespeare is considered bourgeois, something only the educated snobs would attend, Welles understood Shakespeare was writing for the cheap seats as well as the queen, so would give himself permission to heedlessly go for a more reckless 'give the dean a heart attack' approach that, paradoxically, would be more faithful to the material at hand. 

In short: If you film a respectful, staid depiction of a prankster thumbing his nose at staid authority figures, then you become the very thing you're rebelling against, and that kind of feedback squall is so exhausting it may takes years of painless deconstructive art history to recover any semblance of wit therefrom. End of rant. 

Any similarity to packing a massive gravity bong is presumably unintentional

As a result, the play's dense intertextually-lined language unpacks rather flatly, especially since there is --essentially-- so little at stake. This is, after all, the tale of an aged recent (he must have been on the 30 year plan) college graduate who fritters his time away doing tons of drugs and wine up in his apartment, alone but getting periodic visits from his drug dealer, fellow academes hoping he'll get them high. The rest of the time he's either lost in a whirl of phantom anima dream imagery (i.e.when he takes too much) or suffering insane hallucinatory tortures (when he takes too little). If he's in the Goldilocks zone where he's taken just the right amount, why, he can patter around his garret, whipping up alchemical formulas and writing or painting or reading as his whims dictate. 

Still, there's nothing in the play for film to help us understand why he's so keen to worship Lucifer and denounce god, to sign away his soul, rather than just doing drugs and writing poetry all day while ostensibly teaching at some cushy university (hmmmm). Nor is there any indication of why we should sympathize with his latter bratty copping out (he's like a Satanic narc) and second-guess antipathy. What a welsher. our once so faux-brave Faustus.  

If you've 'been there' (it's called college), you can relate when his occasional visitors find him lying on the floor, staring at some unseen phantom, or writhing in the grip of a fine, frothy madness, his clothes and brain in a state of disarray, unable to distinguish his corporeal guests from the phantoms. But as Bill Lee says to his visiting buddies who visit him in similar circumstances in Naked Lunch, "the Zone takes care of its own." 

None of that is any excuse to sign away your soul, though, idiot. That's just overkill, like getting a huge Led Zeppelin tattoo just because you saw Song Remains the Same for the first time, while on acid, last night, and ended up at the Zep-bedecked dorm room of some hot Pittsburgh brunette. Dude, you haven't even read Hammer of the Gods yet, don't be hasty. She loaned it to you on your way out, like a Christian giving a native a bible. A great night and Zeppelin is now your god. But a tattoo is a big commitment, bro. So make sure you listen to both sides of Presence and Coda before the needle hits the skin. No one is perfect. Jimi Page even wears chinos in one of their latter concert videos. Chinos! .

Now, all those negatives aside, there is much to love about old Faustus. Even if Burton the lead actor seems to be suffering from boozy stress, Burton the director is able to use that same boozy stress as a subtext for a richly familiar and welcome streak of Gothic horror and illuminati in-jokes, showing he learned some important things from his drinking buddies John Huston and Tennessee Williams about using alcoholic highs and lows as mythic narrative touch points. And showing too that despite his lofty airs, Burton harbors a secret love of horror. You can tell he's seen Black Sabbath and Masque of the Red Death and he wants to use some of their aesthetic tricks. The popping rich spectrum of dusky deep ochres, blues, purples, and cherry reds, glow as if Mario Bava himself were doing the gel lighting, giving many scenes (restored to glowing HD for Amazon streaming) a highly evocative atmospheric surreal glow that, for me, as a 70s monster kid, reminded me of old Key comic book covers--the kind my mom would buy you in packs of three at the department store to keep me occupied while she shopped for clothes. 

Walks through anachronistic/period sets and surrealistic historical tableaux (the Garden of Earthly Delights, the Vatican, a king's reception hall, a crypt) bring not just mythic resonance but call back to the various movies and genres those props were purloined from. Largely filmed in Italy, these sets were no doubt used in everything from peplums to westerns to Gothic horror (the way Masque used still-standing Beckett sets) creating a sense of stripping away of time's linearity, allowing a stage-like but very psychedelic rapid scene-changing (there's similar bits of Gothic horror call-back in Head, and Psych-Out as well as The Trip, keeping the old Gothic props and sets close at hand for quick inexpensive visits to the archaic subconscious). Copious tripped-out occult magic (nice use of made of a haunted mirror), cobwebs, skeletons, candles, alchemical test tubes and conjuring crucibles, volumes of forgotten lore, and astral charts-bedeck the torture chamber-cum-Illuminati arcane alchemist sanctuary that will be home base for Faustus' solitary drug experiments. Boldly treads our Faustus! Going where one might hallucinate yearning naked women inside the flames of a candle or the eye of a skull, or float through a veil of kaleidoscope effects and blurred edges, time lapse flowers and occult symbolism, to see the effects of time and age upon desire's ripe fruit. The laughing of the flower children switches to screaming with an imperceptible twist of the pitch shifter. 

Like its contemporaries in the Elizabethan dream theater era, Faustus gambols freely amidst the arcane iconography of spirits and demons that would previously (or then-currently, if performed in Spain) be charge enough for heresy. As it is, thanks to the rise of sane Protestantism, even making fun of the pope is not frowned upon, so long as the knave who dares winds up trapped in the arms of burning hellfire by drama's close (we mustn't get the Spanish ambassador too mad, after all). Thus Burton's Faustus (under an invisibility spell) makes fart noises behind the rows of bishops, pelts the pope with a fancy cake, and flogs a bunch of empty robes in a moment that seems straight out of Jodorowsky. Then the psychedelic college kid experimentation aspect continues with the slow downward slide from seeking truths to questions that lie far past the known parameters of life and death to just getting massively hammered. There is no joy of evil in Burton's performance of these things, only a kind of peevish aggression, like a sulky ten year-old kicking his little brother's lego fort.

 The ultimate in devil's bargains is, as I can tell you from direct experience, the alcoholic's. Only by staying drunk can he forget the horrible shakes, DTs and misery that compounds with interest for every day he doesn't suffer them. On and on he goes, on a massive bender, until eventually one morning he comes to and there's not a drop left in the house, and he's physically unable to move without it, so unless someone comes by with a bottle to save him, the voyage to agonizing hell begins. His is the terror of the cold turkey addict tied to a bed table in a hospital, screaming his guts out, like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood.

From top: Hopper schools in TRIP; FAUSTUS

In the beginning of Faustus we find Burton as an aging scholar in round owlish glasses and long gray hair -freshly graduated, advised by one of his druggie friends to "sound the depths of that they would profess."- In other words: don't just say no to drugs, try them first! Condemnation prior to experimentation is not wisdom, but its own sort of vice, twice as vile for its hypocrisy in one so allegedly open-minded and well-researched.

Faustus and Valdez Cornelius mixing a full decanter of the good shit - shhhh - don't let the RA hear

Later, alone in his study, not quite sure which field in which to further broaden his academic acumen, which tome to grace with owlish eye, Faustus is buffeted by a sudden surge of boyish ego and curiosity. He feels the wave knock his soul up against the sand break of the known, made all the more pathetic and indulgent by his speaking aloud at us, as though his imaginary class: "To live and die in Aristotle," seems wise and--to him--oddly sexy, or to study medicine BUT--as as he notes, "the end of physic: our body's health." So from what new field shall his alchemist's brain next turn? Why not to the occult!

In other words, Faustus is bored, antsy, and doesn't feel like studying. His idle hands, the devil's workshop

Drinking buddies Valdez (Ram Chopra) and Cornelius (Robert Carawadine)--as sketchy a pair of Satanic drug dealers as one is likely to find in all of London-- drop by to regale him with tales of the fame and wealth that comes from conjuring demons. Soon trundles the trio graveyard-ways to raise hanged sinners and summon devils! It's all a little too convenient... Faustus gives in way too easy.

You expect the heavens to shout, or at least whisper--to explore the black arts is blasphemy, Faustus! Turn to the church and repent. This sort of disclaimer seems only fair -- due diligence to ward off those who are better off not venturing beyond the No Trespassing sign. And it's no idle threat, either. In all the tales of those who'd ignore caution to sound the depth of that they would profess, the price of enlightenment is dear. And as anyone 'called' to try these things will tell you, even your hardcore hippy friends may warn you off. People you thought were cool declare 'you'll damage your chromosomes, Faustus!"

In Faustus, however it's more bleak and final, the damage permanent.  Hell is only a feeling for one having a bad trip. Eventually --after timeless aeons of distress-- everything will wear off. On some level, as many a scholar has noted, the only difference between a schizophrenic and an LSD user is that the latter knows he's just 'visiting' where the schizophrenic lives.' The opposite of the Sunday tripper, the schizophrenic knows he is just 'visiting' reality via medication and is actually living in the void, like a phantom signal forever caught between neighboring TV channels. 

But whither Faustus? Which reality will be his final resting place?

But it all starts innocent, if sin can be so called. The three head to the graveyard like a trio of errant hippie sophomore knaves shrooming behind Sadler in Syracuse University, circa 1986, finding all sorts of universal truths and froth-at-the-mouth delights there (big rolling graveyards being the perfect place in which to trip, both emblematic of the experience you're on as far as death/rebirth awareness, and the way egoic fear keeps the lightweights away). These pleasures are the first reward of daring, to buffet manly against the current and enjoy the rarefied air above the superstitious public's boorish din.

No sooner has Faustus found his spot for conjuring. he bids his friends depart him so he may work alone. They are never seen again and indeed one wonders about his social skills, for here is a man not literally cut off from the society like, say, Prospero is in The Tempest, and yet he prefers only the company of his own unconscious projections, vis-a-vis the devil, and his anima.

In hindsight, it would be great if Valdez and Cornelius return, for Burton came to life in their presence; he plays well against their relish in demonic control. Like the bulk of the cast, they're students and teachers from Oxford's Dramatic Society and Burton often flickers to life in their company, only to turn dour again when sidelined through lengthy solo dark rants that we know in but a second he will deny having said. He chides Mephistpholis' sadness over his failing soul, urging him to take a lesson from his resolute bravery and "scorn those joys thou never shalt possess." Aa dissolve later and he's letting a statue of St. Sebastian urge him turn to God, then to let a skull on the desk encourage him back to Lucifer. All he needs is a hard push one way or the other and he not just hesitates but thoroughly changes his mind. He's wishy-washy! Take another little drink, Faustus! 

It's hard to get involved in the plight of a man so unmotivated in his flight to Lucifer that its very reason defies credibility. He's a dude burning out his brain for pure onanistic thrill-seeking"magic" and only realizing it's not some dumb heavy metal pastime when it's too late to weasel out. He assures Valdez and Cornelius he'll stick the course. He says "magic enravishes me!" but we're never really sure what his end game is beyond pleasure and sport, to revel in the folly of others. The presence of these two enablers might have made it clearer (peer pressure) but without them, it's hard to fathom why he sticks to it. Whatever he once sought to know, being known, he'd rather forget fast, so turns to drink - which makes days flow faster especially with a devilish enabler servant at your side to make sure you never wake up without a stiff drink at your bedside.

"Glad tidings from great Lucifer"

Drunk writers and artists who sequester themselves for long periods of micro-tripping in service of their art can--with proper blocking--drift into just the drinking part quite seamlessly, as Faustus does here. But as he's not a writer or artist why we should care? Beyond the realization that all pleasure is fleeting and he shouldn't have signed the contract, there's not much he learns or brings to the table.

Reveling by proxy too proves a challenge. Whether flatly chanting along with the bell, book-and-candle monks who try to exorcise his spirit or belligerently chanting "he wants his money!" to an aggrieved bartender, we're not amused or thrilled (like we were in Woolf or Shrew) but rather embarrassed by this base schadenfreude and tone deaf infantile prankishness. Here is a man who freely takes more than would befit a man, then tries to weasel out of paying - drinking vainly against the passing of time (his ever-present hourglass) ticking down to his Hell journey. All the wealth in the world is his for the asking but he'd rather stiff the bartender.

He's a 'bad' drunk!

THOU ART FULL OF HOLLOWNESS:

In his groovy man cave, doth Faustus have the alchemical tools to astral travel the world over and have his heart's desire granted time and again, the only caveat being it brings him no real joy, since there's no strife or earning of the goal, there's none but the pale shadow of gratification. And as anyone who suffers from depression knows, getting all you want in life might make you more miserable than just wanting, which at least gives you the hope you will be happy once said desire is attained. To attain it and still be unhappy is to be faced with the reality of a no-escape misery, a room without an exit. The gorgeous women you coveted as a geek in high school clamor all over you now that you're in a band, but their sudden, almost aggressive affection creeps you out; the terror of actually merging your naked body with someone who you barely know supplants your lustful reveries and turns desire's promise into the stuff of future shame and regret. For Faustus, his wish for 'a wife' is ridiculed by the devil with an open flower of beautiful women who turn into men or aged crones on contact. This is the Sidpa bardo in Buddhism at play. Women never stay lovely, and so outside of space/time, beyond the illusion of permanence; sexual allure beckons like a sticky web of flame that evaporates on contact but leaves you stuck, devoured by withered crones where once were massive babes. (i.e. the woman in room 237)

You can argue that movie stars are the exception, their images frozen in time. Marilyn still looks alluring in Niagara,  and will be just as alluring in 100 years, but imagine you saw that movie and wished you could share a bed with her; then you wake up trapped in her coffin with her rotting corpse! That's what the DTs are like, vs. watching Monroe's movies over and over in a state of benumbed boozy grace. You don't get to actually sleep with Marilyn, but isn't watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for a hundred straight times (even with Elliot Reid in it) better than even a single night with the "actual" Marilyn in her actual current underground boudoir?

It's in this aspect, the terrors of the DTs, where Burton brings his alcoholic and priapic issues into the subtext: the realization that--when given a chance to be endlessly indulged--angelic vice soon turns to a tar pit 

Movies are to the ego what the ego is to the soul, distraction from the terror of eternity. When tripping the distractions collapse into the real, especially on a so called bad (or 'bum') trip. For example, on one bad tip I forgot how to breath. I became aware of lungs, understanding at last their slavery to the body, the awful duty they have, their constant inflating and deflating, year after ear. I could feel them almost collapse from the weary shock of recognizing their eternal bondage. Of course the deliverance from this realization is that you only have to deliver one breath at a time. That's the AA secret. The "I'm just not drinking today" adage, the "one day at a time" is the 'good news' that helps many a drunk, myself included,. No one wants to imagine never drinking again. It's too awful to contemplate, but just not drinking today? Sure, it's a trick to make the abstinence endurable, but is booze's trick any less devious? Both use our ego's need to escape living in the moment (for the ego has less control when we are fully aware of living in the 'now') against itself. Like tricking you into self reflection by putting a top hat on the mirror and telling you it's Fred Astaire. 

Supposedly immortal, the soul is paradoxically comforted by the ephemeral nature of all things, which is the direct opposite of the ego's anxiety. The space-time continuum allows us the comfort of the ephemeral, allows us to dwell under the protective illusion of impermanence. That all things die, that life is rounded with a sleep, wounds heal, flowers wither, traumas are buried in the repressed unconscious, seasons change, nights and days alternate ---these are comforts that deliver us from the terror of continuity. Hell, then, as realized by Marlowe's Faustus, is the waking up from this illusion of impermanence so that the terrifying eternity of existence is revealed and is inescapable. This is the trial of the cave crypt hallucination in The Trip, ("I don't want to die, man"). This is the 'bad trip' every psychonaut sooner or later must endure, the wave that sucks us under for an eternal night, the giant eye at the center of the universe gazing pitilessly through our X-Ray Eyes. This is Hell as inescapable awareness of, as Mephistophilis puts it, "all that isn't heaven", the great flaming void that is left "when all else dissolves."

"The depths of all that thy would profess" i.e. all therein that may be explored

As Faustus will soon learn, the double-edged gift of heaven is the gift of illusion and forgetfulness.  Our way our brain is hard-wired to veil the ever-looming specter of our inevitable death so we can go about our day without being paralyzed with fear. But to function in its correct aperture (as a veil rather than a window), this veil needs death near enough to cover successfully, to know where it is at all times. If we death moves too far away from our vision, the veil covers everything and anything it can. Soon we can't appreciate life due to this veil creating a thin filmy wall between us and the world. Eventually we need to go seek out death so the veil can find something its actually supposed to cover, freeing us to see around its corners at last.

Hell, then, is the terror of eternity that makes us long for the illusion of impermanence. When faced with extinction, life at last becomes unbearably precious -- so that each miserable second is clung to like one clutches a piece of floating bed frame in the midst of a tidal flood current.

Yet, as he clings, Faust has no love of the life he's led, only fear for what is to come. Not knowing that his fear of eternity is itself already hell, he indulges full force. These are the types of lightweights you need to avoid when culling a 'set and setting' for your 'voyages' - as they're invariably the dudes who can't shake their ego's sticky grip, and foolishly believe all the fear mongering their ego incites to keep itself in power. Knowing how to ignore ego's panicky horse-in-the-stall bucking is one of they key skills for successful inter-astral navigation. When God is your co-pilot, you don't even need to go in the plane. With their ego as their co-pilot, these lightweights inevitably panic, and demand to be taken to the ER because they are sure they're dying. Ugh what a drag.

LAST STASH LOST

Early in their meeting, Faustus asks Mephistophilis where Hell is and why he's not there. "Why, this is Hell," notes Mephistophilis. "Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven am not tormented with ten thousand Hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?" 

Such a junky thing to say, bro. If you're living as--or have ever lived--as a drug addict or alcoholic, or known the bliss of a 'perfect' peak ecstasy experience, you may have tried unsuccessfully to recapture that high for years, eventually realizing you can never return to it. That is its own kind of Hell. The only thing that saved me from it back in the 90s was Lacan, and then SSRI meds in 2003. Since my relapse last Feb, I now get that same magnetic tug from the sight of all the IPA beers, the various small batch brews in the grocery store, none of which existed in 1998, when I initially stopped drinking. It was worth it to relapse just to sample those delicious brands. Except now when I pass them on display my heart breaks, my mouth waters, and the yearning increases exponentially the longer I linger. Is that in its way, not Hell, but it's okay since it's always there, the way depressives sometimes keep nooses or guns hidden in their closet, as a kind of assurance. The Hell in Faust's world is the hell of knowing you can never get back to that closet or the beer aisle. You're 86-ed for life... and beyond/ 

If any of that sounds familiar, maybe you too might find a special love for Burton's Faustus or if not love, at least unnerved understanding. For to be in the throes of a serious addiction is to know the joys of hell and heaven are as a coin ever flipping, and one may become the other just through the other's absence, and so sooner or later heaven always flips back to hell. Hell is the constant. It's a question of numbers, of days, of time. For every day the horrible shakes/convulsions/DTs of detox are staved off, the worse they will be when that key moment arrives: waking up completely out of alcohol, and unable to get to the store or bar to get some more due to intense shaking and hyperventilating. But until then, there's that moment in the morning (if you don't have to go to work) where you decide to try and wait until 4 PM cocktail hour, and after about a half hour your hands are shaking and your vision is getting weak and your heart feels as if will explode. Hell gradually comes into focus. You relent and crack open that first delicious IPA, and within seconds Heaven appears instead. 

The only place, it seems, you can't exist, is anywhere between those two extremes. Mephisto's version of hell ("everywhere that isn't heaven") is almost identical with the advanced stage alcoholic or addict, whose heaven is mere absence of Hell (withdrawal), i.e. just not being in the agony of hell is heaven.



By contrast what delight then, to up the ante still further, for heaven may yet become euphoric than just not-hell, with the one caveat that any new plateau of ecstasy may become the new baseline, so that anything less than that same euphoria becomes the next Hell. Eventually Hell is anywhere that isn't euphoria and euphoria is just hell's momentary absence.

The irony of Faustus's deal with the devil--which holds true to for any addict's postponement of withdrawal--is that the decades of decadence he gets (24 years, as in hours of the day) are all elapsed by the end of the film-- they flit by. If there is any enjoying to be had, we don't really get the impression Burton's Faustus has done so, for his ecstasies are wasted worrying about Hell. That's the terrible bargain, the sacrifice of memory: most of a drunk's happy time is either not remembered due to black-outs or slept through. A drunk can tell if he had fun the night before only by how messed up his apartment is the next time he wakes up.  Sandwiched between black-outs, benders, waking up in strange positions on strange floors, and suffering all the tortures of being departed from on-highness, it could take hours for him to figure out how long he's been asleep, what day it is, or what AM or PM on the clock means.

For a would-be escapee into booze's warm clutches, how unappealing Faustus' tavern-carousing, ugly life suddenly looks. Burton, an actual drunk, seems just mean and juvenile rather than the monstrous wit he was in Woolf. Burton the director spares us nothing of the scene's wild guffawing Breugel-esque peasant squalor --yet it's strangely beautiful too, as in the way the walls are painted to resemble both cracks, dirt and trees. Isn't that what it's all about, man, finding the trees in the bar wall filth rather than the other way around?

"Sweet pleasure conquers deep despair," counsels the demonic voices that guide Faustus towards his decades-long spree. Ah but the fine print, Faustus: the longer thy deserved measure of despair stays conquered by sweet pleasure, the higher the compounding interest on the loan against future joy, and the weaker the sweetness. Finally, the sweetness has grown too stale to conquer anything. The despair is now so deep that water line has risen to the ceiling. Thou art thus asphyxiated by woe, Faustus, swallowed up into Hell eternal, all for postponing your deep despair, whose fair judgement and scathing portion - felt in full at the time of payment, might have done more for your artistic vision than all the demonic libations in all of 1967 Berkley.

The Adulation of Future Masses:

Sooner or later if we keep drinking, we die; sooner or later if we keep writing we live forever. The caveat: we're not there to enjoy whatever benefits that immortality may bring. We make a deal with the fates -we get to keep our souls by agreeing to labor in obscurity now, for the promise that 20 years after our death we'll be revered as geniuses. We won't feel the lionizing because we'll be dead, but the idea it's coming is enough to keep us working. Lost in the process of creation, our whole life flits by in a paintless brush.

Drinking on the other hand, brings us the adulation of the future masses in advance - hence it's a kind of reverse direction time line of reward, tapping into an ego gratification time machine. Whatever Akashic record crystal teraflop transfiguring time/space device they're accessing to read your work in the future and send payment of their love back through the past, it's as tactile and sweet in our third eye's ear as god's own indulgent applause.

One thinks too of this time travel authorship with writer Jack Torrance saying "I'd sell my soul for a drink," and thus summoning Lloyd the bartender, and eventually a whole room of hoi poloi. And while he lives forever via his life's work, it's not that repetitive work about being a dull boy, but the real life murder of a black cook and an epic fail of the mission to kill his wife and child - so there you go.

The devil's bargain - Jack would sell his soul for a drink, as if that wasn't the price to begin with, it's like going to the cashier of the liquor store with a $20 bottle of bourbon and announcing "I'd pay twenty dollars for this!"

And beyond all that is the feeling of control that only surrendering control can bring. To have the ability to postpone the anguish of hell and prolong the joy of heaven available to you is surely worth any price even if that price is that, sooner or later, you use up your heaven and can no longer avoid hell's ever-increasing tab. It is due.

"Hell hath no limits"

A special high point is saved for that final act: Faustus's being swallowed up by Hell is effectively done with just a trap door in the floor opening and hands pulling him below, to the depths, at which point the whole production--set backdrops, actors, all--wheels backwards and outwards, as if Hell the Ghastly Furnace was there the whole time, its flames flickering at the other side of the clapboard walls confining Faustus's pained charade. Now, the set is pulled back, the furnace erupts from reality's cracks the way it does on intense DMT or salvia. Burton's Faustus--surrounded by red/orange glowing embers and a fully green demonic Taylor--is sort of twirled in a bad ballet slow-motion spin deep inside a kinky Rube Goldberg-meets-Brueghel haunted house tour Hell. Overlapping layers of Faustus, yelling and pleading; demonic figures writhing; reds and orange layers contrasting with Liz/Meduas's greed and demonic body paint--her mouth frozen in a Norma Desmond grimace. At last her stoic silent treatment and the obedient kissing and many guises she assumed to please him all make sense. She finally roars to life with a macabre flaring of the eyes that's thrilling all the more being so late to arrive (like Tura Satana erupting from a mannequin) Here is the green absinthe fairy showing her true size, shape and spirit.

She is, in every way, tremendous!

Her laugh is in the same beguiling voice that--for example, lured me last year around this time into buying a 15 pack of 'All Day IPA' at the grocery store (how it would whisper to me on my walk home from work, "what a great thing it would be to have that around, have one or two once in awhile") and the way that same voice laughed and sneered a month later when I was shaking and convulsing on the floor from alcohol withdrawal. That was the same laugh!

In her fathomless patience and malevolence, that demonic anima gets us all, sooner or later. And Taylor--who seemed so frozen in this burlesque of statuesque refinement in her earlier Helenic incarnations--now, as Medusa, finally lets loose. Look at her eyes (above)! Now that's a she-demon! In her eyes I see shades of Madeline Usher, Ligeia, Morella, and all those other ghostly/mad women in Corman's Poe films, the ones who come back from the dead, laughing and throttling an ever-terrified Price while flames consume them both, utterly.

But through it all Burton the director sucks the wind out of Burton the actor, leaving him too deflated to project any Woolf-level gusto into his hamming. I can't help but wonder how much more energetic this would all be with a less wearily portentous Faustus, someone who could inject some camp vitality, like Vincent Price, with Burton as Mephistopheles instead, a role better in league with his direction. He shows a welcomely macabre flair,
an admirable sense of pacing and the sort of keen eye for psychedelic vistas that only acidheads, schizophrenics, or alcoholics who've experienced the DTs can really know. He taps into the core iconography of the then-burgeoning psychedelic drug 1967 culture via the same graveyard root Corman used for The Trip and X-the Man with X-ray Eye. Emphasizing the commonality between camp Gothic horror and countercultural psychedelia. If his acting isn't all there this time around, we'll always have Liz and Dick in Padua and "New Carthage" and sometimes we'll even watch them in Big Sur and Heathrow - and if we're also the same persons who love Bava's Black Sabbath and Kill Baby Kill then anything that six-degrees them all together, be it problematic and stilted or not, is going to get us right in the Jeffrey Cordovas.

Have I gone off the deep end with my alcoholism metaphor and Trip comparisons again? Sure I have. But so what? I'm no more repetitive, belligerent and self-indulgent in my fancy (did you get the Band Wagon reference in that last paragraph, didja?) than Marlowe and I relate to Burton's pained hangover more than most; I appreciate that he so gallantly tried to alchemically transubstantiate his weariness into the context of the Faust myth. If he failed, well, who hasn't? His low energy level as Faustus--the tired, sad, 'too many hats broke the camel's neck' distracted nature of his performance--is hardly new, but I'm probably projecting, for I too have tried to direct and act, while hungover/drunk, at the same time - and the results were even more tepid (we can't all be Orson Welles, or Mel Gibson). Burton's eyes may betray insoluble weariness, but his heart was in the right place and today we can still savor many aspects: that beguiling mellifluent booming voice, the way Marlowe's velvet language rolls trippingly off his tongue as if to its fleshy whiskey-soaked manor borne; the eerie Bava-esque gel lighting and horror movie accoutrements; and the druggy college sophomore connotations. I find comfort in the idea that, once upon a time, even professors could continue experimenting with drugs and sorcery up in their attic apartments without losing status. I may not feel much pity for Faustus's 'last-second desperation' as Hell's gorgon arms drag him down into the flames, but I understand how he got there. It's like hearing the 'before' of an AA qualification. And I've found out a lot of things from my own experience of hell's thirsty flames: eternity is only as long as you think, Faustus! Let go of regret for Heaven's memory, for what else is Heaven but Hell, once its fully accepted?

The great rule of eternity is that only nothing is forever...  except thirst.

So.. Drinks, now... let each vicious circle be a signature on our natural habitat's cocktail napkin contract.

Whatever the cost, it's already worth it.

(PS - 12/12/18 - I had a major spiritual ass-kicking this past weekend, when I felt all my recent debauchery sins come up and grab me (though they didn't used to feel like sins, #metoo and my own advancing age have combined to make me a born again prude) and felt suddenly the absence of the holy god light that used to be there automatically all the time, like so constant I never thought it could go out. It is as chilling. Being alone while sick with a bad cold making it hard to breathe and already with COPD and other things and realizing how easily I could just die, with no one to notice, etc. I was so wigged out even putting on my DVD of Twentieth Century didn't help - I understood with a chill everything Mephistopheles talks about in this film, and the whole textual tenet of Flatliners (which was on during my last big scare like this) that I wanted to instantly become a Catholic so I could go to confession, or find a new sponsor to do a fifth step with - chilling. That lovelight has come back on, somewhat, since then, thank god, thank god I never signed anything)

NOTES:
1. That last part seems quite sexist today, presuming a kind of condoned satyriasis is packed kit and caboodle over the hump of spiritual awakening - not no more!
2.  That's a reference to Philadelphia Story, cuz this blog is high-class.
1. I'm guessing, based on my own experience doing the same thing - I may be projecting but, on the other hand, as they say in AA, you can't shit a shitter - not one of AA's best phrases, I'll grant you. 
5. Technically the Hell might not 'be' eternal in the space-time sense, but in Hell, space/time ceases to exist. One comes out the other side of a cold turkey detox--which may seem to have taken less than a weekend to those around you and to the calendar--as if one had been away for centuries of endless torment. Yet you barely remember it, for the brain which records such things was so badly burned. All you remember is that it was an eternity, and eternity is over.