International Hawksblocker: HATARI!, RED LINE 7000

Howard Hawks fans like myself expect motif repetitions: if something works in one Hawks film, you can be damn sure he's going to use it again, and why not? His riffs and motifs strike deep archetypal tones that generate invigorating mythic resonance, especially when they concern men facing death in the service of some grand quest. Whether flying mail over the Andes, blazing the Chisholm Trail, helping save a bunch of ranches from a slimy war profiteer, or just defending the North Pole against some kind of super-carrot, Hawks' men in a group are the men you want to be running around with; their charisma and overlapping witty banter is intoxicating. But there can't always be wars, or endangered ladies, or murderers in jail with rich brothers trying to bust them out, or pilots trying to land in ceiling zero fog, or mighty herds to be driven through a Civil war-torn wilderness rife with border gangs, or a dame whose nympho kid sister is ensnared in the disappearance of her elderly father's IRA-expat drinking buddy. What do these brave death defiers do then? Do we still cheer their risk-taking even if it's just for kicks and/or cash? 

That's what it boils down to: underlying motive. The stuff that makes a hero in one situation is just a death-wish-ridden adrenalin junkie in another. Without a worthy cause, Hawks' men-in-a-group are far less mythic. There's no nobility in driving super fast around a track, or capturing and caging wild, noble animals for lifetime confinement in zoos. The risk is purely for the risk, purely for the rubes entertainment, which might hit the viewer--slack-jawed in his recliner at two in the morning-- a little too close to home. 

So it is thaat Hawks' later non-western films reveal the less-heroic side of heroism, the urge to find danger somewhere, anywhere. The resulting 'adventures' reveal the sociopathic side of Hawks' masculine camaraderie. We Hawks fans realize his protagonists may be less honorable, far less 'cool' than we thought once they have to adjust to civilian life.

 Hawks, as we know, flew biplanes with Faulkner in WWI. He hunted and fished with Hemingway and NASCAR raced with Gary Cooper. He's clearly a 'rugged' outdoors thrill seeker. Maybe due to some repetition compulsion disorder, some existential PTSD lingering forever after adopting the "hurrah for the next who dies" approach to impending mortality while in the Signal Corps. (WWI being, let us not forget, before the full development of parachutes). For all his bravado, the Hawks male is still stuck at the Russian roulette table in Hanoi.  He's still signing up for another tour in Iraq's detonation squad like in THE HURT LOCKER.

Hawks made very few bad films in his long career (far fewer than John Ford) and yet he receives far less lionization. The press tend to think of his best work more in terms of the stars that were in it (there's no 'Hawks box' DVD set), thus BIG SLEEP and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT are in the Bogie-Bacall box; ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS and HIS GIRL FRIDAY are in the Cart Grant box, etc. Part of this might be that Hawks' personal stamp is harder to discern, so comfortable is he across a spectrum of genres, sometimes mixing genres within a single film; another part, that his iconoclasm kept him independent, signing with studios for three picture deals or getting financing from this or that outfit; no studio is able to claim him, the way Columbia claims Capra, Paramount claims Lubitsch, MGM Minelli, or Fox Ford. Still, when many of us list our top all-time favorite films, Hawks takes up at least half the top twenty. My list does at any rate.

But, by the mid-1960s we had come a long long way from Hawks' prime. He was old --perhaps less clear-eyed about what true courage was. Nonetheless, even the last last few films in his oeuvre reward study, if only to further discern the pros and cons of his recalcitrance. I've already analyzed one of his very last comedies, MAN'S FAVORITE SPORT? (see: Fear of Fishing), and now....

HATARI!

1962 -  **1/2

This the one with John Wayne lassoing --and having his jeep butted by--charging rhinos, fleeing giraffes and snorting wildebeests. Africa + Wayne = how can it fail? Wayne and Hawks, these old dudes, were really out there doing this crazy shit! But it can fail nonetheless, at least for some of us. Why? Blame it on the Buttons. And other things. 

The problems start with the supporting cast, continue with subject matter and end with the subtext. As with Hawks' very last film, Rio Lobo, he saddles the Duke up with a bunch of young unknowns, some from other countries, or sons of friends, and these youngsters can't always capture the finer points of group camaraderie or erudite cocktail hour wit the way, say, Wayne could with Dean (Martin), or Mitchum (Sr)., or Montgomery Clift (honey). And there are very slim pickings in the way of cool Hawksian women. In fact, there aren't any. Was Hawks too old to pick 'em and build 'em from the ground up, training their voices to go deeper, light cigarettes cooler, and not refuse drinks like little bitches? 

That's what hurts the most. 

Of the two women in Hatari, French actress Michèle Girardon is a bit too mother-earthy as ranch owner Brandy, and Italian model Elsa Martinelli (as a visiting photographer who hooks up with Wayne) shows all the emaciated signs of either fever or an eating disorder, making her regular refusal of cocktails all the more painful and buzzkilling (as Don Birnim says "in the morning it's medicine! Haven't you learned that yet?"). Nothing kills the mood like a person who is so miserable and you know one drink and they'd be the life of the party, but they just say no, and sulk, and wonder when you're coming up to bed. Then come downstairs every hour or so to glare at you as you slowly kill all available bottles. 

The ration girls to men is absurd and all the men are either too old or too short, or both. Brandy is shared by diminutive German actor Hardy Krüger (who wears a little pair of khaki shorts shorts so we can see his bandy little legs) and lil' froggy Gérard Blain. Valentin de Vargas (he played the leather jacket-wearing ball-having "Pancho" Grande in Touch of Evil) is OK though, and--in the type of cigar-chewing role usually reserved for Ward Bond or George Kennedy--Bruce "Kong-block'" Cabot is "the Indian." So there's them, but they don't scintillate. 

Now, I have nothing against international casts, but if English is not your first language it can be hard to sound breezy and conversational while delivering a mouthful of brilliant Leigh Brackett dialogue. I mean this as no reflection on the actors themselves, only that the international vibe might be what Hawks or the distributors wanted but--we who love Hawks' unique ability to bring witty overlapping dialogue to a group brave and skilled men and witty deep-voiced, cigarette and scotch and soda women--don't like to see what we like to see taken away by bad casting decisions. These actors just can't deliver the overlapping lines fast enough, or with enough zip, nor do they know what words to emphasize so the dirty jokes come across. It's like asking Paul Henreid play Oscar Jaffe or Walter Burns. Sure, Henreid is great but he simply can't talk fast enough and with enough tail-flap flair to get lift-off. 

There are perks to be found in the margins: the memorable Henry Mancini score ("Baby Elephant Walk" comes true) and the lack of stunt doubles being the top two. We can assuage our guilt over the animal abuse by the knowledge Wayne and company had the guts to do all their own animal-wrangling; there's no rear screen projection and no stock footage of any kind ("of any kind, David") and it makes a huge difference. Compare it something like MGM's Tarzan series (which relied on all three) and the many scenes of the groups' complex hunting strategy as their vehicles roar across the plains, driving vast herds before them, really sparkle in the African dust, revealing the film's clear influence on, amongst other things, Spielberg's Jurassic Park: The Lost World. 

I like some other things at play here too: the leisurely cycle of the film follows, say, Hemingway's first person accounts of safaris, like Green Hills of Africa, where the book is divided into hunting on the plains by day and drinking/conversing at night; the cycle of animals and drinks, hunts and conversations, as natural and easy as the progression of drinking life itself. 

But this time--rare for Hawks--it's the night part, the drinking, that fails. Breeziness and camaraderie are a hard thing to force.

I could forgive that forced feeling, maybe, but it's harder to forgive after trying all day to shake the bad vibes of watching these wild and free animals terrorized and forced into a lifetime of captivity. Surely, such behavior is the anathema of heroism. 

But I can even forgive that.  

But what I cannot forgive is the presence of something far worse than bad vibes or forced joviality. It's something so odious, so vile and unspeakable, no forgiveness is possible.

And that thing is a hirsute little ham named Red Buttons.

Red Buttons, the original red-headed stepchild... I love his convulsive dance marathon heart attack in They Shoot Horses Don't They? But in Hatari! there's no need to ask which animal I'd like to shoot first.

Sure he's got a kind of Rooney-like Arthur Murray tenement hoofer grace to his burly hobbit movements, but his hammy cowardice and passive aggressive cockblocking drag the joie de vivre down over the film's wings like a steel mesh net. Endlessly showboating, whining, blowing up one of the blazing hot Serengeti's last acacia trees, solely in order to abduct a whole tribe of monkeys who live in its branches, and then getting drunk that night and refusing to let anyone else talk about anything but how he was too scared to watch his big moment of triumph... oh my God!  He's as un-Hawksian as it's possible to get.

Imagine if you parachuted Jerry Lewis down into Casablanca, cast him as a waiter at Rick's, and told him to do everything he can, up to abd including jumping up and pissing on their table, to prevent Ilsa and Rick from hooking up. Remember that sketch in SNL with Fred Armisen as the weathervane character removed from Wizard of Oz? Surely it was based on Hatari's Buttons. Was that sketch written after seeing this movie. Abbot and Costello are the souls of wingman discretion by comparison.

Not only is he a cockblocker of Wayne and Martinelli's blooming and unrealistic romance, not only does he steal all the ice normally used for cocktail hour (for his poor widdle ass after falling into the pig trough), not only does he kill an acacia tree to snare a barrel of monkeys, he steals the Earth Mother girl from the Froggy and the bandy-legged Hitlerjugend who've been fairly and gentlemanly dueling for her hand all through the first half of the film. And how? By pretending to be hurt! He plays the sympathy card, and ever the maternal caregiver, the animal husbander, she buys it. As Ursula the Sea Witch would say, "Pa-thetic!" 

Hawks has made dozens of films over his long career but Buttons represents a 'new' kind of character for Hawks, one so foreign to his 'isolated men in a group' dynamic here's no defense against him, like an invasive species. The closest thing to an antecedent is perhaps Major Horace Applegate (Charlie Ruggles) in Bringing Up Baby's or the US Army as a collective whole in I was a Male War Bride. But those were pure comedies, with major stars in the forefront and veteran support who knew their job was to give the stars room to breathe rather than forcing them off camera and sucking the air out of their lungs. 

Perhaps we can understand late period Hawks well by contrasting his two tame leopard-in-a-bathroom scenes, the one in Bringing up Baby (1938) and the one in 1962's Hatari!. In Baby, savvy Susan Vance, lounging in her cool NYC apartment, pretends she's being attacked by a leopard in order to get naive David (Cary Grant) to charge over to her and 'save' her (he doesn't yet know it's a tame leopard and she doesn't tell him). In Hatari!, smarmy Red Buttons takes advantage of a naive journalist's natural fear of a leopard walking in on her in the bath (unaware it's a tame leopard) to charge in with chair to pretend save her. But while Grant's over-acting was--and he knew you knew--a front, a grown man play-acting in a Cavellian comedy of remarriage, in Hatari! Red overacts and gesticulates as if an amphetamine-spiked Mickey Rooney crash landed in the middle of Rio Bravo and tried to turn the whole thing into an Andy Hardy picture before Hawks came back from the bathroom.

Anyway, the real problem is sex. The way Buttons cockblocks Wayne constantly, interrupting his woo at the worst times, is forgivable the first time. But by the second it's downright obnoxious, and the third, fourth, fifth... etc. completely toxic. Someone must have found this funny. But it's not. Perhaps. with Viagra still decades off, Hawks had lost all interest in sex's non-farcical aspects. But it's ridiculous and annoying that we're not supposed to wish Buttons would wind up gored by a bull so bidness could get down to. Wayne has to marry the girl (offscreen) at the end just so they can get a hotel room together in town, but then their bed is literally crashed by her three baby elephants, and Red of course, opening the door for them to come in and trash the place. Haw Haw.

Sorry to vent, but I've always hated cockblockers. I HATE THEM SO MUCH! Sex is hard enough to arrange on its own, especially in an uptight country like America. We don't need any more interruptions than we already have. I'm from the school of thought where when you see a buddy hooking up you don't interrupt, you quietly fend off the other suitors, dive on any grenades if needed, or otherwise just give him some room and leave him to it. I always thought Hawks felt the same, and I'm sure he did once. But just imagine if Bacall's attempted seductions of Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944) were continually undone by Brennan's drunk character randomly barging into the room without knocking, lighting her cigarette before she can ask for a match, asking for change or talking about the dead bees, over and over and over... for three hours. Never giving them a chance to be alone together. But Brennan would never do that. Not ever. 

Anyway, Wayne has enough problems without Red as it is. Smoking cigarettes and getting older with every drag, the red sand radiation from The Conqueror mutating his cells, he seems always at risk of stretching his cowboy actor legs once too often in taming of wild animals, like he could wind up like Clark Gable in real life after that mustang in The Misfits (1961) and break something in himself that his body's too old to repair. Hawks and Wayne would be better off back in Hollywood, or on location someplace with an ocean breeze, instead of the animal dung and tsetse fly-ridden dust of Kenya before the rainy season. At this stage in his life, Hawks should be like John Ford, presiding over pointless Irish brawls in paradise instead of racing around after rampaging rhinos and wildebeests or giving a coiled Irish ham like Red Buttons an inch of improv leeway. 

To get back to the girls in Hatari!, all two of them, and all their lack of sex appeal. Now, pop culture has taught us a bit about eating disorders since 1962, I've had anorexic friends in AA point out all the telltale signs, like teeth that look like they're trying to crawl out of your mouth before they dissolve. So it's easy to see that, unless she was suffering from yellow fever while on location (which is probably and maybe even the cause), Italian model-turned-actress Elsa Martinelli had an eating disorder that pains one to look at her in the same aghast way one used to look at Ally McBeal. I could overlook that if not for other sins against Hawksian nature she commits, like when she declines a drink after her first long bumpy, dusty hard safari animal-wrangling jeep ride. In a Hawks movie, when you're all sore as hell from being bounced around, you just don't refuse a first-rate analgesic like alcohol! It's like saying your head hurts too much to take an aspirin! I can abide anything but that kind of idiocy. Bet that Agnes of yours wouldn't turn it down, as Cannino says to little Jonesy in The Big Sleep.  This is frickin' Hawks country you're in, Elsa, not frickin' Texas Female Baptist College on a Blake's bus tour! These people are men!

And I wish to god I was with 'em.

Unless they were in goddamned Africa.

Center: the normal-height human who won Ann Darrow

---

RED LINE 7000

1965 - **1/2

This saga of interwoven young racers and the women who chase them is one of Hawks' harder-to-find and hardest to like later films. Shot in a full frame (1:85) ratio (at least that's the only version available), which is odd for a 1965 racing movie, it's on Amazon streaming finally and the stock car races are thrilling in a dusty STP sign and authentic stock car race kind of way, with great fiery spinouts and crashes so seamlessly interwoven into the storyline you'll swear the real actors are in the wrecks. Was Hawks' camera just hanging around waiting for crashes or were these stunt men? Or did he take stock footage of crashes and then reverse engineer them (paint a car to look like one that had already crashed, and then put one of his stars in a mock-up, etc.)? Knowing Hawks, all three and then some. A lifelong race car driver, he was one of the stunt drivers for the film (at age 69!) and unlike 90% of racing movies there's never a doubt which character is in which car.  The sound is so solid you can feel the engine throbbing in its exhaust RPM through your couch, even without a subwoofer.

It's been called a loose remake of Hawks' earlier racing pic, The Crowd Roars (1932 - see my review here), which is also distinctly 'lesser Hawks.' But Red Line is really part of the 'interwoven young lovers revolving around a cinematically-intriguing profession' genre, with its roots in trashy beach reads reaching as far back as Cinemascope jet trash like How to Marry a Millionaire (1957) The Interns (1962), The Carpetbaggers (1964), and still going strong by the late 70s. There was also a then in-vogue thing for stock car racing, traceable in drive-in product of the era, like The Young Racers (1963), Viva Las Vegas (1964), Spin-Out (1966), Fireball 500 (1966), Jack Hill's Pit-Stop (1968) and bigger budget stuff like Grand Prix (1966) and Le Mans (1971). And of course this genre peeled out into the 70s in a lot of directions: the Easy Rider / Wild Angels biker genre; the Convoy / Smokey and the Bandit trucker genre; and the Monte Hellman Two-Lane Blacktop existential pink slip genre. So in a way, films like Red Line 7000 are the connecting thread between How to Marry a Millionaire and Mad Max. 

Red Line is Hawks down to its rims, but it lacks an axle; the wheels just spin right off the car and off into the gutter. None of the women are exactly Hawksian (Charlene Holt aside), they're far too masochistic and self-abasing (they're just racing groupies- with no other career or interests), and the men are all unattractively stunted on some level when it comes to women. Misogyny has always been anathema to Hawks except in his two racing pictures, where the men seethe with contempt over any girl turned on by their speed. Red Line includes the first time ever in Hawks' canon where a 'good guy' hits a woman. Worse, it's James Caan! He gets jealous over his new girlfriend (Hill) while shouting "Slut!" at her because she slept with his on-track rival, albeit before meeting him. Usually that's enough right there to warrant a man getting killed, or at least pistol-whipped into releasing Walter Brennan. Here the girl seems to be more concerned with the condition of her man's knuckles than her black eye.  These women soak up abuse, and then hurry to mop their blood off the floor so their man won't slip on his way to another woman's boudoir. 

That, in the end, is what's left over from The Crowd Roars, the ugly core of why I don't like that movie either. This antagonistic relationship between the groupies of the racing circuit, their slavish devotion arouses the self-hating drivers' death wish contempt. As one who's known and loved rock groupies as a youth, I sneer at the misogynistic sneering of these Hawks racers!

Still, I like Red Line gallons more than Hatari! For one thing, most people are on the same page, i.e. they're American and able to tap the Hawksian esprit d'corp. The one foreign accent here belongs to Mariana Hill--as a yeh-yeh vivant French racing groupie--but it works because she's actually American doing a French accent. A member of the Actor's Studio, Hill offers a classic example of what I meant earlier about American actors doing foreign accents being better than foreigners speaking English as far as overlapping screwball dialogue (ed note: I edited that out from the Hatari review, but you get the gist). There are also a lot more girls than in Hatari!, and they're way better looking. Also the boys aren't terrorizing any animals. They're not exactly doing anything heroic, just racing around in circles, but they're hurting only themselves, their tires, and eventually the ozone layer.

Like Hatari, Red Line operates in a day-night cycle, with nights at the motel and its nearby restaurant / tavern owned by Lindy (Holt). These bar scenes could have been the heart and soul to the film, but Hawks dulls them with some terrible royalty-free country-tinged electric rock, and way too-many weird-looking (presumably) real-life racing figures doing walk-ons. Lindy talks about knocking down a wall in her place, to make room for a band and dancing, now that Holly (Gail Hire)--a recent 'racing widow' dating Caan before swapping with Gabbi for Dan (Skip Ward)--has become a partner. Got all that? What the film really needs though, more than a rock band or a knocked-down wall, or romantic triangle entanglements, is a rewrite. There's no Leigh Brackett or Charles MacArthur or Jules Furthman or Ben Hecht to add the right sense of wit to the repartee. Asking a guy you're having a one-night stand with to: "tell me about the other girls" is an example of the kind of numb-nuts dialogue they would have tweaked to be witty and wild and sharp and alert, cutting through the layers of crap instead heaping them on. Even Hawks might have changed it to "Who was the girl, Steve?" instead of something so dull and flat "tell me about the other girls" --i.e. acidly curious about why he's such a shit instead of being a blank Westworld automaton eager to take notes of all the geisha-like submissive states that please her prospective new beau. As I wrote awhile back about The Crowd Roars, one came away realizing that Anne Dvorak and Joan Blondell were teaching not only Cagney about women, but Hawks as well. But in this film one gets the impression he forgot all over again, but no girl present was up to the challenge. Blondell and Dvorak would have put these men in a headlock and beat sense into them with their heels. 

And as always with Hawks, music is more than just a lull in the action, it's as essential to the bonding of the group as cigarettes (though there are but few of those this time), pouring drinks (again less emphasis than usual with Hawks), and sitting down to dinner at restaurant tables where you know everyone in the place on a first name basis, including the owner/waitress. But then there's the fake band playing fake 'rock' (ripping sax solo and no sax player, drummer barely even hitting his skins, etc--no relation whatever to the music) and the dancing all starts to resemble some terrible AIP beach party freak-out. 

Far better use is made of motel patio pool and a Pepsi machine, the strip of rooms and lights on the pool all paint a very vivid and familiar portrait to anyone who's ever been drunk at a motel and been out trying to find the ice machine while seeing double and getting picked up by a girl you hope is not a prostitute or a shakedown honeytrap. Gabbi comes onto Caan out there while he's getting a Pepsi and it's a groovy scene. Gabbi's supposed to be Dan's girl, so why is she pouring it on? 

It doesn't make sense but what does? And Holly thinks she's unlucky, a kind of black widow of the race track, so wants to avoid Dan's love so she doesn't jinx him. The team owner's tomboy daughter (Laura Devon) champions the towheaded oaf played by John Robert Crawford (he seems way too big and heavy for a racer, like a 200 pound jockey), who throws her over as soon as he wins a single race. But don't worry, though they went on one date and he blew her off after winning his first big race, she goes running to his hospital bed after he's back on the bottom. It's sickening, the kind of thing Hawks never stooped to before.

Hawks' films at their best offer a utopian ideal of professional competence and stalwart support that is tested against terrible danger. It's the sort of thing that, as a man, is as heartening as an evening out with your cool older brother and his friends when you're ten years-old, But in the comedies that stalwart support gives way in the wake of a wild woman and the existential terror of sex, with death revealed below like a trapdoor opening to Hades. The same mythic problems of his comedies muddles his latter adventures, like Red Line 7000; the casting, usually so spot-on with Hawks, seems here culled wholesale from a Where the Boys Are post-spring break yard sale. There's a feeling Hawks didn't rehearse them too much; that they didn't know each other that well before being thrown into a scene. And Hire is a real liability. The great Ed Howard sums up Hire's performance eloquently, getting at the fundamental problem of later Hawks, implying he was losing his Svengali ability to turn normal girls into 'Hawksian women' with deep, sexy voices, which for Hire failed though Hawks didn't seem to notice:  How could Hawks, always justly acclaimed for the quality of the performances he could coax out of nearly anyone, have thought this was acceptable?" 

Personally, her awful performance doesn't bother me that much (and I just fast forward past her song), and more than Bacall she seems to be imitating Paula Prentiss in Man's Favorite Sport? who does a kind of playful take-off on the Hawksian woman. That was fine because it was true to Prentiss' own persona, and done with real affection. With Hire and the other kids though, they either need more rehearsal time, a decent script, decent sets, or all of the above. James Caan's whole thing of how he only wants to sleep with virgins and not any 'secondhand' stuff seems like a problem made up by a man who was pushing 70 in the age before Viagra, angry at his libido for giving out right before the arrival of "the pill." Caan's obsessive Victorian era jealousy leads to a fight with Skip Ward (Hank in Night of the Iguana, where he was perfectly cast since he was supposed to be a sincere dimwit), the only guy who's not an ass, and as a result Hire goes to see him and his new girlfriend, a sexy French racing enthusiast who first shagged the repulsive cornfed oaf. That's life, man, but just seeing Hire there sends Caan into a fury. And we're somehow supposed to care? Robert Mitchum he isn't. 

I mention Mitchum of course because the presence of Charlene Holt (right) made me think of El Dorado, again with Caan, made (hard to believe) the following year. There the the star wattage of both Wayne and Robert Mitchum boosted her own charm level considerably; as their "shared" girl (she says she's more than enough for both of them --we believe her) she plays off their grounded energy marvelously, never trying to steal a scene or do more than her natural-if-limited talent allows. Here there's not a watt to be found for Holt to light up with, and the problem is Hawks doesn't know it. He's forgotten what's important as far as where to point the camera when it's not on the race track and when to recognize a scene is dead and either rewrite it, recast it, or cut it altogether. Wayne could have reminded him, Leigh Bracket would know too and only they probably had the clout to at that moment.

Luckily, there's the racing to save it: unlike so many racing movies, thanks to distinct color coding you can always tell which car is whose and what they're doing to each other, especially as the furious Caan tries to run Skip Ward into the wall. But the thing is, the shots between drinks or drinks between shots are undone since there's no male group camaraderie (only competition) though there's some scenes with the girls bonding by themselves (they're never catty or competitive, even when dating each other's 'second hand' cast-offs), there's not nearly enough drinking or smoking.

Maybe that's the key to good Hawks morale - take away the booze and the tobacco and the coolness dissipates to nothing. Maybe that's why Hawks returned to the western for his last two films, thus doubling his western output. Hard to believe he'd only made two up to that point, and that they were two of the genre's best -- RED RIVER and RIO BRAVO. 

Why they're the best has something to do with loyalty and a code of honor deeper than Fordian military school blarney and sentimental fascism, but when that current of loyalty is undercut or misused in a Hawks film, the whole enterprise begins to drift loose. It's a problem we men in general have, this weird thing where as soon as a girl comes into our lives we try to make her into our mother and then feel suffocated by what we've projected, desperately looking for a way out of a cage we're too numb to realize we built around ourselves and doesn't really exist, and so we cage ourselves twice over by trying to escape her all over again.

But Howard, most of us left this cage, long ago... the marshall came and took Joe Burdett, and we moved out of the jail back to the comfort of the hotel. We don't even pass out cigars anymore. We don't, because there's no 'where' to go once you're everywhere at once. Now the only aspect of our lives we can't duplicate with an image, a keyboard and a mouse is that feminine vice clamp flytrap magnet that pulls us ever inwards towards our projector eye self. To not blaze away from its gravity with as much horsepower as we can cram under that mortal hood takes raw courage; every second we don't press that pedal down is a victory. As Tom Waits sang- "If you get far enough away / you'll be on your way back home." Racing around in an endless oval, these maniacs avoid that risk, kind of - they don't go home, but never get far enough away from it, either, or even see a single sight. If only there was a reason for winning  that boiled down to something more than a junky's fear of withdrawal, a fear strong enough to conquer even his fear of death... or intimacy.

What's Eating You: FOOD OF THE GODS, EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, JAWS OF SATAN, FROGS

Bert I. Gordon, one of the few schlockmeisters whose career spanned both the 1950s 'big bug movie' craze (Beginning of the End, Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider) and the 1970s Jaws eco-horror phase, comes to Shout trailing clouds of toxic bughouse glory in two new Blu-rays this week. Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977) are now deep black spanking HD new and they may just save your life --in event of giant pest invasion you at least know what not to do. Flanked with B-sides equal to their terrible majesty (Frogs for Food, and Jaws for Ants), they come to us in deep lovely HD blacks and sparkling color, after nigh under forty years of washed out who cared VHS grays. That's a good thing, for when all else fails (and it sure does), we can admire how now pink natural light beams through the willows and fields of murmuring hemlock. Shout treats these tawdry gems with the same reverence Criterion affords Kurosawa: those shadows in which normal size snakes and large ants hide are now so super deep they're darker than the starkest midday shadows, and the colors and finery-- oh oh my children. I like big bugs and I cannot lie, you know this.

Shout knows it too, for they preserve the subtle grain of real film stock so HD or no these still look like 70s movies. And that's what matters, for there's no reason for these two double features to exist--they are abominations in the eyes of God. But some of us, of a certain age and misanthropic disposition, need them. They deliver a kind of deeper vertigo-inducing version of nostalgia, a post-childhood dread Pavlovian trigger that gets us deep where other monster movies cannot reach.

All nonbelievers beware, however: for there are two problems with these films' coming to Blu-ray. First: the contrast between rear projection and overlays is even more very glaring than ever before: the splices and outlines between the humans and the amok nature backgrounds glow like filaments. Second: seeing any animal--even lower life forms like snakes and rats--killed, stunned, betrayed, abashed or even annoyed... is abhorrent to modern sensitized sensibilities. Partially because of movies like these (see my rant on Day of the Animals), part of the 70s naturalist horror kick, we've learned to care about nature. Now Humane Society stooges monitor every animal shot--even the rats and insects get body doubles for crushing scenes--but I sincerely doubt the mysterious BIG had one. And the look of stunned betrayal in the eyes of some of these vermin is crushing in ways it wasn't back in the time of these films' release. To redress the wrong, and spare the sensitive unseemly sights, I've given each film an unofficial PETA rating. First up...

FOOD OF THE GODS

(1976) - Dir. Bert I. Gordon

**1/2 / PETA: D

Food has one of those weird casts that makes you wonder if the great Bert I. Gordon's obsession with giant little things and little giant things is the result of a vision disorder like strabismus that makes it impossible to tell how big or small something is vs. proximity (i.e. are children really small, or just far away?). How else can one explain his decision to cast the ever-squinting, frizzy blonde, cap-toothed, and suspiciously diminutive ex-child evangelist Marjoe Gortner as an NFL quarterback? Why, he's no bigger than a fourth down prayer! Yet there he is, practicing his throws on a frosty field (or is it pollution? Freeze frame!) before trundling off to a remote woodsy island with two of his teammate buddies. They go hunting on horseback - as NFL stars are wont to do, and the ever-dependable Jon Cypher is soon-offed by giant wasps. First they look like toys bouncing on a string and then like superimposed cartoons of wasps (you can see through them), and then--finally attaining opaqueness-- big rubber wasps with their pipe cleaner legs carefully entwined around his backpack.

Marjoe will not let Cypher's death stand! He must have vengeance against the hive! And so the film is off and running. Old Gortner climbs into the self-righteous power trip seat favored by so many self-appointed leaders in crisis situations and is soon battling a giant rooster, more wasps, Ida Lupino as a farmer's wife, and--playing the rote capitalist who wants to monetize the situation-- a bloated, hungover Ralph Meeker in a black raincoat.

Meeker's on the island to get a look at the weird white stuff coming out of the ground like bubblin' crude... the titular food, which might have profit potential as a growth hormone. One thing's for sure, it works! But without a rooster the size of a UPS truck (like the one Marjoe kills while investigating Ida Lupino's barm) there's nothing to keep the rats away, or the giant caterpillars from biting her hand! Argggh!

Gamely moving these big blood-doused rubber worms around in her hand, to try and get them to seem like they're wiggling on their own and that she's trying to shake them off (while she's clearly holding onto them), Ida taps into the same 'go for broke' madness of Bela Lugosi wrestling the rubber octopus in ED WOOD. Her moan of horror seems to encompass the entirety of her fall off the A-list into old age, an almost delirium tremens style moan of low-key horror. So howl, Ida! You have found in your pain the consolation of its full expression; it is only for this expression that the pain was ever for...

...teeth that could blind Erik Estrada

As Meeker's nonplussed secretary, Pamela Franklin disguises her British accent and real-life pregnancy (I'm guessing) by never getting out of her white leather trench coat (above), even indoors. That's gotta be it, for she was such a thin little hottie in The Legend of Hell House, just three years earlier, holding her own against seasoned pros like Roddy McDowall. Here she just tries not to hold back in order to not act circles around ole Marjoe even with clunky dialogue like "I'd like... for you to make love to me." Meanwhile, the much better-preserved Belinda Balaski, as a stranded mobile home camper, pretends to be pregnant, and young husband Tom Stovall worries about her as the giant rats start closing in around their camper faster than a drunken Cornish lynch mob.

But then... endless shots of rats getting shot (for real) with pink paint in the face and body (is it supposed to be blood?) begins to weary the soul. even if it's not fatal and can be washed off, the look of shock and betrayal in their eyes is dispiriting. For mauling Gordon's well-crafted miniature hippie vans and farm shacks with such aplomb, those rats deserved better. As I wrote about Day of the Animals, part of the appeal of these movies (for me at least) tends to be in how the abstraction of the animal attacks (arms about to be bit suddenly appearing to have a pillow crammed under the sleeve; animal trainers doubling for actors; dogs wagging their tales even while growling and baring their fangs) gives the feeling the animals are just good-naturedly roughhousing - the violence implied solely through the rapidfire edits - and if the animals know it's all in fun, so do we, and it makes enjoying the film easier (and no more or less scary). Watching that all-in-fun look vanish in an instant in the startled rat eyes when they get pelted by the pink pellets drains the joy de vivre tout suite from Food of the Gods, that is unless you really hate rats.

That said, many of the better overlays between miniatures, rats, and people still have a kind of chilling immediacy, they feel real and inescapable, maybe because they're big but not so big they can't fit through a window or attack you from ontop of the kitchen counter. Add the (real size) giant chicken and rat heads that menace the cast, the giant caterpillar monsters that claw up poor Ida Lupino's hand, and the hilarious climactic 'flood' when Marjoe blasts open the 'dam', and this bad film shines like pure crap gold, the kind we wouldn't see again until Sharknado. God bless the Gordons, and forgive them for all their sins...especially against the rats... future Indras, all.

FROGS

(1972) - Dir George McGowan

*** / PETA - B

I always thought Frogs rather overrated--most of my horror critic friends love it--but that was on the small screen, wherein its colors felt drab and faded by time and low res cathode rays, its lovely nature reduced to green and brown blurs offset by a sickly yellow for interiors and the tediously flat red white and blue of Ray Milland's birthday party decorations. Now that it's on the Blu-ray, however, the voracious amphibian and reptile and insect footage is beautiful, creepy, and poisonous with ambiguity. The interior mansion shots that used to oppress my childhood with their faded Colonial drabness now glow with a sun dappled pink that gives the whole film a 'twilight of mankind' champagne pop cheeriness.

The lead hunk (you know he's going to be a conservationist) is laconic Sam Elliott (sans mustache) as Pickett, just an easygoin' nature photographer paddling around along the edge of the Florida's Eden State Park, snapping away when his canoe gets rammed by the prodigal son (Adam Roarke) who--with his sexy sister Karen (Joan Van Ark)--is trying out their new outboard motor during a lull in their duties fulfilling wheelchair bound patriarch (and pollutant enthusiast) Ray Milland's regimented birthday expectations at their nearby island mansion. Soaking wet from his splash, Pickett is invited home to change, meet the patriarch, and participate in the 'fun.'

Since he gets a come hither look from foy Karen, naturally Pickett says yes. Soon he's meeting the gang and finding a real kindred soul in Milland. One of the more unique relationships in horror, their connection forms a kind of off-center parallel maybe to Ben Quick and Will Varner in The Long Hot Summer or Col. Rutledge and Marlowe from The Big Sleep, each recognizing in the other a capable outdoorsy plain-spoken hombre. There's also a bisexual vibe in Elliott where we can't tell if Pickett's going to shack up with Karen or Roarke. As seductions and simmering resentments accrue over cocktails, deaths accrue via various (normal size) lizards, snakes, and arachnids outside in the greenhouse or around the grounds as one person goes looking for the one who never came back from looking for someone else. Meanwhile, no one can get any sleep or hook up, for the mansion is also besieged by frogs, croaking away at night, in a deafening cockblock serenade.

Blu-ray image much better

Another plus: so the constant frog song can ring out proud, we're treated to the absence of composer Les Baxter's usual on-the-nose loungey Mickey Mousing. Eerie silences cast a strange reverie-style mood over the proceedings. I'm especially grateful that Milland's wheelchair bound patriarch is more than a one-dimensional capitalist monster. In fact, he's almost heroic in his determination to carry through with the tradition of his birthday, irregardless of how many family members he's losing to the local alligators, frogs, snakes, and spiders. G'head Ray, you golden patriarch, and get that cake!

Meanwhile, they even go for a racial subtext, as the black maid and butler share a coffee at night with the youngest son's black girlfriend and though, true to cliche, they're the first to insist on leaving to the mainland when all the shit goes down, they all go with dignity, common sense and concern rather than cowardice.

The servants' leaving also signifies when the film really comes into its own: sort of like the climax of Orca or Jaws, now it's just the white man and the all-devouring natural world, like it was always meant to be. No witnesses, sides, or seconds, just like the old days. Not for nothing is the clan's name Crockett, for this is the raccoons' revenge for his coonskin cap. The escape for the rest of the clan doesn't go well either: a snapping turtle devours a defenseless Lynn Borden; Sam Elliott bashes the surface of the water with an oar; Adam Roarke swims out to his boat after something chews off the line... And then... well, don't worry - it's too late to change our ways now. Just savor the mix of nice things: the gorgeous willow trees, sun-streaked fog and mist; the dialogue like "pollution control on the paper mill will cost us millions" dropped into normal conversation rather than underlined in thick script marker; the incongruous mixture of wildlife that would only be literally found dead down in Florida (like the New Mexican gecko); the sense of wonder how in hell they effects crew are going to pull off a believable death by a handful of normal-size frogs; and most of all, where that dog came from just in time for the end.  Poor dog. Where did he come from? Dogs never do get a break in horror. The frogs get the best of everything. Also, Milland really needs a different record to play other than lame Sousa record to convey his eternal defiance of nature, but wily old Les Baxter would have his pomp. 

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS

(1977) Dir Bert I. Gordon

***1/2 / PETA - N/A

Shore-swept toxic sludge has a curious effect on local ant-life, as you might guess. But this you won't: the ant queen's pheromones are discussed in a foreshadowing prologue as "a mind-bending substance that forces obedience." What does that have to do with a slumming Joan Collins trying not to break a nail while rooking time share commitments out of a charter boatload of retired and/or attractive freeloaders? Well, Collins' sales pitch is pretty shrill. So maybe she can pick up some pointers from that bigger queen. As it is, rather than seduce and coerce obedience through her pheromones, she bitches at and berates potential customers in a brutal stereotype of the 'lady boss' of the once-gorgeous / still-vain cougar/puerella aeterna archetype, trying to recapture the undivided male attention by trying too hard to spurn it. Spitting out harsh 'quips' like "You are terrific in the sack, and that almost justifies the salary that I have to pay you." Or, to the charter boat captain (Edward Power): "I'm paying damn good money to rent this boat!"

Hey, I'll defend the Joan Collins oversexed bitch in the boardroom capitalist to the end--she's one of the sexiest decade's powerful female icons-- but it would help if the writers had some notion how to make her time share rooking sound convincing. Her sell is so hard it betrays the fact that she yells at herself in the mirror at night because she has no kid to bully and can't make her diamonds cry. Not that I'm complaining. Joan rules! And Empire of the Ants is one of my guilty trash favorites. Shhh! The paltry 3.8 score it gets on imdb.com might be enough to put casual viewers off their toxic feed but I'm betting that would go up to at least a 4.2 once detractors get a load of how vividly this tough old queen has cleaned her antennae for Blu-ray. Even if the dark shadows the drones used to hide in are now less dark, thus exposing the two contrasting film grains, it's still the Plan Nine of giant ant movies. In sum, it is beyond perfect. Even scrubbed clean, those pheromones command obedience!


Now that I've had time to think it over, I'm glad old Bert I. Gordon didn't suss out the subtextual links between Collins and the queen ant, each trying to control the world around them through top bitch manipulation. You can always depend on Gordon to keep things at a very primitivist level as far as adult behavior, missing even the most glaring subtextual veins in his blindfolded jackhammering. In omitting all subtlety and nuance he creates a grand framework for our own projections.

Like all 70s disaster movies, there's a cross section of Americans (Poesidon Adventure template) thrown together on a high-pressure life or death trek. This lets older stars and younger B-listers intermingle and each get a chance at owning a scene while their careers pass each other up and down the hill. There's never enough time to rehearse such a large cast, so the actors all seem like they're genuinely meeting each other for the first time, while at the same time having second thoughts about the whole venture. But there are no cell phones in the 70s on which to call an Uber or their agent, and there's no roads, so no escape. So... without a better suggestion coming from their unresponsive director, the marooned cross section of people who signed on for a 'free boat ride lunch' time share pitch play it like a Love Boat episode: a frumpy middle aged office drone (Jaqueline Scott) who got fired after blah blah years for Mr. Blah, with nothing to show for her years but a blah blah, hits on the grouchy captain; a rich girl (Brooke Palance) wishes her lame husband (Robert Pine!) wasn't such as a rapey coward; cute Coreen (Pamela Shoop) hits on the sulky pretty boy Joe (John David Carson) immediately after Pine tries to rape her.  Talk about bouncing back! And through it all Joan bellows through a bullhorn about where tennis courts will be and serves them more meals than there are hours in the day.

That said, the film wastes no time: the first casualties are swiftly followed by the giant ants storming the boat, which explodes, stranding them all in this remote section of beach, and, well a fire keeps the ants away,  but well, then, it starts to rain. And then, well... dinner is truly served.

As for EXTRAS... Well, considering how under-directed the actors are in his films, it's probably no surprise that Gordon is so awkward and taciturn as an audio commentary guy. It's like pulling teeth getting anecdotes and when they do come they tend to be utterly banal, and often wrong, like his declaration that Welles used Randolph Hearst's real name in Citizen Kane. Or the nonsense (hopefully) story of personally going down to Panama to shoot footage of a special kind of fire ants (but the footage looks like normal nature show stock footage; most ants seem to have been shot inside an ant farm and then matted into the main image, which is fine. I like the effect of seeing them look like they're crawling up into the sky around the terrified humans (above), standing on hind legs (the glass their leaning on invisible). And I also like the big 'actual size' fake ant heads used for the mandible biting scenes here better even than the ones in Them! They're actually scarier for being relatively smaller, the size of a sports car rather than a van. With their jet black eyes and hairy heads down low to the ground, their jagged mandibles seem infectious and sharp. They have a real grim dirty angry menace about them. But I don't think Bert intended any of that, which is probably why it's one of the few things that's effective. Here's a man so dependent on termites he never buys dry wood.

JAWS OF SATAN 

(1981) Dir Bob Claver

*** / PETA = **

Who'd of thought the second best film of the whole lot would turn out to be the most unknown, a bona fide gem of badness, a too-late entry in the Jaws-Exorcist ripoff hybrid race (The Car, Killdozer)? It's also known as King Cobra but Jaws of Satan is far more on-the-nose as to its cross-pollinated rip-off sources (even more specific would be Jaws of the Omen). For as you can guess, the devil this time is a snake, hibernating since being venerated in the Age of the Druids but allowed to return every 666 years to pick a fight with one lucky holy roller. Expository dialogue lets us know that faith-deprived priest Fritz Weaver is conveniently descended from a bunch of druid burning Christians, so is probably the right priest for the honor. "Considering your family history, father, I sure would like to have a look at that coffee cup," says the local tasseographer during a dinner party, perhaps little aware that the then-current rage for coffee filtration has rendered that form of divination fruitless. But soft! The devil cobra is coming and it has telekinetic powers. It can even bite people just by banging its head on an 'invisible' terrarium wall (the director can't be bothered cleaning the plexiglass that separates cameraman and snake so we see all the tiny cracks and smudges). The serpent then stops the train at the town where his old druid-burner descendant nemesis' current incarnation (poor old Fritz) waits, and you can start counting the beats toward the inevitable showdown.

If Jaws of Satan was any good it would be terrible, but since it's terrible, its terrific, because, you see, unlike other actors who channel their anger at their agent into their performance (such as Lupino and Meeker in the above praised Food of the Gods), Weaver refuses to to perform any other emotion than self-contempt and weariness. Every line feels like he's trying to do such a bad job he gets fired so he can go home and soak in a hot tub. "You know, God, he can be quite a 'trip,' too" he counsels a 'tempted' nerdy kid who's clearly never gotten high in his life. Weaver's even less convinced of his own bullshit than we are. What good is it being a materialist priest? Glug glug glug. Guess it's Nack do the toddle... You know, drinking can be quite a trip, too!


Meanwhile, the Satan snake has motivated the local serpent population to rise up from its rocky crevasses and attack the humans. Deaths by rattlesnake bites mount; small cobras show up out of nowhere.

The best sequence occurs in a late afternoon leaf-blown graveyard, where an ancient text is read to Weaver by his credulous monsignor (Norman Lloyd, stealing the film, though no one's even guarding it) and soon Weaver's being chased around the local graveyard by King Cobra, all while all while normal small town life goes on around him, oblivious to his predicament, and he's eventually he's trapped down in an open grave while the snake tries to get at him through a closed gate. Only then doth Weaver seem awake-- and the sequence is so badass creepy it feels kind of natural, like it could happen to anyone. King cobras really do chase their prey like that, so I'm told. People watching from far away wouldn't see the snake down there in the leaves, just you running like an idiot. It's a rare thing to see in a horror film, that sense of horror being all a matter of proximity to indifference.

The other star of the film, the Chief Brody role, is Gretchen Corbett (the spooky girl running around the graveyard in the highly recommended Let's Scare Jessica to Death) as the town's only doctor. Recognizing the big bite on the dead psychic's face is not indigenous, she calls in a good-looking young herpetologist (Jon Korkes) from the big city, but the gross, corrupt coroner has already burned the body, on the mayor's orders! A cobra loose in town could start a panic! And worse, could kill the buzz for the new dog track. It's going to be "the biggest thing that ever happened in this state," assures the mayor.

Damn, what kind of lame state are we in? Dog track? Really?

Applegate, Christina

And there you have it. You know by now that dog track opening is going to be a disaster, that is if the budget allows for enough fleeing extras in the stands (or dogs, for that matter). I don't think we see either. But we do see a very young Christina Applegate as the corrupt financier's daughter. She gets the film's only other spooky moment: wandering around the yard on a dark Lewton-esque night in search of her kitty, the wind rustling the grasses and trees around her. With just the wind in the leaves and her little voice calling for the kitty, it's genuinely chilling.

But the rest of the time, the details are so ludicrous as to defy all explanation. The supposedly independent doctor lady Corbett needs herpetologist Korkes to ride to the rescue when a rattlesnake crawls into her bed (she could easily throw a sheet over it) and when he finally arrives this professional snake handler needs to use five different snake-wrangling devices and a gun to finally dispatch it, only after pretending to struggle with it, for like six minutes, all so they have an excuse to sleep together. Bro, if--even after you have a loop around its neck--you--an expert snake handler--still have to really fight against a rattlesnake's power--and then, wait... wait... finally blow its head off (getting snake blood on the sheets), rather than throwing into a pillow case and releasing it into the garden, and it's the kind of innocuous serpent that even Ray Milland in a wheelchair could kill or incapacitate without looking up from his red white and blue birthday cake, then, well, you're going to be very good in bed either.

wait for it....

So now the couple is together, the evidence of something unusual going on confirmed, but the mayor still ignores them: the dog race track grand opening must not be delayed. The "biggest thing to happen to this state" turns out to be the kind of cheaply rendered event that Aaron Spelling might stage for a Charlie's Angels episode: a dixieland jazz band and about ten extras mill around a sussed up high school track field. Naturally we expect a snake amok in a stadium, people fleeing and trampling children as they fight for the exit, Satan motivating the greyhounds to attack the band, etc. Instead, all that happens is Christina Applegate gets bit by a snake while looking around in the janitor's closet. And that's the end. I don't even think we see a single dog. Nice!

Meanwhile, Weaver, converted by his graveyard scare like a born-again Scrooge, tunes heavenly antennae to yonder caverns for the foretold showdown, shouting "SayyyyTANNnn!" over and over in a perfect imitation of Oron Welles' shouting for his footman in his 1948 Macbeth .

Great stuff. Aside from some real dead snakes and a distasteful episode involving a sleazy would-be rapist biker hired to terrorize Corbett, there's nothing to dampen the overall mood of joyful disregard as the film travels the pre-set pathways of its chosen namesake/s. And then at the very end, after the flames of righteousness have burned the reels away, you can still see the wire that held the snake erect, like a thin little curse finger aimed right at those on imdb who gave this a 3.6. They might be right, but right only gets you so far. Jaws of Sayyyy-TAN goes farther.

Chop wood, carry Sponsors: the MAD MEN Finale

This weekend's TV was momentous with AMC's crown jewel ending at the beginning of the glorious Free to Be You and Me 1970s. Don Draper finally hit bottom and was in the right place at the right time to surrender, couched in the loving heart of the American 12-Step share. After sneering through the consciousness-raising retreat center, ambling after the niece of his (stolen identity's) wife, the closest thing to a mother/lover he has left, and finally driving her away through his last straw / drowning man clinging, he's ready for the joys of complete collapse. He came to this retreat with this younger woman, a truth-seeker of her time, but she's the one who's not ready for the light. It turns out he's the one who's finally ready. At last, utterly beaten, he's able to rise up and hug a shlemiel in a group therapy session, tears flowing like melting ice after a long long winter. And that frees him.

Dude! I can vouch that it happens. Don't quit before the miracle and the miracle only comes when you're so near quitting you're already packing up your shit. It's like a deep end pool, when you get down so low you can finally launch yourself up from the bottom. Crack off the last few shreds of your toxic ego and rise, humble, beautiful, drenched in loving tears, the blood of the lamb. I been there! You understand at last that the expressions "everything's rosy" and "rose-tinted glasses" come from a real thing - the world does look washed in rose red; the color of the Buddhist's robes, and roses.

Ever the quintessential 'American' ad man, the spark of enlightenment leads to the perfect Coca-Cola commercial, one that would define the decade itself, the "I'd like to teach the world to sing" commercial, that seamless interweaving of the mainstream popular plastic packaging, post-Aquarius encounter group openness, commercialization and a freedom beyond the boy's club sexo-alcoholic escapism of the Don Draper sixties. This Cocoa-Cola commercial offered a freedom that understood no one escapes oneself for long, and the minute you stop trying to run, you start seeing yourself in others, you're what we in AA call "a worker among workers" (rather than the "piece of shit at the center of the universe") then joy comes dropping down like a cartoon anvil. Hugging the shlemiel (Evan Wood, below) is the first truly free thing Don's ever done, to release seven seasons worth of accumulated stress, of the Don Draper mask, the alpha male swagger, all melting like globally warmed iceberg wicked witch through just hugging it out with a weak-chinned balding charismatically challenged schlub, the kind I used to be always mean to, fearing if I was nice they'd hang around and try to poach foxes, embarrassing themselves, chasing off foxes and cramping my style by association. Learning to recognize myself in them, to love even them unconditionally, was the biggest surrender I ever had to make. Part of me always knew and hated to be reminded, in some circles I am that same shlemiel.

Believing the Aquarius line, "I'd like to teach the world to sing," we all were moved.  I remember hearing that song everywhere in the 70s as a kid and when I was getting sober in 1998, detoxing at home alone, bawling to the "Thank You" video by Alanna Morissette, which was on constantly in the last days of music video-playing MTV, reminded me of it. As she sang, standing naked in the middle of a busy subway commute, I could literally hear and feel the iceberg in me finally melting enough that it just split and cracked open and dissolved, finally,right in the midst of an AA meeting on a late Friday afternoon in 1999, triggered by my self-imposed humiliation over walking in late with squeaky shoes, toxins and sweat, laughter and tears, the surrender, the rose-tinted waves of gratitude all pouring forth like the incoming warm ocean. And the guy qualifying was just some old bitter ex-GI, ranting about how his true self is a crotchety old bastard. But he broke me. My true self could be a bastard too, and it was all right.

The Nordic Aliens bring their universal message

And to this last episode's credit there were no little montage vignettes woven in during the Coca-Cola commercial, no carousel pics of Betts and Don at the dance, or forward to Roger's third wedding, or Don getting the Clio for the ad. It's not even clear for sure if he came back to McCann and pitched his revelation, or ever went back at all, and someone else pitched it. And that's the genius, for in committing to meditation all that stuff ceases to matter --it's a new day, beyond duality.

And to me, my interpretation, he did pitch it. It's his career capstone. Because if he did, then the entire show from beginning to end makes a post-modern socio-historical Guy Debord meets Alcoholics Anonymous kind of sick-6th sense. It's glorious to see how the show really understands these kinds of breakthroughs. As for Don and Jon Hamm, of course no actor is worth a damn unless they've already worked through a lot of it. And moments like these remind us that being able to act deeply emotional 'true' stuff hinges on such unrelenting self-honesty. And that's how fiction ends up being truer than truth. How Don, as a fiction, is truer than any real person can be. I know it sounds corny, but I'm getting weepy just thinking about it.

TV - THE ONCE-SHARED LANGUAGE 

And most unique to the 70s too, we were all--the entire nation--into that song. We all knew and know all the words, not that there's many. Because irony didn't exist in the popular media; we were too open-hearted and there weren't enough channels or options to separate us, no other devices on which to watch things. In the 70s we all had to endure each other's programming and the kids never got first draft choice if dad was around, but we were always in the same room, seeing the same things. Bored as hell as Meet the Press droned on Sunday mornings, for example, though dad might let us see Sesame Street later, because he thought it was pretty cool, good music. It left us all with a cross-generational water cooler currency woefully missing from today's everybody on their own screen post-nuclear familial structure. That's how that Coke commercial crossed the generations, it bonded the entirety of the nation in its moment.

TV was a shared language in the 70s but it was the EST and therapy groups and encounter sessions that brought us closest. Even if your parents didn't go, some couple they knew did, and the message of openness and being 'perfect in the now' crossed from that couple to your parents and outwards in a loving pink energy ripple effect. Parents knew how to treat us like people rather than valuable art objects being smuggled through downtown Rome, to not hold on tight or try to align us to their thinking, to not evaluate their worth as humans via what daycare we tested into. They were them and we were us and all were okay to do our own thing. This kind of encounter group wildfire helped prep me for later LSD, yoga and eventually AA. Don's encounter group scene's tremendous cathartic power comes from that same rippling love wave, the time when yoga and meditation were brand new to the west. There was no arguing with the resulting slow burn awakening as the news of inner peace's availability spread (like that 70s Faberge Organics shampoo spot: "tell two friends / and they'll tell two friends / and so on / and so on").
---
It's the same with Don's mountain retreat moment, as we say in AA, "your own best thinking got you here" - which has about two dozen dual meanings. To be able to commit to a meditation class without smirking, or judging, being able to take instruction from a young hippie kid in the lotus position, to get the message rather than let your ego--like a jealous rival--convince you to hang back and judge the messenger, to sneer at such naked emotional simplicity rather than shiver in the naked heat of the sun when the cool bar beckons. But looking at the entirety of Don's seemingly haphazard journey west, we see how every little incident led to this moment, from the invite to the Veteran's fundraiser to giving some snotty thief his car, all step by step, like a careful opponent making sure all his enemy's (i.e. ego's) avenues of escape are blocked before springing the iceberg break coup de grace. If he had his car he would have quit before the miracle (as we say in AA); if the guy speaking had been attractive, or young, or old, or somehow different enough to be either desirable or a threat the miracle would not occur; if that mopey bitch in that first encounter group hadn't cross-talked about being abandoned by her mom, then his ride wouldn't have bailed, and so forth.

Don was hugging the shlemiel not because he heard, as we say in the rooms, his own story, or recognized the dawning of the commercialization of the Age of Aquarius, but because he saw beyond himself finally, so beaten down his ego actually left the room, so he could know this person was him, and was Jesus, and the dying Betts, and his children, and his whore (real) mother, and the brother he drove to suicide, all wrapped into one flag-draped coffin of a rainbow child.

But Don is an ad man to his core, and even there in the crucible of surrender, lurks the next gold ring. For him they are inseparable, but that's the thing you go into the wilderness of Self but if you don't bring back a present, a souvenir we can use here in the communal house, you just wasted our time telling us about it. We're conditioned to accept that from popular culture, so maybe it doesn't even get our French theory noses in a twist when-- right after the finale's final credits-- comes a car commercial with Jon Hamm voiceover. The average critic writing about the show doesn't mention that, doesn't see it in the context of the show itself. But any acidhead huckster would note, that's SYNERGY too!

It's because I'm a Pisces and a child of the 70s that I can both scoff at astrology and yet know it's true, and it's because I have seen the land beyond duality; I know duality is beautiful as long as you know it's fiction. And I know that fiction is far truer than reality in depicting the truth of reality; I've hallucinated enough to know never to believe my own eyes or ears. When skeptics say they need evidence to be convinced of flying saucers I snort derisively. I secretly mock those I deem less humble than myself, and I get that irony of that, and yet prefer to laugh at myself rather than try and change it. And I know I can cry and feel bad about pollution all I want, but that never helps things, only action. I can donate $ or volunteer without losing the joy or sense everything's okay. I know I should meditate and feel joy and love and put it out there to those who need it, not who's hot or deserves it, to effect change. Not for nothing Jesus washed the feet of the lepers instead of the dirty supermodels. When I first had a big spiritual awakening I knew that, for that selfless perfect love to stick around, I'd have to be nice to ugly idiots, and god there were so many! Instead I ran and ran. By the time I stopped it was ready it was the 90s, and too damn late. Now there was the internet, and SSRIs. My hair was not on fire so I was no longer willing to dive into the well.

I'd like at this juncture to thank those who got me here: God, my sponsor, my therapist, the makers of Effexor, Wellbutrin, Neurontin, Remeron,  Robert Duvall in The Apostle. For Don, his first sponsor is clearly Helen Slater (left), this wizened broad (aptly, her first role was in 1984 as Supergirl!) eyes tired but serene with the gaze of one who's come through the inferno to the light of forgiveness and unconditional love. She reminds me of the cool people who kept me coming back to AA in the very very beginning, the ones who barely said a word other than 't'sup?' after the more overt and smiling welcome committees scared me off time and time again. Slater's wizened woman says and does the same things these "t'sup?" people did to keep me coming back and give me the final gentle push through the breakthrough door (see: CinemArchetype 11 - The Wild Wise Woman) rather than trying to drag me through like a stubborn mule. Slater comes to him not as a future conquest, or yet another mother on the run from her child (his favorite brand), but as merely a gentle guide who knows that, as far as a push towards the light, anything more than almost nothing was too much. There's a moment before the shlemiel takes the talking chair where she looks and smiles over at Don as if inviting him up but doesn't coax, sensing his inner ice already beginning to break and not wanting to rush him. The universe is clearly giving him this moment - no one is going to go other than him. And when he stands up walks over to the shlemiel she just gives the faintest of smiles, not the 'I made this happen' smile, but a faint one wherein we see the joy of the truly enlightened upon seeing the course of dharma in action and gratitude that they've been blessed with being awake enough to pick up on dharma's plans like it's some kind of subatomic benevolent Dr. Mabuse. And as the lighting cues ever so perceptively shift, we realize with her help the episode's stealthily gone from inviting us to sneer along with Don at all the new age claptrap to weeping at being once lost and now found, in the same moving way Clark Gable did in Strange Cargo! Or Billy Bob Thornton in The Apostle!

Helen Slater, showing she always had a way with reticent buds (Supergirl, 1984)

And that's how it happens, to we who have had the terror of death's visit and the post-ghost Scrooge satori, who've walked in late to an AA meeting with super squeaky shoes, every squeak echoing louder than the speaker, and the same creating the sound in our head of a cracked dam buckling, finally giving way into true surrender. I felt like my older brother ego finally passed the joystick after banging around the same game level for 30 years, and my inner little brother picked it up and effortlessly opened six new levels, including the exit. Freedom. Ugly or old, fat or anorexic who cares, bro? You're a child of God. I love all things scrooge satori merry xmas you old building and loan. I love you all as I used to think I loved myself, but only a sick sadist would treat someone he professed to love so harshly as I treated me. "Self-seeking will slip away" is one of the AA Promises. It does come true, it's the 'slipping away' part that intrigued me when I'd read them up on the wall, as if it wasn't something done consciously, it just happened on its own, like baby teeth falling out. When the egoic whipping boy construct of self is gone, the collapse of the persona illusion of difference falls soon after. What remains? Only Love.

It's what makes a Subaru a Subaru.

So we mustn't think of these events we've seen in Mad Men as fake, or either cynical (the 'Coke Meditations') or sincere.  Having lost both my parents recently and neither one of them much for protracted death scenes (my Christian Scientist mom lied to everyone until right up to the last minute, so we wouldn't worry or try to come visit or try to get her to move to a real hospital). I also was moved by January Jones' own melting frostiness. She showed in her one telephone scene that her frosty stiffness over the previous seasons was not just because she was a bad actor. All the frost pays off for this one beautiful scene on the phone, the one final moment of these two gorgeous emblems of the 60s, each accustomed to the social order elevating them by virtue of charismatic superiority, each clinging to the tenets and terms of their social personae, until they finally--in this moment--break and they can surrender to their real feelings. These moments of redemption are what makes all the bullshit not just necessary but worth enduring. The longer the climb the better the sledding, and what other reason for reaching the top is there? Behold a white horse. And the man that snorted it was Death. But first, Coke added life, and was the real thing. And he rode it.

Until the fuckin' 80s. Don't get me started...