Thurs. the Looking Glass: NIGHT OF THE COMET, LIQUID SKY + Mary Woronov

INTRO:

Thurs. the Looking Glass: a new series covering 1980s science fiction and horror films which may have crept through the myriad mirror mazes of time and eluded deserving viewers. Many are being rediscovered now, thanks in large part to the stunning work of Shout Factory's new Scream! offshoot (see my praise piece on Bright Lights) which has been giving these half-forgotten treasures snazzy hand-painted new covers and the kind of film-specific attention to detail only a fan could bring, conceive, and appreciate. Scream Factory, we hail thee.

Preface: To be a teenager in the 1980s was a terrible nightmare of dwindling freedom and choking sameness. We started out the decade as children running wild, puffing our Winston Lights and Marlboro Reds at the designated junior high school smoking area, engaging in unprotected everything, wiling away the hours at Spaceport or just driving around in our inherited Ford Mavericks looking for empty parking lots to break up or make up in, to smoke a bowl, at the drive-in. But old Nancy Reagan didn't like that and by the end of the decade we were getting busted right and left --it was a war on teenagers and we'd get handcuffed just for drinking a beer on our front porch, or having a feathery roach clip hanging on our rear view mirror. And making it worse, our metal head buddies only told us they'd laced the joint with PCP after it was too late to just say no.

We wouldn't have said no anyway, fuck Nancy Reagan, but it would have been nice to have the option. We had to drive a long way to get home, and it was a Friday night, when the cops were out in full. Watching our freedoms dwindle one by one in the name of the angry distraught mothers of MADD. There was nothing to do but go to the mall... again.

1982 ad for Montgomeryville PA drive-in, where I saw too much. 

But we had the movies. Horror and science fiction films in the 80s didn't have to shell out zillions in advertising and PR to barely break even; everything was tactile and urgent --stuff seemed at stake, and films weren't groupthink second-guessed into cliche'd oblivion like they are now (though occasionally they'd force a film to have an R2D2/ET mascot like that stupid owl in Clash of the Titans). Distributors could just buy a few local TV spots (ideally during Creature Double Feature) and just ease on into one independently-owned theater for a week or two. Enough oddball films had become huge hits-- Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Road Warrior, Conan, Halloween --that producers were willing to roll the dice on pretty wild shit.

What's most to love is that there was no CGI in the 1980s: no rules, no format. Compare that to now, where everything is just the same old zombies and torture chambers and video game-ish land sharks, and wince for today's lost teenagers - who now never have to leave their rooms to see things that would have turned our 80s blood cold.

NIGHT OF THE COMET

1984 - ***1/2

One of the stealth 80s heroines of sci fi, Catherine Mary Stewart (top) looks like a younger more Jane Fonda-poised version of Linda Hamilton and works as an El Rey theater usher who dominates the high score list on the lobby Tempest, eats Twizzlers for breakfast, and sleeps with the projectionist (Corman-Tarantino go-to douche bag Michael Bowen)--more out of boredom and not wanting to go home and deal with her bitchy stepmom's comet party than any kind of love or desire--but doesn't even have to feel bad about it next day, no big deal. She's cool, in other words, in that 80s way girls were, you know, before "The Rules." The next morning, though, everyone's dead across the world because of the comet, turned to dust... only the occasional zombie remains. Luckily, Stewart's fearless, assured, kicks ass, and shoots straight, thanks to a Special Ops father who taught her and her sister self-defense before heading off to deep tactical cover in Nicaragua. When she tells her first zombie foe, "I don't know what kind of scene you're into, but I've been trained - and I don't want to hurt you," honey, she means it, just as she means "The Mac-10 submachine gun was practically designed for housewives." and longs for an Uzi. It's no bluff.

So it seems the survivors of the comet dusting are the ones who for some reason didn't bother seeing it, who missed the show, and kept safe behind steel walls (like a projection room, truck cab or a storage shed). The partially exposed are devolving into homicidal mutants and/or Omega Man style crumbling vampire zombie pale, shades-wearing mall stock boys turned new wave machine gun killers; and there's a cadre of sinister underground bunker scientists racing for a cure, turning into shades-wearing Omega Man zombies. The empty LA orange and red skies and streets are a great magic hour wasteland and there's cozy use of an automated radio station all done up in swaths of new-wave color lighting. Eating Raoul co-stars Mary Woronov (as one of the reasonable scientists) and Robert Beltran (as a sexy truck driver) are great, but it's clearly Regina (Stewart) and Samantha (Kelli Maroney) who carry the weight of the film, displaying a believable rapport that includes cool sibling rivalry-support banter, shared laughter, commiseration, sororal bickering, and Mac 10 target practice.

I can't say enough great things about these two leads: Maroney shreds every line as the little sister, wavering from girly cheerleader one minute, telling off the stepmom the next, realizing slowly and believably the world's over later, and coming to terms with grief over her dead friends and blown possible lover opportunities with a wistfulness already beyond her years, yet is still able to rock an amok consumer post-apocalyptic department store montage set to "Girls just want to have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. Sure that all sounds really 80s-dated dumb but hey, the song had just come out the year before (and the Girls Just Want to Have Fun movie wouldn't come out until the year after), so it's not the film's fault that the song and the trying-on-clothes montage have become inescapably and inseparably cliche. We might wish for a world in which it was cliche to have super cool, capable girls like Regina and Samantha in horror and science fiction films, but they're almost impossible to find in any genre. They're like Hawks heroines as teenagers in the 80s. They'll steal your gun, knock you off the high score list, jack your whip and then kick you in the nuts if you sass back, but if you're cool... man are you in luck.

The weirdest part of the film is that nowhere in the credits is there a sign of Paul Bartel, John Sayles, Lewis Teague, Penelope Spheeris, Joe Dante or Alan Arkush, all of whom worked for Corman and inherited his flair for feminist-but-sexy beatnik wit, a finger on the pulse of the youth (this movie was the punk rock poseur Breakfast Club - fuck John Hughes!) and the knack for feeling subliminally connected to the universes set up by bigger-budgeted films. But if there are no Corman or Bartel connection, why are there two leads from Eating Raoul, and a conspicuous movie poster for Death Race 2000 on the theater door?

Oh well, the film has a genial mellowness is all its own--I even forgive its last scene slide into conventionality as Regina enforces a midnight curfew on her sister and makes the rescued kids wear itchy clothes. It's a very 80s veer towards the family unit as 'the burden of civilization falling to us' but on the other hand, they grew up military brats with expert Ranger training, so maybe the conventions are almost subversive in their way. I can't excuse the dated light-FM closing song, though. Some sounds just haven't stayed fresh, that's for sure. Before this, writer-director Thom E. Eberhardt's did only one film, Sole Survivor, which prefigures the Final Destination films by 20 years with the same plot (PS -and rocks; and a film called The Night Before after. Never heard of that either? What about Captain Ron, which is way better than you'd expect --it's got great Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell chemistry --they're still together in real life, and never got married (PS -nevermind, I was thinking of Overboard).

LIQUID SKY

1982 - ****

A genuinely great performance art science fiction hybrid experimental 16mm oddity from the downtown NYC heroin chic fashion poseur scene, Liquid Sky is what Bowie probably hoped The Man who Fell to Earth would be. Russian ex-pat Slava Tsukerman co-wrote it with the star, Anna Carlisle, who plays both Margaret, a disaffected model in Day-Glo face paint and a surly junky male model named Jimmy. If this was a guy playing both roles it might just be the usual camp drag theatricality but Carlisle brings a depth of wry deadpan wit and existential sad resolve that's Weimar Cabaret-level decadent without ever descending to camp, belying her tender age of 26 with a sophistication worthy of Dietrich and an androgynous punk edge worthy of Tim Curry. When she announces she's from Connecticut ("Pilgrim stock!") in one of the film's key and classic scenes, we realize Connecticut is America's Valhalla-gone-Gomorrah and Carlisle is the persona we all hoped Edie Sedgwick would be in Ciao! Manhattan. She takes both her male and female roles over the edge, even going down on herself while fashionistas (before there was such a phrase) jeer jadedly.

O, those effete women and mildly manly men who spend their 70s-early 80s nights milling around tiny black box combo art gallery / fashion studio storefronts downtown, engaging in never ending private fashion shows in vain attempts to stand out from a stable of similarly face-painted and ennui-and-opiate-withdrawal-driven clotheshorses, this is what the East Village NYC in the late 70s-early 80s was all about, before Giuliani and the internet fucked it all up. Meanwhile a German scientist named Johann (Otto Von Wernher) has followed a tiny spacecraft (about the size of a closed George Foreman grill) to the roof above the East Village penthouse flat Margaret shares with her knife wielding Valerie Solanis-style performance artist heroin dealer lesbian girlfriend Adrian (Paula E. Shepherd, below).

The plot follows Margaret as she tries to do some coke, but winds up raped by a sleazy goombah who force feeds her goofballs (i.e. roofies). She fights back, pulls a knife, but at the same time barely gives a fuck (not enough to get up off the bed at any rate)--she knows she'll get him back whatever he tries to do, and she's patient as a cobra; Jimmy meanwhile is withdrawing from heroin but has no money and Adrian won't front. A fashion designer promises 'him' some lines if he shows up to model the next night at a shoot on Margaret's roof. Meanwhile the alien is floating his giant solarized color style eye thing around, observing all the action through a color-twisted prism and killing those who dare reach anything so jejune as an orgasm. It maybe hides behind the white mask in the center of the weird neon hula hooped painting in the center of the apartment. When Margaret's lovers come, a cigarette burn in the celluloid behind their head sucks them right out of the film, leaving her free to resume her high fashion Fassbinder-ish moping. Her own inability to have an orgasm (due to either drugs, ennui or some combination) saves her neck, and even allows her to notice her little alien guardian. Though she never sees it (them?), they form a bond as touching as that between the disembodied Virginia Leith and her similarly unseen closet monster in The Brain that Wouldn't Die!

In short, a beautiful time is had by all, especially if you don't mind repetitive synthesizer percussion noise that resounds on high decibel pitch-shifted frequencies like an angry outsider filmmaker's first and only melody on his first and only Korgi synthesizer. Highlights include: Adrian's inspired spontaneous beatnik poetry rant (using Margaret's dead, naked acting teacher as a bongo); the odd but natural way two people hanging out in bed can devolve into attempted rape and/or stabbing without either one particularly feeling the need to get up; and Margaret's inspired final monologue, delivered as she applies intense glow-in-the-dark face paint in pitch darkness, like Kali, Warhol, and a stoned Annette Haven wrapped up into one very, very cool, droll, WASP fashionista.

But there's also a different kind of New York coolness in Susan Doukas as Jimmy's sex-starved mother in the apartment across the street, especially in her guileless moves on Herr Johann when he uses her apartment to spy on the UFO and check out all the deaths and sexes. He continually ducks out on her without putting out, maybe saving both their lives in the process (they'd get zapped at orgasm even from this distance), though sexually frustrating her and myself (I hate to see a fine older NYC lady go hungry). She may have to do without but Doukas does a hell of a job at conveying the homey warmth and welcome forwardness (even if its tinged with desperation) one hopes for from sex-starved middle-aged Manhattan foxes with big American NYC apartments, the type who know their Chinese food deliverer by name and with whom you can probably crash for a few weeks while you look for your own pad or finish your book. Dude, I'm grateful to dames like that and they deserve to have their needs gratified, if for no other reason than that they are bold enough to admit they have them in the first place, and this film is a gem.

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Mary Woronov, with the Velvet Underground and her co-whip dancer, Gerard Malanga

Lastly, a shout out to the beautiful, tall and cool Mary Woronov, the living legend link between the great schlock cinema of the 70s-80s and the 1960's Warhol / Velvet Underground scene.  Check her above, snuggled up with mighty Lou Reed and giving the camera a badass stare. Edie Sedgwick may be the one everyone gushes over, but its Woronov who's a true rock and roll survivor. She's still got it! Here she sheds some insight on why she's seldom left the niche cult market and taken parts in big Hollywood films: 

"Let's face it: women's parts are gone. Women are gone. They've disappeared from the movie screens! You know when I was working with Warhol there was no problem because it was a homosexual atmosphere. But in Hollywood it's a heterosexual atmosphere, and they do not like to see strong women. So instead of actresses we've got hostesses. 'May I show you to your seat, Mr. Schwarzenegger?' So that's why I keep doing...these other movies." (1990 Cornell Cinemas)

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Damn girl, it's Hollwyood's fucking loss and the gain of all weird movie lovers... 

Postscript: I wasn't sure why I put these two films together for this inaugural Thurs. the Looking Glass entry, but Woronov is the key. Sure she's not in Liquid Sky but her grrl strength and Warholian style is, and both films are rare in that they star strong, capable women with boys way, way to the side. In fact, the genders are almost reversed - the women are in charge in both films, recalling in their way Star Maidens and Norman Fell's almost-forgotten All that Glitters! Neither of which are on DVD, tellingly. Release them you 'fraidy cat censorial sexist pigs! Release them or feel the kraken tentacles of the Kali Woronov Durga's vengeance, and mine own! (See my article about them in Acidemic's Nordics issue)

1994: The year Fiorentino and Tarantino saved us from Vampire Morality

Now more than ever we're remembering the pre-CGI sci fi horror boom of the 1980s as a golden age, not just because we miss actual celluloid but because between drive-ins and theaters on the one side and VHS rental on the other, money was being made (this being the era still when video tapes cost $100 each and were bought only by video stores for rentals). In 1987 alone, two semi-big budget films came out about vampire teens, with almost the same story:  Near Dark and The Lost Boys. Both involve a vain, bland, petulant teenage hunk ready for his first false step, seduced by a hot young vampire girl who lures him into her weird pack (cuz he's hot) rather than just eating him. The pack in each film includes a small child vampire frustrated by their being frozen so long in a tiny form. And in both, this vain young male fledgling vamp wastes his gifts in lots of moral hand-wringing about drawing innocent blood.

Ugh, there's the rub. Like joining the army for the uniform's effect on girls but then refusing to pick up a gun as your mom told you not to, and being outraged when you're not allowed to just sidestep that part of training, because hotness = morality. It might seem noble but there's a name for men who live off women. In both films the hot vamp girl feeds the hero from her own wrist after she does the dirty work. But he gets no blood on his hands, thus doesn't lose his self-righteous sparkle. Oh Prunella! Oh Heaven forfend! Son, that's called being a mooch, the worst kind of pimp.

I refused to see either films in the theater at the time, because I hated seeing the 'brat pack' spill over into my favorite genres --me being around their same age, insecure, and deeply allergic to their sullen narcissism. I still am but I can tolerate the movies for two reasons: one, I'm older than them now (their image frozen by celluloid's vampirism) and two, because in 1994, Tarantino and Fiorentino set me free.

The Cool Kids (Top 2: Near Dark)

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The buzzkills

Yeah man, Jason Patric in Lost Boys, Adrian Pasdar in Near Dark: two doe-eyed hunks used to getting every girl they want just be batting their doe eyes and looking across the room or plain at them with a slight sneer that reads "I'm already disappointed in you, yet I see something special, worthy of my time. Even so they rely on their potency signifier--a motorbike or horse--to do their small talk. But once they're 'bitten' or hooked into the life, they're clinging to their vamp girl like she's their new mommy (one of perhaps a long string of blank doormats expected to worship their lame peccadilloes). They suck, in short, not literally.

Both films assume we know and respect the hierarchy of attractiveness in boys but young male viewers who aren't doe-eyed hunks aren't about to identify with these clowns and we're the ones who watch these kind of movies, the ones who would--without a second thought--kill some humans and drink their blood if it meant getting a hottie into bed. We'd worry about our immortal souls at the proper time (after it was too late to do anything about it), when it was more Sophoclean. That would be a good angle: the awkward shy kid uses his vamp gifts to bite everyone whoever wronged him and gets so high off the hottie vamp's attention and the sense of belonging to the cool kids for the first time in his 'life' that he doesn't eve have a second thought until it's far too late to save his soul, yet still early enough he can still sense and mourn its loss.

Instead, in these two films, the doe-eyes just squirm and try to dodge their bloodletting responsibilities like Donnie Brasco with a gun to a squealer's head, waiting for a deux ex machina to rescue them from feeling compromised, unaware (due to bad writing or nervous producers) that those  'yellow brick road to hell' choices are what gives the tale oomph. Instead, they get to keep their hero's armor untarnished and we end up loathing these self-righteous mooches with a passion that lasts far longer than our ugly duckling phase. It lingers on all through our life that loathing, until we're old enough that we begin to beam nondescriptly at their moody foibles as we would our own grandchildren's.

Jason Patric in Lost Boys is exhibit A: When he sees Star (Jami Gertz) in a big beachside crowd gathered around an open air stage, he starts following her around as if he's already pissed at her for walking away from him, instead of falling onto her knees before his physical beauty. He considers his prettiness a sacred church. No laughing or running around should be allowed in his presence. This overconfidence gets a comeuppance when he's goaded into a dangerous beach race to one of the cooler vamp cavern hideouts and manipulated into drinking vampire blood. And for that reason alone these scenes are the best in the film, and director Schumacher ably captures the adrenalized swirl of energy around hooking up with a group of wild new friends, the need to belong weighed against the alarm bells going off deep in your sacral chakra.

Star, it turns out, has chosen to initiate a new member to the clan but dumbshit Patric can't figure out what's happening... chalking it up to some ecstasy or something in the blood wine he was given. Next day he's a pale, shaky mess who can barely keep his feet on the ground, which would still just be similar to the next day after bad ecstasy. Some of us back in the 90s had to fill our high heels with sand just to stop from floating away after nights of drinking weird potions in the basement with the boys, trippin' out on Miles Davis' Live Evil and driving home at dawn on the back of undulating black asphalt serpents with yellow dash line dorsal ridges. Even when cheap chemsits cut the MDMA with strychnine, we didn't blink!

Patric's a pussy.

Almost the exact same plot serves Near Dark but instead of Schumacher's ingenuity with packed beach boardwalk scenes, thousands of coordinated extras, colorful taxidermy gardens, folk art eccentrics, pumping anthem rock, and the ingenious literalizing of common phrases of parents (if your new friends jumped off a bridge, would you?), there's Kathryn Bigelow's moody Badlands-esque emptiness. She brings us vast fields like a lover's skin, the few straight roads like arteries begging to be punctured with gas stations, phone booths, and silos, and one of the more realistic looking biker bars caked with dust and the muted loneliness of the aging regulars, all the fight leeched out of them slowly by prolonged exposure to the emptiness of the landscape. When the vampire pack invades the bar, it's almost like they come as angels of deliverance from this glum nothingness.

Near Dark wins the contest just because it at least thinks to critique its doe eyed hunk's willingness to literally leech off his girlfriend. One could conceivably view this second-hand gulping as a metaphor for the hypocrisy of today's consumerist carnivores who get super indignant when confronted with images of factory farming. Who resent being compelled to look into their own prey's eyes as if willful blindness is a moral defense. Serve the calf's brains jellied inside the cow skull, you're gross, but the rump steak, a chef. Killing humans is no different than choosing your own lobster once you're not a human anymore. If we all had to do a few days work in the slaughterhouse, co-op style, how much you want to bet this country would be easily 70% vegetarian? No wait, I don't gamble. It might send the wrong idea to children!

I feel guilty every time I leave my cat or dog in the morning, or when I go to the zoo. I never got comfortable even fishing. Even throwing them back in, I winced at the pain from imagining a hook in my cheek. Rules of the Game (1939) is very brave in that - what other comedy shows dozens of bunnies and birds being shot, for real, and the hunters barely noticing, so wrapped up in their petty romantic intrigues? And though the characters don't flinch, Renoir does. But he doesn't blame them -- they are after all the very rich, the predator species of all cultures. It's what they do. That's real morality and if it leaves a strange taste in the mouth, savor it --that's the bitter tang of real art!

I tried being vegan during my big spiritual awakening of last fall (see 'Scrooge Satori Apocalypse', The Holy Madman for proof!) but simply got too dizzy in the end to keep it up. My body delighted in shedding all the crap from my system, but then ran out of stuff to shed, and began feeding on itself. My body was like fuck you I'm a meat eater, give me meat or after the little bit of fat we've stored is gone I'll start in on the muscle, bro, I just don't give a fuck. So I obeyed it, the way a vegan game warden obeys its aristocratic ruler. I learned one simply can't be holy these days without one's own private cook. And whatever happened to the apocalypse of 12/21/12? Aside from the trans-galaxial enlightenment I and dozens of others received either from galactic alignment or placebo effects, nothing happened. Not even ice cream... 'cuz it's dairy.

Going back to meat took its toll though, and now I'm blind in one eye again, so I don't have to think about the pain and bottom line-minded torture my dinner went through to reach me. Maybe the whole point of ignorance is bliss, there's a reason that Italian guy eats a steak in The Matrix and not a celery stalk.

Tony Scot's parallel lines 

Too bad filmmakers, even talented ones with some moral fibre (mmm mmm) like Neil Jordan, Bigelow, and Tony Scott, balk at the chance for true vampiric ambiguity: The Hunger, Interview with a Vampire, We Own the Night, Near Dark, The Lost Boys, the list of movies where a lucky stiff is vamped only to get all moral about killing is endless. It makes me wonder... is there any vampire movie where the newborn actually does kill a human or two without moping about it for the rest of the story? (see my post on Vampire Morality Blues). Damn I need a drink. Oh wait. I can't anymore. I'm like one of these vegan vamps, but for booze.

But then... a miracle happened. The year was 1994, a boozy flood came and washed the lack of sin off the screen. All that bad faith ended with a triple threat of charismatic young leads who got away with cold stone murders: Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and The Last Seduction. And in a less permanent way, Ferrara's The Addiction (1994).

Looking at them now, they're still cool -- but what was so energizing about them has been forgotten by the skin deep imitations - and what was that? That the lead characters all got away with murder. They killed the innocent and robbed and arranged murders and in the end got away scot-free. And we rooted for them every step of the way.

There are no words to describe our exhilaration after having to suffer through so much leftist moral hand-wringing over onscreen killing. Superheros crashing Humvees through shopping malls like maniacs, probably wiping out dozens with collateral damage, but then braking to not hit the main villain; whole crates of ammo being fired by The A-Team without one guy being even wounded; Cameron having to show that the hundreds of cops Arnold shot in T2 are only clipped in the leg (Fatalities = 0, it says on his monitor), it all got to be a serious problem.  But then came True Romance (1993), and the crazy couple got away with the loot, for once, and the girl didn't browbeat the man for killing her pimp! Hallelujah.

Naturally there has been some kickback. A couple of dumbass kids out in the boonies went on a killing spree after being inspired by Mickey and Mallory Knox, but their parents' lawsuit against Oliver Stone was unsuccessful!

Sadly, as they have always done, the Hollywood imitators of the Tarantino mythos got the surface right but missed the point. The skinny black ties and pop culture references didn't make the QT films great, it was the flatline savvy about death, about understanding that cinematic death doesn't equate to real life death, but that in realizing this the onscreen deaths actually become more real, more vivid; the more they are recognized as cinematic expressionism rather than glum social sermonizing, the more true they are. Audiences can be trusted to not all go home and kill Rodney Dangerfield. As Godard once said, it's not blood, it's red. When we want insincere Hollywood hedonists to lecture us about the sanctity of life and death we'll ask them. Go ahead and bite a neck or shoot a man, Billy! You've got nothing to lose but your fear of flying. Can't you ever let go of the handrails.. even in a dream?

Raiders of the Found Stash, from Flint's Treasure to the Crystal Skull!

In addition to being priceless, education ruins movies. It brings a liberal arts-enforced, PC-indoctrinated empathy that can subject once merry romps to bitter pill analysis under the scrutiny of wool-removed eyes. The jaundiced way I see West Side Story (1961) now corresponds to a warning about Syria: instead of letting warring tribes settle their differences in an organized rumble, Tony barges in, uninvited, and two people end up dead. If he had just stayed out of it, all the differences might have been ironed out in a simple brawl -- a few bloody knuckles and black eyes instead of corpses. But, as Maria says, "any fighting is no good for us." Ai Maria! Fighting is much better than dying. America, and Maria, disagree. This is typical of the Lucas mentality--as when Luke refuses to fight Darth Vader in the third Star Wars. He should watch Sword of Doom or a UFC fight sometime and see it's quite easy to fight without hatred, even with a loving form of attentive dispassion.

Similarly Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) used to be about awesome fights and solid thrills. I saw it eight times in the theater alone, probably 20 more once I bought it on video back when videos cost $40! Now, some 30 years and a liberal arts higher education later, I see the steep price its innocence and 'matinee spirit' carry. Is innocence itself the culprit behind its covertly pro-colonialist--even fascist--message? One must assume so. The privilege of the ignorant is the unique pleasure of venting racist spleen without ever guessing that doing so, in fact, makes you the bad guy. 

Now the film plays like Starship Troopers without the self-aware irony. Spielberg and Lucas apparently woke up to this, too, because the 'where are they now' saga of growing old and passing the legacy and zzzz, begun in Last Crusade (1989)--which I despised despite the awesome zeppelin sequence-- continues in Crystal Skull (2008). Now Jones is in the Sean Connery role, i.e. a know-it-all curmudgeon, traveling the world with rock-n-roll son in tow, brawling indiscriminately, playing for rough-and-tumble stakes far too high for his age. Does Spielberg think this is pleasant, forcing us to imagine his frail old skeletal system subject to such harsh abuses?

Worse, he wants to grab that crystal skull--not for his museum or alien research or curiosity--but because someone else wants it. He just plans to return it to its rightful lost city pedestal, high in long hidden Mayan jungle ruins, so the Russians don't maybe find a way to turn it into a source of 'limitless power.' Based on past experiences with crafy Belloq and the Nazis doing the same to him, Indy should just mosey along after it, nice and slow, give the Russians time to try it out for themselves and then just pick it up from their melted skeletal fingers at a more convenient time. But he doesn't want them even to see it. He'd rather make sure the skull is in the same place as the Ark and all the treasures he's looted from oppressed countries safely buried in a classified storage facility, never realizing that in withholding these relics and truths from the curious he's little more than a Medieval Catholic inquisitor, brutally upholding the status quo at the expense of human evolution. Supposedly an archaeologist he's really a fundamentalist, like the Vatican or Smithsonian, hiding any evidence that might prove their books on history are incorrect, their doctorates essentially as worthless as if in phrenology or flat earth physics.

Ford's Indy is now too old to bother searching within himself instead of projecting into old tombs. Such self-awareness would infer some sort of legitimate curiosity about the world around him, instead he plays the muttonheaded buzzkill naysayer. This amazing skull, with its grey oblong cranium and odd powers, is clearly alien and yet Indy still scoffs at the idea it's from outer space. The only 'awake' and genuinely curious character--the only one worth rooting for-- in the whole thing is Russian agent Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who expresses a personal desire to learn the truth about extraterrestrial experience and intentions. Indy belittles this desire, he scoffs like she's crazy! Aliens, yeah right. Even if the alien thing is true, Indy would never believe it coming from, you know, a Russian, and worse, a girl. Maybe he's just stonewalling, but if so, why not be at least civil? Can you imagine Han Solo being such a buzzkill? Refusing to believe the Death Star is real, even after it blows up Leia's home planet? And instead, maybe laughing in Princess Leia's face for daring to suggest the planet was there in the first place? 

Time frames help unpack these reasons: both the sociopolitical landscape of the year each film came out, and when the film is actually set, mirror grave political and social realities. The first Indy film was set in 1936--before the official start of WW2, when the Nazis were in their Aryan-roots relic hunting stage. The Ark is found and fought over in Egypt by Germans (still in their wooing Axis satellites phase) and one plucky Yank --six years before the Americans were officially at war with anyone. So really he's just a thief; he has no permission from the Egyptian government to confiscate holy relics from their desert. Presumably the Nazis made some kind of financial arrangement with Cairo, but not Indy. He only grabs the Ark by holy writ of his yankee gumption.

It's convenient that Egypt doesn't seem too interested in its own relics, and since any previous owner (Moses) is long dead, the Ark belongs to whomever can grab this hot potato macguffin first, because third world countries, it's implied, are backwards children who'd only break their own treasures so don't deserve them. In the Peruvian opener, the Hovitos mirror the Egyptian natives, unable to enter the mystery cave and so whomever brings the gold godhead out is apparently their new king, but it helps to speak Hovito, which Dr. Jones doesn't deign to learn, so he loses out to the crafty Belloq, who merely follows Jones from a safe distance and lets him do all the dangerous stunts, then grabs the prize. Therefore, by not deigning to learn the native language, and not being smart enough to let someone else do his digging for him, Indy is considered the sign of the superior archaeologist. (i.e. decent men don't fraternize with the wogs). 

Sorry, Steven and George, but Belloq's far more of a 1981 man, a Wall Street shark with flair and a sense of humor, than Jones, whose scoundrel gall is only redeemable since he's oblivious; for an academic he's staunchly blind to anything like a bigger picture or his own micro-aggressions and SWM colonialist self-entitlement. 

Is Spielberg being snarky about France with this recurring archetype? Consider for example the way De Gaulle went and took credit for the liberation of Paris while the American and British troops continued to push the Germans back to the Rhine in 1945! Or the way we forcefully took France's colonies back for them, from partisans who had been fighting the Japanese, like Ho Chi Minh, while the French sat around and gesticulated in their little cafes! Does America doing the work and then the French stepping in to take credit and control not recur both in history and the film, and each time--well in Algeria and Vietnam especially--restoring a Colonial rule only moderately less harsh and/or injust than the Axis, who at least deigned to learn the language?

Let's stretch this idea even further to link the Carter administration and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with its own Belloq, i.e. a short French director (Francois Truffaut) conducting an arcane metaphysical ceremony to communicate with the ancient ones. There's no Harrison Ford role in CEOT3K per se, just a Goldie Hawn if she got away with her baby at the end of Sugarland Express (1974). The Goldie Hawn archetype was very big back then. But if you consider the big news of the day was Carter and his Camp David Accord you can etch the little guy pragmatist clear as a bell in a still lake. Today, the idea of a crafty French Jew working for the Nazis before they went full-on genocidal is much more interesting to contemplate than Jones is with his muleheaded Yank 'blunder in and raise havoc' tenacity. There is no 'Belloq' in Skull except old Ray Winstone who exists mainly to take advantage of an old man's sympathy, a kind of shadow to Indy, whom he only resembles the more he tries to distance himself. Ray's character may be an opportunistic slime, but he's white, British (i.e. future NATO ally), and a man, therefore he must be allied with against a Russian girl, his moral turpitude be damned.

I should mention that from 1993-1999 I worked for a French art dealer who was a LOT like old Belloq. I won't mention his name but I will tell you he got into steep debt playing futures markets; eventually defrauding investors and clients. He wound up on the run in Brazil where he later went to--and escaped from-- jail on a whole new set of charges. Various lawyers, detectives, and Mossad agents are still sorting out a morass of who-owns-what and owes whom and who is really the rightful owner of a painting my boss took on consignment and sold to two different people at the same time and then told the owner it was still unsold, so he kept all the money hoping to double it in the future's market in one day and then pay the owner, but instead lost it all, then vanished. The whole experience (lots of lunches with fed, lawyers and detectives over the years after) left me with near-lawyerly insight into the workings of ownership, provenance, and extradition. In fact, I can no longer watch Raiders without musing over who would win a legal dispute between Belloq, the Nazis, Jones, and the Egyptians if they all went to court over who owned Ark. Hint: it wouldn't be Jones. Not even close. Belloq, like my old boss, is Jewish, on the other hand, at least he's coded that way--so would have the closest and most ancient rights.

You think I'm anti-semitic mentioning that, but dig a little deeper. Think of the Ark's provenance, all the way to the initial owners. But you won't, will you? Because it never will get to court, as Indy will steal it long before then.

At some point history, books and bible meet, and we automatically get messed up with myth and fiction.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) follows this self-imposed blindness, the First World concept that 'possession is 9/10 of the law,' and therefore force + superior intellect + luck + white maleness makes rightness. And the only one who deserves the rare comic book is the one who promises never to read it, to keep it in its mylar in a special temp and humidity-controlled vault. 

As Jones moves into the atomic age, he survives an atomic bomb test by hiding out in a model home fridge, showing he's still surviving by missing the spectacle, and soon after he's caught up in a greaser vs. jock fistfight set to Elvis songs, driving around on a vintage motorbike, but scoffing at the idea of a real alien presence on Earth, and once again avoiding destruction by not looking into Medusa eye of the true unknowable Other, the one who would explode Spielberg's cute/evil alien dichotomy with its sheer monstrous 'beyond good and evil' ambivalence.

That's one of the reasons why--all through the movie-- I was rooting for Cate Blanchett's Ms. Spalko, who at least treats Jones and his doofus family with some compassion while at the same time not losing her ruthless edge. She's dicked over by him time and again because he can only see this good/evil dichotomy, hence she and the Russians are evil, period just as he is good, which as a professor of anything should make the academy reconsider his tenure (although contempt-prior-to-investigation is definitely a sanctioned practice in academia when it comes to UFOs). Miss Spalko at least, has an agenda. So what if she's a Communist? At least she plays the game with good sportsmanship and is awake to the mystery of the skulls. Indy doesn't even feign a sporting interest for the purpose of his job in the way Sam Spade did over the Maltese Falcon. Say what you will about the Russians, agent Spalko is a woman, sir, who likes talking to a man who likes to talk. But Indy can only clam up, as tiresomely and rudely as Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.

But the main tell in this version is that the academic deconstructions of Jones as an emblem of bull in a china shop imperialism has at last begun to take hold. Now Jones can only take the skull and bring it back to its rightful place at El Dorado; when he tries to take so much as a small sword - a knife from a mummified conquistador, his doofus son makes an 'ahem' voice, like put that back, that's not yours, that belongs to the dead conquistador's family, or... He doesn't have a specific reason, and it suddenly casts all of Jones' past acquisitions for his museum in doubt. 'Grave robbers will be shot,' the sign says going in, which his son points nervously a-towards. "Well, we're not going to do any grave robbing," Indy says. But of course his whole life has been one long grave rob. Considering the modern age legal battles over cultural ownership of relics (see here) of late, perhaps Lucasfilm and Spielco have begun to realize that the casual American arrogance underwriting Jones' plundering in the first films might be unconscionable but they should realize that this arrogance is what makes it so eloquent as a metaphor for 80s amok capitalism. Jones is a badass because he's so heedless, so obsessed with acquiring whatever ark-shaped jet ski catches his eye. Imagine how great the film might be if Jones was a heroin addict thanks to a dislocated knee? Instead Indy can't even borrow a dead conquistador's knife for his future endeavors, because his son--leather jacket and motorcycle signifying conformity's sanctioned signifier of rebellious trappings-- clears his throat in a way so pussy proper over 'stolen' antique weaponry it makes me want to punch him in the face and steal his switchblade.

This question of who gets the loot started to flair up for me a few weeks ago while watching another of my politically incorrect favorites, the MGM 1934 version of Treasure Island. Whose treasure is it, rightfully? Whomever has the map? Whomever paid for the expedition? Or whomever stole it in the first place? Or owned it? Or took it from third world natives too primitive to understand the whole concept of 'private property'? When Jim Hawkins and his mom go to look for the money Flint owes in his chest after he dies, mom plays the moral cuckold, saying first say they will collect only what is owed "and not a penny more!" But the treasure map makes it okay to, in fact, take Flint's whole savings account. Flint stole it from his fellow pirates who all stole it from Spanish lords and ladies from centuries before who stole it from their subjects: Spain, the enemy of England, Jim! Like stealing the Nazi gold from Kelly's Heroes or the falcon from the Russian, Kemidov; it's hard to say anyone really has a right to it if the current possessor stole it from people who stole it from (and killed) the previous owners, yet try telling that to the Mossad, am I right, Mr. Wildenstein?

The status of the treasure as up for grabs offers a very peculiar notion of 'white makes right," white being the clothes and the powdered wigs of a gentleman born and bred vs. a dirty scalawag. In the MGM production, there's no mention of how the treasure will be divided up, presumably in equal parts between Jim, Ben Gunn, the Squire, and Otto Kruger. But does the crew get a share? Presumably the pirate crew would get nothing for their efforts other than some measly pay. Are they really the bad guys for wanting to seize it for themselves? In reality the only ones with any right to it are the relatives of the victims of the pirate crew's initial piracy, and after that, the pirates themselves. But the right of Jim and his gentleman born to have all of it and the devil take the pirates is somehow much righter than any other option, if for no other reason than a boy like Jim is writing the story.

"Three more stout and loyal men you'll never find... in this room, Jim."

Luckily MGM changed the ending somewhat, so that Long John Silver (Wallace Beery) escapes with his shirt stuffed with gold coin sacks. He probably worked the hardest to get it, and is not just the craftiest of the lot, but also the only one in the whole cast with an infectious wit and easygoing charm. There are some who might call Indy a pirate, one disguised as an academe. We kids knew he was really Han Solo, so the prof thing was a kick, a fun disguise. By the time he's chasing the Skull though, he really is a professor, the worst kind. In the Treasure Island comparison the Indy of Skull wouldn't be Long John Silver --that role would go to Cate Blanchett-- but the crusty Captain Smollett (below, center), good to have on your side when the shit starts going down, but an awful drag at a party.

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Post-Structuralism of the Living Dead: PONTYPOOL (2008)

"Only the medium can make an event" - Baudrillard

In PONTYPOOL  the world ends not with a bang but with the words "in Pontypool the world ends not with a bang but with the words 'in Pontypool the world ends in Pontypool'..."- an ever-tightening stutter-stop loop that causes cannibalism as people try to unsay the source of the said words. It's no time to be running an early morning English speaking radio talk show, in a town so blizzarded out all winter that you have to take the world's word of it that it's still out there, past the white/gray curtain. This one early morning a slow escalating series of incoming calls, emergency broadcasts (or pirate interceptions, in French) and mass confusion envelop early morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a self-styled outlaw with a yen for conspiracy theory; his harried but maternal line producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle); and intern Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly). For a long stretch of film we meet only them, and a lot of voices calling in to deliver astonishing reports that go blank in big flurries of horrible chaos as people chant meaningless phrases over and over then bite each other.

Of course if you've never done angel dust then the stories sound like the ravings of the town's many drunkard local fishermen. Grant can't quite believe it, and his paranoia begins to overwhelm him -is the whole town in on some bizarre prank? It's not until BBCI phones that Mazzy realizes what was mere minutes ago a punishment assignment (Pontypool the Canadian equivalent of Siberia due to his cantankerous airwave anarchy) has led to this one Wolf Blitzer Gulf War-style moment.

He blows it, though. Too freaked out.

The sense of cozy insulation works a soothing spell for quite awhile (especially if you listen on big cushy headphones  while watching in the dead of night/early morning, as I usually do). Grant, Sidney and Laurel-Anne's studio is set up in a church basement (looks like an AA meeting is about to start) and they haven't seen any of the things described. This is a snowbound town where nothing ever happens or has happened. All Mazzy and Sydney and Laurel-Ann have are the callers, whose voices gradually devolve into repetitive cannibal madness and all other lines--police radio, AP wire, 911--are dead, or dying, just static and then the alien-like buzzing we belatedly recognize as the emergency broadcast signal. It's like the whole world has shrunk around their little studio - an island in an already island-like town. Pontypool, where they know most of the residents by name, winter nights stretch long into the following evening, leaving the town forever shrouded in a haze of booze, depression, and shuffling from heated car to radio station basement to car to home to bed to car, with no sun to indicate if you're coming or going, with windows just reflecting an opaque walls of darkness and snow. It would make sense that, of all places, here is where language and listening has such power - where everyone is snow blind so their other senses are enhanced.

What really makes it work is the power of imagination coupled to the frustration of never getting the complete story --we strain at the bits of the movie's limited knowledge, and we recall the way breaking news drips slowly with newly emerging facts buried in an avalanche of idle speculation to fill in the minutes on CNN and their ilk. It recalls back when the radio was the news delivery system, where vivid descriptions conjured mental images of disturbing power, a time when 'showing' mass cannibal carnage in all its Tom Savini-ish Fangoria glory was a subversive act, something to look away from in blanched shock. Now it's the opposite --showing us almost nothing becomes a new form of subversion, back to the fire and oral history and imagination. There are now countless zombie / mass plague insanity knock-offs and for a few seconds the 'found video footage' trick was novel but that was 10 years ago and they're still endless (and cheap). Of them all, only Pontypool (2008) finds an original tack, sailing towards the source of the original Romero film's hidden candy shell power--the news broadcasts--the way the professional newscasters with their cigarettes and thick glasses and bustling assistants behind them all both offer reassurance and terror, their steady authoritative and comforting deep news anchor voices only serving to make the pronouncements about 'packs of ghouls' more terrifying (Night never use the word zombie in that movie, or even--as I recall--the second).  Pontypool rocks that same tack. It's almost too post-structuralist for its own good at times, too lit workshop precocious, but makes terrific use of uncertainty, the unreliable aspect of oral history and delves deep into the way imperiled people instinctively turn to the media to provide a narrative structure for the chaos around them, and how the media finds itself compelled to provide one, to make it up on the spot if need be. Without clear visuals, long shots of the calamity, official press conferences, the calm but thrilled voice of a reporter standing in the snow near a firetruck, we have only our own imaginations with which to structure things. At such times radio can reach the deepest vaults of our mind, forming deep cerebral cortex responses not normally our own. The morning 9-11 went down, for example, I was at work, in the office: no TVs, AOL still relatively young, so we listened to it on the radio. Hearing Peter Jennings describe the towers falling and planes crashing into Washington, I imagined the world consumed in fire, civilization ending all around us, a happening so apocalyptic it was hard to fathom it was even real, more like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. When I finally saw the footage, horrifying as it was, it was almost a relief (the building fell straight down rather than to the side creating a domino effect stretching the length of Manhattan- which was what I had pictured). That's kind of maybe part of the reason why I love this film so damn much. It's the only thing that's yet come close to recreating that surreal almost merry apocalyptic feeling. I was, in fact, giddy. It was only a few days later when I noticed half the "blue collar Buddha" (as we called them, mostly firemen) population of my uptown AA meeting was gone, and the few that remained, devastated with grief and survivor guilt, that the full brunt of it all sank in.

But that's it - we can't always be near a TV with CNN, but even if the power goes out we can find and old battery-operated radio. We all secretly love calamities (as long as they don't happen to us or we don't know whether anyone we know was hurt or killed) because suddenly, for once, something is happening and the mood amongst the reporters is always jubilant. They try to restrain themselves, but this shit is why they got into this. Careers are made in such moments. It's one of those rare times when absolutely no one can predict what will happen, when no one knows the whole story, and it's the newsman's turn to create a proxy, out of thin air if need be, until the real one finally coheres. The whole world seems to wake up in such moments, to be unified in their collective shock and awe, secretly loving the thrill of orbiting closer and closer to a possible armageddon, to the mad chaos of complete social chaos.

Why  I've already seen Pontypool four times is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth on a frozen Ontario small town morning it provides, and the early stretches of incoming news as DJ Mazzy in the morning starts out with the usual bickering with his producer over when to read school closings and the slow mounting panic/paranoia when he begins to think people are all fucking with him, all so organic it all unfolds in more or less real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing; as the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality, we trust his deep perfect radio voice (it wouldn't have worked with a high-voiced wuss actor like Edward Norton). In other words, while not being specifically scary, and always kind of funny-ominous, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and effect even your blogging about it, for more than any horror film I've seen, it gets that whole post-structuralist Burroughsian language as a virus concept.

The secret, as media studies grads know, is the news media's secret agenda has always been to cast anxieties about the prevailing social structure's solidity off on handy targets: crooks, shady pols, terrorists--which then makes the news a comfort. You see which way the finger of blame points, and you make sure you're standing behind instead of in front of it. And when you're behind it, you're strong; furthermore, you know which way to look for oncoming danger. So when the TV station reports on a mass insanity uprising, it becomes 'real' in a way it couldn't be otherwise even if you witnessed it yourself. This process strengthens you by strengthening the illusion of law and order's ultimate omnipotence within you. As Jack Torrance would say, cannibalism is okay to talk about in front of their son, because he "saw it on television." It's the same for us. In fact cannibalism's power in Pontypool lies in its invisibility. Thus one Romero news broadcast is worth three dozen CGI zombie army ant hill urban killing floors, all those tedious Matrix-rip bending over backwards, both barrels blazing slowmo shots are just video games played by some kid you pass on your way to pick up your laundry. The end of the world can't be accepted as a legitimate event until it is authenticated through the TV. Unless the revolution is televised it cannot exist. This is what Baudrillard and McLuhan can teach Gil Scott Heron. It's why so many disaster movies now get real news anchors to come on with their fake news.

In Dawn of the Dead (above) Romero yanks even that little buoy of illusory 'objective reality' away right from the start; the TV station itself starts to collapse from nervous exhaustion at the start of the film, the crew devolving into petty arguments and agendas. Those who haven't had a chance to experience the dead rising directly commandeer the zombie outbreak to suit their agenda, the black intellectual in the in progress talk show labeling it as a cover-up for cop violence in the ghetto. When the four people we follow find a TV later, there's just one continuous talk show left, with two pundits yammering in a progressively more hostile, childish manner. Reality, civilization, has in effect become totally subjective. Even bona fide facts are debated. It was always like that once, maybe, before cross country railroads and telegraphs. But each man was connected to some tribe, some family in those days. Now our tribe is purely virtual, friends from everywhere except our own neighborhoods. Without the news to structure our reality, we're all insane from cabin fever inside a week, even while inside a crowded survivor camp.

Pontypool zeroes in on this issue by presenting the entire 'event' from within a radio station on a single day. It is only Mazzy and his producer who can determine to what an extent they should continue to connect their listeners to their callers. In this town we learn the 'eye in the sky' for local morning traffic is an old dude with binoculars on the hill, playing chopper sound effects so we get the impression he is in a helicopter, which for some reason makes us feel warm, loved, guided into work by a heavenly hand. A weird musical family shows up dressed as Arabs to sing bizarre but hopelessly square 'Arabian' songs, the dad firing a plastic Uzi for accent (I had the exact same one as a kid). This isn't given much commentary in the film but it's a good metatextual meltdown signpost. We learn that the Pontypool crisis involves the repetition of phrases until they become meaningless, a weird infection of thinking transmitted through language, an idea that rewards deep contemplation if you approach it with enough McLuhan, whose concept of language as "a form of organized stutter" underwrites the film's post-structuralist collapse, where meaning and syntax become derailed, causing human brains to go crashing into the morass of subjective looping, where each new repetition increases in violence until they rend one another limb from limb. Is this something to do with Quebec separatist intellectual terrorists? The French language seems suspiciously immune.

While the chants of the crazies may seem meaningless, what we glean from Pontypool is that everything has meaning, and the power of chant is no fluke. Anyone can use repetition to either make themselves calm (the rosary, chanting) or  drive themselves crazy (All work and no play make Jack a dull boy; sections of Mingus' Black Saint and the Sinner Lady) or both (dervishes, maenads). What makes Mazzy interesting as a character is that he is aware of this and does not take his DJ power lightly; even his school cancelation snow day news carries poetic, grim observations, and he predicts the coming crisis all based on one odd morning encounter, even knowing he may be starting the very fire he's railing against by railing against it. And he gives both women cute innocuous valentine's day cards, indicating that beneath his gruff exterior and contrarian shock jock tactics (mild compared to America's) beats the heart of a regular sentimental guy, a rotgut and cigarettes innocent. In other words, this is not an American film. There's no in-fighting, cursing tantrums, misogyny, lectures, or grandstanding. Sydney's anxiety over what her DJ's going to say is moderated and modulated moment to moment as he pushes the envelope but then eases back; her riding him to be less incendiary but tempered by an almost motherly need to keep him grounded, trying to encourage Laurel-Ann to feed him the news slowly and get confirmation first so he doesn't start a panic.

This is perhaps the film's one dubious theme, the conception of language as a virus, that it's not the news driving us crazy but the saying that the news is driving us crazy which is driving us crazy. Since these media-virus concepts show up in Cronenberg a well one wonders if this interest has anything to do Canada itself, its weird placement between the USA's ever loudening media barrage and the BBC's staid tosh clarity. The movie seen on streaming (on Netflix) is itself a virus, infecting anyone who plays it. The media breakdown can extend to your life -- is there a virus within Pontypool itself, that scrambles the very particles of code within its signal, ala The Ring? Or was my girlfriend, in the throes of a phone interview with some comedian in the other room, tripping on the extension cord for the WiFi, causing the Netflix stream, as well as internet, to go out in a single flash right at a key moment in the film? It was so perfectly timed I became as unnerved as old Mazzy. Let's pause and ruminate on what version of the new 3-D that will be, when the film makes your TV explode at a key plot juncture.

Sure that's a sick idea, but that's the thing -- when the news envelops you then you don't really know what the hell is going on the more you think you do; you don't know what is real because your imagination can't stop filling in details, and neither can the newscasters. Pontypool's climactic moment of interdimensional communication is when emergency broadcast interruption comes roaring through the station, cutting out the broadcast to announce those listening should refrain from speaking, using terms of endearment or embracing loved ones, or using the English language, ending with "don't translate these words" which Mazzy reads, translated, over the air waves- Is this, then, a structuralist terrorist attack. Oh yes Quebec resistance, how very French of you!

Top: Lisa Houle - Pontypool / Bottom: Anna Karina - Alphaville

But the French, as Godard's Alphaville (1965) computer knows, are too stubborn and contrary to be as ingenious and post-modern as the unseen linguicidal agents of Pontypool, which does for the 1939 Martian broadcast what the Blair Witch Project did for found nature films, i.e the very lack of reliable 'authorized' source information gradually reduces the one on the microphone to the sole remaining authority. John Connor at the end of Terminator 3 achieved this but with nuclear certainty, while Grant Mazzy ingeniously understands that, unless the revolution is televised, it does not exist, so as long as it is only chaos, a mere riot, he can talk it out of existence; if it is more, he must know what that more is, or cease to exist. Without a pundit chattering out in the cold and another one warm and looking at them from beyond a glass or plastic screen, and us looking at them, then there's no certainty about anything. Let go of language and everything is revealed. Not even the credits can end your transmission. So stick around past the end credits... to the grave! In the words of Sir Alfred McLennan, we must take this secret to our graves.... and even beyond!

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