High Strangeness: LANA TURNER'S HOLY MOUNTAIN and Rose Hobart takes a trip

2012 note - Frost apparently remixed both films together to form Lana Turner overdive, which I herewith present, leaving the text as is.
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A follow-up to Helsinki Productions' awesome LANA TURNER'S INLAND EMPIRE. This one was just posted a few days ago, and finds Lana continuing to lose her mind as she seems to connect with some cat spirit that may or may not be an old Egyptian star goddess... Just roll with it! Spot the connections to Dario!

These Lana epics remind me of one of my own psychedelic remixes, DRUNKARDS OF BORNEO. Ever see it? I'm supposed to do a poster for Ethan Spigland's class on the Situationists so I've been learning about 'detournement.' And honey, this is it:



When we think of 'reappropriation,' 'collage,' 'detournement,' don't we conjure a  handful of images, and a handful only? A urinal signed 'R. Mutt', a soup can, and a slice of film from 1933 called 'East of Borneo' that became the first remix, courtesy Joseph Cornell, called Rose Hobart?

I stumbled upon the original East of Borneo by happy accident at the Whitney Museum's Edward Hopper show back in the 90s. I never forgot it: Drugged leopards dropped onto screaming stunt men, a satisfyingly alcoholic Charles Bickford stirred to sluggish life when his non-white prince pal makes a play for his wife, come to fetch him like a dutiful, confused puppy. Imagine LOST WEEKEND if the girl in the leopard coat followed Ray Milland all the way to Borneo, where she got hit on by Bim and Ray had to disguise himself as a little turkey in a straw hat? Talk about codependence! Basically, her intrusion topples the whole kingdom. Women.

So in my version, the idea is of course, acidemic. The girl comes, takes a trip while never leaving the grounds, and is amused by a sacrifices both human and monkey. Through it all, a mystery man laughs and laughs! But bromance triumphs!! Bros before ho's, that's the moral. Even if I've never practiced it, personally. So.. let DRUNKARDS OF BORNEO create the space for post-modern healing, and god bless us as November 2010 crumbles into the rose-tinted abyss of memory. And if you want to get in on the weirdness... get on it. Rent THE BIG CUBE and deconstruct that tall drink of bitch!

PS - Right as I was writing this, the unimpeachable, Film Doctor was posting a bunch of great 'detournement' links. Debord is in the air! If only we could bottle it... for profit... and peace!

Lyon in Winters: LOLITA and Immortal Porpoises

Where I come from, home for the holidays means dying lawns, cloudy suburban skies, foil-covered crock pots brought unwillingly from the car to the front door; chattering hellos from perfumed relatives; ceilings slick with condensation from ever-baking turkeys and boiling rutabagas; football and the voice of Sam Elliott extolling guts, glory, Ram, from the living room; a barrage of women nattering from the kitchen. It's a time to go to school reunions and movies just to get out of the house. Hometowns leave their mark, like a lash of sameness, slash of lameness you'll never paint over... but is it that bad? What if you come from a family rife with divorce, guilt, skeletons, incest? Pedophile freaks subverting the family dynamic? Lolita cousins coming onto you while aunts and uncles look at you harshly but you're too drunk to resist? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

I had a fine podcast discussion with Jamey DuVall at Movie Geeks United for The Kubrick Series' -- and so I've been thinking of LOLITA all day. Let me share it with you as we close the holiday down:

Laws dealing with minors and corruption are tricky things. A kid (under 18) who rapes his cousin can get off with just a flick on the wrist, but a guy who sends one of his prostitutes home for Xmas on a train can go to jail, just for buying her a ticket that takes her across state lines. This all goes back to 1910 and a law meant to catch white slavers that was amended as the Mann Act in 1948 largely due to the newspaper headline case of Frank LaSalle, a an old pervert dragging a naive shoplifting minor named Florence Sally Horner, off on a two-year cross-country spree. The constant travel making it hard to discern the unkosher relationship kept in place by blackmail (he saw her steal a notebook from a five and dime and played copper). This was a vile case, a shot heard by journalists around the world, and the headlines have never been the same, for better and for worse. They made laws designed specifically to catch evil men like Frank (and Humbert). Good for them. I'm not kicking about it. I'm super skeeved by this topic. On the other hand, my own super skeeve response fascinates me. I know I'm not alone in it, I know its origin in the Freudian Totem and Taboo root cellar of the unconscious, but what is it, really?

Kubrick's film LOLITA, as well as Nabokov's original book, seems to take the Horner outrage and subsequent law as a challenge to depict the corruption of a minor in a non-hysterical manner, with trans state-line travel galore. I've seen the film and read the book numerous times, but never thought of that strange but valuable (if abusable) law... suddenly, this past viewing, it was all I thought about.

My dad has a terribly long and ornate joke dealing with this law, involving transporting immortal porpoises over staid lions, or something --which I heard him tell other adults at drunken dinners all through my childhood--and I never understood why it was even funny or what the hell they were talking abou. The point is, it's a law designed specifically to counteract the moves of people like Humbert, himself an evil user of pretend morality. Humbert's flabbergasted relationship with Quilty is an ultra-cool mirror of the guilt-wracked hypocrite censors challenging lysergic intellectual Kubrick to both adhere to and defy the "How could they ever make a movie of Lolita?" marketing catchphrase.

Over the passing decades this film's been many things to me, but this last viewing it seemed to be about art vs. censorship and the way the promoters of 'childhood wonderment' and the Peter Pan 'if you can dream' aesthetic--the Norman Rockwell fishing boy logo of Dreamworks and the mouth agape wonderment of E.T.-- are the both the exploiters of children and culprits who bring us the hyper-awareness of the dangers of pedophilia. The two are entwined, a double exposure of exposing, like a cobra with the head of a tail-eating mongoose. The more you pine for and prize a 'perfect family' the more pressure-cooker force you put on those latent incestuous, pedophile dark desires. Pedophilia is the ultimate evil, after all, the one crime even the other prisoners in jail will kill you for (in jail); it goes deeper than Oedipus, down into the murky swamp behind the Bates Motel, and it is embedded in the fabric of our modern trend towards the deification of children and their 'innocence.' Is it any accident that the two main architects of this hypocritical saintly children-izing in the early 1980s were Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg?

The difference in the pre-ET 70s was that no one wanted the Norman Rockwell 50s 'childhood wonderment' thing anymore, so there was less to repress, and what you don't repress you don't have to 'act' out in sexual transgression. The pedophiles and flashers were still around in the 70s--the rate of crime in this area has not risen--but parents' intense fear for their children's safety wasn't as ubiquitous. The Don Draper cultural rubric didn't include constant monitoring of playdates. The kids were left to roam the house, yard, or neighborhood while parents smoked, drank, swapped, played bridge, and carried on. We kids knew not to get into cars with strangers or take their candy, and above all we knew when to stay out of our parents' way and when was the right time to creep downstairs and steal from the cabdt dishes. We knew when the bridge games would devolve to the point that our presence would be greeted with welcome instead of stern reprimand; we knew the tartness of our parents' whiskey sours and Tom Collins' kisses; we learned to mix drinks with the powdered packets of whiskey sour mix and play bartender. Adulthood was a virile open-shirted marvel in the 70s... there was no clear line to cross. Sometimes, it just reached out and grabbed you. You felt safe around it, yet knew that it was, itself, unsafe. You know, like life?

The sad thing now for an old rager like me watching LOLITA is to see the inexorable passage from mom to daughter to daughter-mom in Sue Lyon, as it so preternaturally predicts the arc of America's cultural mores, from repressive 50s-early 60s, (Shelly Winters) to liberated late 1960s-70s (Sue Lyon) to repressive 80s (Lyon-in-Winters). Elaborating the transformation is Sellers as the liberal trickster elite and James Mason as the outflanked conservative imposter. Just as the most vocally anti-gay politician is inevitably found drunk in a gay nightclub, so does Humbert Humbert hide, like a scoundrel at his last refuge, behind the outrage of conservative wagon-circling.

The message was clear and simple to a generation for whom Freud was like Oprah: the more concerned you are over your child's well being the more suspect you are. I was more or less Lolita's age when I first saw LOLITA, and my perspective and identification with it has changed a bit now that I'm Humbert's age, or rather Quilty's. It's the Quilty character who dominates now, more, for me. The vantage point from which art--through its transparency and deliberate digging for dirty truth--looks down upon dull, corporeal expression of desire. To paint a nymphet, like Degas with his ballerinas; to film a nymphet like Rollin with his vampire women; to write of one, like Nabokov, is to effectively sublimate the desire to corrupt them in the real. The artist has 'already' tasted such forbidden fruit in this sense and found he much prefers using the desire and rapture as a inspiration, a springboard into art. rather than actual tawdry seduction --a dead end. Artists understand that sexual gratification means an end to the dance, a sudden return to shame and self-consciousness, a hasty, guilty retreat through the parking lot. Instead of making art, you made a 'situation', a guilt trip, a baby, or a messy crime scene.  Compared to the divine rapture of creation, which is eternal, it's just a negative chalk mark on your karmic blackboard. In other words, there's those who are inspired by the muses to create and those who just want to mount the muses in their trophy room. The last ones are the evil who may or may not know what they do oh lord.

Lolita in this instance if of course the muse, dragged down too soon into the tedious abyss of mortality (i.e. getting knocked up, moving to Alaska, where maybe she'll grow up to be Sarah Palin!), and Humbert the bourgeois authority that proclaims things art or pornography according to his own licentiousness (he makes things -- Lolita herself -- forbidden to the masses [not letting her in the play] so he may enjoy en toto under the pretense of protecting her morals) and Sellers is the artist, the Bugs Bunny who actually controls the stuff of 'real' art, for he knows what's really going on... and that is the primordial jazz of constant persona dissolution.

The moral to all this? Family ain't perfect, but you can trust its imperfection a lot better than you can trust the TV that tells you a true family is like the one they show. TV gets its messages from the Humbert elite and they don't have your best interests at heart, and never did. In the 1980s, before SSRIs were popular, some of us had to successfully kill ourselves just to convince our parents we needed therapy. In the 1990s it's reversed, but the same principle of fear and gray flannel blending applies. Therapy was once taboo, as in 'people would talk' - they'd think you were bad parents if your kid had to go to a therapist. Now that once 'moral' attitude that therapy is taboo is itself taboo. We've got to get the Lyons back out of the Winters and lift the immortal porpoises across staid lions if we're ever to wise up to the fact that our desire is inherently unfulfillable. Only then we can wise up to the double-edged sword of desire, and just hang it on the wall rather than wield it-- for we only ever cut our soul to ribbons. The only exorcism of desire that truly fulfills and heals that soul is art. Humbert can shoot up the Quilty art museum all he wants (in the beginning), but he's already lost the war... he's already given the surest sign he's a dirty old man: he's a prude.

Quixote Ugly: THE SWIMMER

"He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools."
-- The Swimmer, John Cheever

Of all the great white male midlife crisis epics, outside of TV's MAD MEN, what can beat the Burt Lancaster-starred adaptation of John Cheever's THE SWIMMER (1968)? What kind of 'meet' competition is there for challengers even to lap up against? The recent Time magazine cover lauding Jonathan Franzen as the literary canon's next Great White Hope sent a shock through the up-and-coming, young, brilliant and angry writing community at Pratt. Here was yet another middle-aged higher-educated white male of means writing about mid-life crises, college tenure boondogles, student affairs, eccentric characters spouting pithy one-liners, and car accidents that leave multi-generational ripples across sprawling summer cottage-owning families - just what the world needs now.

I'm guessing on all this, of course. Never read no Franzen, whatever it is he wrote. But the writing community at Pratt was nonplussed and that's enough for me. Sight unseen it was Time grasping at any last straw in the arsenal for keeping awake their dwindling upper middle class white male readership (1), attempting to fully lionize another Norman Mailer, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or John Cheever, Phillip Roth, or even John Irving. In this way, was it not unlike the drowning grasp of The Swimmer himself!

Wait, is that why I'm writing about it? Dude, I've made my peace with all that, I hope, the loss of the automatic advantages my dad's generation received. I vowed long ago to ever be caught sober in a country club again, unless it was for a memorial service, preferably mine own. (2) How's that for pith? (hic')

THE SWIMMER too is morbidly pithy, it was made the year after I was born but it already saw the writing on the wall for my life story. It's aware of the absurdity of great white drunk male lionization. It reaches into the floater's open chest wound for the heart of white male 'pride of ownership' and finds it all turned to ash except for rotting crotch. But what a crotch! So sad we lost it.

What happened?

According to one disgruntled neighbor of Lancaster's character, Mr. Merrill's: "You got tossed out of your golden playpen, that's what happened."

As an entitled sexist white male myself, born in 1967, I grew up hearing overhearing racist, sexist and Polish jokes, told by adults over cocktails on the couch. Sitting beside the feet of the adults in awe, rushing to refill their drinks on request, blending the whiskey sour mix in the blender, smelling the sweet sugar sweat of hungover adults on copping sips at all hours, the association of maturity with booze, cigarettes and unconscious prejudice is built deep into me. These proclivities forged this site, and though I know it's all wrong, I smoke nonetheless and have an attitude of class entitlement so inappropriate to my actual circumstances that I consider my maintaining it a form of Quixote-ugly heroism. So when I see Burt in THE SWIMMER gradually sink into the deep end of illusion, I weep, for us both. The scene of his humiliation at the hands of the filthy ethnic grocers at the public pool especially wrankles. This is the ultimate in both comeuppance and validation of the class system the film is watching die with the impassive eyes of a five year-old boy on the cusp of sociopathy watching the last gasp of a flopping fish.

The rules of this descent are especially telling, the class consciousness vivid without being judgmental. When the playing field is equal, says all great white epiphany, the lowest common denominator always rules. Once you let the poor people in, your pool is officially 'public' i.e. packed and full of kiddie urine, a slum. On the other hand, maybe it's you who was the slum the whole time: "Ya wanna know what your kids thought of ya, Mr. Merrill?" the grocer says. "They thought you were a big joke!" Exemplifying the nouveu riche (the type who have to tell you how much everything cost), they're like devouring birds who wolf down our Burt like one of Sebastian's baby turtles.

Standing forth from the nouveau riche-ethnic fray, in the film's most touching scene, is Joan Rivers, playing a weary (hungover) but genuinely present broad at the nouveau riche party, who sees--just for a minute--a chance at something new and exciting at the thought of driving him off with Burt on the spur of the moment. But before she can find her car keys, the moment passes. Still, what a moment. Everyone Burt Lancaster meets before her is either oblivious to his 'living-dead' ego or resentful of his past flaunting. Joan is just lonesome and radiating that special late afternoon ennui. Her sad but witty resilience creates a small oasis of realness in Burt's downward spiral, like if she wanted they could swipe a fifth of vodka from the bar cart on their way out of the party, hop in her BMW back down the river to her East 82nd street apartment, and shack up for the rest of the weekend in the AC, just drinking, screwing (as they called it then), watching old movies on the late late show --and he'd never have to get his well-deserved comeuppance. It's easy! I've done it myself, had a girl in Cherry Hill who I sometimes miss and her parents were fun and had a pool. She smoked menthol and blew her hair out and had that accent but she was thrice the lady my more cosmopolitan ladies were... Watching Joan you can feel the way sex and drinks in an air conditioned room cures a weary hungover sunshine-infused soul. Seeing her you can feel the chill sunburned skin gets from cold from being in pools and drying in the sun, the dusky chlorine and nicotine smell washing through the AC, like a cozy womb of air.

 Burt, forget about that little young blonde and go where the flavor is!

And that's my advice in a nutshell to all future Swimmers: Never go back to your wife, the kids, the house. Never get out of the goddamned pool. There's no such thing as ugly women, only sober men. So grab the first boat that comes along, as long as she's just hot enough you don't have to hide, but not enough that you get jealous. Never get out of that boat, Burt. Absolutely goddamned right.

THE SWIMMER doesn't get out of the boat, yet it still sails without him. The age of the great white sharky novel sinks down to the bottom as he pounds the iron doors of his golden playpen like its the locked steerage gate on the Titanic. His future is all drank up and pissed out into the rose bushes. His key don't fit that lock on his door. Another mule has long ago kicked down his stall.

Released in 1968, THE SWIMMER is like the last conservative helicopter out of hippie-swarmed Saigon. Burt swims backwards through the evacuees like a sperm whale who alone realizes there's a prophylactic net ahead. But there's no going back, oh Connecticut Paragon! Your day of slapping polyester asses and drinking the world into a hazy welcome mat is over. Swim to the sea, Cheever of Men, if it will have you. Just know there's lots of other sharks fighting over every last late-night co-ed spring breaker, and for far too long you've coasted in a sea of spoon-fed chum. Are your teeth sharp? Is your skin hard? Is your mouth a little weak? Are you smart? Or would you rather be a duck? Then quack, Mr. Merill. Quack! 

NOTES:
1. My dad's subscribed to TIME all my life. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, I read it every week, especially Richard Corliss' film reviews, and carbonizing my prepubescent hormones via its pictures of Cheryl Tiegs and Charlie's Angels - back in the days before I knew what sex was or that my arousal was 'dirty'. I hate it but it's a part of me, that's a fact. Nowadays I'm too leftist to tolerate its petit-bourgeois slantiness and Effexor has left me a happy eunuch! 
2. Postscript - it turned out to be my mom's - Kenmure CC, SC - 2/15 - RIP Nancy Kuersten xoxxox

X is for Xanax: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963)

Bartender: Mister Birnim, this is the mornin'...
Don: That's when you need it most, in the morning. Haven't you learned that yet? At night this stuff's just a drink... but in the morning it's medicine! --Ray Milland - LOST WEEKEND (1945) 

Dr. X: "I'd give anything! Anything to have dark!"  -Ray Milland - X-THE MAN W/X-RAY EYES (1963)

Science has proven our senses capable of far more than the limited strata and spectra of processed information we know as collective reality. Like radios tuned to one station, our brains screen out the static and noise of whatever channel isn't immediately relevant for survival. After we have everything we need and want to feel safe and secure, 'set and setting' in place, we may want to slip the dial a smidge, drop a tab or chant some AUMs - see if we can pick up some other station, inside, outside, within / without the Known channel. We might find some beautiful music, sometimes by chance a heavenly voice of an angel (or a devil in disguise), but sooner or later we're deafened by the holy static, terrified by unearthly yowls, no volume knob can possibly reduce the infernal bells. Spinning the dial quickly back to the starting point, we hope we can find our safe channel again before we wake up the neighbors and wind up carted away gibbering in a straitjacket. If we can't, we wind up in the psych ward laughing at transmissions no one else can hear. If we do, we've just had a successful 'voyage' beyond the confines of collective 'reality.' We can try to transcribe what we heard, or paint it, but until we flip the dial again, we're back safe and sound, and back.

William Blake once wrote that if the doors of perception were cleansed the world would appear as it really is, infinite... but Lovecraft might add that--once the novelty or holy glow wears off--the infinite is a hard thing to live with day-after-day. We may after awhile finally remember, on some deep cosmic level, why the doors of perception aren't cleansed very often. Quickly we wish for a bucket of mud to splash upon them.  Unable to 'turn off' the infinite blazing through, we can only hope the 'finite' blinders come back quick. If they don't, we may find ourselves strapped to a gurney, trying to claw our eyes out, begging the nurse for a sweet, sweet Xanax and/or Ativan drip.

More than likely though, we'd just get rip-roaring drunk, and finally "get to see the world in real black and white," as Tiny Dr. Tim says in "W.C. Fields Forever." Eventually, the colors fade; Oz wears off back down to simple homespun sepia Kansas, and there we are, ready to don the yoke and slog forth into the world once more, a worker among workers.

Yeah, you need to be insane and/or holier than hell to live with those cleansed doors all the time, the X-ray eyes. And you need to know that I didn't even have to look up the above quote from LOST WEEKEND, also starring Ray Milland, because I know those lines by my drunken black X-ray heart, which makes me uniquely qualified to discuss X. For, like Don Birnim in LOST WEEKEND, and Dr. Xavier in X (also Ray Milland), I see too much, feel too deeply, and sometimes have the power to see right through my own eyelids, so that I see the same thing whether my eyes are closed or open. At those points, I grasp for anything to numb the mind, to shrink the aperture. But nothing works for long, leaving me eventually a twitching, hungover mess on fire with thirst and delirium tremens... welcome to the poison path!

It's hard to believe in hindsight that 1963's X (AKA- THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES) prefigures the psychedelic explosion of 1966-68 by a good four years, putting it way ahead of its time, as if Roger Corman could himself could see far into the future. It's still light years more 'true' to the psychedelic experience (especially the 'bad' trip) than nearly any other film trying to actually capture it, including Corman's own THE TRIP from 1967. While Corman's thrifty sets and leftover costumes and props give X-RAY an air of hackwork, that actually works for the overall effect, as if against such force of vision the world's clapboard paltriness is revealed, as if the full wave spectrum reveals, in addition to God's singular cyclops eye staring back at you, that the city you live in is just painted plywood fronts. This makes it hard to tell whether it's a nouvelle vague deconstruction (the French flag colored light bulb/balloons in the photo atop would fit right at home in MADE IN THE USA) or a brilliant inquiry into the 'gaze,' buffeted by waves of post-modern accidental Brechtian cheapness. Since we can't see the difference, we feel sure the difference is there. That's the kind of faith poor Mr. Birnim Wood Xavier doesn't have anymore -- he knows. 

Here's the plot: Dr, X-- grumpy as Don Birnam on Yom Kippur--feels skittish about the experimental eye drops he's invented and which he administers to himself as experimental subject. His colleagues tell him he mustn't! It's unethical! He kills one of them, because doctors who'd rather kill dozens of innocent animals than risk being their own guinea pigs are fucking chickenshit. Milland, who played an alcoholic so well in LOST WEEKEND he became one in real life, captures Xavier's sociopathic surliness in a way that spills outside the script until we're not sure if he's acting or the script was changed because that was easier than trying to change Milland's foul mood. The medical staff at X's hospital of course try to stop him, but it's too late. He sees it all: everything from under a women's skirts to inside their organs, to behind cards in poker and eventually to the chewy tootsie roll center of the universe. He goes from saying to hell with anyone who gets in his way in the pursuit of visual clarity to to hell with anything that gets in his way of driving headfirst into the desert on a quest for glorious opaqueness.

Then again, there's hot chicks scattered all over, so hey -- just dig that crazy looking girl in the photo below, with that awesome Cyd Charisse-meets-Vampira-style black cocktail dress. Note the swingin' way Milland has with a martini! Oh, Ray knows his way around a cocktail party.

Attractive Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van Der Vlis, below) is Xavier's love interest, though he doesn't pay her much attention. In fact he tries to hide from her once he's wanted for murder, but she follows him around like that girl with the leopard coat in LOST WEEKEND. I say give him a break, Nat. Poor Xavier is so busy seeing through things that he can't even sleep! You can't EVER sleep if you can see through your own eyelids! Have you ever woke up and not known whether it's six at night or six in the morning? That's the devil of it, Nat! Without a Valium or a bottle of Nyquil you're finished! And Nyquil hasn't even been invented in 1963! And for Valium you need a prescription. Why, Why Nat?!

Luckily for every wanted-by-the-cops freak like Dr. X there's a sleazy sideshow barker who'll hide him in a fortune teller tent and put him to work making medical diagnoses sans X-ray machine. As with past Corman carny films (remember CARNIVAL ROCK!?), there's very little attempt to convince that the interior threadbare sound stage sets are anything but sketches meant to support the thesis, but what a thesis! And Don Rickles--a regular of AIP's Beach Party films--is a natural impresario of see-through-itiveness, alternating compassion and hucksterism in a way that lets you loathe him and love him in alternating waves.

Diane and Xavier later have to split for the glitzy neon exteriors and the threadbare casino-set interior of Las Vegas, where his see-through card abilities parlay into a small fortune, but 'crowds' are attracted by his luck, leading to casino scrutiny, and Xavier's a surly sod who doesn't take his huge sunglasses off even in the dark of the casino, so ere long a police helicopter is chasing them through the desert after Xavier's car crashes because he can see through the road. So he runs around the desert while engaging in a staring contest with the eye in the center of the world and well...  I won't tell you who wins... I will say that the impressionistic free-form Les Baxter jazz score runs under everything like it's a drum-legged magnet pulling Milland by his giant dark glasses through the rattling sets.

Truth be told, like Milland's grumpy character, X is a hard film to love. Ray's just not the well-meaning basketcase he was as Don Birnam, but the film is still impressive and balls-out original in the way Corman just goes for it, and by it I mean the infinite trip -- pre-2001. I mean, there was no precedent in 1963 for this kind of way-out-there psychedelic trip. Corman was inventing yet another micro-genre in the exploitation universe.

Milland's career was off the rails anyway by the 1960s, meanwhile, due to his own penchant for mood-altering substances... he was taking whatever he could get, role-wise, even if it meant his head had to be sewn on the the ample frame of sensitive linebacker Rosie Greer (THE THING WITH TWO HEADS) just for a post-op recovery shot of Demerol. But even straining to appear less hungover than he was, Milland is never less than compelling and Dr. X as a character benefits from his peevishness. He makes us feel every ampere of his grouchy pain.

 The film's Richard Matheson-like script was penned by Ray Russell, whose credits are not otherwise impressive (MR. SARDONICUS? Yeeesh!) and Robert Dillon (FRENCH CONNECTION II). But it compares well with THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN in its gutsy exploration of the yawning abyss of the fourth dimensional existence, in its going beyond the illusory atomic structures of our familiar universe; and in its leaving sanity behind like a nagging wife, and--with a beatnik beanie in lieu of swim cap-- diving into the center of the known universe to prove its pasteboard flimsiness.

"I just do eyes!"

I'll share two personal anecdotes at this juncture:

1) In autumn of 2003 I was struck by a huge electro-magnetic freakstorm crown chakra third eye lightning bolt which enabled me--albeit briefly-- to see the same image with my eyes closed or open. The black-electric gray field of inner vision behind my eyelids had come into perfect alignment with the 'real' world around me. It was a moment both terrifying, exhilarating, liberating and mercifully brief.

2) I once was (circa 1987) talked into taking two tabs of blotter acid when a half would have been too much. I found myself walking down the middle of the street, clutching my hair and screaming and laughing at my own terror at the same time. If you can imagine being on a terrifying roller coaster plunging straight down, nonstop, for hour after hour, getting faster exponentially but never hitting bottom, maybe you can get an inkling. I was hoping a car would run me over and free my twisted soul from its melting shell. I saw through everything and I saw the skin cells flaking off all the bodies of the world; I felt the breathing of every living (and nonliving) thing; my breath was the murderous exhaust of cars and my thoughts the howling jackal-like yelps of playing children, buzzing engines cutting through the once sacred cake of my mind with their chainsaw mindless exuberance. With everyone's ape faces dissolving and aging in spiral movements I could barely even dare to look at my shoes. I walked on instinct towards the park, with my dog, who took one look into my eyes and moaned piteously, as if seeing the devil.

It took a long time, but in each example of my own experience -- the good and the terrifying-- I eventually got back to normal's soft gray field of blandness blanket. So I can feel Dr. X's pain at never being able to get back to that. It's the inability to turn it off that makes the schizophrenic seek the shelter of madness, and cigarettes. You can try to get drunk, but your senses are so heightened that even water tastes too strong for your senses. A shot of bourbon is so strong you can't get it to within six inches of your lips without gagging. And lord, I've tried. Such Roderick Usher-style morbid acuteness of the senses is not for lightweights. At the very least, you need a chaser.

I first saw X-THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES one afternoon on local TV in the early 1970s, with one of my first babysitters, 'Toots,' a blue jean-jacket and straight blonde hair 16-year old hippie runaway from the shelter where my mom volunteered. Ten minutes after mom left, Toots's boyfriend was over, the TV was on, and though they made out between commercials they snapped back for the film, and between the three of us, we talked of it avidly. In my first grade brain it lay as a cornerstone of mythic, intense older kid power. They explained what was going on in ways no other parent or babysitter ever could. It seemed strange, this film, savage, like an episode of BATMAN beamed in from a much more inhospitable, terrifying adult reality. Still, as with the above narrative about the two tabs, I was glad when mom came home, Toots left, and Ultra-Man came on. The soft gray blanket of banal space-time uniformity never feels so sweet as when it's returned after being momentarily ripped away.

So in short, X is a film that needs a sweet Xanax. It's the raw truth of God's eye staring you down through the center of all things. A Lacanian like Slavoj Zizek could have a field day with it. But it's over, it's gone. The magic and mystique of being able to 'crack it wide open' has been lost in our simulacratic age. No parent in their right mind would let a hippy runaway chick babysit their seven year-old today, or probably even allow them to watch a film like X in the first place. Now the TV eye has seen through us, not vice versa, and if anything it is the characters on the TV who will one day squirm in horror at the awful truth when their vision is no longer blocked by the fourth wall and they can finally peer out of their hole in the screen at us on our couches. Offended by our blank impassive eyes, they shall reach out from the screen to pluck them out! Our worst fear? We can still see!!

 NOTES:

For further reading check out my 2005 opus, Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child from Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #3