Great Acid Movies #52: THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970)

The weird thing about acid (and its affiliates) is just how life-changing even one experience can be. If our mind can be likened to a big old Victorian house, most of us just live on the first floor. The basement is locked; the attic and second floor bedrooms boarded up. Who knows if rats or squatters are living there? Better not to open them up just in case. Eventually we become convinced the boarded up doors are just walls. Any attempt to open them just fills us with fear, the whole downstairs seems to quake in separation anxiety --where are you?? Come down this instant!

Then, one night, LSD comes along and kicks open the boarded doors, and unlocks the basement and attic, forcing us through the whole house on a sweeping grand tour. It turns out the rest of the rooms in the house aren't dirty and dusty and empty as we thought - but teeming with art, carpets from distant lands, incense and peppermints. Even if we never see those rooms again after we come back down the stairs, we at least know they're there. If we have a bad trip of course, he shows us the basement, where all the slimy monsters live; but there's another set of stairs there that leads down... to the attic - you come out on top, in a spiritual awakening.

Dogmatic shrinks might tell us those newly discovered rooms are all hallucinations, but honey - until you've tried it, you don't get a vote. If a hallucination seems more real than reality, it's at least worth examining, especially when quantum physics shows us just how impossible true objectivity is. I could tell you Portugal doesn't exist. After all, I've never been there. Bush ran his presidency that way and still got a second term, In fact, the appearance of matter is a hallucination anyway; if we could see the world as it really is we'd see not a chair but a frequency spectrum, vibrating waves...

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970) operates along this line of philosophy, detailing the way LSD's door-kicking habit disrupts the don't ask/don't tell dysfunctional denial-based cohabitation of the all-American middle class family at the end of the 60s. It strikes me as the sort of film where the writers started out as anti-drug 'there is nothing real beyond the first floor' types, the 'I know every inch of my house so don't ask me what's behind those locked doors because there's nothing behind them, ok? Nothing!' types. But then, in the interest of fairness and perception, the filmmaker/s took acid halfway through preparation for shooting and changed their whole attitude. The result is a film divided. It still has the look and feel of an after-school special coupled to an earthy fly-on-the-wall semi-documentary style (ala say, MEDIUM COOL or ZABRISKIE POINT) but runs a deeper, stranger game. It takes the rare arpproach of truly progressive acid movies, and judges both sides as fucked, and runs off to start a whole new thing, balanced without judgement or condemnation, just trust in one another and the ability to fucking listen to each others' true pain.

Must be we're in Canada.

Eli Wallach and Julie Harris play the Masons, high-strung suburbanite parents of acid-dealing musician Artie (Stephen McHattie) and his naive sister, Maxie (Deborah Winters). After a big fight with the family, Artie gives Maxiee her first trip and her parents later find her freaking out in an upstairs closet. Recognizing symptoms of what they've been reading about in hysteria-mongering tabloids, the whole flock rushes to counseling and then bring it all up the next time they get together with their neighbors, who are steeped in enough adulterous affairs and debauched drinking they're bred to ignore and deny--in clouds of pointless self-righteous indignation--that there's a problem, until the patient therapist finally cracks some ICE STORM-style ice and lets the sunshine in.

That said, for all its acumen, PEOPLE NEXT DOOR can't stop beating a dead horse as far as making sure we compare Wallach's sweaty angry dad constantly validating his right to drink, smoke cigarettes (these are the socially sanctioned choices of their generation) and plow pertinent wives vs. the bladerunning between rock and roll Buddahood and psych ward schizophrenia that is his children's teenage wasteland.

The best moment is at the end, when mom comes to visit Maxie in the psych ward and finally realizes her daughter is actually the sanest one in the family, just unable to let go of her bipolar schizo "act" because she's both stubborn and a bit of a showboat. By opening her mind to admit her own need for wider perspective, mom and daughter are able to reach each other at last.

In the end, THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is not a condemnation or a celebration, perhaps in that sense it's cinema's most compassionate yet non-corny look at aberrant social behavior until William Blatty's THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980). The moral: LSD can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility just like any other potentially life-affirming drug or event. Metatextually speaking, the film walks it like it talks it, refusing to go the way of many other cautionary acid tales (i.e. GO ASK ALICE) which fall back on old demonizing myths to generate suspense and pacify the establishment, even if once again the family strengthens itself by ostracizing the father, paving the way for our current plague of either gone or feminized fathers. Now more than ever... we need the 70s dad, for all his sexism and drunken mischief, to return.

Great Acid Movies 6: HEAD (1968)

Jack Nicholson wrote the script, shortly after writing THE TRIP, so you know drugs inspired the brilliant disconnects and loose-footed anti-commercial totally-free association of HEAD, the Monkee's "no one cares about as anymore so fuck-it" masterpiece. Bob Rafelson directed and he'd risen the ranks by directing the Monkees' TV show, which--though it's aged a bit due to its constant aping of Hard Day's Night, has moments of crackling surrealist wit. Well, HEAD ain't that Monkees, it ain't even the Monkees you don't want to remember but nonetheless, it's the kind of surrealist masterpiece that only gets weirder on repeat viewings, full of great music (the album is a must, and songs from it have appeared all over movies by Cameron Crowe, Wes Anderson, etc.) and deranged odysseys, undoubtedly meant as a post-contract nose-tweak at the TV producers of the Monkees' hit TV show for dubbing their instruments, years later it's still a cult classic, studded with cameos from all sorts of Rafelson-Nicholson regulars (from Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider etc), and great bits by everyone from Frank Zappa to Timothy Carey to Victor Mature. Even the fake Tor Johnson shows up!

There are film clips from several of my favorite movies, including THE BLACK CAT and GILDA in HEAD, and there are great talking head interviews that lead nowhere ("If someone laughs at you, that's a violation of your civil rights!") and cameos galore: Terri Garr, Victor Mature, Frank Zappa ("I see you've been working on your dancing, though."), and of course Jack Nicholson in a blink-and-miss cameo, before he was anyone. Zappa later tried to do something similar to HEAD with his 200 MOTELS, but as I recall it didn't quite get there (and was shot on cheap video). This stuff is harder to pull off than Rafelson makes it look.



My favorite of the four lads here is Mike Nesmith, who takes up the exaggeratedly dry and humorlessly hilarious cool leader position, the kind of role I generally assumed when I was the "acting guide" in college "acid tests," which I usually was. I saw this as the back half of a student union double feature with YELLOW SUBMARINE the first time I ever took any sort of psychedelic as a freshman (back when movies were shown from actual film reels at colleges). The experience changed my life forever. I laughed so hard I got almost hyseterical. Fortunately most of the crowd had left by then, and those that were there weren't in much better shape. And if there's a place to laugh hysterically (literally) in the audience, it's HEAD.

The production company behind HEAD wasn't AIP (American International Pictures) but the BBS conglomerate which also made EASY RISER- but it's got AIP in its blood. There's elements of BEACH PARTY movies, and the Corman Poe series. Rafelson's film raids seemingly every prop and backdrop from back lot studio storage,  with western vignettes, cobwebbed castle corridors, World War Two foxholes,.. and, yes, Anette Funicello. Compared to the more death-rebirth focused imagery of Corman's The Trip from the previous year, of course, this is inevitably lighter. The music is better, and the comedy is deadpan gold but the Nicholson 'he knows what he's talking about' LSD savvy is all over the place. It's the kind of thing you can't fake, and if you doubt, just compare to all the terrible, dated big studio productions of the time, all desperate to grab the hip hippie dollar by adding light show frugging, Goldie Hawn in buckskin shorts, and/or old men trying to stay relevant by toking on hookahs.


That all said, there are some draggy song moments, such as Peter Tork wandering through the snow and Davey Jones reviving tacky British music hall. Luckily however, there are no sped up comical chase sequences set to one of their ditties, which The MONKEES were so fond of on TV. Wait, come to think of it, there are... at the very end. Well... that's show biz!

The acid 'peak' for me would be the great Timothy Carey (as "Lord High'N'Low"), running up to boys and shouting "Where ya been? I been lookin' all over the world for ya!" he later shows up again at Mike's birthday party - a Warhol factory-like surprise party scene in which Mike crankily berates the crowd: "Maybe I was better off where I was. You jump out me... scare me half to death," then adds the coup de grace: "The same thing goes for Christmas!"

Then, the crowd parts as Timothy Carey, deformed with some kind of bizarre facial paralysis, dressed from AIP wardrobe in cowboy mining attire with a noose around his neck, stalking through from the back of the crowd, meandering, shambling, slouching towards Nesmith, going "Attaboy, Mike... atta... boy... Mike," over and over again, progressively more hysterical and menacing, which--if you've ever been tripping or a schizophrenic--is hilarious, because that's how it "really" is... any little phrase or word can echo in the head until you go insane. All your filters are off and the world comes in bright and crazy. It's all too much!

Looking into Carey's insane eyes is to glimpse art's true primordial eternal mission: to transmute true existential terror into surreal dark black comedy. If you can laugh even as you're being ripped apart by the demonic lurkers at the threshold, you're doing all right. The demon dogs at the scales of lightness, the camel in the eye of the needle, and Peter Tork's ice cream hand at the commissary: baby, it's all the same. But why listen to me? I know nothing. I know nothing like the back of my hand.


I've only literally fallen out of my seat laughing (in public anyway) twice, and seeing HEAD at that midnight campus screening was the first time. People around me thought I might have to be carried away. I laughed until my stomach hurt and tears streamed down on the auditorium floor. I had been reborn. When I went into the theater that night I was just a frightened nerd with dandruff, wire rim glasses, and clammy hands, but when I emerged from the theater I looked like this (left), a Dionysian representative of crazy Mike Nesmithian absurdist-confidence radiating psychedelic light but without the tacky peace/love gooeyness. How do you thank a film for doing that? If it wanted the sun, I would write it down in letters that would burn a thousand feet high, "to Sir High'n'Low... with love"

Acid Cinema Special Edition: The VIETNAM Experience

The topic of critical backlash against INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is still hot two weeks after the film opened, and seems aimed primarily at the "light" portrayal of the plight of the Jewish people under Nazism, and the Jewish-American commando squad's glorified brutality-- the "fire with double-fire" approach. These issues point me to a dilemma that afflicts many Americans, the refusal to see beyond the bogus facade of "civilized morals"--even when their own lives hang in the balance.

When Wes Craven or Charles Bronson turn the other cheek back around and start blasting and hacking, we're supposed to go "oh how quickly civilized behavior falls away to reveal the savage!" and supposedly go home and feel bad about how quickly civilized behavior falls away to reveal the savage and worse, how much we enjoyed seeing it happen. But to me, I just feel bad that it's not quick enough, that the sucker vacationers in American horror and revenge movies don't start reverting to savagery until needless damage has been done to the RV, and when they do, there's little celebration of their return to the true wilderness of the chthonic. Once you realize you're in a horror or war film and no rescuer is going to hear your screaming and whining, you can begin to fight back, to find self-reliance, the true warrior spirit. It's like when a kid sent to his room until he learns to behave, he kicks and cries and gets it out of his system, he never stops crying or kicking but then after awhile realizes he's stopped, is calmer, and goes downstairs all at peace, realizing instinctively he's able to rejoin his parents, and they're going to not even bring up his tantrums but just accept the newfound man.

Hollywood's forgotten or doesn't want to remember this parenting strategy because it still thinks mom will come if it just cries and screams long enough. Maybe I was lucky to have parents who let me figure it out for myself, who were trained by whatever 70s child psychology Jaycees speaker wandered their way to resist their instinctive urge to soothe my fits of tears and rage. So maybe its this parental weakness across the board that has led to the change of a nation of adults to a nation of infants expecting, as Camille Paglia says, the law to behave like nurturant mother. Now when the final girl finally kills the slasher, she no longer bellows her victory cry but instead reverts back to being a frazzled whiner...

And it all leads me to ask why and realize that my Acid Movie thread must now address Vietnam. Before I begin, please keep in mind this DISCLAIMER, that I'm always only really talking about movies, not "reality." I have no idea what being a soldier is actually like, and I thank god I missed the draft, but I'm a big WW2 history enthusiast, played war nonstop up until the age I started smoking weed instead, but I am fascinated by the whole process, again, as seen in films and documentaries. And taking acid is a little like losing yourself to a primal savagery that can move beyond civilized empathy as needed. As a man you are far less likely to let a girlfriend manipulate her with tears and sniffling.

The story of acid in the America of the 1960s is a story of a nation in conflict between a renewed lust for life and an enhanced drive towards death, between the Rebels and the Republic, the old guard Don Draper types clinging by their fingernails to the 1950s American dream as it dissolved around them and the crazy peaceniks mocking and deriding everything that dream stood for. While dad swilled a cold beer and cheered the bombers on the news, his kids were out in Central Park, dropping tabs and flashing peace signs. Seldom before or since in American history has the line between old and young, life and death, love and hate, conformity and free-thinking, been so sharply and clearly drawn. And, in the field of combat, the same line existed between delusional top brass notions of "heart and minds" and the real blood-and-ambiguity-drenched quagmire of the killing field.

LSD erased all those lines...as well as all other artificial social constructs. It could make you very peaceful with yourself as you committed horrific violence against yourself or others, merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream of disconnect... On acid, you realize that even killing can be an expression of love... just ask the Manson family! Or the babysitter nuking the kid in the microwave and putting the TV dinner to bed (as the old wives' take went), or Native Americans apologizing to the buffalo as they kill it, understanding that they're killing themselves for all is connected. All murder is just projected suicide. The Native American's knew we always only ever eat ourselves. On acid, we knew it too. We tasted it. And it tasted like majestic purple mountains.


Taking acid certainly could prove a boost to your perception, heightening and sharpening your senses enabling the user to transcend their usual social more-laced strait-jacket. Whether over in the war or at home, what seemed like unshakable bedrocks only hours before--marriage, church, state, government, patriarchy, tradition--became suddenly clownish, yesterday's papers, tools of hypnosis to keep the cattle placid. Acid made killing 'real' to non-combatants because it shuckered them loose from the grip of the patriarchy, helped them think like the enemy, or how they imagined the enemy thought; slinking through the jungle, hard-wired and alive to every flapping beetle wing and blowing leaf, and best of all, free of all the moral inhibitions about killing that would mean almost certain death if left unchecked back in boot camp. Mashing open an innocent Vietnamese farmer's face with the butt of your rifle (as in PLATOON) would be intolerable sober, but is just another freaky thing to trip out once you surrender to the fact that you're living in a world... of... shit, as Private Pyle puts it in FULL METAL JACKET (1987). They didn't give acid out in the boot camp though, but beatings. Same result.

An integral -- though demonized by the liberal press-- part of boot camp is hazing, the beating of lagging cadets with soaps wrapped in towels, to toughen them up, give them a face-to-face taste with unendurable pain, the kind that transforms and darkens you, makes you less afraid since you know it can't get any worse. Anything less than that level of prolonged and traumatic beating up is just business as usual from then on; the volume is turned way down. This tradition is nothing new, and corresponds to Native American rituals that involve hanging by pierced shoulder muscles until you see your white buffalo vision and know you are a man. Women have the agony of childbirth; men have to find their own.

Or, you could just try taking too much acid, a sort of self-induced hazing. Either way, you have to do something to free yourself from living life in a state of fear-based wussiness... it takes a jolt to your whole body-mind-spirit in order to shake the civilized cowardice out of a man, to obliterate all breadcrumb trails back to mommy. You can't wait to turn savage after you're savagely killed, by then it's too late. You have to be already on fire to fight fire with fire. A shrink might call it trauma-induced sociopathy but then again, that in itself would hardly disqualify you from the draft.

In Private Pyle's case, the hazing works all too well, but he doesn't even wait to get to the jungle before he has to start blasting. There's always that one dopey kid in your circle who makes the mistake of letting the newly freed inner demon take over completely. Rather than just harnessing its energy. This dopey Pyle-type always has to do something stupid like mess with the cops or pull out his stash in public, or try and rape an elderly lady in the middle of the park, or play one last round of Russian roulette.


But if you do it right and stay open to change, just allow the demon to have a share in the company and not full ownership, then you're in business. You can let the demon out when you need to be cold and merciless, such as when breaking up with a long-time lover; breaking a dog's neck to put it out of its misery after you accidentally run it over; pulling the plug on comatose grandma's breathing apparatus, and so on. With the demon at the reins, hearing someone plead for their life doesn't break your heart anymore. Don't they see that death is no different than life? That they're just scared of the unknown, of change? That they're behaving like a kid trying to talk his mom out of making him leave for the first day of school? Death is just the kindergarten of the next level education system. Really it's their ego that's scared, for it knows it will be truly dead, for the ego does not endure, and once the ego is dissolved, all fear goes with it. When your brain is exploding with the eternity of existence, you no longer whine to yourself about whether your friends are giving you enough credit for its luminosity. And so, what is war but an amusement park, a roller coaster on which you give your war shout and wave your hands (because if you don't you'll probably scream like a buried-alive Poe character?


In Oliver Stone's PLATOON (1986) the life/death line is drawn between the "cool" soldiers who smoke pot and dance and sing like a bunch of ANIMAL HOUSE-meets-MASH regulars, headed by Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) vs. the bourbon-swilling homicidal conservatives, represented by Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger). You may be too young to remember, but PLATOON really hit a national nerve when it came out in 1986. Vietnam vets would see it and cry afterward, right in the theater, I know because I saw one, finally recognizing and then releasing some of the horror they had been holding in for so long. I was a sophomore in college and our homework in America in the 1960s class was to get out to the off-campus theater and see it, and so my gang of hippies and we figured, why not eat mushrooms beforehand? We called a cab, piled in, and the cool driver takes one look at our tie-dyes and said "go ahead and smoke a joint if you want."

We knew this homework assignment had become something akin to a living myth.


For me, the film and shrooms kicked in at once to result in a quick descent into a palpable madness of paranoia and nihilism. In the surround-sound theater, I could sense every bug buzz, every snap of a twig, in the jungles all around me, knowing the buzzing gnats slowly moving around might turn any moment into VC twig snaps, that every possible rustle of leaves might mean death. The experience was so vivid, my friend Jason had to leave during the Mai Lai massacre segment, but I was really into it... It was that feeling of "why not just kill 'em all?" that comes from being pushed past your limits, the realization that insanity has a purpose, a grisly kind of freedom. I was 19, the perfect draft age. The mushrooms in conjunction with the movie had shown me the ambivalent killer I could have been with just the flick of a switch.


This "death-embracing" aspect of LSD is something America never has been able to reconcile with its more peaceful half, just throwing baby and bathwater alike into prison and barring the door on any further conversation, at least in the US. In England the late-inning demonizing was taken with a grain of salt, and the Nietzschean rebirth from civilized wanker into super-warrior via psychedelics thing appears in British films to this day. Leo DiCaprio taps into it for his psychedelic interlude during a stretch of THE BEACH (2000) and Cillian Murphy finds his inner psycho for the climax of 28 DAYS LATER (2002). Shauna Macdonald (above) experiences a similar death/rebirth when falling into a pit of menstrual blood signifier slime in THE DESCENT (2005). It's the last straw of horror that snaps her free into CARRIE-style warrior woman.


The Japanese have always been fans of this conversion and the slew of samurai films such as SWORD OF DOOM (1966) illustrate a cosmic understanding of the difference between sympathy and true compassion. The antihero main character played by Tatsuya Nakadai, for example, kills a weary old man he meets on a hill, just because he seems to be a burden to his granddaughter. In sword battle contests he only cares about perfection of technique, barely noticing the corpses he leaves in his wake. Perhaps the Japanese, British, and Germans for that matter, are just a little better at "going there." May I venture to guess it comes from being bombed (more than once)?

We Americans can't abide freedom from resolve-weakening liberal head games without a little help from our lysergic friends. We need far more of a push to shed our civilized moral paralysis, as we see in our terror of issues like euthanasia, castration and abortion. Comatose, paralyzed, dying patients are kept alive for years, and convicted sex offenders begging to be castrated are turned down flat due to minor health risks. Every hospital should have a man like Willard/Kurz in APOCALYPSE NOW or SWORD OF DOOM's Tatsuya Nakadai (above) to walk through the wards and dispassionately off the incurably sick or comatose, castrating and severing and doing whatever needs to be done. But it's shocking just to think of it. We are too scared to face death square in the eye! Won't someone think of the children!!?!?!

But we do have Vietnam, a shorthand signifier of the 'state of mind' where American hypocrisy collapses on itself and leaves you standing there in the bush with a gun in your hand, clinically insane from lack of sleep, and with a head full of contradictory orders.



APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) is the ultimate trip for Vietnam, the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY of war films, updating the original acid story, Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS to accommodate a broad spectrum of black comic situations. Brando's ambiguity as Kurz in the last section is always a bit of a let-down to what came before (maybe Brando wasn't 'experienced' anymore by then?). But before he bogs it up, the peaks happen often, most notably in the big bridge scene that's preceded by Lance mentioning to Chef (Frederic Forrest) as they're cruising up to the final checkpoint, beyond which is Cambodia: "You know that last tab of acid I had? I dropped it." Forrest replies, as if barely listening, "Far out."

Willard (Martin Sheen) gets off the boat at the bridge, bringing Lance with him like a magic protection symbol, like the white cloth pinned to the nurse's jacket in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. Everyone fighting at this bridge seems lost and abandoned ("Who's in charge here?" / "Ain't you?") until they find a taciturn spectral presence named Roach (the Duane Jones zombie figure equivalent from IWAZ) who they bring out of his pot-smoke-and-Hendrix-filled cubby hole so he can take out a crazed VC sniper in the black night distance. "He's close man... real... close", says the Roach, his eyes glazed over with the 1000 yard stare. He loads his grenade launcher and just fires it straight up into the air without even looking, BAM, all is quiet, no more sniper. Roach's face barely changes except to snarl a bit as he whispers, "motherfucker" and pops out his grenade shell


"Soldier," an impressed, spooked Willard asks him. "Do you know who's in charge here?"

"Yeah" says Roach before disappearing back into the blackness. Who does the Roach mean? the devil? Or something even more bizarre, past duality, the Kali energy loosed upon the world? Roach is the end point of the Lance and Bunny mystical surrender/conversion... the ultimate acid soldier. His very name is synonymous with adaptation and survival: Roach will inherit the earth and in his stoned, gone expression is the true spirit of the Vietnam War -- at least as understood by the hippie layman.

Willard's question is, to Roach, Jimi Hendrix's same question in that song, "Are you experienced?" i.e. have you taken acid and 'passed' the test it dropped on your desk? The answer to both is the same: "yeah." (Roach looks a lot like Hendrix might in the war). No doubt that Roach is "experienced."

Earlier in the film we see the crew panic and machine gun a boat full of Vietnamese, but it's they who then label Willard the cold blooded killer when he shoots the sole wounded survivor. Willard notes that the American approach to Vietnam was "to shoot you full of holes and then give you a band-aid." and that the brass wanting to take down Kurz for killing a few suspected spies is "like passing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." We can't really blame the crew, just kids who know--as we do--any false move on the part of a seemingly innocent boat family might result in a suicide bomb or pulling a machine gun from a bag of rice.

According to the documentary, HEART OF DARKNESS, Coppola, cast and crew did lots of acid on set in the Philippines and you can feel it in the film's pulsing dissolves and apocalyptic imagery. Similarly, for PLATOON, Oliver Stone was actually there as a foot soldier in Vietnam and is admittedly very much "experienced." In each case you can feel the understanding of the killer instinct and the refusal to condemn it in the hypocritical "give 'em a band-aid" way of the American social structures.

THE DEER HUNTER focuses on the moment of facing this fear of death, but it never gets past it. Walken's addiction to Russian roulette indicates a kind of suicidal ideation autopilot. But the moods of APOCALYPSE NOW and PLATOON move beyond fear of death and into deep archetypal breakdown like true acid poetry. Cimino can't get beyond his own limited leftist jaundice.

In the end, you need to overcome your fear of death in order to become a true warrior. For some reason the bulk of cowardly Middle America thinks of tripping as somehow treason against humanity, and yet it would make for better soldiers, less afraid of dying. Almost all the people who want psychedelics to stay illegal have never tried them, just as people who want guns illegal don't own them. People are against the death penalty because their loved ones were never murdered. It's all part of the same hypocrisy.

Who's in charge here? Anyone with the balls to let go of fear and stick out their tongue for the real eucharist. As Brando advises in APOCALYPSE NOW, "you must make a friend... of horror." It's the only true thing he says, even if he already said it in LAST TANGO IN PARIS. 

Great Acid Movies #1: MOBY DICK (1956)

Here's an old existentialist shark hunter "joke:" an existentialist dies and goes to heaven and he's all excited to ask God why humans exist. "To feed the sharks!" is God's taciturn reply. The man replied, aghast "But God, we're hardly ever even in the water anymore!" To which God replies, "You hightailed it out of there as soon as you found out. Why do you think I created seals?"

Man never feels he's lost his purpose when he's battling leviathans at sea. Be they giant sharks, squids, whales, or sea serpents... the leviathan is made in God's real image and likeness, shipmates. Hunting this double-crossing man-eating God stand-in with single-minded vengeance (for creating us just to be shark food) is a true "if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him" spiritual path. All of which is why John Huston's MOBY DICK is such a good acid film. Like Huston's other acid-ready films (such as UNDER THE VOLCANO) there's no psychedelic drugs in it, but it comes from an age of writing when great minds were just more open to seeing an ambivalent God in the nature around them, rather than adopting the cold, clinically cynical attitude of today's scientific-minded writers. And Huston's just naturally dosed, which is also known as being a badass to the bone, to the point you don't even have to prove it. Melville also is just such a badass and my guess is that in his day their bread had ergot in it.

The key scene is Ahab's slow as molasses and twice as dark speech to Starbuck about how he hunts not just a dumb brute "that acted out of instinct" but "look here, Starbuck. All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me. He heaps me, yet he is but a mask. Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate, the malignant thing that has plagued and frightened man since time began, the thing that mauls and mutilates our race, not killing us outright, but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung." Seeing him say that, in a vicious hooded Kubrick dead-eyed stare close-up, makes the tripping whiskey heart sing with intrepid excitement and shout "yeah!" 

Just look at that top picture, tied to the whale and still stabbing at it furiously! That's what tripping's like, sometimes, being lashed to a giant white whale and just trying to remember to take a deep breath every time you go under, and keep calm, keep stabbing, and know deep down only your own hell-bent fury will see you through. That's how you surf the psychedelic tidal waves, shipmates! Stabbing all the way! And singing as you do it, "oh you kings and hoses / blow down your blood red roses!"


With Dick you got everything: a tattooed giant as your friend, the born-tripping Orson Welles in a white beard giving a rousing lecture in full poetic nautispeak, an Elijah whose babbling prophecies carry an acid shiver as ancient and true; and an Ahab that doesn't bellow so much as twist with every word, the way one speaks when acid has tinged their blood with so much electric current they wind up in body like a watch chain around a pole. When he finally appears he comes off like Abe Lincoln crossed with Colonel Kurz lording it over a psych ward full of schizophrenic pirates.



People say that Peck--38 at the time--was too young to play Ahab, that it should have been Welles, instead. I say thee, nay. Peck is perfect; his stovepipe hat and beard giving him a trippy Lincoln gone-wrong patina. And Orson's presence is felt all through the film via his spellbinding oration in the church scene anyway, allowing Peck to emerge as the dark shadowed self to Orson's resonant rev: skeletal where Orson's robust; evil where Orson is good, etc. (check Orson's ham enunciation as Ahab in his Mercury Broadcast of Moby Dick here). Welles' bravado is contained and thus more powerful given only one scene. Plus, Peck uses his natural charisma, his Atticus Finch oratory. to inspire loyalty and fervor, where Welles would likely inspire only eye rolls (on the radio show he sounds hammy, adopting an "Argh, matey!"-style pirate accent).

A key scene that shows off Peck's genius is when Ahab finally emerges from his quarters and gets out and stalks around the bridge before the assembled crew, poetically ranting against the white whale and nailing a gold doubloon to the mast - the reward for the one who first spots Moby Dick ("He's white I say!") I always feel ready to die for Ahab 100%. in these scenes, even mercilessly sober. At last, here is the true meaning of Christmas, an ancient dark messiah who wants to stalk up the chimney and crucify Santa Clause on the TV antennae, just like you always dreamed of doing, but thought was wrong; but, at sea, a captain cannot be wrong.

And there was Pip, Dear Pip the cabin boy. And Starbuck, whose courage was like any other commodity on the ship, there when needed but not to be foolishly squandered.


For me this is Peck at his finest. Frankly, I didn't know he had it in him. He was perfect in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD but that kind of calming patriarchal decency was hung on him like an albatross. Here on the Pequod, in that crazy black stove pipe hat and beard, his eyes wild with endorphin-activating Old Testament energy, he's the closest thing yet I'd seen to a living mythic American wild man archetype, that is, until Daniel Day Lewis showed up as Bill the Butcher, and later Daniel Plainview. When I hear Ahab ask who will follow him after Moby Dick, "to his death!" I invariably jump up and cheer, going insane just like Queequeg. Even though I know full well the Pequod won't come back to port, but swim upwards to the bottom of Davy Jones' locker, I can feel the pull in my blood like a magnet. That's psychedelic shamanism at its finest, shipmates! To your flagons, then, for the full measure of grog --it's hot as Satan's hoof!

Great Acid Movies #25: PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002)

A mad meditation on color, love, music and maturity, sandwiched between auteur director Paul Thomas Anderson's better received epics MAGNOLIA and THERE WILL BE BLOOD, PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE was perhaps meant to unite Sandler's ticket-huffing demographic with cineaste hipsters; it was maybe a wrong move as both groups stayed away in droves, snuffing the film's chances for box office recognition. But here me now: PUNCH is no boondoggle! It's a gem and all it takes to see the luster is to get over yourself for hating HAPPY GILMORE. I have. And so are you.

Ostensibly exploring the agony of having seven nagging older sisters, the ecstasy of first love in Hawaii, anger management, and coming clean about porn addiction, PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is really about sound and color and if you can key into it as a purely sensory experience (ala FANTASIA or 2001) then the brilliance, the love and the redemption flow unstoppably all over your pants. Even if you saw it once and didn't like it, I'd say toss your rolled-up expectations in the trash and just sit in it, without expectations, one more time. For though it seems that Anderson is following the same Lynchian framework of ERASERHEAD -- the isolated everyman in a strange landscape of alienating industrial sounds and soul crushing neighbors and bullying relatives --it's more a fable or a light show, or a concert in words. If casual Anderson fans tend to skip over this film in their worshipful canonizing, they miss the heart and soul of the Anderson auteur persona. Unlike his mentor Robert Altman--who can get bogged down in his actors' improv thesping--Anderson is a track-shot formalist at heart and in LOVE the cast may be small but this isn't a HARD EIGHT-style Sundancing chamber piece. It's a candy colored dazzler of lyrsergic intensity and late 1960s optimism still simmering in the deep recesses of even the most repressed dork's heart of hearts.

Anderson guides you, via Barry's shocking blue suit, to experience the movie as pure cinematic color. He even advises in the DVD gatefold:

Get Barry’s suit blue, blue blue. Don’t be shy. Get Barry’s shirt white. Don’t be afraid to let it bloom a bit. Turn up the contrast! Make sure your blacks are black and listen to it loud.

Yeah... he loves long beautifully-constructed tracking shots, and here they take on a poetic abstraction, sometimes quite literally dissolving into the brilliant color morphing video art work of Jeremy Blake. That kind of pure cinematic abstract art is often misunderstood by mallrat American audiences trained by lackluster public school art programs to look balefully on attempts to infuse abstract poetry and surrealism into mainstream movies. Adam Sandler and art are--to the great majority of filmgoers in this country-- at opposite ends of the symbolic day, never to meet. Art is what bores you at afternoon museums while you count the minutes to cocktail hour; Sandler is what you watch way, way after cocktail hour, after dinner, after the parents have gone to bed and your townie friends show up with a case of beer... and probably fucking Slim Jims. 

If they bring some tabs of acid too, though, you'll want PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE to split the difference... Suddenly Adam Sandler sulking through the abstract parts of FANTASIA and it all begins to make perfect... whoa, is that... a... why does he have a harmonium on his desk, man? Far out. 

This is Anderson's tale of Kafka-Lynch 'the normal, cranked' insanity, but it carries the low-key sense of redemption and manly arc circumventing that is Anderson's stock and trade. Like Val Lewton, Anderson has an ability to be patient with his self-centered characters, leading them with unrelenting compassion and firmness unto awakening and transformation. A comparison for the visual style would have to be the Coen Brothers, but the Coens' love is much harsher and deriding. Anderson's love on the other hand is that of an older brother: if there's some need to poke fun and be cruel, it's always with an inevitable beatific and benevolent purpose (forcing the younger sibling to stand up for himself, for example). In that good brother way, he's protective without fighting the little brother's battles. To put it very broadly, Anderson's movies are older brother mentorships, inspiring awareness of love and self-reliance no matter how harsh the brutality, ala Nicholas Ray or Altman, while the Coen Brothers' movies are witty formalist meditations that inspire awareness of existential mortality and the inevitable crunch-crunch of death's jaws, ala Aldrich or Kubrick. Huge difference? You tell me...


That sort of tough love of an older brother for a younger sister or brother is felt especially deeply in PUNCH-DRUNK, which chronicles the "coming out" of one of L.A's more deeply hidden sweet souls. As friendly to this cause as that arc is, it's nonetheless the visual landscape of the film that merits the lysergic connection. The pinks and blues and whites and deep black silhouettes are all the sort of stuff many directors use to hide the flimsy material but in PUNCH-DRUNK's case it is the material; the style shapes and frames and focuses and blurs until we recognize that pure art is the way to shift attention from the banal blinders-on crawl of drab social reality into the liquid present where life is a continually moving, breathing changing force, expressing itself constantly through the air, the stars and the sea and every random song select or spin of the roulette wheel adding you forward into ever more complex and radiant equations. So when you see PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE, even stone-cold sober, you can follow Anderson's breadcrumb trail right into that same candy colored universe of egoless nonjudgmental acceptance. In short, watching this movie gets you toasted on art, love, and a dizzying array of overlapping dialogue by the seven sisters, who make the witches of MACBETH seem like Girls Gone Wild.

The sisters are just one facet of this film which hold massive hidden depth within its seemingly "quirky indie" surface. They all talk simultaneously while saying different relevant things, like a maddening Greek chorus with everyone on the wrong page of the script. There's parts in this film that go by so fast they're easy to miss the first time around: the sparkling modern kitchen and nanny with baby in the house of the conniving sex chat blackmailer "Georgia" is something I want to see again, for example. Her contented, housewife status attests to the success of previous scams she's pulled with the mystically named "Mattress Man" (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) husband. As said the dark father/older brother figure, Hoffman is also worth seeing several times to get all the great, blustery David Mamet-ish expletive/repetitive venom. He's the evil version of Burt Reynolds in BOOGIE NIGHTS or Tom Cruise from MAGNOLIA, grown old and portly. From a lysergi-mythic vantage point, Mattress Man is seen not as a dark father per se, but the one whom appoints himself the villain that must be faced/stood up to in order to "earn" the passage into manhood and marriage. Brevity prevents me from gushing in length about the always revealing Emily Watson, perfectly cast as the patient love interest, eyes sparkling with undisguised love and fascination with violence.

Lastly, what can you say about Sandler in this film, other than he finally finds a role that uses his Nicholas Ray-little-boy-lost rage for good rather than the evil? I'll confess I'm way too highbrow to have seen even a single Sandler movie other than this one (I went to high school with too many boys like him), but after seeing LOVE a second time, I'm seriously considering throwing HAPPY GILMORE or something onto my cue.


You, o snobby reader mine, needn't get that drastic. Just open your heart and forgive Sandler his schnooky SNL trespasses and dig on a big triumph that may have slipped by you one way or another. More importantly, if you've seen it once, you haven't really seen it. Anderson redeemed Mark Wahlberg (BOOGIE NIGHTS) and Tom Cruise (MAGNOLIA), and you're only a hold-out in the waiting room of ignorance if you can't finally come in and admit he's done the same for Sandler. So ignore the "misfire" tags of those critics too hung up on expectations to dig a low-key candy-colored Valentine's Day essential floating through their midst. It's a movie that you can't help but connect to your own life; it helps you remember that you too are capable of true love and redemption. I mean yeah, it's a tripper movie about a total square, man. But dig, he's got cajones. El hombre has the love in his life; he's a man at last; he's encountered the eternal maturation flower of the third eye opening. He's let his spirit fly and crunch at will. It ain't got drugs, but the movie itself is one giant candy tab... just turn up the contrast to savor that blue suit, crank up the volume and Anderson'll take you there... to the Loveland, where redemption comes in bright colored sheets, preferably displayed at eye level in the center aisle... The colors sound electric and the music is so good you need it loud to have really seen it



Read my very special Andrew Sarris blogathon overview on Paul Thomas Anderson here

Some Kind of Mushroom: GO ASK ALICE (1973)

It's a heavy trip, being addicted to 'drugs.' In the case of the 1973 TV movie version of the 'anonymous diary' GO ASK ALICE, drugs are a vague mix of cocaine, amphetamine, quaaludes, Valium, marijuana, but mainly--weirdly enough--LSD. Moron says what, now? That's what happens to sweet Alice (Jamie Smith-Jackson, who's excellent) after she first blows off her nerdy high school friend to hang out with the cool kids. Her first trip occurs when she's passed a soft drink at a party. The kids around her chant "button button - who's got the button?" as they put the white cap-like object in their mouths. The cap, I guess, was acid. But how does that relate to the button-button? Alice notes in the diary voiceover later that night that once she let go of fear and symbolically died at that party she felt, for the first time, beautiful.

Dewey eyed lying in bed, she ponders (in her voiceover diary entry) never doing the drug again, or seeing the boy who gave it to her. Seconds after writing in her diary that she has no interest in ever doing it again, her new boyfriend calls and she goes running down the stairs and out the door and starts doing coke. A scene later and she is 'hooked' on a regimen of her mom's tranquilizers, speed, and acid. The confusion over what drugs she's doing might not be in the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is.A commercial break later and she's hooked on LSD.

It's right there one who is "experienced" smells a narc.

Do you know how hard I tried to be addicted to LSD in the 1980s? It's impossible. Those of us who tried to do it on a daily basis soon learned it just left us exhausted and stressed out (unless we micro-dosed every other day, like mature adults). There's nothing physically addictive about acid, and anyone knows that to be tripping your face off all the time would be horrible, we'd wind up like Jesus dancing on a tiny table top in the middle of a schizophrenic snake pit. And the idea of junkies shaking and scratching as they turn tricks to pay for their next LSD hit is ridiculous. Heroin or meth, crack or coke, sure - I've never been there but I can believe it thanks to to the spasming torture of alcoholic withdrawal symptoms. But psychedelics like LSD and DMT are totally different. LSD was used in the 50s as a cure for alcoholism. And yet 'acid' pills (?) are clearly the drug of choice in GO ASK ALICE. There's no mention of heroin, and when she's introduced to speed it's in pill form, which is the same thing as an upper, i.e. amphetamine, which the narrative states she'd been taking long before that. So what the fuck? Did this Alice, the anonymous author of the original tract, ever even see a drug?

the 'big' money

Certain scenes from this film were burned into my head from when I saw it in in school, circa third grade, in the seventies. None of these scenes make any actual sense (maybe that's why they registered with me as a kind of nightmarish alternate reality). They key thing I remember/ed is the brief bit where Alice and her fellow druggie runaway acid addict are in their nightshirts and on their knees on dirty grey shag carpet in some older couple's apartment, begging for LSD pills like doggies. Maybe I resonated because my brother and I played similar games with our babysitter, shhh, but that was for candy and, occasionally, stickers. Can you imagine wanting to do acid with leering adult perverts right in your own neighborhood, maybe in a tract home that is modeled the same as yours? Everyone seems like a leering adult pervert on acid to begin with. Also, it's the banality of the room and the look of the couple that make the scene so horrific, but it's also the wild, desperate, submissive look in the girls' eyes, their matching straight dirty blonde hair. It''s haunted me all my life.

But, as with the drug references, it's very (intentionally?) muddled. What pill exactly does the creepy sadist have in his hand if its not acid? Are the girls in withdrawal or just bored? What sick game is he proposing in his muffled voice, and why does one girl lunge at him while another spins around and races into the other room screaming? The effect is unsettling - as if the film is a nonsensical dream deliberately trying to upset and confuse us while making the crimes depicted impossible to duplicate, scrambling the details to a nightmare logic degree. The only other place one can find dislocated drug den space like this is in David Lynch movies, like the blue-light saturated, slowed-motion, after-hours coke parties at the local roadhouse.

This surreal melting extends to non-drug interactions too: one day Alice walks in on her boyfriend to find him in bed with someone else (see below) My fellow third graders schoolmates argued over whether it was a boy or girl in bed with him, for months! Watching it now, some 30+ years later, I can't help but think the vagueness is deliberate, to muddy the waters, to depict the druggie world as it must look in the brains of children for whom adult realities are constantly shifting and getting harder to navigate, where gay scenes are so shocking we may very well instantly block them out with alternate cover imagery.

What Alice Sees before leaving

What we see after Alice leaves

Now that I'm able to stop pause and make screenshots (above) I can see it's a deliberate switch: first a very dark-haired girl is in bed, flashing Alice a weird, creepy smile, then it's her boyfriend and another dude with their shirts off). Either way Alice steals his money and grabs a bus to San Francisco with her Kay Lenz-ish friend.

William Shatner eventually helps her get clean. I remember her outburst at a drug counseling group when a fellow addict seems to be enjoying his tales of glue-sniffing just a little too much (and then he offers her something called "a mixed bag"): "He's getting high just talking about getting high," Alice says, after storming out of the circle. "And you're getting high off of his high, and I'm getting high off of your high. And it's one big contact high!" That line seemed to me, even at the time, seeing this in first grade, as the one kernel of truth, and it haunted me all through my first AA meetings. In fact, remembering this scene kept me out of AA for longer than it might have otherwise. The grainy TV movie image of her walking away triumphant from the myopic addict circle was my badge of resistance against AA's cult reputation.

One area wherein this ambiguity and deliberate fogging device works (to promote childhood playground discussion perhaps of what really happened?) is family dynamics: The parents are oblivious to how zonked the kids are at Alice's birthday party, even giving them champagne. Later they prove blind to Alice's pain, and dismiss her real concerns about druggie reprisals (after she rats out a tweaked babysitter) with rote speeches about standing up for herself.

The result: someone doses her soft drink while she's babysitting (we're tipped to her being drugged when Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" starts playing on the soundtrack) and you know how the rumor goes about babysitting on acid (1). Alice locks herself up in a closet to resist the temptation (apparently overwhelming in 70s babysitters) to put the baby in the oven and the chicken in the crib. Luckily the lock holds and the baby is saved. When she comes out of it her hands are all bandaged from having tried to claw through the door, Poe-style. It's pretty ridiculous, putting herself through what would be hell even straight (rather than just watching TV and letting it pass) and leaving the infant unattended, rather than risk some abstract urban legend hazard, like now that she stopped doing it for awhile she suddenly believes the parental hysteria flame-fanning hysteria of the parent-baiting newscasters.

comes a straightedge

But for all that--the parents aren't the bad guys, which is sooo 70s. Parents were expected to have their own lives, and help their kids best they can, but not become dicks about it, or get all micro-managing and helicoptery. Therapists came with innate social stigma. If your kid was in therapy then your family had 'problems' and you were shunned, so you basically had to commit suicide before your mom would agree to send you a therapist, which is good and bad, I think.

At any rate, William Shatner is there to help her transition. Fake mustache or no, he's actually pretty wise, assuring her there's no easy answers, no specific thing she can just eliminate to get her life back on track. It's going to take ruthless self-honesty, work, and time. Damn, dude, time sucks.

Oh yes. That really is Robert Carradine, above, as the sleazy druggie boyfriend. Allow it.

In the end, for all its vague twisting and avoiding the gritty details, GO ASK ALICE was a major cultural touchstone of its time, seen by nearly everyone my age and that's enough to make it 'important' as a factor in the larger teen drug equation. It's the movie that taught us to fear psychedelics as much as we feared heroin, coke, pot, etc. and in the process taught us that our parents knew even less about drugs than we did.

Yet for all that, ALICE still works: the performance from Jamie Smith-Jackson is spellbinding. She goes through so many changes so fast she barely seems like the same person from scene to scene (the closest comparison I can think of is De Niro's Travis Bickle) -- and there's no quick short happy ending, just one trial after another. It's because of these trials, though, that Alice endures, even grows as a person. Like the Airplane song goes, she is some kind of a mushroom, and so is the film surrounding her --both have adapted to find nourishment even in the mire of after-school message bullshit.

For if drugs were legal, Alice wouldn't be having these problems - that's the thing. If the deans just passed LSD out at graduation then the evil kids wouldn't have any more power to seduce, hypnotize, and destroy. Until adults stop demonizing what they don't understand, older kids with drug savvy will always have the most power; but if the parents have the drugs, and the kids want some, then forget it --they'll behave like angels.

As it is now, even if you have the most beautiful, spiritual experience in your life on acid, even if it brings you out of suicidal depression, you can't tell your parents because they'd just send you to rehab or call the cops. So the creeps who gave you the stuff become the only people you trust, the only ones who know the score, so when they say heroin and coke are even MORE beautiful, well the only thing holding you back are warnings from adults who warned you off LSD too. If you're taught to think all drugs are the same, and all bad, then all drugs become good once you have even a single good experience. And they're not. Some are downright evil.

I believe that if psychedelics and pot were legal a whole new shift in the drug war would take place and the scummy leeches like Alice's boyfriend would be down to just the nasty shit like crank and coke to make their living. Hell, I'd be anti-drugs then. But as long as you make spiritually transformative chemicals like DMT, psilocybin, and LSD as illegal and as demonized as the evil shit, it's like you're giving a bunch of grotty hairbag scrubs power over your kids, and then wondering why they're finding God for themselves in some rock venue parking lot, rather than being spoon fed God in some dozy Sunday sermon. Go ask Alice, I think she'll know... that you played yourself, America. You gave up logic and proportion, and instead trusted the shadiest drug dealer of all: the evening news, sponsored by Ortho.

NOTES:
1. The big urban legends on acid were 1) the kid who jumped out the 10th story window thinking he could fly, and 2) the babysitter who put the baby in the oven and the chicken in the crib.

The Acidemic Halloween Chthonian Reader

Halloween is a time to look back, into graves and open mouths of demons, surrendering of the soul, and of the white patriarchy to the avenging rainbow warrior feminine. I too must look back, for like so many wanderers watching the credits of their lifetime movies looming like an approaching purple storm cloud on the horizon and unable to stop the car or even turn around as the yellow lines drag me relentlessly forward into their thresher consonants, I have known fear and felt that pang. I, Tiresius the groin-gashed grail junky present humble sampling of writings from Bright Lights and the earlier years of my own Acidemic that can perhaps incite you or your other to an orgy of castration and Kali-esque bloodletting!

Each title is a link to the article itself. I was kidding about the bloodletting, unless it's fake blood. For Halloween craves not to be pressed against the hot Texan window of blind justice.

An Unsawed Woman: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003 remake)

"... this is the slamming indictment of both feminism and the counterculture as reflected in the swinging free love hedonists of the 1970s. Erin is riding in a van full of dope-smoking wannabe non-conformists, but she is utterly unable to accept that in this part of Texas, right and wrong are just different ways to skin the same hippy. Even taking into consideration the amount of drugs in the car, Erin insists that they call the cops, and then insists that the sheriff do his job, drive on over, and relieve them of the responsibility of dealing with this hitchhiker's dead body. In other words, Erin is one of those free love liberals who see the cops as "pigs" until the situation gets out of hand, at which point their aid is not merely requested, but demanded. As Camille Paglia writes, "Liberalism sees law as tyrant father but demands it behaves as nurturant mother." (SP, 3, 2005)

 "What It Takes to Make a Softie" - Breaking Noir Tradition in The Leopard Man 

"Now, in "real" space and time the leopard wouldn't have let her get so far from the trestle. Thus, the locked door of the mother is presented as outside of the realms of time and space. Her oblivious mother reacts toward the screaming and pounding as if her daughter has only just left and is obviously faking it because she's too lazy to walk across the street. Plus, she somehow knows that the child is still without the cornmeal!" (2005)

 The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier - Re-Visiting Death Proof 

"As 16-year-old driving students we're all subjected to the ominous expectant dread conjured by the health class highway safety film, which often shows 'real life' grisly auto fatalities. From this, at least in pre-internet generations, comes the original Faces of Death locus of attraction-repulsion. Some of the scenes are allegedly real shots from accidents, but most are faked (and we've no way of knowing which is which), but-- as a way of scaring young viewers into sober vigilance--it becomes sacred. With Death Proof, Tarantino seems to recognize that this gory educational interlude is in fact a cinematic rite of passage. Once we survive the trauma of this public education-sanctioned gorefest, we're ready to move into symbolic adulthood--like the second carload of girl friends-out of the college-like stoner flirt world of the Texas Chili Parlor and into the real working world of film crews, i.e. the people behind the illusion. " (BL, 2008)

The Screen Eats the Soul: Draining Satan's Image

The devil on the other hand, is the lawyer working to keep you out of the prison of staleness that results naturally from one's fear of change; the devil offers a way that egoic indulgence can prosper. Depressed from being inside all day watching old movies? Don't go outside and get some air, son! No need for that. Here, nip some bourbon from your dad's liquor cabinet! Now you can watch more TV with your stale headache gone, long gone.

Note that for the Catholics in the film, any contact with the feminine is risky and traumatic: Karras abandons his own mother, leaving her to rot in Bellevue for the vague reason that he's "busy" (chilling in the dorms with his male buddies). And right there is the battle for good and evil boiled down to the basics: the banal made uncanny through proximity: the fear of going into your daughter's room to tuck her in at night-- with all the shady incestuous priestly pedophile implications that tug hither and yon--cranked to eleven. The biological father of Regan has left mom, and cannot even call his own daughter on her birthday, probably for fear of getting the peevish voice of mother. He doesn't want to face his wife just as Karras is loath to face his own mother and gradually that extends to Regan herself since his guilt over missing her birthday causes him to miss the next one too. Thus Regan's possession is a flinging open the doors to the dark animus of the anal command to enjoy, a lack created, in effect, by the father's fear of his own castration (or rather afraid of being forced to check under his elastic band of protection and realize that his phallus is already long gone). (Acidemic #7, 2008)

 

Someone to Fight Over Me- Feminism, S&M, and the Daemonic in Twilight

The erotic charge of setting a romance in a past era lies with the straitjacket moral code: the only way a woman can keep her honor is by resisting both the man and her own desire. She indirectly invites the overpowering on herself as a means of sidestepping issues of her feminine integrity and honor, and the uncertainty of responsibility over one's actions. This is not weakness on her part, but an intrinsic understanding of what's truly erotic about societal loopholes; she has the strength to surrender and go limp... (2010)  

 

 An Argento Family Reunion Special: Crying over Mother of Tears

"Exhibitionism, which must run deep in all artistically successful families, becomes its own obsessive double in the Argento world, especially once dad directs both mom, Daria Niccoldi, and daughter, Asia, together as he does here (and also did in the traumatizingly strange Stendahl Syndrome). The end of this film, which is basically watching gallons upon gallons of yucky ooze get poured onto Asia as she climbs to freedom, is something that, taken at an incestuous Elektra-complex meta-textual level, would be at home in Eraserhead." (2008) 

Naomi Watts: Cinema's Post-Modern Mother of Mirrors 

...the impossibility of any sort of sexual interaction between Watts and her giant ape "son/lover/father" is an interesting mirror to our own position as viewers of the film who harbor an objective longing to "possess" Watts in whatever way we might possess an image. Our eternal misfortune as viewers stranded in an audience is that we're "wrong-sized" and "wrong-dimensioned" for the onscreen diegesis. If we were able to jump inside the movie of King Kong we would be as clumsy and destructive as Kong himself, crashing around the New York City sets, not knowing proper 1930s etiquette — bumping into the blue screen and knocking over the gaffer's coffee. Much as we desire Naomi, we can only try and protect her much as Kong does, and once the airplanes get him, so too do the house lights and ushers come to kick us out of the theater.

BIRTH: Kidman out-Kubrick's herself with an even shorter leading man...

With her hair cut Rosemary's Baby short, her legs spindly thin, it's as if she's Rosemary the Sequel, with that film's Satanic promises of wealth fulfilled, and she still trapped in the mundane patriarchal conspiracy of conception and birth. Sean represents more than a reincarnated little bastard-- he's her inner child reduced to a zombie. He's the ghost of her true nature, and she hardly recognizes him at first, but when she finally does it makes her giddy. (Acidemic 2004)

Great Acid movies: MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

Consider the Satanic initiation of Hazel Court in the film: desperate to regain Prospero's favor after the arrival of lovely Jane Asher, Court undergoes a solo ceremony where she is "stabbed" by a series of shamanic figures from throughout the ages: there's an Egyptian, Japanese, Russian, all waving their scythes and knives over her prostrate immobile heaving buxom figure and distorted through sheet metal reflection and green tinting. With it's thumping Les Baxter score (which John Williams ripped off for JAWS), this scene should be familiar to anyone whose ever dropped hardcore psychedelics (or had a really bad fever) and had to undergo similar life/death blurring at the hands of "the threshold dwellers." (Acidemic, 2009)

Acid's Greatest Horror #1 - ANTICHRIST (2010)

May I venture to take a page from the book of Camille Paglia and suggest that if someone is afraid to look head on into the wild devouring Dionysian oceanic dissolution represented by pure unleashed feminine sexual drive, then it is they who are the misogynists, not Von Trier, and not Sam Peckinpah or Roman Polanski or Hitchcock or D.W. Griffith--directors who at least have the cajones to wade into the murky swamp of the chthonic? At least their films are more fearless and honest than the films of the countless directors who rather than wade at all, just scoop out a handful of muck from off the bank and then parade it around on a stick back in safe old dry land, or they just hide it in tight spandex and shoot it out of a wet t-shirt canon, then wait to film it after the threat has been "subdued", i.e. objectified, crashed, burned at the stake, and/or mangled. Is there a difference between silicone and sawdust when it comes to Norman's mommy's smothering breasts? Ding dong the witch is dead and she got a nose job! But when the witch melts back into water it's no more a death than the Medusa losing a snake of her hair. Norman knows this all too well; he must kill and display his trophies over and over again; the hair keeps growing long after the body has withered to bone and parchment skin. Death not ends it, only castration... Ancient, old Teiresius with his bitch-tits, wandering off into the Led Zeppelin wasteland night.." (Acidemic, 2009)

 A Moon, Cat Women, and Thou...

"I like that there's no exterior footage in CAT WOMEN, no daytime shots, mismatched day-for-night driving scenes, no sense of grass or natural light. On the dark side of the moon life is one long semi-sleep in a cavernous beatnik jazz club. It's soothing to my Swedish blood to imagine a world where the sun never comes up and the planet is populated only by cat girls who, for all their guile, are so much more sympathetic than the clods of astronaut turf-clawers like the gullible, brain-dead Sonny Tufts or the suspicious, reptilian Victor Jory who never doubts his own moral rightness as he punches out women right and left (he'd be a great candidate for Summers' Isle)--or the nakedly greedy and self-serving Walt (Douglas Fowley), and the blank-as-candy Doug (William Phillips), who somehow earns the love of Lambda, ah sweet Lambda (Susan Morrow)."

There it is -- Kali, aloft!!! Ride, hippy!  Ride! Happy Halloween!!