Queen of Disks

Finally, the second part of that tarot mockumentary Ray Barbetto called "sinsational! (sic)"

The 12 Steps of Godard

Godard can set you free. Oui, it's true. I've been tripping out on the mazes and head games and poignant transcendental beauty of that Godard set with Detective (with Julie Delpy, pictured at left) and Passion and so forth on it. Anyway, here's the 12 steps.

1. Realize that all the plots and story lines that crop up will never go the way they should, and you need to let go of that.
2. Realize that Godard is better understood by people outside of France. Because Godard needs subtitles. People mumble.
3. Make an unconscious decision to trust Godard's love for you, the viewer, for his actors, and for the cinema. Make an effort to connect with that love. Godard is best taken with a light heart... as are all French films! Lighten up, American capitalist!
4. As you release your common expectations of story and ending, look for the collapse of boundaries between signifiers, genres, etc. Intertextuality is Godard's thing, so people are always reading aloud, and the stuff they read comments on the mise-en-scene and on the film itself, and on filmmaking, but obliquely.
5. If you are still having trouble, try this: Imagine you are making a collage in art class -- cutting out pictures from magazines and placing them in odd ways. You cut out a model from Elle, put her in the middle of a steel mill photo from the 1800s and add a giant tomato from a cooking magazine. Surrealisme!
6. Now, make the connection between the autobiographical and the universal and see how everything connects, fractal-like, down to the smallest atoms and up to the solar system, and onwards in both directions-- always the same actions and interactions. The myths of the ancient Greeks are still being played out, but with couch potatoes and birth control, speed bumps and Ambien.
7. Now you are beginning to grasp the underlying unifying cosmic principle behind coincidence, synchronicity and intuition. So go back to your collage and now pretend you could make the collage paper into a movie screen - with music and sound and images, all to play with as you choose.
8. Instead of getting hung up on using one set of characters all the way through, realize the eternal exists right now in the present moment, so no set of characters is fixed.
9. Seeing cause and effect so clearly now, you merge into the present moment - by viewing Godard's film you become a part of it, the way a flower only comes truly into bloom when gazed at.
10. In the moment, you recognize all signifiers for what they are and are free to see around the edges of Godard's tricks.
11. Understanding then, his genius deadpan comedy, you too keep deadpan and merely nod and look askance.
12. Having been set free by Godard, you move out into the world to love all unconditionally and spread the healing balm of your serenity upon our wounded planet with your every move. Amen.

Ten Dollars a Fifth.

You know that TCM Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 2 set? If you get it and expect a good time, well, watch out for Norma Shearer, that's all I can say. She's trouble. She's in the first two films: MGM's THE DIVORCEE and A FREE SOUL. If sex, drugs and hot jazz were cake, the Warner girls--Stanwyck, Clarke, Harlow--could be said to have it and eat it too, then keep quiet about it until they need another fix; the MGM girls like Shearer would have their cake and then feel guilty, complain to all their friends that they "shouldn't have eaten it" and then go to the Ladies room to "heroically" renounce it back up.

That's not heroism, Norma, that's bulimia!

Where MGM makes its error is in presuming that their audience genuinely believes that premarital sex is an evil on par with murder, rape or (gasp!) gambling. Where Warners throws scenes of their starlets changing in and out of their sexy underthings, MGM has Shearer do it all behind partitions; when Shearer is raking in jewelry we see only her hands and his, never any mention of the implied quid pro quo. Shearer scenes of implied sin feel like she's counting money from a stolen wallet in a bathroom stall, sober, terrified, with three paranoid look-outs. Such nervous guilt isn't up to pre-code so to speak, since, as Dave Kehr puts it: the "heavy hand of MGM respectability presses down," forcing her to realize "that such dalliances are meaningless without love, marriage and the promise of a family."

One of the parallel points of interest in pre-code films is the handling of alcohol, the modern equivalent of pot in films like HOW HIGH or FRIDAY (at Warners) or heroin in films like REQUIEM FOR A DREAM and THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (MGM). Prohibition was still in effect for most of the pre-code era, and the films in this set are rife with briefcase-carrying bootleggers, secret knocks at hidden doors, and whispers from drug store clerks to shaky customers about some "secret stock in the back room." In A FREE SOUL, we even learn the typical price when a drug store clerk sells a St. Vitus-dancing Barrymore a fifth of whiskey for "ten bucks." Ten bucks! In 1931 that was like $80, or the price you'd pay now for a delivery of... "ahem." What were we talking about? The evilsh of drink, oh right. There's something legit about it being destructive but, ah, who caresh? MGM will get all the Barrymores sober one day, but for now, let's get Norma Shearer safely wedlocked.


Kehr's article points out that NIGHT NURSE (1931)--easily the pick of the set--was directed by William Wellman right after PUBLIC ENEMY. It makes sense, seems of a piece, and makes me want to immediately research Wellman as a hidden auteur. Andrew Sarris rates him a mere "Less than meets the eye" in his American Cinema book, asking why PUBLIC ENEMY isn't as good as SCARFACE. I'd say there are streaks of laziness in Wellman, but also fearless genius in trusting his actors to do fierce bits of business, trusting their personas and letting them go the extra mile where most directors would probably balk and cut their extraneous antics short. Cagney and Stanwyck both get chances to go apeshit on people in such a way as to make cinematic myth on the spot. Gable punches Babs in NIGHT NURSE, knocks her right down - boom!; Cagney shoves grapefruit at Mae Clarke; nurse Stanwyck screams in unbridled rage at the drunken mom who's letting an evil chauffeur and doctor slowly starve her two stepchildren to death (and she can't stop it due to AMA rules).

Right or wrong, these sorts of violent Wellmanian outbursts are electric, like whole Sam Fuller movie coiled up and sprung through a brick wall.  They more than make up for any dull stretches. They are what is best in cinema, i.e. when it stops preaching and starts hacking at the chains of the truly unfree soul.

PS - There's also a great bit in ROXIE HART, a (post-code) Wellman film I just happen to have recently seen, where Ginger Rogers does an impromptu softshoe up and down the prison steps after striking some sparks with smitten reporter George Montgomery. The camera doesn't move much, like Wellman is just watching rather than filming. It's just Rogers banging out a dance on the tinny jail steps because she's kind of turned on from her sparks with old George, and it's the best moment in the film. To a judgmental classicist like Sarris, this scene is probably uninspired and lazy. He'd probably think Wellman just left the camera running and went out to have a smoke, letting Rogers and Montgomery do what they wanted. That's it exactly, Mr. Sarris! That's it, exactly....

The cinema is full of hacks that obliterate termite freshness in the name of white elephant emotional dictation, killing material the way Lenny kills puppies and blondes in OF MICE AND MEN. We know they don't mean it, but there it is, lifeless and big as all indoors. Wellman isn't like that. He keeps his grip light and if it don't come out SCARFACE, so what? It could be worse. It's still breathing. That's what being A FREE SOUL means, Norma, so swig a little!

The Mens and the Ladies Rooms -- in collage abastract form!

I've got the next bunch of days off and nothing to do except probe the inner reaches of my psyche or clean my linen closet.
And did I mention I don't have a linen closet?
These collages stem from the dreams I have wherein I have to go to the bathroom but the bathroom is a maze of bad smells and strange signs and flooded urinals that even Duchamp would not call art. I am sure these urinals would be called art, though, at least amidst the surrealists, whom I adhere.

I meant revere, of course. That was surrealism... in action!