Unironic Ventriloquist Radio: YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN

"They say any idiot can write a book, if that's true I'm their boy."

Call me strange but I've always been a little bothered by concert 'films' -- the idea that the sight of a guy straining at his guitar is of some intrinsic aesthetic relevance to the experience of the music. Maybe I've been to too many Grateful Dead shows while hallucinating but I find the sight of people playing guitars to be fairly obscene. It's dirty, all those phallic necks and jerking strum movements. Sometimes seeing the musician is off-putting to your musical enjoyment, the way going to a reading by your favorite author can ruin his work for you (never meet your heroes). What is the correlation, for example, between watching a Jheri-curled ebony gremlin blowing into a shiny brass cornucopia and the the primordial jazz of Miles Davis in his late 60s-70s electric period? Better the music be seen as the earth's crust cooling and buckling at the dawn of time. What has a bunch of balding white guys in tuxedos with horsehair saws to the music of Mozart? Better an interwoven laser show. How does a fat dude with crazy gray hair wanking a long hunk of shiny purple wood correlate to the spacey noodling of Jerry Garcia, rather than... what... a zonked hippie chick sitting in a puddle behind the stage tracing patterns in the air like her fingertips are invisible sparklers? In the age of mp3s you can love a band and have no idea what they look like, and it's much better that way. I never want to go 'see' my favorite authors read, lest I be turned off by their voices or appearance and lose all love their work - imagine their real voice in my head as I read instead of the hazy matrix of inner voices I ascribe. I get around this by blotting out the author photos on books I own. You won't find a one. I even have doubts about showing my own on this blog and elsewhere, but I try to get around it by wearing dark glasses, beards, and deadpan expressions.

On another note: thanks to the anonymity of the web, mixed media collages that used to qualify for stuffy grants from arts foundations and take years to finish are now set up in seconds by freshmen college kids on their laptops who may have no idea how meta and post-modern they are by watching TRANSFORMERS on mute with a Mash-up remix of Pat Boone and Beyonce playing on their iTunes as a substitute soundtrack, all totally without any idea they can try to connect the interwoven symbolic meanings of it all and discover the joys of post-modernism for a media studies thesis. Meanwhile there are music documentaries or biopics out there that don't even have the rights to the music of their subject and so use muzak that sounds 'roughly' like the band. Authorship as a commodity thus shifts and feints and ducks back through an endless maze of duplication, collage, licensing, advertising 'rips' and adaptation. And you have pop stars now who make their songs on thin square pads and their concert performances consist of them sitting onstage with their little box, and pressing play, and then bravely extending their right hand across the bar for their cash while bewildered kids, too hip to complain, dance uncertainly. Maybe Andy Kaufman would love it... for awhile.  I'm Emperor's New Clothes about it.

Because it's all been done already.

No hay banda!

Artists have continually worked to negate each other, to make their own brand obsolete, and various forms of expression that take lifetimes to learn now become mastered, outdated and forgotten within months thanks to overexposure. We must remember that in 1929 a similar thing to our current 'collapse of the performative sphere' happened when the icons of the silent film era went stepping nervously into sound, unsure how the public would react to their ungainly, sadly human voices--their fans had seen and loved them or so long, god forbid their voice didn't match their expectations - they were ruined overnight if their accents were incoherent or their man's manliness undone by an effeminate whinny. We know about all that from SINGING IN THE RAIN, the fall of Gilbert Roland, "Garbo Speaks!' and Club Silencio in MULHOLLAND DR. (above) but what about the reverse? What about beloved radio comedians moving hesitantly into motion pictures. People seeing them for the first time after imagining faces to their voices the way they'd imagined voices in 1929? What about... ventriloquists on the radio?

In the golden age of radio the 1930s-40s (before TV took over) everyone in America knew the voices of comedians like Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The best material resulted from pretend feuds between them, which provided lots of insult gag opportunities. There was the original east-west rivalry in NYC-based Fred Allen vs. LA-based Jack Benny and one between Charlie McCarthy and W.C. Fields. The latter was more complicated as Fields didn't have his own show, was an established film star, and Charlie was, well, a hunk of wood with a shy not especially charismatic Swede attached. If aliens one day pick up our radio signals in space, some of the first things they hear won't be SETI, but these old radio shows still flying out into space bouncing around in the void, and they'll probably scratch their heads, especially over Edgar and Charlie. A ventriloquist on the radio? What were those Hu-Mans thinking?

 
I got into old radio shows as a kid in the 70s after hearing THE SHADOW Sunday nights on PBS's radio station, which I received on my little clock radio. This was the closest thing, aside from an actual film projector, one could get in the 70s to a VCR. Being able to listen to creepy shows like Inner Sanctum and The Shadow in my bedroom, all the lights off, put the hook in me, and the comedy was reassuring, especially if you were an avid watcher of Bugs Bunny cartoons, then in constant afternoon rotation, as guest voices from those shows constantly showed up, betraying their origins (i.e Foghorn Leghorn based on Senator Claghorn in Allen's Alley; the dopey buzzard based on Mortimer Snerd; Mel Blanc a regular on the Jack Benny show, etc). Still seeing Allen, Gildersleeve and Edgar Bergen and Fibber McGee all for the first time in this one old movie gave me the creeps. It took a long time to forget about that unpleasant frisson and just enjoy as I had enjoyed in my innocence...

The Siamese twin Hilton Sisters in Freaks (1933)

Edgar Bergen and two animate objects

Bergen and McCarthy especially were quite jarring on film, which is strange since the whole reason a ventriloquist act should work is our tendency towards anthropomorphism, the way our minds see a human shape, moving its mouth, and hear a voice, so we link them together. It's unconscious, beyond our control, hence the uncanny frisson; but on radio it's much easier to imagine Charlie McCarthy as a separate entity, existing in a fantasmatic rather than uncanny dimension. In their elder statesman days on the Muppet Show Bergen and his wood fit right in, but muppets are different than human actors or ventriloquist dummies, more colorful and with some level of expression gained through the full range of fingers along the wide felt mouth--and with no handler visible--but Charlie's mouth is kind of robotic, his dead eyes stare right through you and that jaw moves up and down but that's it-- and Edgar is always literally an arms length away. For some reason I still find Charlie terrifying in 'person' and Edgar kind of anemic and 'half' there. The whole issue of the ebony demon with his silver cornucopia comes roaring back when you have close-ups of old wooden Charlie McCarthy, his mouth moving up and down like a macabre robot, his dead eyes refusing all attempts to project emotion. When handler Edgar tries to get it on with a girl and, while explaining to her how ventriloquism works, his dummy keeps talking, sabotaging any attempt at cool, it makes him seem quite dysfunctional, like he's got a kind of projected Tourette syndrome. It's FREAKS-ish, i.e. the scene with the Siamese twins and the frisson-laden idea of loving one 'half' of a whole while the other half hangs around, vibing or cockblocking depending on whether the subject is split or not. Edgar is incomplete on his own, he is not a 'puppet proper.' His persona is diluted and partially externalized into a soft-voiced half-man. If you have  to have a talking piece of wood, saying "why don't you kiss her and get it over with?" before your first meeting is halfway through, you are officially a creep.

My first viewings of Bergen's big starring feature debut with WC Fields, YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN (1938) were from an old afternoon UHF TV show, sped up and edited for time (and racism) as they used to do in those days. It was great on a fuzzy small TV screen, the uncanny valley was less uncanny, and I saw it dozens of times and became quite familiar with its comedic rhythms. Years later now, on DVD, the film is stretched back to normal running time, so it seems to move super slow, with dead air moments. Now the picture is super clear and scenes I've never seen have been restored, and now McCarthy's uncanny automaton qualities are much too pronounced to ignore. His close-ups seem like some home movie some devout pagan idol worshiper would make for Andy Warhol... if Warhol was into puppetry.

Fields' scenes were often shot by Eddie Cline, separately from Charlie's, helping the timeless-strange aspect along as Cline had a much better knack for ramshackle comedy than the film's official director George Marshall. Also helping is Field's obvious alcoholism: he staggers through the film in a zig-zag, avoiding the major 'marks' the way his character avoids the process server, preferring to run through his litany of old circus impresario gags from THE OLD FASHIONED WAY, SALLY OF THE SAWDUST, and so on, rather than engaging directly with the material before him.

It's a smart movie because, as a narrative, YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN is pure hokum, old hat even in the silent age. And as a romance, it lives and dies in the soft dulcet 'real' voice of Charlie McCarthy's handler, Edgar Bergen, and some anonymous wartime heroine, playing Fields' daughter, bravely trying to seem not creeped out by the fact her love interest can't let go of his wooden 'buddy' even to hold her hand, yet he wants to marry her although he only met her a few hours earlier. Ick. Luckily the scenes with Larson E. Whipsnade doing his timeless but 'off' carny acts (subbing for the bearded lady sharpshooter, etc) are hilarious, like a jazz solo springing off the crusty familiarity of the tune (like Coltrane riffing on "My Favorite Things") and the weirdness of the overall film pays off in a skewed three-prong textual dissolve:

'Textual' Prong #1 - Meta - CHEAT is a relic of a bygone age and I love it largely for my own memories of what was going on in my life (the first warm glow of drink, that golden nectar) when I first taped it, a day I stayed home sick to edit out the commercials and then felt guilty all day as my mom stink-eyed me from the kitchen. I've seen it dozens of times. Dozens. That guilty depressed feeling staying home was almost totally wiped out by years of drinking to it late in the AM, but now that I'm sober that stain remains, and now that it's on DVD and I'm on meds, I get all the various stages of 'me' viewing its earlier 'home-edited' edition as well as this new one. The film's hokey datedness encourages such long term relationships - each new viewing holds surprises.

Prong 2 - Sub - The Brechtian-reflexive schtick with the creepy dual come-on of Bergen and McCarthy to Vicky. Charlie's telling Edgar to tell Vicky he loves her and wants to marry her before he has even kissed her (he can't kiss her because Charlie would be stricken mute, or else Vicky would hear Charlie in her molars). And Fields lamenting when a native steals the cork out of his lunch or daring you to guess whether his lines are intentionally or unintentionally fumbled or written that way.

Prong 3 - Inter - The nostalgia of the early Americana circus film was once a huge part of any sawdust-covered five cent cinema's rotation, especially in the silent era: there was always a sad clown played by Lon Chaney or Wallace Ford, who loves the acrobat but she's under the thumb of the abusive strong man; there was also the rich kid scheduled to marry a stuffy heiress but loves the waif; a poor kid romance 'meller' of the "I'll pay the rent!" variety that careened around the country in Fields' heyday: it's this corny schtick that Fields grew up watching and acting in (he was a long time circus juggler) which he is here lampooning.

In other words Fields is parodying genres of film that most of us have never seen nor would we want to. Most of them are deservedly long gone. HONEST MAN is a 'parody' of the sawdust-soaked cliches of Fields' youth, the innocent abroad with his hankerin' for the city (as Fields lambasts in FATAL GLASS OF BEER), the rich but loveless family of snobs Fields' daughter is willing to marry into if it means getting the circus out of debt: it is not just a parody of turn-of-the-century wealthy snobbery, but of Hollywood's past depictions of same, including Fields starring silent vehicles like SALLY OF THE SAWDUST.

Small wonder then, that Edgar's competition for Field's daughter's hand is the aptly named Roger Belgoode III. The scenes of class clashes and chaste romance were mockable cliches even in the 1930s, and this third prong represents that intertextual nostalgia the film carries for the lost era of full-length bathing suits, opium pipes, theater organs, and flagpole sitters. Back in 1938, this cornball stuff was their That 70s Show. 

CHEAT also grows less stilted once Fields sends Bergen and Charlie adrift in a hot air balloon and they discover Mortimer Snerd has been sleeping in the basket. For some reason, Snerd eases the creepy affect from all the McCarthy close-ups. Watching a puppet open and close its mouth while Edgar talks to himself, phrasing the set ups to his jokes in such archaic language they could only hold punchlines on the other end ("Is you mother living yet?" - "No, not yet") is less creepy for some reason once there are two puppets interacting with Edgar. It helps too that there are no other people around, especially not a girl. It helps too that Snerd is supposed to be dead-eyed and moronic. It's because he's an idiot that this hood-eyed hunk of wood is more relatable than the shark-eyed Charlie.

This was Edgar's feature film debut and he seems nervous and shy. Talking in an effeminate little whisper he's too dependent on his dummy to become a 'leading man' who can believably engage in romantic relations. He would make more films and get a better sense of a separate identity, but here he seems naught but a shadow. Expecting a girl to give up a cozy rich scenario to save her dad's circus in order to fall in love with this split subject wreck is so unreasonable it's kind of insulting.

And yet, the interesting thing about Bergen here is the example of just how fucked a ventriloquist who gets successful is: Bergen/Charlie must now and forever stay split. Bergen's real daughter Candice may know the separate Edgar, her father, without the dummies, but do we? Does Vicky? Bergen's 'own' voice has grown soft and delicate in relation to Charlie's far wider range, the way a couple overcompensates for each other's perceived faults; his eyes stay half-focused on his wooden 'other' as if in a trance. This is his Faustian bargain for success - "he" has become his "other's" puppet. The literal half-man --when he speaks as himself his voice is lowered and soft and girly, as if he has nowhere to throw it because no one will have it. He says his lines nervously, ashamed of his lips moving. This is all done no doubt so Charlie and Mortimer seem louder, but instead their combined split subject performing carries a cold dead air -- not helped by the fact that no one in the circus audiences ever laughs at or enjoys their show. I mean how hard would it have been to add some laughter from the crowd rather than letting the poor chump twist in the wind?

No wonder then that Bergen is such a perfect foil for Fields... on the radio. Similarly mired in a defective ego ideal --the liquored-up charlatan, Fields can duel Charlie with pithy one-liners and simultaneously neither actor need even be 'present' -- Fields stays in his cups and Bergen in his dolls - what their duels have, then, is something beyond acting, a multiplication of interlocked archetype slitters right up there with eerie totem pole sacrifices we see in films like THE WICKER MAN or England's Guy Fawkes effigies.

Fields in one of his many ingenious disguises

 The ultimate difference between Fields and Bergen (now that I'm sober this seems especially glaring) is that while they both effectively hide in plain sight through deceptive means, one is multiplied and the other divided: Bergen's deception is 'thrown' (external); Fields' is 'drunk' (internal), Fields slowly vanishes down a beer tap drain while Edgar multiplies like a hydra until he's neither here nor there, but solely in the interaction between here and there. The romance between Edgar and Vicky is therefore as creepy as incest, since it automatically infers a menage a trois with an inanimate object and ensures you can only marry half a person - and kissing them for any length of time essentially strangles their Siamese other. 

The main love relationship Fields has in his films by contrast is always a chaste paternal one, with a daughter or niece since he is in effect already happily married to gin which doesn't talk but rather is consumed utterly, so Fields in a sense is always in the process of sneaking away in plain sight, drinking his 'other' back into the void, and then being drunk in turn; he mutters to himself under his breath like the very air around him is his dummy, and everything he does or said he had done or said before ("Dragging my canoe behind me!") in his other films is done and said again. As all drunks repeat their stories and sentiments endlessly, so too does Fields repeat his stories and bits from film to film to his straight men, be they A-list stars, poker tables, cigar store Indians, hick extras, or oblivious family members absorbed in their own petty breakfast gossip. So in a sense Fields has an open dialogue not with an external totem of himself as Edgar does, but with a ghost, a half Fields referencing a 1/4 Fields, and so on... until he's so infinitesimally small he becomes bigger than all creation... 

Vandal in the Wind: OVER THE EDGE (1979)

"I'm sorry about your son - sorry he was on drugs!"  -- Doberman

Walking home from work, fall day, Cheap Trick's "Surrender" came on my iPod and whisked me back to New Grenada, 1979... walking home from Knapp Elementary; "Let's Blow Up the School" was the movie I filmed in my mind; I didn't even need a camera. My own imagining of the carnage ignited a tingle up and down the spine. Eventually, I forgot it, grew out of it, focused my rage on playing war games in the back yard with the kind of realistic (black or grey, not orange) cap guns that are all but illegal now. But the inchoate pyromaniac manic fury of my elementary school years roared up from the depths on that walk home from work: "Surrender." Maybe surrender to the system, maybe to the urge to destroy it. Sure they had conformity then too, but it was out of fashion. Desire for destruction was healthy in the  70s; we kids were allowed freedom enough to see the full extent of our prison. And if we wanted to smash our heads against the bars, mom didn't even make us wear a helmet.

That raw, powerful, dangerous, sexy thrill of running 'loose' seems absent in the kids of today, as gone as the analog hiss of old eight tracks. My hiss is gone too. I'm old, man. So why do the kids today seem even older? Is it the cell phone addiction? Has the virtual so taken over their lives they have no time for actual destruction?

Blowing up the school is not a new idea, of course, and nowadays it gets muddied in terrorism and Columbine. Now it's no longer permissible to even blow up the school in one's mind, let alone in cinema. Only a handful of films have ever acted on this basic childhood fantasy: ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (see: Columbine Queen) and OVER THE EDGE. Both came out in 1979. Coincidence? I was twelve, in 6th grade, wild in the streets... as long as we kept within range of mom's shout for dinner, we could do damn near anything.

None of us knew about either film in 1979 of course, nor did we know that the arrival of the 1980s would signify the end of all our freedom, the arrival of AIDs and paranoia, etc. All references to explosives in schools would become verboten (unless portrayed as odious villainy rather than anarchic rock heroism). HIGH made some drive-ins but we were too young to go to them; EDGE was quietly shelved for being too dangerous. It found its audience later, on VHS and cable. I myself stumbled on it via a TBS afternoon screening while loafing around at my parent's house after college. It was 1991 by then; I was unemployed, alcoholic, bitterly single. At first I thought it was some dumb typical after-school special of the era. By the time it was over I was drunk, crying with joy and triumph --the real me was back!

The kids in OVER THE EDGE are somewhat older than me in the same time frame, but not by much. I remember the Farrah feathery style of the girls' hair, I knew the long haired blonde boys, the badasses in their red bandannas--both the bullies and the kids who would protect you from the bullies--and how to maneuver--all without paralyzing fear or insecurity. I knew air rifles and 'punks' and firecrackers, and catching fireflies and pillbugs and crayfish and all the other animals now dead from the DDT used to stop the Japanese beetle infestation. I loved Ms. Zackon, my 4th-5th grade teacher with her hand-knit shawl teaching my 4th-5th grade combined class (the 'artsy' kids --as opposed to the 'gifted' kids who had their own combined class). Zackon had Kate Jackson hair and had us sit in circles and listen to 'Free to Be You and Me' and watch 16mm projected science fiction shorts about the collapse of the environment and the dangers of conformity and overpopulation. We knew about strangers and not to accept candy or get close to their cars, otherwise, play ball!

If we ruined freedom for the kids of today by wasting that freedom on petty vandalism and games of doctor, well, sorry about that, boppers.

Or at any rate, the older Vincent Spano types ruined it, not me and mine. EDGE opens with him shooting out a cop car windshield, setting a whole string of escalating events in motion: first Sgt. Doberman's routine harassment of the first two kids he stumbles across: Carl (Michael Kramer) and Richie (Matt Dillon). Richie's mom's cool and takes his side but Carl's dad instantly presumes it's all his son's fault and then has the rec center closed the next day when some big Texas investors visit the town, leading to a near-riot.

The escalation of kid resistance in retaliation to the mindless parental authority crackdown is truly galvanizing. When the lost poetic soul of the film, Claude (Tom Fergus), is busted by Doberman after the kid who sold him the hash rats him out, the reprisal against the rat is the first real shot across the bow, but it leads to Doberman's killing Richie, and from there onward in escalating disaster until even catharsis is pushed too far.

In EDGE we see it all, and we see it all slowly being taken away: cigarette smoking privileges being revoked as a reprisal against school vandalism; Claude thinking he's taking speed to help him with a test but realizing it's actually acid and we in the audience being trusted to know the difference and to be knowingly bemused and sympathetic rather than clueless and appalled (presuming we've all been there, in that Bosch moment); Vincent Spano with his mook sidekick delivering a pre-emptive squealer beat-down; Matt Dillon with his real pistol and preteen rebel smirk.

Free from the urge to bow to parental rule-making hysterics, the kids in this film know the thrill of breaking and entering, the sting of unjust police harassment, the frustration of only sporadically open rec centers; promises of bowling alleys and theaters all yanked away at the first sign of economic instability; first feints at sex that are the result of affection rather than hormonal lust, an affection about to be steamrolled into cookie-cutter post-Porky's exploitation; great rock on the bedroom hi-fi  giving way to crisp but strangely soulless synth pop.

The parents in this film never bother to think about whether or not the 'trouble' some of these kids are in has any basis in fact, or what defines 'trouble' -- they're still getting over the fear of being 'in trouble' themselves. "I don't have to tell you how deep... in trouble... some of these children are," Jerry says as if lecturing a bunch of kids caught shoplifting while addressing the concerned parents in the emergency PTA meeting.

Any kid who's ever been hassled by petty cops like Doberman (above) knows the deal. He considers you dangerously strung out on 'narcotics' if he catches you with a sliver of hash. He chases you on a high speed pursuit if you throw a narc-rat-fink kid into the pond ("a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid"). He doesn't understand the difference between keeping a community safe and declaring war on children. He mistakes protecting citizens with insisting free souls surrender to the same illogical boot heel of anxiety and voter-appeasing restrictions of liberty that have him so cowed and surly, so eager to flex the only power over others he has.

Most of us who grew up harassed by these types of LEOs just get over it and move on. We understand and forgive the hopelessly entangled process by which genuine democracy lurches blindly around the seesaw of freedom /experimentation and remorse/ repression. Kids shouldn't have to understand, or forgive, this surrender. Parents may just seem a little weird, as Cheap Trick sings on the soundtrack, but if they give themselves away, it's just because they know there's no real escape, only symbolic evasion, what the 12-steppers call 'a demographic.'

These kids may be fucked up and angry but they're mainly bored, and who wouldn't be? They aren't archetype cliches cobbled together for an after school lesson about drug abuse, vandalism, guns, and curfew-breaking. They're real.  Stuck in the isolated hypocrisy of New Grenada, trapped by the world, by parents and cops and teachers all of whom push and prod in directions handed down by rote, they are awake in a town that's asleep, and the best the town can do is try to control them by making waking up illegal.

This is my generation up there: captured right at the point where the 70s turned to the 80s, the William Macy suicide center of BOOGIE NIGHTS, the dawn of the crackdown on our freedom to live in the moment and create our own tribes, our own interlocking separate society.

But.... we didn't need freedom anymore once had cable and VHS. We stopped talking about movies we had seen or heard about as if fireside gossip, and just rented them. When those abstract shapes on the music cable channel on Claude's bedroom TV are replaced by the 24-hour music video channel MTV (in 1981, two years after this film was made), we no longer needed to sneak out the window and seek a party. Video killed the radio star... and in the process snuffed out any motivation for genuine 'real time' anarchy.

OVER THE EDGE changes the usual math of the parent-kid divide by siding itself with the kids... all the way, and allowing us to exult in the little moments of true rebellion, even if they are ultimately pointless, which is a total reversal of most after school specials: Richie standing on the hood of Doberman's car as he tries to haul off Claude; the retribution against the Leif-y narc; the kids locking the parents in the PTA meeting, etc. --it's all cathartic as hell, but then as the cars in the parking lot erupt in flames and the kids rage Lord of the Flies-like we start to become afraid of ourselves for the primal inner wild child joy of seeing the school--the kid equivalent of a soul-deadening prison-- destroyed. We fantasize about blowing up the school, but when we actually blow it up, we see the ugly core that drives that fantasy. We devolve along the Hawksian axis all the way out of ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and find we've been running amok in the climax of MONKEY BUSINESS with the drugged Cary Grant as the painted savage preparing to roast his rival. By then it's too late to save the baby in the boiling bathwater; the wild chaos of death and anarchy tails childhood idealism like a dogged detective and the reactionary rabble roll over everything like a tide, shedding the old skin of the country as they come ripping through the amber waves like a sloppy surfboard Erica Jong zipper.

Today the juggernaut of parental outrage has slowly been gaining steam anew as it roars forward into the new world of cyber-bullying, teen online suicides, and a million forms of new veiled draconian rubrics, from being ignored to micro-managed with nothing in between. We all knew the catch-22 as kids in the earlier eras-- in order to convince your parents you were really depressed and needed to see a shrink you had to commit suicide successfully.` Similarly coming home traumatized from bullying was just 'adjustment' and ultimately a lesson in learning to stick up for oneself. Now--only now--after this string of suicides--are parents admitting maybe there might be a problem with the way inter-child harassment---extortion (for lunch money), assault, sexual harassment, stalking--is tolerated, or was. So now, metal detectors and routine searches, kids expelled for just pointing a finger and making a gun sound.

Too late. When the cat's out of the bag, only then, do parents outlaw cat-bagging, and by the time the justifiably furious are done smashing things, and the crazed parents done erecting new 'freedom-enhancing' restrictions, it won't even matter which side was wronger. The repressed will be off to erupt in a new dimension, a new location, and the restrictive laws will just hang there like a coastline of empty straitjackets, waiting for the next wave of kids, who shouldn't have to wear them --they didn't do nothing---but you'll make these kids put them on anyway won't you, mom? Just in case. And so good for their posture!

Looking back over THE EDGE now, sober and "serene," it seems that the ultimate factor that destroys New Grenada is the refusal of the parents to admit that the base of their pyramid will probably not widen, and that their kids can't slow their own maturation to suit their parent's stunted growth rate. Nowadays kids grow up big in tiny domes, cracking the roofs on their backs. Maybe I'm jaundiced from growing up free with no roof to worry about. Now I can only watch the film, hear the song, and know that one day, we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun, Matt Dillon shall move on and create modern indie junkie cinema with Gus Van and Francis Ford Coppola. Motorcycle Boy will live! But we, Mr. Claude, and Mr. Richie, we belong dead. We who have burned so very brightly, but not to last. 

So long, Earl. Good luck. 

How TUCKER & DALE and Rikidōzan can Save America... from STRAW DOGS

America has become so ugly, violent, and bitter over its president, its policies, and its blue/red state divide we need an intervention. You can hear it in the catcalls at the Republican debates and read it in the reviews of the STRAW DOGS remake, and like everyone else in this country, I know I am right and all those other people are idiots --but has anyone turned hate to love through their love of hate? Changed minds through the same sneering intolerance that resists it? No. It's only ever worked en verso when you've learned to forgive, (as Wilde wrote "love your enemies, it drives them crazy) and then to kill and destroy one another with love, via a performance of destruction instead of the real thing. It's a neat trick, but no one uses it anymore. We could use a man like FDR again...

Blue states and red should work together so we don't fall out of 1st place in the world's most awesome list. It's imperative we stop fighting in the backseat before our fed-up parents turn the car around and we never get to go to Disneyland. Once there, we can fight all day, in a fantasy performance of our old fights. Never thought I'd say it, but if we can't stop fighting we deserve not to go to Disneyland. We're supposed to be this super power but we can't stop bickering even as our distracted dad is about to go off a cliff. If both sides of our political divide would rather run the country into the ground than give an inch to the other, Civil War 2 is inevitable, and it's all in an awesome new movie coming out called TUCKER & DAVE VS. EVIL.

 In this film a pair of redneck hillbilly cannibals turn out to be just two lovable decent dudes whose well-meaning interaction with a camping group of college brats turns deadly. But they're not really creepy redneck cannibals, this is all a huge misunderstanding! It's pretty funny. Actually, it's hilarious... and actually, it might be the one film that can heal the rift of misunderstanding between our great semi-nations. Because in the end, redneck and bourgeois douchebags need each other. We're like stars and stripes, stupid-looking apart, but together --flaggish.

Why the anger? We're not kids any more, after all. Well, some of the conservative tea party reds think sex before marriage is a sin, and masturbation is as well... so good lord, no wonder these fundamentalist Christians are so violent and confused! Deadly sperm backup or DSB is not a joke! It may in fact have been the cause of both world wars as well as our current ones. (Hitler was all into that sexual denial stuff --for Germany! - He had one testicle --maybe!)

Thus - those red state voters should all make an effort to masturbate every day, to find a safe comfortable private sanctum and 'git'ir done'. This is their patriotic duty! Semen retentum venom est! 

Aint seen this yet... looks mighty innirrestin'.

The blue states don't think they have issues--they masturbate often--but there's a more insidious impetus that keeps them just as fidgety and self-righteous as DSB... and that's denial of their violent natures. They want equality and justice for all, but they want 'someone else' to go bring this justice over across the tracks to the 'all' because the 'all' reek of the lamb. These blues recoil in horror over slaughterhouses, poverty, ignorance, and bad dentistry. These blue staters would never invite a man who kills his own pigs and cows to their Sunday barbecue, because that's cruel, and gross! Pass the pulled pork. End! End of discussion. No irony permitted. They ride their bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge in the rain rather than ever take the subway--even the subway's too un-eco for them; they get their food at the Park Slope co-op (I do support their Wall Street occupation, that's a whole different thing). There's something these kids need to do, too, and it's not masturbation. They need to learn to admit they love violence... and the smell of the lamb...assssisssiassss.

As it is, the blue state person is like the beautiful Yvette Mimeux (above, left) as the eloi in THE TIME MACHINE (1960),  totally dependent on the blue collar morlock for her plumbing, defense, and cable installing needs. This is why Obama doesn't get anything done --he needs a red state Joe the Plumber to fix the White House bathroom. He's constipated from waiting for change. Clinton had enough red in his blood to just go ahead and pee in the oval office vase. Obama thinks 'rationality' will work and that common best interest will prevail over irrational venom --since when has it ever?

But can you blame the red states for being resentful? Ain't you ever seen DELIVERANCE, son? How would you like it if squealin' Ned Beatty came a-paddlin' through your land hoping to get one last freakshow gawk before your house and still were washed away so he could get hydro-electric power for his central AC and 'lectric terlet? You would love it? Yer a sick freak.

This brings us to Dustin Hoffman in the original STRAW DOGS (1972), wherein he was not the hero defending his home from redneck invaders, as has been commonly summarized by critics (who didn't see it or don't 'get' ambiguity, and dismiss it as a standard anti-hillbilly home defense yarn). Dustin's character never even learns about his wife's rape. He defends his home against invasion because he won't turn over a child murderer to them (for lynching). When the rabble try to storm in, Peckinpah reverses the normal blue state rape-revenge thriller model - graying every area he can and forcing a complex emotional response from any alert viewer. The real violent monster in the film turns out to be Dustin. He's not Dirty Harry, but the snide liberal police chief who'd rather set murders free than let Callahan rough up a perp. Simply put, Dustin's character is a dumb busybody, enforcing his smug liberal intervention on the locals who've done things their own way for centuries, and there's no getting around that unless signifiers (glasses = good, shoddy dentistry = bad)  blind you to what's really going on. It's these signifiers that DALE AND TUCKER play off of to such hilarious and genuinely touching effect. Katrina Bowden (30 ROCK) is even in it. So relax! Men of all genders shall swoon at her celestial midriff.

Most entries in the hillbilly rapist genre today are patterned not after STRAW DOGS, but after THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, which brings in cannibalism and the usual meat hook and bone sculpture decor and the unspoken moral that if the blue states could access some of that red state killer instinct they'd kick the red stater mutants from here to Macon. That ain't true, Bubba will whup your ass no matter how broke your glasses get. Thus, both sides need to own up to their faults if we're to ever move forward as a nation and share the wine and cuir de visage. Or as Grace Slick said at Altamont, "People get weird, and you need people like the Angels to keep people in line. But the Angels also — you know, you don't go around busting people in the head."

 

Until then, thanks to our bickering backseat, America will continue to be one of those couples that fight in public. Why are they even together? They had a trial separation back in the 1850s; they had a real bloody row over the kids, until finally there was a joint settlement. But now our red states want to go out for a pack of smokes and never come back; they want to put up a big wall to keep Mexicans out; they want to start making liquor again in the hills--smoking at the bowling alley-- and who can blame them? Every day some new blue state health nut decides the red staters should have more tax placed on whiskey and tobacco, that this and that should be done to their land and that Christianity is stupid and lacks logic. Huh. Like science really knows what it's doing. Half the time the hillbilly cannibals the blue state prigs encounter got that way 'cuz a radiation poisoning!

The Hills have Eyes 

As a blue stater with a red state little brother out in Arizona who collects cars and guns and has two dawgs, I say we either let the south secede, or embrace them for the crazed thugs they are. One or the other. The shadowy elite who run things wont let us get a divorce, so succession is out. Why not try what worked for my brother Fred and me -- Hell, we made it to Disneyland and we fought the whole way down. But we had a secret. We knew the fighting would never end, so we pulled our punches, we 'fake-fought' - that's where you have to honor every fake punch and throw. So even if a little kid just tags you in the solar plexus, you have to double over like you got a shot from Mike Tyson. If you pick the kid up to throw him, you have to kind of hold lightly onto him as you throw him for a soft landing. You'd be surprised how much aggression you can expunge through this avenue.

 

In the red states, though, they're hip to that irony. That is their strength over the blue states, who seem to think of cops and politicians as 'in charge' and that things are fundamentally all right. Red staters know better. You can decry lynch mobs as evil, but then don't get mad when murders walk free on technicalities. Adherence to the letter of the law is just fear of making executive decisions. Red staters know that law and order can collapse any time. When the zombies come, it's to my redneck brother's door I shall run, knowing his windows are barred and his gun locker is always oiled and accessible. My fellow blue staters will all still be waiting for the official word on what's going on, assuming someone's going to come by and rescue them.

Someone ain't!

I lost some of my faith in my blue state people during the last time the Republican convention was held in NYC, when massive demonstrations and so forth went on, the protestors never getting the irony that they were validating every paranoid fear of the right wing, assuring the spooked white folks they were right to want to put the hippies in jail, to close up their borders and turn their backs on their fellow men. The protesters should have met the Republicans with love and welcome, brought so much love that they overturned the whole thing, made it so the Republicans couldn't even get onstage because so many hippies were hugging them, and they couldn't even think of war let alone talk about it with all that love around them. Gandhi knew this. As much as he makes your skin crawl, you have to show your enemy love if you want true victory. 

That's how America won the hearts and minds of the devastated Japanese population after WW2. Around 1950 and the dawn of TV, they brought in all these huge American wrestlers to fight the Japanese wrestling star, Rikidozan, and after long violent matches--sometimes going on for hours--Rikidozan won and the entire nation rose up in ecstatic cheering. The Americans were cool enough to not say, 'hey man, this time American should win.' It wasn't like that. Americans had heart and soul back then because we were united - we had to be united to win that war. The wrestling matches helped ease the pain of the beaten Japanese - and I love this example because it perfectly encapsulates my message of the fighting brotherhood, of wrestling (or fight clubs) wherein the winner or loser is irrelevant, only the pain and spectacle matter. And that there are no hard feelings but rather a bond of brotherhood afterwards.
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This is the guy who was the star in Japan:

Japan - Rikidōzan
Known as the "Father of Puroresu", Rikidōzan was a sumo wrestler before turning his hand to professional wrestling in the early 1950's. He rapidly became a star in Japan by defeating American wrestlers, boosting the morale of a nation devastated after World War 2. NWA title reigns and an international fame boosting win over Lou Thesz cemented his popularity before he began training two more legends of Japanese wrestling, Antonio Inoki and Shohei "Giant" Baba. He then went on to develop his business empire, acquiring hotels, nightclubs and boxing promotions before he ran afoul of the Yakuza in a Tokyo nightclub in 1963. (from Onwards to the Horror Show)

Imagine if every night there was a big wrestling match televised between Israel and Palestine--Hymen "The Golem" Roth Vs. the Palestine Monster or between Red state and Blue: the Iron Yuppie vs.  Johnny Reb (that last one's from The Simpsons). We wouldn't be solving any of our problems, but we would be at least showing that we 'get it' - we'll never agree, and we can still fight, but like brothers who get out their animosity and rage in a pulled punches kind of way that lets them both walk away winners.  It's a world away from watching old men talk our country into the grave, which is also a kind of theater, for are not these issues are long since decided by our shadowy Masonic elite?

We can't keep denying both our reptilian killer natures and our dueling head-butting mammal ones; if we're not going to actually kill, then, well, we need a fight. If we don't see a fight in a long enough span of time we end up going to war for no reason. Also, we need to give each other a private space to take care of our sexual onanistic needs, so the DSB doesn't make us too venomous, and to keep the anger managed, so we may as well set up some ground rules... for the good of all America! Let Tucker and Dale show us the way... to Canada!

Daze of our Lies (or "As the Reichstag Burns"): SECRET HONOR, HITLER (1962), UFO HUNTERS, Lord Lhus!

"So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause."

- Padame Skywalker

There are no accidents in weird rainy accidental double features, like when I chanced upon the very strange 'forgotten' 1962 film, HITLER (with Sam Fuller stalwart Richard Basehart as Hitler? Whaaat?) after watching Altman's SECRET HONOR (1984), with Phillip Baker Hall as ole Tricky Dick Nixon, and then a UFO Hunters episode and now The Myth Behind Star Wars, with little snatches of everyone from Joe Campbell (my Merlin), to Camille Paglia (my Kali). Let me tell you, it was a great night to be alone with a microphone and multiple video monitors reflecting my exteriors, clinking ice, babbling with boozy exaltation into microphones parked by overflowing ashtrays, sweaty ice buckets, and an alien that looks like a cat monitoring my every move.

"I'd like to thank Birch for recommending this film in a previous post."

SECRET HONOR might bore the layman but should be inspiring to fans of George C. Scott, for it seems Phillip Baker Hall--magnificent in crushed velvet deep red jacket-- channels that actor's raspy but concise fury, or at least shares a similar vocal timbre when he goes for the deep lusty curses and rap-rap-rap-rapid stutter-patter of loquacious subject-skip-stopping babbling. Too bad he pours Scotch like a woman.  Chivas drinkers, weep at his tiny little sips!

I was bored by Nixon when this was all happening live on national TV in 1972 (I was five), but learning how to cut loose in your oak-paneled study and empty out your soul long into the night, alone into a microphone or a painting or a keyboard--while feeling alternately like some ecstatic Wagnerian god and paranoid melancholic--is something I really relate to today, relatively sober. Like many writers and artists I had the realization awhile ago that being home alone with recording equipment, paint, ink, music etc.  is as good as it can ever get; everything else--going out, seeing friends, sex, bonding, etc, work--always felt a little empty, as If I was just avoiding this, the task beyond all tasks. The terror of being alone in your study with just the blank page or microphone in front of you - armed only with a whiskey tumbler and maybe a cigarette --this is the period at the end of the unending sentence. All the rock and roll and drugs and madness was all for this. Risking your neck fucking over the boys at the Bohemian Grove with loose talk, it was all just for this, for the cassette tape, for posterity, to preserve your fuck you to Lord Lhus in the annals of the eternity. Lord Lhus, fuck you! Ommmmm

It's only American to believe in the dark secrets behind the Masonic symbolism of the presidency but only this 'fictionalized' Dick (nervously ripped raw in his haze of paranoia, scotch and mother issues, dares speak the truth alone with his studio audience, which is that the Bohemian Grove--where he was brought several times to hear the edicts of his shadowy sponsors-- is the true seat of power in this country. Washington is just where their edicts are implemented. These guys weren't "a bunch of homos from Cambridge! Yhese guys were men! Assorted white trash, what they wanted was a political laboratory" controlled from deep in the Grove, where 'Jew mobsters' like Meyer 'Hymen Roth' Lansky could run naked and free and assume their natural giant saurian shapes. It is all just too much for old Dick and he himself turns out to be Deep Throat, bringing the Washington Post down upon his sorry ass before he's forced to sell out the country any further. He is just an "un-indicted co-conspirator like everybody else in the United States of America!" His "Secret Honor" is that he saved the country at the loss of his innocence. He bears the shame of saving you!

Bohemian Grove 'Cremation of Care' Ceremony - you never saw this.

If you surrender to Hall/Nixon's fever dream rant (and you may as well since there's nothing else going on in the film) you enter a pretty spooky world, a U.S. with the curtains ripped back to reveal giant white owls devouring a pile of gutted mice and money. Presidents like Nixon (and now Obama) are just brought in as straw dogs to take all the shit the manipulated American public cares to volley after being robbed and deluded by the previous office holders (who conveniently step down right before it hits the podium). Watergate was Nixon's way of reversing the straw dog parabolic mirror. Instead of the plan to throw Nixon to the wolves so his puppeteer overlords could sneak away into the redwoods unmolested, Dick tangles himself up the strings so he can go tumbling off the stage, forcing the curtain down, derailing their entire evil plan.. for now.

Meanwhile we see the paintings of Eisenhower, Lincoln, Jefferson on the Oval Office walls, and they all seem twisted and arcane, as if swirling reptilian pan-dimensional aliens were, even now, within the confines of a portrait on television on television, writhing and breathing and corrupting the deepest tissue of man's democracy and soul with extra-dimensional spider eggs. 

Note - collage by EK made from SECRET HONOR still-  "your perception may vary"

Hall is magnificent, at times working himself up into a raspy heart-attack laughing and crying over his fucked-up brothers and the way he was screwed over by the Kennedys. "I am not the American nightmare! I am the American dream, period!" Still, SECRET HONOR seems to be missing a key ingredient if you see it at home: an audience response. I saw it alone and it made me uncomfortable, like being locked in a room with a raving drunk who doesn't really see you, who thinks you're probably a ghost (maybe you are) but still expects you to laugh at his jokes. In the rapturous flow of good scotch he hears the ghost applause anyway, rushing in his ear canals like blood currents. Who amongst us drunks can't relate when Nixon notes, "I used to love to sit in the Lincoln study -- fireplace going...the air conditioning on." Is that not, in fact, the best combination known to the drinking man? And it's evil, too!

Right after I hit stop on my DVD, along came HITLER (1962) on the Military Channel. "Made the same year as PSYCHO!" raves (incorrectly) Lou "Blue" Diamond Phillips, your host of An Officer and a Movie.  I confess, I love to watch the Military Channel on Friday or Saturday nights, pretending I'm seeing it on an empty couch in the barracks lounge after a day of sketchy combat. For some reason, it's quite relaxing. And then, weird finds I'd never even heard of before, like this come on! What a world! As if it wasn't weird enough just seeing a low budget black-and-white B-movie trying to tell Hitler's biography, the vocals in the soundtrack seem to have been recorded through a guitar flanger pedal, as if it was just too painful to hear without electric distortion!

Without the flanger, HITLER still comes off as very strange, like a lengthy episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents meets a Sam Fuller-directed sci-fi sequel to John Huston's FREUD.  I can imagine Godard and Bassin pissing themselves with delight seeing this at the Cinémathèque Française, though somehow I doubt they did. It's so obscure it's unlisted in both Lenny Maltin's Film Guide and Time Out Britania, and even Time Warner's info screen for it says it was made in 2003.

Weirder still, the film explains Hitler's mental problems as stemming from a Ross and Rachel-like orbit with his sexy cousin, and then Eva Braun and a Norman Bates-style orbit with his loving mother. It may as well be from 2011 or 1954! In a word, it belongs nowhere.


Alas, too, the film is relentlessly unpleasant, as Hitler buckles under the pain of sexual frustration and ze burden of having to carry his mother to zee root celler bunker, so to speak, whenever Himmler comes over.

Now, I know what it's like to have a cute Germanic blonde young cousin, and let me tell you it's not that bad, Adolf! You can handle it, you don't have to arrange for your thugs to shoot her after she shouts at you: "Your mother, always your mother! You can't live vit ze shame! You will see your mother in every woman's face, just like you see her in mine tonight! I dare you to look at me and tell me who you see!" You don't need to let it get that far. As if reading his DSM IV chart, Hitler explains "attraction turns to revulsion - the satisfaction that even an animal enjoys is denied me!" and it all becomes more and more icky. He can't bust a nut cuz his nut was shot off at Somme... or so ze legends say. It's never flat out states, but what is?

In other words, this ain't your history book Hitler. This is your Krafft-Ebbing Hitler. He turns out is just a misunderstood impotent lecher surrounded first by evil political machinations and then, when his impotent tantrums fail to cow the globe, by people who dare to try and save what remains of Germany's civilian population instead of fawning over him to the last. With the poverty budget, his infamous bunker looks like little more than a basement rec room, and the whole arc of the war takes place in and around a handful of tables, maps, and filing cabinets. The only really attractive set is the decadent apartment he shares with his hot blonde cousin. He should have stayed home, alone with his microphones and kept his raving indoors, like our friend Phillip Baker Hall as Nixon in SECRET HONOR, or Dubya!

Next up on the cable flip was History Channel's UFO Hunters --an interesting show that thinks it can win over skeptics through its cock-eyed idea of 'rational' thinking, which is what Sherlock Holmes would dismiss as inductive reasoning: Let's say a kid sees a bunny rabbit in her backyard and tells you, all excited, and you tell her rabbits don't live in the area, therefore she is lying, or it's just a dream. But then 40 years later she still insists she saw a rabbit, and the UFO Hunters show her a cotton ball, asking her if it looks at all like the rabbit's tail. She says it does. They therefore conclude that she's not lying, or dreaming, but that she found a stray cotton ball drifting out in the fields and her imagination did the rest.

But then the other UFO hunter points out that no one has been out in the fields taking off their nail polish, and so no cotton ball is possible. This is all of course excuses made to cover their inability to admit the truth of a rabbit. That's the sad tail-chasing truth of inductive scientific inquiry --they can't wrap their minds around the much more logical idea of the rabbit. Why not? Because rabbits don't live in the area. Everyone knows that. And around they go.

The rabbit (i.e. aliens, remember) is where mainstream western science, which has been leading us for so long, chokes up on the reins and rather than turn the reins over to the right brained empaths they throw the reins into the fire. But who am I to judge them, I with not a single un-violated precept? I, who can't be sure what he saw in 1974 wasn't a kite instead of a drone floating above our heads after school? (We flew a kite up to try and knock it down or tap it, but then a low flying Cessna almost flew right into our kite! It swerved to avoid us, and when we looked back at the drone it had zipped off. The Cessna perhaps spooking it. End of memory. But since there are no drones surely what we all saw was a party balloon or a  very light bucket.)

The Mythology of Star Wars came on right after the UFO show.. and they brought up the interconnected conspiracies of the Empire, with Christopher Lee's character in the Phantom Menace and his desert world mining operations as the Nixon, the Obama, the 9/11, the Reichstag... the flaming goat dog of straw! The cremation of care! It all came looping home, closing the gaps on the conspiracies - Hitler, Nixon, Aliens, it was all combined to mean something!

In closing let me say that I'm not a crook, or co-conspirator, or a believer, or a dogmatic skeptic, or a nutcase, or a fascist. That's depending on whom you ask of course, your honor, but there's a lot of people to ask. Everyone thinks someone else doesn't deserve to be here, especially me. Somewhere someone thinks you're a crook just for having read these words, and that someone is right over your shoulders. Or maybe it's me, cuz you stole my heart, or soul. An undivided self is an oxymoron. Unite your warring halves and watch it all just disappear... and you shall be be a dark cloud remembering it was only ever sky and sea, never meant to last, never meant to be kept so separate from its setting by by slow pressure cooker compresses and midlantic storm front regions, never meant to grow as stale with cumulonimbus conservative paranoia as tricky D. Nix himself.

If the ocean could come claim you it would gladly dissolve you back into itself, dear rabbit-denying skeptic buzzkill. In that, fill thy coffee mug with comfort, and a liberal dash of 80 proof mortal dread atop it, like foam. But when you lift your cup to drink, lo! There is no cup, no arm to lift, no fingers, no mouth. Your drinking motion is just a folding of a single wave back on itself, a splash more Chivas and then even 'then' is gone ...

And the reptiles in the grove just smirk and loll in the aeons of your warm blood surf.