International ScarJo: GHOST IN THE SHELL, LUCY, GHOST WORLD, Black Widow

Turn the cable on at any given time and there she is, as: as KGB-enhanced warrior "The Black Widow" in THE AVENGERS; a neurochemically-enhanced girl who achieves 100% brain usage in LUCY;  (voice only) a sexy Siri Mach 2050 who achieves the technological singularity in HER; an alien who lures Scots to the slime in UNDER THE SKIN; an alienated Tokyo tourist in LOST IN TRANSLATION; an alienated high-school graduate in GHOST WORLD.... on an on, aliens, augmented humans, ghosts (in worlds or shells), and AI. Her wry half-smile and husky voice transform any enhanced, artificial, alien or weird character into something warm, tangible, iron tough yet all-forgiving. She's Captain Scarlett Johansson, and she was born in the Bronx (and an inheritor of all the tough chick rasp that implies).

Ever ready to use seduction or a mixture of the kind of martial arts (Muay Thai, Kali, etc) that involves swinging around people's necks like an ice ballet starlet, in Ghost in the Shell she also has a great 'across the thug-filled room' saunter, shoulders low and hunched, as if primed for a sneak attack, and a unique way with sussing potential trouble out of the corner of her eye without breaking stride or cool. She seems always a notch above her material, yet she doesn't step on its toes as she climbs. Gingerly she even brings it along behind her. No easy feat, to redeem and solidify shaky CGI realities. It's OK, too, if she can't quite pull off some of the more encompassing moments of grandeur, for she has the brains to underplay rather than ham it up. Hers is the same cool savvy of 80s (male) action stars like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger --if she lacks their self-deprecating doofus undercarriage, she at least doesn't wink at the audience or start doing funky dances like Cameron Diaz. That shit doesn't age well (just watch those two Charlie's Angels movies, or Knight and Day), but Scarlett is built to last.

Though adept at smaller scale comedies (where she'll occasionally dust off her Jersey-Bronx-LI accent), since becoming an A-lister, ScarJo hasn't labored for respectability in prestige pics too often, content instead with her lot as the poster girl for a Tyrell Corporation-sponsored Time-Image sci-fi future. The first girl to hang glide all the way across the Uncanny Valley, she's part Hawksian 'one of the guys,' part 'your older sister's one cool friend who's nice to you.' When we see strange new sci-fi worlds through her eyes, they seem livable; their furrowed scalps are gently but robustly tousled by her maternal (but not bossy) fingers. Be they Seoul's skyways, the post-riot despair of 3 AM Glasgow, jet-lagged Tokyo, futuristic Tokyo, some other Tokyo, Paris, mall culture America, the empty rose-colored void, she can bring humanist warmth. 

Turn on any channel and there she is, making the future seem not only real, but inviting, even survivable. 

Her gaijin hair is Asiatic hipster grrl cool. (Ghost in the Shell)

GHOST IN THE SHELL

I'd heard the 'white-washing' accusations (1) before going to (open the Netflix envelope of) Ghost in the Shell, but that only helped lower my expectations, which were low to begin with, for it seemed like Aeon Flux meets Ultraviolet x Resident Evil all over again. But after seeing it I was a fan. Ghost in the Shell is actually a goddamn great film. It's so rich in ambient futuristic detail --from the ingeniously animatronic reptilian geisha girl assassins to the visualized 3-D streams of bit data (they make the green columns in The Matrix seem like the dos prompts in War Games --insert snorty nerd laugh)--its generic cop vs. corporate corruption clunkiness is forgivable (and certainly no more perfunctory than that in Ghost's most obvious template, Blade Runner) and maybe even necessary, since the mise-en-scene itself is so densely layered we need the story to be familiar enough we're not totally alienated.

In a role originally played an anime pixie (and ink has no race, people!), Johansson stars as "The Major," an advanced cybernetic cop chick chassis (the shell) housing a Japanese girl's ghost. Fronting an elite group of cops, she investigates AI-related crimes, and is a bit of a hothead. She regularly gets told not to rush into danger by her concerned chief (Takeshi "Beat" Kitano), which is almost as tired a cliche as M. Emmett Walsh tossing back whiskey and cigars while talking about "beauty and the beast - she's both." As in Blade Runner, some advanced robotics engineers are the target of a splinter group of amok replicants, or something (shades of Shelley!). Their next target seems to be Major's own creator, Juliette Binoche (which is funny if you've just seen Clouds of Sils Maria).

(Spoiler Alert!) The killer /bad guy, 'Kuze', a cyberterrorist robot-human, played by another gaijin, Michael Pitt, is a marvelously intricate character in both acting and CGI senses of the word. he seems to be constantly reconstituting himself from surrounding bit rates, only half alive and half virtual at any given time, his tortured voice wracked with auto-tune and static, his awareness of his past at odds with the Major's computer generated amnesia. Once they start talking, Major starts 'going rogue' while the evil robotics CEO turns the bullets their way. Luckily, the cool thing about being a robot: she can get shot to shit and still be ready to dive slow-mo backwards off the parapet and come crashing upside down through a skyscraper window with both automatics Woo-style blazing in just a few dissolves. The future is nothing to fear as long as hangdog toughies like Beat Kitano carry teflon briefcases and can shoot from the hip. It's an unusually upbeat, even tidy, Robocop style resolution, but it hardly matters - the greatness is in the details, the startling HD clarity that makes the film seem ready for a VR headset 2020 remastering. Compared to the new Blade Runner movie, it's a goddamned masterpiece - maybe even better than the original Blade Runner or, gasp, even Akira! Time will tell.

But getting back to the race cards: the casting of Johansson and Pitt as formerly Japanese eco-terrorist twenty-something lovers (arrested and mind-wiped) presumes if any Japanese person could create their own ideal robot shell, they wouldn't look Japanese, or at any rate even if the ghost/soul was Japanese, the white (French) engineer would give her shell a white face, and she'd automatically speak English (the universal corporate language) rather than Japanese. This strange but sadly (if conveniently) conceivable decision reaches a peak subtextual moment when Kuze and the Major, remembering their Japanese teenager past, take off each other's facial covers, revealing the circuitry beneath; in the process they seem to be showing the maze of sociopolitical awareness vs. box office second-guessing at work in their mask's lack of epicanthic folds. Is it racist, sure? But is it the cause of - or a statement on - ?

In her hirers defense, ScarJo has ample experience for the job, including that of being alienated in Tokyo (as 2003's Lost in Translation); having her face dissolve into bits of digital programming, also in Tokyo (in Luc Besson's Lucy); disappearing altogether and becoming just a SIRI-style AI voic (in Spike Jonze's Her); growing up as a rich person's clone, for future organ harvesting in a Logan's Run style enclosed citadel in The Island - etc. I'd also say that, though white-washing is a long and shameful cinematic practice, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee didn't just play Fu Manchu because they were white, but because they'd played evil megalomaniacs successfully in the past. Fu is more than just Asian - he's also evil and a genius. Those three things are not always interconnected and in dicerning Fu's chief trait as his Chinese decent one does China a disservice as much as the other way around. In the same way, ScarJo the actor has a resume of successfully conveyed artificial intelligences, test tube babies, amnesiacs, assassins, and substantial fight training that keeps the obligatory hair in the face stunt doubling to a minimum. She's a global star. She's sanded her psyche down for mass appeal, ready to be on the cover of everything from Italian Vogue to Japanese iPhone keypad ads for fragrances based on the novelization of the German film based on a Chinese fable.

There is one way to avoid all the conflicts when watching Ghost, a way to amp up the subtextual resonance until it rings like freedom's bell: watch it on Blu-ray with a Japanese dub language track. Hearing a Japanese actress speaking from inside ScarJo, as a Japanese ghost trapped in an artificial gaijin shell, will likely make all the difference.

I don't know why I'm sticking up for the casting decision- except that I, like everyone else of the SWM variety, needs to prove he's not racist, even if it's only to himself, and the filmmakers clearly went for distance in re-imagining both their holy bible Blade Runner and the original 1995 anime classic. There are multiple viewings worth of layered space and evocatively wrought Black Mirror future shockiness, and I'd hate for all that to be lost like tears in rain just because the producers were scared Maggie Q. wasn't enough of a household name. The level of artistry and detail on display is jaw-dropping, and for once it actually serves a narrative purpose: cluing us in on--not only the world of a very conceivable, maybe even inevitable, future--but the foreign/alien way that future will be perceived, i.e. when VR and 'R' merge inextricably.

I can hardly wait until it too is on FX or FXX and comes punctuated with commercials for 4D, the 'next word' in high-definition television. Ghost in the Shell seems clearly meant for it.

As an anime from 1995, all its cyberpunk detail often seemed to get lost in the overwhelming rush of negative and positive space (ink can't be layered the way blacks shadows in HD can) and--let's face it--the internet was just getting rolling in '95 --AOL still connected via whirring phone modem. A lot of all that internet stuff was still just on the (printed pulp paper) page of Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson novels. Shell's anime style (left) used a lot of rotoscoping and 'real' lights and--unless you were an anime devotee familiar with the narrative tics and traits, ahead of the curve on the dawn of cyberspace--it seemed a kind of over-the-top cartoonish reliance on animation shortcuts rather than segue/linking micro-movement (i.e breathing). That over-the-top literalness in this live action version lives on only in the 'tactical' eye adjustments of Batou (Major's right hand man, he loses his human eyes in a bomb blast, and opts for two telephoto / infrared lenses that make him look like Little Orphan Annie's jacked uncle). Aside from that, nearly every image is sublime and best of all, at least semi-subtle and subdued. Since the actual actors and lighting provides some measure of corporeal relativity, the VR super-impositions stand out yet are so fully meshed, at times reminded me of last February when I had the DTs. While the slow-mo glass shattering and frozen water diving splashes have long been cliche (thanks to The Matrix), here they actually fit the post-modern future on display, as she comes through a window that's also a giant video screen - as if turning the pixels of the image into glass shards.

The ultimate takeaway is that, when the virtual world is as valid and 'real' as this one, (and the Uncanny Valley bridged), one of the side effect developments will be time travel along personal axises and the ability to replay our sensory recording of a single event, which can then be slowed down until the whole world stops on a fraction of a nanosecond for all eternity, and those watching/reviewing can wander into the middle of your 3D retinal projection display and see around corners and read the names of files left on the dresser. Weirder still, these memories could be hacked, so that around the corner too might be a VR assassin ready to--if not actually stop your heart and kill you--at least steal your mental capacity, leave you a stunned amnesiac while he makes off with your internal hard drive. We see bits and pieces of this future in various Black Mirror episodes, but here it all fits together in a blast that's like an atomic bomb trapped inside an orchid.


If social-racial progress gets knocked back a peg by ScarJo's presence in this film, beauty parameters takes one step forward due to her lack of fear at presenting to the world a genuine womanly shape in bodysuit --not zaftig or shapeless mind you, but filled out like a mix of Marilyn Monroe and a UFC fighter -- her lower center of gravity and sinuous synchronized shoulders and pelvis betray evidence of long-term fight training ala Cynthia Rothrock in her earlier films and of Gina Carano in her current ones. She keeps her head perfectly balanced, like a Steadicam, when she weaves around a room, shoulders slinking cannily back and like a combination alley cat and see-saw.

It makes a huge difference. Watching Rothrock throw down next to Michelle Yeoh for example in Yes Madam! is to see the difference between a dancer, lithe and fast (Yeoh) and a genuine kickass fighter (Rothrock); Johansson has grown into the latter. You just can't imagine yourself getting back up from a fight with ScarJo as easily as you can one with Maggie Q.

At the same time, Johansson's modulated low-key acting (as demonstrated first in Lucy) fits both this fighter stance parameter and the role of a soul who's basically had her identity stripped away; her brain has been washed white and enhanced with micro-processors that record and play back memories that can be, as in the Tyrell corporations' most gifted Nexus edition, Rachel (Sean Young), artificially implanted or removed. Her whiteness and blank performance reflect cultural meaning in an era where the digital and analog are no longer separate, where humans can be hacked and turned into weapons just by touching the wrong door knob during a live action interior chip role playing game. But it's her daringly 'real woman' body, unhidden and unashamed, that becomes the unassimilable remainder, an assertion of humanity against the machine, and her micro-gestures of awakening vulnerability accomplish a gravitas Sean Young never could.

What makes Ghost in the Shell work for me, too is that, like Blade Runner, it keeps its ambitions and goals for narrative resolution low-- cliche'd, linear, resolved--to better focus on the visuals, mood, ambience and subtext. Compare with, say, the disastrous Matrix sequels where vast reels trudge across with abstract thesis dissertations on the collapse of space-time vs. the simple Wizard of Oz meets the Pusherman mythos of the first. Macking out between the cop show beats in Ghost are fascinating throwaways, such as a go-nowhere but still interesting scene where she touches the actual flesh(?) of an androgynous, only partially-human, 'mixed race' freckled prostitute (above). In a very touching--but not quite sexy--scene their faces touch close enough the heat is there, but there's no need to go all the way into some gratuitous cyber-lesbianism. Instead we have that curiosity with which a human might gaze into an animal's eyes (as in the cliche'd scenes with Batou's stray mutts) or vice versa, each fascinated by the mystery of a separate, never quite-knowable intelligence on the other side -- as beautiful, as de Lautréamont's saying goes, as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table. For Major it's the unknowability of what makes us human, metered out with the fascination of the machine for the human and vice versa; each enraptured, envious, even, of the other: a human with artificial augmentation seen through the eyes of the reverse.

And then there's the weirdest, most strangely vivid and human--portion of Ghost in the Shell: Kaori Momoi a Major's mom. It's clear English is not Momoi's first language but she attacks it with a stunning, raw innocence- as if in forming these strange words she's creating some new kind of polyurethane fiber: even across the divides of language and digital artificial shell recombination, and even race, she quickly recognizes her long lost daughter without ever having a big reveal. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from that. Probably not.

IRON MAN 2 / AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON / CAPT. AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER: BLACK WIDOW needs her own damn movie, Marvel. 

A nurturing friend to the Comic-Con geek, ScarJo likes to get right up close to the Hulk and rub his fingers or invade his puny Banner's personal space, or fall on top of him in a sexy silk dress behind the bar, telling him "don't turn green, ok?" She ends up trying to help Capt. America find a girlfriend even while they unfurl a dastardly Fourth Reich Paperclip conspiracy deep within the CIA (I mean HYDRA within SHIELD) and finally does the direct approach with Banner when he won't take please for an answer, and he ends up running away instead. The smart move, that, because Black Widow is single for a reason: Marvel 'gets it' -she belongs to us all. She's who we, the lovelorn teenage male demographic, imagines coming home to. We know she wouldn't be turned off by our living in mom's basement and spending our disposable income on mint condition action figures. Were Marvel to saddle her up with some dude like Luke Wilson, bringing her flowers and making hangdog eyes, that, sir, would be a major miscalculation in how fantasy works to allay and soothe the hormone-tortured adolescent mind. 

 Marvel's too smart for that. Marvel gets it, and clearly posits Black Widow (it's in the name) as the girl we can imagine ourselves with (lord knows I did, back in the days of her character's large-size black and white comics when I was at a nerdy high school freshman). Or at the very least she stays single and we stay best buddies.

That said, I wonder just how many young boys and lesbians actually do imagine themselves with Scarlett Johansson. I don't think it's that many - she's more like our badass fantasy friend. Maybe it's her Bronx upbringing, but Scarlett's one weakness is that she can't do 'weakness.' She can never quite tap the accessible vulnerability (emblematic in, say Heather Graham or Patricia Arquette) that brings out the lusty aggressor in a man, so essential to his sex drive. Instead, we love her at a respectful distance, and like her style; as a pal, she boosts our ego without having to get awkward about it.

There's a scene early in the first Avengers where she's tied up and  getting slapped around by a cadre of Russian mobsters in an abandoned warehouse and her cell phone rings, it's Fury who wants her to come in, and she says something like Hold on, I'm almost done interrogating these guys. In the calm collected way she says it, the men realize she's never not been in control of the situation like they thought. She easily escapes her bonds and beats the shit out of them all with pieces of the broken chair, then sashays away. That scene to me illustrates the breadth of Scarlett's range, for she is not the most giving and exhibitionist of actresses. This scene plays her dramatic weaknesses into strengths the way Neil Young overcomes his limitations on guitar, through a kind of advanced depth primitivism. We can buy her as vulnerable only if it comes packaged with the idea it might be a ruse.

On the other extreme of the acting intensity range, for example, we might consider Noomi Rapace, who acts her pain and anger so vividly in films like Prometheus and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that she leaves any concept of 'fun' far behind her. In her hands, that scene in the Russian warehouse would be a grueling drag. She'd make the pain and trauma of her slapping brutally real - she'd make it our problem, the post-Fury call thrashing would be cathartic but we'd still be left irritable and clammy. Rapace forgets we come to movies to be entertained, especially movies about space monsters and girl avengers. We don't need to feel traumatized, or to hate ourselves worse than we already do. The only thing tempering our pain at Rapace's automated C-section in Prometheus is that her character has been such a self-righteous drag we're happy to see her suffer. She makes her own pregnancy issues everyone else's problem, then gets pissy when the ship's crew don't drop everything they're doing to ram an alien space craft on her command even if it will kill them all. ScarJo by contrast implicitly understands the parameters of a scene in ways beyond mere chops and intensity; she's her generation's Angie Dickinson, she's Lauren Bacall x Alice Faye. 

Dig the way her shoulders hunch and move with her eyesight like a canny
low-center boxer snaking through the crowded disco as the ecstasy kicks in.

In Lucy (2014) there's a great bit where, after she's been spending the first 1/4 of the movie crying and pleading, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking open a kilo of high-end brain boosting Limitless-style super drugs she's been muling. Peaking on these blue crystals, she ably escapes, kills an array of bad guys, gets shot, goes to the hospital and--while a doctor removes the bullet as she holds him at gunpoint--she calls her mom to explain that she remembers being in her womb and the taste of her milk and how much she loves her.

Good lord! Delivered by Johansson in a flat whispery monotone, Lucy's call to mom will bring uncomfortable recognition from anyone who's ever had a mind-opening drug trip / manic high and decided to call their mom out of the blue to re-'connect', and explain they've cracked it wide open, broken the code, that they 'get it now' and can see past the limitations of time and space and realize all the interconnected love etc. etc. This will either move their mom to tears of gratitude or have her ready to call the psychiatric clinic. I know I've had a few of those back in the 80s-90s, and was always grateful for my mom's sense of denial, for I'd never hear about it later and forgot most of what I said/promised. Since then, I've been on the other end, watching younger generations do the same thing and I've been privy to how crazy these sorts of phone calls and explanations sound, both pretentious and deluded, egotistical and full of fragility masked in bravado, as if in convincing me of their discovery their discovery becomes permanent, rather than just the flash of illumination - eternal only in the memory. It's like they try to etch these fleeting feelings into the consciousness of those around them, rather than where they should go- onto paper, magnetic tape, and hard drives- but, what might be trippy in art, brilliant in theory, sounds nuts in verbal rants to your sleepy friends and parents. Profound insight doesn't translate out of the blue, just like hearing about someone else's dream never has the same dizzy power as telling our own.

It's perhaps the sadder truth of enlightenment, especially via the poison path, that the more brilliantly the ideas cascade inside your mind, the more the tongue can barely keep pace. Ideas, insight and inspiration may all flow out into brush strokes on canvas, words on the screen, words from the mouth - but try to talk normal to a friend or parent and you don't sound like someone who's cracked it wide open and broke on through to the other side. You sound like an amok egotistical maniac, a frothing lack-of-sleep meth-addled grandiose version of James Mason in Bigger than Life and maybe, a little bit, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy would if she didn't wisely underplay to such a dry extent. It may seem at the time like bad, flat acting, but any other way would be far worse. And besides, soon her Lucy can back up her words by remote controlling all media and gravity via telekinesis and shit in ways that make her more than a match for Neo in The Matrix, but she does it all without leather and dark glasses.

For Lost in Translation (see A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula)

Ghost World

It was in 2001's Ghost World, Scarlett J. first showed the world a most endearing smirk that set her in a class somewhere off from/above the zero sum hipster anarchy of her self-destructive friend Enid (Thora Birch). They start out as equals in sardonic incredulity but by the end Scarlett looks upon Enid with the same kind of bemused indulgence Enid looks upon Steve Buscemi. When, with that not-yet patented ScarJo kind of halfway grin that can--if tried by amateurs--smack of snide dismissal, she finally turns against Enid in favor of a job and some semblance of normality, we feel a chill in our guts. We don't want Scarlett to do that to us - we'll be normal if that helps, for we realized too that Enid's rebellion is a dead end. Sure her options were all soul-sucking drone work, but she needed to knuckle down and do it, to let her soul die just a bit, to reign in her wild mare, and then let it loose at night, in basement art, like some John Cheever character, instead of sticking with her snider-than-thou posturing straight into the 'isolated drifter -one dollar' bin. Poor Enid.

Scarlett J. was right to do dump her because Enid's world view and attitude is, in the end, not self-sustaining. There's nowhere to go, and that--I think--was the film's big flaw, it didn't know how to end itself. It should have zapped the title up to a blast of punk anarchy when the old man gets on the bus that wasn't supposed to come and leaves Enid alone on the bench. Bam! She looks out at camera, Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. Kafka-esque, man: the bus out of here never comes - oh wait it came after all these years - and now it's gone again! Forever! A Winner. They probably tried that ending, but test audience asked what happened to Seymour, so the film checks in with Seymour again, letting us know--not that we cared--he's doing just fine, getting professional help, as if we needed to know that rather than to experience his and Enid's fall both in that one bus stop moment. The utter pointlessness of rebelling against life outside the beef jerky and nunchucks of prefab American reality while still living within in it, Scarlett mutes it all down and gets excited about a fold-down ironing board in the apartment she's renting with Enid (if Enid gets the money), and that's really the film's one emotional payoff. The terror that flits across Enid's face as she suddenly realizes she truly is alone in the universe. Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. Another key winner final shot.

Scarlett's never really given us that ironing board moment since, thank goodness, and has become instead a global scale avatar of a kind of mirror reverse nerd gaze - reflecting the geeky adoration of the Comic-Con Cos-play Kid back upon itself, with a wry half-smile that says "I know you would run in terror if I came onto you in real life, and so I'm not going to, because if I did, and you ran, you'd hate yourself and then when you saw me onscreen again you'd jut get the sting of shame at the memory of when you ran away, so I'll spare you the shame and me the lack of your movie ticket royalty. But otherwise, I would totally hit on you as you're cute in a geeky way. We both know that, so let's never say another word about it." 

This is the gaze that boys want to see mirrored back, for it acknowledges their gaze as something other than a toad-like imposition; even as it gently rejects, it flatters; the male gaze is returned without the Medusa stone surcharge so usually associated with 'real' women. The fanboy's gaze is not judged sexist, misogynist, evil, gross or all the other judgments breathing mammalian women make on men who leer way out of their league, nor is it returned with a come-on directness like a prostitute meeting their gaze across an Uncanny Valley casino bar, the type where you look away in fear instantly, before you consciously even realize what just happened. Even if you've never seen a high end prostitute in the wild, you still instinctively don't kick yourself for being chicken, because you suddenly realize a beautiful girl's sudden reciprocal stare is terrifying, your gaze can't help but flinch if it's not used to being gazed back at the same way that it gazes. It's like Delilah springing forth with a garden shears to cut your balls or hair off the minute you spot her in the Waldo crowd.

ScarJo doesn't bring the shears. Her stare says, hey man, relax, the parts of us that are human are so far apart I can look back at you as insolently as you look at me in the hidden darkness of your roost. The shell you gaze into may be owned by Sony, but my ghost is my own, and I promise you this: no matter what else the future may shear away, you can keep your hair on.

Further Reading:

Skeeved by an Asian: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, MASK OF FU MANCHU, ETC. 
It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR
Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT
CinemArchetype 16: Automaton / Ariel 
A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE

NOTES:
1. Blair, Gavin J. (April 19, 2016). "Scarlett Johansson in 'Ghost in the Shell': Japanese Industry, Fans Surprised by 'Whitewashing' Outrage". 

Great Acid Easter Cinema: THE GREEN PASTURES (1936)

This 1936 all-black folk interpretation of the Old Testament draws 'Uncle Tom'-style flak from liberal academia, and maybe they're right (1), but on the other hand, God is portrayed as a black man (Rex Ingram), and He is a God of Wrath and Vengeance. Talk folksy as he may, even within a heaven of clouds, fish-fries, five cent see-gars for a-dults, and cups of firmament-deficient custard, Ingram commands the screen with a profoundly resonant analog gravitas. And I personally love the shit out of this movie, and if part of that love comes from a kind or round-about racism, then stone me not lest ye be first stoned, as I was when I had it on a six-hour tape sandwiched between a host of 30s Betty Boop cartoons and Death Takes a Holiday (1934). The tape was labeled "In case of Emergency" - knowing this blog you might guess what kind of emergency I meant. For nary a month or so went by that my weird self-medication regimen wouldn't fail on me, to the point I'd drunkenly and ill-advisedly take too much acid or too many shrooms in order to pull myself out of a spiritual depression tailspin and, instead of finding solace, wind up spinning even faster, the yawning chasm of Hell below me like a giant laughing Medusa planet maw. In those dark moments, with Death so close I could see its reflection in the toilet bowl mirror, I'd reach for the Boop-Pastures-Holiday trifecta tape, and lo, I would be slowly lifted back up from the pit. The music of the Hal Johnson Choir is the kind of music I hope they play when I die - I'll follow that sound right up the heavenly gates, or--at any rate--out of  the devil's grasp. The Hollywood group for such things (they also supply similar notes of grace in Dumbo and Cabin in the Sky), the Hal Johnsons are like the hand that lifts down from the clouds to raise the lowliest of sinners from the mire. Even as they're perfectly in tune you can hear nearly every voice separately at the same time - the cumulative sound is never muddled, and always warm and freeing.

"Nothing dies forever," (perhaps) a (mis)quote I just now heard while in the other room where is playing The Expendables 3.  But honey, ain't it apt?

It worked for me in that low moment because, for all its folksy stereotyping, Green Pastures glows with real spiritual magic, of the same sort I feel listening to Leadbelly or Mississippi John Hurt. I think it's because, at its core, Green Pastures is not about a black child's simplified imagining of the Old Testament portion of the bible while Mr. Deshee regails him at Sunday School, so much as it is an illustration of how suffering is the prerequisite to compassion, which is the pre-requisite to true happiness, how these steps can't be 'faked' even with good psychedelics (as I'd learn time and time again) and how the god of wrath and vengeance too must suffer and in that, at last, finally find the compassion that eluded him for his own creations.

When viewed from the soul-broken LSD bad trip that leads to clear-headed mystical scissor complexity it is a very modernist film, fusing the mythos of the Old Testament to the mythos of the Carl Sandburg/Mark Twain-folksy Old South, with nary a nod to any kind of banal social realism or political correctness along the way. Very of it's time, not just for its free hand with race and co-opted culture but for its ability to tread clearheadedly into avenues of deep overt symbolism thanks to the literati's post-war existentialist crisis. Darker than blue and wrong as acid rain, it goes down sweet as whole bottle of vanilla extract, gulped down as a last resort on a blue law Sunday when the shakes are so bad you can't even get off your knees without dry-heaving.

Like that extract's effect on a shattered alcoholic system, the Green Pastures' sweetness helps you keep it down even as its potency warms you up. The gentle but properly-aligned gravitas of Ingram's lord is like a salve to gash that's bled your soul, mind, and spirit into each other. He's like a draft of Moby Dick's hot blood in a shiny grail fed to a crippled Ahab. He doesn't grow back a new hollow leg, but he just might make it to the kitchen on the one he has, and there are refills thar. The strong response we get from the white community, as in the vicious minstrel satire of it in the "Going to Heaven on a Mule" number in 1934's Al Jolson vehicle Wonder Bar. compared to the earthy resonance and genuine care given to every fibre of Green Pastures should make us all ashamed. Most of these talented actors struggled along playing servants, if anything, or threadbare budgeted blacks-only films and plays. The enduring power of Pastures, Stormy Weather, Hallelujah!, Emperor Jones, and Cabin in the Sky is that these actors cram a whole canon of worthy work into them, a reminder of how much richer our collective cinema might have been in a less segregated history. 

And me, during those brutal Sunday hangovers and too-much acid 'suffering side step fails' while miserably alone and bereft and it's winter and work looming like the gallows, man, the thought of an entire keg of liquor waiting on a nice rainy ark, with everything from guys in gorilla suits to freshly painted zebras for company, was like a salve that erased the pain from phantom limbs I didn't know I had.

To a poor space cowboy fallen so far off his horse he'd already passed the ground three times, jerking spastic as he'd plummet, like catching St. Vitus on a yo-yo string, Ingram was the one lord who made sense, the only lord I trusted.

1930--the year Green Pastures was written (first as a play)--was a year of expanded demographical suffering for this great country. A whole lot of once-middle class white folks--many of them decorated war heroes--were suddenly very enlightened in how it felt to be poor as hell, spat on by the cops, forced to sleep in Central Park and to take whatever demeaning job was offered for however insultingly little. They were, as the saying goes, humbled. They knew at last some measure of what it was like on the other side of the class divides. The market had crashed, the Depression was on, there was as yet no such thing as minimum wage or unemployment insurance; you couldn't even drown your sorrows because of Prohibition. FDR was still three years away, but Hitler was rolling slowly but inexorably into view as well, like his dark mirror twin. Each a socialist public works highway-building savior to their nations, both Adolph and Franklin hit their full stride in 1933, ushering in respective sweeping reforms (like on the US side, social security and prohibition's repeal) but that was three years away. In 1930, only the factors that created the need for them existed.

What was needed also maybe was some kind of faith that modern hip disillusioned NYC audiences could embrace without feeling  overly churchy. In other words, we all could--through the "American Negro Spiritual"--get needed heavenly uplift. Anyone who's been kept from the psych ward by the saving grace of an old Leadbelly record, heard perhaps by chance while passing an open window, knows what I'm talking about. There's an alchemical power to transmute sorrow to joy, hell-lashed helplessness to heavenly power, in those Leadbelly records. You know it when you feel it and you never forget it, because it's an inexhaustible source of solace. And urban audiences both white and black could get behind it.

This same appreciation for black spirituality--real or imagined--took root in a lot of us who grew up in 70s Middle Class America. As a child in Lansdale PA, I was used to black people more as TV characters than actual neighbors: Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and What's Happening! and of course radio, where you couldn't tell who was male or female ("Hot Child in the City" was my favorite song 'til I learned it was sung by a man) let alone black or white. Our sense that the racist jokes and cartoons we saw and heard were wrong (it was mostly Irish and Polish jokes anyway) and the evil of racist thinking didn't really sink in until Roots came along, and suddenly and abruptly, we--along with the bulk of white America--were all like, holy shit, that really happened??! We ashamedly threw our joke books and inherited Little Black Sambo 78s away, and watered the seeds of our newly planted collective social guilt like it was a rare orchid.

At the same time, I today regard with suspicion the uber-liberal academe for whom ever single word spoken in popular media on this subject is either vile and racist or safely didactic, either flavorless, dour, or scolding. A black actor for these lefty liberals has to 'represent' color, one way or another, elevating or denigrating with his or her every step and word. To quote one of Green Pasture's angels as he looks down from the clouds at Jesus carrying the cross, "that's a terrible burden for one man to carry."

Performing the opposite of that kind of mono-dimensional liberal strait-jacketing, Green Pastures' modality recognizes the universal man as black via accentuation of the black man as Other rather than a bland mouthpiece for the kind of sanitized PC sermonizing that reinforces stereotypes even as it works to transcend them. In the liberal mind, the black character is so not different he can never be universal--often the more entitled (usually upper middle class) liberal mind can't see that basic paradoxical opposition.

So it is that white fans of 30s black Hollywood like myself (and Quentin Tarantino) risk demonization at the hands of the left for the crime of looking at the vibrant soul of the black performer with vampiric envy. We recognize that vitality, that wellspring of submarine missile-to-stratosphere soul, as something we lack. We feel it in our soul's bones, whether it's projecting or not, it's still valid. Like Mick Jagger gaping at the wonder of James Brown on that legendary 1966 TAMI Show, we long to absorb that resonance, that heavy frequency. The performative aspect of a white writer of earthy black characters may seem racist, but race is way too complicated not to mar the vision of the liberal who sees such envy as racist a priori to the experience of that level of depth. The hard left tries to create equality by denying the existence of any actual 'soul' resonance. Spike Lee will tell Tarantino's fans to be ashamed for loving his liberally N-word peppered dialogue, irregardless of their race, but art flowers in the offal of wrongness. It withers and dies when subjected to 'peer-reviewed journal' sterility. Those journals are either part of--or at the mercy of--political dissent-promoters out for tenure who just don't 'feel comfortable' with genuine subversion. They need iron gates installed around the campus just so they can demand they be removed. Like Barton Fink, they feel the common man's plight, but only if they don't have to eat next to him, for truly he doesn't measure up in direct experience to their sanitized ideals, who does? 

And so goes my rambling preface to my telling you that The Green Pastures was written in 1930 by the great white wit Marc Connelly, one of the Algonquin round table, who based it on the irreducible Roark Bradford's Ol Adam and his Chillun. And critics are right, it's a mite racist in its colloquial innocence. But it's also 'from the mind of a child,' for whom misspellings of names like "Aardvark" for the  ark sequence are comparable to painted signs in Our Gang comedies. And let us not forget, in the same era, the most popular books were savage satires of white hick poverty and deviance by eugenics proponents like Erskine Caldwell, which were even lousier with folksy phoneticism. Relative to Caldwell's hilarious savagery, Pastures is socially progressive, wise, and gently humorous rather than mercilessly misanthropic. If some of the black actors seem to embody exaggerated grotesques, it should be remembered that the source text basically chronicles Eden, the Flood, ancient Egypt, Babylon, and so forth, and puts forth the idea of humanity ever-oscillating between humble reverence and depraved decadence, between higher human idealism and bestial indulgence, that each flood, famine or volcanic eruption, or other extinction event which God creates, wipes out the more animalistic (analog) heathen versions of man in order to distill a stronger divine (digital) proof. This fits ancient alien theories too, positing 'extinction events' as our otherworldly creator's method of scrubbing the kitchen clean, tossing out the failed batch, and starting again with a modified recipe, one step further on the road to modern humanity.

We should also remember that the most racist of all biblical films are really those deadly dull ones from the 50s that cast only white actors, sometimes in black, brown, or yellow face, to play Middle Eastern/North African biblical figures. These ponderous roadshow 'scope endurance tests never get called racist even by liberal academes (who've probably never seen them, for in sooth, they are generally godless). Based on the relatively small geographic area where most of the Old Testament transpires, characters should all actually be Arabic, Israelite or North African. Where in popular culture, aside from that Isaac Hayes album Black Moses or the colorblind Jesus Christ Superstar, or on Kwanzaa tapestries, are Old Testament characters ever black? The black man is the original man, true? So no other race should portray Adam and Eve, and that means everyone else in the bible should be played by some mix of African and Middle Eastern heritage, even towards the second half as part of the Israel / Ishmael divide. (2)

Right

Wrong!

Now, I'm no fan of the bible and its obtuse user-unfriendly 'folk' language, but when it's folksied up by old man Connelly, I feel the mythic archetypal potency of its message blaze outward in ways no old lady Sunday school teacher or droning priest could ever match in my own unwilling churchgoing experience. Alone amongst biblical films in its wise humor, Pastures works to summarize (and hold accountable) God's actions throughout the Old Testament. God's periodic visitations of Earth, His judgements of early man's wickedness, and his 'wrath and vengeance'-spurred habit of raining destruction to start anew, over and over, proves a bad habit humanity can't help but pick up themselves. God is loath to recognize himself the source of evil. To this end, the film manages clarify the huge difference between the Old Testament God and the New God, moreso than any other movie or sermon I've seen or heard.

For an illustration: almost at the end of the film, in the midst of a WWI-style battle, comes a son of Adam, named Azrel, who runs into God a few hills back from the front line and--like all the other humans but Noah---never recognizes him (even though he's played by the same actor, both God and Azrel - reflecting God's own inability to recognize His reflection).

"Maybe we was tired of that old God," notes Azrel. He and his people have created a different God for themselves, one way nicer than the God of wrath and vengeance, as He calls Himself. Azrel lays a trip on God that cuts deep: man needs God to be a god of mercy, not vengeance, and so the new God will be perceived that way whether He is actually merciful or not.  To thrive, and to understand the concept of mercy, God realizes even He must suffer. Forgiveness can be learned no other way. Azrel won't even acknowledge the wrath of the old God, regardless of the God's wrath. The new God is merciful and kind, and even God Himself doesn't have a say in the matter. It's such a profound yet simple message it took me awhile, wasted as I was through my first dozen or so viewings, to really understand. It was only, really, after my drinking got so bad I went into AA and had a few spiritual pink cloud awakenings that it hit me in the same way. Without the prolonged wretchedness of my last year of drinking, would I be humble enough to accept this true and complete surrender? A soul is like a piece of steel that must be softened in the hell of the forge before it can be crafted into a beautiful functional blade. If we try to avoid the heat, we shatter under the hammer, and it takes rehab or detox or just years of denial and pain to get all the chunks to bond back together in the forge, otherwise the parts shatter again the first hard surface the blade strikes. So it is that, in its bizarre unheimliche mix of historical fact and mythic 'telephone game' translation and editing, Green Pastures gets at a truth too deep to convey with anything like dull DeMille solemnity.

Wait, are you not paying any attention, and just rolling your eyes at my typical educated white boy need to justify co-opting blackness through folksy blah blah?

If all I've said doesn't mean anything to you, o judger of my love for Pastures as 'benevolent racism' then consider just this: The Hal Johnson Choir does some great singing as the Heavenly angel congregation, the kind of music we don't hear nowadays when gospel is either Mahalia Jackson style (which is awesome but every song sounds the same) or classic (which often grows stodgy after one bar). Hal Johnson's choir is more attuned to, say, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, another old trippy favorite of mine. Pastures is not a musical and the songs mostly serve as transitions between scenes and as background, but their heavenly (it's the only remotely appropriate adjective) sound underwrites all the action like firmament underwriting the Earth. While God meddles with, or just visits, the folks on his Earth over the course of the millennia, like a botanist checking on his experimental orchids, deciding whether or not to wipe out this latest breed and start splicing again, the Angels up in the heavenly choir keep everything rooted, sanctified and grand in a way that manages to be humble and cosmic at once,

And if the language seems outdated, note of the original bible text (which I looked up wondering what the hell firmament was):

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day (GENESIS 1.6-8)

Jeezis that's muddily convoluted (and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament;?) I far prefer de Lawd's version:

"Let there be some firmament, and I don't mean no little bit of firmament. I mean a whole mess of firmament, 'cuz I'm sick of running out of it when we need it.".

Like a lot of enduring mythic texts, the Old Testament defies easy interpretation as either truth or fiction, i.e. it is true myth, i.e. tall tales ala Ulysses, Prometheus, Paul Bunyon, and Poor John Henry. It's a text rife with magical staffs and personifications of elemental forces that were probably never meant to be taken as concretized dogma (3) as there are huge gaps in logic that my Sunday school teacher never could answer for me. For example, who did the children of Adam and Eve go off and marry if there were yet no other people? And later, the children of Noah, the same question. Did they mate with some prehuman life form? Or with each other? If with each other--and this goes for the two of each kind of animal Ark system--how, with such a small gene pool are we not all deformed, inbred monsters so many generations later?

My Christian Science Sunday School teacher was worse than ignorant of the answers. She radiated the smell of elderly skin and rotting old lady teeth which, coupled to fellow student Marilyn's infernal and endless sniffling, further abstracted whatever meaning we bored kids might derive from our reading the bible aloud, around and around the table, the abstract and redundantly worded language of the text devolving further and further into meaninglessness. We would either rush through the text in a bland monotone (Marilyn), stutter and mispronounce every word (Terry), or make fun of it by emphasizing random words in a hammy voice (me). Green Pastures at least has the gumption to discern the common threads in the text and summarize its events into a relevant and moving preface to the New Testament.

The moral being, even God sometimes needs to suffer to grow, and the only way God can understand mercy is through His own suffering, the kind that comes from seeing your son die on a cross. Through acceptance of the unmitigated feeling of hangover depression comes its deliverance-isn't that what the blues is all about? For the hungover wretch like me, the pain was abated as long as the old country blues played on the speakers, like a hot bath for sore muscles. Silence or some other music was like suddenly getting out into the cold shivering air. 

For First World middle class white kids like myself, with no diseases or ailments or crippling accidents or arrests of any kind, we can really only know true suffering via mental illness, such as bi-polar depression, or our own self-inflicted variety (via perhaps self-medication to allay the first kind) so we suffer from anorexia, drug withdrawal or bad trip overdoses on psychedelics that turn out to be laced with strychnine or formaldehyde, or are just way stronger than we were prepared for, amplifying our sense of loneliness and isolation to the point of existential agony. Failing that, it's my opinion suicide attempts are a last ditch effort to achieve the same grace. If you survive, suddenly your once stifling woes are dialed back into focus and maybe your mom finally lets you get the help you need. Suffering is the fire of God the blacksmith, melting down your frying pan brain. Best learn to love the sound of the hammer ringing, because He's never satisfied, not 'til your shiny and pure and sharp as a Hattori Hanzo Bill-killing special. Here's a little song I wrote about it, ready?

The dentist is not punched for his painful probe;
instead you pay him for the end result.
The infant is forgiven his filthy diaper, and
the old man his soiled bedsheets;
but not the young junky vagrant with no bowel control!?
Not the drunk, convulsing, stumbling reminder
that no purloined ecstasy escapes its full opposite?

What hypocrites we are to not see each new load of shit the same,
each endured pain the price of future joy,
the clean fang the dentist's pain full paid;
heart unafraid to face the same fate
as that dead old boy, 

poopin' his way back to you, babe.

--

If your crying is not from worry or the dread of dying
Allow it. Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from fear the manna shall soon cease its flow,
Aummmmmm, allow.
If your crying is not from dreading some fatherly punishment yet to pronounce
over missed finals, Aummm

nor from tedium feared before it's even started
aum...
This suffering is sanctified.

Where the twig meets the leaf is where the first frames of meshed mom morph.
Then it vibrates outward like the unspooling spiral of the seashell snail shape Aummmmmmm
shuffled downward onto plankton carpets,
shamanic rattles caked in baby spittle,
white and shiny salivas glistening like the freshly hatched serpent.
Aummmm, shapes cut from glowing red lantern spin orbit patterns as your crib surrounds you.
Aummmmmmmmm, the holy gleaming halo of your last first faint sunset Aummmm.
Each death, night, goodbye, adieu just an outward breath Aummmmmmm.
Mom, that titan, encircles us no more tonight,
just the slow spinning stars of nontoxic plastic, above us casting shadows,
out of reach, above the bars of our baby crypt.

The rattle dries into whiskey and drum sets, growing tall brings girls of equal height,
their breasts no longer big as beanbag chairs,
only the forgotten homework now stirs a guilty shiver
only that is the infant's giant mom's
harrowing equal
in absence.

Inward..
Buzzing, the razor stops suddenly, the chair
either dentist of barber, you forgot which,
lurches downward.
The bib comes off.
We're unleashed,
but to where, with such an obscenely naked neck?

And so we sense that the hangups that befoul our spiritual questing are all beaten and cleared away by the enormous suffering of the Jewish slaves and the black slaves of the Old Testament, and the grotesque words, faces, jewelry and actions of their oppressors speaking to a great evolutionary comeuppance, as the grotesque exaggerations of blackness, the dice game, the koochie dancers, the grim inhumanity and shallow interest in 'tricks' gives way to hard-won dignity as humanity collectively moves from a pagan pantheon of animal gods and graven images (requiring human sacrifices) to the idea of a single, yet jealous god who demands fidelity, and finally to the one god himself changing from a god of wrath and vengeance to a god of love and forgiveness not through his own choice but because his creation, man, wills it, via the strength over him he's given them through suffering - the indirect 'balance sheet swivel'. It's all there in Ingram's face as de Lawd, and also as Adam, and also as Hezrel, a name that appears here and nowhere else.

During my 'here comes the big 12/21/12!' big rapture moment (4)  I understood at last with diamond clarity that all the suffering in the world had only this one purpose, the shaking of the gold prospector's pan - to sift away the dross and mud so God might see what's left to shine, and all the baubles and wealth in the world won't buy you one step onto that golden stair, so don't be sure all that glitters in the Robert Plant's hair has two meanings.

But in losing all that, in tossing possessions away, in enduring centuries of slavery with one's every pain-wracked step (5), one earns the gift even God can't take away. No expensive wine ever tasted half as sweet as plain water to a man dying in the desert. So Jesus made men desert wanderers, that they might know this awesome sangre vintage. Why did God invent war? Because there's no atheist in a foxhole.

And because I'm too pampered to want to wander and die in the desert just for a taste of this golden water nectar, too lazy and grandiose to want a walk-on part in the war, I became a psychedelic surgeon lead role in a cage, cutting myself apart in endless operative bars. But when I accidentally sew my ego into my soul via incorrect sutures and stay awake in the dark night of the soul despair, then I got Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Pastures, to raise me clear above it via a transcendental alchemical process of absorption, for I can feel the beauty and triumph to be found through 'feeling' their own acceptance of their pain. This is a true alchemical miracle. It comforts me and reminds me the desert's always waiting, somewhere wrapped in foil in a forgotten college freezer, the 'good work' always ready to be picked up right where I left it. Aummm. And don't let the lord convince you that one keg of liquor on the ark is enough. Better take two kegs, lord. Or the Big Book of Alcoholic's Anonymous. On disc. As read by Tim Leary. Or at least Dennis Leary.

A final word: 
Perhaps in order to balance things out, Rex Ingram also played the devil, or at least his son-in-law in Cabin in the Sky, another all-black film that posits negro culture as being more extreme in its polarity than whites (i.e. a black man is either a sober God-fearing Christian family man or a debauched craps-shooting, razor-wielding pimp --there's nothing in between, aside from Little Joe, of course) gets far less critical dross, but I think is far more racist (7). In Cabin we never see the lord, Ingram only plays the devil; in Pastures we never see the devil, Ingram is only the lord. And he played the genie in Thief of Baghdad! In other words, he's very good at playing larger than life mythic archetypes that far transcend the generic role of the 'bearer of the burden of blackness' though he seems to be able to do only one per film. For example, in his opening words in Pastures, he genuinely seems to be asking, in that beautifully gentle but forceful purr of a voice, "Have you been baptized?" ("Certainly, Lord" the choir responds) Have you been redeemed? ("Certainly, lord"), etc. He's a complex god because though he judges his creation, his main requests are simple that man honors him on Sunday, obeys the commandments, and doesn't go "squirmin' and fightin' and bearin' false witness." He brings in the three Hebrew angels in long white beards, and declares "It so happens I love your family, and I delights to honor them." The angels mention their people are in bondage down in Egypt. "I know they is. Who do you think put them there?" The Angels look dismayed "Oh, that's okay, I'm gonna take 'em out again." The Angels smile - but again there's the nagging suspicion that God is a bit of an insecure egotist. A good parent understands his children are bound to disobey on occasion, that it's essential to good growth of independent thought. This seems especially true with a God who seems to do things for no reason and then undo them, looking for any kind of dissent at his contradictory impulses.

During my last big awakening I became a ball of light unmoored from my body and 3D space time. I realized I was always either revolving closer to the godhead or farther away - but there was no such thing as true motionlessness, like a balloon constantly being lifted between ceiling and floor - and to merge into the godhead obliterates all separateness, and can be dangerous unless you're ready to die -- like moths aren't meant to survive hitting the bulb they orbit. A part of them lives on, dried on the bulb, so to speak, but the shell falls away. In this case it was I realized, a rebirth moment- reliving the ground zero of infancy --the sun being mother's breast, her uncritical love, her all-protective presence.

When you're a baby, your mother is a gigantic icon, more then five times your size. You worship her and need look no farther for true sustenance and comfort and if you hold a good orbit around her you're okay, but drift too far from her amniotic light and it's total darkness (she has to go to sleep sometime). She becomes just another star as you drift (as seen in Enter the Void). And if you're not working back towards that holy light, the devil's got you in his long reach gravity, convincing you to curse, get drunk, and get more stuff for your shelves because God doesn't exist anyway. True or not makes no difference: I remember, I feel the comforting gravity of the lord when watching Green Pastures -and that is enough. If there is a God, the miseries he creates here on Earth are to aid us in finding a streak of true faith and true mercy, true humility, the nonjudgmental love that unites all dualities back into a healthy radiant whole. There's really nothing else important -- life is just for this. Crying about injustice doesn't move him. It's there for a reason, to get you to cry your way past the trap of ego, to uncover the you that remains when your ego is finally willing to leave and let your Full Self emerge. It's all that lasts. Do I bend mighty low? I do. And showers of warm grateful tears are my reward.

Until the drugs wear off.

------
NOTES:
For New Testament Action, see Acidemic's 2011 Great Acid Cinema JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
1. See G.S. Morris's great, even-handed analysis: Thank God for Uncle Tom. Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures (Bright Lights, Jan. 2008)
2. I don't know what I'm talking about here, shhhh!
3. Imagine if Aesop's Fables were taken as truth, with vintners making sure their vines are always low enough for foxes to reach, lest the grapes turn sour, etc.) Naturally, were the ancient alien theorists right, all these miracles would be the result of their advanced technology
4. fall 2012 if you're keeping score, check the posts.
5. Giving away all your possessions and $$ gives you a rush of total freedom, if it didn't then cults wouldn't exist. Add to that the idea that a vegan diet is both very holy and right and yet makes you highly suggestible and passive, and drudgery and ceaseless toil give you clarity (i.e. when standing for 24 hours straight, lying down is a sublime ecstasy) then cults have a great rationale for all their exploitive behavior.
6. STP - or DOM - is a Berkeley chemist masterpiece, it's a sports car that comes with no brakes, and no way to de-accelerate, the gas tank just has to run itself out. I didn't know til Erowid that what I'd taken (DOM) was the same as what my doppelganger avatar Dave in Psych-Out (Dean Stockwell) . See: Great Acid Cinema: PSYCH-OUT (1968)
7. see one of my very first posts on this site: CABIN IN THE SKY: Co-Dependence and the Lord. (7/07)

Beyond the Bruges Horizon: SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS

I meant to see Seven Psychopaths (2012) and then saw it, some of it, hated what I saw- returned it - then I forgot I saw some of it, re-Netflixed it, and only remembered I'd seen it halfway halfway through, so it was already pointless to stop a second time. I know what that says about me (nothing good) but what does that say about its writer-director, the "Irish Tarantino," Martin McDonagh? His play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore was bloody funny. I saw it on Broadway totally by chance via a relative of my last AA sponsee who was in the cast. It was a great thing to see free. McDonagh's first big film In Bruges was also refreshingly dark and hilarious, and didn't even need a point, aside from that McDonagh loves that Stephen Frears movie, The Hit (who doesn't?). But Psychopaths, McDonagh's tale of a drunk Irish writer (Colin Farrell, modeling himself no doubt after McDonagh) who has come to Hollywood as Barton Fink once did, high on Hollywood's reverence for playwrights, is worse than some Vancouver-shot made-for-Cinemax After Dark crime sex thriller which at least would have the integrity of sucking. This has too many established cult stars for that. They make it worth not turning off within 20 minutes, which is the best option. But who can turn off a film with Christopher Walken, Tom Waits, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson? At least you got to slog halfway through, or keep it on while you get back to your book.

As an alcoholic writer though, I might be prejudiced to hate any film that presumes we'll root for the sort of well-to-do dissolute drunk ex-pat who thinks coming up with the name Seven Psychopaths makes him a genius, and who then expects his friends to write the rest for him via their crazy stories while he lives the semi-high life with hot girlfriend, and is daily ushered on adventures by a crazy motherfucker Boondock Saint of a broheim, played by the ever-jiving Sam Rockwell (the role played by John Goodman in Fink). Dude, even for self-reflexive blocked writer movies--an insufferably pretentious lot--doing the whole 'blocked screenwriter's low life muse gets him into jams that slowly become the movie he's writing' thing is really played out, and was even in Charlie Kaufman's script for Adaptation (2002), which at least had the good sense to blow up the bridge behind itself as far as writing about how hard it is to write scripts, and had the decency to actually have a source text not about itself (The Orchid Thief by Susan Lean, instead). I don't mean that as a compliment, because instead of dry heaving the day away kneeling on his bathroom floor like a real writer would (ala William Faulkner in Barton Fink), Colin's character thinks it's enough to writhe in self-conscious writer's block torment under a California sun, never getting the severe solipsistic narcissism at the core of such emotions (he should be inside drinking! Like a boss!) and Farrell's character thinks its enough to feign both narcissism and torment while smoking and drinking, but only as much as the producers will allow. Struggling screenwriters around the world, some of whom might even be talented, would blah blah...

Hey, I'm guilty too. I've always thought about one day writing a feature length script, and am sure it would be a smash hit, and I plan to write it one day, maybe, don't rush me, goddamn it... Meanwhile, I know a screenwriter who wrote lots of them, makes a decent amount of money, and lost some of it to me at poker, and none of his films made it past 'turnaround' then, starting around 1997, a script was picked up, Boom! Soon he was scouting locations and letting us know he had Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon on board, and then he was on set and working hard etc., only having the whole thing dump right to video at the last minute. After sinking years and years of his life into it, his film didn't even make a tiny 'plop' of a splash. The irony? It was about Elvis impersonators who rob a casino and the same year there was this "other" Elvis impersonator crime spree movie 2000 Miles to Graceland. He came away from it relatively well-paid anyway, but good lord, my sensitive soul would have shattered if--after all that--it was just dumped to video. All those years of effort right into the $2.99 remainder bin at Blockbuster.

But hey, hey got paid. And he finished the damned thing. And it wasn't about his adventures in the screen trade. Because that's shiite, and nothing gets me more pissed than hearing a screenwriter on easy street trying to pass his writer's block off as entertainment via sly post-modern mirror effect, and writing his characters into saying how it's a kick-ass idea, and getting away with it.

So.. Colin Farrell... he's got the title "seven psychopaths".. so great. Why wouldn't it be great? He was so good in In Bruges he would seem a no-brainer as McDonagh's drunk Irish screenwriter stand-in. He's got it all: a bitchy American girlfriend (the perennially indignant Abbie Cornish from Limitless), his two-bit charismatic hustler buddy (Rockwell) leading him into scrapes, and... what else... oh yeah, a pen. Y'know... ferwritin'.  Everything's set for brilliance, and I refuse to believe that the man who gave us one of the most climactic final act cat entrances in the history of the legitimate theater could crank out something so pleased with its half-baked 'stale-even-when-Guy-Ritchie-was-first-ripping-off-Tarantino' po-mo laddishness-ness.  It may have helped if we'd seen in the film some of Farrell's character's earlier work (as in Adaptation when we see Charlie on the set of Malkovich). How great it would have been had we seen him in Bruges giving script notes? Then Farrell could have the crazy projection of his own unconscious ego and it wouldn't seem so unearned. I mean it would serve a point, an escape valve because he's got to kiss so much executive ass to keep every expletive.

All writers have them, counterbalancing their schtick, for Woody Allen it's Bogey (as in Play it Again Sam), it's John Goodman in Barton Fink; the brother in Adaptation; the bunny rabbit in Donnie Darko. Instead Rockwell's more like the rabbit in Harvey, or John Goodman in Red State. Sure there's Christopher Walken as a dognapper but man he's gotten old, and he has a dying black wife who may or may not be a younger black wife of Tom Waits in flashback, both of whom have been unfairly perhaps left off all the Seven Psychopath posters and publicity tours. If that didn't sting, to be in a movie about vengeance and being maligned by society and be in turn spurned by even that very movie, left off all the advertising for the crime of being.... what? A black woman?

But what's most unforgivable is that Farrell is not convincing as either a drunk or a writer and he's certainly not one of the Seven of the title. He's too kinetic and cocky, terminally sane. He has no shakes, no quivers, he is just barely hungover and even at the height of his abusive cups he never slurs a syllable. Imagine if he did, or if his Irish accent got more pronounced, blacker, more violent as he drank, something to go with his sudden outbursts? Imagine if he had brought some real intensity to the role, given us a reason for him to be Irish, been acting a Wellesian uber-serious Macbeth in a room full of vapid scenesters! Instead, his drunknenness seems a facile pose, the kind of drunk character no true drunk would ever write. Waits and Walken and a little bit of Harrelson offer the only mountaintop gravitas to be found.

You know what was funny In Bruges!? Everything was funny in In Bruges! 

Amanda Warren, vengeance shall be thine!

I'm no social activist, usually, but it's also quite galling in this day and age that a black woman plays a key psychopath role here and deserves to be one of the seven alleged psychos (above), yet is not mentioned or seen: Psychopath #1 Olga Kurylenko has little more than a cameo and is just a gold digging Russian model. Psycho #5 'the passive-aggressive girlfriend" is a bit of a bitch but as she's dating an abusive Irish hack it's quite understandable --not a psychopath either, just dumb with her choices, and terribly written,  a compendium of ball-busting career girl naggishness. But the biggest psychopath is the self-defeating racist PR people who thought that a black character shouldn't be visible on the posters, but rather 'hidden' deep in the basements of the film's memory. Has Pam Grier's massive 'fro been for naught? Coffey could kick the asses of everyone in this film, but why bother if she has to sit at the back of the table read?

Meanwhile the script tries so hard to play like Elmore Leonard that it sounds desperate. The writers McDonagh apes here are always smart enough to keep a few genuine rough edges on a film about rough edges; they know that you always put the cool black lady up front. Quentin did that and Jackie Brown is a classic. Does McDonagh really not know how sick we are of the whole quipping hitman lad thing? Trends die much more slowly outside the US, I realize. I personally lost interest in Brit "Lad" movies before and after Snatch, which was great don't get me wrong, and that old guy in the thick glasses made for the most terrifying gangster villain since Peter Brandt in The Song Remains the Same. And I love Get Carter and The Hit. But did McDonagh even see them?

Martin McDonagh is a good looking lad with a Sting-esque jaw and crystal blue eyes. I haven't given up on him. He should have played the Farrell character and left the directing to someone else who might have hipped him to the fact that unironic post-modern self-reflexivity has become banal. It's not McDonagh's fault, coming up as he has in the very very different world of theater, such as The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which rocked a similar tack, only with the psychopath having a cat instead of a little dog. But that had a genuinely dangerous girl psychopath with some actual dialogue, and a lot more blood and guts. If we bear this past triumph in mind, the desperation of Farrell's character is understandable. When operating far away from the Irish minutiae he knows, McDonagh falls back like a panicked bronco, flaring up in all directions in the off chance Hollywood will just at some point rise to its feet, cry bravo, and grant him a green card.

Theater has always been self-reflexive, much more so than most other idioms. Half the early Hollywood pre-code sound films were loosely based on the back stage experiences of Broadway playwrights and wits, lured west by big money. Movies based on plays based on movies (Chicago, Phantom) are ingrained in the celluloid conscience as suitable for framing and all are about razzle dazzle and the great White Way in one way or the other, to name only a few (older ones, of course, more so: A Chorus Line, Twentieth Century, All About Eve). Gotta dance Gotta dance God... ta...   dannnse.. But what works in the theater doesn't play in action movies all a-stud with stars playing halfway ass up into Entourage-ville.

All that said, I really loved In Bruges (above) but even that would have been impossible outside of its setting (a film shoot); what worked there was a horror and fascination with the beery surrealism of Belgium and the way what we consider enchanting and old school is just icky in the eyes of Brits; and all they can agree on is that Yank tourists need a good thrashing and that if you have any cocaine they will go home with you and stay until it's gone and then help you find more. And the filmmakers-within-the-film shooting a scene with baller little person extras and fog machines make for plenty of coke ops. It was original, clever, but not at all full of itself. But now, alas, every self-effacing moment in our drunk screenwriter's odyssey carries a coded message of self-aggrandizement that sticks in the craw almost to Shyamalanian toxicity.

I usually don't bother with negative reviews. Life is too short and I'm too marginal to afford alienating anyone, but if I don't say something this time, I'll probably forget I saw SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS and watch it again in a few years. And that I cannot allow. So forgive me, Woody Harrelson, as I forgive those directors who trespass on your unique comedic brilliance like drunken burglars.

Next time, a speaking role!