The Shrouds of Soavi: CEMETERY MAN, THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER

Once upon a time in swingin' Italy there was such a deep merging of art with blood and beauty that a beautiful blonde in a fashionable dress could stand on a corner, petulantly smoking against a futuristic glass skyscraper reflecting the ancient bombed-out cathedral across the street, and just that image--coupled to the sounds of traffic and Nino Rota-could knock you into a state of modernist euphoria. The blood was her beauty; you could feel her pulse in the operatic contrapuntal score - she was history, the nail in the crossroad between ancient Rome, the Second World War and the sci-fi Age to come. You'd swoon from her beauty, reflected in the light and breeze.

And then in the same movie, a sun-browned hairy little gnome in an ugly peasant dress (Jeanne Moreau as Marcello's drag of a wife in LA NOTTE) could make your hand reach for a razor or noose on instinct, anything to escape her gravitic buzzkill 'wifey' aura. This was the flipside of the Monica Vitti's eternal sex-spontaneity promise: the vortex of maternal devouring, the endless Catholic maw of guilt and suffocation. Even gorgeous raven-eyed Yvonne Furneaux (below) could seem like an evil clutching graveyard drag, pulling us out of the DOLCE VITA and down below the domestic tedium tombstone, the quicksand tar pit from which no swinger returns. Run, Marcello! She's calling you with suicide threats again and you're just naive enough to believe her, to presume yourself at fault, yourself responsible - after all you had a suffocating mother, too - and still feel bad about having to pry her claws off you with a crowbar just to get out the door and go to school in the morning.

If you do the math however you realize (as I did), that sort of thing is a prime example of emotional terrorism, and you don't negotiate with terrorists. Me, I only figured that out thanks to shrooms, which armored me like Zarkov's memories when my old college (Italian-American) ex-girlfriend tried to keep me from going to one too many parties back in 1987. My own mom was Swedish, so I never had that problem, hence this girl's sticky needy 'mama mia' tentacles were a brand new thing. If the shrooms hadn't rescued me (whispering words of strength and guidance inside my head like the voice of Diana Love to Helene in The Undead).

But everyone's an emotional terrorist in mid-60s Rome. There's not a Swedish mom in sight, unless they're a murder suspect with their steely-eyed coldness. And there ain't a mushroom to be found, only knives; the only way to hear that escape-urging voice was to start slashing. Rome: a land of the lost, the adrift, where the half-built skeleton of an emptily decadent future and the ruins of a recently-bombed ancient demonic past stood literally on the same block like twin skeletons hanging on the wall at an inquisition waxworks. Rome, at the time when gender was juuust starting to slip its rocky encasement. Rome, where you couldn't tell the women from the effeminate men if they wore big black raincoats and gloves and lurked in shadows and all you could see was an outline and a flickering knife blade showing your screaming face reflected like that cathedral reflected in the windows of the modernist high rise. Is it sexist to presume the one in the raincoat was a man and the one in a dress a woman and not a drag queen? The reasoning, Agatha Christie simple - make the killer and all the male actors the same height and approx. weight of the women, to keep the suspects pool large, and to make for an extra twisted denouement. Gay stereotypes mincing at smoky bars may be for freak show frisson, but visibility is visibility. Gawking is the first step to acceptance.

Almost as a side effect to the giallo model, psychosexual freedom!

But... is it art? 

I refer of course to the bloody sexually perverse knife wound, the bleeding begun with Bava's ill-received Blood and Black Lace and finally turned into a virgin spring gusher after Antonioni's Blow-Up helped obliterate the distinction between high fashion, signification chain-disrupting ambiguity and 'maybe' murder. Argento took pages from both films, and swirled it all to a giddy new extreme that felt genuinely dangerous. He launched a whole new genre and suddenly he had 'a team' - a production organization centered around his two mentees, Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi.

No offense to Bava Jr., but the difference between these two disciples was like hacksaw and hawk, like comparing Ennio Morricone with Ermine N. Goborra, but they all worked on each other's things and years later, thanks to greater technological advances undreamt of in their era, we can appreciate their films as good as they could in their studio screening rooms at the time, more or less, and savor every corner of the widescreen frame and every glowing color. Far better looking than films made today which rely on HD cameras which give everything a wan, washed-out look, these Italian horrors pulse with restored giddy colors that intoxicate even when nothing's happening onscreen.

The diff again: Lamberto directs like a fifteen year-old burnout in art class, saved only by his stoner shop class graffiti touches as if passive-aggressively trying to prove to his father, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava that he should have been allowed to be a veterinarian or heavy metal bassist instead of a filmmaker. Still, if you've ever been a 13 year-old heavy metal album headphones-on bedroom heabanger, you can't help but love him.

Conversely, Soavi is a metatextual satirist who goes to the root source of Argento's work-- the subconscious--and picks the doors to the Antonioni tiger, the door brother Lamberto left untried. He finds the zone where Antonioni meets Bunuel, the same space from which David Lynch dances in a papier mache Bosch Wicker Man mask, there to fool Godard into thinking it's a safe spot for deadpan absurdist dissertations. Then, when Godard starts opening his little red book, Soavi sneaks off to run amok in the fields of cinema fantastique like a drunk dragon.  And there he finds the fissures in modernism's ideas of modern society and widens them to let the madness seep in like nitrous from an amok dentist.

DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE

("Cemetery Man" - 1994)

****

The idea of being trapped in love's absence--a big empty hole in the ground where a coffin goes, and only a fat dumb little brother or neighborhood dork for company--has never been so palpably felt as in Michele Soavi's great opus, DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, one of the best 80s horror comedies to ever come out in mid-90s. I remember the ads for it (small space) in the Voice when it came to NYC theaters, and thinking: yeesh, just what the world needs, yet another Pulp Fiction / Living Dead first person shooter game with an Italian narcissist hipster pretty boy shooting zombies all day in slow-mo, probably with a shrine to Elvis by his black tie collection and some karaoke in with the terrible dubbing and excessive gore. But this was years before DVD, back when I dismissed Argento as misogynistic and felt that Italian movies had to be in Italian to even think about (for dubbing was a sign of xenophobia and subtitle illiteracy) and so forth.

What a fool I was! DVD has so many taught things to us... to me... multiple language tracks let us know the Italian language track often looks even less synced than the English, and the restoration and beautiful transfers of widescreen HD help us to see at last 'what the fuss was about,' and to better appreciate such things as the jet black dry subtle cineaste termite wit of horror auteur Michele Soavi, and the rich textures and muted sunless palette of his mise en scene. 

Based on an Italian comic book, Soavi's masterpiece is a sensitive jet black satire on death, desire, and adolescent obsession all wrapped up in horror comic trappings. A kind of hipster Alessio nel Paese delle Meraviglie, its protagonist can stand proudly any decade next to Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey in Blue Velvet as far as fearless intrepid truth-seekers uncovering the rocks in his backyard to see what worms, pill bugs, and centipedes are thar. Charging into any mystery or romance that grabs him, even if it takes him over the edge deep into his own psychosexual dysfunctional core, our graveyard keeper hero takes what comes with a shrug and a soft weary moan.

Presented in a kind a tumble down overflow of macabre black humor romantic episodes, the film speeds so merrily along from event to event it could easily have been fleshed out into a full season of its own TV show. The overarching theme is how hot young things stay loyal to their rotting cannibal corpse lovers even as they're being eaten or beheaded (and vice versa) by said zombie lover, all in an effort to escalate the DSB of our young protagonist for some hell-centric reason. All told, while episodic and hard to pin down it's a sublimely dream-like odyssey into how death never dies and desire's fulfillment was never born.

And as a sublime anima, playing many roles, returning again and again in different guises, like Liz Taylor in Doctor Faustus (1967) or Isabelle Adjani in Possession, or Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, gorgeous Anna Falchi dies and comes back in numerous guises as his anima/object of desire. So gorgeous and sexy she could melt the 'thing' out of the Arctic all by herself, Soavi makes full use of the way such shocking hotness has an uncanny frisson to melt an already overheated mind. In true anima form, she's the sort of girl a young sexually frustrated young man dreams about almost  making it with, only for there to be some distraction or calling away before it starts or ends, leaving the man in a kind of exquisite frustration, loping after her as the backgrounds shift and envelop so that circumstance seems to use her allure as some horrifically just-out-of-reach carrot (her absence as the whip). At first she's a grieving young widow, seen in the corner of his eye, who comes alone every day to the cemetery to mourn her much older, goofy-looking husband (his picture's on the tombstone), whose love-making skills are constantly mentioned like a dagger in our hearts, mocking us in ways you may have to be a smitten lovelorn dude listening as the girl you like goes on an about how attractive some toothless scraggly idiot is, like you--in your finery and wit--don't even exist! Everett's Dellamorte is smitten of course, as would anyone be, and soon they have some great death-evoking moments, kissing with full protection (their lips and full heads wrapped in burial shrouds); when they do finally get into it, it's atop of the husband's grave, prompting the old man to reach up through the soil and take a bite out of her, thus interrupting things... again! Sprites fly around them as they make love, disembodied souls seeking moments of conception the way hermit crabs seek the right empty shell. It's always something.

Cross-addicted

Like his same-initialed Donnie Darko or Dylan Dog, Dellamorte doesn't deign to separate fact from fantasy, so why should we? Certainly the town's chief detective would never suspect him of murder, and later even outright refuses to, as when he stumbles on the mayor's daughter's severed head keeping house with Dellamorte's dummkopf assistant. That episode, and a hilarious bit between an undead biker and his haughty young deb ("I shall be eaten by whomever I choose!") are folded in between the many guises of Falchi, and her tragic death/s and Dellamorte's visits with the cryptic and strangely tolerant local detective.

Falchi is so gorgeous that after she's dead - and she goes early on- you feel the ache for her, a real sense of loss perfectly summed up in DD's rote distraction performing his dead killing duty, so that when Falchi comes back all wreathed in vines we're so glad to see her we don't even care if she rips him to shreds. It's more than beauty or her surprising gift for balancing dark dry deadpan drollery with a constantly shifting array of moods--from melancholy depth to necrophiliac ecstasy, from undead vindictive succubus to suicidal prostitute to local student (?), etc-- Falchi genuinely seems like an array of different people, all cursed as they may be by the kind of impossible beauty that makes normalized relationships with men almost impossible.

Funny, profound, surrealistic, deeply sad and subversive, DD gets over its lack of forward momentum through an endless parade of weird cool touches, such as Death appearing in broad daylight out of burned phone book ashes, all done in a very clever analog style, the sort of thing Terry Gilliam's tried all his life to achieve with the same nonchalant virtuosity but he ends up overthinking and spending too much money; or that Michel Gondry does with too much knitted nerd twee and not enough subversive darkness. Soavi tosses such bits off like riffs that always lead back to the graveyard, capturing that lonesome isolation we feel as virgin teenage boys living with our idiot little brother and clueless parents, all of them blind to the dead coming back everywhere, while we yearn for the phantom girl we keep seeing beckoning to us, and always from whichever window we're farthest from.

It's hard to believe this came out after CGI and Jurassic Park as it could easily be from the 70s or 80s. Its knowing winks to Evil Dead 2, Clockwork Orange, Polanski's The Tenant, and Zulawski's Possession put it in that category of cult cinema so packed with in-joke references that they will only appeal to the cult of weird cinema, leaving the banal and average filmgoer out of the loop, ensuring a very narrow demographic. But I do the same thing here in this blog - so what the fuck ever. If you're reading this, you are one of the "chosen few"  Soavi even refers to us, the chosen, in the next big classic of his we'll be discussing:

LA SETTA

(Aka THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER / Aka DEMONS 4 -1991)

***1/2

Among the other things that marks the quality difference between Lamberto Bava and Soavi is the dubbing. In Soavi, the voices match perfectly and the soundtrack pumps. To compare this as just a third Demons film is like calling Raiders of the Lost Ark a sequel to Treasure of the Four Crowns (1). As with so many of its ilk, good or bad, La Setta draws liberally from the Italian devil movie pool of "influences" and influenced - i.e. Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Exorcist, The Sentinel, the (real life) Manson murders, even Argento's own Phenomena and it even works as a sort of quasi-prequel to The Visitor. There's a Manson-esque desert canyon drifter named 'Damon' (Tomas Arana) who opens the film by freeloading a meal off a pair of traveling hippie families, and then sacrificing them all (kids included) to feed the need of a slowly gathering Satanic overthrow, but not before introducing himself via lyrics (spoken) from "Sympathy for the Devil" and assuring the blissfully unaware brood that the Stones' lyrics are profound and meant for "only a chosen few" as if angry one of the hippie dads would dare recognize his plagiarizing.

Forward ahead a bit and into Frankfurt (like Dellamorte this was filmed in Germany) and a killing or two and then we see old man Herbert Lom leave his Frankfurt hovel and take to the road with his mysterious package (you'll never in a million years guess what's in it). Soon he's standing in the small town in the heart of Black Forest road and nearly hit by Miriam (Kelly Curtis --Jamie Lee Curtis's sister), a sweet guileless young (single) elementary school teacher who ill-advisedly takes him and his strange package home to her cluttered little apartment, one of those little German townhouses split down the middle so she has an upstairs, basement access, and an attic but each floor is small and Soavi gets lots of cool shots bearing down the stairs at each floor like some guest taking the only seat left at party, on the stairs between floor, giving it all some terrarium look, mirrored--hilariously--in the POV of her white rabbit. In grand late-80s style, Miriam is kooky and single with no husbandly prospects (her wedding couple snow globe lets you know she's wishing for one) and a nagging best friend who's always trying to set her up on dates. For awhile it seems like she's following in the footsteps of Anita Skinner's character Dee-Dee in one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, Sole Survivor (1983) in that she hooks up with a young doctor who helps her even if he doesn't quite believe her crazy story... etc. And in Terminator echoes (which as I've said has Halloween echoes), the bunny equals Sarah Connor's iguana, and her slutty friend ends up dead (like Sarah's bouncy roommate with the headphones, or Dee-Dee's strip poker-playing neighbor, or Halloween's PJ Soles). And there's the Curtis sister connection... Dude, it's all connected.

At this point I'd say if you haven't seen it, stop reading and see it first. As it's got so many great WTF moments I don't want to spoil them for you. It's on youtube (for now) in a decent print (where I saw it) and so while we wait on a region 1 Blu-ray, maybe you can enjoy it now - it's manna,... for the chosen few, the type who geek out when they recognize one of the sleazy truck drivers (Richard Sammel) as the Wermacht soldat who gets his head beaten in by "ze Bear Jew" in Tarantino's Basterds.

Okay, whacked-out film, right? WRONG! It's grounded like a deep well, even the Satanic impregnation aspect has roots in ancient Greek myth: instead of bedding the devil (as in Soavi's previous film, 1989's THE CHURCH), we have an updating of Leda and the Swan, though instead of Zeus as a rapist swan, Curtis is impregnated by a Satanic (dig that malevolently intelligent black eye) pelican-ish creature at the bottom of a deep well underneath her house, but instead of sex it just pecks out the brain-eating bug larvae nesting in her neck. If taken alongside the Leda myth it's suddenly as if we're realizing Satanism is just the ancient Greek pantheon gone hopelessly shady from the lack of sun (after hiding out from Christian zealots for centuries).

What makes all the weird bug-up-nose strangeness work of course is that--and this is especially true as far as the score is concerned--this shit is serious. Composer Pino Donaggio merges sustained vocoder, funky bass underwriting great Satanic chanting, and abstract drumming as if summoning some ancient evil Lovecraftian behemoth. Little details accrue alongside the dark comedy--the main evil cult member brings his face ripping tools, but won't let anyone else touch them, like they're some high-toned guitar; the cult uses reflected full moon in vanity mirrors to light facial surgery down by the creek during one of their ceremonies. How or why a new (woman's) face would reanimate Herbert Lom. no sane person cam guess but the mundanity of the ceremony (if the placement in the flow of the river isn't aligned they'll be at it all night, notes the doctor wearily), the rabbit's final declaration of Satanic mischief --it's all absolutely deadpan termite. Once the bug goes up into her brain we get an interior view, into her dreams, as if the bugs POV includes access to her third eye subconscious like a two way radio. Bits of Antonioni-style alienation affect include the doctor risking his job leading her down into the morgue corridors deep in the antique hospital basements, a long hallway, the come to a doorway - he mentions the guards as if worried one will approach and then tries to kiss her against the wall so a passerby would think they're just down there for privacy and oblivious to the world.

That kind of set-up cover moment occurs a lot in cinema, as if danger itself is the key to busting the first move, but this time there's no security guard and she rears back from his ill-timed attempt. In true termite fashion it's just another knowing deadpan inside toss-away joke. Earlier the doctor mentions he's allergic to Miriam's rabbit and jokes about it being the devil, kinda ("There's nothing wrong with my rabbit," / "That's what he wants you to think!") but it turns out he's right, since it knows how to work a TV remote, and later nibbles his fingers at a key moment causing him to fall down the well; and when he opens the seal on the coffin, under the lid, it's sealed, like a sardine can (I guess they do that?), and in poking it open the doctor gets squirted in the eye. When Miriam's water isn't working we see her looking up into a mysterious pipe--and we get the water's journey from the poisoned well up through all the arcane old German Schwarzwald plumbing to her sink in a style way prefiguring Fincher's in Panic Room--Miriam barely misses getting squirted in the same way when she turns away at the last possible second.

Meanwhile old Herbert Lom stays totally inscrutable - is he good or bad? We don't know for half the film--he could be either a Castavet in ROSEMARY or a Merrin in EXORCIST. But either way, we worry about Miriam's boundaries. Avoiding bringing Herbert Lom home is the first thing parents teach children, so she's definitely an orphan and definitely missed a lot of key survival tips most kids glean before they graduate the sixth grade. Mockeries of things like the Shroud of Turin (a dirty hanky on his face later kills people through suffocation); a girl crucified, one frightened by a snake, the kids wearing weird WICKER MAN-style pagan masks, a mysterious Asian lady in red trying to steal the dirty shroud hankie and Curtis fighting to keep it with all her might, though she can't possibly want it, all proving if nothing else that like Argento, Soavi has seen BLOW-UP a dozen times, if one can really be said to have seen it, or anything, really....

As in ROSEMARY'S BABY there's a weird disconnect as it turns out this apartment has whole vast chambers Miriam never dreamed were there. Characters have cool names like Moebius and Martin Romero ("Martin" being that lesser known--and recommended if you can find it--Romero vampire flick), they're the kind of oblique in-jokes that someone like Joe Dante or John Landis would need to underline, but Soavi just buries them under everything... not unlike the elaborate ironwork that's clearly (presumably) merely found basement pre-war janitorial relics, though who the fuck knows?

The Black Forest atmosphere is sublime and Donaggio's moody score brings in everything Argento's films were totally lacking by then--laden as they were with Heavy Metal and ill-chosen composers like Rick Wakeman. Even Donaggio could be the wrong choice, sometimes, totally missing the tone of some American movies he worked on (like Tourist Trap- which he scored as if some childhood carnival whimsy) but maybe his not knowing English was part of that.

Stole many a man's soul and face

Meanwhile, what of Argento? He co-wrote this, and one wonders if he was just spreading himself thin. He'd lost, by '91, his most important collaborator, the Debra Hill to his Carpenter, the Gale Ann Hurd to his Cameron, wife Daria Nicolodi (and Asia's mother) and seemed to perk up only for the chases and hardcore misogynist killings and snoozed through the rest. In 1991, American horror movies had given up trying to be stylish and riffing on tropes and capturing that dusty gray sky, muted colors and strange textures (as opposed to Argento's preference for bold colors and slick modernism) and his wickedly subversive sense of deadpan humor. What makes it so very Soavi is the... whoa.. made myself dizzy.

Hope you guessed his name

After this, Soavi went onto Italian TV shows with unpromising names like "Anti-Drug Squad"- easier to finance and finish, he says, and no distribution headaches. I'm sure, but they'll never be STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS. This is the dawning of something all right, but it's not the age of anything but looking down the rabbit hole spiral into the infinite(ly recorded) past.... For the chosen few, this Stone's at you. 

Curtis family (L->R) Tony, Jamie Lee, Kelly, Janet Leigh

Kelly and Jamie Lee at father's funeral, a fraction of a millennia later

the before and after.....

NOTES:

1. no offense to the Demons, they're plenty meta, I just shy away from endless static camera gross outs, watching the pustules appear, swell up one after the other and drool fizzy food coloring leak from fanged mouths, it's like 7th grade lunch period all over again. 

CinemArchetypes 18 - The Aesthete

Well here's the last stop on my currently habit-imprisoned train, this is where I aims to be, claims to be.... this is the place that we aim for, we artists of pen and brush and neurochemical excess. Don't mistake our sexual aloofness for inhibition but rather a cumulative loathing based on excessive debauched memories, ghosts and horrific hangovers. Our souls are glutted with the ecstasies and agonies of the flesh, so now we'd rather just contemplate the wreckage for awhile. The aesthete's disregard for solace and emotional baring allows him to scuttle gender's narrowing limitations and so, instead, the aesthete's raison d'etre, the last standing ideal he can find in his shit-kicked can of carded houses, is the collapse of the ground between each pigeon hole; boredom and small-mindedness are his only enemies, and he knows to beat them he must join them, love them, forgive them, as he can seldom totally escape them. His goal is to be so far out that even the maniac charging him with a knife is not a foe; even death's wicket absinthe demon vestments are nothing to fear.

In cinema he is sometimes the 'gay best friend' or some expository dialogue-mouthpiece scholar visited in his book-stack warren by the detective hero for a clue from the past, but he is never a cliche. Kick the generalities curbside and don't let the groupthink studio heads swap out his generous heart and adventurous spirit with mere rote quirks! They will drain his beauty like wine snobs so uptight about their hundred dollar glass of vintage port they end up spilling it all cuz their hand shakes. Slowly, fearfully, the pressure from the money men leads to second-guessing, draining the aesthete of life until he's merely a prop. Don't say it couldn't happen!

John LaZar - Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Up until Tuesday night I had been cursing the Kubrickian darkness in Wellesian brogue rather lighting a candle just because the wax smelt churchy. But friends, I've been shown the light. Obama won and so finally we have proof that if all us freaks and oddballs stick together we can actually drive this bitch -- and as Mae West said in Klondike Annie, when you make fun of the good book the joke's on you, not because dogmatic preachers shout it but because making fun of anything destroys your spirit. First you joke good-naturedly about it, then its less of a joke, then its a threat, then suddenly it's the only reason you're not happy; your own judgments are attacking you and eventually it's your god-given right to kill the judge within. Like in Mingus' "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Daughter are some Jive Ass Slippers," one cool little musical motif gathers some friends and slowly a whole mob shows up to dig the sound and then it gets crowded and heated and the music gets repetitive and circles tighter and tighter and towards some violent orgasm of mob violence against you, the listener, and  bam, you're gone, just air and the whole crazy dance starts over. This is something in myself I had forgotten until the hurricane, the Obama victory, and seeing Zachary Quinto play a hip '64 shrink coercing a lesbian mental patient into barbaric Clockwork Orange-style aversion treatments on American Horror Story. 

Sometimes the trappings of an aesthete are just for show. It's easy to cover one's tracks in all sorts of shady business by cultivating an air of mystery and eccentricity, but such a creature is easily found out for he has not faced the true aesthete test of either perfect aloneness or perfect acceptance. He must face the demon staring back up at him from the toilet at which he is kneeling in rueful dry heave hell, and survive. He must drink his demon under the table, then drink the table under his higher power, or else rear back in moderation like a golden stallion. The aesthete has a morbid acuteness of the senses and the vile laughter of ruffians on the street in passing is like gunshots to his ear. So he must either shut himself away behind his romantic wall with only mad sister Madeline for company, or accept, love and forgive the ruffians one and all, like Scrooge does, and has to do every year, because slowly over the course of the fiscal countdowns he doth forget his Xmas spirits. The Swimmer didn't ever figure that out, and he ended up locked out of his own empty castle in the rain, like a poor ass Kafka. In short the aesthete must either open his heart so completely that it turns inside out or endure the pain of it slowly crumbling into a brown dwarf star.

1. VINCENT PRICE

"Sometimes I feel like I'm playing the subconscious of the entire human race" Price once said, "and I love it." Is there a more perfect choice for Roderick Usher, for Poe in general, than Price? As Little Italy and De Niro were to Scorsese, so Poe and Price to Roger Corman. But Price is velvet voiced, with a rare balance of open-hearted gentleness with mephistopholean grandeur that we lovers of cinema gobble up like sin itself. We're not really scared of his characters, but we're sometimes horrified by the depths of madness they sink to, which Price embodies with a glint of mania that shows us the fun, the joy in madness that all monsters should feel, at least twice, and in doing so he helps us transmute our own despair at death's inevitability and life's incessant slog, the constant closing of the door on paradise as one recedes into the cold marble wasteland, into something like a hot cocoa and slippers by the fire.

2. Rupert Everett - My Best Friend's Wedding (1996)

Damn, I need to wash my eyeballs after trying to find an image for this one. The available stuff on other sites are burdened with fluffy fonts for memes meant to be passed relentlessly to and fro in those relationships that form between two people when one is madly in love but able to exhibit some restraint because just being around their love is enough, and the other glad to have an adoring friend at their beck and call, who 'gets' them. Most of us are lucky enough to have been in both these roles. Maybe we even switched them with the same person. It works but it takes real devotion to the aesthetic of it all for it not to self-destruct just the same. One false kiss and it's all for naught.

That's what makes Everett's character so transcendent. He is delighted with the normal folks he meets, even the bride and groom's clueless family, and not in a cynical snide way. His heart is joyous enough he doesn't need to even express it, except to feign heterosexuality as needed while still exhibiting his peerless flair (including leading the extended wedding family in a rendition of "Say a Little Prayer for You"). And he flies back to the wedding just to rescue her, with no intention of sleeping with her... ever. Unheard of in most films today... alas.

"George's maturity, considerateness, tact are intimately connected to the gayness that sets him apart from the social norms, permitting him a wide distance from the practices and conventions in which those around him are entangled. He is able to talk to Jules in a way that would be impossible for a heterosexual man, offering her always an intimacy that is all the closer for being nonsexual.... (his) public speech to her... constitutes a veritable proposal, the commitment to a relationship that will be permanent but nonexclusive, , built upon a much sounder formation than sexual love or romantic attraction. -- Robin Wood (Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan - appendix p. 306)

3. Robert Downey Jr. - Sherlock Holmes / Game of Shadows

The master of 'macho fey,' Downey's Holmes is full of warm, insouciant charm while still being a true badass and just a little bit of a shit. Highbrow types dismiss any blockbuster as without merit and vice versa, but just ignore them and dig the steampunk detail, the interesting 'pre-figured' fight scene inner monologues, the colorful but imminently deadpan nonchalance, the fast-flowing Wildean witticism, even the acrid tang of Gunga Din-ish misogyny. Guy Ritchie gets it right and Downey Jr. finds a character that he can bring the full brunt of genius eccentricity to. His Holmes is how I wish someone would play Algy in The Importance of Being Earnest. Ah, a man might dream...

4. Judy Davis as George Sand - Impromptu (1991)

The 80s was a bad time for aesthetes, but like all things must they ended. Then, 90s: Nirvana, metrosexualism, and this great gender-bent love story: I fell in love with Hugh Grant's gentle brilliance as Chopin courted by Davis' wild, dressed-like-a-man rogue Sand. The chemistry is like top shelf champagne. A robust story of artists, love, gender and the wives of disinterested nobleman who support the arts mainly to forge illicit love affairs with wild bohemians while their mutton-chopped men are off shooting grouse, it made huge impression on me when I first caught this on cable when I was a drunken poet back from Seattle, heartbroken and unemployed and ready to find validation for my cockeyed theories about how truly cool artists are beyond gender duality. I had a total man crush on Judy Davis, as apparently did a lot of people as she was in a vast array of cool artsy films in the early 90s, but she was never quite as sublimely macho fey and endearing as here - the film that opened her doors to Naked Lunch, The Sheltering Sky, Husbands and Wives, Barton Fink and --alas--The New Age.

5. George Sanders 

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

Thanks George, for swimming (for however long you deigned to) in our cesspool. With that warm dark cultured tone in your voice, at once comforting and threatening, you made us secure as well as nervous; you made the room seem fraught with possible greatness, your characters were the type to become exhilarated, roused from their wit and gin-soaked ennui at the thought of a fight or a scandal. As a kid I was bored and uncomfortable by Rebecca until your Jack Favell shows up. You're just a conspiratorial voice at first, chummy with the chilly Ms. Danvers; the next minute bounding through a window to greet the stressed new Mrs. De Winter.  We learn you were not just Rebecca's cousin but her lover, and while none of her supposedly scandalous deeds could be mentioned since it was the age of the nervous censor, plenty was implied through the code's symbolic registry and every timbre in your delicate yet manly voice. Did you catch her in a lesbian tryst with Danni and blackmail your way into an incestuous threesome? Were you the one who debauched Rebecca initially? Against her will, at first, at some ancestral summer place when the adults were all out on sail? We never know, but that's what makes an aesthete an aesthete: he shows you just the tip of his depravity, and that may be more or less all there is of it. We just don't ever know.

Under the mantle of the code, homosexuality was the sign of a depraved mind so gayness went part and parcel with a litany of evils. A gay person by definition was abnormal; she or he had orgies, killed hired girls during laudanum blackouts, and smoked pot with jazzbos up in Harlem --in for a penny in for a pound.

So while on the one side Rebecca offers the rare perverse sickness of Olivier, a gay man in a lavender but presumed loving and tolerant marriage with Vivien Leigh, displaying great moral outraged sickness on learning the truth about Rebecca's bilious private life; on the other hand there's Favell's rougish waggery, like a breath of fresh air, like Hopsy running back to the comparable honesty of Jean Harrington at the end of Lady Eve.

6. Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker - Laura 1954

(Contains SPOILER) As a guy who loved good drinking movies but had yet to write one word about film outside a college class, I felt iffy watching Laura for the first time, the sickly jasmine air of the theme song and the girly name implied a certain 50s fashion show dullness, but meeting Waldo Lydecker early on, in the bath but typing away and narrating, was like being rescued from what you fear is going to be a very dull party by a one man cadre of Algonquin wits. That Waldo turns out to be the killer is just the icing on the cake since he's the first one you like and the only one you identify with. The others are little more than ciphers until Laura finally shows up out of the rain, and the flashbacks, into her own murder mystery, and the drinks come out in full. Greatest of all is the way his homosexuality or status as 'out of the running' for her hand in marriage or sex isn't really mentioned or deemed important, and he even out-aesthetes Vincent Price, here having a wild time as an upscale freeloading gigolo suspect. That's what gets him: Laura going for a two-fisted heterosexual neanderthal like Dana Andrews isn't threatening - it's a whole different thing; but Waldo can't brook another aesthete sniping in his stall - the effete intellectual in her life must be Waldo or no one!

"In true aesthete form Waldo loves a beautiful, intelligent young creature but in a way that's beyond the grotesque fumbling of the earthbound mortals in unconscious thrall to their boiling reproductive gene pools. His, my dear Dana Andrews, is a life of the mind! Of the spirit! Of art and beauty and truth and poetry, but when we aesthetes see our muses stoop to breed or date an inferior subject, or worse throw us over for another effete aesthete, well we lose our continental minds worse than if we were just an ordinary jealous suitor! It's happened to me personally not once, not twice, but thrice! Ladies, you know your names! Call me! ."

7. John Dall as Brandon and James Stewart as Rupert  - Rope.

"Hitchcock’s Rope was scripted by gay playwright Arthur Laurents from a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton. In his memoir Original Story By (2000) Laurents discusses how the screenplay was to go. “The three main characters in Rope are homosexual. Brandon and Phillip are lovers who carry the Nietzschean philosophy learned from their former prep school teacher, Rupert, to its outer limit: a murder committed to prove superiority. Rupert is a good friend and probably an ex-lover of Brandon’s; his is the most interesting role.” In fact, Rupert seems based on Wilde, and it’s clear he has played (if inadvertently) Des Esseintes and Lord Henry Wotton to these two impressionable youths. Made three years after Lewin’s film, Rope is essentially Hitchcock’s Dorian Gray. The screenplay calls Rupert “distinguished in appearance, manner and thought”, and stresses his dandyish aspect: “He is completely self-possessed and elegantly detached. His manners are beautiful, his speech is eloquent and his tongue can be sharp.” Of course, as a Wildean figure, he also has a sinister aspect: “[Y]ou cannot really be sure whether he means the extreme ideas he propounds or whether he is joking. Just as you cannot be sure whether Rupert is essentially good or essentially evil.”

Laurents probably had in mind Wilde at the height of his fame and immediately prior to his downfall. In 1894 Wilde wrote for an Oxford undergraduate magazine an egregious piece which he called “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”. Here are two of its maxims: “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others”; “Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance” - Ken Mogg (Senses of Cinema)

8. Dean Stockwell as Ben - Blue Velvet (1996)

There's a spectrum of aestheteness and at the gutter end lurks Ben, a nightmare fever dream monster of an aesthete, the sort who could believably entomb his sister in the family crypt just because the demon fairy in his absinthe bottle whispered he should. I don't think David Lynch intends him or his buddy Frank and their other cronies to be 'real' in a concrete Lumberton sense... They are prototypes for the non-corporeal dancing dwarf-style beings to come. Ben is how nervous 50s children would imagine a gay hipster beatnik and Lynch and Stockwell let that idea of an "entered" "sandman" "crooning" "In Dreams" run free of quotes! You need to see this movie again, and again, wiederholungswang style, until there's that 'pop' and you get the whole Oedipal jazz fairy tale in a heated flash, and suddenly you're free.

9. George Sanders' brother - Tom Conway as Dr. Judd in 

Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943)

In Tom Conway, Val Lewton found his quiet spokesperson, his ego ideal, suave, literate, educated, a little too polished to ever convey his full measure of world-weary sadness. As such he appeared in three films, two as Dr. Judd. In Cat People, Judd proves his aesthetehood by deciding to seduce Irina himself, understanding that a well-meaning putz like Bill with his endless patience is not what she needs to come out of her dark anxiety. She needs dark stranger who's in love with death enough that he won't be too bummed out if she really does turn into a panther and kill him. Until then, he dismisses her fears as a kind of ancestral unconscious conservatism, but he acts on the mythic level in seducing her, because a) Bill's already left Irina by that point so he's not necessarily cuckolding and b) maybe it's unethical but it's okay as it's unethical done altruistically - i.e. his is an unselfish selfishness. A 'good' doctor would never be able to cure Irina, because he couldn't step into the dark sexual surrogate role with the shadowy elan of an ideal Shavian / Jungian. Inversing the usual dynamic of the good moral person who harbors dark sexual secrets, beneath Judd's caddish whims and dark sophistication lurks a beautiful altruism. 

He was back for The Seventh Victim, which--since he was already dead at the end of his last film--reveals New York City is purgatory, a bardo of deserted late night subways, overcrowded missing persons' offices, strange make-up companies, and Satanic cults coaxing each other deeper into the abyss. Dr. Judd may be still a bit of a cad, but his apparent womanizing secretiveness once again harbors a real heart, and his rendition of the Lord's prayer at the climax is enough to make even a jaundiced old pagan like me throw in an extra five dollars when the plate's passed at his next AA meeting.

10. John Astin-  Gomez Addams - The Addams Family

If you want to understand the divide in America you have only to watch an episode of The Addams Family vs. an episode of the Munsters, one abided the tedious status quo of 50s-middle class family dynamics, warping Universal classic horror signifiers to a banal framework approved by the moral right; the other depicted rich decadent surrealist eccentrics that mocked the moral light, showing how the oddball freaks could be far more tolerant and good than the 'normal' people who lashed out at anything outside the norm. And at the head of it all stood the vaguely entrepreneurial aesthete Gomez Addams.

Gomez's love of wife Morticia is the prana for the whole show. She loves him too but she's too legit crazy to provide the show with its Wildean compass the way Gomez does. If you were a normal shlub longing to be considered different while never stepping anywhere near the edges of society's freshly-mowed block, The Muensters was your show; if you were a total freak who couldn't sandpaper down your edges anymore than a leopard could change its spots, who didn't care about being accepted either by the normals or the crazies, but liked them both anyway, who felt that the intolerant moral conservative neighborhood voting committees out to get you were really just kooky lovable monsters like yourself, turning the other cheek all the time and setting it on fire with love and matches, then you found a home in that kooky mansion, with Gomez making sure you always felt welcome, regardless of what bit of occult statuary was growling at you.

11. Jean-Paul Belmondo - Breathless (1959)

He plays at being a thug, but if you pay close attention to his words, Belmondo's character in this premiere Godard feature is a hopeless aesthete, one who has severed all ties with the law-abiding world, shooting a cop and going on the run as matter of course, but unlike the murder committed by the two encoded Compulsion-style thrill killers in Rope (who hoped to prove their "beyond good and evil" superiority), Belmondo just drives outside the frame of the film and into your lap like a William Castle skeleton, pointing out the beautiful architecture of the theater before chasing after the gorgeous (and androgynous) petit-bourgeois NY Tribune-hawker, Jean Seberg down the aisle like some obnoxious yet eloquent Harpo Marx. My favorite line is near the beginning when he's driving along in his stolen car through the country and he says to the camera, "If you do not like the country, and you do not like the city, and you do not like the sea... then get stuffed" ---that was the old Fox Lorber subtitle, which I like better than the Criterion "then go fuck yourself," but either will do. Belmondo acts the vagrant moocher, the ruffian, but his fatherly need to point out the joyous beauty around him reveals he's really an aesthete, with Paris his playground boudoir.

12. John Waters

He voiced the first openly gay character on the Simpsons, and when he dropped by just to do novelty dances with Homer and fawn over Marge's corncob drapes it just seemed natural and delightful, and even those of us without the stomach for Pink Flamingos knew there was no escaping our love for Uncle John Waters. I forget where I read that his favorite films were Boom! and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, but I know it was in high school, and it took me 10 more years to have any chance of seeing them (early 80s) and so he set me up with a life mission.

While certainly shocking and subversive, Waters' films always have a vitality and openness that leaves you elated rather than dispirited. The charm of this openly gay aesthete finds its delirious yet always coherent flowering with Hairspray, which blasted free the Peyton Place-level repression of Baltimore with the bomb of sock hop music, in the process inviting fat chicks, drag queens, beatniks, black folks and creepy senators into the prime time light - just dance and all is forgiven, honey, and that goes both ways.  He's the all-inclusive candidate who finally dissolves the pinched face intolerance of the moral snipe red state thin white hypocrite establishment to a wicked witch black puddle, but then, like John Lennon at the end of Yellow Submarine, invites the sad blue meanie to the party. When we are all-inclusive we cannot fail. God bless us all! xoxox