Vampire Lesbians of '76-'67

Dress your wife like you do the women in the streets

believe me, you'll have a vampire too.
                               --Vamps of '28 (Whistler's Jug Band)

The song lyric above refers to the aggressive gold-diggers of the late 20s-30s, who were far more common before the economic changes of WW2. The "vamp" was also a silent film staple, regularly luring long-time devoted family men into financial destitution with the help of their blackmailing boyfriend/pimps. Theda Bara (below left) was this old school vamp's ultimate expression. And then she was gone. And when she came back, she was gay. Men could now walk the streets in relative safety, unless they were having a mid-life crisis of course...

While the (straight) girl vampire in 1928 was a femme fatale in an age when sex was commodified on a much less simulacratic level than now, the vampire lesbian was/is different. A functional metaphor for the seductive magic of cinema itself, she is simulacarum squared, the viewed viewing itself being turned on by its own reflected image. She doesn't need the masculine gaze to exist, and that soothes the weary masculine gaze, big time. To not be needed for the performance to exist, is this not the dream of the one who elects to stay home from the theater?

Her mystery cave beckoning victims to a Venus flytrap-style blood draining down in her crypt/playpen, the vampire woman conjures an erection wherein the blood isn't kept inside the phallus, but drained from there, so eventually the man's whole life and soul and wallet is sucked up through his..."ahem" like some kind of straw. The mythic, 'draining' power of the vampire can leave men--once their orgasm has passed--with a depressed, gasping for air feeling; the whole horrible truth of the grand genetic bait and switch is made bare only at that time, the hour or so when he has no sexual desire at all--but he's too weak to make a getaway, to get make some excuse that won't arouse her ire (after all - she has merely to drop by his house while he's at work and chat with his wife, and his world collapses - best not to piss her off). The wizard's curtain is, in this brief period, ripped back to expose the snarling, endlessly self-replicating human reproductive drive. "What have I done?" the man thinks. But it's too late, the trap snaps shut. He may as well do it again, once he's had time to --ahem--recharge.

Cinema offers a similar bait and switch: it beguiles us with lurid posters promising our wildest fantasy 'coming next week' but only keeps us mildly entranced this week, we sit until we feel we've got our money's worth, then cinema dumps us to the curb. All we have left for our money is a little ticket stub and a strange feeling of emptiness "what do we do now? Go home." Most of us can't stick around and see a second movie (sneaking to a different theater in the multiplex, maybe); we have to go home and process, to look at roads and traffic and friends and menus, at least for awhile, until we're recharged. The vampire woman and cinema then have the same effect. We mustn't get too close to either lest they destroy us--and the safety of the film screen's relative distance lets us at least admire our vampire woman from afar. She may drain us but never fatally - we emerge pale and dizzy from the theater, but not dead. She meanwhile keeps drinking.

But if she does so with another woman, there's no jealousy. No reason for power position jostling. We can safely dissolve into the ether.

Dracula's Daughter (1936)

That so many vamp ladies are lesbians speaks to humanity's problem of being unable to successfully civilize the basic act of animal copulation. Lesbianism can seem from an intellectual point of view to be more evolved than "straight" sex with its messy pregnancies, STDs and unsightly ejaculates. Male orgasms leave us hopefully transported for a few seconds but it's still this vile reproductive cycle, this demon drive for life that's got us in its sway. As personal and intimate as it all is, we haven't exactly invented the wheel, just been driven to do what humans have been doing since before they were apes. Movies too, are something we all do. Everyone can see any movie and have the same reactions, the same sense of intimate connection, the same subsuming of our egoic identity into the oceanic narrative. We're all just 'the masses' each with a little pair of 3D glasses that screen each other out so it's just us and what's onscreen... alone in an elaborate ritual dance.

Vampire lesbians don't have a need for 3D. They're already beyond the masses; they're undead, beyond concerns of reproduction, and--even better-- they have only one particular use for men, as a drink. And most importantly for our peace of mind, their sexual preference relieves us of another tiresome aspect of straight masculinity - our feeling of responsibility towards women as protectors. They choose to do without us, so we can enjoy their rampages without guilt. As men in the audience or at home watching DVDs, we're free to cheer on our own coming irrelevance.

The vampire male meanwhile (presuming he's straight) has only one chance at keeping his cool in the face of such staggering chic, to just not put out... ever! It drives the Kristen Stewarts wild!! But at what cost?

If you're an artistic, deep vampire dude with perfectly-mussed hair who's been having good sex for say 90 straight years--with partners living, straight, gay, and undead curious--then I can imagine you have moved on from caring much about it, needing to boast of it to your bros. There's nothing left to prove. Most spiritually evolved beings will tell you that after a certain age, sex falls away like a booster rocket. One may make love like a lesbian, i.e. more orally motivated, less genital/orgasm-centric... more giving, but the sex drive will eventually come back and throw you off your game --so best not even start. It's much nicer to be a eunuch, free from being anchored to the demanding phallus --after all we neuter cats and dogs largely so unfulfilled sexual 'heat' doesn't make them crazy-miserable (there's no such thing as doggie condoms)--aren't we as humans deserving of the same liberation?

But then... Kristen Stewart is so cute. You have a big dilemma, don't you, Edward? Don't you wish you could be a vampire lesbian?

Though a certain train of feminist critical thought sees the appeal of lesbian erotica to men as a kind of a priori mastery/ownership --i.e. that we (men) see the sapphic mise en scene as waiting for us to step into the screen and supply the third wheel missing ingredient--I've always argued the opposite. Male identification is more complicated than a simple 1>1 equation. It often takes the form of rivalry or fraternal admiration or distrust rather than the presumed 'identification'. We want to admire the courage of men as if they were our older brothers; we don't want to see them spazzing out and embarrassing us, you know, like real little brothers. This is something filmmakers often misunderstand, forcing annoying sidekicks like Jar-Jar or Short Round or Robin on us. Men want to see men they can learn from and respect (Han Solo not Luke). We actually identify, as Carol Clover's counter-Mulveyan theory in Men, Women and Chainsaws, more with the female characters than the men - the male characters are seen as competition, as threats. I'd posit a Jungian insertion there, that we do so because our anima finds a suitable projector screen therein. It's not 'ownership' of woman that lesbian erotica provides the male, it's ultimate freedom from ownership, which as part of its contract includes the threat of other men, competitors (the bull sea lion who fights young bucks all day to keep his harem) and our dreaded responsibility--as male viewers--for the onscreen actions of our wives and progeny.

The pure lesbian vampire scenario then actually frees us from all direct "identification" inside the narrative, including the fraternal, so we're free of having to 'compare' our size, if you get my drift, or worry about not fulfilling our responsibility to fret. If there is a guy character in the lesbian vampire scenario who's not a slimy sadist or English hippie deserving death for being so trusting then we eventually may come to like him, but generally without a man in the picture we can retire our narrative outsider status and dissolve into the amorphous perspective abyss. We still admire the sex and carnage but from a nice respectful distance, the distance of an unborn spirit that may now stay unborn, for there is no seed in the picture by which to sprout into tedious life.

Vampyres (1974)

That's why my interest in lesbians always pulls to a grinding halt when they get all mushy over adopting a child or getting their hands on some sperm either from a donor or a trusted friend (which is why I couldn't get five minutes into THE L WORD). Ladies, I wanted to scream at the TV, you just took the coolest thing about being lesbians and changed it in order to be as cloying in your pro-family sentiments as the heterosexual behemoth we were rooting for you to destroy all this time.

The Vampire Lovers (1970)

Luckily,  being both a vampire and a lesbian is a double whammy of reproduction prevention, ensuring no last minute addition of a shark-jumping "Oliver" to your inner TV show. Still, in case you're a novice, and this post has encouraged you to enter the vampire lesbian realm, tread lightly, by which I do mean hold off on Jess Franco's VAMPYROS LESBOS and Jean Rollin's anything, until you're ready. Stick with Hammer's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970), and now in Blu-ray, VAMPYRES (1974), and of course DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1973), and the gray-market only but Jeeze it's Vadim's best film, BLOOD AND ROSES (1960, top). Classic horror fans already know that DRACULA'S DAUGHTER (1936) is pretty cool too--with the cinema's first coded lesbian vampire seduction/murder--though I don't like Gloria Holden's austere peasant hair style; and if you're all out of other options, you could do worse than THE HUNGER (1983, below) but the hair is even worse than Holden's (see below and cringe in pain for those doomed 1980s).

The source material for all this lesbian vampire chic, Le Fanu's Carmilla, is an English novel from the golden year of 1872. In other words, its very Gothic and  tres erotique et domaine publique. It's included in the Criterion set for VAMPYR (1932), which presumably has a lesbian vampire somewhere in the story (I've never managed to stay awake to find out). You can also read the whole 1872 text for free here. Dig this passage, told in first person from the innocent young girl victim's point of view:

She used to place her pretty arms about my neck, draw me to her, and laying her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, "Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die, die, sweetly die into me. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit."

 And when she had spoken such a rhapsody, she would press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek. (Chapter 4)

So next time you're alone in the night somewhere, try whispering in a sexy voice, "Carmillaaaaa" over and over, really slowly, and see what happens. If no one answers maybe you haven't even been born yet.  But I bet someone answers. I bet you learn the rapture of that cruelty which yet is love...and that you dress your wife like you do the women in the streets, and believe me, you'll have a vampire, too, lord lord. So for god's sakes, bring protection, the cross, the stake, the jimmy hat, and the will to run back to your wife, praise Whistler's Jugs! Mama, slaughter the fatted calf for dada's home for now!

All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS (2010)

From a very pedestrian viewpoint, the Runaways were a scruffy pre-packaged all-girl rock L.A. version of that original pre-fab/anti-fab combo, the Sex Pistols. The Runaways were aimed at a fucked-up demographic by nutcase impresario, Kim Fowley, just as Malcolm McLaren aimed the Pistols. But then there's the 'enlightened' viewpoint which was like whoa, these chicks rawk! And they did lots of drugs, and were lesbians! And broke up mere minutes after reaching stardom, like true fucked-up badasses. With both pedestrian cynicism and fanboy admiration, then, THE RUNAWAYS remains kind of confused about whether its a tired meditation on girl's voices LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS, sisterhood via semi-edited lesbian attraction ala, TIMES SQUARE or drugs, phoniness and flame-outs on the pursuit to one's own original artistic voice after being moulded, like ROCK STAR. What it is, well, is a little of all that, a film well-crafted to tell its tale, and maybe that's the problem.

It starts well enough as far as the rise: Joan's first guitar lesson; the band learning to deflecting tossed beer cans (a punk show problem) with their guitar necks thanks to manager Fowley's extensive training; cramming into small hotel rooms, dealing with hostile club managers, etc. In short, the girls pay their dues. Then, soon enough, they're on top of the world, then Cherie throws a hissy fit tantrum and the band is over. Little things add up to an uneasy feeling throughout. It's CROSSROADS if they welded on THE DOORS and FOXES and clanged the loosey-goosey 70s 'kids are all wrong' bell of OVER THE EDGE (still the greatest kids amok film after all these years) before running back to rehab.

Too bad about Dakota, though... tick-tock. RUNAWAYS misses some grittier possible marks in order to coddle blonde "Cherry Bomb" lead singer Curie's bratty myopia, a bad decision considering Fanning's half-hearted blank slate interpretation. Or is it just that Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett rocks so much harder and mopes so much mopier that the movie grows lopsided? See that picture above, of the real Cherie? She may be acting as coy as Carmen Sternwood but those eyes are feral and dangerous, like a wild tigress I have known, like Carmen Sternwood (the nymphomaniac druggy sister in The Big Sleep) in fact.

Now look at poor Dakota below, blank as the freshly fallen snow. Carmen Sternwood wouldn't even waste a bullet on her.

I say this as someone who loves Dakota, or loved (past tense). Despite the cliche-bound script I was touched by her gut wrenching a capella "Hound Dog" in 2007 (my review here), but here she's just a shell of a phoned-in blank nothing, snarling on cue and looking cute but lacking any kind of self-assertion. There are 16 year-olds out there who are going on 23 and there are 20 year-olds out there going on eleven. Dakota was an eleven year-old going on 30 but now the age of twelve seems to have caught up with her. Maybe the studio hoped Fanning would mature during the filming, that maybe she wouldgrow into the role, but there are ways that girls can delay womanhood's onset. I shudder to think that Dakota's following in so many young girls' DSM IV-certified child actor anorexic stunted growth footsteps, but in THE RUNAWAYS she's still just a half-starved deer in the headlights, not yet a she-wolf, eating that deer, as nature intended. Fanning lets Kristen Stewart do all the eating while she sits in the corner, sucks her thumb, and looks coy. Is she even having fun? Does she still like to pull the wings off flies? Are you getting all these super-droll BIG SLEEP references?

Despite the Dakota handicap, THE RUNAWAYS has things going for it, like an awesome soundtrack dialed cleverly to the left of cliche'd expectation, opening up on Curie's first menstrual period, reddening in a gas station bathroom to the tune of Nick Gilder's "Roxy Roller." Meanwhile Joan Jett's jamming to Suzy Quatro's "All my life I wanted to be somebody now here I am! I'm the wild one," and huffing glue with her less-than-Cherie-level-hot girlfriend. Now that's rock and roll. Cherie, meanwhile. is cutting her own bangs and punking out her lingerie before hitting the high school talent show in a glam rock Bowie lip sync, getting cheered on by the sisters and booed by the fellas. But hey, all she's doing is lip syncing and posing, Joan at least learns guitar, though her first teacher is a clumpety old man who wants to teach her "On Top of Old Smokey." Which alas impels a walk through the empty parking lot as "This is a Man's World" nods sympathetically from the soundtrack, and not the James Brown version, but MC5!

Again, cliche' sidestepped, by a sole-scrape.

But, even though Cherie lights a cigarette at the wrong end and dances around dressed as Stevie Nicks, we're still never quite sure what drugs she's doing or what kind of rock star she really wants to be, if any, or what kind of actress Dakota wants to be, for that matter. Stewart's Joan fills her squirt gun with vodka and urinates on the douche bag headliner's guitars --she really is the wild one, and you hope some of that wild stuff might rub off on Fanning's Currie, and eventually...  for awhile... it does. When their plane's about to land in Japan, the pair quickly wolf down their coke and pills in the airplane bathroom to avoid trouble with customs and suddenly the film speeds up for the butterfly stomach sweaty-palmed high of being cranked-up onstage, twirling under the hot blazing lights, merging like a playback pitchshift melt with the slow-downs of their first kisses in the dark of post-show euphoria, drenched in crimson light and scored to a slowed, druggy  "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that makes you ache in rock and roll remembrance of the first trip on acid or the first trip on ecstasy, the first kiss backstage or first time on stage on acid playing and singing while the microphone spreads out before you like an insect highway --the blazing red stage lights in your face forming a fiery Bosch triptych funnel around the microphone and your mouth becomes the size of a black hole in outer space, spewing flaming lyrics into the clenched alien insect fangs of the hatched web of the microphone, and outwards in waves of pink that wash over the melting-faced fans. It's a first kiss that starts as a gentle shotgun from a joint and slowly tentatively becomes a supernova of blinding white light. From their first gig all the way to Cherie finally passing out in Japan, the film is alive with pleasure.

Fanning's good in these moments of stoned triumph and good much later as a zonked junky in the grocery store, using her cart for support as she glides through the aisles, trying to buy two large onions and a liter of vodka from a skeptical cashier who looks distrustfully down at her blank eyes, bruised arms and shitty ID. We like that she steals her dying aunt's medication, and that she plays mind games with her copycat sister, but it's one thing to be believably fucked-up, another to turn that fucked-uppedness into rock and roll gold. Brando was a believable working class slob in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, for example, but that's not why the role made him an icon. He brought ferocious animal grace, he made the brute sexy in his savagery. Fanning needs that kind of ferocity. She's still eerily mature like she was in I AM SAM, but now she's clinging to a blank DARIA-style po-faced apathy. She's the FUGITIVE KIND Brando, trying to stare down adulthood in the mirror while passive-aggressively parodying her character's archetypal punk oomph.

Well, who can blame her, considering the horrors she's seen herself go through on film? Speed, anorexia and self-loathing keeps a girl 'forever young' until one day she just turns to dust or goes to rehab, or is saved by rock and roll. Yeah baby, rock and roll.

But Dakota: if rock is to save your life you have to at least give a shit about it. You have to thank it, bathe in it, love it unconditionally. Otherwise you're just a poseur looking for a validation hand-out, the addictive high of adulation is an excuse that prevents you from actually interacting with lesser (and everyone else is lesser) mortals.

In the end, Kristen Stewart pulls off being a rock and roll survivor just like the real Joan Jett because she taps into that feeling of how passion and genuine interest in something (getting better at guitar, for example) is a lifelong pursuit that saves you from all self-defeating distraction. Fanning / Currie never learns this, never deigns to look outside the mirror for her raison d'etre.  But in Joan Jett/Kristen Stewart's case it's a love of one's craft that I call the Keith Richards life preserver. She has her guitar, and she'll never need to look farther than its strings to find her own backyard.

No this same guitar playing focus is what keeps death at a respectful bay for Keith Richards. It's what lifts him above the druggy waves that drown lesser rock mortals, that lets him soar past the trials of bad trip overdose and grubby hangers-on that drag other rock stars down. His guitar is his magic charm, like Tamino's Magic Flute in Mozart's same-name opera, steadying him through trials that would panic and drown rock stars whose focus drifts to groupies, money, fame, or the terrors of bad trips and relentless dehumanizing crowd adoration. Joan loses all her fame and rep when the band crashes and she burns, and she's so young and overwhelmed she can't pull herself out. BUT once she's suffered and lost her mind and got it back through writing "I Love Rock and Roll," she has found her Keith Richard life preserver and earned the right to be a rock goddess, the way she hadn't while on the fast track through Fowley's hype machine thresher in the Runaways. She suffers and survives by grabbing onto the Keith Richards life preserver, focusing on her guitar and the craft, the playing. It keeps her afloat above the AOR sharks, big money, fame's rises and falls (and the only thing more jarring than sudden fame is its sudden absence), romantic love (which women are taught should be their 'ultimate'), and drug abuse. Guitar - it's a creative outlet she can practice and play on forever and never stop improving, a focus that keeps her head down and her attention rooted on the next step ahead, instead of all the side distractions. She can bring it everywhere and never stop playing. That guitar lifts her from both sinking into the mire, and from floating away into space. It's like a crack in a prison wall and you know that the more you scrape at that hole, the wider your glimpse of daylight 'til one day you can just walk right out (just don't forget your trowel).

Alas, there is no 'out' to escape to, but you can take comfort in the fact that you'll never run out of scraping; the scraping becomes the spiritual practice --that's the Robert Johnson crossroad devil's bargain. Joan Jett and Kristen Stewart signed the Satanic contract (Stewart with acting - continually seeking out good directors, scripts and new challenges) but Cherie and Dakota (through phoning it in) just fold the devil's contact up and ask the devil if they can hold onto it and "think about it"...  until indecision becomes their whole persona, and that's death if you're in a rock band. You may as well bring your mother along on tour, like Cameron Crowe in fucking ALMOST FAMOUS. Yeccch!

As a child actress coming into adulthood, Dakota's heading into some treacherous waters... she needs a Keith Richards life preserver. She seems to have forgotten she used to have one in acting. She's a lost little girl and making personal lostness part of the role isn't the same as playing a lost little girl in such a way as to make us swoon from the cinematic complexity of your acted lostness and thus to recognize cathartically our own lostness. Instead, it's not just Cherie throwing a tantrum of indecision, it's Dakota throwing a tantrum by draining Cherie's tantrum of cinematic resonance.  She's become like another child star whose precocious genius has seemed to fade, Christina Ricci (as Nathan R. writes about on Film Experience). If moviedom was their parents, Christina and Dakota would be going through a phase, a kind of passive aggressive tantrum, like Richard Burton in EXORCIST II. Sometimes too, as with Burton, if you have a rep of being a great actor, directors are skittish about telling you how bad you're sucking. And you go on auto-pilot, not realizing future generations will be cringing over your hammy bad vibe hangover of a performance for eons to come.

Since we never see the Currie spark in Fanning, we never really see what it is she lost, or if she even lost it. We can only discern that that some people were born to rock, and others to fold napkins at a gift shop and occasionally dress like Stevie Nicks. I'm not knocking napkin folding or Stevie Nicks. Most of us--myself included--leave the rock world for folding napkins sooner or later. Maybe napkins are all we can handle. Only a few go the distance like Joan and Keith, for whom no drug will ever supplant their rooted allegiance to rock, which is why they're free to do as much of them as they want. The rest of us may have rocked and had a good time, but love of rock never really supplanted our love of drugs, our love of the stage, fans, and jamming out never supplanted our longing for creature comfort. We'd rather stay home and listen to music and get high than go out on the road and deal with afternoon sound checks in barrooms still reeking of smoke, booze, sweat and vomit from the night before. We'd rather not have to worry about staying more or less sober until after the first set, which means approximately five hours in some bohunk town with nothing to do and nowhere to go except wait in a smelly bar that reeks of booze and you're not allowed to drink until a half an hour before the first set, so you sit there in the corner and the pre-show jitters and last night's hangover make every hour stretch like days.

But then, Boom! A double shot of tequila, lemon, hit the stage and it's all worth it. That's the rock and roll experience, or it was for me. So I quit, because a beer-soaked, cigarette and vomit-scented bar is a terrible thing for a sober person to have to smell for hours on end, with nothing to do and nowhere to go until the set starts (a bass is pretty easy to set up), just forced to just hang out in a bar and not drink while coping with the twin anxieties of a) what if no one shows up? and b) what if a lot of people do and you suck? It's a nerve-wracking strain that has your whole psyche screaming, hour after hour, smelling that stale beer/puke/urine/sawdust smell, staring at the shelves behind the bar, shivering in the cold caused by the wet-mopped floors.

All worth it with that first flush of the double shot before the show starts, sure, but the strain!

Man, it's hell getting up to heaven. For me it wasn't worth it, so here I am. I hope Dakota doesn't cop out if acting is her passion, but if not, well, you can't hang in the doorway forever deciding if you want to endure that horrid 5-hour wait in the vomit-and-beer smelling soundstage, all made up and clutching a sweat-stained script like the hand of your mother when being led to the doctor's office for your first shot.

As for the real Cherie Curie, she finally found her own Keith Richards life preserver... chainsaw sculpture!

Saw strong, big sister! Saw that shit STRONG!

LL/LL: Through the Peeping Glass

Mining a bit of the sleazy tabloid feel of STAR 80 and WONDERLAND with the lost Lenore/Laura Palmer surrealism of FIRE WALK WITH ME, the images from the "last of Lindsay" photo shoot (see below video) for the in-development INFERNO are disturbing in their implications of an as-yet innocent Linda Lovelace being roped into a hotel g-bang by her rough trade husband, Chuck Traynor. When you consider that poor Lindsay was on her way to jail when this photo shoot occurred, prior to any actual filming of the story, and that scraps of the sexually turgid script are apparently all over the internet, I get uneasy, doomed, wretched feeling we're all going to hell, just from a video about a photo shoot! In its own way, this little video teaser is already a perfect slice of Hollywood at its most self-reflexively turned-on and remorseful about it at the same time.

Considering he's done only one other film, 2008's YOUR NAME HERE, its perhaps unintentionally revealing that the first thing on the poster you read is "Mathew Wilder's Inferno," as if implying he's the impresario-exploiter of the piece, the Chuck Traynor to Lindsay's Linda. And what does that entail? Maybe he's just distinguishing the film from Dario Argento's INFERNO; I hear the script's good, but does that earn Wilder his headliner marquee status?

The big star of the video of course is Lindsay; her expressions in the photos betray a staggering talent and a wounded soul: regret, excitement, ambivalence, and even disinterest in her own welfare. Anyone who's ever been in love with beautiful, young, tragically self-destructive woman will inevitably have that familiar feeling of their heart dropping to the floor and breaking into a million shards. It's almost enough to make you go and sin no more.

Life imitates and heals art as, right in the middle of a photo shoot re-creating this ground zero of lost innocence, two smart, talented ladies sit and talk, capable lionesses in a den of wannabe poachers and hyenas, the sidelines a blur of slavering and snapping paparazzi. Supplying the light to the shadow, the always amazing Kim Morgan does the interviewing as Lindsay--her voice raspy and thoughtful-- explains how she reads the character of porn star Linda Lovelace. On her own blog, Sunset Gun, Morgan notes of the experience:

Thoughtful, funny and good, Lohan depicted her shoot, which were essentially, stills from the movie (written and to be directed by Matthew Wilder), with impressive, shifting emotions, gritty strength and intense poignancy. As photographer Tyler Shields snapped the dramatic pictures, based on an especially sad moment in  Lovelace's life, it was fascinating to watch her go in and out of character.

When it was all done, Lindsay sat on the bed with me while I asked questions (and here, simply listened, like a therapist), and she talked quite easily about the sadomasochist relationship of Lovelace and Chuck Traynor, at one point saying the script reminded her of her parents. Yes. She has been through some things. (Read full piece here)

Like myself, Kim Morgan is a staunch defender of Lohan's right to be wild, pointing out that the same bad behavior in men (like Colin Farrell, for example) only gets a winky smirk from the press, while a girl like Lindsay is crucified and condemned as if by a nation of tut-tutting moral committee matrons:

I don't care what so-and-so movie writer from whatever newspaper or Web site feels about Lindsay's partying or sexy lifestyle (there's a strong strain of misogyny in this kind of critique), the real question is, can she act? If critics assessed Jack Nicholson for his off-screen behavior, he might not have the Oscars he so richly deserves. (KM)

That's a good point, and the answer is yes, she can act up a storm. The misogyny thing is tragically true. In her own way Lindsay is the Richard Burton of her hour, but girls aren't allowed to be bedrunken titans, only coy and pretty and if they want Oscars they have to wear false teeth and shoot skeevy Florida johns; they have to bow and suffer before the pervy desires of evil men rather than looming tall and true and as fucked up as they wanna be. All phoenixes must first be ashes and these days they use special phoenix-retardant urns to keep the vengeance from spuming forth.

Thus INFERNO could be Lindsay's THE WRESTLER, or it could be her I KNOW WHO KILLED ME PART TWO, and maybe a lot of that will depend on sexist preemptive judgment and maybe not. Either way, Lindsay's due some respect from the sneering hordes, whatever the role. And who will play Lindsay playing Linda and re-enact this photo shoot in 40 years? Will the self-reflexive merry-go-round of glamorously tawdry recreations of scuzzy moments in adult film history ever come to its crashing halt or will it just get more dizzying? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

I know why the entombed mummy sings...

In the late 50's-early 70's there was a deluge of marvelously British horror films from Hammer Studios, you probably already know that. But did you know their 1959 MUMMY secretly rules? While they sucked on UHF TV with their washed out prints and bad editing and pan and scanning, they look damned great on DVD. Being British and smart as paint the filmmakers often enriched these pics with colonial and class issue subtext, including a sub-subtext linking buxom beauty co-stars with pre-Christian paganism? Jolly brave and true of this upstart little studio, and damned British. When I read the words Pinewood Studios in end credits now I get all tingly... be it early James Bond, The Avengers, or lovely Hammer.

Many of the Hammer films have aged well; maybe it's that the DVD spit and polish really brings out the deep reds, maybe it's the pre-Christian roots and rigid class system creating far more sparks than would similar situations in the States; Britain's longer history of international third world exploiting and economic inequality makes their horror films--which after all deal with the 'return of the repressed'--- so much more "rich" than ours of the same period. For weird old America we have Edgar Allen Poe ("the divine Edgar") and maybe Ambrose Bierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and then we run into a wall. But England has a whole Victorian era to plunder; the monsters generally come from the wealthy class, and the peasant girls are the first to get it, the nobility last to be suspected and by far the most decadent. Hammer horrors invariably include a cozy tavern scene full of comic relief hypocrite doctors and priests, agitated innkeepers who won't let their daughters divulge information ("Hush up, girl!"), witnesses who no one believes because they're tipplers, and a cowardly populace who bar their door at night.

But the one I want to single out as exemplary in its completely Britishness and gutsy approach to monsterness is Hammer's THE MUMMY (1959), expanded from the 1932 original to include the Victorian equivalent of a Middle Eastern terrorist, an Egyptian Egyptologist (the nerve!) named Mehemet Bay (George Pastell) who dares suggest that ancient burial relics should stay where they are, undisturbed, or the very least stay in Egypt and not become mere curiosities for the swaths of unwashed gawkers at the British Museum. How dare this fez-wearing heathen even suggest such a thing?! But the even-keeled screenplay lets this Mehemet Bay off with plenty of sympathy; he even prays to Karnak, the god of said mummy, to release said mummy's spirit at the end of his vengeance spree. And his house is pretty nice-looking. I'd rather live there than in Cushing's wearily formal mansion. The two actors play well of each other, and their climactic battle of wits--- with Cushing blithely baiting the Egyptian into a confession by dismissing Karnak as a second-rate deity-- is truly a unique sociologically ambiguous moment in horror.

Of course it's not perfect, unless you believe Brits have way too much faith in guns over supernatural juggernauts. Every night he gets a visit from a seven foot-tall mummy who smashes doors apart and barges through rooms like a freight train, and--even after two shots from his revolver did nothing the night before-- Cushing's sure his shotgun will do the trick. What saved him the night before was the late inning presence of his worried wife, as usual the spittin' image of the mummy's dead love. And of course, Cushing insists on sending her away during the mummy attacks, so she'll be "safe." Ah so brave! So blind. So British.

Feminist-wise the film fares little better: the beautiful, cat-eyed Yvonne Furneaux (Carole's sister in REPULSION,  Marcello's clingy girlfriend in LA DOLCE VITA) is the 'living image' of the dead high priestess, the point where if Cushing had a brain he'd just ask his wife to tell the mummy to go back and kill Mehemet. Instead, even after she saves her fey and disinterested husband's life once already, Cushing sends her upstairs, "like a good little girl." Even more brainlessly, at the climax, he has her wait out in the bushes with the inspector so "she'll be safe." And of course, the cops stationed outside fall like dominoes and she's spirited off, as we all know she must. Then again, we don't watch these films to see how to smartly deal with the undead, we watch them to see heavy-breathing beauties walk down dark corridors in their foxy Victorian era negligees, and then get carried into bogs by lovesick corpses.

And man, what a girl. Slim old Peter Cushing looks like he'd be crushed in the sack with her, frankly - she's like twice his weight in this film, and he seems to be implying his characters' secretly queer by the way in which he coldly dismisses her affection; he'd much rather wrestle with a manly mummy! Oh those lads of British theater! Christopher Lee is great as the bandaged (and in flashback unbandaged) high priest, getting to use only his expressive eyes and lumbering gait; you can feel all the horror and anger of being entombed alive for centuries in his sad, lovelorn expression. Hey, if I had been buried all those centuries, I'd try to carry Yvonne Furneaux off to my swampy lair too. If I was unable to speak my love (since the cats back in my home epoch cut out my tongue) or write her sonnets (since my heiroglyphic-writing hand was paralyzed) I'd have to demonstrate it in other ways, like obeying her commands with a shambling wordless courtesy.

I love Cushing! I love this mummy more than all the Universal sequels to the Karl Freund original combined. Which says exactly nothing. Is there anyone in monster fandom who loves the mummy over other monsters? Who is like a 'mummy' fan? To me, the mummy is right at the level of the Wolfman, who leaves me kind of nonplussed, though WEREWOLF OF LONDON has great atmosphere. I love DRACULA (1931) the most, and the Hammer vampire films--with a few tedious exceptions--are my favorites. Still, Hammer's MUMMY is a mummy to be reckoned with, a juggernaut that wastes little time in moving from the door to your throat. Even the lengthy flashback to Egypt is creepy, with long ceremonies of death, death and more death, the strange props that make it associatively linked with Kenneth Anger's unforgettable LUCIFER RISING (1972).

And lastly, one can't ignore the vein of rich critique to be found in exploring the fey way Brits claim Egyptology as their own little playground in these films, seeing Egyptians themselves as having little to no right to their own artifacts, and also even after it's clear Karnak is a badass god who can help mummies live through untold centuries, he's still considered a pagan superstition compared to the god of these fey British scientists, and Mehemet Bey's way cooler and sexier than Cushing in the film. (coming off the best, actually is the American accented Eddie Byrne as the inspector). When the white patriarchal reps see this giant mummy resist bullets and crush larynxes with ease, they still refuse to believe in him, even when he walks off with their girl! I root for the mummy every time! Go mummy! This time you shall be free, shall be free. Even if freedom means a mucky swamp grave, there to float and dream until Jimmy Sangster writes you into life once more. Kharis, you magnificent bastard, I read your scroll!