CABIN IN THE SKY: Ethel Waters, Co-Dependency and The Lord

Preface: Popular African American success stories since the dawn of American pop culture usually involve some strong parent or grandparent with strict ideas about child-rearing (think of Jamie Foxx’s Oscar speech about how his grandma used to beat him to get him to listen and otherwise he'd be just a street kid, etc). Multi-generational and community strength seems to be needed (vs. the more self-contained independence of the nuclear family in white neighborhoods). Again, looking at this just from the movies and my own (white) reading of (white mainstream) portrayal of black culture, i.e. through a thick blur of my unconsciously prejudicial upbringing and liberal arts 80s college education, etc., that's the most glaring thing I find when revisiting Cabin after so many years, on my new spiffy DVD (each front-loaded with racism-apologies as is this post with my own);

An interesting subtextual window into the popular conception of African American temperament can be found in CABIN IN THE SKY (1943), released on DVD last February (and a must). What's set up in the allegorical story is the polarity of opposites between temptation (represented by craps, booze, sex and other "black" vices) and goodness (the church!). Though one can read this largely in terms of musical style (the lascivious dances and shimmies in the club scene climax, the --sadly mostly excised--hell-set number) vs. the church, heaven and Waters' backyard, the subtextual implication is that the African American subject needs more control/discipline than a white one due to a surplus of energy/life force (or what the Lacanians would call “jouissance”) so they have to work twice as hard to be good, or else be twice as bad as whites on account of they're being lazy, shiftless, et al. But if they get the discipline together, then they're formidable, respected and devout enough to make a white preacher seem depraved and weak-minded in comparison.  Placing this dichotomy of good vs. bad in CABIN, we find Petunia (Ethel Waters) regularly dragging her no good shrimp of a man, Joe (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson) off to church, much to the consternation of his gambling cronies. Joe "wants" to do good, but he owes money from throwing dice with a no-account hustler named Domino (“Bubbles” John W. Sublett). When the game goes bad, a gun goes off and Joe is reckoned a goner, until the powerful prayer of his good woman saves him.

There’s a run-in between the factions of good and evil at the crime scene as devils and angels argue over Joe’s soul. They agree to play it as it lays, giving Joe a second chance and each using their abilities to lure him one way or the other. The representatives of good are dressed in solemn military garb with stout, straight backs and strong voices; the devil's minions are playful jazzbos (including Louis Armstrong). The devil's son-in-law (a marvelous Rex Ingram) sets about trying to lure Joe back to the fold via a winning lottery ticket and Lena Horne's gold-digging vamp. Through it all, it's assumed the Joe needs to repent, if for no other reason than Ethel loves him so gosh-dang much.

This "love" is what tips off the whole thing, for a close reading reveals it as nothing more than smothering, all-consuming, co-dependence. Joe is never even asked how he feels about Petunia: all concerned know that she’s a good woman and therefore Joe is one lucky fellow! Case closed! But it's clear she's more enamored with her own powers of endearment rather than she is with said endearment's undeserving object, Joe. In the end of the film, Joe wakes up from his death bed and wants to tell Petunia his dream, but she won’t let him: “That’s not important, let's just talk about how much I love you!" Too bad these two didn't have access to a couple's therapist, or Joe might have learned it was okay that he felt stifled. She's the bad guy here. She can't wait to jump to the wrong conclusion when she comes home from work to find him fighting off the caresses of Lena Horne (who's the first to learn about his lottery ticket - since she and the ticket are both hell-sent). The look in Anderson's eyes as Joe after Petunia flips out is priceless. Unlike the instantly apologetic typical husband in (white-based) movies who takes the guilt on himself for his wife's misjudgments (since on some level he's tempted therefore guilty), Anderson's Joe just seems saddened, worried at seeing this mean shrewish streak in his usually vivacious gal.

Through it all, thought, Joe, the man, works almost as a Hitchcockian mcguffin-- a plain white flag in the capture-the-flag game between forces of good and evil. He exists mainly to be adored by Petunia and to reflect within himself the weakness for vice which is by association subtextually inherent in the African-American character. In the picture above you can sense his passive ambivalence about her: she grins like she's about to devour him whole; he looks up more than a bit afraid, like a mouse gazing up at the smile of a Cheshire cat.

Vincente Minnelli is a brilliant enough director that one is obligated to do this subtextual digging, particularly when his AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951) features such a similarly dysfunctional romance at its heart, between a self-satisfied but financially bereft painter who has little gratitude for his kind if overly gabby 'sponsor' or sugar mama (Nina Foch) he wants to be self-sufficient while doing no work other than painting, which the best he can do is sell on street corners when she could get him gallery shows, like all good sponsors. And when he finds himself attracted to Leslie Caron, he cares not a wit that he's forcibly breaking up her own sugar-daddy connection, forcing her into the same self-inflicted poverty he relishes, regardless of her feelings and the feelings of all those who he owes and abuses. And yet we are somehow expected to root for him, because he himself is so in love with his own big white smile. A similarly uncomfortable implication of narcissism occurs in CABIN: Petunia loves Joe the way Gene “loves” Leslie in PARIS, which is to say, as a possession, as a symbol of their self-righteous "integrity," an integrity that blinds the owner to the collateral damage it creates. Gene wants power, to be the one with the purse strings and have Caron's big gorgeous eyes look up to him in awe; Petunia wants Joe because left to his own devices he'll be gone down the road of sin faster than you can say Jack Russell terrier.

Gene Kelly and Nina Foch, AMERICAN IN PARIS

Seeing CABIN with a modern therapeutic eye it’s plain the only woman in the film who truly understands Joe is the devil’s temptress, Sweet Georgia Brown (Lena Horne). Unlike Ethel’s Petunia, Georgia at least seems to accept Joe as he really is, to see him clearly, rather than as a reflection of her own ideal ego. As Petunia's undeserving love object, Joe may as well be a stuffed animal, but with Georgia he's a man. When Horne and Anderson share a scene there is a sense they are connecting on a personal level as actors, something that never happens with Anderson and Waters (who preaches to everyone as if she's helping them out of a deep pit).

Joe as a man is ultimately so ineffectual, however, that he lets himself get pushed around in his own nightclub (which he buys with his lottery winnings). You would think he could hire a bouncer to take care of the no-account Domino, who crashes the gate to sing "Shine" and do a nifty tap dance (one of the film's big highlights so who's squawkin'?). If he was, say, Ricardo Cortez in a Warner Bros. gangster film, Joe would just snap his fingers and his big thug bodyguards would at least toss Domino out on his ear if not beat him to a pulp in the alley. Instead, Joe is so ineffectual he can only watch as Domino steals his thunder and even pushes him around... in front of his own staff!

Petunia continues to manifest the hypocrisy of the church when her attempt to get Joe back starts a raucous bar fight at film's climax. Refusing to accept any blame or let people work out their own issues, Petunia prays down a tornado, beseeching God to destroy the whole town. Mind, this is all a dream, but it seems rather cavalier of Petunia, a supposed good woman, to order God to destroy a town just because she's getting bored with all the violent attention that she herself created by disguising herself as a no-good vamp.

Naturally, as with AMERICAN IN PARIS, none of this matters particularly, as the songs and dancing is everything. That’s fine, but to me, and any good deconstruction-happy crazy theorist, it's because Minnelli's focus is on the song and dance that these other recurring sinthoms are so telling. One wonders who the woman, mother or past 'sponsor' that left Minnelli feeling so boxed in. For CABIN, while has managed to sidestep a few racial slurs he's blind to where he's fallen smack dab into others, such as those of the infamous grinning minstrel. Every single character in this all-black film seems to keep their mouth peeled back so their big pearly whites can create that nice juxtaposition of white against their black faces. It’s creepy to see characters holding these big toothy smiles through whole scenes while another character talks. I kept looking into their eyes for signs of passive aggression as if they were overdoing it on purpose as a form of protest, but all I saw was weary strain, a determination to do it right lest their boxed-in director demand yet another jaw-aching take.

Still, any racist aspects of the film pales beside its sly indictment of co-dependent romantic obsession and fundamentalist Christian dogma, assuming that's what was intended in the first place. Let's hope one day there will be a movie about African-Americans who can gamble, drink and carouse and still make it to work on time, raise decent children and love each other for who they are. Amen!

The performance that changed your life Blogathon: Jon Voight in RUNAWAY TRAIN

For my money no actor better embodies the ideal mix of sensitivity and toughness than Jon Voight. In films like MIDNIGHT COWBOY, COMING HOME, THE CHAMP, and DELIVERANCE he exudes a courage that is not the result of being thick-skinned and oblivious, but from love. You look at his little baby face and you can see a wealth of emotion that breaks the heart even as it wakes it to action. What about the way he suddenly becomes a scared, cornered little boy at the end of COWBOY, holding Ratzo’s body and looking around with this tough guy face, like a five year old trying to scare the bullies by looking extra mean? HEARTBREAKING!

Yet for my money, none of these can really match the reality-warping turn as Manny in the 1985 Golan-Globus hit, RUNAWAY TRAIN.

Like a cross between Hannibal Lechter and Rocky Balboa, Voight's Manny is a champ to the underdog in the gloomy Alaskan prison where he’s been kept chained up in solitary confinement for two years, due to his constant attempts to escape. As the film opens, we find the whole prison population riled and excited at the news that Manny will soon be returned from solitary to plan to escape amongst them once again. The tough warden knows he’ll have a riot on his hands if Manny's allowed to escape, even briefly, so he plans to have him shivved during the evening’s boxing match.

The film earned Voight an Oscar nomination, and became a favorite of many an artist like myself who endeavors to crack the code of "maleness" and what it means to find courage as a man, both in and out of the social order. According to IMDB, Marlon Brando was a fan of RUNAWAY TRAIN and mentions his admiration for and identification with Manny in his autobiography.

The grimy warmth of the prison (surrounded by inhospitable Alaskan snow white mountains) conjures the same sort of masculine womb of smelly camaraderie as one finds in Wolfgang Petersen's DAS BOOT (1981), creating a palpable existentialist atmosphere. Voight is its natural leader, and a terror to conventional authority, representing an uncompromising lust for life that transcends everything from sex to pleasure to any form of comfort. No prison can hold him, no threat can deter him, no amount of punishment can break him. After he kills the assassin at the boxing match he looks up at the warden and his goons on the balcony and throws a chair up at them: “Come on! Come on! I got nothin’ left to live for!” Manny shouts upwards as if attacking God, begging the warden and his men to fight him, or shoot him, anything but the endless drudgery of his current situation.

Voight’s so alive with animal ferocity in this scene that it leaks out onto the viewer, certainly it leaked out onto me. At the time I first saw this (a rental I watched in my sterile NJ suburban parent’s house shortly before slinking off to college) I too felt this seizure of hope and inspiration. This was what it meant to be a man! I needed the lesson, for I was about to be cut loose on my own for the first time. Voight's performance is a boilerplate lesson in alchemical transmutation of adolescent alienation and self-centered fear into life-affirming rage and courage. Watching Manny rant and rave, I know I was learning how one could conquer their fear of death, bullies, and job interviews.

Of course Manny does escape, with Eric Roberts by his side, who provides the human narrator/foil to Voight’s crazy juggernaut of a freedom lover. It's not until a third or so into the picture that they climb aboard the train to escape, and wind up hurtling through the empty white wilderness, on an unfinished track line, in a train where the driver is dead and there's no way to get to the engine to slow the speeding juggernaut down.

Throughout their odyssey, Manny tries to impart some life lessons to the delusional Buck (Roberts): When escaping through the sewer pipes, Buck blanches at the smell, but Manny merely says "That's the smell of freedom, brother."Once aboard the titular train, Manny urges Buck to wise up and get a job once he gets back to civilization. He tells Buck that if he can learn to just clean the floor really well, to scrub “that one spot” he’ll have made it. But even the awestruck Buck can tell, watching Manny's crazy eyes as he starts to envision this spot, that this is not so reliable a career counselor.

As a life coach though, Manny is peerless. That sort of roaring walrus energy is the eyes-wide open approach to life that all men should strive for. I once had a mystical vision of a giant bull walrus roaring through a whole in the arctic ice... this beast, all alone and in lifeless freezing waters, but with that roar, that blind raging shout of “I am,” the walrus becomes one with the cosmos (Perhaps the Beatles had this same 'vision'?) I knew I could stay happy and in the moment as long as I remembered the loud bellow of this walrus. I later realized that Manny is the human version of this walrus; hurtling towards death, frost on his big walrus mustache, Manny even manages a heroic gesture of selflessness before journeying into the final blast of white.

With his eyes wild with life his big cheeked mouth frozen into an eternal leer,, Voight’s performance is the sort of thing that can blast a stupefied suburban slacker right out of his chair, and have him moving fearlessly out to get a job, go to school, and or join a band in no time flat. After this movie I was ready to scrub and scrub that damned spot on whatever floor some lame boss assigned me, and not see it as some damned stupid job but as a chance to define myself through action, the real time equivalent of a walrus roar in the ice, or the frenzied performance of Jon Voight as he hurtles through the blinding white void.

Shaw Bros' HEAVEN AND HELL (1978) comes to Weinstein.

A distribution deal between Image, the Weinstein and the Shaw Brothers has finally brought the wildest, most surreal martial arts films of the 1960s-80s to our needy shores. Up to this point the only titles were those Quentin Tarantino was able to smuggle out with the help of the Weinsteins (who love to promptly shelve stuff for years and years) But now, international cult film fans in the USA can rejoice without reservation. These are the good old days.

For those new to the myriad pleasures of the Shaw films, the best indication of them is probably through Tarantino’s KILL BILL. The actual Shaw Brothers films are like madcap post-modern kung fu cum Peking opera joints with crazy costumes, goofy special effects, outdoor scenes that are clearly filmed indoors on brightly lit sound stages (often with bare, black soundstage floors). The effect is similar to the weird indoor/outdoor planets Spock and Kirk explore in the original STAR TREK series. My personal recent favorite, available at retail for $19.99, is HEAVEN AND HELL (directed by Chang Cheh, of FIVE DEADLY VENOMS fame) a goofy blend of goofy kung fu action, weirdly surreal humor, and a tour of grisly punishments reminiscent of the Japanese film (avail. on Criterion), JIGOKU.

The film opens with a forbidden love affair up in heaven, which is represented by lots of fluffy clouds, white fog machine fog, and very bad fight scenes (intentionally ballet-like?). When the heroes are sent tumbling to earth, we promptly get a new set of credits, and the tone of the fighting and action shifts to a bizarre expressionist, crypto-Bollywood Kung Fu dance odyssey where the menacing gangsters leap around like they’ve been studying Russ Tamblyn’s moves in WEST SIDE STORY. If you’re not digging this sudden shift to bizarro dance world, you might as well hang it up now, because it only gets weirder from here. The question is, are you going to label it cheap or are you gonna dig that its “Brechtian”?

Certainly the sets--as with many of the more fantastical Shaw Brothers productions--are so minimally rendered as to make expressionism in films like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI seem opulent. Our heroine’s bedroom prison is a huge, blackened soundstage, demarked by a poster bed, a Caligari-esque distorted free-standing door portal, lots of colored gel lighting, and a window frame. Elsewhere action occurs in front of monochromatic gray walls that stretch into infinity, and with the glory of widescreen, one can almost peer around the set and see the Exit sign and a gaffer or two eating their lunch in the corner.

By the time the lovers and their friend have fallen into Hell, where the bulk of the film will subsequently play out, the fight scenes have improved and the soundstage has transformed into what looks like one of those charity-driven walk through Halloween haunted houses (replete with black lights shining on foil covered cardboard saw blades.) There are all sorts of hells being shown off, from Ice Hell, to Gambling Hell (we pause for some shots of an endless game of mahh jong) to Booze Hell (a boozer tries to get a sip out of a fickle giant bottle of Johnny Walker Red that tilts back and forth above him like one of those weird red “drinking birds”) to the Greedy Hell (where misers are forced to drink liquified gold running down what looks like a mini-golf course volcano) to “Tongue-Pulling Hell” and on and on to the big final, infamous “Plow Hell” where victims are forced to lie on hell's dusty concrete floor while big wooden plows with spikes in front are dragged over them.

Luckily Buddha himself comes to the rescue and instructs our hero to find four other innocent souls over in the next hell, who all happen to be kung fu experts who have been wronged and killed unfairly. We see all this in patient flashbacks for each fighter, and then, conveniently, the villains who wronged them on earth are revealed to be guards and officials in the kingdom of hell, with big ribbons hanging out of their mouths to represent long tongues. Now will come the time for each man to have his revenge, and to fight masked demons for what begins to seem like eternity to even the most patient viewer.

Eventually we wind up in a golden “other” place where souls can now be reincarnated. Some bad humans end up as chickens, but the good ones, standing in the center of a giant swirling spiral of color painted on the soundstage floor, are granted the right to return in a (hopeful) sequel.

If this doesn't sound like cinema heaven to you, then I condemn you to "Endless Chickflick Movie Hell!"

If it does, then good for you, you can come back to this wondrous land where king fu movies now run remastered and cheap with glorious color and original Cantonese language tracks, and coherent, well-written English subtitles.

Blue Dude & Red Walter: The Big Lebowski Revisited

Watching the Big Lebowski last night as a salve to my wounds over the sad state of this country and its Iraqi conflict and Bush's "it's not true if I close my ears" attitude towards global warming, I came to a blissful realization... the only way out of our dilemma is to for blue and red states to come together in a dysfunctional brotherly hug of forgiveness and tolerance.

If you haven't seen the film, do so right now and don't waste anymore time reading this blog. But irregardless of whether you have seen this masterwork or not, you have LIVED it, in the sense of being alive on this planet in this particular century. The key relationship in the film is between the Dude (Jeff Bridges), an easygoing pothead (i.e. blue states) and former student protester and his bowling partner Walter (John Goodman), a paranoid psychotic red state-type Vietnam vet. The plot has the Dude lured into some byzantine kidnapping scheme between a millionare and his nymphomaniac trophy wife. Julianne Moore plays the millionare's artsy daughter (the Lauren Bacall part, for this is, in its fractured way, a remake of THE BIG SLEEP).

As a sharp blogger points out in Themuy, there are plenty of odd connections in the film, set during the original Gulf War, and our current beswamped "Vietnam Redux" of today.

i originally saw this in the theater and was sorely unamused by it-- I found Goodman's character hard to endure. Why was an easygoing dude like the Dude hanging out with this psychopath? In the intervening decade since I've had the wisdom and time to make peace with my gun-toting redneck brother out in Arizona, so I realize that a lot of my fear and loathing stemmed from being "related" to stuff I don't understand or have contempt for. (I realized his passion for cars and firearms was no better or worse than my passion for women and mind-altering substances.) Dude, I am losing my train of thought here. The point is, Dude and Walter are joined at the hip, they are aspects of one self, the blue and red states of America. Dude lacks the aggression and oomph to confront situations head-on, losing himself in the THC fog of liberal idealism. He needs the gun packing muscle of Walter to sort things out, but at the same time, Walter fucks up EVERYTHING he touches. He's the bull in the china shop. He's the ugly American tourist reason the French are snobby towards us. Everyone in the world hates us because of sanctimonious paranoiacs like Walter.

And yet, we can't get rid of him. We love him and need him, as ugly and overweight and violent as he is. The way Walter fucks up all the schemes the dude tries to pull off is indicative of the nature of the current Iraqi conflict. Walter rides into the situation blinded by his righteous American sunglasses of freedom, confident in his girth and bluster to roar him through. Instead he gets bogged hopelessly down and even as it happens, he stays chipper and confident, at least on the outside.

The scary thing is, how little has changed. We are exactly where we were in Vietnam except now the American youth are apathetic, ignorant, slack-jawed and too busy getting drunk and disorderly to challenge the system, and who can blame them? If the protests of the late 1960s taught us anything, it's that protests don't work, at least not when it comes to war. Once a pitbull like Walter sinks his fangs in, he doesn't let go until he's exhausted every last cent out of the treasury and left 3/4 of the country he's invaded completely destroyed. (at which point he slinks off like a guilty kid to avoid having to "clean up the mess" ala the Marshall Plan).

In its frothy way, the Big Lebowski is a satirical jab at American idealism, but it's truly affectionate, pointing the way towards a solution to the national split. Walter may be psycho but he believes in something. It's the nihlists who are the real threat... with their intellectual attitude that nothing matters: "Relax Donny, their nihlists, they don't belive in anything." For Walter, for the Muslim and Christian fundamentalists and for the neo-conservative constitution-shredder we currently call a government, it's the believing that makes one dangerous... but is being too cool to have a cause really the answer? The fact is, blue and red are dependent - we define ourselves on what we are not, and without each other, we would not exist. So lay down your tear gas, America, and give your "other state" foe a bear hug instead... after all, we're Americans, together! Ugly or gorgeous, richer or poorer (and getting more so every second), thick or thin, drug-addled or high on Jesus, it's all good, baby. The dude abides.