The Jong who stole Christmas: THE RING around the ROSEWATER (or I'm dreaming / of a BLACK MIRROR)

"What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world." ---Jean Baudrillard

“Nothing says solid like a cloud,” - Jon Hamm 

If Baudrillard was alive today he'd be rolling around in his grave, trying to claw his way out of the earthen simulacrum, because a Palm d'coco de oro treatise on today's events would write itself. The sheer 'told you so' power (he declared the image had replaced the real as the dominant paradigm in modern society) would revive him to live another thousand digital ages. His quote above was made a long long time before today, the day our theater chains surrendered to a virtual terrorist and the dominos tumbled and a pair of stoner comedians created the most bizarre post-modern international incident since WikiLeaks. It's more post-modern than a Julian Assange biopic leaked on the internet and satirized by SNL.

The post-modern satirized be future shall happens!

Actually, there is no precedent for something like this at all... at least not in 'real' life, but as this incident makes clear, real life has been eclipsed by the virtual. The only TV show that seems real enough in its surreal dystopian nightmare reflection of our internet age's inevitable future is the BBC TV series BLACK MIRROR. I've been sticking their logo over every picture I can find (above and below) in an attempt to situate the surreal events of today (and yesterday) in a context by which their high strangeness might be appreciated in its full Baudrillardian splendor. In 'real life,' Sony has been extra-dimensionally skewered --a 3D sword sticking through a 2D movie screen simulacrum--the alleged giant kowtowing to the ornery David while it struggles to shake off the disorientation from being slingshotted. It's just a dumb comedy, after all. But Americans all implicitly understand that comedy is serious business especially since dictators--like militant feminists and fundamentalist extremists--tend to not understand the complexity of satire or critique or even how fiction works. If you make an action film with a bad guy saying he wants to kill the president, they might arrest the actor who said it. Witness the directorial debut of Jon Stewart, ROSEWATER, about a British-Iranian journalist detained and tortured after being interviewed by a Stewart show correspondent Jason Jones pretending to be a stereotypical cold war CIA spook.

Meanwhile there's a show that came out this past Tuesday on BBC Channel 4, a 78 minute BLACK MIRROR Christmas special and it makes the nightmare post-modern digital-internet worlds conjured by the first two seasons seem like Candyland. It even puts Jon Hamm through the ringer. Have those Brits no mercy? Is this what happens when you let atheism get in the way of peace of mind? What is Christmas even mean when such things can happen in "the world."?

This was a time for America to put its ass where it's mouth is, and stand up to a Napoleonic complex bully who talks really big but has limp missiles. But when that same kid uses the very TV-media-internet complex you see him on against you, grabs you right through it and shuts off your lights like Samara in THE RING, then you better do what people had to do to avoid being dragged down the well by Samara in that film --show someone else that weird avant garde film she made with her mind, or in this case the reverse, not show anyone the film you made about how her art is pretentious.

I'll shut up. In case she's right now snaking through the intricate back alleys of the web and on her way towards me. Just to avoid it, here's the video!



What BLACK MIRROR "White Christmas" trades on is more of an eternal Buddhist hell, making the idea of eternal torment through sheer maddening boredom and stasis (as being trapped in a virtual simulacrum world for centuries and centuries with nothing to do and no need to sleep or eat) feel horrifyingly tangible in ways Christian imagery of flames and pitchforks (or enemas and electroshock) just can't quite match. We don't know what burning in torment forever is like, but we've all been bored --and that really does feel like eternity. The recently released CIA torture report is, by contrast, a lark. And Samara's killing habit seems merciful. After all, there's no one watching once Samara's victims are taken. They don't have any demon with a sackcloth waiting just off camera to grab their freed souls before they can swim up to the white light, and keep them trapped in the well with them for ten thousand centuries. Samara Morgan isn't 'real' and Naomi Watts, our post-modern mother of mirrors isn't really scared of her. But neither is Seth Rogen's stoner scared of Kim Jong's Phantom Menace.

More terrifying than a thousand Jasons

But that doesn't allay our terror, the fear of having our one place of amniotic safety--the screen, the 'black mirror' (i.e. you can see your reflection when it's off)--used against us. Beyond just VERTIGO-style deja vu flashes of being Jimmy Stewart still hanging from the infinite height of the infinite gutter, I learned today all about the true nightmare that's just a couple decades of technology away. It's already too late to even think about going off-grid to escape it. You'd only wake the demons with the sack cloths: "We got another runner." Best to just wait and be a good boy and be nice to animals and children, and full of prayer and wise oaths, then when the modern instance of your death comes, go quietly and race with all your might towards that white light.. Because at any moment, someone could just hit pause.

So I'm going to bed and actually pray. Because in the words of the great Curtis Mayfield, "if there's a hell below / we're all / going to go."

On vinyl, invincible

Man, though, could he play guitar. "Move on Up" alone is proof we've got a friend upstairs. French intellectuals like Baudrillard can note America's fictive dominance, but if there's one thing we know, it's how to stay true to the funk even as the flames of perdition consume us, be they Christian, Buddhist, or Hollywood's. After all, we have done our share of consuming, it's only fair we be consumed too, in the end. That's karma -- cuz everything you do / you do it to you. So c'mon Buddha, c'mon Jesus, c'mon Elijah, c'mon Krishna, c'mon St. Michael, St. Anthony, and St. Francis, St. Vincent. Save us from the horrifying fate of being blocked, cloned, or duplicated, or digitized. Yea as we walk through the Uncanny Valley towards our full pixelation, we call on you, SWEET EXORCIST... on vinyl!

THIRTEEN WOMEN (1932) + Peg Entwistle, the Ghost under the Hollywoodland Sign

Imagine if Fu Manchu's insidious sadist daughter Fah Lo Suee (Myrna Loy) in the unbelievably racist but very entertaining MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932) went off to a girl's finishing school in America, tried to pass as white, pledged a snooty sorority and was "outed" as half-caste by the evil sisters, and forced to leave school in shame. Naturally she would wait ten years or so for her cold-served revenge, wait until they were all ensconced in their respective jobs and luxuries, then slowly and creatively destroy the lives of everyone in the sorority, one at a time, with the power of hypnotic suggestion via her astrologist boyfriend.

Man, I'd love to see that, wouldn't you? And for an hour, we can. Loy, who at the time she was swathed in roles as Asiatic temptresses, plays Ursula Georgi in THIRTEEN WOMEN (from the same year) does just as Fah Lo Suee would, driving to suicide the very same sorority members who got her kicked out through suggestion and rigged horoscopes.

Knowing her justified vengeance is on its way helps we in the audience endure sleep-inducing scenes of some of the titular number of women, who gather on Irene Dunne's Westchester veranda, with its indulged boy child and continual flow of chauffeurs, butlers, and cops, to discuss the spate of recent deaths in their party. Turns out they all had their horoscopes done by a mysterious swami Yogananda (C. Henry Gordon) who's been sending them letters saying the stars predict their deaths! What the swami doesn't know is that Ursula isn't sending them his predictions, all for health and happiness, but her own, predicting death. Yogananda thinks he must be losing his touch when he reads of their demise. Why didn't the stars predict this?
Answer: because the stars didn't predict Ursula would meddle in their cosmic message giving (this leads to all sorts of cosmic questions, i.e. why didn't the stars predict Ursula's changing their message and thus killing the women through the power of suggestion?) 

Dunne's materialist beeyatch will have none of it. But, in the age of rational thinking, the notion you can avoid fate through strenuous college educated denial begins itself to seem like a kind of obstinate 'scientific fundamentalism.' Yet it's smart just the same since clearly belief in these grim horoscopes sent by evil Ursula may just make the deaths happen. In short, even if you know the stars never lie, their interpreter easily can. (Hence my feelings on it are a typical Piscean dichotomy: I don't believe in astrology, but I know it's real.)

To illustrate that point, Dunne's sunny veranda is contrasted with the shadowy eastern mystic exotica apartment shared in NYC by Ursula and the Swami. Schooled in the arts of hypnotic suggestion as per her exotic birthright (she's "half-breed type, half-Hindu, half... Japanese, I don't know..." labels detective Ricardo Cortez), she spends the days and nights toying with his affection to enhance his anxiety about his "skills" at divination.

It's based on a novel by Fortean Society-founder Tiffany Thayer, so you know the astrology and hypnotism involved in THIRTEEN WOMEN aren't dismissed by him as mere poppycock or treated with disrespect. And Tiffany was a dude, so you know he probably got ostracized in school himself. A man named Tiffany no doubt has vengeance on his mind against any number of schoolyard taunters.

Myrna Loy may have been gliding on a semi auto-pilot through a slew of these kind of 'evil Asian' or 'wild half-caste' femme fatale roles as an MGM contract player at the time, but she's still got Loy star power radiating a cool wicked allure and never phones it in. Unless you're a prom school snob who's never felt the sting of a snubbing it's hard not to admire her drive, and secretly be rooting her plans of bloody vengeance to come off, even (or especially) when they include blowing up that 'adorable' moppet of Dunne's. 

It would have been great if they got a real Asian actress, like Anna May Wong, to play the part. Though she may not look caucasian enough to pass, the racism would have some real bite, then, but one understands if not forgives perhaps these pre-code baby steps, and if you love Loy as I do you have a special spot in the dark of your heart for her early Hindu-Asian vamp roles. What she lacks in the warmth and wit of her later persona she makes up for in slow-measured cobra staring. And as a villain she's quite complex--and as her main opponent, the single mom of rich whiteness that is Irene Dunne seems hardly a saint... When Ursula tells her of being raped at the hands of white sailors while a still a child,  Dunne isn't even sympathetic, but merely snaps "You're crazy!" 

But even then, Ursula's racist. She talks of how her "white half' craved the care and respect due her, i.e. she buys into the idea of white superiority, that white people need and deserve extra care and respect not afforded to the more savage non-white races. Telling of her desperation to pass as white she notes that Dunne and her friends "wouldn't let me cross the color line." Hard to believe that so few films even in the pre-code era were so blunt. Imitation of Life, eat your heart out! This chick actually is doing something about it! She's taking matters into her own hands, and getting revenge. And I respect that. There should be more of that kind of thing going around, but producers are always afraid of riots, and Southern distributor boycotts. 

David O'Selznick produced, which may explain part of why the California veranda scenes are so cloying; he loved that stifling flowers and maids nonsense, the kind of thing that reminds me of being bored as a kid. Dunne's star started to rise as the film was being prepared for release, so it seems like the cool murders were cut to make room for her to stretch out on that veranda. At least the veranda is filmed indoors on a set; something about too many outdoor shots depresses me in a film like this. Real daylight should be banned from supernatural-tinged thrillers, though big crowd scenes at train platforms (LA's La Grande doubling for the Hudson Line out of Grand Central) help make the film feel truly A-list. The big train chase finale is train lover catnip!

Alas, even with the Dunne-upping, THIRTEEN WOMEN didn't do very well critically or commercially and still hasn't earned the cult reputation it deserves (in my opinion). Perhaps the well-scrubbed rubes of '32 hated to be reminded that their callous racism was inevitably heading back around to haunt them via the slow, inexorable spin of karma. And men don't like realizing just how easily their hormonal desires can be used against them, i.e. that falling in love with a pretty exotic girl may mean said girl's manipulated them, not that they're irresistible and just found a disposable mistress they don't have to worry about marrying (due to miscegenation laws), that love might be something easily harnessed and co-opted as a weapon (film noir was still a war away) rather than a wondrous magical blah-blah that goes on between two white people, with other races and half-castes free to serve said white people as domestic servants or prostitutes but not to find love themselves unless they die at the end or are otherwise ostracized.

Naturally the forbidden aspect of all this led to a huge craze for DH Lawrence adaptations and other 'miscegenation fantasies.' In these romances,  it's never in doubt that the non-white woman is inferior to the white man she loves; she's crossed a line, dared to love outside her people, and usually has to die in the end (preferably jumping into a volcano to appease the censor Gods ala Bird of Paradise) so the white guy can marry the long-suffering dull-as-dishwater white girl waiting at home.

What makes 13 Women so unique is there's never a doubt that Ursula is superior, mentally and coolness-wise, to every other character in the film. She has the whole male population snowed, including investigator Ricardo Cortez. Her only mistake is in letting her thirst for vengeance cloud her judgment at the very end. But before that, she's a miracle of diabolical cunning: seducing and beguiling every man in a ten mile radius, driving an array of white ladies to murder and suicide using only the power of suggestion, shamelessly trying to kill an innocent child, effortlessly avoiding the police dragnet out for her by shacking up right under their noses in Dunne's gate house, having seduced and moved in with Dunne's chauffeur --it's all pre-code gold. As I've written before, the censors let sexy Asian characters get away with all sorts of kinky madness no white chick would ever be permitted (as long as the people playing them were really white, in make-up --see my award-spurning Skeeved by an Asian).

And so it is that Loy's Ursula goes down swinging, diving onto the tracks in the wake of an onrushing star, head unbowed, even robbing Cortez of the special joy of nabbing her. And once she does, the film ends with nary a shred of follow-up to the white dogs she's left dead or post-traumatically distraught. The star claims her and that's it.

That in itself might make you want to see it again and again, as I have, especially since parts of it are better than Nyqil, which then makes the weird Loy sequences all the more dreamlike as you gaze on them with one eye open, and the great rushing shooting star dissolves into the camera lens and all the stars and victims and treasures are no more. And it's pretty short. 59 minutes. No word exists on why they edited two of the 13 women out --did Selznick think his rube audience couldn't count that high? Maybe Hollywood just couldn't handle that many women at once --too dangerous to the status quo? I can see it now: "Ten's the limit!" Selznick exclaims, "Any more and the South will riot!"

But what happened to one of those cut girls?

Top: Entwistle as Hazel Couisns in THIRTEEN WOMEN (premiere: Sept. 16, 1932);
bottom: Entwistle as herself in NY TIMES (death: Sept. 20, 1932), a victim to Hollywood and the power of suggestion.

That brings me to one of the women--Peg Entwistle. A scene of Entwistle killing her husband after getting a letter from the swami was almost entirely cut out of the film except for the single shot of her standing in their boudoir with a knife, looking down in horror,  her own dire horoscope at her feet by her dead husband, and an overlap dissolve of screaming headlines (above). Was it perhaps a bad reaction to her theatrical performance in a a pre-release screening that led to the rest of her scene/s being cut from the film? Did this acclaimed stage actress ham it up too fiercely, unacquainted with the subtler forms of big screen acting?

Whatever the reason, she was dropped by RKO before the film was even released, and man she fell mighty hard, straight down to the rocks. In other words, distraught over Hollywood's could shoulder snubbing, she leapt, in real life, to her leap atop the Hollywood sign, just a few days after the release of her only film, Thirteen Women-- a film about the power of suggestion, and of the evils of gossip and snap judgments to derail careers, invisible forces that can drive women to murder and/or suicide. The stars never lie, but whomever controls the stars--be they God, Ursula, or RKO--can make whatever celestial adjustments suit their whims.

Who knows why she chose not to stick it out? I won't be coy in my mystic prowess and suggest some life imitates art occultly-foretold fate even when said fate is fiction, but I will venture is that a lot of actors are bi-polar and easily confused when it comes to make believe. Good actors can be enormously susceptible to the emotions of their characters, i.e. their roles bleed into their personal lives, sometimes fatally. In Thirteen Women her character is hypnotized into murdering her husband during a black-out, and this seems to have carried over into reality, as if the missing scenes found a way into her soul, like a kind of self-projection compulsion recreation disorder. We're in the black-out too. It's as if we can only hope some combination film archival sleuth and Montgomery Clift in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER somehow merge together and the repressed memory--that long excised scene of Hazel Cousins stabbing her husband--is at last unearthed in some long buried preview version. Until then, the spirit of Entwistle can have no rest. Her ghost still walks, they say, around the base of the letters, scaring off tourists and whitening the pallor of intrepid ghost hunters.

Clearly Entwistle had issues with this kind of actor-role power of suggestion psychoses going into Hollywood, which may explain why she was such a success doing Ibsen's THE WILD DUCK on Broadway. In that play (hod onto your cigars, my armchair Freuds!) she played Hevig, a sensitive daughter who.... kills herself at the very end. She allegedly was so good she inspired a young Bette Davis to become an actress. Maybe she was too good.

In the end, Hollywood rewards tenacity and gumption. Even terrible films endure forever, so if you're in them, so do you (unless your scenes are all cut).  Nailing the oblique existential pain of Ibsen without a camera present, ala in the theater, ultimately dooms your best work to the void. Hollywood's a tough racket, with a wide audience, where talent and charisma win out, provided you endure with trouper-level patience -- unless somehow they decide to bury you. Loy toiled diligently through a solid decade of vamp roles, stretching from silent to sound eras, waiting for Hollywood to stop saddling her with exotic femme fatales, but she never complained loud enough to earn top brass ire, nor did she blew her Asians off. She tackled each new half-caste or full-caste with sensual relish, and eventually she rose above the typecasting to become the fist cool wife in cinema, Nora Charles. And if Peg had bothered to read her stack of unopened mail in the foyer before taking that long walk up the hill above her bungalow and jumping off the sign, she would have realized she'd been offered Hedvig again in another production of Ibsen's Wild Duck, so her options had far from dried up.

Maybe she's still doing Hedvig out in limbo, caught in an endless loop of life imitating art not wisely but too well.

Here are the last lines of The Wild Duck, after Hedvig has shot herself (my underline):

Relling:
May I inquire,--what is your destiny?
Gregers:
To be thirteenth at table
Relling:
The devil it is.

Life imitates art a priori to the art.

In THIRTEEN WOMEN, Ursula implants suggestions into Hazel Cousins' (Entwistle) mind via hypnosis. Hypnosis is a tool for being able to influence the unconscious, and it's this unconscious mind that must be courted and accessed by the conscious self in pursuit of great acting. It's where paranoia is born, and where artistic gold is forged from molten lead of mania, despair, craft and inspiration, sometimes all at once

Without consciously surrendering the reins of ones' being to one's unconscious in some measure, a truly great performance cannot be achieved. That's the heart of 'method' and it can sometimes unhinge actors to the point their offstage personalities change in affinity with their characters. The unconscious doesn't always give back both reins.

Being too good at playing a suicidal woman onstage surely commingled with Entwistle's own genetic depression. Her mind was a pile of kindling responding to nightly Hedvig matches, sparked by Hazel Cousins and all the 'suggestions' of suicide going on around the other characters. Her summary rejection by Hollywood fanned a fire so large that no curtain call or vodka binge could quench it, all while a letter that would have kept her working for another six months at least lay hidden under a stack of unopened mail in the foyer. If that's not a sick sort of unlucky 'thirteenth at table' kind of fate, what is?

The Hollywoodland sign was right above her house; all she had to do was climb.

They took the 'land' part of it down awhile later. Her story, though, is far from done.

People who've snuck over the fence to stand below or near the famous sign sometimes run into her phantom (as seen in PARANORMAL WITNESS.)  Apparently, she leaves the scent of gardenias (her favorite flower) in her gliding eerie path. (See Stephen Wagner's: The Ghost of the Hollywood Sign or the short film and e-book by Hope Anderson.) It's bizarre how that all works: ghosts, scents, power of suggestion, unconscious, art, cinema, color lines, snubbing, fear, depression: LA.

She's become an emblem of Hollywood Babylon to the locals, and to me.

I hope one day we'll find the original preview cut of THIRTEEN WOMEN and finally see Entwistle's full murder scene, so we can judge for ourselves. Maybe then she can finally rest in peace--the heaven escalator take-up reel can roll her under the angelic white light lens and project her onto heaven's screen at last--and what was once just a truncated 60-minute wisp of a film will finally be a decent length and so weird and pre-code violent it can stand up to anything, even the sudsy micromanaging fingers of O'Selznick. Alongside the original pre-code cut of TARZAN ESCAPES and the excised Myrna Loy in her underwear singing her verse of "Mimi" in LOVE ME TONIGHT, this is my biggest 'censored outtake' reel excavation' fantasy. Similar recoveries have already happened to FRANKENSTEIN (the return of the girl being actually tossed into the pond, rather than the old cut right at the moment he starts to reach for her after running out of flowers), BABY FACE (the restoration of "Crush out all sentiment!" in the letter from her Nietzchean mentor instead of the bad faith "you have missed the meaning of my teaching"), and THE BIG SLEEP (here)! Come on and make it happen, please, God of the movies!

Until then,
Peg Entwistle, 

may you find the peace in the endless obsidian scene, find the stardom

denied you in lights
by a cutting room snub
in Los Angeles.

May exhumers of dead reels

undo your scene's cold knifing.

May Tinseltown's fearful fathers
be judged cowards 

for snipping you down to a single scream,
lest you shred with your thousand sharp edges,
the dull leaf Dunne's center holding.

Let the autopsy of your shattered soul restore your role

on Blu-ray

or at least DVR,
but, either way, forever,
so your solo sign vigil might at last be relieved,

gravity reversed, soaring up and up to the top drive-in screen 

of the Forest Lawn.

Let thy night's shrouded woe be shed,
as it flutters o'er LA's orange grid--
like tinsel in the Santa Anna wind
turns to swaddling cloth
for a newfound print.

Bette Davis loves you!

Amen and.
Goodnight, September!

The Blackened Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)

Playing like a midnight car accident between the Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish existential comedy, Wonder Bar was one of the last films to sneak by the Joe Breen production code and it all but dares the censors to cross the line backwards in pursuit, like a bunch of ball-snipping nihilists after the Dude. Occurring almost in real time, over one evening at the titular Parisian nightspot owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the movie aims for a 'cavalcade of stars' vibe ala Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, or Paramount's  International House but it lands on a roof all its own. Onstage: Busby Berkeley-directed dance numbers including one spectacularly offensive cavalcade of black stereotypes savaging the folksy decency of the (then still just a hit play) The Green Pastures. Offstage, a savagery of future Breen no-nos: unpunished murders, endorsed suicide, gambling, unpunished extramarital trysts, and even homosexuality. If there's no W.C. Fields autogyro to lift you out of this dark madness, well, just walk home as nonchalantly as you can. It's Paris, after all --even the forbidden is permitted.. for now... but Nazism im der Winde kommt! 

There are several interwoven stories and emotions too strange not to unweave and examine separately:

1. The chilling exhilaration displayed by the Russian gambler who lost his fortune gambling the night before, so is planning to to kill himself tonight. Clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about the ways he might do it, his merriment in the face of being broke nonetheless recalls Dostoevsky's famous line, "a real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion." As he gives away his watch and remaining rubles to the scantily-clad chorus girls, they don't bat a single eyelash over his suicide threats (if they took him seriously, after all, they might feel obligated to give him his stuff back).

2. The love quintanglement between the ballroom dancing couple of 'The Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him- at the time it still meant one of the professional male dance partners that used to be for rent at upscale ballrooms) played by Ricardo Cortez, his partner Dolores del Rio, and a whole slew of their former lovers, past, present, and future angling for a spin. There's the rich married woman (Kay Francis) after Cortez; and after Dolores, the bandstand crooner Dick Powell and, most masochistically self-abasing of them all, emcee Jolson (Powell 'knew' her first). But no one is going home happy tonight because Dolores is way to obsessive over her Gigolo. To the point, perhaps, of murder. A crime which Jolson is all too eager to cover up in a bid to win her over. 

Seriously, the way these people crawl and scrape shamelessly after each other is almost Carson McCullers-level degrading; Jolson's level of bootlick self-pity, especially, is just way too adult for the future era of the code and too self-pitying for our jaded age.

3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two 'party' girls while their matronly spouses look on in shocked disapproval (Guy laments: "there out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris"). But-- in the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the evening--the ladies too find matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos. There's some amusingly drunk interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, but it's dispiriting to see the weird Gold Digger three-way romance of the 1933 film reduced to slovenly old midwesterners drunkenly drooling over mercenary French hustlers. 

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography and surreal camera movements seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round. Showing perhaps a less Gold Diggers-level budget, forced to rely too heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. And more than in the past, Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism: our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns first as people and then as abstract patterns, then back again, in a way that's truly relevant to the film's uneasy sense of self-loathing and dehumanized alienation. 

5. The cast's freaky 'otherness' is played up even as they are meant to be identifiable as certain types, i.e. the foolishly-smitten with her young gigolo trophy wife, the jealous Latina firebrand, The hood-eyed Latin playa, the bug-eyed Jewish golem, the hick tourists from Indiana, etc. There's no sense of connection or belonging, just humanity slipping in and out dehumanized abstraction. Only the suicidal Russian seems to be all the way human --no Wonder this Bar is making him suicidal.

5.  Al Jolson singing "Going to Heaven on Mule," in blackface.
Yikes, here we go...

Grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through an array of offensive stereotype postures, cavorting and twisting his blackened face into hideous leering grimaces, Jolson's blackface is truly a shocking sight to see. Meant as a homage-cloaked xenophobic satire of the then-popular stage play, Green Pastures, one "wonders" how this or any aspect of Al Jolson was ever popular. He does grow on one in a forgotten curio sort of way over the course of the film, but then this number kind of dispels any good vibes he might have generated. The shock of stumbling on this, buried deep in the rest of the film, is like overturning a rock in the the Museum of Radio and Television and finding a nest of hideous vermin.

Notes the Museum of Family History site, almost by way of apology-cum-rationalization:

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors performing in blackface were more accepted by the general public, though Jolson was the first comedian to use blackface. He did this with a great deal of energy and spirit; he felt freer and more spontaneous behind the burnt cork than he ever did in 'whiteface.' As time went on, though others may have used burnt cork, it was obvious that no one could do blackface like Jolson.

In his book Dangerous Men, Mick LaSalle describes Jolson as the 'troll king' of early sound film, the golem who segued between evoking the lovesick deformed circus masochists of Lon Chaney-Tod Browning silents and the fast-talking toughs of the pre-code gangster boom. Unlike the Chaney freaks Jolson's was an inner deformity in his own mind, leading him to project a level of insecurity and self-loathing so intense it became its own grandstanding narcissistic opposite. A kind of slow motion downward death spiral down a Vitaphone crackle-and-hiss drain, it was if being the first person to speak and sing on film had left him permanently self-conscious, yet tickled to a childlike fit of jouissance over the attention it got him. "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He's a "borscht belt Pagliachi... a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, more self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

Now there are some who think two wrongs don't make a right, but this ground zero of semitic self-loathing coupled to black-face racism has a train-wreck pull for others, such as myself. Does it help that Jolson was a big supporter of black entertainers and possibly felt a kinship with oppressed African Americans? (i.e. slave race ancestry?) A Jew who played up his own Jewishness, Jolson had to struggle with stereotypes himself in an age where clubs were openly 'restricted' and long before Gregory Peck made his Gentlemen's Agreement. Jews and blacks alike had to play humble, decent submissives who understood and respected Jim Crow and social restrictions as being for their own benefit, helping them hide their inferiority from their WASP overlords. 

As if cementing the similarity, behold the above picture: the archaic Yiddish characters on the newspaper providing a reverse under-halo to the sunrise of loose straw from Jolson's hat, framing a blackface golem beamed here through a stray TV signal from some uncanny nightmare dimension. 

The Green Pastures satire aspect is eerily soothing in this bizarro world context: the opiate promise of heading into the sunshine of eternal glory (anywhere but here) on a mule, just like the code had planned for us immediately following this last moment of a wanderin' in the pre-code valley of the shadow of libidinal freedom.

 Here's Jolson fan Glenn Kenny on the many questions surrounding Jolson's 'right' to blacken up:

"For "Mule," Jolson's in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren's least infectious tunes... But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see's Jolson's blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward."

One of the comments on the post, from 'Karen':

"And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you've emphasized: the moment that Jolson's grinning face rises over the edge of The Forvert, like the White Queen's face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it's because I'm a Jew myself--or maybe just because I'm a human being--his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it's well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he's aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile."

I like her comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context, noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. She's right that we'll never have an adequate grasp of the overall frequency of such a negative interpretation. 

B ut perhaps we can glean a rough idea from the post-WWI, pre-WWII Parisian setting.  

Paris had become a black musician expat refuge for two very good reasons: Parisians revered jazz and weren't as racist. There were no Jim Crow laws, or other humiliations (like not even being allowed to sit with the white folks at Harlem's Cotton Club). That treatment was more reserved for the French equivalent of the black person, the Arab. 

And yet (or maybe because of the lack of racism towards ex-pat African Americans) Paris nightclubs celebrated and overindulged in the spectacle of blackness, of difference, amplifying perceived traits to a state of almost avant garde shock value. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up in posters and set decor, band members changing from their usual tuxedoes into leopard skin for the film short. 

The exotica of Josephine Baker (left) made her a huge star (left), and let's not even go there with Sarah Baartman (i.e. 'the Black Venus).

And the connection between Jews and black musicians had always been vibrant, loving and reciprocal. During the Nazi occupation 'Zionists' were suspected of underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notes:

Jolson was a Russian Jew and knew something about discrimination and could draw a parallel between the suffering of blacks and his own people. He grew up in the minstrel tradition of vaudeville and used his blackface as a way of bringing black music to white audiences. It was also a way for him to immerse himself in the characterization. It’s been said Jolson used the technique as a metaphor for human suffering.

In an excellent From the Barrelhouse piece on Django Reinhardt comes this excerpt from a tract on 'Nazifying Jazz' -

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.”               -- Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s Bass Saxophone

None of this forgives the litany of stereotypes, even to me who grew up gazing with a five year-old's pre-racial mistrust at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons like Coal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television, even seeing Song of the South in the theater, and never thinking anything was wrong about it except that it was boring as fuck and I wanted to get on to Treasure of the Matacumbe, which came on after Song in a 1976 double feature revival, though that sucked too. I ended up throwing up in the lobby, while my mom and an usher hovered over me in deep concern. It wasn't because of the racism, it was just too boring.

More than anything now, in today's light, minstrelry is our shame, not Jolson's or anyone else's. It's a sad example of the white compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent underneath the skin of so much news channel rhetoric. And yet, at the same time... exaggeration and performed accentuation of difference is sometimes the gateway to tolerance.

Speaking of difference, a few words on the seemingly altered face of Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested Cortez. I know she's beautiful or whatever but her face creeps me out. The sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones, etc. She's like death incarnate... at least in this film. When the blunt cops in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL use the vile phrase 'cut' to describe plastic surgery (Kim Basinger plays a girl "cut to look like Veronica Lake"), I think of Del Rio, and vice versa.

In fact, and I hope the photo above bears me out, she's halfway to looking like Allida Valli in Les yeux sans visage (below). And the very fact that Jolson is still clinging to this hoary old Lon Chaney-style masochist cinema, where the ugly deformed performer sacrifices himself (so the plasticine dish can run away with the callow spoon) shows a terminal example of self-directed racism that's an illuminating mirror into the self-hatred of one's own image as 'other' even as one clings to it like a life raft. In a way he'd be ideal as the evil plastic surgeon in visage... slowly reducing his love's face to a featureless taut skin skull... "this time I'll burn all the animal out of her!"

This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and imperfections--bad teeth or big nose or wrinkles or thin lips--is mostly gone now. If someone wants surgery they have it, but we're intolerant of all hate crimes, even self-hate crimes... the bleaching and 'cutting' of Michael Jackson being a very public cautionary tale.

And the freak otherness doesn't even begin to end there: as the socialite craving the Gigolo, Kay Francis is at her most eerily caricature-like: that alabaster skin, triangle mouth and round fleshy head make her seem like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoon of herself or some drawing on the cover of a cigar box. I don't mean that as a jab either (I'm a huge Francis fan), but just trying to corral all the jarring elements of this extraordinarily bizarre art deco cubist face, and the way it seems to signify all the amorphous wrongness floating through the film, the International House anti-matter, the feeling that the foundations of Hollywood personae are crumbling right and left as Breen's brown-shirt inquisitors are kicking down the door.

But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's still Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for both aberration and finger-pointing, for both freaks and gawkers, all races and some racists. When we see a pair of men dancing together, Jolson makes a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise (below), the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it ("Oh you kid!")  Jolson is, above all, a caricature himself, running around from table to table while emceeing and joking, his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a Nerf ball through the deep end of a pool, he's a freak among freaks. A user review on imdb sums his character up as a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else...) I would add a metatextual furtherance to his comparison--just replace Major Strasser with Joseph Breen and Vichy with his army of toady censors.

So that's it, last call. Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but it's still tonight here at the Wonder Bar, and like people getting as sloshed as possible the night before Prohibition goes into effect, all the soon-to-be-verboten tropes are assembled for one last hurrah. The most glaring example to even the pre-code novice will ben seeing SPOILER ALERT Jolson get away with covering up his lover's crime of passion by letting another man make good on his suicide threat, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so unconscionable it's shocking even for a pre-code, so shocking he mentions it to no one, as if he's getting away with something he doesn't want anyone even in the movie audience to notice, Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be able to play for almost 30 years? Even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow a draconian end to what used to be relatively harmless decadence--the Weimar era and the jazz age--and the arrival of corrupt, racist, sexist, colonialist  'morality' of the both the Nazis and The Production Code. Some joke, like when the bartender flicks the lights on at closing time and you realize you've been kissing an empty skull. If you're the type who can still laugh after that, get this movie.

Bella's Big Bounce - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN - PART II (2012)

To those of us who recognize her special gifts, who know how to appreciate the beauty within her sullen reticence, part two of BREAKING DAWN proves to be the deeply Jungian-delible feast where we get to see a new, ass-kicking side of Kristen Stewart. Now officially a vampire, she looks more alive than she used to as a human. She was meant to be this way, born to become a vampire! The 'I wish someone had tried to save my soul before I too was turned' types who complained every step of the way through the previous four long films are forever shut down. She's been Antigone adamant about death all the while, she's been like that kid who's compelled to seek out LSD despite the warnings of his friends, and now she finds her reward. And since, within the mythos of the series, Stewart's Bella is a "newborn" she can outvamp all those who previously lorded over her. Gone is the usual insecure adrift, Bronte-ish innocent! In her stead, monster bitch.

Forgive me if I sound enamored of it all. I'm now almost old as Bella's dad, Charlie (Billy Burke), was at the start of the series (2008) so my view of the series has changed, from bemused, slightly intoxicated outsider fondness (and nostalgia for my year of living in the Pacific Northwest) to mopey adoration for NEW MOON's whole 'Baby Jane-en-verso' aging ur-text, to weary respect for something that has a demographic other than my own. Now with the final installment I am already way past the point of feeling a direct connection to my old awkward high school passions. See, when I was Twilight-appropriate age I was all in the comic book Elfquest, and had fantasized my way into a very similar tribe, the Wolf Riders. I tried, really tried, after one achingly perfect, mystical dream, to disappear into the Elfquestverse, the way I'm sure kids do today with the Twilight; they're similar tribal fantasias of belonging with the cool weird beautiful people clique. I forget how I grew out of it - there just wasn't enough material to maintain the fire, and now I could give a shit about it. Enough time has passed that the dream belongs to someone else, some different assemblage of cells and thoughts, one still strung-out by public school days and lonesome comic book night teen trauma. Now all I want is a comfy coffin for my weary vamp soul. Now I'm like the world-weary seen-it-all Volturi member, Marcus (Christopher Heyerdahl).

But I still kind of am in love with Alice, the psychic vampire who wins over Charlie and effortless makes every moment special. She's the fantasy 'it' girl for my straggling type - I'm wagering, and she fits perfect. She's what Sabrina was for me in the 70s (in CHARLIE'S ANGELS), the brainy cute one who 'understands' our shyness and takes the lead with a gentle, babysitter-like patient fondness.

With my  first praiseful post on the Twilight series, over at Bright Lights in 09,  I felt I was was a defense lawyer for the series, trying to justify my intellectual curiosity against the pooh-poohing of my critic peers, culminating in my opus "Someone to Fight Over Me."  But all that gazing into the pool of youth left me aging rapidly and the generations of hyper-evolved youth just keep coming, as do new apps and platforms and operating systems for my Mac; the technology grows at an exponential rate and I can no longer keep up. I'm a reverse vampire, aging faster than a regular mortal, crumbling to dust like David Bowie in THE HUNGER.

That's why in this last and final incarnation, the TWILIGHT saga is no longer a contrast or fantasy or escape but a breath of misty old growth forest air. I appreciate that ADD trendiness is ignored by these teen Methuselahs. Their every... sentence... takes whole Antonioni films to come out... but... the molasses pace... can prove a dreamy kick and Robert Pattinson is a master at making certain phrases twist and turn in the waves like frogs. One has time to wrestle with the Big Issues of life, not just as a teen girl or old man in a young man's body, but both rolled into one immortal soul, a Benjamina Button conjoined twin set, one aging chronologically the other the reverse, until they meet as grandparent and newborn child, and then disappear beyond the veil.

In this fifth and final installment the Cullens assemble a host of quirky vamp clans to stand firm against the onrushing Catholic stand-in, the Voltari, who plan to wipe out said Cullens. The clans are all ageless of course, so include hunks from the Civil War to the days of the ancient Romans, allowing a vast new array of options as far as fantasy-adoptive families. The film is carefully crafted to create just such a sense of belonging, the 'teams' of Edward and Jacob have just expanded to a whole league, and they would never say a word like 'yolo'. Every character in the clan is unique: creepy, hot, or creepy-hot; as long as the viewer stays unseen in the vampiric dark he or she fits right into the mix.

I may not be able to see the youth clearly now... the world in my ball has gone dim... their outlines alone shimmer in the glow of their digital screen surroundings and my glasses seem to work less and less well with each passing film--but I can still meet them halfway, at the forest of one of their own primal mythic worlds, where everyone is centuries-old and frozen at youth on TCM, or how I still see myself as 21 in the bathroom mirror when the Baby Jane clarity is fogged by the steam of showers. I can still meet them at the halfway point where those who strive for eternal youth settle for an early death. Call my deconstruction of the series dangerous to its intended youthful demographic if you prefer, but there is a rich modernist ancestry to that subtext, as I've pointed out in a past post, particularly to films from the 1930s like DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, THE WIND, and MOROCCO.

Any true horror fan knows, that real ambivalent attitudes towards life and death are rare even in the classics. So many filmmakers looking for a quick signifier mistake gore for subversion. In Meyers' work, moral ambivalence isn't avoided just because the Cullens are 'vegetarians' - i.e. hunt only deer and cougars. The parallels with some kind of cult or drug scene are never avoided and parents should be scared that their impressionable TWILIGHT fan daughters will be predisposed to roll with the next pale, good-looking junky clan that happens by, and soon they're learning all the tips of how to not seem stoned out of her gourd when having 'serious talks' with her parents (the other vamps have to remind Bella to blink once in awhile and to wear non-red contact lenses, the way stoners use Visine.

Such worries by parents are perhaps dispelled, allegedly, originally, through the popular press's misinterpretation of the series as advocating celibacy, but celibacy isn't always adherence to a restrictive social order. It can be a renouncement of societal expectations and a stand against the impetus towards unconscious reproductive urges, marriage, peer pressure, and male desire. Not only do Edward and Bella wait for their wedding to 'do it' but once 'it's' done 'it' triggers an accelerated pregnancy that kills the mortal Bella. Not since SPECIES (here) has a fantasy film so cleverly tapped into our secret revulsion towards the Cronenbergian biological express train nightmare underbelly of sexual desire. Once you slow down time you can speed it up too but God drags pregnancy out as long as possible so the full horror of it doesn't have time to settle; it moves along to slow to defend against. In her brilliance, Meyer floors it, so the full monstrousness of the 'right to life' idea is revealed.

And you can fault the mopey teen trappings all you want, but this last installment especially has the guts to go deep into the more taboo realms of mating and pair-bonding: Much time is spent explaining that Jacob is not a pedophile just because he's 'imprinted' on Bella's baby girl, Renesme. It's "not like you think!" he explains over and over as all react in understandable disgust. A normal film would prove just how much 'it's not like you think' by cutting out that whole sub-plot, lest any unsightly criticism be drawn. But with the substantial heft of Stephanie Meyer's franchise behind it, the ickiness goes unfiltered, and that's so punk rock!

Another punk element is the scene with Bella at he first hunt, crouching up on a rock like a feral stalking beast, and later coming home and trying to explain why she's not dead to her one-note worrywart dad Charlie. He doesn't like it, but what choice does he have? Where can you find a deprogrammer in rural Washington State? In the 00s? Meanwhile, his granddaughter grows way too fast, and Bella's cold to the touch and has weird eyes, or uses eye drops so he won't see how red they are, like any good daughter grass smoker. But if Charlie says anything to anyone about how weird it all is, Bella's going to do an even bigger bounce and he can't deal with that and thus it is yet again that Bella uses her dream child to dominate not just Edward (she forced his hand so he had to turn her into a vampire, finally, at the end of Part I) but her father as well. To create a situation where your father has no choice but to allow you freedom to be stoned and/or stone, to leave you and your bad boy alone as immortal statues left for centuries in overgrown gardens, hidden from his meddling overprotection, is devoutly to be wished by any and all 6-17 year-olds.  Bella has indirectly attacked Charlie via nightmare screaming in previous films, and attacked Edward via a reckless pursuit of danger (the only thing that makes a phantom image of Edward appear as if a symptom of adrenalin-poisoning) but nothing beats a miracle gro baby as a tool for moral high ground. And besides, dads in coming-of-age myths exist mainly to be ignored.

Understanding the lost ability of these kind of 'child as tool of revenge' sagas can shed light on our darker instincts and help us in understanding just why American folk heroines are so different than Europe's Red Riding Hoods and Gretels. Through myth we can embrace the irony: America's population is composed of wanderers and the descendants of wanderers: Ellis Island, Vikings, colonialists, and slave-owning ex-Irish penal colonists. The rest of the world is full of people willing to stay where they are, their fidgety neighbors who used to ramble on about their plans for exploring are all long-since moved to America. And so it is that we in the USA find fantasizing about wandering an unrewarding use of time. We have to do it for real, as our ancestors did, or not at all. Our fantasies are of staying still, but surrounded by cool peers-- Hogwarts, the Shire, Forks--as long as parents aren't there. Those who paint the best fantasy homes get visited by others, until a world beautiful is created online, only to have marauders break in and slaughter everyone during the big wedding.

This is our history as a nation and a world, but for vampires it's history without the forgetfulness that goes on as generations snake forward through the tunnel of time, shedding memory skins with each incarnation, leaving only bad habits and alcoholism, and debt. In the Twilight realm, the original explorers who left Europe in the 1800s are all still here, and still look like they're in their early 20s, and willing to be friends with your sorry ass, thus elevating you to some Wagnerian height of 'belonging' ecstasy, a height missing from your usual high school experience. Here at last those troglodyte wallies are devoured and forgotten. If each successive generation is just a little more slackjawed than the last, gone soft from suburban slovenliness, then these vampires and shape-shifters represent a chance to undo them all, to clean house, to eradicate the slow moving herd members.

Lastly, perhaps there's no more common dream archetype than that of the instant, fast-growing baby. By putting digital transplants of one actor's face (Mackenzie Foy) over the younger and older versions, she seems truly creepy, all the more so for being cute. Her smiling face adheres to various younger bodies as she grows so that by the time she's actually wearing her own face the damage is done and she's still creepy cute. The total effect works to make her every appearance as uncomfortable as stumbling onto a baby skeleton in the lowest ebb of the uncanny valley. It serves the story, though, as well as in a probably unintentional but nonetheless valid metatextual frisson. The drama centers around the child having to prove it's not a full vampire but she's also a hybrid between digital and 'real; her CGI-edged face all but matrixes out of the screen in some 3-D Final Cut-layered feedback... even in the simulacrum she's a devouring simulacrum, the kind of child born to make haunted videotapes and project images onto film even from the bottom of the well.

If you've read the book, then you know what happens and then doesn't happen never happened, but it's still a pretty great surprise, a Sam Peckinpah / Walter Hill style bloodbath even Kate Beckinsale and Milla Jovovich franchises at their bloodiest couldn't match. There's an eerie silence that results when characters you've spent the movie getting to know are suddenly absent, with a snap or a blam, as final and startling as an introduction to the finality of death as any child could hope to find. If you do manage to become involved in the Peckinpah-ish finality of it, and if you know the sad desperation of the lonesome teenage suburbanite for whom no amount of friends and super powers can compete with that Truman Show sense of isolation, then you know how such blanket cold can radiate so warmly, like a wedding cake corpse cooling in an unheated winter theater. In our lonesomest hours we'll risk our lives just to feel connected, even if that connecting involves the sacrifice of the last few vestiges of reality on the altar of the fantasy franchise, as long as you both shan't live.

"I'm not afraid to die..." Tony Scott and Dangerous Women

The news of Tony Scott's unfortunate death, which floored all fans of ballsy film, came this Monday afternoon when I was already moping to my saddest Spotfiy mix at work, mulling over the last full season of our old Mayan calendar existence... maybe. Mourning for the first fallen soldier in the first day of fall cohered my melancholia, already awash with all the sad chicks in my headphones. I knew I needed to revisit DOMINO (2003) when I got home. It may seem an odd choice from his impressive repertoire, but I think it's his most personal film, almost a righting of the wrongs of one of his first films, THE HUNGER (below), from 20 years prior (1). That was just a vamp story, but it could have been great, but for Domino, well, Scott was good buddies with the real Brit bounty hunter / Laurence Harvey-daughter it's based on, and his respect, awe and affection is palpable, inspiring Scott far past his usual style surfeit. It goes deeper than any mere romantic fancy or extended music video notion. It's genuine admiration for a girl who lives up to feminism's promise. It gets him over.... well... most of his own hurtles.

Scott's films tended to be both overrated and underrated in equal measure, at the same time. Like his older brother Ridley, he's a master of light and sound who'll go the extra distance for just the right shot, and that's not always a good thing.  The both fall prety to second-guessing and over-editing, the mega-budget leaves them paralyzed with options denied the tougher, leaner filmmakers, the sort who never have time or distance to lose sight of what their original vision was in the first place. That said, Tony's films especially deliver consistently and he's left behind a legacy of beautiful and true moments, even if the films around them don't completely hang together. He was a courtier of reckless abandon in life and in cinema, like John Huston, Sam Peckinpah, Sam Fuller, Abel Ferrara, and almost no one else. It's rarefied company, and he deserves his place at the shooting range/gaming table.

Perhaps he's right now up in the crazy clouds, carousing with the real-life Domino Harvey, who died at 35 of a possible drug overdose (ruled as heart attack) the year their film was released. Maybe she's waiting at the bottom of the ocean (in my conception of the afterlife, the bottom of the ocean and the highest clouds are on the same level), with a devil's bounty hunter badge for him. If you ever see him in the DVD extras to his films he always seems like he's got one eye on the exit or the horizon, half-fully engaged, half-recoiling from the acres of hangers-on and crew and cast all wanting something from him all the time, sone decision or calamity. So he was always talking about, and filming films about, ducking off into the sunrise with nothing but a gun, a suitcase of money, and a Hawksian woman. If you have the gun and the Hawksian woman, why do you even need to make a movie? Because he still can't get away from himself, except by working.

It's important the girl is the right girl and is not afraid to wear lots of black eyeliner or kill a man execution-style. She mustn't preach anti-gun violence / non-smoking / condom-conscious moral reform code or credo as so many A-list stars do in their contractually smoke-free films.

Scott never bowed to the PC reformers: in his films everyone smoked, because he liked to film the sunlight through half-open Venetian blinds and the curling smoke hangs very nicely in the rays, defining them against the slotted darkness. And like Hawks he knew the profound bond created by sharing cigarettes, and that they're cool regardless of killing their users, and if you thought it was wrong to smoke indoors on a film set, for the health of the crew and the easily-influenced kids watching at home, then go fuck yourself. If you got cancer, well, you know what to do. Make it quick. Anything that kills you makes you cool first, let it kill you coolly, too.

Art with Scott bowed not to PC thuggery. Words can't express how rare or wondrous that attitude is in a land where everyone talks about being bad and subversive while having fainting spells and calling their lawyers if the road takes them even remotely close something like a genuine edge.

A small insufficient tribute, here are three of Scott's dangerous women, in reverse chronological order:

Keira Knightley as Domino Harvey - DOMINO (2003)

You can badmouth Tony Scott but if you do, and someone bashes a high contrast emerald beer bottle over your head, DOMINO is the proof you had it coming and that a lot of punchy fashion models might be healthier mentally if able to work at bounty hunter jobs instead of just their drug habits. Knightley is in good company with Mickey Rourke (the boss) and Edgar Ramirez (smitten). All three have no problem being balls-to-the-wall badass even when just standing around in a laundromat in their underwear, and Tony Scott takes every opportunity to bash and savage the whinin' boys of the Hollywood industry when these bounty hunters get their option picked up. Knightley is so good as Domino that when she says "I'm not afraid to die," you believe her. It's not just idle MTV boasting.

Even if you've seen it already and it just gave you a headache, watch it again, and then again, and you'll still be soaking up the details. Maybe Domino doesn't actually kill anyone (that I recall) but she does break an actor's nose just 'cuz he's a douche and if maybe the big mob stand-off climax seems like cliched overkill and much too similar to Scott's earlier TRUE ROMANCE climax, you can bet he tried the script and plot a dozen different ways before realizing this was the best and most cinematic way to go, and was full-well aware of its derivative Hong Kong-ishness and it being ultimately unlike the real Domino, whom he knows, as I've said. And as she says in the film, if she told us the full truth it would have to be sanitized so she wouldn't go to jail or have mobsters on her ass, and Scott knew it would be better to just lie bigger than truth smaller. And didn't Hawks steal from himself, too?

Besides, they do too much mescaline very convincingly. That forgives a lot, in the Acidemic book. Did they actually do some with Scott out in the desert for prep? I'd believe it.

Plus, Knightley's white satin beauty and adamantium razor cheekbone toughness are backed up by a strange and effective roster of side players: Christopher Walken, Delroy Lindo, Mo'Nique, Tom Waits, Mena Suvari, Macy Gray, Jacqueline Bissett, Dabney Coleman and Lucy Liu. Even against all these hard hitters, Kierra kills it.

Patricia Arquette as Alabama - TRUE ROMANCE (1993)

It's both hard and too easy to dig up misogynistic subtext in Tony Scott's films, but he loves showing super strong women who love their man and aren't disgusted if he still reads comic books, stays indoors watching kung fu on a sunny day, and kills people.

An example would be the way Alabama finds Christian Slater's murder of her pimp incredibly romantic... when we in the audience and Slater grit out teeth the moment she learns, expecting a long moral harangue about the wrongness of violence, like Liz Hurley might lecture Austin Powers on casual sex, or John Connor his Terminator about "you can't just go around killing people." Instead, she's not even merely turned on in some sadomasochistic way but genuinely moved. And we love the way she later--in a hotel room in LA while Slater's off getting burgers, oblivious--faces off against a hulking mob goon (the future Tony Soprano) in a fearless deadpan mix of slurred casual evasiveness--lowly letting her bag of womanly tricks and feints run empty with a resigned, chiding chuckle, mixing coy laughter--leading to sudden, brutal, outside-the-box retaliation. It's a triumphant bit of acting and a ballsy move on the part of the director to film it so artfully and savagely.

I personally like TRUE a lot better than QT's directorial debut, RESERVOIR DOGS, which gets better as it goes along but has a painfully overwrought beginning (after the awesome diner scene) with much too much of Tim Roth yelling in pain like a little punter and fake blood and monotonous grey concrete decor. Alabama is ten times tougher than the whole damn lot of those dudes, save, naturally Lawrence Tierney; you can imagine her getting gut shot and just laughing about it while never trying to deny her mortal terror. That sort of chutzpah we really don't see again until Daniel Craig finds a way to laugh uproariously through his own ball torture in CASINO ROYALE. Scott saw that women had to be tougher and stronger than men every day, and loved them for it, as we love them always, now, through his eyes.

Wherever they're looking now, we'll miss them.

NOTES:
1. The Hunger- a postscript, 8-13 - this was just on TCM - it's pretty upsetting because parts are amazing, especially everything with David Bowie, who modulates his rapid aging so superbly you forget what age he even is in real life. Deneuve is also superb and was initially to be my third dangerous woman, but Scott's vision really fails him, not least because the next lover Deneuve chooses is Susan Sarandon, a bad choice as she is in full moral piety mode, sabotaging the whole damn thing because she objects to killing people three times a week for the next 300 years, and as if the whole 'bad faith' angle wasn't bad enough (it's sunk better films than this: Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys) Scott cranks up the jump cuts back and forth across time and space so now you can't even kill a person without intercutting ceiling fans, Bauhaus videos, and a crazy baboon. Good lord Tony, why make a lesbian vampire film just to suck the 'dirty kick' out?