CinemArchetypes 18 - The Aesthete

Well here's the last stop on my currently habit-imprisoned train, this is where I aims to be, claims to be.... this is the place that we aim for, we artists of pen and brush and neurochemical excess. Don't mistake our sexual aloofness for inhibition but rather a cumulative loathing based on excessive debauched memories, ghosts and horrific hangovers. Our souls are glutted with the ecstasies and agonies of the flesh, so now we'd rather just contemplate the wreckage for awhile. The aesthete's disregard for solace and emotional baring allows him to scuttle gender's narrowing limitations and so, instead, the aesthete's raison d'etre, the last standing ideal he can find in his shit-kicked can of carded houses, is the collapse of the ground between each pigeon hole; boredom and small-mindedness are his only enemies, and he knows to beat them he must join them, love them, forgive them, as he can seldom totally escape them. His goal is to be so far out that even the maniac charging him with a knife is not a foe; even death's wicket absinthe demon vestments are nothing to fear.

In cinema he is sometimes the 'gay best friend' or some expository dialogue-mouthpiece scholar visited in his book-stack warren by the detective hero for a clue from the past, but he is never a cliche. Kick the generalities curbside and don't let the groupthink studio heads swap out his generous heart and adventurous spirit with mere rote quirks! They will drain his beauty like wine snobs so uptight about their hundred dollar glass of vintage port they end up spilling it all cuz their hand shakes. Slowly, fearfully, the pressure from the money men leads to second-guessing, draining the aesthete of life until he's merely a prop. Don't say it couldn't happen!

John LaZar - Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Up until Tuesday night I had been cursing the Kubrickian darkness in Wellesian brogue rather lighting a candle just because the wax smelt churchy. But friends, I've been shown the light. Obama won and so finally we have proof that if all us freaks and oddballs stick together we can actually drive this bitch -- and as Mae West said in Klondike Annie, when you make fun of the good book the joke's on you, not because dogmatic preachers shout it but because making fun of anything destroys your spirit. First you joke good-naturedly about it, then its less of a joke, then its a threat, then suddenly it's the only reason you're not happy; your own judgments are attacking you and eventually it's your god-given right to kill the judge within. Like in Mingus' "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Daughter are some Jive Ass Slippers," one cool little musical motif gathers some friends and slowly a whole mob shows up to dig the sound and then it gets crowded and heated and the music gets repetitive and circles tighter and tighter and towards some violent orgasm of mob violence against you, the listener, and  bam, you're gone, just air and the whole crazy dance starts over. This is something in myself I had forgotten until the hurricane, the Obama victory, and seeing Zachary Quinto play a hip '64 shrink coercing a lesbian mental patient into barbaric Clockwork Orange-style aversion treatments on American Horror Story. 

Sometimes the trappings of an aesthete are just for show. It's easy to cover one's tracks in all sorts of shady business by cultivating an air of mystery and eccentricity, but such a creature is easily found out for he has not faced the true aesthete test of either perfect aloneness or perfect acceptance. He must face the demon staring back up at him from the toilet at which he is kneeling in rueful dry heave hell, and survive. He must drink his demon under the table, then drink the table under his higher power, or else rear back in moderation like a golden stallion. The aesthete has a morbid acuteness of the senses and the vile laughter of ruffians on the street in passing is like gunshots to his ear. So he must either shut himself away behind his romantic wall with only mad sister Madeline for company, or accept, love and forgive the ruffians one and all, like Scrooge does, and has to do every year, because slowly over the course of the fiscal countdowns he doth forget his Xmas spirits. The Swimmer didn't ever figure that out, and he ended up locked out of his own empty castle in the rain, like a poor ass Kafka. In short the aesthete must either open his heart so completely that it turns inside out or endure the pain of it slowly crumbling into a brown dwarf star.

1. VINCENT PRICE

"Sometimes I feel like I'm playing the subconscious of the entire human race" Price once said, "and I love it." Is there a more perfect choice for Roderick Usher, for Poe in general, than Price? As Little Italy and De Niro were to Scorsese, so Poe and Price to Roger Corman. But Price is velvet voiced, with a rare balance of open-hearted gentleness with mephistopholean grandeur that we lovers of cinema gobble up like sin itself. We're not really scared of his characters, but we're sometimes horrified by the depths of madness they sink to, which Price embodies with a glint of mania that shows us the fun, the joy in madness that all monsters should feel, at least twice, and in doing so he helps us transmute our own despair at death's inevitability and life's incessant slog, the constant closing of the door on paradise as one recedes into the cold marble wasteland, into something like a hot cocoa and slippers by the fire.

2. Rupert Everett - My Best Friend's Wedding (1996)

Damn, I need to wash my eyeballs after trying to find an image for this one. The available stuff on other sites are burdened with fluffy fonts for memes meant to be passed relentlessly to and fro in those relationships that form between two people when one is madly in love but able to exhibit some restraint because just being around their love is enough, and the other glad to have an adoring friend at their beck and call, who 'gets' them. Most of us are lucky enough to have been in both these roles. Maybe we even switched them with the same person. It works but it takes real devotion to the aesthetic of it all for it not to self-destruct just the same. One false kiss and it's all for naught.

That's what makes Everett's character so transcendent. He is delighted with the normal folks he meets, even the bride and groom's clueless family, and not in a cynical snide way. His heart is joyous enough he doesn't need to even express it, except to feign heterosexuality as needed while still exhibiting his peerless flair (including leading the extended wedding family in a rendition of "Say a Little Prayer for You"). And he flies back to the wedding just to rescue her, with no intention of sleeping with her... ever. Unheard of in most films today... alas.

"George's maturity, considerateness, tact are intimately connected to the gayness that sets him apart from the social norms, permitting him a wide distance from the practices and conventions in which those around him are entangled. He is able to talk to Jules in a way that would be impossible for a heterosexual man, offering her always an intimacy that is all the closer for being nonsexual.... (his) public speech to her... constitutes a veritable proposal, the commitment to a relationship that will be permanent but nonexclusive, , built upon a much sounder formation than sexual love or romantic attraction. -- Robin Wood (Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan - appendix p. 306)

3. Robert Downey Jr. - Sherlock Holmes / Game of Shadows

The master of 'macho fey,' Downey's Holmes is full of warm, insouciant charm while still being a true badass and just a little bit of a shit. Highbrow types dismiss any blockbuster as without merit and vice versa, but just ignore them and dig the steampunk detail, the interesting 'pre-figured' fight scene inner monologues, the colorful but imminently deadpan nonchalance, the fast-flowing Wildean witticism, even the acrid tang of Gunga Din-ish misogyny. Guy Ritchie gets it right and Downey Jr. finds a character that he can bring the full brunt of genius eccentricity to. His Holmes is how I wish someone would play Algy in The Importance of Being Earnest. Ah, a man might dream...

4. Judy Davis as George Sand - Impromptu (1991)

The 80s was a bad time for aesthetes, but like all things must they ended. Then, 90s: Nirvana, metrosexualism, and this great gender-bent love story: I fell in love with Hugh Grant's gentle brilliance as Chopin courted by Davis' wild, dressed-like-a-man rogue Sand. The chemistry is like top shelf champagne. A robust story of artists, love, gender and the wives of disinterested nobleman who support the arts mainly to forge illicit love affairs with wild bohemians while their mutton-chopped men are off shooting grouse, it made huge impression on me when I first caught this on cable when I was a drunken poet back from Seattle, heartbroken and unemployed and ready to find validation for my cockeyed theories about how truly cool artists are beyond gender duality. I had a total man crush on Judy Davis, as apparently did a lot of people as she was in a vast array of cool artsy films in the early 90s, but she was never quite as sublimely macho fey and endearing as here - the film that opened her doors to Naked Lunch, The Sheltering Sky, Husbands and Wives, Barton Fink and --alas--The New Age.

5. George Sanders 

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

Thanks George, for swimming (for however long you deigned to) in our cesspool. With that warm dark cultured tone in your voice, at once comforting and threatening, you made us secure as well as nervous; you made the room seem fraught with possible greatness, your characters were the type to become exhilarated, roused from their wit and gin-soaked ennui at the thought of a fight or a scandal. As a kid I was bored and uncomfortable by Rebecca until your Jack Favell shows up. You're just a conspiratorial voice at first, chummy with the chilly Ms. Danvers; the next minute bounding through a window to greet the stressed new Mrs. De Winter.  We learn you were not just Rebecca's cousin but her lover, and while none of her supposedly scandalous deeds could be mentioned since it was the age of the nervous censor, plenty was implied through the code's symbolic registry and every timbre in your delicate yet manly voice. Did you catch her in a lesbian tryst with Danni and blackmail your way into an incestuous threesome? Were you the one who debauched Rebecca initially? Against her will, at first, at some ancestral summer place when the adults were all out on sail? We never know, but that's what makes an aesthete an aesthete: he shows you just the tip of his depravity, and that may be more or less all there is of it. We just don't ever know.

Under the mantle of the code, homosexuality was the sign of a depraved mind so gayness went part and parcel with a litany of evils. A gay person by definition was abnormal; she or he had orgies, killed hired girls during laudanum blackouts, and smoked pot with jazzbos up in Harlem --in for a penny in for a pound.

So while on the one side Rebecca offers the rare perverse sickness of Olivier, a gay man in a lavender but presumed loving and tolerant marriage with Vivien Leigh, displaying great moral outraged sickness on learning the truth about Rebecca's bilious private life; on the other hand there's Favell's rougish waggery, like a breath of fresh air, like Hopsy running back to the comparable honesty of Jean Harrington at the end of Lady Eve.

6. Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker - Laura 1954

(Contains SPOILER) As a guy who loved good drinking movies but had yet to write one word about film outside a college class, I felt iffy watching Laura for the first time, the sickly jasmine air of the theme song and the girly name implied a certain 50s fashion show dullness, but meeting Waldo Lydecker early on, in the bath but typing away and narrating, was like being rescued from what you fear is going to be a very dull party by a one man cadre of Algonquin wits. That Waldo turns out to be the killer is just the icing on the cake since he's the first one you like and the only one you identify with. The others are little more than ciphers until Laura finally shows up out of the rain, and the flashbacks, into her own murder mystery, and the drinks come out in full. Greatest of all is the way his homosexuality or status as 'out of the running' for her hand in marriage or sex isn't really mentioned or deemed important, and he even out-aesthetes Vincent Price, here having a wild time as an upscale freeloading gigolo suspect. That's what gets him: Laura going for a two-fisted heterosexual neanderthal like Dana Andrews isn't threatening - it's a whole different thing; but Waldo can't brook another aesthete sniping in his stall - the effete intellectual in her life must be Waldo or no one!

"In true aesthete form Waldo loves a beautiful, intelligent young creature but in a way that's beyond the grotesque fumbling of the earthbound mortals in unconscious thrall to their boiling reproductive gene pools. His, my dear Dana Andrews, is a life of the mind! Of the spirit! Of art and beauty and truth and poetry, but when we aesthetes see our muses stoop to breed or date an inferior subject, or worse throw us over for another effete aesthete, well we lose our continental minds worse than if we were just an ordinary jealous suitor! It's happened to me personally not once, not twice, but thrice! Ladies, you know your names! Call me! ."

7. John Dall as Brandon and James Stewart as Rupert  - Rope.

"Hitchcock’s Rope was scripted by gay playwright Arthur Laurents from a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton. In his memoir Original Story By (2000) Laurents discusses how the screenplay was to go. “The three main characters in Rope are homosexual. Brandon and Phillip are lovers who carry the Nietzschean philosophy learned from their former prep school teacher, Rupert, to its outer limit: a murder committed to prove superiority. Rupert is a good friend and probably an ex-lover of Brandon’s; his is the most interesting role.” In fact, Rupert seems based on Wilde, and it’s clear he has played (if inadvertently) Des Esseintes and Lord Henry Wotton to these two impressionable youths. Made three years after Lewin’s film, Rope is essentially Hitchcock’s Dorian Gray. The screenplay calls Rupert “distinguished in appearance, manner and thought”, and stresses his dandyish aspect: “He is completely self-possessed and elegantly detached. His manners are beautiful, his speech is eloquent and his tongue can be sharp.” Of course, as a Wildean figure, he also has a sinister aspect: “[Y]ou cannot really be sure whether he means the extreme ideas he propounds or whether he is joking. Just as you cannot be sure whether Rupert is essentially good or essentially evil.”

Laurents probably had in mind Wilde at the height of his fame and immediately prior to his downfall. In 1894 Wilde wrote for an Oxford undergraduate magazine an egregious piece which he called “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”. Here are two of its maxims: “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others”; “Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance” - Ken Mogg (Senses of Cinema)

8. Dean Stockwell as Ben - Blue Velvet (1996)

There's a spectrum of aestheteness and at the gutter end lurks Ben, a nightmare fever dream monster of an aesthete, the sort who could believably entomb his sister in the family crypt just because the demon fairy in his absinthe bottle whispered he should. I don't think David Lynch intends him or his buddy Frank and their other cronies to be 'real' in a concrete Lumberton sense... They are prototypes for the non-corporeal dancing dwarf-style beings to come. Ben is how nervous 50s children would imagine a gay hipster beatnik and Lynch and Stockwell let that idea of an "entered" "sandman" "crooning" "In Dreams" run free of quotes! You need to see this movie again, and again, wiederholungswang style, until there's that 'pop' and you get the whole Oedipal jazz fairy tale in a heated flash, and suddenly you're free.

9. George Sanders' brother - Tom Conway as Dr. Judd in 

Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943)

In Tom Conway, Val Lewton found his quiet spokesperson, his ego ideal, suave, literate, educated, a little too polished to ever convey his full measure of world-weary sadness. As such he appeared in three films, two as Dr. Judd. In Cat People, Judd proves his aesthetehood by deciding to seduce Irina himself, understanding that a well-meaning putz like Bill with his endless patience is not what she needs to come out of her dark anxiety. She needs dark stranger who's in love with death enough that he won't be too bummed out if she really does turn into a panther and kill him. Until then, he dismisses her fears as a kind of ancestral unconscious conservatism, but he acts on the mythic level in seducing her, because a) Bill's already left Irina by that point so he's not necessarily cuckolding and b) maybe it's unethical but it's okay as it's unethical done altruistically - i.e. his is an unselfish selfishness. A 'good' doctor would never be able to cure Irina, because he couldn't step into the dark sexual surrogate role with the shadowy elan of an ideal Shavian / Jungian. Inversing the usual dynamic of the good moral person who harbors dark sexual secrets, beneath Judd's caddish whims and dark sophistication lurks a beautiful altruism. 

He was back for The Seventh Victim, which--since he was already dead at the end of his last film--reveals New York City is purgatory, a bardo of deserted late night subways, overcrowded missing persons' offices, strange make-up companies, and Satanic cults coaxing each other deeper into the abyss. Dr. Judd may be still a bit of a cad, but his apparent womanizing secretiveness once again harbors a real heart, and his rendition of the Lord's prayer at the climax is enough to make even a jaundiced old pagan like me throw in an extra five dollars when the plate's passed at his next AA meeting.

10. John Astin-  Gomez Addams - The Addams Family

If you want to understand the divide in America you have only to watch an episode of The Addams Family vs. an episode of the Munsters, one abided the tedious status quo of 50s-middle class family dynamics, warping Universal classic horror signifiers to a banal framework approved by the moral right; the other depicted rich decadent surrealist eccentrics that mocked the moral light, showing how the oddball freaks could be far more tolerant and good than the 'normal' people who lashed out at anything outside the norm. And at the head of it all stood the vaguely entrepreneurial aesthete Gomez Addams.

Gomez's love of wife Morticia is the prana for the whole show. She loves him too but she's too legit crazy to provide the show with its Wildean compass the way Gomez does. If you were a normal shlub longing to be considered different while never stepping anywhere near the edges of society's freshly-mowed block, The Muensters was your show; if you were a total freak who couldn't sandpaper down your edges anymore than a leopard could change its spots, who didn't care about being accepted either by the normals or the crazies, but liked them both anyway, who felt that the intolerant moral conservative neighborhood voting committees out to get you were really just kooky lovable monsters like yourself, turning the other cheek all the time and setting it on fire with love and matches, then you found a home in that kooky mansion, with Gomez making sure you always felt welcome, regardless of what bit of occult statuary was growling at you.

11. Jean-Paul Belmondo - Breathless (1959)

He plays at being a thug, but if you pay close attention to his words, Belmondo's character in this premiere Godard feature is a hopeless aesthete, one who has severed all ties with the law-abiding world, shooting a cop and going on the run as matter of course, but unlike the murder committed by the two encoded Compulsion-style thrill killers in Rope (who hoped to prove their "beyond good and evil" superiority), Belmondo just drives outside the frame of the film and into your lap like a William Castle skeleton, pointing out the beautiful architecture of the theater before chasing after the gorgeous (and androgynous) petit-bourgeois NY Tribune-hawker, Jean Seberg down the aisle like some obnoxious yet eloquent Harpo Marx. My favorite line is near the beginning when he's driving along in his stolen car through the country and he says to the camera, "If you do not like the country, and you do not like the city, and you do not like the sea... then get stuffed" ---that was the old Fox Lorber subtitle, which I like better than the Criterion "then go fuck yourself," but either will do. Belmondo acts the vagrant moocher, the ruffian, but his fatherly need to point out the joyous beauty around him reveals he's really an aesthete, with Paris his playground boudoir.

12. John Waters

He voiced the first openly gay character on the Simpsons, and when he dropped by just to do novelty dances with Homer and fawn over Marge's corncob drapes it just seemed natural and delightful, and even those of us without the stomach for Pink Flamingos knew there was no escaping our love for Uncle John Waters. I forget where I read that his favorite films were Boom! and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, but I know it was in high school, and it took me 10 more years to have any chance of seeing them (early 80s) and so he set me up with a life mission.

While certainly shocking and subversive, Waters' films always have a vitality and openness that leaves you elated rather than dispirited. The charm of this openly gay aesthete finds its delirious yet always coherent flowering with Hairspray, which blasted free the Peyton Place-level repression of Baltimore with the bomb of sock hop music, in the process inviting fat chicks, drag queens, beatniks, black folks and creepy senators into the prime time light - just dance and all is forgiven, honey, and that goes both ways.  He's the all-inclusive candidate who finally dissolves the pinched face intolerance of the moral snipe red state thin white hypocrite establishment to a wicked witch black puddle, but then, like John Lennon at the end of Yellow Submarine, invites the sad blue meanie to the party. When we are all-inclusive we cannot fail. God bless us all! xoxox

"If only all of Rome had just one neck" - CALIGULA (1979) and Guccione's Goombah Grandiosity

If you were alive in 1979 maybe you remember the avalanche of seedy press for CALIGULA, Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione's rose garden funeral of sores: tales of the countless bored and abused extras; the rants of unfair treatment by inserted porn stars; furious British stage thespians; and writer Gore Vidal. It all trickled down into your local newspaper, which you read after your dad tossed it down by his feet, where you crouched reading the funnies and looking for bra ads. It seemed like a neo-pagan bacchanal was going on, drowning all concerned in flames of sin and aggravation.

Now that DVD, internet and--'choke'-- sobriety are here, we have a model for this situation -- CONTEMPT (1966): Guccione would be Jack Palance; Tinto Brass would be Fritz Lang; Gore Vidal would be Homer. But then you would need to stretch the shooting and reshooting schedule of the diegetic Odyssey to around two years, and add a lot of sensationalistic excess, far more lurid than Lang's topless mermaids. It was the sex and violence entwined that made CALIGULA stick out amidst the legion of past gaudy Roman spectacles of vile excess and pretentious overblown grandeur (of which SATYRICON, with its relentless parade of grotesque homosexual spectacle, was perhaps the pinnacle). Rather than just shocking or prurient, Guccione trying to be genuinely dirty, not just titillating and lurid in the service of a biblical-ish story that would smuggle smut past the censors like Cecil B. DeMille did with SIGN OF THE CROSS, but something unapologetically irredeemable --to not only capture the genuine decadent excesses of its times (when it was made and when it was set alike) but to sicken even the grindhouse crowd. It carried a queasy anticipation that shockmeisters like Peter Greenaway and Michael Haneke would spend their lives trying to instill, only to fall back in the waves of pretentiousness so many critics mistake for art.

We must remember this: Playboy, for all its 'dirtiness,' couldn't really expand past Hef's limited-if-larger-than-life sexual parameter; his idea of sexual content was frozen at the heterosexual, white, privileged and bawdy. But Guccione, the Soprano to Hef's Corleone, liked to smash taboos, his own sexual preferences be damned. If it turned him off, if it made him sick, well that was his problem, throw it in anyhow. Print the legend. That took guts! And guts like that can only come from Roma or Italian New York City. Oh if only there was someone other than Donald Trump (and the Grand Prospect Hall commercials, "we make-a your dreams come true!") to represent that kind of goombah grandiosity in today's world!

Let's set the scene: 70s New York City was not unlike the Rome of Nero, of Caligula, with the then-legendary Plato's Retreat, the then-beginning to boom rise of VHS rental, Giorgio Moroder, disco, glitter, cocaine, perms, shoulder pads, Sylvester Stallone, Travolta's chest hair --it all congealed into CALIGULA. Chances are it wouldn't even make it to our local theaters here in Wherever-sville but we knew it had some sick, gaudy mojo working, beyond good and evil, beyond taste and vulgarity, into some ultra violent energy expenditure and grand guignol excess as a generator for black magic cine-alchemy. We read entertainment page write-ups, chronicling the disasters, set disputes, rewrites, ego clashes, and general nausea of the entire crew, with a mix of agog titillation and puritan judgment. Schadenfreude over the film's problems turned us all into moral knee-jerk prototypes for Jason Voorhees and Anita Bryant.

Of course I wouldn't see it until eight years later or so, when I was reasonably bloated and debauched (from being in a rock band) myself. It was the wintry Halloween of 1988 in ancient Syracuse, where wind freezes the snot while it's still in your brain and from Oct-April, the sun is never seen behind the concrete sky, and the sidewalk is not seen below the layers of frozen slush. My band was playing a Halloween party at some dismal frat house ($$). The cold was in our bones; no matter how many flat kegs we suckled at, no matter how many layers of thermal underwear we wore, no matter how many drafty windows we covered with plastic tarps and duct tape, we were frozen - fingers too froze to play. We had to sharpen up, get mean, get psychedelic, get drunker. So we rented a VHS camera to film our impending frat show, and CALIGULA (and a Betty Boop compilation) to, you know, do some VCR-on-VCR recording action, because cameras back then came attached to VHS tape recorders in strap-on bags that you slung around your shoulder while you recorded, or trusted the equipment to some shaky friend to film your band for you.

Even in 1988, after years of wide XXX availability, CALIGULA had a rough reputation. Sick shit like that wasn't just floating around; there was no internet for all the world to slowly grow jaded via. Decadence still had currency beyond merely making you depressed for all humanity and sick in the pit of your stomach; there was an extra, sexually-charged frisson to the old ultra-violence. None of us had seen it, but we knew of it from being kids during al that bad press. We knew it had a big budget and real name actors in a historically 'accurate' but soul disparaging world where somehow ancient Rome used neon lights and the entire world was like some end-of-the-night Studio 54 bathroom. 

This comboi made it seem legit dangerous. As writes Cinema de Merde's CdM.Scott:

"...the story already includes a lot of sex, and to include all that sex, making the film disreputable porn, means that it can go in any direction, explore any topic, without having to tiptoe around it. And the result is a movie that maintains an excitement throughout, because we are acutely aware that ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN."

Dude! 

So we begin with a title telling us it’s Pagan Rome, 37-41 AD. We see Caligula and his sister Drusilla cavorting... He is called to see Tiberius, the current ruler and Caligua’s adoptive grandfather, played by Peter O’Toole. He’s all pale and his face has bloody sores, seriously such a horrifying figure I was really hoping he would die sooner than later, because his presence made me so uncomfortable. He forces Caligula to “do your dance, boy” which Caligula resists. Tiberius makes him do it, and it’s this highly-stylized military thing that you can tell he’s been doing since he was five and finds horribly humiliating. However, we see the first glimmers of Caligula’s character when he snaps into this almost psychotic wide-eyed smile, seems to turn his mind off, and throws himself into his performance with maniacal glee

That's right, bro... we, who are about to rock, relate!

The gig at the dismal packed, steaming, decadent frat house over, we come home and, lo and behold, CALIGULA didn't record properly. We wasted the whole 3 hour stretch of our initial viewing for nothing; so we had to try again. It was painful enough the first time and we were too busy with pre-show jitters to pay close attention, but now... well.... and to make matters 'worse,' someone had relieved my nervous anxiety of playing in this crowded frathouse basement about five hours earlier with a chunk of a beer coaster that had been dipped in liquid LSD, which had kicked my brain into lightshow nirvana in a BIG way right as we started playing Pink Floyd's "Echoes." I needed a roadie/keeper just to help me out of my rig at the end I just stood there, dumbfounded as my face melted onto the beer-soaked wooden plank stage and my girlfriend, in full lizard girl makeup (it was Halloween), beckoned, hideously, the sweat and makeup congealing in swirls of muddy desire so terrible that even now in writing of it I cringe like a sailor gazing down the abyss in Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom."

So now dawn is coming up and our duping of CALIGULA is still slogging away, and I'm feeling guilty and scared of my girl upstairs in my room, beckoning mr, even asleep, with her lizard makeup off, exposing her alabaster perfection (she was Italian-American, from Carmel, NY; with pale blue eyes and perfect white skin - dear lord) and right as I was drifting up in mortal dread, I saw the infamous death wall scene...and Caligula throwing the tomato at his foe, who is buried with his little head waiting in the dirt like a single cabbage for the approaching blades. And Caligula's immortal line, "If only all of Rome had just one neck!"

I crawled up as if one with the rising sun, with the girlfriend waiting, asleep but sexually hungry as always, even in sleep, her lips reaching up from the warm earth like a flower in search of the sun on a foggy day, but everything about her was too beautiful, her alabaster Roman skin and deep jet black hair now swathed in my deep red sheets in what looked like endless permutations of still-beating hearts. When I closed my eyes all I could see was bright bands of red, the heart patterns forming from rushing blood in my ears and the sounds of dozens of televised screaming defenestrations echoing from tinnitus feedback and her yearning with every breath, her pulling me towards her, her big legs grinding me up like a sticky Venus fly trap snapping shut, castration with every decent, the perfume drifting around--the patchouli and the hash and the sweat congealing--it all intense, lusty, not beguiling but freaking me out.

I closed my eyes and melted into her arms and there are these big mower blades coming for me, the wall of death... the blades, the black blood-stained earth, the red wall, the jeering, the light rain, the mist, the tomatoes pelting my head.

It's never stopped, that LSD-vision of death whilst wrapped in sleepy white arms and red sheets on a cold Sunday morning... it's my VERTIGO cliff ledge, my Joe Black chess game on the beach from which no Spassky goes unfunneled... it's there like the guardian at the gates of my coveted guest list hell. I don't want to go but there I am in line... and there the blades rush forth...  closer. 

Because a week later, Max rented the 'other' edition of CALIGULA. We apparently had got the wrong one; it had been re-edited and stuff added and other stuff removed and either way we hated it but it just... would... not stop. So we went through the whole thing again. That "just one neck" line (and the "Go into your dance!" line) made it into our daily parlance to express nearly anything we hated or wished to devour --it summed up perfectly our LSD-addled desire to crush our enemies, i.e. all frat boys, and hear da lamentation of their Benetton-wearing girlfriends; to devour and encompass, or at least keep warm against the looming upstate NY winter; to reclaim some modicum of glorious and even arrogant power over our own lives; to not get old, and swollen, and engorged like a snake eating ourselves from the bottom up. 

Claire Forlani drinks Dewars, Carrie Matheson, Andrzej Zulawski's SZAMANKA (1996) and Angela Chase

From left: Claire Forlani, Claire Danes, Tiff

I wanted to talk about so many things, Angus darlin': Seed of Chucky, angels, dolls in blood splattered that watched yesterday in MTV sanitized plasticine, shellacking my brew capped madness, Angus, darlin, and Jennifer Tilly's shrieking and and Redman's guts disinterred from his horny bucket and everything edited for MTV-ready close-ups of Glen or Glenda-gendered dolls and flashes of Nirvana's leader's shotgun smiles and long long screams that turn from crying into laughter and back again, then watching right after it Andrzej Zulawski's Szamanka (1996) which is not an easy thing to say with false teeth.

At least the words are not false, that from said teeth flow, from boxes heart-shaped in their shapelessness, bags tossed as rubbish into the Warsaw mud. Flown, Angus, darlin' -blown rather, a punk-en down Dalle Betty Blue-blackend bird spazzing through anthropology classes as her lover pilfers thousand year-old psilocybe and amanita muscaria mushrooms from a mummified shaman's pockets. Each wodka shot or peanut butter-covered stem tracking each punch and drunken stumble dream pie like meth and coveralls to grinding mechanical factory sex atop crumbling swamp corpse; grinding academics in their dancing and beer spill sip-n-slide; moving far away from the phony graphic-tinged needle tip distance twixt the ancient fungal shaman's last expression train down through more more the turn style jumped, coiffed, jumped back through and gay references hurtled like Jack Benny's Polish theater troupe bombed and built anew under which in the shelter Zulawski slept as a child.

With a little sex in it -- in this case too much 
gown
own, eru aasway to wit, ergo, in lieu
you outta brush up on your Greek, Janderson.

So get a Greek and brush up on him.

gloob gloob cheek cheek cheek remember that girl round the bend, up the creek to the unreal city, Warsaw, the sign, smashed by vandals who can't remember if they're pro-or-now-anti, what? War, of course, vulgar, the Molloch shell vents in its sewer steam a gentle cloud over the sleepy pylon circle round the sad scene of concrete-and-carcass carnage; gritty cop gloves waving laborers in tiny roadsters; a continuous surly blur; the sad clown whistle of electro-shock, aging right there in the chair with frozen lips like embryos in the freezers of rich Parisian ladies with no time for the future, just Emmys, three year sobriety chips, and of course, love.

 Go... now....
Homeland, Carrie, the river Catalano... and Tino, now visible, barely, up in the monitors. Frozen Embryos all thawed and playing for all ages so long as they're grown up past beanstalk heights. Carrie Matheson's madness retro-fitted to the micro movements of Saudi journalists, the seething hormonal guilt of traitors over tailors and Gettysburg's ghosts sluiced through the filters of  swimming pools heated from nearby crematoriums.



Claire Forlani may not be really Scottish but it's about time we had more 'Red Flag' style nutcase women ruling in booze-shill hell rather than these khaki-wearing 'regular guys' who will never leave the safety of their heaven-lite Budweiser perches or hit their kids or blow up their garages but instead watch Up all Night but never stay it, instead get lassoed into family dynamics and beige color schemes and dear I think you've had enough but they'll never actually have it.

I vote for the natural hell habitat of stumbler psycho hotties storming through 4:20 AM clubs, ranting about some guy you've never met (I'm not going to admit I don't know who Angus is, not if it keeps her pouring) but clearly she fucked the guy who owns the place at one point and now owns it or thinks she does and anyway she's pouring you enough post-last call slugs of near-top-shelf from behind the bar that her anger and narcissistic indignation is seductive like a slightly less cold freight train down an ice cold mountain you've been climbing 'til yr fingers frozen bloody be and then down down down deep deep down
down rather than listen one more minute to the still preachy echo of last call wives and
moms and bosses and sanity hand
rails and Up All Night marathon in progress still, attended now by mothers in laws, and the law itself, folded in the couch cracks like mold in their menopausal minds.

Instead, all of that is shuckered loose from and you grab the last falling skittering perfume and real fur coat (faint scent of kitty litter and bile amidst the Chanel) and marble ice covered in melanin-melting thinner in older age hand of Forlani's Lady Macbeth-ish mad Scot,
slipping from yours soon enough, aye Angus,
if skin were mottled fur,
out along the slimy ocean cobblestone streets,
into more and more warming drinks,
floating you home on blackened bruise cushions (for the nonce mere tingles),
a vague memory of a cab driver shouting but no sound in the oceanic roar of your ears,
handing a crumpled twenty (cuz she liked round figures), a flag of surrender from weak wavy fingers, no receipt, and no bags except the Dewars promo swag,
soft applause dampening yr fall
into the comfortable curbside trash pile pillows.
The gentle muddy on-all-fours crumble,
the keyhole of yr deadbolt, bruised by step stumbles but not bloody
thence to in the warming carpet
die and dive and wake, reborn, ashen of complexion,
and the sun's already set on the.... day? night? Or is it dusk? That's the devil of it, Nat.
I mean not the devil, but Claire... my madwoman of the tarot. 

She's gone and left only bruises and a hangover fit to darken half of Glasgow..

Claire Forlani, Mallrats (1996)

and Glasgow's already pretty dark, mate.
It's Sunday...already. Pink Edges along the skyline,
pink edges along the rooftops,
twice as sad either way, like eyeliner stains the streaky
soot of fingerprinted window glass,

adieu, she left her cell # on your dresser, your messages all texted threats and oaths,
each one expanding on the last since gone
unanswered.

Angela Chase

 But o she was a dark sexy hurricane of black velvety mink and broken necklace clasps. Death takes a holiday (excuse me, Joe Black), Mallrats...


and worse, Mystery Men, Magicians, and The Medallion
waking Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly) from her plastic frozen sleep.

a family dressed for church steps gingerly over you, and saving your last act of valor just for them, ye vomit near, but not right on, the dad's black polished shoes with a whale-like roar "All Hail to the Drinkin' Man! All Hail Macbeth! Thane of Cawdor! 

"Ouryay untingcay aughterday!!" - American Horror Story: Asylum, Sign of the Cross (1932)

I'm not sure how it is now, but as a kid in public elementary school we used to whisper fearfully of the poor kids being beaten in Catholic School. The sight of a nun striding through town instilled great fear (even if you didn't go to their school they could just grab you and start whacking if you sinned within eyeshot). All haughty with its 10 PM time slot and FX cable censorial freedom, American Horror Story has explored this icky sadomasochism with relish, solidifying its place as America's hour-long abject subconscious depository not only for our true historical horrors, but our horror film history: a crucible of all their combined tropes and tricks --exorcism, Satanic possession, Nazi war criminal mind control experiments, breeding monster programs, alien abduction, and most terrifying of all.... nuns. This season, American Horror Story goes deep down back to that 60s-70s memory, the crux of children's terrified jouissance over being spanked in the era before panic over Satanic abuse led us to consider all corporal punishment as suspect. It's been great rediscovering that queasy current!

When the teasers came out with the nun's bleeding black alien eyes and the subtitle Asylum it was a shock of sadness for we fans of the original (see my old post likening the show to the Eagles song "Hotel California"). Here comes the downward spiral, we thought. Season one had a horny narcissist, his bland TV handsomeness making him a very familiar antihero but never before had we seen one so mercilessly exposed to his own odium; a daughter who didn't even know she was dead; and the whole bloody history of Hollywood, the James Elroy L.A. nocturne Black Dahlias and the Jack-cum-Joan Crawford search for eternal beauty and better parts for aging actresses and suits of human skin or latex and outwards to Columbine and back downwards to basement abortions and--best and newest-- the idea that an old maid can make herself seem hot as Audrey from Twin Peaks (1) to a man and his friends will see him humping the old broad from Six Feet Under--all swirled together in a spiral of sexy adult soap opera, a Dark Shadows on bar whiskey and 70s cocaine. Dude, that first season was awesome. And bringing Meryl Streep chops, to Bette Davis willfulness and Boris Karloff menace, and her own Frances Farmer hot mess sultry, Jessica Lange redefined cougar sexiness.

But moving the action to a 1974 asylum, really bro? Like Shock Corridor, Bedlam, Silence of the Lambs, 12 Monkeys, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Requiem for a Dream, Marat/Sade, Quills, Terminator 2, Strange Illusion, and dozens more, all of whom have been imitated to death.


But hey you know the AMH crew can pull it off because they presume you've seen all those films, so they can riff on them and you'll get the in-joke. In most shows there is a main character, the FBI guy, the crime fighter, the good guy, and plots are linear, or like The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, consisting of a new story started from scratch and ended each night, or if we follow one kooky extended family in a haunted house it's a comedy like The Addams Family or The Munsters. But rather than shopping for tropes like leisurely Rod Serling at his Any Town USA grocery store, American Horror Story goes on a looting rampage, grabbing what it can from the ravaged shelves and dumping  it all in the 1964 crucible made familiar by Mad Men, one of the final remaining years in our history when gay bashing, sexism, racism, corporal punishment, and smoking were not just normal, but inescapable. Going back to that time might seem cool on AMC, but AMH reminds us it's really a full-on nightmare.

And what a bounty of nightmare this is, where death is the last of your worries. See, I don't mind onscreen death because an actor reveals himself as an actor (no actor --no matter how brilliant-- can stop their breathing altogether, or suppress the occasional involuntary closed eye twitch). Playing dead is proof you are not dead, for one can't play dead and be dead at the same time. Kids love to play dead for that reason; it's life affirming! But there's nothing life-affirming about being imprisoned in a closet for weeks on end. We can't really imagine being dead for real, but we can easily imagine being left to twist in the hands of a sadist who's been put in charge of our welfare. It's very claustrophobic, and depressing, and why I generally don't like movies set in asylums or prisons. I can't breathe just thinking about it!

But the awful 'correctional' behavior for gays and promiscuous women (condoned by the state in 1964, presumably, and even today in Alabama, probably) is so new to TV, that it makes up for all the claustrophobia. In its genius, this week AMH even showed a movie within its stormy episode, refracting the horror image through a 30 year intertextual expanse and displaying what one presumes is a Catholic-sanctioned historical epic, Cecil B. DeMille's SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932). So after one of the worst hurricane disasters in Northeastern US history, we watch a show that takes place during a terrible storm ("Nor'easter") in 1964 where people watch a 1932 film. You do the math!

Oh man, as I've writ in "God Bless the Orgiast / Whose Brought his Own"), Cecil B. DeMille's big sound film freakout harbors such a pre-code phallic yen for lurid orgies and grotesque spectacle and such blatant disinterest in its wearyingly dull old Christians that it reveals something deeply cogent about the apparent hypocrisy of church approved films. DeMille doesn't even bother to check to see if the Christian dialogue is even coherent, audible, relevant - much like no one bothers to let a priest know his sermon and his own halted speaking patterns are absolutely impossible to follow or even feign interest in; we merely wait for the lion's jaws like kids with shaky legs.

Maybe that's because decadence is cinematic and Christianity is not; De Mille never shows any spark of life in his Christians: they just pose like old paintings and drone on as their long fake beards slowly dissolve under the sweltering Roman klieg light sun. On and on they drone, until lion fang intervention is all but screamed for. And the Catholic system accomodates for this, and in fact might even be said to promote it, making sin twice as tasty than it would be for someone without a church upbringing.

The worst part of the movie is this inert love triangle between a party-hearty Bacchus brother (Frederic March) who's been a long-time lover of Nero's horny, puppetmaster wife (Claudette Colbert), and Ann Harding, the milquetoast daughter of one of the dull bearded Christians.  We keep hoping March will wise up to the humorless sanctimony of his alleged 'true love' Harding, and come back downstairs to the keg.  Besides, who wants a whiny virgin Christian with a water pitcher when you can have sexually experienced Claudette Colbert in a milk bath?  Yet since we have the Catholic consent to see the film in AMH it means that Harding must win, must lure him from his decadent podium and down into the sex and drugs-free cellar of piety until he's just one man kissing one girl's 'promise ring' and renouncing every scrap of fun he ever had.  I kept hoping March was just going for the long con, the Sebastian summer project, but he was serious! That I do not forgive.

March's acting style here is one long John Barrymore impression (March actually played him, more or less, in 1930's THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY), a dramatic choice probably explained by his lack of guidance from DeMille, a director whose lack of dramatic subtlety can make even the most bitterly pious of yokels choke on their smuggled-in pint of Dr. Silver's Golden Elixir. At least I hope they'd choke, and not completely miss the point of all life, which is that SIGN is hardly a biblical epic at all but rather a horror film similar to DRACULA (1931) in the way the stilted, undead quality of the recorded air in early sound film adds a solidity more nurturing than the bottom of a dark ocean, and the way it ends with lovers marching out of a deep cellar's steep stone steps into the wrathful sunlight, and it expects you to choose good over evil even as the villains are invariably more magnetic, their malevolence pulling us closer into their sludgy violent orbit the longer we gaze at them; meanwhile the heroes gesture impotently or sternly lecture why it is an ugly old clueless patriarch should be obeyed instead of sexy young intellect in any form. And therein is the difference.

In DRACULA it's the 'good' - the white hetero pair bond and their holy father -- going into the light to live happily ever after after killing the 'evil' Count Dracula down in the depths of the ruined abbey, but in CROSS it's the reverse, yet the same: The 'good' are going to their deaths at the hands of lions after emoting their last few reels away in the Colosseum basement. Christians are the 'reverse vampires,' drawing crosses in the sand, making them out of sticks like sad sack introverts confusing symbols with spirituality, like nerds deserving of the lion saliva-whetted willie from which no traveler returns unbaptized.

That's where the demonic possession of American Horror Story's only uncorrupted nun comes floating back into view. Imagine if Ann Harding's cockteaser was possessed by a horny demon? The scene in this episode where she cows the once uncowable Dr. Arden shows just how cool a little Satanic influence can make one. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the devil's wishbone, the devil's drag strip, the devil's A.B.Cs...


POST SCRIPT -
In fine guilty style I thought and fretted about my use of c-word in the title of this article, thinking I could get away with it via its odd usage as a verb (an Exorcist quote) But my source for Catholic guilt assured me it didn't matter, I was still sinning. When no one had stormed my apartment in protest even after it being posted for several seconds, my guilt seeped into the things surrounding me, including America's Next Top Model. The whole show reared back like some timeline serpent of bitchy Kristen close-ups, biting me with the venomous self-realization of a Cleopatra. So I changed it, reversed it, like backwards Latin, then Pig Latin. Diousnessoay!

NOTES:
1. It would be interesting if they reversed that in a later season, a ghost who can seem totally hot, a perfect 10, as they say-- to your friends but you see only a drunk 6. That would be something the Lacanians would be really psyched about -- because the guy would shag her anyway, for the high fives.