Abilene Point is Anywhere: How Texas Conquered Death - SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

As part of the Richard Kelly blogathon on Exodus 8.2 I'm revising and re-posting my initial fractured skewed take on SOUTHLAND TALES which is in turn heavily influenced by Steven Shaviro's highly recommended book, Post Cinematic Affect.

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous." 

----Alfred N. Whitehead (1925)

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more 

futuristic than they originally predicted."

--- Krista Now (Sara Michell Gellar), Southland Tales

"Can you prove it didn't happen?" 

-- Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space

After the cult explosion around Kelly's big debut, DONNIE DARKO, it was inevitable his follow-up would be needlessly obtuse. With a bit of post-modern affect discussion under your belt, or on a double feature with BOARDING GATE however, it might tighten up. Might not. There is an annoying buzz of self-indulgent confidence at work in the film which you'd never find in the much more serious Assayas. He would never share the naïveté that since DARKO is a cult item, SOUTHLAND will be too, and its weirdness will engender a cult it's right there with BUCKAROO BANZAI as far as 'another think coming'. With its ceaseless frisson and funky breaks meant to dazzle fans of a certain age, it's a film made up of dead hypertext links and little text. At least BUCKAROO had Peter Weller's taciturn deadpan perfection to carry it along. The closest SOUTHLAND gets is The Rock, and though he makes some brave choices (Bob Hope-style faux cowardice), Rock's no Weller. Can you imagine the Rock as Bill Burroughs?

Kelly's presumption that we'll watch SOUTHLAND over and over and compare obscure references and symbolic meaning on the internet comes from an understandable-for-the-young miasma about changing viewing habits and--interestingly enough since Assayas is French but not Kelly and only Europeans (and South Americans) love their auteurs unconditionally--that newer generations of internet kids will think he's cutting edge if he just explores their virtual worlds. Youtube and Netflixe have arrived though, and it makes watching one film one time a daunting improbability for newer generations. When BUCKAROO came out we didn't think it was great but we still taped it off cable and watched it 100 times, because "no matter where you go / there you are." Do you want to know why DONNIE DARKO was such a hit, and screened at midnight showings for years in my old East Village neighborhood? Because chicks loved the doomed, moody romance in Jake G's stoner stare; his battles with schizophrenia mirrored their own issues with existential expressions like cutting, anorexia, drugs, and (at least for the girls I knew, at the time who loved it), grudge sex. It was a hand into their darkness, a friend who knew the score and who had great eyelashes. And it was lyrical and poetic without being overly sentimental. And since girls went, guys went right after them. You could go to the midnight show in your pajamas and no one would bat an eye, or a ball, very far. In other words, it was a date movie for the midnight hipster set. They could go after hooking up, meet back  up with their friends, and then not have to see each other on the way out.

"Quantum teleportation, teen horniness, and war."

SOUTHLAND has nothing much for the all-night girls to make it worth escapades out on the G train, except maybe the Darko-ish sex appeal of Justin Timberlake as Boxer, the lone gunner at the pier at the end of time, but he's just one (or rather two) of a big, overstuffed and seemingly under-directed cast, and while I admire the abstract crossword puzzle association to films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (plastic oranges are to SOUTHLAND what the watermelon was to BUCKAROO), MADAME SATAN (a crazy Zeppelin party), THE BIG LIEBOWSKI (dancers in jazz age make-up out on the skee ball lanes), and MULHOLLAND DR. (Rebekah "Llorando" Del Rio singing the national anthem over John Cale strings). It doesn't add up to even the sum of its parts. Don't get me wrong - I love Moby's score, and I love that everyone is working to stop the apocalypse in only in the most perfunctory of ways, but I'm a dude... who's seen a lot of dude films, over and over, that girls may not like since they ain't got no romance, or angst. My girl can't look at SOUTHLAND for more than a handful of minutes without getting restless and yet she name-drops Sparkle Motion at every party she goes to. I even gave her the T-shirt, which some enterprising silk-screener cobbled up.

DARKO was about the apocalypse immolation of the individual but SOUTHLAND presumes there is no individual to sacrifice, no time left to travel anywhere but straight up. DARKO was elliptical but had momentum, SOUTHLAND has only the stasis of 2-D checkerboard movement, like the way time slows and matter mirror shatters close to the black hole of ground and time zero. But boys are more pro-apocalypse than girls, which is another reason this film didn't connect with them. The nonstop parade of documentaries about 2012, Nostradamus, and the Ice Age on Discovery and the History Channel proves what Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES hints at: some of us, self included, are excited for the apocalypse. It's a chance to stop receiving paper bank statements in a whole new way. I'd even argue that we're apocalypse-dependent. Without the fantasy of a global reset button, we'd be stuck with the guilt, hangover, and debt of seven generations. Aren't you always tempted to just blow up the house rather than have to clean up your messes or look that crying Indian in his eye? I mean Native American.

In the new century, if we heard the world was gonna end 'exactly' five hundred years from now, would we care? The game of it all becomes what the Buddha calls "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world." When the world finally adapts that marvelous strategy, owning up to amnesia is the same as pressing the button because even Def-Con 5 needs love.

Even the bad guys who monitor everything from afar in SOUTHLAND are secretly enthralled by the notion of the end, and are all rebelling from one program or another to ensure that end arrives. Good guys and bad all want the same thing, escape from an age when amnesia is inducible via an easily acquired drug, because when that happens, life has no meaning. Anyone can be abducted and turned loose without being able to identify one's abductees. Whole lives can be lost in a flash. The Rock (Boxer Santeros), starts the film with amnesia and the first thing his wife (Mandy Moore) notes when seeing him--as if it was the reek of stale booze and cigarettes or stale perfume on his collar--is that he'd been kidnapped and mind-erased. He denies his amnesia on instinct as if its something to be ashamed of, like he did it on purpose. It's a weird choice, but if you've ever come home from a party with a mind full of weird drugs you promised your ball-and-chain you wouldn't do, and can barely remember doing, then you'll know the feeling.

Red Bull give you wings

What Kelly also understands is the nature of drugs and the weird habit alcoholics and drug addicts have of watching the same movie over and over again because... I forget why. They're too wasted to change the channel? Or dredge up another DVD from the vast archive? Or for that matter, the endless repeat seasons of reality TV shows, where our knowledge of what is going to happen, who will win, who will die, is granted us like benign rulers, or our own inner Pilot Abilenes. Revelation 6.8 and behold a pale horse and the name that sat on it was repeat business; if you've ever edited footage on Final Cut until it loses all meaning... or if you've ever conducted experiments on soldiers or sniffed paint fumes from a spray can, or had amnesia, then you know what I mean, and if you're happy and you know it, hit the squib, and act shocked when you die. Snivel as you swivel your electric high chair, so the Dead End Kids won't want to start no trouble in the rubble. Just leave them a DVD of SOUTHLAND TALES, and they'll think you were one muthufuggin' lost-ass generation. Weren't you, Perfect Tommy?

The Balloon that is Welles: MR. ARKADIN and His Versions

 "I've spent years inflating the balloon that is Welles. Please do not puncture it."
- Orson Welles (guest-hosting The Jack Benny Show)

Orson Welles styles his hair and beard like a roiling Van Gogh postman for MR ARKADIN (1955), which recently screened on TCM and at least trippy enough with its mismatched sound rhythms that you can feel Orson Welles playing around all through post-production, alone in the dead of night but for a whiskey bottle and whomever's still conscious, having a high old time. It's just too bad the ARKADINs come couched in a luxuriant 3-DVD + novel set on Criterion and not floating in on the late late night/ early dawn on UHF, bridging the late-late-movie and the local kiddie show, for that strikes me as the best way to discover it, and to marvel at the way its Brecht/Godardian deconstruction masks its choppy poverty of funds, just as old Monogram movies might be deconstructed and adored by Godard, the way PLAN NINE was for early-rising kids like me. Instead ARKADIN moves in a reverse direction --it's artistic merit will established due to the Welles name ostentatious Criterion couching. Still, as long as it can be reconstructed in the mind as a Monogram horror film that's gone off the rails and run off to Europe, rather than 'Art,' it's a four-alarm gas.

The cheap budget means most of the more complicated action is discussed rather than seen, in rooms where people lurch about as if in the stateroom of a heaving yacht; they drink champagne, they method act in waves around a plot that folds back on itself like two old radio shows playing at once with bizarre synchronicity. The connections with narcotics, rings of East German female stasi, Nazi money laundering, and other captain of industry psychedelia can't disguise the feeling that maybe it's all still just old Welles talking to himself, all lonesome in hall of mirrors (he supplies 8/10 of all the actor voices). As the past comes catching up with his elusive Arkadin, the film--whichever version--flitters by in crowded European relic-filled chiaroscuro table angles, narrow stone streets, boats, card games, and Jess Franco-ish reflective zooms. You can smell the stale booze and the perfume of the girl you were with still lingering, tangy underneath the ocean breeze; cigar smoke, the hyacinths from some passing Ibiza flower wagon, tourist suntan lotion; the ghostly laughter of passing mistresses adheres to the sticky resin of whiskey spills along the strips of celluloid taped to every available surface; snatches of great dialogue that seem to be a kind of journal of witty things Welles has said and heard in his European exile, when the girl playing his daughter (Welles' then girlfriend, Paola Mori) approaches Mischa Auer's table and asks "do you remember me?" he answers gayly, "I can never remember a pretty woman, it's too expensive." That one was so good I had to write it down, but in doing so I missed twelve more.

Like internet dating, this film is the story of trying to unmask someone while keeping your own mask on, trying to open up a dangerous candy egg as it in turn is trying to open you. Inside the normal, competent, witty candy shell could be anything, from a saintly cream to the bitter yoke of a bi-polar psycho with can opener fingers, or just an endless solid candy shell opening up with flytrap lips. You can't let the fact it might be poison bother you. It's your duty as a man to plunge ahead, tongue extended in the French fashion. As the night moves on the girl who came off so polished and nice becomes bossy and mirthless. You struggle to face your encroaching sobriety with less wild-eyed panic, even as you take mental inventory of where your socks wound up should you have to grab your shit and bolt (if her husband comes home early). Meanwhile a churlish demon sulks within your own egg, scratching at your insides like they were his dream journal until your French-fashioned tongue slips and reveals a screaming multitude of convicted hellions writhing (and writing) below your smooth surface. Nice going, Eisenstein!

It takes a great director to tap into that hellish core energy. It takes an even greater energy to tap in a whole layer further to find the black comic heart within that hellish core, for evil too has an inner yolk, a deep, well-earned sense of wit and good humor. Such a yolk is Welles, who rules in the Hell of his B-movie international erudite jet trash dinner guests rather than serve in Hollywood's regimented, joyless 'A' heaven.

To get back to the internet date analogy: consider the date is a success and they are married and even then, for a few months, the candy shells are undamaged by the demon yolks within. But now the stress of daily grind, of each others' messes, have made hairline fractures and your yolk demons have figured out how to short wave radio to each other with special code words that crack shells like high pitched arias. This fighting is the great expression of love between demons. It is something foreign, alas, to someone like Welles, a towering genius who preferred women at a distance, to be loomed over as they cringe with their jigsaw puzzles or to be seen only in passing, in the shadows of sharks ala LADY FROM SHANGHAI. Rather than show his true core demon to his daughter (played by his much younger fiancee at the time), Arkadin would prefer to just disappear into the ether.

But a 'towering' (the adjective seems built for him) genius like Welles must inevitable embrace loneliness like he embraces alcohol, tobacco, and hashish, and all other eggshell removers, until the last vestige of phony candy shell is gone, and the whole social sphere-- wherein friends bring friends over all day and all night--seems dull and inane. He'd rather be alone in his editing suite than at a party or in bed with a gorgeous Italian. In proto-nouvelle vague fashion, there's the sense that while you're watching any version of ARKADIN (Criterion includes three), Welles is giving you his notes on it, fusing his commentary track half a century early into the essence of the dialogue, overdubbed by himself for nearly every male character. You get the sense meanwhile that the female actresses could be dubbed by whomever wakes up first in Welles' chateau, before whiskey and sycophants render her incoherent.

Note that Welles never made a movie about an actor or artist struggling with their art, tending rather towards rogues and captains of industry. Not for him the sanctimonious glum piety of something like QUILLS, which mistakes the addiction of writing flagellant smut as some noble calling; not for him either the dry classical polish of actors like Laurence Olivier or Kevin Kline who sometimes mistake Shakespeare for bourgeois highbrow Art as opposed to merely the pinnacle of charlatanism. Welles made a career laughing at the titanic absurdity of his own persona, especially as a guest on radio shows like Jack Benny and Fred Allen. He always preferred to play the devil rather than the angel, and the one time he wasn't the heavy--in LADY FROM SHANGHAI--he wasn't much good at it. He couldn't even make eye contact with his own ex-wife, turning away to pontificate in his high whispered Irish brogue instead while Mr. Bernstein ran away with the loathsome ogre lawyer showman, the plumb part designed clearly for the balloon that is Welles.

To Welles, and to Don Birnim, and to Ben in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, and to myself of course, whiskey is a far more noble addiction than writing. We'd rather be remembered as being able to hold our liquor rather than getting a Pulitzer. Drinking leaves only empty bottles, and maybe broken glass, while writing leaves mistakes and presumptions and arrogance that can gestate for centuries until your original meaning has been torn out and the zombie husk of your words used to champion any old egg-crushing cause.

Or worse, they can be forgotten altogether.

I know from my own work in film, TV, and radio how seductive it is when you're the star of your own show. I love to edit myself on screen. There's something quite magical about it, the chance to study how you look and sound to other people, frame by frame. Welles never lived long enough to see the age of affordable digital video, alas. I wish he'd made a dozen ARKADIN sequels instead of making the same film three times. Such is the life of a vagabond obsessive, mayhap. Indecision reigns with Welles but at least glum sanctimony has been kicked out the window. Welles makes any other egotistical tyrant genius look shabby by comparison, and he makes himself perhaps shabbiest of all. That is why we love him: he's cinema's one true prodigal, and his own best company.

PLUNGE! Dr. Mabuse vs. Ameritrade

 

If you're adverse to silent films, maybe you're like me and really just adverse to their usually trite orchestral or piano scores. The trick to enjoying DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922 - avail. on DVD and Netflix Streaming) is to turn down the sound (no comment on the included score, which I've not heard) and connect your ipod on shuffle. Surrender to the possibly synchronistic juxtapositions rather endure the banal orchestral or piano score that tends to underlines even the smallest of gestures without a whit of counterpoint or ironic distance, to the point that even John Williams might accuse you of overdoing it.

Fritz Lang films can move like molasses at times, but this silent two-part event is never dull with the random counterpoint of your ipod. If you trust in the process you're bound to get at least a few songs worth of real, eerie synchro-connect through this random collage process. I had the theme from John Carpenter's Escape from New York: Main Theme start right as the action shifted to a big night club where a crazy woman was dancing on top of two giant wooden noses. It became Lynchian, this Lang-Carpenter synthesis, like two rights canceling each other out and leaving only 'Silencio'. Meanwhile hypnosis and staring eyes and disguises pervade the film - paranoia and shiftiness, the mad rush to get rich obscuring all instincts for self-preservation. You know how those Germans were, and how we are... driving over a cliff as we argue over whether or not seat belts are important.

The big day trader moment comes early: Mabuse's agent looming like a spectre over the Berlin stock exchange, kidnapping briefcases to drive stocks down and then releasing them to drive them back up. The timeliness is never far off, but now, more than ever, it's hauntingly relevant. America's credit rating has plummeted! Mein Gott! We're not far off from that Expressionist moment of post-WW1 Weimar Berlin when the mark was devalued and Americans went over to celebrate how far their dollar could get them thus birthing the era of Weimar decadence. Don't forget that the Great Depression was years way, partying was in high effect and blonde prostitutes cheaper by the dozen.

The recent bouncing of our national worth along the stock exchanges of the world has a lot to do, in my opinion, with the day traders who think they're actually doing something important with their lives by their slot machine-like hunkering over the E*Trade accounts, guys who wear khakis and high five a lot, so their beer ads claim. They must still be out there, but they're not the true Mabuses. They got took by the master behind the scenes, the sneaky pete conservatives who deliberately shorted the market for their own sinister agenda. They sold out their own country in a lemming stampede. The less self awareness they have, the easier they are fleeced, according to Mabuse's supernatural theology. It's in clinging to the illusion that you are normal, a 'regular guy,' that you befoul the world, funneling the treasure you never knew you had into the pockets of criminal cartels.

Mabuse would return under Lang in 1932 with TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, albeit confined to a mental ward and using his fierce Teutonic will alone to control sabotage. Like DER SPIELER, the film mirrors its dire political present very well -- Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in jail, after all, and European nations grossly misunderstood Germany's ability to sneak around the post-WW1 economic and military constrictions.

Lang hated the common man as much as anyone and you can see him siding with the sinister cash-hungry Mabuse during this stock sequence. You could probably stop watching, for awhile, right after the poker game that follows (scored by my ipod to Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg's La Chanson de Prevert) as I did, and then watch again later, in 20 minute chapters of your ipod's choosing, but even as strictly a random collage of great expressionist images MABUSE is ever-awesome. Weimar evil has seldom looked so inviting, so artsy, so terrifyingly expressionist, and Lang never seemed to be having as much fun as he is here, venting cobra venom with the mechanical cool of a cuckoo stock ticker.

Thanks to Lolita Kane's awesome blog post.

A Pretty Girl is like a What?

THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1939) and SUCKER PUNCH (2011) both operate on the principle that beautiful young women are a threat to male sanity and are witches and insane and have cast hexes on us, especially if we're uglier, older, shorter, balder, sourer, poorer, weaker, lamer, squarer, or viler overall than the young, dumb, rich, handsome, eloquent sots these ladies tumble for. The beauty of these young women is a twisted dagger slowly turning in the base of our necks, making our face blush in shame. Such a blusher is the sourpuss Frollo (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) and his adopted charge, Quasimodo (Charles Laughton), who both pine for oblivious dancing queen Esmeralda (Maureen O'Hara) in HUNCHBACK. SUCKER PUNCH instead intends to make us--its ideal fanboy demographic--equally ablush and enthralled, pining for these baby doll babes, longing to free them from the sleazy stereotypes that have them roped into a combination mental ward, inquisitor dungeon, and strip club.

Since one of these movies is an esteemed, timeless classic and one is universally reviled, why not compare them?

Esmeralda (a never-hotter Maureen O'Hara), the dancing gypsy, is actually the only object of desire for nearly all of Paris in HUNCHBACK, and those who can't compete for her love either cheer in the massive, impressively clued-in throng, or sulk... and skulk... like Frollo, a dark soul trying to be darker than he really is, who eventually frames her for his rival's murder, since she--a nothing gypsy girl!!--dared spurn him, the Marquis de Bishop of Whatever. We know Frollo isn't too bad because he saved Quasimodo as an orphan and gave him sanctuary, but he's not cool about his charge putting on airs. Any psych major will realize that running under the benevolence of the gesture is the need to not be the ugliest guy in the room. At any rate, it's still nicer than just leaving him to die in the gutter, presumably.

Meanwhile the idea of sanctuary in the church seems a strange one (has no pursued murderer in Paris ever thought to hide there? If that law existed in New York City you wouldn't be able squeeze a toe into Saint Patrick's Cathedral, or any church, ever), especially since, Esmeralda is the only one in the whole film who ever runs in there for safety. We know she's good because over a montage of sinners praying "give me this," and "I want that," she's saying "let me help" and "save my people." She's not selfish, and man that's understandable considering she's so hot she's probably never had to pay for anything in her life. It must be alarming to have such a profound effect on people, where the benevolent glance or kind word can turn any passing wastrel into an obsessive stalker. But you can't exactly pray to be less gorgeous.

The film takes full advantage of the barbarism of the era to milk suspense, and the sanctuary of the 'classic lit' rubric to protect its salacious sadism from the censors' persecutive scissor, and that means confession under torture (Esmeralda gets the rack), public humiliation, whipping, and hanging. The big gallows' rescue is one of the most electric crowd-pleasing crowd scenes ever filmed, but for me the best moment is before that, when--on returning home from his grueling ordeal outside church where he endured flogging and hooting punishment--Quasimodo takes a look at Frollo, who is equal parts anxious and indignant over his charge's punishment, and shouts that Esemeralda gave him water!!!" All the pain and humiliation was worth it, just for that one drink (on the other hand would the drink have been so great without the pain and humiliation?) It's the equivalent of a guy boasting to his roommate upon coming home Sunday afternoon after spending the night with a girl they both were after the night before. A time for basking. A bro would be happy for his friend. Frollo could be happy his adopted charge just earned his way up from whipping boy to fledgling wingman, or to get embittered and petty about it, like a murph or wally.

Either way, from then on Quasimodo won't lay off the bells. It's a problem.

That just a gulp of water can override his pain and humiliation to the point of ecstasy creeps Esmerelda out big time, of course. God forbid she give him a kiss, he'd jump off the tower to his death in a paroxysm. Frollo, meanwhile, has his power and status which makes his abject humiliation and pain over her rejection all the more unendurable.

Zack Snyder's SUCKER PUNCH works similarly, because the lead, Baby Doll (Emily Browning), is such a blank slate-- refusing to do anything right, stick up for herself, or decide what she wants to do for a living. Naturally she ends up shanghaied by her sleazy embittered stepfather to a combination ballet school, mental institution for 'interrupted' girls, and, and sleazy strip club where she fantasizes her way into overly-designed video games where she wipes out giant samurai or steam-powered WWI Germans with apparently no effort and nothing at stake beyond loss of her quarter.

That a young girl (though at 20, her step father has no power of attorney over her, so the whole committed thing is dubious) can be so trapped by the male gaze that even her fantasies are not her own (do baby dolls really imagine such vivid fanboy CGI steam-punk detail?). She's not only stuck in this loony bin dance club, she's stuck having to fight giants and stuff in her "own" fantasies, which might be fun for five minutes but basically its like watching her douchebag boyfriend play Doom rather than go down on her (like he promised) while she listens to various remixed and re-recorded 'sexy' rock and pop anthems like "Sweet Dreams (are made of this)" and "Army of Me" on her iPod. She can pretend that she's not being exploited, but no amount of CGI airships can quell the unease in her gut.

I knew going in how badly SUCKER PUNCH was received, but whatever. You just have to see the grave where your dreams died. Every man who's read comic books instead of playing baseball in his youth has an inner movie he's been slowly writing as he goes along, an unfinished screenplay with lesbians and martial arts, and he sets scenes to music he likes as he mopes or fumes along the boulevards, listening to anguished rock in his headphones or on the way to work, planning and editing to the beat, each gunshot suffused with meaning that will never translate beyond his own tortured adolescent pine box. But how can he know just how little anyone else cares about these fantasies? He's too enraptured with his own sad longing, and why would he want to actually film this shit anyway, even if he had the backing? How could Snyder know his private dance floor fantasy would kill that same fantasy in the rest of us? Everything, from the infantalizing stripper-baby fashions, to the steampunk battlefield, turns to hot air in his anti-Midas touch.

Sorry, bro, he killed it. Gone, the agog rapture for the baby doll pout and the Catholic school girl uniform; gone, the yen for bustiers, stockings and stylish black heels; gone, the thrill of watching a sword cut through adamantium like butter. Gone, the kinky allure of a black lace choker or blonde Heidi braids. Gone, the concerned interest in bi-polar body mutilation. Gone, the sparkly reflection of the hot sun in the pool of cold well water cupped in Esmerelda's alabaster palms. It's all now as stale as 1980s puffy hair and neon spandex. These details once brought us from story sea to resolution port, sheltered in the hurricane eye of long straight shiny jet black hair, perfect skin, and rain-stained eye liner; the chick who soaked you past flooding and bailed fast as a mail sack picked up by a speeding train is now just a mom. On Facebook you can see her age and widen, til all that's left are pixels and dental records.

Now there is nothing, just a blue light was / my mind / but the red light ain't my baby, no more. She never even noticed, through her Vogue cover never-pay-for-her-own-food (not that she ate anything) and champagne bubble veil, the vile water line of male desire, the same rising flood line of pent-up fanboy bitterness that sinks SUCKER PUNCH. So if you want your son to give up living in a fantasy world show it to him. At least the TV he sees it on is real, allegedly.

It's a good lesson too for pretty girls everywhere: all Esmeralda would have had to do to get rid of Frollo and avoid all the agonies of his vengeance would be to hold him tight and talk about marriage and and how much she loves him and will never let him go, and how they'll be together forever, and have eighteen children, all boys, and then just keep going, clinging to him constantly and talking and shouting loud enough to burst his ear, though not even straining her loud ethnic voice, for her mama! Mama! Que largo dentes vos sos! Frollo would be instantly claustrophobic and run as fast as she first did when Quasimodo's hideous shape and crooked, needy smile came lunging out at her. Such is the abject terror when one finds their obscure object of desire has stopped running and has turned back with needy arms outspread. All that bedroom longing and tortured romantic obsession is revealed suddenly as the delusions of a hungry ghost desperate to avoid the empty stare of its own waterlogged, puffy-lipped corpse. The rest is silence, or Stooges covers... echoing through an empty multiplex.