Great Acid Cinema #1: DAZED & CONFUSED (1993)

Yeah so what if they don't do acid in it? It's still great acid cinema, as in a good trip, since a joyous awareness of living suffuses it and, like any good trip, it starts in the late morning and ends at dawn of the following day, leaving our heroes driving into the sunrise cranking "Slow Ride / Take it Easy" on their drive to a nearby city to score concert tickets. Oh yeah, when you're young, sexy, high as hell, and surrounded by the cool, confident tribe of your choice, the world is a ball. It's hard to capture on film though, without coming off cocky or snide. Can Linklater really duplicate that rare ecstatic bliss of the moment onto film?

There's no comparing DAZED & CONFUSED to other nostalgic "day in the life" teen nostalgia-thons. It belongs in its own section, as far away from THE BREAKFAST CLUB as the original WOODSTOCK is from WOODSTOCK '98. I was a newly-laid teenager taking my first girlfriend to see BREAKFAST in the local cinema, and while it resonated it also skeeved me out. There was no place for me amidst these stock types - I was too cool to be a geek (I thought), to uncoordinated to be a jock, too sober to be a burnout. I needed rescuing, by the right tribe. It would be another year or two but it happened.

DAZED would have rescued me. For one thing it would have taught me that in order to be confident, drunk, coordinated and cooler, I needed to understand it was cool to embrace pot and understand its rightful place in the culture of these United States. It's the substance that exposes the fascism that passes for high school football and class separations between jocks, stoners and geeks. Anyone who gets high is suddenly cool: less violent, less self-righteously scared (stoner paranoia is quite different from all other paranoia). A better if lazier person all around. Linklater's film gets that, yet it also understands the positive aspects of apparently brutal ordeals like hazing as far as creating important rites of passage in a mythic sense. The transition of boys to men, girls to women, the ceremonial effect of physical trauma, and the way the entire senior class works harmoniously as one giant good cop/bad cop machine, the bullies creating a trauma which the nicer seniors then step into heal, and to extend the olive branch invite into the cool kid clique, relative to the stoicism with which the beating is endured. There's a sense of interconnected belonging in DAZED that you don't find much outside of Howard Hawks. If Howard Hawks was a teenage pothead in the 1970s, this is the film he'd have made, or wanted to make.

So casual it's almost unnoticed is the ingenious way that Linklater moves gradually from a larger school cast of characters in the opening scenes to just a couple kids by the end, the ones who got transformed, who made the change, who stayed up all night: the taunted junior league (incumbent HS freshman) pitcher who takes a licking from Ben Affleck and winds up in his first make-out session; the antsy Adam Goldberg who gets his first bruises, admiring them on the way home in the rear-view mirror; the stoner quarterback who decides to not sign his sobriety pledge even though it means missing all the senior year football glory. Each finds and endures their initiation into the unknown.

The coaches who enforce this pledge are brutish caricatures (ala Cloris Leachman's hubby in LAST PICTURE SHOW) but the rest of the adults are all seen as complexly benevolent, just pretending to be enemies of the teenager universe, understanding the need for these bizarre initiations, playing their parts as parents: the dad who stays home and scares away the stoners coming to the door expecting a party, like its reverse trick-or-treat; he lumbers out after them in his big Texan get-up like the new sheriff in town, only to let out a sly grin when they're out of sight; an irate local shoots at the kids for smashing his mailbox, but you know he won't call the cops on them. He doesn't even aim to hit - it's all a rite. These adults dig that it's their job to throw up many obstacles as they can in these kids' way, but to not make them too insurmountable, and to not get mad when every last one is hurtled or ignored on that last ditch blaze out of Dodge. Without the obstacles, there's nothing gained. It's a difficult thing to even notice in one's growing up (this is all based on true Linklater adventures).

While some coming-of-age films unconsciously advocate the status quo (John Hughes) and others outright challenge it (Jody Hill, Werner Herzog) there's also in-between pictures like DAZED, which do both and neither, thus actually offering a unique hybrid wherein high school stoner cliques become like indigenous tribes of old, with all the violent initiation rites of piercing, burying alive, scarring, masked dances, etc. having been transformed into wooden paddles and threats over loudspeakers, chases and inflictions of pain, all followed by welcoming and sympathy ("Heard you got it, pretty bad," a hot girl consoles the pitcher. "In my day it was much worse," says an older mentor type). The noble endurance of pain/trauma initiates a positive response in the community, triggering sympathy and connection, and a mounting loathing for the odious Affleck.

Men tried to recapture this in the 1980s by going out in the woods to bang on drums and whatnot via the "Men's Movement," but the pain of initiation was forgotten. It's neo-pagans with their tattooings, fight clubs and acts of defiance that are closest to true bonding. The pain of a tattoo or a fight (or the terrors of an acid trip) has permanence. It creates an event from which, in neurological terms, creates all sorts of new pathways and possibilities for change. People get tattoos at certain times to mark occasions. The paddling and grilling of football creates this same mark, so does overcoming the anxiety associated with your "first time" getting high, or making out, or riding with the big kids, or standing up to a shitheel even if it means you're going to lose.



The only film that matches it is OVER THE EDGE. If you've ever been "cool" or been giddily excited to be sitting in the back seat of some badass car getting high for the first time, in quiet awe of the older longhairs in the front seat, blasting hard rock and the feeling something dangerous could happen at any moment, and yet feeling oddly safe and secure, that's the vibe Linklater captures in DAZED. While OVER THE EDGE found our kid's dogged by the aptly named Sgt. Doberman, these kids don't fear cops so much as boredom, the future, emptiness. What they don't realize is that they've created a perfect social network, right there, a community in the strict sense of indigenous populations, of cultures centuries older than our own, who understood it was dancing, drugs and cool friends that made one whole, not expensive cars and financial prosperity.


I had trouble picking a number one for this list. If it was pure hallucinatory weirdness I was going to have Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN. OR EASY RIDER for the more straight-up influential counterculture, or 2001 for the arthouse. But ultimately none of those are really about us, man. Kubrick looks at man as just another form of intelligence on an endless journey of evolution discovering itself; EASY RIDER is ultimately more about condemnation than solution and Jodorowsky's endless penis/vagina humor and freaks-for-the-sake-of-freakiness gets wearisome after awhile, even when stoned out of your mind.

But DAZED leaves you on a full-blown contact high, full of that drunken giddy sense of possibility that comes from being newly free from parental curfews, open to the possibilities of the universe. We come away as happy as Mitch Kramer when he plops down into bed and puts on his big headphones to rock himself to sleep. Compare that to the up-against-the-wall headphone desperation of Carl in OVER THE EDGE and you can feel the healing. While most cool teen films spend their time pointing fingers and selling soap, DAZED AND CONFUSED whispers in your ear to meet you outside in five minutes, then drives you off to a place where you can be, as John Sebastian put it at Woodstock, "walking around this big beautiful green place, and not being afraid." When all the bullshit's cleared away through memory's uncloggable filter, that's what remains, that sense of "not being afraid" and being connected to everyone around you the way your chest is connected to your limbs, or as J. Sebastian later noted "You couldn't get one page of a book between me and that crowd" 

That's why we're here, to shrink the distance until it's less than one page between you and the crowd, and Linklater's the only one who's truly been able to capture it. DAZED & CONFUSED is the rare case of lightning actually staying in the bottle. Every time you watch it you get as high as the first. No other drug in the world can make that claim, nor group of friends, nor band, nor film. Just thinking about that awesome opening,  the orange 1970 GTO rolling slow into the school parking lot as "Sweet Emotion" pumps though the soundtrack--makes my mouth dry up, my spine tingle and my heart flutter with pre-trip-ticipation. It's our Valhalla. It's our Motorcycle Boy. It's our one shining moment.

Love Freezes THE DEVIL COMMANDS (1941)

In the late 1930s, early 1940s horror was at a low ebb, what with the real horrors going on overseas, blah blah. Boris Karloff made six pictures in 1939, eight (!) in 1940.

And then in 1941, just THE DEVIL COMMANDS.

In 1942, he made just THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU, largely because of being tied to the endlessly successful ARSENIC AND OLD LACE back east. With that play's old dark house crashes into Brooklyn comedic vibe, one could surely get a sense that typical Karloffian boogie men were fading under the glaring lamp of Nazism and industry fears the public was scared enough just wondering when the Japanese were coming. ARSENIC showed them the old monsters were now fun; after being scared by the newsreel, audiences found them cathartic.  The sense of losing one's place in the iconic understructure comes most to the fore in the much later TARGETS (1969). But, in THE DEVIL COMMANDS, Karloff taps into melancholic desperation of a million housewives and newlyweds terrified to open each new telegram. The public's fascination with hanging and life after death tied symbolically with the sense of suspended animation associated with the home front during wartime.  Memories of the first world war still fresh in the collective consciousness, the dread of being a parent of a solider or a war bride encompassed the fact that one could receive letters from the front, weeks after the writer's death, a voice from beyond the grave... mishmashed in the swamp of the collective unconscious alongside the suspended animation of newly minted young brides who'd enjoyed only a few hours of conjugal bliss before their husbands were shipped off to the front

The main storyline for DEVIL is A-typical for Karloff's films of the time, in which he played over and over a kindly scientist turned evil when his formula for bringing life to the dead is stolen by heinous gangsters to bring someone back from public excecution to smite those who falsely accused him, or ratted him out. Inevitably he winds up back from the grave to bump off his betrayers, one... by... one, or else sends his zombie slave do it. This was the more or less same plot for: BLACK FRIDAY, MAN WITH NINE LIVES, BEFORE I HANG, THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG and THE WALKING DEAD.

Directed by Edward Dmytryk, THE DEVIL COMMANDS (1941) appears at first to follow the trend of bringing back the dead (this time via radio) but manages along the way to invoke something darker and more interesting than the usual gangsters and nooses. Here they're swapped for a mysterious lady spiritualist, played with great depth and malice by Anne Revere.

As pioneering brain wave researcher Dr. Julian Blair, Karloff begins the film a cheerful family man and respected scientist, we see him say good-bye to his loving wife, Helen (Shirley Warde), before she leaves on an errand and is hit by a car, and though she appears in only a few scenes before her death, one still feels the warmth between them. The sense of connection and esteem for one another is palpable and touching, making Dr. Blair's subsequent, prolonged grief after her death something genuinely palpable. Eventually Blair's obsession with contacting Helen from beyond the grave via radio waves starts to be a real turn-off; he spooks his respected colleagues and doting daughter, Anne (Amanda Duff), and is eventually run out of town.

Setting up his equipment in a remote country house, still determined to use his brain wave recording technology to contact his wife "beyond the veil," Blair takes up with a manipulative spiritualist, Mrs. Walters (Revere), abandons his daughter and even helps Ms. Walters cover up the murder of his own maid, when the poor woman gets "too close" to their disturbing secret.

The big secret is a doozy: a gaggle of diving helmet-wearing corpses seated round the table in a combination Frankenstein laboratory and spiritualist seance, the perfect merging of science with the occult! To detail any more would be a sin, but suffice it to say that with Revere's sinister spiritualist, Karloff finds another excellent actress to work with. Where he generated great warmth with Warde, he generates conflicted remorse and determination with his wife's dark shadow, Ms. Walters.

It is to Dmytryk's credit that the film takes some time to let characters develop in both negative and positive directions. The fears of the general scientific community towards something beyond their understanding doesn't stem from a knee-jerk hostility to new ideas as such, but rather the worry that in opening the gate between this world and the next, we risk exposure to some demonic force beyond our power to control. Whereas most scientific communities in these films just snicker and deride, this attitude is at least open-minded and refreshing.

This deviation from simple religious and scientific dogma provides an unusually clear window into the era's fears; in 1941, the U.S. was still dealing with its isolationist stance with regard to the Second World War. Dr. Blair's fellow scientists don't mock him, being too respectful of his previous brain wave research, but they argue: "We don't know what evil may be lurking beyond that veil!" The dread here is less about death than about opening a telecommunications bridge to the afterlife, i.e. once we start messing in Europe's affairs, what's to stop Europe from messing in ours? Once we let the dead back in, what's to keep them out again?

It's a complex narrative for such a short running time (barely an hour) and without Karloff adding so much heart and sympathy it wouldn't be the little powerhouse it is. Revere is great, dark and oddly sexy as the unscrupulous Mrs. Walters, but her horror career never materialized (though the granddaughter of Paul Revere, she was blacklisted, along with Dmyrtryk!). Her performance here will intrigue classic horror devotees, for whom a new scary face is always welcome. In short, one goes into THE DEVIL COMMANDS for Karloff, one comes out with Karloff, and Ann Revere!

Go to FRANKENSTENIA for more Karloff Blogathon entries!

(Portions of this entry were originally written for popmatters in 2003)

Momentum Mori: TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

A crazy screwball masterpiece (for once all three of those words are stunningly apt), Howard Hawks' TWENTIETH CENTURY is a must-see regardless of its flaws, i.e. a kind of shrill fast-talking lack of sympathetic characters. PS - The title is because it is on the train, the 20th Century Limited, that runs from New York to Chicago (and thence on to LA, a kind of fast track between Broadway and Hollywood); hence it's not one of those historical odes to a simpler more morally repressive time that make you sleepy with all the trotted-out bonnets and high collars and quaint old aunt spinsters (which the name might otherwise evoke). This has John Barrymore as more or less himself, born under the sign of Sagittarius ("That's the Archer!!") harassing Carole Lombard, all night long, and her realizing they're both trapped within the confines of a frame that's both coffin and train car, a screen-shaped hall of mirrors trying to escape its frame and finally, in a supreme moment of triumph, ending up right back at the beginning. As the impresario of his own theater and turgid historical productions, Jaffe at least pursues the illusion they can escape the screen at any time, while Hawks looks upon such thoughts as a Hickey pipe dream and just makes maximum use of the space that's there before it constricts to a single dying light. The Dutch act, it's called, even suicide being just another dramatic posture. Theater is the only escape from death, but in TWENTIETH CENTURY, death is the only escape from theater, and always just one step ahead of the sheriff.

I mention the frilly old clothes because TWENTIETH CENTURY is one of the more self-reflexively psychedelic and modern of all the old pre-code comedies, while  the ponderous trappings of costume dramas, the sort of thing that gets the highbrow ladies out of their mansions, are clearly Jaffe's stock and trade (the first play he casts his starlet in has a character named 'Uncle Remus'); the film itself is kind of anti-Southern Gothic. It is awake and alert in the way it explores the nature of persona, of mask-wearing, of "Who am I this Time?"-style thespian identity melt-down and, how through this melt-down, one can begin to 'wake up' out of one's life, the way one wakes from a dream or is knocked from perfect communion with a film by the need to go to the bathroom.

Consider Barrymore's co-star: a young girl named Jane Alice Peters who changed her name to Carole Lombard, here playing a girl named Mildred Plotka who Jaffe gives the name Lilly Garland so she can play Mary Jo in Jaffe's latest southern Gothic melodrama, right there that's four masks stacked on the other like pancakes. "You're not Lilly Garland anymore," Jaffe coaches his terrified new protege, like she's been coasting on the wattage of that name for years when he just christened her with it not two minutes ago. "You're little Mary Joe. The scene is pure purple!"


A similar journey of identity and origin blows in the wake of this speeding screwball train. It's from a Ben Hecht-Charles McArthur script, adapted from Charles Millholand's play, Napoleon of Broadway, of which I profess to know little, except that its based on real Broadway tyrants and that Alec Baldwin played the Jaffe in a stage version a few years back but kept the name of the film. I do know Hecht is one of my writers. He wrote SCARFACE (1933) and NOTHING SACRED (1937) just for starters--too great comedies about death. Perhaps it was his years as a reporter and theater wit that left him witch such a rare ability to stare the void straight in the face and laugh, wryly. Or maybe it was just that he liked to write on trains (back when Broadway artistes like himself did ride the Twentieth Century Limited back and forth from New York to Chicago and/or Hollywood) and trains give one time to muse and reflect and notice the way one's dim reflection in the window rolling through endless wheat fields begins to look like a skull, and time and distance blur and you can drink all you want without worrying causing an accident or being picked up for vagrancy, and all rich with meaning so that if you keep your eyes unfocused, you can see Death there, waving, right outside your peripheral vision, blurring by in the fences and trees along the tracks, the way a director might wait right off the stage during a show, biding his time...

Death is all around in TWENTIETH CENTURY. Oscar Jaffe threatens suicide (with sublime melodramatic flair) every time he starts to lose control of his actress or budget and the dialogue is choked with hilarious threats and insults, like "If he were dead and in his grave, I'd throw a rope around his neck and drag him on a Cook's tour!" But like some crazy shaman, Jaffe treads the lip between life and death in split second ham doses. Contorted like his old silent version of Mr. Hyde with hands curled in pre-strangling mode one moment, lowering them them gently at his sides in the manner of a priest to meet a backer that wants to finance his play "from a religious angle" the next. In a split second after split second, Barrymore's whole soul morphs and erupts into entire plays worth of indelible moments bashed together in long single shot takes where Hawks just uses the edges of the image as the train dimensions and lets these cats with their tails tied together have at it. It's ham-shamanistic alchemy, and the  great, dark self-reflexive material brings out a full-on dose of Barrymore mania...kind of like what Robin Williams pulls off sporadically as the voice of the genie in ALADDIN or the TERMINATOR 2000 model dying in a molten pool of steel. A tale, ultimately, of a doomed impresario hurtling ever forward into the void, we wouldn't see a better locomotive-character/fearlessly self-depth-plumbing actor combo until Jon Voight's crazed escaped convict in RUNAWAY TRAIN.

It may be hard to believe for modern audiences, but Barrymore played romantic leads in silent films (he was known as the "Great Profile"), but with the coming of sound he was already "washed up," an alcoholic for whom coherence was a matter of some effort and little regard. CENTURY was amongst his post-code last gasps, proving he could definitely be counted on to play himself, a gentlemanly but hopeless drunk with sporadic moments of genius clarity peppered through his UNDER THE VOLCANO-like staring contests with the onrushing blackness.

He brought plenty of tragedy as the debauched, broke count wooing Greta Garbo in GRAND HOTEL (1932); was a believably mentally ill father returned from the asylum to re-connect with daughter Kate Hepburn in A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT (1932);  brokenhearted that Trilby doesn't love him as a hammy SVENGALI (1931); and like a gut-crushing portrait of me in the early 90s as a suicidal alcoholic movie star dealing with his much younger paramour named Paula in DINNER AT EIGHT (1933 - left). In all these, among his only good films of the sound era, he's alternately brilliant and unfocused, cordial and disoriented. In DINNER AT EIGHT in particular he's amazing, preparing his suicide with great formality only to emit this pained choked sob, just one, which he chokes back, for whatever ghost cameras happen to be around.

As Oscar Jaffe in TWENTIETH CENTURY however, he is transcendent, as if arising from his suicide hotel grave in DINNER AT EIGHT for one final phoenix expenditure. Imagine an alternative ending for SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), wherein Norma Desmond convinces DeMille to make Salome, bending reality to accommodate her grandiose self-image by, say, her playing both herself, Von Stroheim, William Holden, the dead chimp and even Billy Wilder in a frenzied audition, channeling the spirits of every Broadway and Hollywood has-been and vindicating their endless struggles against death, disease, age, and--worst of all--obscurity.

Good as that might be, Barrymore is better.


Then there's the light and shadow aspect of the film, deep shadows Hawks absorbed back in SCARFACE that allows the relatively cramped train sets to appear deeper than they are. At the end, after Jaffe's been shot and lies "dying" in the middle of his compartment the lights are dimmed for perfect mood and suddenly we too are swept up in the drama of it all. With everyone crying over the fallen Jaffe as he reaches into the approaching darkness for one last contract to get Lily to sign, you get the feeling that everyone is moving into a place of perfect freedom. In dramatizing death, we defeat it. With opened eyes you can see that these images from decades ago are alive; they know you are looking, watching, and so it is that our mind animates the world of other minds, like they've conjured a rip in the screen via this self-reflexive celebration of ham acting and the power of pretend death to grant eternal life. The darkness of an empty theater becomes reflected now in every depth-filled shadow. As the stickers the crazy backer spreads around the train read: Repent, for the time is at hand.

The other light Hecht counters with as a possibility throughout is of course, God - the Passion Play, the Patent Medicine King's stickers, even the pin Lily Oscar first poked her with is kept in a church-like box --the idea of fakery as a kind of avoidance of God and a "spiritual calling" is detailed throughout but is it either one or the momentum between the two, the fluidity of emotional change-overs exhibited by both of them compared to their one-note underlings sets them apart, in a higher frame -- "entitled to privileges."


Considering religion, the sanctity of the home and children as it whizzes through Illinois and Ohio on the way to New York, Hawks' film finds that the healthiest choice of all to live in a state of constant morbid obsession and histrionic ego, keeping reality forever at bay through constant play-acting, a kind of forward momentum mori.

Or maybe it's just that as a young Hawks devotee, TWENTIETH CENTURY blew my mind, my first post-modern art wake up call, the slap in the face of aesthetic arrest as actors seem to transcend the walls of the screen and compartments with lacerating self-awareness and Algonquin savagery. It was the first time the curtain pulled back for me and I realized that not only is all the world a stage, but every action and reaction blocked (with chalk) by some unseen guiding hand. Are we our own Oscar Jaffes, coming from a place far in our future, bedeviling our present time/space-anchored cast of selves with outrageous stage directions, or do we wish we were? Maybe that pin is in a churchy-looking box for a reason, because any suffering we endure in this world is for our own benefit, to access our lungs in a holy scream. When we finally do have 'the scare' of getting bad news from doctors over X-rays or C-scans, or get phone calls in the middle of the night about accidents, or lose jobs and girlfriends and apartments, all so God can get through to us, to puncture our illusion bubbles and put 'the fear of God' into us and scares our ego at last to silence. When our ego gets too titanic, God can't even get us on the phone. And so he breaks us down, gets that scream out, helps us stagger Broadway with it, and then the ego gets titanic all over again. There's just one way out, Lilly Garland! Let the psychedelic pistol shot of this movie to open up your mind and bid your ghost grab hold of Barrymore's coattails as he rides into the valley of the shadow of death at a mad gallop!

Psychedelic WebCinema! The THIRD AGE Begins

A plug for my friends of the THIRD AGE, a new webfilm series with some seriously warped psychedelic edges! It launches today... so get ready, set, setting, and click here