MAD MEN, in the bad way

And about MAD MEN this season (only on AMC) - how come it's so squirmy and preoccupied with being vile and no one likes each other anymore? Now that the fifth season brain frieze has begun we've had to wonder if we'll ever get our awesome show back -- the one where we thrilled to see high powered drunks in action: getting high and telling off hippies; pissing their pants before big client pitches; inventing the term 'carousel' for Kodak in a non-dry eye house pitch; struggling to remember the password at a mob-run gambling house, and of course, Don's chain-smoking womanizing hard drinking stallionsmanship and his super cool alpha dogs unchained relationship with Roger Sterling?

This semester old Don's married to some young yeh yeh girl with a sexy crooked smile and he's determined to stay faithful, to the point of taking the dull moral high ground even unto Pete Campbell, silently judging old Pete just for getting some and wanting to feel in charge when it's plain to see he's totally whupped by his alpha dog sweet bitch wife. So far we've even seen Don lecture Rolling Stones groupies, strangle an old flame in dream effigy, quietly cut down on his smoking and drinking, even giving his new wife a hard time for throwing him a surprise party. In his middle age he's become a tedious moral guardian. And the show itself seems more concerned with getting all the period mod furnishings just so than actually recreating an air of exciting pre-PC possibility and balls.

We don't go to Don for a lesson in morals. We go to Don to see our libidinal wrongs unchecked and amok; we like his hypocrisy and brave drug-taking that sometimes leaves him roofied and bloodied in hotel rooms he rented with sexy young couples on the lam, but even then he doesn't feel guilty. We miss Betts shooting at the neighbor's carrier pigeons after he threatens to poison their dog; we miss the drunken bridge parties and outdoor garage full of beer; we miss the ease with which Don compartmentalized a dozen different shitty behaviors, all of which made his moral facade hilarious and apt. Now the hilarity is gone but the stern morals remain and as a result everyone in the cramped new offices are at each others' throats.

Meanwhile, the younger generation in the office is picking up the slack in all the wrong ways -- they're all sleazy frat boy gestures and no action, while Don was always very verbally respectful of his women, even advising Pete Campbell on the first day of the first episode "people won't like you" for being such a shit to women. The shits remain, but Don doesn't lead by example (of how to be a satyr without being a snickering frat boy) he lectures like the guy who sowed all his oats and now wants everyone else to learn from his empty-oat sack example.

All I want to say is, Dick Whitman, yo: Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill are still decades away so why not live it up while you can, sexual harassment in the workplace-wise? So far this season has deliberately withheld conspiratorial vicarious partying from us, even via Roger Sterling, who used to be my favorite and is now struggling with the irrelevance of his type of hardcore boozer prostitute procurer under the new Mad Men rubric which declares only misery, desperation, and humorless sanctimony can reign.  The Lucky Strike campaign is long gone, and no one is allowed to feel rich and secure inside that horrible claptrap modernist office space. And Don's hip new apartment is kind of, I don't know, too showroom bourgeois-in-a-bohemian-mood showroom sterile?

Adding to the insecurity is the tired trope of centering each new episode around some icky historical newspaper outburst: the Richard Speck nurse murders prompt terror and sleeping under couches one week; the Whitman Texas tower sniping prompts anxiety about sending daughters off to college the next. It was a time when the nation seemed to be coming apart at the seamszzzz. All we need is a cliche'd overused pop song from the late 60s to make it complete (rather than Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" or Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" we get the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," but all that does is make us nervous Mad Men's wasting too much money for the licensing).

And then we have domestic non-bliss with abusive pretty boy MASH surgeons and bossy mother-in-laws; we have Betts gone obese from stress and maybe a tumor; we have icky little near-affairs with the Brit with the bad skin; we have icky little near-affairs with reptilian mongrel Pete Campbell at driving class. Oh brother do we have icky little near-affairs... where's Don with the non-icky? He's too busy scowling to even crack a joke.

That's all I wanted to say but I had to say it, especially since last night I saw for the first time Fassbinder's LOLA, which is so full of cool, amoral intelligence and luxurious libidinal disillusion it was like a summertime smack in the face compared to Don's lion in glum morally self-righteous winter. Don, get your act un-together. We need that old libidinal train wreck, or at least a man with the balls to let lesser men pursue the same vices he once did without self-righteously judging them. How does Don think HE would have reacted back in season one if some codger like Burt Cooper laid into him about being true to his wife and not indulging in the client party girl pool? Don would have solemnly nodded, then done whatever the hell he wanted. People, this is TELEVISION! Don't you have some  Jon Hamm voiceover luxury-driven car commercials you want us to see? Then show us why luxury still matters! Only... from Hondota!

In Hysterics: LIAR LIAR Vs. A DANGEROUS METHOD

Is hysteria at the root of comedy in the same way sex is at the root of hysteria? Or has fear of being a bad father replaced sexual repression as the self-exposing terror at the heart of the modern persona? Has the removal of spanking as an acceptable from of behavioral correction in our current era of overprotective rod-sparing in fact altered parenting and childhood to such an extent that the neurosis at the heart of repression is no longer a sublimated sadomasochistic incestuous taboo but fear of being branded a bad father? Without the threat of spanking to anchor his authority, the father becomes the child, living in mortal terror of being accused of spanking or, at a more acceptable Hollywood plot level, being branded a bad dad and thus spanked by the ex-wife and her lawyer with the rod of alimony.

Watch A DANGEROUS METHOD and LIAR LIAR in the same day and the whole crazy charade comes clear: Cronenberg's 2011 film chronicles a passionate lapse of ethics on the part of Jung (Michael Fassbender) with his sexually unhinged masochist patient, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). As Freud, Viggo Mortenson smokes cigars and feigns shock at his mentee's weakness but is he maybe jealous? Even though with her hysterical symptoms including a frightening distending of her jaw, Knightley's Spielrein is still super hot. As she gets 'cured,' her madness abates and she is "allowed" to go to medical school and become a psychoanalyst herself, but hot mess-wise it's like she dries back into the scenery.

Jim Carrey's 1997 film by contrast follows two days in the life of a high-powered lawyer who specializes in unscrupulous larger-than-life lying. He's never around for his son's birthdays or ball games or whatever and he's divorced but when Jim does finally show up he's a riot, apparently. The son loves him, but is getting mighty disillusioned about his father's constant empty promises. When he's present, of course, Carrey's emotionally arrested spastic antics make him the ultimate in 'fun' dads, but it's these same qualities that code him sexually arrested. He's a fun dad but useless as an actual parent or presumably as a lover. His is the opposite of the suffocatingly masculine sexual presence of Sabina's unseen father and his apparently frequent corporal punishments. One is far too rigid a suffocating authority figure, the other far too genial and mostly absent. When Carrey's son's birthday wish comes true it means his dad can't tell a lie for 24 hours, but unfortunately within that frame he has to win a big important divorce case that's a handy mirror to his own life. When it all goes to shit he's forced to beg his son try and undo the 'curse' via another birthday ritual. 

But of course Jim's inability to lie is wherein lives the comedy. Forced to be bluntly truthful in his statements to the court, Carrey gets to twist and spazz impressively in a textbook example of Jung's autonomous complex, wherein the subject is emotionally arrested, unable to cope with adult reality, a split subject at war with itself. As such a subject:

"... the significance of archetypal defenses is relatively greater. When the ego is not developed, the damage is more catastrophic. The psychic defenses are more primitive and archaic, such as splitting and projective identification. The inner world is full of rage and violent aggression, which is split off or dissociated into fantasies or autonomous archetypal forms, which threaten to turn against the self and others. There is not an adequate ego to deal with the rage or with the split off forms which are invested with aggressive, destructive energies. (Singer, Kimbles, p. 160)

The differentiation of Carrey's post and pre-epiphany persona (for these comedies always end with the dad realizing what's 'important' in life - i.e. the family) hinges merely on the sublimation "for good" of the autonomous complex Jung describes. Carrey's performance of "the claw" (above), a hand he cannot control, keeps his son amused (and is thus good) while his spastic herky jerky in the courtroom endangers the sanctity of the legal profession (and thus is bad). By ultimately leading Carrey to a self-realization (he quits his job to spend more time at home with his son) the autonomous complex 'wins' and forces Carrey to relocate to a place where said complex has its approved outlet -- forever amusing the son in the seclusion of the home (with 'the claw'). Carrey remains unable to actually eliminate the complex, merely finds its correct outlet, just as Sabina eventually finds hers in her own doctoral practice. Once Sabine steps out of her ascribed domestic sphere and enters psychiatry school she's cured of her spastic distended jaw hysterics while Carrey steps into the domestic sphere to find a place for his. In other words, in each case the symptom must be contained and harnessed into a place opposite the one ascribed by gender norms.

As it's a love story we root for the forbidden passion of Sabina and Jung in METHOD, their affair is an autonomous complex that cures each of its victims of all sorts of positive traits, such as doctor-patient bonds and professional ethics-- and leaves them wiser and complex-free. In the end, Jung and Sabina keep their jobs: Sabina marries someone else and Jung pops out more kids still with his long-suffering wife, all while Freud looks on, askance. Lucky for them, neither Jung's nor Sabina's issues involves the trials of parenting. Jung avoids his kids at least in the film (and lives in a time when such remote parenting was accepted) and yet childhood parental relations are at the core of his secret affair, as in the whipping and spanking of Sabina during their trysts.

So while Carrey finds an outlet for his undeveloped ego's hysteric split in amusing his son with an autonomous hand 'claw,' which only pretend-threatens corporal punishment (triggering jouissance in the child), Sabina and Jung find an outlet for their own jouissance by not sparing the rod within themselves. Jung's claw (the whip) becomes a surrogate for Sabina's father's spanking hand, while Jung himself gets to escape the crushing guilt over his own real-time absentee fathering through this re-enactment of a role as Sabina's corporal pater. Just as his whip hand acts as surrogate to the hand of her father on Sabina's ass, if you'll forgive the expression, Carrey's claw wraps around his own neck. Perhaps when Carrey's son grows up his girlfriend (or boyfriend) in college will deliver her (or his) own version of 'the claw' on him, by his own kinky request, and the cycle will be complete.

Back in the day I dismissed Carrey, along with 'idiot savant' film stars like Adam Sandler and Jerry Lewis, as lowbrow buffoons strictly for the kids and the French. But armed by DANGEROUS METHOD, Carrey's schtick glows with archetypal dementia that explains my overall reticence, my fear of squirming on the gender-based guilt hook. Now that I've made that leap, these spastic males I used to hate can join the pantheon modern apocalypse dads I wrote of awhile back for Bright Lights (See: Dads of Great Adventure) wherein I suggested that the hook of modern disaster movies is no longer fear of dying but "having it be your fault if your children die, are wounded or abducted while you have them for the weekend." It's a very real fear dads of today have, far worse than they used to, but in a way it's a cop-out: you avoid imagining your own death or taking responsibility for your own happiness by just imagining being 'in trouble' with the wife when she finds out.

Conquering fear is of course a huge part of the sadomasochistic complex, but such a complex precludes any by-proxy nonsense such as what the anxious dad obsesses over, imagining his child being spanked by some stranger in a white van, i.e. living a by-proxy terror for his son. The "this is going to hurt you more than it hurts me" speech that used to prefigure a spanking becomes literal, as the father spanks himself at the mere thought of anyone ever so much as touching the behind of his child, unless that someone is a qualified physician or his own mother but that's none of his business, thank god.

Or worse, the child missing, going missing on his watch, having it be his fault. Better a thousand deaths than that.

Hold yourselves together, Jimbo

This by-proxy masochism and guilt of the lost child anxiety complex is replaced in child-friendly comedies like LIAR with guilt over being an absentee parent, i.e. one way to avoid the anxiety of being a bad parent is to not see your child at all (it can never be your fault if he goes missing during your designated weekend if you never pick him  up in the first place). But he feels guilty about even thinking that --for the masochistic response can't be allayed so simply (as most kids learn by the end of elementary school)-- so last minute spastic airport chases and climactic declarations of castrative fidelity to the tedious parameters of mom-governed parenting ensue. We never see the real connection between the child and father (as opposed to performer and audience), only the declaration that from now on there will be a connection, after or under the credits. This is the last minute voluntary castration and re-entrance into the domestic sphere, back to the realm of the wife, where family unity is ever-measured against the displays of same on the TV, and inevitably found wanting.

It's still a noose, this domestic trap, just a looser one; eventually the outright avoidance comedic dad returns. Unable to maintain his fragile ego against TV's injunction, his sense of self and purpose leaking out of him like a sputtering balloon, he flees into the realm of the infantile, which is where we usually find him when the film begins. Having received his karmic lesson after the climax, he goes racing back to share his 'changed man' status with his son, who is imminently departing (with mom) for a new life with a bland and simple 'perfect' soon-to-be stepdad.  This new guy usually has a good supportive job and is 'there' for the son in ways the actual guilt-ridden dad is not (a step-dad isn't expected to be perfect, thus he's free from guilt and can actually be present).

No one in LIAR sees a shrink but they should, in order to see that it is the unbearable pressure of being a perfect TV dad that drives the 'real' dad away; the 'new' bland dad is just the castrated version, the pod person, who has trimmed away the excess jouissance that has no place inside the bland confines of the ascribed nuclear family. He's a cautionary example (to moms with their TV high standards) of getting what you wish for. The new dad is useless as a father because of his perfection. What the real dad does have, what he can bring the stepdad can't, is, eventually, hopefully, a way to incorporate some of the wildness that drove him from the family in the first place. The dad must bring the wild back into the family, learn to take charge, even punish and be an authoritarian figure if need be, to not need to be the 'friend' all the time, not need to be loved, not let himself by paralyzed by fear of being judged according to the Perfect Man Rule Book, but to bring in his boots of eccentricity rather than leaving them at the door (and if the wife says they're too muddy, for example, she or the son can bloody well clean them). He needs to 'take 'er easy' as a dad and not hover over the boy; if he's terrified that at any moment some fathering challenge may erupt and expose his lack, he must hide it, must fake it til he makes it. Because if he's going to let his fear show, he's going to do more harm than good.

What the dad fears is/isn't there underneath his shaky, undifferentiated persona isn't there under anyone else's either -- it's just that the bland stepdad never had the illusion it was. The Carrey style dad feels he's the only one who feels that way, so a solution, like a carrot on a stick, dangles ever near... the problem with that stick is, whatever spastic pleas for adoration consume him at the moment invariably make him late for whatever's next on his agenda; prior commitments are forgotten in the rapture of the moment. A differentiated persona internalizes the split so instead of one hand doing something (say strangling himself) against the rest of the body's will, the subject can go ahead and act like a lunatic with his whole body, but keep 'one eye on the time.'

Unfortunately in METHOD we're not allowed to stop at the moment of true blissful union between Sabina and Jung the way we stop with father-son reunion LIAR. Instead there's Jung's bitter mishandling of rumors about him (which it turns out were spread by Jung's wife), his insistence the passion he and Sabina have found must be internalized, cut-off due to peer pressure. Eventually Sabina finds a way to split the hysteric masochist off into her other sexual encounters, while Jung finds the moxy to challenge Freud and follow his own drummer into the realms of the mystic - even terrorizing Freud with displays of telepathy. What Carrey is so afraid of in LIAR--that even if he parents with all his heart he may still be found wanting-- is supposed to happen. All dads must inevitably be found wanting to be true dads, otherwise the child just suffocates from cardboard perfection. It's something Freud realizes with a heavy heart while on a ship to America with Jung, who brings him a dream that predicts Freud's passing into history. It's something to be proud of but with the glory of 'passing into history' comes the realization of no longer being cutting edge. Freud will become part of the same closed-minded establishment that used to boo him out of conferences. Freud accepts it with the understanding grace of a true psychoanalyst, a true father. After all, to do less would void his own theories.

It's necessary, this final rejection by the edge, this merging into 'establishment' and empty symbol - it's the final lesson. No one can stop time from stepping on Freud's or Jim Carrey's faces until all that's left is a graying portrait on the wall. The difference is Freud knows it, and can thus can play his part and then get on with his smoking. The Carreys of our world refuse to accept this, so never get to the level where they can finally accept the truth, which is that the only good father, in the end, is a bad father, i.e. a good father pretends to be a bad one when a bad one is needed. Children need a father who can say no and be stern in some things, can frighten them with his manly authority if needed, and have fun and be merry if not. The wise and differentiated father knows when it's time for the son to be disillusioned and rebel, when it's time to be symbolically buried, and to let his son move on, to not whine or cajole if his sone eventually comes home only at Christmas (or if married, every other Christmas); all fathers say, awkwardly, "here's your mother" after 30 seconds of phone call small talk. Only the good fathers don't feel bad about it.

Bad "authoritarian" dads mistake their role for their actual self, and wreck their children's lives by micromanaging them long into adulthood--they are never the 'fun dads' who let their kids party in the basement. A bad "fun" dad, by contrast, refuses to take the role of authoritarian, never notices when he's being intrusive, overstaying his appearance at all his son's basement parties. A good dad stays upstairs, lost in Handel, but will snap into it if, for example, there's a fire or he's in a good mood and comes down for five minutes to grumble and grin then roll his eyes and say 'keep it down to a roar' before trundling upstairs). Otherwise fuck you, man, he's listening to Handel. Having raised a great son he cuts him loose like a painting he's spent decades working on and now must sell to a private owner. Freud may cling to his idea that the 'repressed sub'-conscious is the whole unconscious and rant against the new kids who've found endless levels of basement below that one, but perhaps it is just an act. An artist may cry and stamp his foot but he knows that just drives up the value when it's time to sell the painting. A good dad is always down to let the prodigal wander, and to take comfort in his sixth cigar of the day as he fades into irrelevance in his paintings' lives. And that's why there can be no self realization without tobacco, Anna. Or death neither.

CinemArchetype #11: The WIld Wise Woman

"Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PHD -Women who Run with the Wolves

There's not a lot of wise women archetypes in the movies - maybe that's because they were all burnt at the stake in the gynocide of the Middle Ages. We've largely forgotten how cool they can be. When they've appeared they've either come on as wizened old crones (hence not a sexual threat), pedantic humanitarians, buzzkill church ladies and/or fantasmagorical spirits. There are real-life icons like Jane Goodall (left), healers (Mother Theresa), TV earth mothers (Oprah), first ladies, scientists, surgeons, pilots, astronauts, and they abound in fairy tales and myth.

But in cinema, few and far between be they.  There is not a single one within the entire Star Wars mythos. They have only minor side roles in Middle Earth and Hogwarts.

 Is it because wise older women aren't cinematic, or do they just 'spook' us into feeling guilty, like we should finally call grandma but the thought of doing it fills with a horror we can't quite admit? I've enjoyed assembling this entire series, but I must say I've been dreading this one. Luckily there's the amazing Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women who Run with the Wolves, a book I once bought for an old girlfriend, who couldn't understand it, gave up after ten pages, and thought I was holding my knowledge of Jungian archetypal symbolism over her head, and I was. She was wise in that sense. The very existence of that book brought on a lot of fights, and maybe even broke us up and for that I am grateful. As was she. As Estes notes:

“Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”

The wild wise woman has, as Estes notes, the ability to love even death, and failure, and rejection, as well as their opposites. She knows how to let go of her children (or neither bemoan the lack of) without a thought, never resisting heartbreak any more than the sky resists a passing cloud, to take all that comes as rungs on a single winding ladder, to nurture without conditions, to look upon all god's and man's works with the loving nonjudgmental eye with which she'd view her grandchild's ballet recital... Jung wrote of the 'whole self' and discovery of one's true nature as essential to one's ability to be a good parent: "Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent." Guiding the wise wild woman towards the universal life are the archetypes. Mothers, queens, doctors, spirits, and warriors, have lived that life, to the benefit of all us children. 

1. Cate Blanchett  - Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

I found the first Elizabeth to be over-plotted and over-acted, but The Golden Age is just good old-fashioned, even subversive, camp. Blanchett--having dispensed with the origin story and all the 'must rise against patriarchal oppression' historical accuracy motif-mongering--is free to play Elizabeth how she should be played, with drollery and sly spirit. A great moment comes early on when, in the midst of  an ornate procession aglow in serious Bollywood pomp, she breaks her regal deadpan expression to wink at one of her friends in the crowd --the playful "you and me know it's all just a show" + the actual show's effective truth = sooo British, so wise-woman. Neither repressed (even if sexually frustrated) nor repressive (no Inquisition or witch burnings on her watch), she is earth mother and sky father both, able to wear the crown without it hanging too heavy. Two steps ahead of her enemies, free of all fear, she is an iron lady and effervescent as a daisy; nurturer and destroyer; possessed with the ability to wipe out the entire Spanish armada with her virgin power and golden stormy garb; the stormy magic of the channel is due to her fabulous clothes! She becomes what royalty was always supposed to be: a living archetype that points endlessly inwards, outwards, and upwards, all while re-defining fabulousness with an insect reptilian glam.

2. Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper - Night of the Hunter (1957)

& the Eternal Mother - Intolerance (1916)

What a pair of career bookends! Surely Laughton had Gish's role in the silent multi-narrative film Intolerance in mind when casting her as Rachel Cooper in Hunter. While Intolerance didn't do well at the box office, Griffith's unabashed symbolism (with Gish the archetypal mother rocking the infant of humanity in its cradle) is--if Night of the Hunter (which also flopped) is any indication--ageless, as all true mythic archetypes. Both films offer a clear line between evil 'false prophets' (the child-stealing "moral crusaders" of Intolerance and Mitchum's scary preacher in Hunter) and the true protectors of innocence, who are far less flashy about it.

Gish is perfect in both roles. Vulnerable, a bit frail maybe, but iron tough. Whether enduring betrayal by a no-good man (Way Down East), the dust bowl (The Wind), the French revolution (Orphans of the Storm), or beatings at the hands of her cruel drunk father (Broken Blossoms), she wins us over to her cause through those hardscrabble Yankee eyes. 

3. Pamela Brown as Catriona Potts - I Know Where I'm Going (1944)

One of my getaway fantasies is to escape out to the wilds of Kiloran and shack up with Catriona in her supremely cozy inn on the hill. Can't you see me, bonding with her troop of wolfhounds and borrowing from her loaded gun rack to go off across the moors hunting the most dangerous of game? Getting my hair wet from the wind and warm foggy damp of the isles and warming it up by the cheer of a good fire as I pour out whiskey for a small, manageable stream of cool visitors, like Roger Livesy? Can you imagine it, lad? 

There we are, the lot of us, staring out at the windy, stormy sea while nodding in and out of woozy romantic black-outs. Such a feeling is, I hear, hardly unique to me, but do they imagine the moors just right? Ah, such a life. I'd do anything for it, except to actually go to Scotland. 

Oh yeah, and Potts is a great character, utterly self-possessed yet needing no support from any man or woman for that matter, yet totally open-hearted--able to go hunt her dinner across the moors and then hold down a cocktail party an hour later, ravishing and natural on both counts. 

4. Julie Andrews - Mary Poppins (1964)

"Blown by the wind with an umbrella, she comes down from the clouds in response to the Banks' advertisement for a nanny. Her personality can be abrasive at times. She is not very sympathetic to the children other than in the Disney movie adaptation. There have been many questions as to whether Mary Poppins is human or not (perhaps an extraterrestrial disguised as a human)--that is for the reader to decide. P.L Travers said that Mary Poppins is 'a pretty young woman, a nurturing mother and a wise old woman, all in one.' Thus, Mary Poppins may be a reference to the "Triple Goddess," a frequently occurring archetype in many world cultures." -- Woo Factor

5. Katharine Hepburn

She's already shown up in this series as devouring mother (Suddenly Last Summer) and anima (Bringing up Baby), but I don't dare leave her out of this. In films like her Spence collaborations or On Golden Pond she proved she could match any big old patriarchal blowhard, stare for stare. The real sizzle in her chemistry with Spencer (who, gifted though he may be as an actor, radiates joy-killing sanctimony that keeps him at arm's length for me) is her refusal to buckle to his patronizing edicts, nor hold a grudge against him for trying, all of which makes her a modern heroine and a wise woman of the first class... Maybe it's true she always played herself, but it was a self that could encompass any character or role, the way the sea encompasses the eternal sailor.

6. Nancy Reagan as child psychologist Dr. Canford -  Shadow on the Wall (1950)

Perhaps this unique character slipped by the censors because having an adult male psychiatrist playing dolly games with a child to exhume their inner traumas would be creepy even for the patriarchal idiots of the censorship dept. But hey, however we get an unencumbered professional female character like this is worth it. A rarity even today (compare her with, say, the doormat sex-starved female shrinks in THE DEPARTED or BASIC INSTINCT) and Nancy Davis pulls it off very well. It's easily her best work, and I say that having seen almost nothing else of hers, for reasons you might well guess. She manages to take over important medical duties from men without them squawking or belittling her, and she even educates older men lawyer friends of the family on the latest breaks in the developing field of child psychology. No man comes along feeling he has to 'put her in her place' with a smug passive aggressive put-down come-on (as endured by Ingrid Bergman in SPELLBOUND), nor does she need to run to her male mentor for guidance (SPELLBOUND) nor does an attractive male patient make her forget her objectivity (SPELLBOUND also) or make her choose between marriage and career because 'no wife of mine is going to work blah blah.' (every movie made between 1934-1941)

While it's great this film exists, it makes Hollywood's long history of sexist inequality that much more glaring by contrast, since it never had its own series, or spawned imitators. And it's a shame, as there's much left to uncover, certainly it puts Nancy Davis in a light that even pro-drug reprobates like myself have no choice but to admire.

7. Gloria Foster - "The Oracle" - The Martrix (1999)

An enticing mix of folksy grandma, 'magical negro' archetype, wild wise woman and high cult priestess, Foster's Oracle is a rather unique character in modern genre cinema, alas. If present at all, older women are the stereotypical self-righteous liberal leaders (ala the new Battlestar Galactica) or earth mothers. The Oracle encompasses both of these, overflows their banks and unites them --a whole matrix unto herself.

Though ostensibly in the Cybil mode (hence the name), she's closer to a kind of Yoda-cum-grandma, shepherding this confused white guy though the apotheoisis he needs. Still unlike Yoda she doesn't want him to hang out in her kitchen and practice. This real wise woman neither inflicts her social programs on others, nor downplays her importance. She delivers mantras (there is no spoon') and colloquial metaphors ("noting her cookies will make Neo feel 'right as rain,' and that certain paradoxes will make him flip his "noodle.") without ever thinking one is more or less important. No male senex/seer would ever be as effortlessly nurturing or ultimately as cheerfully ambivalent. 

8 Alanis Morissettte as God - Dogma (1999)

An avenging apocalypse-toting Kali 2000 mixed with a goofy Harpo Marxist sprite, Alanis's God is one of the few redeeming features of Kevin Smith's overwritten, under-directed, under-edited, tediously foul-mouthed ode to the pantheon of Catholic angels. Electrifying and 'in the moment' she proves you can be wise and wild and beyond morality without sacrificing playfulness. As Television without Pity notes, Morissette-God:

 "Makes angels cry and stoned slackers stop swearing with the sheer force of her presence; issues screams that are literally earthshaking and explosive; resurrects the dead and makes ‘em pregnant; can do a pretty good handstand."

9. Cecil Cunningham as Aunt Patsy - The Awful Truth (1937) 

and Maude Euburne as Ma Pettingille - Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

Nowadays this role is occupied by the gay next-cubicle office mate, or a college buddy working in a sports bar (you know -the person you turn to when you're suddenly single). You crash on their couch and they convince you to either call or not call her or him. They're single and doing whatever the fuck they want, sharp as tacks. They know just about all there is to know about men, women, and the idiots they make of themselves when they fall over each other. Never, however, do they try to meddle in the foolish strivings of the more romantic generations, except as a combination sage counsel, shoulder to cry on, and smart aleck observer / eye roller. 

They are the one type of old person I'd be proud to grow into...the sage Buddha-meets-Algonquin caustic of classic screwball comedy.

10. Dorothy Neumann as Meg Maud - The Undead (1957)

She's a good witch, despite her crooked nose (putting to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly"), and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future like himself were not uncommon in her bizarre Middle Ages dimension. Neumann was a great find for Corman; she's to the putty nose and chin born, but with a genuine ease, wisdom and spry sweetness that makes her Meg equally reassuring and spooky.

11. Edit Barrett as Mrs. Rand - I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Warm-hearted and smart, Mrs. Rand uses voodoo to sugar-coat real medicine and common motherly sense to ground the entire island of San Sebastian. She may have used voodoo to kill the mind of hated daughter-in-la Jessica (or did she? In Lewton's never-far-from-reality dream world, it's impossible to tell) but it's her warm spirit that anchors Frances Dee's quite elegant performance as Betsy. "You could do it, Betsy," notes Wes in regards to finishing the job. "You have the drugs!"

12. Bea Richards as Baby Suggs - Beloved (1998)

Tak Fujimoto's cinematography captures the purple brilliance of black skin at twilight with precise poetry, but director Jonathan Demme couldn't really find the right dramatic air to make Beloved breathe as something other than a half-this, not-quite that + maybe that kind of idea humorless downer hodge podge. Still, it's a wealth of mythopoetic realism: old plantation horror stories, ghosts, folktales, superstition, and religion all bleed into the mundane muddy life of an escape slave woman haunted by the past. 

And then there's Bea Richards' awesome Suggs, the backwoods earth mother / preacher. Bea Richards alone seems to grasp the folksy deconstruction at work and morphs herself into the humble epitome of a wild wise woman in a way that's genuinely compelling. The end has her conducting a big gathering in the woods where she tells the congregation to love their hands, to see and take notice of their hands and all their power and beauty. I think of that scene a lot when I'm stressed out in the grocery store... just keep thinking of Baby Suggs telling me to look at my hands, I'm grounded.

13. Maria Ouspenskaya - The Wolfman (1941)

Marlene Dietrich -Touch of Evil (1959)

Unfortunately gypsies have had a hard time throughout history--first Middle Age witch hunters and then the Nazis tried to wipe them out. But as archetypes they survive and are without parallel or antecedent, especially as fortune telling, whip-cracking, Esmeralda-pimping relics of a deeper connection to arcane truths Christianity has tried for thousands of years to eradicate. 

Acting teacher and all-around legend Ouspenskaya gave the role of Wolfman's advisor a lot of sympathy, as Theron Neel notes:

Ouspenskaya’s main purpose is to act mysterious and deliver ominous expository dialogue to let the audience—and Lon Chaney Jr.’s Lawrence Talbot—know what’s going to happen. This she does wonderfully, but she does oh so much more. As the mother of the doomed Bela (played by Bela Lugosi), she’s oddly touching as a loving parent who has somehow accepted the fact that her son is damned. Ouspenskaya treated the character of Maleva as seriously as any other she’d played. (Portraits in Horror)

Dietrich's gypsy woman is no slouch either, but a whole different sort, more adult and ennui-ridden, more stand-offish yet just as 'oddly touching' and compassionate in her cold way; Ouspenskaya doesn't have to recall years of sleeping with Larry Talbot for money while he hangs out at her place guzzling a case of whiskey listening to an old pianola but the effect is the same. Dietrich's character understands she might be the closest relationship he has, Pete aside (and wife dead), and she gets just how sad that is. She doesn't quite care, but doesn't not care either. She still comes running out of her salon at the sound of gunfire, in a last minute gesture of compassion for her fallen ex-John, noting "he was some kind of a man." Up until then she seldom speaks without a cigarillo in her mouth; can turn questions like "what can I offer you?" into hollow ghost slaps; is usually counting money, doing the accounts; stacking tarot cards, and telling Hank his future is "all used up" without even having to turn one over. Like Ouspenskaya's gypsy she is the earth mother to a falling shadow self (both Hank and Maleva's son Bela are in the Shadow section of this series). In their ways, like Baby Suggs, an 'already paid my suffering dues' outcast, they represent the wellspring of nonjudgmental forgiveness that comes from the wise woman archetype. Western civilization has tried so hard to cement their earth power over (with by-the-book blind men like Vargas and blank-slate sex objects like his wife Susan) its made them all the more open somehow. In the twilit world of the gypsy seer, even monsters can find motherly love. Too bad it's the gypsies that are always first on any culture's kill list, right after the monsters, of course, and women in general.

14. Elizabeth Taylor (gone gray) - Giant (1956)

(Taylor's) character in Giant clashes with her newfound homeland Texas' narrow-minded patriarchal ways, and everyone of the old guard just has to put up with it. None of their patronizing crap works, even when she's way out of line they can't rope her in. So they surrender, like aggressive dogs surrendering to Cesar Milan in the Dog Whisperer. Like said dogs, these Texans realize they love her for standing up to them without holding a grudge about it. She never turns sour and sulky over not getting her way, and in the process she becomes the social mother conscience for all of Rich Oil Texas. She creates a new respect and admiration for the voice of dissent. It's okay to walk away having lost a fight with Liz Taylor. She'll always let you try again. She might even let you think you won once in awhile, or at least reached a draw. She knows how to back off from the male ego before doing any permanent damage. She'll let you heal and then--as if by magic--that thing you were so obstinate about seems to have shrunk in import. She somehow has had her way, and you  keep your pride.  (see: Suddenly Last Summer)

PS 12/22: I've seen Giant several times since I wrote the above and come to really love and understand its genius. Unlike, say, Scarlett O'Hara who never really matures until the end (with Rhett a little too perfect), we watch both her and Rock grow as people as they tussle over all the relevant issues of age, race, tradition and gender. It's a series of scenes where they argue and put their foots down and then nothing ever seems to be resolved, but it is. There's no scene of either ever winning the argument, just the evolution of the narrative happening and changing it all as it does them, until there's Mexican blood in the family, and Rock's racism is gone, he's now a champion of equality, and being knocked into a salad bowl is somehow his knighting in the royal gaze of our wise woman queen. 

 

15. Kim Hunter as Zira - Planet of the Apes (1968)

When you're captured by oppressive apes or aliens you always hope some nurturing earth mother scientist will come along and declare you an endangered species in need of protection. Zira's compassion for Heston-kind provides the sense that perhaps, somehow, things may turn out all right for human-ape relations. In the sequels she ends up giving birth to her own species, thanks to traveling back into the past, the ultimate in matriarchal self-creation.
  

16: Lorraine Bracco as Dolores Del Ruby - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)

Few people have seen this disaster from beginning to end, but I caught a whole middle stretch on IFC awhile ago while half-watching, half-writing something else, so got to see Dolores Del Ruby conducting peyote rituals and Bracco is awesome, dropping truth bombs like "playfulness ceases to have a serious purpose when it takes itself too seriously." What? On the page that kind of drivel is mad pretentious, a sign of a verbose hippy dipshit author in love with his own voice (in case you can't tell, I find Tom Robbins' writing insufferable, he's the Jimmy Buffet of Thomas Pynchons), and the movie is somehow worse. But not Bracco, she stands above. I still wish there could be an alternate cut of Blake Edward's Switch where Bracco goes all-the-way with Ellen Barkin (who's a straight male reincarnated). Oh Bracco --will she ever get the credit she's due?

Irregardless, matriarchs of the psychedelic bent are so far between I have to at least mention her as extra credit. Okay, mother?

Uneasy Riderless: THE OREGONIAN (2011)

If you're ever driving west, across the northern part of this great country, to the mighty Pacific, do skip northwestern Oregon, if you can, or at if you can't, never get off Interstate 90. Back in 1989 my girlfriend and I decided to take the road less traveled, a smaller, woodsier alternative route and soon found ourselves creeping along twisting crumbling two-lane blacktops, snaking around gnarled tree trunks, roots buckling up through the crumbling asphalt; past weed-filled pastures with broken barbed wire, collapsed barns, boarded-up strip malls with the burnt-out husks of pick-up trucks still in the parking lots, boarded-up motels, caved-in mailboxes, unlit neon bar signs dangling on their last chain and long since unplugged, scraping plywood-covered doorways, and big trees edging up against the twisty road, their branches interlocking overhead to block out the sun--not that there was any thanks to a thick blanket of blue-gray clouds. No life, not even a bird or a bug. We kept on, debating turning around even as we sped ahead, the coming night lengthened the shadows cast by our headlights into Nosferatu shapes. The road seemed to be pulling us forward into the sheer blackness of the next turn like a twisting yellow line-tentacled land octopus, as if its giant maw waited for us behind some approaching corner in the darkness behind the tall trees. It was coiled to spring on us with either in some Lovecraftian all-consuming gulp, or just manifest in hillbilly violence. I could feel the suppressed ghostly rage, the hick evil lashing its genitals like a red traffic light that would never turn green--just daring us to go ahead. I could imagine townsfolk drooling over my pretty traveling companion while rocking the car, abduct her. Me speeding away, losing her to some grabbing hands, gone in the night, forcing me to spend panicky hours asking for help from unsympathetic locals at the one dead-eyed bar still open; I could hear my progressively hysterical voice as I navigated their The Vanishing or And Soon the Darkness-style scenarios--my brains already paranoid and scrambled from a day--or week, if you want to be honest--of near constant weed-smoking. 

If you're a guy, you know that's the worst thing you can imagine, being too high to make life-or-death decisions while scummy locals paw your ladyfriend. It's bad enough having to ask for help to begin with, even if those you're asking it from are well-scrubbed, church-abiding, and all that crap. 

Sharing my experience of western Oregon as a Lovecraftian mire: Calvin Reeder, who has recently blown some festival circuit minds, and irked others, with The Oregonian (2011). A landmark debut of high 16mm film strangeness in the Alice in Wonderland / limbo / post-apocalyptic / dream world / experimental mode, without half trying, it joins the ranks of works by David Lynch and Herk Harvey in the nightmare logic American indie pantheon, but with the tactile American flannel shirt dread of Coscarelli and Carpenter as a backdrop. With it's droning electric guitar score and refusal to explain itself or offer any stable reality to measure the warp against, Reeder's film turns to the groundless ground previously inhabited only by Eraserhead, and then goes deeper down into the muck, attacking along the fault lines between avant garde 'le bad cinema' and psychedelic Xtreme horror, between waking reality and nightmares and a grunge-tinted road movie. It's Dementia AKA Daughter of Horror if it wanted to be Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on a Plan Nine budget and instead took too much acid and wound up stumbling through Carnival of Souls in search of a midnight show of a panic movement Easy Rider x Repulsion retooled as a Dali nightmare in flannel by the dirtbag Pacific NW trailer-raised twins Alejandro Jodorowsky never knew he had. 

The story progression centers around the experiences of a blonde hippy-ish smoker (Lindsay Pulsipher) chilling at an isolated lama ranch; a creepy stalker fuels her boyfriend's jealous insanity. After her boyfriend passes out drunk, she bails in his car. Suddenly she's waking up in a car that apparently crashed into a father and son who were having a picnic by the side of the road in the dead of night. Now they're lying dead, and her forehead is covered in blood. No one is around anywhere to help. She staggers down that lonesome road looking for someone to help, or a pay phone, or anything. But.... there is no phone to call the cops and the Northwest Oregon desolation of which I spoke stretches for miles. It's where she is! Everyone she meets, standing out by their mailboxes, just stare and smile insanely. They laugh like eight pages of LSD just kicked them in the head like a tidal wave leaving only a gibbering mess behind. She hitches a ride with a gross trucker, and eventually becomes kind of traveling buddies with a degenerate in a big, dirty frog costume. The phones, when she finds them, connect nowhere-- buzzing in her head seems to be activated by the signals. She later she hooks up with a bunch of weirdo musicians who drink gasoline (?) and spend their free time staring at her and laughing. 

Luckily she finds a shotgun on the road, and a few guides who advise her to just relax and, as Martha advises in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, "sink into it."

I love that Reeder refuses to pick a side, to explain the madness, to have some root answer to whether it's all a nightmare in a car accident victim's brain, or a Phantasm-matic inter-dimensional death drive film school experiment. Unlike most other weird cult-aspiring films, it maintains its madness with the patience of a gardener. For my money, The Oregonian is way better than a lot of over-praised existential stuff like Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive (though Refn's awesome Valhalla Rising compares well).

I'd warn that there is a very strange bit of sexual dream violence in case you're squeamish, and one too many eggs frying. Kind of gross in parts, to be honest. Me, though, I'm super sensitive to those things and found it to be far too into nightmarishly surreal to be misogynistic or genuinely upsetting. There is a chance everything our looking glass Alice heroine sees and hears is all just cover memories to mask the trauma of a past rape (ala Last Year in Marienbad) but that's no more valid an interpretation than the one wherein she's dead and this is all limbo, or Hell, or if she's just lost in western Oregon and this is what it's really like up there. Whatever your interpretation, it's new to itself and thus beyond your mortal critique. Imagine if Louise Bourgeois and Edward D. Wood collaborated on a 1972 road odyssey Repulsion ---would you dare call it misogynist? Or pretentious?

Fuck you if you said yes, even if you're probably right. That's the problem with us, not the movie. The movie is Art, and we exist only to see it and try not to flinch. Let's be tough. There's a great moment that says it all. After enduring a psychotic, lengthy yelling at by her rabid meth-addled boyfriend out at the lama ranch, rather than running or crying, our heroine looks at him and lights a cigarette. She may be in hell, but at least she has some butts left in her pack. It's such an unusual touch and so very right. If we ever drive across the northern part of the country again, out to Portland or Eugene on the Pacific coast, and we decide to veer off the safety of Highway 90, to visit the vast wasteland of rural interior Portland, along ye quaint Oregon local roads, drifting through the damned interior, hoping to see some local charm on our way to Portland or Eugene.... which we did only that one time, then run! Run back to 90! For god's sake keep on the big black road!