Notes from the Class and Alcoholic Struggle in a THIN MAN Marathon

TCM screened the entirety of the alcoholically fluent Thin Man series for New Year's Rawkin' Eve 2016. Naturally I hung around for it, glued, as one is, by the ever-deft blend of comedy and mystery, the natural charm of Powell and Loy as tipsy Nick and Nora, and the colorful thugs. The thing struck me most now for this --nth viewing (and maybe I gleaned this visiting my brother in Arizona over Xmas) is the way rich or upper middle class alcoholics often wind up with slightly lower rungs of friends and mates, the booze acting as a kind of leveler ("it makes you my equal" as Sinatra tells der Bingle in High Society), illuminating the scions of the rich's lack of interest in bourgeois sophistication as opposed to earthy vitality and color. Seen as a whole, in one glorious TCM New Years night, from MGM to my screen--seven (or eight? hic) films stretching from pre-code 1934 to post-war noir jazzbo 1947, we see this class struggle in action, but also the way the long term effects of copious drinking parallel the effects of censorship and WW2 on American life. There's a reason, in the end, for avoiding America's low-lifes-- no matter how Runyonesque they may be. Censorship ironically made us presume otherwise (fighting dumb social norms being an American obligation) but hang out with them long enough and the poor rub off on you until there's no going back, entirely. In your absence, the upper crust cracked open and all that's left of the mansion you left behind is Blanche Dubois, impinging on your booze and personal space. Follow that earthy Runyon flame too closely and the lowlife becomes your whole life; suddenly you're traveling in coach instead of a private car, then packed into the baggage car with barn animals, peasants, drunken bums... Maybe it's that there's a war on...

And then maybe you're the drunken bum...

Nora was definitely slumming when she married private detective Nick Charles, for she started out rich and to the manor-born, the alleged upper crust. But her side of the family all have a yen for the rough trade, as we see firsthand in AFTER THE THIN MAN. Dominated on the home front by upper crust tea-totaler patriarchs and great aunts who need eight servants just to get out of bed, naturally they'll run off with any man who's independent, tough minded and able to breathe life back into their half-suffocated sense of adventure.

In the original THIN MAN (1934) the 'actual' titular 'thin' man (Nick isn't the Thin Man--that's a common misconception), Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis) is a successful crackpot inventor with terrible Gold Digger blonde-fakeness-roitin' up tootin' and powder-takin' feminoid chits with perma-waves fit to knuckle a Fred down low past the trotters and the truffles and all the googen plazas in betwixt. By which I mean, he lets a platinum wave undercut good common sense. Wynant was first married to Mimi (Minna Gombell) -a shrill, clipped uptight broad with whom he has a foxy young daughter Dorothy and a creepy-intellectual son Gilbert, and still supports them and also Mimi's gigolo second husband Cris (Cesar Romero). And then there's Wynant's secretary Julia Wolfe (Natalie Moorhead) who cheats on him, presumably, with the squat pug-like Morelli (William Brophy) and the dirty little rat Nunheim (Harold Huber).

The party Nick and Nora throw meanwhile indicates they too like to hang out with the lower dregs just as much as the Wynant family. Their Xmas party is packed with flea-bitten boxers, agents, dumb reporters who don't know what the word 'sexagenarian' means, and a stockpile of gold diggers and sobbing long distance bill-running mom-callers. The only sane sweet two girls in the whole rotten pack are brunettes: Nora herself (Myrna Loy) and Maureen O'Sullivan as Wynant's daughter Dorothy. The rest are hardbitten blondes (including Nunheim's 'frying pan juggler' and Chris' first wife).

I might come off as being snooty in pointing these differences out, but in fact I'm arguing that the variations of cross-class couples in this first film better situate the unique chemistry of our favorite drinking duo, thus answering the question: what would their romance be like if street kid Nick and debutante Nora's respective classes were reversed? And in later films, in a clear nod to MGM's obsession with provincial morality, Nick's past is changed to indicate he's not from New York City but from a cute small midwestern town with a well-respected physician father and literally a white picket fence.

I've always liked to believe THE THIN MAN is really a kind of Hammett-to-Chandler cross-over BIG SLEEP sequel. The wry humor and quick back and forth of Bogie and Bacall in SLEEP seems like a prelude to Loy and Powell's Nick and Nora--the class differentiation is just right. Marlowe isn't just a gumshoe-- he "went to college and can still speak English if the situation demands it" and Mrs. Rutledge clearly loves the rough trade as much as her nympho hophead sister. She mingles with the underworld for gambling and drugs, and he mingles with the high class socialites to provide protection when their blackmailers play too rough. As a couple they act as go-betweens between these two worlds: Nick knows the night-spots and the thugs; Nora knows their prey --the shattered effete scions, skittery cousins, and shrill dowager aunts.

Natalie Moorhead / Edward Ellis

For a contrast, we have the dysfunctional slumming dating pattern of Wynant (he dates downward, and so 

do the women he dates, in turn, connecting him financially with mugs like Edward Brophy and that dirty little rat Nunheim. Wynant reminds us, so painfully, that to be rich and successful is to need a detective on rolodex ("Rutledge should hire you permanently to keep those girls of his out of trouble" notes Marlowe's assistant DA buddy Bernie Ohls), or a 'present' parent (like Sebastian's mom in Notorious) to screen out the charmer predatory riffraff, do background checks, and otherwise make sure you're not sleeping with or getting rooked by any gold diggers, vamps, spies, pimps/hookers, or greedy two-timers. Wealth does not often equal a clue when it comes to dealing with its accompanying social parasites, especially as so often the father is too busy working to raise his kids properly. So the wealthy patriarchs hire detectives to get rid of their daughter's leeches without getting their family name dragged through the papers. In marrying the detective, Nora keeps her own wealth permanently immunized.

And in the end maybe what started out as bored jet set thrill-seeking on Nora's part (they met when Nick was hired by Nora's late father) turns to love that's somehow the ultimate measure of class, the difference that separates the cool rich (the kind we love) vs. the snobby airheads (the targets of our scorn and con artist chiseling). William Powell is perfect casting for Nick Charles, since as in My Man Godfrey, he has an elegance and charm that is like a beacon that transcends classes, a charm that magically wards off the con artists and moochers. Even the mugs he sent to prison like him, and surely there is no higher proof of character.

Even so, at the dinner party denouement (of the first film) he articulates a priori animosity towards an as-yet-unmet sleazy lecher for Dorothy (they're interrupted from boarding a train together, perhaps crossing state lines and allowing her to make "first false step.") The guy she's meant to be with is a young dope of amiable quality: Tommy (Henry Wadsworth), who tells her to "pack some clothes and (her) skates" to come with him to his parent's cabin in the country (the addition of the 'skates' is so sharp, I always use it as an example of the importance of specific detail in writing), letting us admire the youthful earnestness of their pairing even knowing absolutely nothing else about him' contrasted with the louche "first false step" guy, who basically has a kind of whiny fey sneer in his voice (he gets one line and gets slugged). Of all the people in the film, it's this one guy Nick isn't nice to, even though, aside from being a scuzzy opportunist, he hasn't really done anything wrong. But that lets you know too that Nick is, above all, chivalrous, and maybe even a bit of a prude when it comes to premarital sex. After all, despite the boozing, he does live at MGM.

AFTER THE THIN MAN (1936) plunges us into more of a 50/50 mix with the (K)nobb (Creek) Hill types of San Francisco, replete with goggle lensed alienist (George Zucco) keeping doe-eyed debutante Selma (Elissa Landi) strung out on pills and, like Mimi (or even Nora), so under the sway of some handsome grifter husband (Alan Marshall) she shuns the respectable slime pails in her class (like Jimmy Stewart).

Another dark reflection of upper crust Nora's love of streetwise Nicky, Selma's obsessive doting over this cad is yet another valuable window into a possible facet/outcome of the rough trade/gigolo gold-digger (male) symplex which we see time and again in the series, putting us in the odd position of realizing money is in its way an amplifier for trouble in ways middle class folks don't usually need to worry about (the really slick operators are going to be hunting richer quarry). In AFTER, the domineering matriarch Aunt Katherine (Jesse Ralph) is clearly underwriting Selma's case of nerves, amplified still further by quack shrink Zucco's undoubted regimen of mind-altering drugs. She's so dominated and overprotected that her aunt indirectly forces her into marrying such a swine.

Curiosity about the lifestyles of the lower dregs has long been an obsession of the rich but during prohibition especially the two were dependent on one another for their very social survival. When Nick says "that man is here," while bringing in a tray of booze to their guests, he's referencing a common insider bootleg era phrase, evoking the system from the previous year when booze came by delivery service--usually via suitcase. A variation of that exists today for cocaine. The last few parties I went to were full of models and yobbos all ended with midnight or one AM "call" and the arrival of some sketchy dude selling cocaine to a crowd who've pooled their money in a different room. Once said sketcher would see the hotties to be had he'd call his buddies and within minutes there'd be a sketchy hoodrat hanging on a willowy model in every corner of the room. While I hate cocaine and would leave when they showed up (and no no longer go to those parties), I appreciate that this fraternizing of suzzy coke dealers and the beautiful people goes back to prohibition in the 20s-early 30s, and when the arrival of a certain package made an ordinary gangster delivery boy become the apple of every thirsty girl's eye.

Now me, I've not only struggled with alcoholism but with my own snobbiness for I've learned to be the bemused hip wingman rather than the worrywart aunt of sulky ectomorphism when it comes to monitoring my friend's and family's mate choices. The amount of suffering I had to undergo to make it to this sketchy truce of peace was/is astronomical. I dated a Cherry Hill NJ girl five years without ever overcoming it. Looking back, I loved her folks, they were great people, but at the time, my indignant snob hackles rose. She later told me they sensed that, but were amused by it. Man oh man, the middle class is a tricky place to be.

What does money have to do with love maybe you ask? It's character, pure and simple, that overrides culture? Yeah it does. A rich family might live poorer than a poor one; a rich house in Princeton might look at first like a rustic cottage, its austerity reflecting--only as we learn later--some early colonial debt of honor to family tradition. Meanwhile a huge mansion next door might be packed with gaudy statuary and uncleaned pee stains from amok puppies while the owner chomps a cigar and insults Mr. Merrill in back by the pool.  Class may not be just about money but in the words Loreli Lee, my goodness doesn't it help?

Right as I wrote that I hear Nora behind me on the phone, noting that they had a wonderful time on their cross country trip: "Nick was sober in Kansas City!" as if that's in itself a rare and precious thing instead of a shameful waste of Kansas City's withering flatlands, of which drunkenness is the only possible response.

By the time of the third film, ANOTHER THIN MAN (1939) with Colonel McFee the family lawyer harrumphing that they drive out to his remote LI estate to help him, the drinking was sidelined at best for unto Nick and Nora a child has come. They find uncle's compound swamped with security guards but there's "good air for the baby" and overlapping needy characters cramming their way into the smaller and smaller, simpler, and progressively more spartan apartments, bearing pages of red herring exposition like trays of hardboiled eggs. By this third edition, the rogue's gallery giving the gladhand after Nick sent them up the river is kind of cliche, as is the dour humorless upper crust relative / uncle who first summons Nick-o-lass and little Nora to his or her remote mansion, and the MGM treacle seeping over the Breen line ("Gee, boss... a cute widda baby!")--even if that damned baby is goddamned Dean Stockwell, saints forgive him--is an unwelcome intrusion. Even if they do have a nanny, the writing is on the wall.

Muriel Hutchison

The unique selling point to ANOTHER--not later duplicated in the series--is the startlingly touching romance between red herring grifters Sheldon Leonard and Muriel Hutchison. When she pulls a pistol out of her garter belt the whole series grinds to a turntable scratch halt. In lesser hands, this skeezy pair of crooks would be quite forgettable, but here they wind up as the second coolest couple in the whole series, further blurring the class lines. Now that there's real life Nazis in the works and boot strap-tightening and victory bonds to sell and buy, well, there's no longer magic in the contrast between rich and low class settings. The way Hutchison says "okay" when he asks her if she wants to play for keeps and make it a duo is like an oasis of sexual vulnerability, streetsmart brass and spritely comedic wit, perfectly fused to Hutchison's Frances Farmer meets Judy Holliday sexual persona. As the patient daughter of the rich colonel, Virginia Grey; Tom Neal (DETOUR star later convicted of murder) is a chemist. And in't that WB B-movie gumshoe Patrick Knowles? It might not mean much in terms of charm and acting--all top notch--but it's clear we're beginning to drift off the A-list.

By now Nora is on her way to being marginalized as a totally ditzy dame but still gets out good lines, tossed off 'yes-and' improv intuitiveness, following Nick's lead to get rid of the pesky romeos at El Morocco: "I won't stay in quarantine! I don't care who catches it!" That shit is awesome, BUT then she doesn't know to look at the maraca player onstage for her contact instead of falling into trite Lucy Show-style mistaken identity-brand comedy with an excitable gigolo. Come on, writers! She's not Lucille Ball... she's goddamned Myrna Loy! She's NORA!

THEN CAME THE WAR

The weird boilerplate fascism accruing in the dregs of this slumming cocktail series almost heralds the Second World War in itself, as if all the decadent art design and detailed underworld flavor of the first films has to be sanded down. Now the crooks aren't drunks themselves but racial stereotypes borrowing babies for a baby party, with no sense of one another as characters or actors, like they all just met on the G train out of Brooklyn, or are lining up at boot camp, the endless blank white surfaces behind them reflecting a utilitarian minimalism in the set design. So the wall of an LI mansion becomes the wall of an NYC hotel with just a change in a single wall hanging, with none of the lived-in wealth of grime vs. swank in the first film, some of which survives into AGAIN WITH THE THIN MAN but by SHADOW OF THE THIN MAN is just vapor.

And the thrill of drinking while dodging bullets, and enjoying a marriage with a wife comfortable with both, was going, if not gone, or at least put away for the moment, eased into storage, alongside the west coast Japanese-American population and pacifist humanism, until the end of the war, when noir artisans like Siodmak and De Toth would de-mothball the exoticism that Welles and Von Sternberg had previously delivered, the way someone who eats too much of a certain food never wants to eat that food again, at least until, say seven years or a war have passed.

Two things MGM couldn't overbake with Fordian hick Christian small town provincial weepy moralism: the positive drinking, and the idea of an underworld itself --both essential staples to the series, and both presenting MGM's moral hand-wringers with a problem. The grifters might now all look like they'd been posed in front of walls as phony as a Woolworth painted family Xmas portrait backdrop, but they were there. The glorious mansion of the second film, or ritzy apartment of the first, even the visit to relatives in the third, is supplanted. though, in favor of a nanny, a maid and domesticity galore, Nick is even goaded into drinking a glass of milk to appease his demanding son. Sir, that's carrying supplicated wholesomeness too far!

Good bits: Nora summoning Nick from a bench in Central Park, just by shaking up a cocktail shaker near their fourth floor window across the street! But the minimal sets and tedious MGM homespun shit, coupled with Nick's dime store penchant for playing the ponies, seems like their millions are long gone (they now have an upper floor Central Park condo with a single maid instead of their San Francisco mansion. More than a drinker, Nick's now portrayed as a chronic gambler (that might explain it), loafing around in an upper middle class boilerplate (i.e. they're now the Muensters not the Addams Family). The younger mirrors to Nick and Nora this time include Barry Nelson (the hotel manager from THE SHINING) as part of an allegedly good crime-solving couple, but the writing coasts on lazy coincidence of the sort that would make Dashiell Hammett turn ashen: Nick just "happens" to just be where crimes "happen" rather than being swept up in the naturalistic flow realistic to a big city life that brought Dorothy into a hotel bar over Xmas at the sight on Nick, who once worked a case for her father and with whom she had a childhood crush, etc.

In other words, the believable chain of involvement that separates good writing from bad in the mystery game, is gone, replaced by the kind of lazy B-movie mystery writing where murders just happen wherever the detective happens to be. The one interesting saving grace: the detective's own fame is the trigger. If you're already paranoid about some devious deal your pulling, or pulled years ago during a mysterious hotel fire, the sudden arrival of a Charles onto your scene might trigger an outburst of blackmailer/witness silencing, and 'threatening note wrapped in a rock' window-throwing --this is believable as an explanation why famed sleuths find such ornate murders wherever they go. As Charlie Chan might say, a famous detective never runs out of crime to solve, for fame causes new crimes to cover old ones, like an artist sneaking into museum at night to fix a flaw only recently noticed in an old master, and thus turning an original into a forgery.

Stella Adler

This time the stealth actor in the bunch is none other than legendary acting coach Stella Adler. Watch her big scene with Nick and dig the way she feints forward while he questions her, as if about to kiss him before a serpentine back slither over the word "threaten" until it's practically an admission that Nick's a snake charmer and she's under his sway. But meanwhile, on the negative tip, Nora is getting daffier and daffier, relegated to all sorts of half-baked in-betweenism and ditzy harebrained derogatory MGM backwards-dancing clutziness. She's developed a real knack for stumbling down lazy screenwriter shortcuts towards new inadvertent clues, sussed out of the monochrome sets and cardboard cutout characters and spilled in her lap so the little lady can feel involved... aww, look at her go. MGM back to its old conservative tricks. That is, until the climactic reveal, when she shows moxy and courage to applaud.


THE THIN MAN GOES HOME (1945)
(THE WAR and its END)

"C'est la guerre" - Nick says before downing a nonalcoholic (supposedly) shot of cider. They're on a crowded train (and civilians told to not do any unnecessary traveling), a far cry fromthe swank sleeping cars they had in earlier films. Their overcrowded train coach reflects a loss of comfort or privilege inherent in  homefront upheaval, ala DR. ZHIVAGO's long train to Siberia, a kind of national boot-strap tightening, the kind of socialist compromise MGM would only allow during the actual war (there's not a lot of folk in uniform in this 1945 film, though - Nick's too old by now, or something).

This HOME they go to is another MGM wartime sentiment Andy Hardy softsoap backpedal. Up to now we though Nick a savvy big city detective, but suddenly his urbane cool is funneled into a Spielberg middle class small town ("Sycamore Springs" - saints preserve us) Look out the train window, Nora! He's wistful over the old windmill as it passes by in the train window. While in the baggage car with Asta they're sitting by boxes of "Limburger cheese" and many goats.... i.e. cheap hick sitcom laughs (they have to battle their way through standing room only crowded hallways to get there). I love that the family sticks with the dog in the freight car rather than just letting the group be separated, and no little Nicky, where the hell did he go? Military school? Good. Was that Nick's idea, or Louis B's?

But the series surprises with a good thing for every bad, and this time Loy, in petit bowler hat, is suddenly a whole new mature kind of gorgeous, way above the curve for her or any age. Powell on the other hand looks legitimately booze-battered. He seems much older than last we saw the him: glossy, with a tacky oversize checkered-style suit coat hiding his paunch making him resemble a salesman rather than a detective, dyed-black, receding hair and mustache, complaining about his stomach lining, drinking nonalcoholic cider in a mirror maybe to Fields' Never Give a Sucker ice cream parlor. (As she would do in I Love You Again, Loy prefers the souse to the sober). We learn he's been working, making high fees as a detective, and that Nora's fortune seems apparently gone. The class system that they flourished in is gone, too. The war and its propaganda engine have elevated the cornfed law-abiding common man to the top of the heap and dissolved the sodden drinking classes in ways which seemed patriotic at the time, but would be considered red propaganda as soon as the war ended, and that's the weird thing with Russia. You were patriotic when promoting Russia during the war, and an enemy of the state immediately after. Make up your mind, America! Give Nick back his first-class compartment or give him a consolatory drink!

And the lighting, so layered and rich in the original, has been slowly fading away into spacey country blandness, so bleached out that a person wearing a dark color or sporting a noir shadow would be instantly arrested. So now Loy starts telling wild stories like the "Stinky Davis Case" - which we'd love to see as a movie instead of this one, to impress Nick's country doctor pops; when that fails she starts rattling Sycamore Springs' skeletons, hoping a crime will break out as a result "so [Nick] can show his father what a wonderful detective he is." We can't help but wonder: Are we hearing this right? The "only you darling, lanky brunettes with wicked jaws" worldly hipster has morphed to this sober paunchy gumshoe. ("You might get all sweaty and die," Loy cautions wryly). She's aged way better than he has. Did I mention that? And she's mastered the street slang. But her behavior isn't endearing - it seems wildly ill-advised. Worse is her comeuppance, a humiliating country spanking to punish behavior that the Nora we know would never stoop to. 

The only other babe this time is a muscular little Mary Lou Retinal scan of a blonde (Gloria DeHaven - left) who quotes Shelly while thesping around the first cool set in the film (her shadowy mansion), and then we remember the Tennyson quoted by Edward Brophy (now a greeting card salesman) and we get the feeling that, hey, them what wrote this been to college and wants we should know. Things start looking even further up when lanky Ann Revere appears in a red herring role as a crazy local wild woman, all underlit in her tarpaper shack out in the swamps, Charles suddenly dumping pieces of backstory out of the blue after sending ditzy Nora chasing Brophy around and trying to get him arrested ("They have to do something," the police chief says. Meanwhile Ann Revere conked him on the head with a frying pan rather than answer questions and somehow that doesn't get her arrested for assaulting an officer, so it's not just Nora who doesn't understand law but the police chief either. And then Nora slaps a red herring suspect at a pool room out of the blue in order to get Brophy arrested and the bouncy music says we're somehow supposed to laugh. 

But the end, the final round-up exposition, is as deliriously convoluted as we'd hope for, with the small town maid-playboy adoption and the Bruce Partington Pants, but there's also Nick popping two shirt buttons that day as a lad who finally earns his dad's admiration for solving the case and using doctor dad's highbrow medical jargon along the way.

The brush, son... the brush.

1947 -- The War's long over now, and the Noir can safely begin, set to smoldering jazz on boats three miles out-ish, though I presume we're not meant to think Prohibition's still in effect --is that for the gage, the dope, the weed? Bring on the finale, la SONG OF THE THIN MAN.

w/ Keenan Wynn as the 'young hep cat' they adopt,
or who adopts them

But before the jazz, and the hep lingo, it turns all bullshit sterile, with Nora turned into the exacting old bitter battleaxe she stood against in the earlier films, demanding Nick spank Nick Jr. because he wants to pitch ball instead of lumbering along with his bourgeois piano practice, acting like she's the height of hipsterdom for letting Nick bust out his "last" bottle of Scotch to celebrate the--what was it?--no one who hasn't decided their next Scotch is their "last" can remember or think what the hell that is. By now it's Nick Jr. who's cool, not his drab parents, with Nora's spanking obsession and Nick's jet black dyed hairpiece making him seem bloated and old, and why not? You'd be too if you drank like Nick Charles for the last 20 years... wait, its only been like 13! That's booze for you- and is exactly how long I drank like that too. Anyway, he plays off his non-alcoholic cider like it won't effect his jubilant ease-in-his-own-skin debonair airs, but where are they? His alcoholic métier never quite recovers from his character's booze-related health issues, the inevitable age of his character and the actor, the previous films' wartime home front belt-tightening mirroring his slow backsliding out of the upper class, dragging Nora and her family fortune down with him until he's just another Bukowski-esque bum pitching nickels at the dog track.


If you've been drinking all the way up and including this last film in the series during the TCM New Years marathon, then maybe you'll wonder if Nick's as woozy as you are. Now the drinking is all done by salty sailor types, for now a man cannot be a dad and still be a lush, no matter what Nora says to the contrary (she's not mad he's drunk, just mad he didn't bring her) Still, "he's a pretty good guy," she tells Asta. "he keeps us in dog biscuits"). Aye, now there may be something in what all that is about and we must like that the real time between these cases is allowed to accrue, so each time the folks look further aged.

 By contrast imagine if James Bond in that TV BBC Casino Royale stood in for the real Bond instead of making him a perennial youngster and including the same Moneypenny, Lois Maxwell, so that he needed a cane fur crime solvin' while she stayed kinda hot til late in the game, but there you go because the jazz lingo is all about the Jacksons and 'buckle buckle who's got the buckle' and there's a bullshit detector I got when that shit is like strictly Abe Kabibble and Pops under glass, and da bunk and the Jacksons are all out on the MGM lot with the reeds and the Freeds, but the diggity is strictly like from the non-squaresville camp. Like hey the writing has copped to the censorial small town rubric but the noirscape has taken effect anyway, like the profs never stepped all over the straight shit from out the dance floor in good old Hawksian the SONG IS BORN with Gary Cooper instead of Danny Kaye, I mean BALL OF FIRE not soul of the southern song, like strictly from Memphis, "that don't sound like the old Hollis Juice" - and with most of the film taking place in a series of jazz boats and joints (and even Nora picking up the lingo that giving the gal the 'fuller' means "the brush," son). "The brush."

Gloria Grahame in Song of the Thin Man

They're still "the squarest bunch of hipsters I've ever seen" notes the young Gloria Grahame, looking Veronica Lake type-ish in what would be her definitive scene-stealing performance if she wasn't stealing scenes even more valuable all through subsequent decade and Nick Ray's flea-bit pocks, er.. pockets. By which I mean the 50s, Asta, the 50s.

Last thing to mention, a really gone (white) Charlie Parker type checks into an alcoholic rest home--one of the first we've seen though they were all the rage in the pages of Chandler. The doctor notes of this suspect that "His mind has been completely shattered by alcohol." As a clearly pre-recorded clarinet solo wails in the background on the rest home grounds, dig the fine line between insanity and just cookin' on yon olde axe.

And compare too the awful ground between the high steppin' livin on 1934's original and 1947's now. Barely 13 years--you took no notice, old VERTIGO redwood slice-- but a whole nation's concept of alcoholism was won and lost as if in an MGM backlot dice game between Charlie Parker and Bing Crosby vs. Josephs McCarthy and Technicolor Dreamcoat Stalin. And best of all, surprising the hell out of me, Keenan Wynn is their jazzbo mascot, gamely shepherding them through the jazz joints like a mix of Johnny Staccato and Charon.

The last image of the entire Thin Man series, and maybe my entire life: Asta sneaking out from under Nick Jr's sheets to not get busted by Nick and Nora for sleeping in his bed and moving back up through the sheets to the pillows almost immediately as the lights are off.

Positively tha same dog.

See also:

Myrna Loy Round-up 

Booze! Rate Your Drinking Problem through these 12 Progressively More Harrowing Movies

William Powell's Retrograde Psychedelic Amnesia: CROSSROADS, I LOVE YOU AGAIN

BEST OF 2015

What a year. Is this the one where time broke? Critics best of are divided and prejudiced by what they were able to see, for thanks to streaming sites literally zillions of new movies come out every second. Whether a movie is from 2014 because it was at Cannes but not released to you until 2015, or won't be released til 2016 and you can't write about yet or hasn't been released here at all so you can get all chummy and presumptive of your readers' indulgence like people still care you used to write for the Times Ah hell, I'm doing it too just by talking about how much I hate them.

1. IT FOLLOWS

Dir. David Thomas Mitchell

Scary without being cruel or callous, sweet without being corny, David Thomas Mitchell has made maybe the best horror film ever. It has hit me, myself, quite personally, reminding me not of the 80s slasher craze that traumatized me a young kid but my reaction to them; my buddy Alan and I searching closets with a butcher knife and fire poker. I'm watching it right now, for the tenth time, and swooning from its deliriously low key embrace. Those long takes, low angles, the brilliant tracking shots through abandoned Detroit cityscapes like its America's own haunted house, Mithchell's ability to bring out the uncanny frisson of geometrical movement while avoiding Kubrick's coldness. Detractors cite its inconsistency but they should remember that this is myth, baby, one of the most succinct and scariest myths ever made, with the best scary cool analog synth score not made by John Carpenter. A dream-past reverie on that mortal moment when we realize we're now 'grown' and not 'growing' --so we begin running from death as it runs to meet us fast as a mental patient's relentless stalking countdown. Seeking immortality in the sexual drive, 'passing it on' through the generations (Life as the original STD), the horror of birth and fear of death commingled like atoms to form the core of what makes 80s slasher movie tropes our new Grimm's Fairy Tales archetypal lexicon. Virginity is just death's cab without the meter running. Once we finally break the seal and have sex, the driver hits the flag down and the engine sputters to life. From now on, we're running up a bill.

There's also Maika Monroe, touching and low-key as Jay, the prettiest girl in the neighborhood yet actually sweet to all the kids on the block-- the mere mortals--including her kid sister and her friends-- how that sweetness will rally them all around her in a protective wall when needed, generating a kind of chivalrous loyalty we haven't seen since the Victorian age. Or the way even the smallest, shyest of replies and questions seem to hurt and embarrass these kids, their voices reticent and low, making it seem like no matter what the hour they're always trying to not wake the seldom-seen parents. Or how beautiful pink and blue lights and 70s suburban shadows make every shot a luminous poem alive with vaguely 30s two-strip color used on films like Mystery at the Wax Museum and Dr. X, showing the extent which HD's qualities and debits can be employed rather than merely ignored or overcome. Or how there's not a single cliche within 30 miles --no pop songs, no filler, no snark or meanness, yelling, or parental meddling. Instead, every frame a poetic illustration of the birth-death cycle, how even if we're just the subject of someone's attraction the demons can use their form against us. No desire is free, no matter how unexpressed.

Once accustomed to our biological clock's roaring electric hum, all other sounds seems underwater.

2. THE HATEFUL EIGHT

Dir Quentin Tarantino

Everyone here at my Phoenix, Arizona-dwelling NRA member brother's house got ammo, holsters, and/or gun cleaner in their stocking today (it's 12/25/15) but all I wanted was this film, for our Xmas day seeing DJANGO three years ago had rocketed me into a higher time zone. And a bullet-riddled 70mm roadshow advance limited release "road show" screening of H8TEFUL was playing right next door in Tempe. It's colder here than it is in my home of New York City right now so I dig that his 8th film is set in the mountains over on the border between Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming in white-out blizzard inside and around a cozily lit all-purpose bar/stagecoach rest stop with a thunderously sly Morricone score riding below it like two ponies of Col. Rutledge's brandy. The 70mm and the blizzard environment keeps the breathtaking vistas blurred the way they are in real life when darkness falls early through thick Battle of the Bulge (also shot on 70mm) clouds, and keeps the indoor fires so vivid and analog perfect they could warm your tootsies just by moving a few rows closer.


Tarantino's out to fuck with our conceptions of 'rooting for' heroes and booing villains, and to even throw our PC feminist ire under the bus so that I use the word 'tootsies' for toes even though it goes against my liberal arts mind control programming. Such is the QT genius that this old programming freezes up, so I can cheer seeing Jennifer Jason Leigh get her teeth knocked out for using the N-word. I hope her ferocity is recognized at Oscar time! Is this her Hans Landa? Other cast members include Channing Tatum in a slight but mesmerizing performance that would make him a star if he wasn't already; Samuel Jackson as a Bass Reeves-y bounty hunter with a yen for goading a Confederate general (Bruce Dern) into reaching for his gun first and--well surprise, soo-prize--Walton Goggins demonstrating the maniacal Tarantino oomph that separates the inconsistent character actor from bona fide badass. And Bruce Dern is amazing as the general; he sounds like he was listening to real confederate generals to get his inflection right. Other cast members don't do as well: as the 'dispassionate' hangman, Tim Roth sounds like he's trying to be Christophe Waltz one minute, and Peter Sellers doing a Richard Attenborough impression the next; Michael Madsen,  in Sheriff Woody cowboy vest, seems lost as an enigmatic drifter, but his voice is great; Mexican actor Demián Bichir sounds like he's doing a fake Mexican accent as "Bob" but it's funny, and maybe even appropriate.

It's too bad but maybe fitting that the police union condemned the film, for it shows among many great examples of how America becomes stronger together: black and white, blue and grey, bleeding red and reading a dubious Lincoln letter while the camera slowly rises as if up a flagpole (instead of a taut noose). It's why I support the John Milius brand of seemingly self-contradicting pro-gun liberalism more than the guilt-trip crypto-fascism of the Michael Moore. Quentin does too, it would seem, for here amply illuminates the way the difference between murder and justifiable homicide/self defense sometimes hangs by a thread, and the importance of making sure your opponent has a price on his head or his finger on the trigger, before you blow him out of his boots, lest you find yourself hung right quick. Above all it shows the reason this is important to have: real evil exists in the world, and, when you're out in the wilderness, there's no 911. Sometimes the thin blue line has to be drawn on the spot, in the bloody snow, by a boot with the toe shot off.

3. MAPS TO THE STARS
Dir. David Cronenberg

This lurid, slow-burn haunted Hollywood saga of pyromaniac schizophrenics, ghosts of dead starlets manifesting to daughters now grown to twice their age, spoiled child stars, egomaniacal life coaches, and insane pyromaniacs, could only come from an indie auteur outside the system but fluid within it, i.e. a Canadian, i.e. Cronenberg. With his pathological aversion to whimsy, he ensures the ghosts are a logical hallucination of youth-obsessed narcissists trained in the art of letting their imagination get the better of them. In the same year's Clouds of Sils Maria, Juliette Binoche plays a similarly middle-aged actress returning to the play that made her famous, but as the older woman rather than the young hottie. It's a terrible blow to the ego, but she does it, and it suits the masochism of the Bitter Tears-y play but in Maps, the better option to growing old and being forced to play your own mother is finally presented: burn the whole fucking place to the ground. (full review)

4. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

Dir. George Miller

The weird gold patina of the action in the promos made it seem like much CGI about nothing, especially if you loved the Road Warrior (Mad Max 2) as an alienated kid, but didn't really like the first (with its then "American" dubbed soundtrack) or third (too grotesque and scatological). But Miller's fourth film takes the big truck chase climax of the The Road Warrior and stretches it two hours into the void, filling it full of sunbleached women, Nordic mutants and crazy vehicles. It left some critics shellshocked but most of us had our socks blown off so far they drifted in astral winds. I have a feeling it's going to make a lot of alienated 15 year-old boys very happy for centuries to come.

5. FORCE MAJEURE
Dir. Ruben Östlund

In Majeure, an upscale Nordic family's Alpine ski vacation is interrupted after an avalanche blowback whiteout rolls over the outdoor brunch patio, compeling the father to bolt inside, leaving wife and kids to fend for themselves in the process. The white out clears, brunch resumes, the father returns like nothing's happened, but the mom's faith in him is destroyed; he only exacerbates her distrust when he tries to remember it differently, to deny and convince her of a different set of facts. Thanks to the long-held stationary camera, the white-out can no longer occur in memory as well as nature, not in this era, not when the elephant in the room has been identified and deflated. Dad has no power, inside or out, and he gets slapped for flinching.. But fate is cruel evenly and the white outs never end. Östlund gives us such a wide magnificently framed canvas of events, makes such sublime use of the HD frame, that we feel like we could step through the screen right into this amazing hotel. We can smell the melting snow and rubber, the chlorine... it's intense, beautiful, vivid, and smart. Maybe the best film about the toll 'family' vacation takes on a fathers' nerves since ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW.

6. INHERENT VICE

Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Who knows what would have been the result if Welles made a 70s stoner detective film. Would it have been INHERENT VICE, or is there just no character titanic enough within the story to hold his interest? In the end, that may be the thing. There's no core or center to VICE, no 'hurrah' moment like the pool party in BOOGIE or the "I'm the antichrist" climax of BLOOD. Phoenix is a great actor, but he's a scrawny shell of a thing, a short wiry little weirdo whose hipster disaffect on talk shows is alienating and less clever than he thinks. We don't gravitate to him like we do to Warren William or Bogart in similar roles, or even Dick Powell or big Jeff Bridges (or his father, Lloyd Bridges, for that matter). As for VICE's detective narrative, it's more coherent than some, but that can work against the LEBOWSKI 'there is no explanation to life's latticework of coincidence - so let's go bowling' open-endednes. In the meantime, just soak in Eric Roberts' brilliant monologue that rips the guts out of capitalism with an LSD trowel and reveals nothing but jewelry-coated vultures beneath the black enamel topsoil. Savor the breathing aurae of cinematographer Robert Elswit, spiderweb lines of light and shadow haloing around every actor; the great clothes and cars like some old album come to life that slowly gets weird the longer you stare at it, because --hey what was in that joint? (MO)

7. THE CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Dir Olivia Assayas

With its trio of strong female leads ranging along the All about Eve / Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant axis, playing versions of themselves and each other with interlapping age gaps accounted for with the same weird mix of back-stabbing and tough love with which younger executive assistants are shepherded by older employers into the abyss of self-awareness and ambition. While certainly great material for the actresses to layer up in, almost accidentally summing up and illustrating Assayas's great instinct for self-sabotage, his fascination with watching his/her life/work burn up in the car fire of doomed love (he sucks at endings).  Maria (Juliette Binoche) is the aging star and her assistant Val (Kristen Stewart) is the protege; they talk about Maria's character in the play within the film, Maria's Lars Von Trier/Fassbinder nihilistic interpretation vs. Val's interpretation of Maria's interpretation as an easy rationalization that excuses self-pity, creating a false image of youth based on one's own rose-tinted memories to shield the character's own stunted maturation. Binoche is great but Kristen Stewart steals the show as Val, handling her personal assistant duties with startling cool, knowing just how to rile or soothe or otherwise push her boss's buttons while juggling deals and cars and hotel rooms and interviews and meetings with photographers without ever seeming to break her cool detached stride or get mad at her incessantly ringing cell phone. Chloë Grace Moretz is the rising star playing the younger part in the play - there's a great bit of her in a kinky superhero movie Maria and Val see at the local theater.

8.THE OVERNIGHT 

Dir. Patrick Brice

It's hard to make new friends as an adult these days--it takes effort. And that goes double for couples, which is why it's often up to their children. For my parents it was through the Jaycees they met all their swinging couples and my brother and it being the 70s, I remember staying up and greeting the sunrise with another family, all nine of us, where everyone loved everyone else, that was magical stuff. Where did that go? Have I become a night owl in love with staying up to sunrise because of those memories? Even the 70s had a hard time capturing that giddy high. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice skipped the kids part, and there's The Ice Storm skipped the love part, and there's Radley Metzger's Score! and its predecessor Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? skipped both, but The Overnight gets it oh-so right, launching it into a kind of in a weird class all its own. What works so well in this film is the spontaneity of it, the actors are all excellent, and the truths and acceptances fly fast and furious. I generally avoid anything with the name Duplass associated with it, for personal reasons that really have nothing to do with them themselves, but this film is so good --with great well nuanced performances by Taylor Schilling and Adam Scott in the 'normal' couple role, and Judith Godrèche and Jason Schwartzman as the more liberated couple, in a beautiful house with an array of fabulous artsy rooms, including as we learn, separate bedrooms. The whiskey gets poured, the clothes are shed, the bong is brought out, the kids lulled to sleep, and the chips begin to fall where they may. Whether or not you experienced any nights like this yourself, either as the child or the drugged out adult, you can't help but appreciate the way inhibitions are shed when truths come out rather than vice versa, and one doesn't merely fall back on old knee-jerk circle the wagons denial and evasion, then liberation of inhibitions lead to all sorts of confessions and bonding, the bullshit all cut through in great strides. Capturing the magic of that is like lightning in a bottle, which is why this film is so very much electric.

9. (tie) A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE 

Dir. Anna Lily Amirpour

At last there's an Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in "Bad City," actually amidst the graveyards and oil derricks of Bakersfield, CA., "pumping up money" as Hank Quinlan would say, or "blood" as vampire Plainview would say. A place where rock anthems are still and forever relevant, it's forever the 80s, all while Madonna stares out from her poster and the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. "The first western Iranian vampire movie" has a startling doppelganger effect in Sheila Vand's similarity to the film's writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, as she's an amazing character, a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed women in Iran's repressive milieu, wrapped in her black cape hijab like Dracula's, she preys mainly on male predators, waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, her playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way. Even with his blood rich in ecstasy, though, after a costume rave, our girl holds off indulging, instead engaging in a slow motion moment, beautifully set to a madly whirling disco ball and White Lies' "Death," a perfect song to bring them together as it builds slowly from just another click track into emotional sweep and grandeur all the more special for seeming to come so guileless and true, the Let the Right One Inverse of Sixteen Candles.

                 INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

Dir. Desiree Akhavan

Here's a second great film written, directed and starring (1) a hot young second generation Iranian American woman (Desiree Akhavan) living just too much for the city. And If you've lived in NYC in your 20s and dated around with a lot of wild drinking, drugging, hipster girls in run-down apartments, shared your hopes and stash and yadda yadda, then you can tell when it's done right, by someone who knows what they're talking about. Frances Ha? No, I don't believe girls this naive could survive five minutes (maybe it just hurts me to remember being that naive here myself?). But Broad City? Yes, no doubt. Those girls are the shit. And then there's this great film, the way it constantly checks itself through blunt confessional conversation rather than wreck itself by backsliding into second generation Iranian-American immigrant, lesbian awakening drama, slutty exhibitionism or quirk cliche. All the cliche in fact I was dreading, including the WASP girl opening up to a foreign culture at a colorful garbed wedding, etc, or the stern old world parents that don't get their Americanized daughters bisexuality (the dad puts his foot down, mom says "I'll talk to him") or something? Here the dad is great, chill even with moving his daughter into filthy artsy flats full of strange roommates.  Mom can't quite acknowledge the coming out, as if she's literally deaf to it, but that's natural, at least there's no grandma praying over her; the dialogue and Park Slope vibe (I know, 'cuz I live there, bra) is spot on.while the girl played so stunningly here by Akhavan is so alive and believable I love her; she makes no attempt to become a type for another type to bounce off against, avoiding nearly every indie pitfall or pratfall through the kind of cut-through-the-crap comedic honesty I hadn't seen since last year's Obvious Child...

10. THE NIGHTMARE

Dir. Rodney Ascher 

(From Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories): Scientists tend to forget the way our sensorially-decoded paradigm is limited to human perception of self; it's their myopia that makes them paranoid, like fundamentalist Christians seeing heretics in the cobwebs of their attics. If a Christian has sleep paralysis, the being looming above him would be perceived as Satan; if he had been reading David Icke, the being would be a reptilian alien; a gnostic scholar would see an archon; a UFO scholar, a flock of greys come for an abduction. That doesn't mean they're not seeing something, it means they're seeing things as they really are, fluid, void of permanence, subject to our sensory decoding and all its cultural whims, shaped by our perceptions themselves, just as they are shaped by our biology. Ascher approaches from this end, via experiencers talking about their visions, which are in turn vividly recreated for an approach that, like his previous hit, ROOM 237, transcends mere 'documentary' to become something truly new, twisted, and deeply illuminating.

11. WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS

Dir. Jermaine Clement, Taika Watita

Finally we have a mockumentary as good as This is Spinal Tap. A Funny or Die production in conjunction with the NZ crew behind the late great Flight of the Conchords, this is a richly photographed, laugh-packed, low-key vampire roommate comedy that I'll admit sounded pretty cashed, played-out, and same-old-shit sort of thing on paper (a mockumentary about a flat full of unmarried 'young' male vampires? How fresh!), but in practice, the genius details start accruing immediately and never stop: there's the basement dwelling Shreck-like Nosferatu; Jermaine Clement as the deep voiced Vlad the Impaler/Byronic brooder; a younger maniac; co-director Waitita as a vamp stalking his still-human ex-fiancee, now 92, and so on.. With the amount of blood and killing presented so matter-of-factly (rather relying on the usual 'vampire veganism' copouts)--it emerges a well-worth repeat-viewing future cult masterwork, as instantly timeless as the centuries-old vampire myths they so affectionately satirize, hilarious but with a blood-curdling savagery that makes every laugh just a hair uneasy (in the best of way).

NOTES:
1. Amirpour didn't play the lead in her film, but did double for her in the skateboard scenes, so what does that tell you? 

Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression vs. American Dogma

According to some wide mean streak in American pop criticism--stretching from bourgeois Academy voters all the way to  the soured douchebags of the comments sections--gorgeous sexy young girl artists and performers are meant to be just about anything but genuinely subversive. Never challenging to the status quo in any other way but via shrill feminist harangues and union cards. They can be gazed on but not gaze back, not threaten our place of omnipotent safety in the theater/living room. Medusas in Reverse, we presume our right to gaze upon their loveliness (or lack of) at our Mulveyan leisure, judging them for their garb, hair, posture, youthfulness; but if they look at us the same way, it turns us instantly to stone. It's the revenge of Lacan's petit a, when one's persona-accruing object of desire turns suddenly and stares back, or even worse, sends us a come hither stare. Suddenly they're no longer achingly far away but too close for comfort. We run shrieking to the channel changer like a window shade, embarrassed and angry. Later when they've closed those eyes to sleep we creep up from the dark and scribble mean things on their door. We're so mature.

If you don't know what I mean, here's an example: you're a regular straight dude gazing at some beautiful woman across a crowded room or street, not even thinking consciously, just spreading some proprietary gaze around like a radar, as a man does, especially in our constant state of televisual hypnosis, where we're conditioned to treat all pretty girls as if they're onscreen and can't gape back. So there's this one girl you see across the street and she's way hot, so you're gazing a little more wistfully, as if she was your favorite new actress. Then suddenly she sees you. She stares back at once, unflinching, smiling enigmatically, and starts to cross the street towards you, slowly but not shyly.

Before you can stop yourself, you blush and turn away, start walking in the other direction, like you got caught at something. A second later you reconsider. You're not a shy poseur, you should turn and meet her and who knows? Is she waiting there for you to nut up or shut up, gaze-wise?

Of course not. She's already gone. It's too late. She's talking to someone else, or was actually walking towards someone behind you. You realize her proprietary gaze is way more advanced than yours. For you she was pretty, for her, you were fresh meat. She knew she'd cow you, knew you were all gaze and no follow-through. Now though, you hate her. She popped your balloon with a pin eyelash.


Welcome to the New Depression. For the American critic, who is too high up the bourgeois ladder to look down without getting vertigo, this is where it ends. That hate constitutes sufficient ground for the poison pen to write and having writ, move on, and often that means on down to their parents' basement, as they been fired, their editors have had their budget slashed and can hire prettier younger critics at 1/4 their price... all these old dog critics can do is bark petulantly from the safety of their wordy leash columns. And their reviews get more and more blatantly misogynist the more and more power--imaginary or other--they're forced to secede to women 1/2 their age eager to work twice as hard for 1/4 the money. Most obvious of all though is something I see in academia all the time, a complete blindness to their own faults and foibles. Having years of clout, all access laminates, and Fed-Exed daily screeners have left them spoiled and egotistical, and if someone comes along and points out their writing betrays an insecure misogynist virgin at its core, they wig out like it's not just they have been insulted, but--as JJ Huensecker would say--all 20 million of their readers. And if the someone pointing it out is a hot bitch 1/3 their age who writes twice as well for 1/10 the price and just got the exact same all-access laminate and put on all the same PR screener mailing lists, they lash out blindly and viciously. In the words of some pompous silver-bearded bourgeois behind me at Magno Screening Room circa 2003, "how dare that little blonde bimbo call me a misogynist?!"

Isn't this the reason so many women don't gaze back? The average male gaze becomes like a prison searchlight, or a buzzing hornet. The woman mustn't seem like it bothers her, that she even notices, lest that average male gaze turn hateful, fearful, threatened. This gives her power in its way, as she becomes more and more like an onscreen heroine, a babe on a jpeg, an abstract locus of petit a Lacanian desire. But it's got to be withering on the nerves, like not flinching while one hornet after another buzzes around your ears and eyes for minute after minute, year after year.

Kristen Stewart, looking

If you are man able to embrace that reciprocal sting of the woman's return gaze, without needing to sting in return (recognizing your flinching as a pre-conditioned response that's 'on you' not them) even savor it like a Joseph von Sternberg protagonist, then you can stay in awe, as a friend and admirer, and thus not lose her as a source of soothing beauty, inspiring cool, and seething wit. You can bask in her soothing charm and imperious aura as she commands the dream screen cabaret, not imagining oneself as her would-be wooer but as her life coach, a cool friend, advisor in romantic affairs.

On the screen this translates more or less automatically, which is why for example I hate to see an actress I admire date an actor I don't (in a movie). George Brent or Fred MacMurray, for example, have faces my fists clench up instinctually to punch. I want my girl to date someone played by Cary Grant or William Powell, someone with class and wit. They can return that gaze without blushing and looking away, and I can watch them as their unborn child might from some Enter the Void perspective, their godlike figures looming on the screen. It's this position most film critics refuse to acknowledge, as it's way more prenatal than their billing/cooing staring judgment. It's the Studlarian masochistic viewer rather than the Mulveyan sadistic. This position posits that viewers we inhabit a perspective beyond age and gender, beyond control, tied to the winds like a roller-coaster like a newborn. We are subject only to the presence/absence of the goddess, our gigantic mom idol, Nicole Kidman beaming overhead like a rectangular religious vision over the 'Exit' sign when you see Birth alone in the dark of the Orpheum.

First we need to erase from our brains certain rom-coms that try undo von Sternberg's masochistic gaze, that try to flatter the shot guy complex neediness of certain little pisher comics desperate to seem desirable to hot blonde shiksas.

Rot in Hell, "Harry"! 

THE DEFAMATION OF THE PLATONIC PAIR BOND: 

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY (1991)

In American rom-coms of today, love scenes are generally written and acted by people drawing on a collective cinematic memory that doesn't reach father back than 1991's When Harry met Sally, which smugly taught that men and women can't be best friends without eventually hooking up, that even if you're smaller than she is with a voice like a tin piano, you can pull some late inning guilt trip to get her into bed, craftily knock her up, and then live happily ever after, elf princess hand-in-hand with craven Gollum.

Sally's arrival into the mainstream lexicon ("I'll have what she's having") stunted the sexual development of American romantic comedy, trapped it in a nose-wrinkling cutesy fake orgasm tourist mentality ever since. There's only a handful of romantic comedies made in Hollywood in the last 20 years that get the complexity of French love stories by say Rohmer or even Clint Eastwood's early films like Breezy. And none have been able to really show falling in love happening right there onscreen; as Yogi Berra might say, they can't slow down fast enough. Maybe that's because the PC corrective shoes on our 70s swinger feet have left us hobbled so that we can't even retreat. There's no Mae West to lead us out from under the unending parade of televisual hot mess permafrost. Amy Schumer came close in Trainwreck but then copped out by learning cheerleader dances and curbing her drinking. Only recently, with women-penned young adult novels like Twilight and Hunger Games, are we presented with female protagonists too strong and complex for insecure male screenwriters and directors to sabotage, and actresses too young and strong to be yet cowed by that old devil searchlight male gaze. They got gazes all their own, these dames, and god forbid they cast their beams back into the camera, the whole audience freezes up like a corrupted share drive.

Not since the days of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish have women characters been so true to novels and plays, i.e. genuinely complex--even to the point of feigning weakness-- rather than our current movie idea of strong, where no heroine is allowed to go farther than her own surface and becoming empowered means a gun and a new hat, rather than ripping a hole in the glass ceiling and smoking the sky like crack. These Reverse Medusas don't get the same kind of open praise as the 'little sisters" (Jennifer Lawrence), or old school Hollywood knock outs (Scarlett Johansson)-- the ones who fit inside established persona categories, who talk the walk and wow the interviewers and generally play the game, the kind your parents want you to marry when you bring them home over Christmas (as opposed to locking up the liquor cabinet and shooting you baleful looks). I love both those actresses, I love most all actresses in fact. But I have a soft spot for the apple cart kickover artists, the hot mess crazy wreckers.

But to swap the genders, in which category do you think Brando or James Dean would have fallen in the early 50s?  Certainly they would scare the shit out of your parents' parents, simultaneously generous and miserly, girly and manly, fey and churlish, mercurial, dangerous, alive, smelling terrible. These bad girls and reckless boys were all over the 70s, and the drive-in, but where are they now? We need them! Go to bed already "mom" and let the bad kids come over. And if some shit gets broken, stolen, or bloodied, so what? Crazy is so close to genius you have to just trust all the smashing is going somewhere relevant, even if it never does. Otherwise, we'll never make a movie any better than Forrest Gump. 

THE REDEMPTION OF THE PLATONIC PAIR BOND: MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING (1997):

You can still find mainstream badass women characters that average critics love but don't recognize for their genius, any more than they do Kristen Stewart (until she was lionized by the French this year). Julia Roberts is brilliant in My Best Friend's Wedding but those who revere her tend not to be film theorists, maybe for no other reason than they haven't seen it due to the title and dippy ad campaign/poster. If not for Robin Wood's high praise in Sexual Politics in Narrative Cinema I wouldn't have seen it either. From afar it looks like a typical rom-com except for one thing: Julia's two best friends are men, one an aesthete gay editor (Rupert Everett) miles away from the 'gay best friend' cliches, and the other a blank slate sports writer (Dilbert McDevitt) who has a sexual past with Julia which was transcended by friendship, which is in the context of the film, proved more important. 

The moral of the film, that Wood picked up on is essay and I'm running with here, is that having a platonic love affair/best friend of the opposite gender one never hooks up with (either anymore or ever to begin with) is not only possible it's better than actual carnal love, at least for a certain kind of person, i.e. a true writer in the sense that sex and procreation are never as important to a writer as writing, or shouldn't be. Writers only engage in sex long enough to write about it later. In The Leopard, Burt Lancaster says "marriage is six months of fire and forty years of ashes," but the platonic soulmate best friendships are more like forty years of smoldering coal, continually giving enough heat to warm the entire room and allow for freer movement, but with a sweater on instead of naked on a bearskin rug, with roaring fire sweating followed by post-orgasmic freezing.

DAMAGE

And so today, a new age is born, where women cut through the male gaze barbed wire and emerge bloody and triumphant. We have subversive outside-the-box genius women on screen and airwave who are unafraid to tap into their own personal hells, their bi-polar melancholia, drug addiction, abusive past, as colors for their performer paintbox. And above all they unveil the willingness to sit there, in make-up, furs and write large upon our screens such reverse Medusa gazing as Hollywood not seen since the era of screwball comedy. They are like a relatively young version of Gloria Swanson, continually shedding her Norma Desmond reptilian scaly hide on a monthly basis, rather than letting it accrue, get flaky and become the ascendent ego.

It's terrifying for a man to realize just how much damage his gaze inflicts; he doesn't even think he has a gaze at all until some girl gazes back and he feels so suddenly caught and threatened. For startled bourgeois critics, self-assured return gaze brazenness better have a British or French accent attached, or she better be over 40 and playing a villain. If she's one of ours, a young American, then she's just being uppity, trying to glorify those haughty hussy habits which mothers would willingly ween from the line. If these dangerous women try to find the poetry that is there in the abyss of the mirror, they become a threat.

The Europeans aren't as threatened, which is why their women are allowed to be so much more vibrant, intellectual and confident. They know that just because it's destructive and pointless doesn't mean it's not brave, beautiful and poetic. Sixty years ago the whole continent was smashed to shit, but look where they are now compared to us! Shit doesn't matter. Only occasionally are there critics in the American press and mommy blogs who can locate and analyze the dark chthonic core of feminine power and celebrate its destructive Kali currents rather than moping like some Fordian Irish scrubwoman.

You know you are, you Kali flame dancin' foxy fur-wearin' bitchez!

ANGELINA JOLIE, for example, once had the kind of crazy that scares the shit out of the status quo Oscar-giving bourgeois (they gave her one anyway) but then she starred in Beyond Borders (2003) and became that character, i.e. a Red Cross Saint Theresa-type enamored of saving the third world's children. Now she just earns an eight figure check on the blockbusters to pay the orphanage bills but saves her real chutzpah for saintly suffering mother roles like Changeling.

That's okay, that's her trip. Who am I to judge her on what she says or does (Dan Hill, bro), now. But she used to be a bona fide badass, as you can see if you scroll up her red carpet moments at the 1999 Oscar ceremony where she showed the kind of black widow resonance a genuinely dangerous actress could radiate, especially since her date was her equally sexy/creepy brother (above left).

Because such crazy sexy cool as hers in that picture is usually only celebrated in men (Jack Nicholson, De Niro, Day Lewis), the only way American actresses can show their fiery goddess of chthonic psychosexual power and still catch an Oscar is if said fire is contextualized and confined to the psych ward, or meets death at the end. Angelina Jolie could win an Oscar because her Lisa in Girl wound up even crazier and less likely to be released than when we first meet her. The bourgeois were 'safe' in applauding her, loving the caged lion but ready to run like hell if it ever got loose.

Well, it escaped, collectively, and the bourgeois critical consensus has been running ever since, still loping around behind the web's instant feedback loop like that old Italian guy chasing after Barbara Steele in 8 1/2. unaware they're on a goddamned hamster wheel, fighting every day for space in actual print publications like wildebeests at a shrinking watering hole. There's no more Pauline Kael to call them out as they pile into any old van marked 'Important' art cinema, only to find they have nowhere to come back to when the festival is over; they've been replaced on the mastheads by cute interns with six-digit Twitter followers who never even heard of Hitchcock.

French publications like Cahiers du Cinema, meanwhile, once our tastemakers, pointing out what amongst our perceived B-movie dross was gold and in the process helping us re-examine all B-films in a new light, are becoming more bourgeois, busy praising small third world proletariat struggle documentaries rather than Ants in your Plants of 2009. And so our White Elephants stampede towards Oscar gold, renting space on the dwindling art house screens for a week to be eligible, pushing the real art, the dangerous art, off in just the same way their editorial champions were pushed off their mastheads. Only a few Europeans like Von Trier, Assayas, Refn, and Noe seem to be still trying to unearth the weird undiscovered worms beneath unturned rocks of the Now, but they get very hung up on sex and violence, both to please executive producers and to get shocked write-ups. If the critics feel something, these auteurs reason, even if it's just shock and disturbed trauma, at least they felt.

Meanwhile, in America, we just don't get deluges of German Expressionists fleeing the Fatherland to Hollywood any more, bringing women like Marlene Dietrich and Garbo to school us in the return gaze, the sick pleasure in seeing a beautiful self-possessed women seen both herself seeing you and you seeing what she sees, and feeling the sting of rejection when she turns to look at someone else (hopefully not goddamned George Brent).

As Mick La Salle points out in his book Dangerous Women, there was nothing sexual in the love of a 1920s moviegoing male for Garbo.  They'd go to the theater every night, eyes looking up to the big screen, with a love that encompassed and then transcended even the giant mommy aspect (her silver screen projected face as large as mom's was when he was a suckling child); the 'Garbo widow' effect tapped into primordial matriarchal pagan harvest goddess worship, and outwards into a kind trans-behavioral oceanic state of aesthetic arrest.

But today Laura Mulvey's theory of the sadistic gaze is treated more or less as factual gospel in academia, and so pre-empts and denies that relationship can exist. Though Mulvey is on record saying the meant her theory more as a conversation starter rather than the first and last word, mainstream theory has irrevocably begun using it as a new dogma. And now even the Femme Fatale is criticized as a male design, and the result has been a generation of crypto-feminists trying to slap the imagined masculine gaze from out of their eyes and face like a crazy person batting at invisible mosquitos.


LANA DEL REY: 60s AMERICA'S SWEETEST SUICIDE NOTE

Lana Del Rey's made a string of great sad sexy videos that seemed to prove the ghosts of early 60s Los Angeles suicides are the only thing of substance left in America, and even then only because their last few memories were shot on Super 8 and 16mm home movie stock. But the negative feedback her schtick received, even from third wave feminist pundits, back in the early days, was quite alarming. It wasn't exactly new (she would fit right in any David Lynch or Don Draper nightmare) but she tapped a nerve. She was gorgeous yet strange, with those lips that hovered between seeming real and seeming augmented; a dazzling body and great cascading beehive-ready hair and a never say no policy to drugs, alcohol and bad boys that sent our American Puritan minds racing. She was just doing whatever drugs the bad boys have, getting into cars with strangers, and engaging in all sorts of twisted scenes with hot black guys and middle-aged bikers, much to our masochistic Von Sternbergian fury. The privileged PC Communist infiltrator liberal arts faculty-brainwashed feminists found themselves angry over the most mundane inconsistencies in her origin story. She used to be named Lizzy Grant and have curly hair and sing bubblegum pop or something, like she was the only singer who ever changed names or personas.

Meanwhile, the Jungian mythos and psychomythological natural law-abiding Paglia feminists like myself were genuinely enthralled by Lana del Rey/Lizzy Grant's ability to zero in on and then embody the dark dream anima of the American culture dreamscape consciousness, as if she was a succubus from space who'd lived many lives and been soaking up America's broadcast radio, TV and dream transmissions as she flew closer and closer to our dreaming third eye, ready to meet that return gaze and Medusa us at a moment's notice should our sympathy but waver a nanosecond.

In short, if the naysayers had gone in for Jung or even modernism then they'd know their their indignant anger was the correct aesthetic response, the same one response solicited by the girl who stares back and causes us to blush instinctively, look away, and feel like a loser. The anger over the sting of shame is the correct aesthetic response; it's the not realizing this--not realizing masochism is the purist cinematic experience--that's the problem. It takes self-awareness to be able to detach from one's shame long enough to appreciate its all-encompassing beauty, rather than just presuming you're right to hit back if you feel hit, regardless of you actually were. Those Del Rey videos sting our pride like a slap in the face. We can storm off and volley off some outraged tweets or use the pain, the humiliation, as a kind of reset button. We can savor it the way we savor dream cinema, the type where not possessing or controlling the seen stimuli that so affects our emotions is a liberation through enslavement.

ROSE McGOWAN'S COUNTER-TERRORISM AESTHETIC: RM486

Trained as we Americans are by today's multiplex cinema to slough off actresses and characters into various boxes (sullen daughter, misguided vixen, All-American heimliches dumbmadchen, materialistic villain, traumatized victim / avenging angel, etc.) we feel bewildered when a woman, especially a young pretty woman kicks them over, not after a third act sulking montage but within the same bedroom conversation, navigating a push-me-pull you Sun Tzu-Rommel strategy. We're Americans, we're not comfortable with ambiguity and fluid personae in attractive young women. It makes us nervous. Would we want to sleep with them or not? It's a simple question! Yes or no? Our fantasy is being punctured by her bi-polar ambiguity.

Let's say you're an average SWM in the 90s but haven't had any luck with the ladies for almost a year. Then, you see "her," everyone in your posse thinks she's gorgeous, and you are the one who brings her home to your bachelor pad. You sit her down on the bed, and go to make some drinks in the kitchen, high on yourself, already mentally slapping five with your clique the next day at brunch. Then... as you mix the drinks and she unfurls, she remembers she has to quick call her friends so they don't worry where she is. Her mom cuts in on another line and she spends an hour shouting in Russian. After ten minutes, you go in the other room and watch TV; you come back when she hangs up but within minutes she's already asleep, totally passed out. You're a gentleman so that's that; you tuck her in under the covers and lock up your valuables, go in the other room and watch The Lost Weekend as the sun comes up. Then you crawl into bed, on top of the covers, and a few hours later you half-asleep mumble a good-bye as she slips out the door.

Man, if your buddies could see you now.

But if you're bitter the next afternoon; if you feel you were owed some sex or something--to justify those high-fives-- that's on you, bud. Sorry your fantasy, or rather "the" fantasy--the one conjured and subliminally promised by Esquire, NBC, and cinema--didn't pan out just exactly as you fantasized, that you'll have nothing to boast of. But! If you can sublimate that frustration and shame into your art, then it's just a question of masochistic tolerance, and love of women moves into the abstract. That's when you can appreciate her ferocity and honesty rather than what your boys expect you to "get out" of her, what "base" you crossed.

But even we Von Sternberg masochists, we debauched libertines who worship the Medusa, feel slightly like we let Rose McGowan down when we see her looking like a gray alien or Argento Opera-lashed post-pagan in her badass music video, RM486. Bald, chalk-white, whispering Roy Batty's Blade Runner monologue like her full WB Network-encoded matrix is being spat out in digital ticker tape, she's a new model, a Nexus 9, fluid and beyond duality, the gender strait-jacket in chewed-up tatters at her feet. She's let the full brunt of our collective gaze rain on her, raze her, and let the old self dissolve like William Shatner's tears... in The Devil's Rain.

To paraphrase Lori Williams in Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, whatever she's training for, she's ready.



There was only one imdb user comment (last I checked) on her video's page, from a German guy named Thomas who notes:

"I must say I quite like her as an actress, saw all her 'Charmed'" episodes, but it's tough for me to appreciate these 4 minutes, maybe because I find her very attractive and in here, she goes for the exact opposite."

I don't mean any disrespect to Thomas--he at least is self-aware enough to imply he's biased because he find finds her attractive. But Thomas, that's it in a nutshell! Being 'tough to appreciate' is the goal of all modern art. Rose and her video artist director Jonas Åkerlund have taken your attraction to beauty and used it to fuck with you.

When a hot woman transforms herself not into an approximation of a Maxim airbrush but into a kind of abject Molloch style alien--as RM does here--she's reacting to the beauty and youth industrial complex that's kept her and her sisters in anxiety and paranoia to the point they torture their face with collagen and Botox late into the night until they emerge at dawn like Universal pre-code Jack Pierce abominations, teeth scarred from eating disorders, faces frozen fast in a hideous duck-like grimace; they go from aging beauty to avian gorgon in a single long and tortured night. RM's given you the real Self beneath the illusion and if an hour phone call in shouted Russian wasn't your expectation when taking the hot girl home, relish that feeling of alienation and confusion, because so few men even get to that level--it's like secret initiatory hazing, the first step to liberation from desire. It's the true "modern" aesthetic response, as important as the initial riots over Picasso's debut of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. (upper left)

Maybe there's something deeper than narcissism and fear at work behind RM's overpainting, self-sabotage, reverse beautification, a kind of counterespionage CIA mind trick, throwing a Perseus mirror shield visor over your face, to reflect Medusa's Vogue-Revlon gaze, to freeze it with horror, paranoia, creeping dread as it beholds its own hideous reflection. Rose McGowan's lashing out against the Hollywood beauty grist mill is heroic, as the Brits would say: it's absolutely bonkers! As daft and admirable and crazy as they come: half Frances Farmer punching out cops, half Saint Francis marching the dye-stained child laborers out of his parent's textile mill into the blazing sunlight.

Sleeping with the enemy of my enemy on his enemy's command = a cinematic love story for the ages

HITCHCOCK'S LADY SPIES

I used to think that the casting of so many attractive young girls in high ranking CIA spots in movies like Zero Dark Thirty and TV shows like Homeland and Alias was just licentious license, but if you see an actual CIA documentary, like the one on HBO, recently you realize it's the truth: pretty young women are all over the upper ranks of the CIA. They are brilliant and brave and better at connecting the dots of seemingly unrelated events and movements into a serpentine whole than men.  Beauty and charisma are keys to success in any field that relies on winning people's loyalty, turning their allegiances around using nothing more than a warm smile and maybe waterboarding. Acting and spying are really more or less the same, drawing on the same skills. Beauty is as valuable to a spy as a photographic memory or crack shot marksmanship. Only an American would think that using beauty to excel in your job is somehow 'cheating.'

Hitchcock's movies point even darker: spies are not only actresses but whores, stealing uranium secrets instead of 'earning' cash, forced to sleep with the bad guy by the good guy for the country she loves (there's no concrete difference between a CIA handler and a pimp), doing what needs be done to get evidence, cash, the part, or the script. Even if it means losing the respect of Cary Grant, the show must go on. If she pretends she's in love with someone long enough that even she starts to believe it, well, isn't that the same as falling in love for real? It's the kind of thing that can drive a girl mad even while earning her Globes, Oscars, and jury prizes. Glittery ephemeral dreams leave just a blue key and an empty box where once was a Betty and Diana. Slimy spiders scatter through the bulletin board web, pinning every nude scene movie still helplessly out of context, then hating you for your image's power over them. You've become not just a spy, not just an actress, not just a whore, but a target, a bullseye at the center of the board, the spider that all strands lead to, your every trapped panicked thrashing movement part of the inexorable slow sexual strand red carpet roll up between fear, desire, and procreation. It's this exact madness censorship tries to stem, in vain.

When it gets out of hand, it's time to tell mother.

Notorious

Now the spy comparisons get too close for comfort, and the terrorism of celebrity begins, the slow poisoning by flash bulb and corrosive gossip. Wherever you go people stare or demand to be stand next to you for a selfie. The only sane response is to go mad. There's that old koan about the beautiful woman who wanted to become a Buddhist monk but the master wouldn't let her because she was too beautiful to not be distracting. Undaunted, she took a hot iron to the side of her face, and was admitted immediately. The moral: you shouldn't seek enlightenment unless you do so as one whose hair is on fire seeks a pool of water. And if you've never been on fire then what good are you, o uncooked roast, o churlish banal carcass that for wont of heat doth rot and bloat with banal surmise, while impaled on spit and turned on flame to sizzle doth a kingly feast make?

And then to choke them aye... that is art, and the core of honey trap assassination.

Hail Stewart!

A César for Kristen...

In European cinema, the performance of dangerous womanhood within feminist parameters is more alive and less bourgeois, less dour and militant. You can still smoke and dance in the cafe (I think?) prostitution is far less stigmatized (still?), and May-December romances accepted without Puritanical staring (for now). Women are assertive without being bitchy (and are still hot). Just compare the self-possession of Isabelle Huppert vs. say, Susan Sarandon, or Isabelle Adjani vs. Geena Davis as they look and act today. And this is not to say Davis and Sarandon are not great actresses, just that what they were fighting for as American women in Thelma and Louise is a birthright to Europeans. Luckily, bourgeois America's Puritanical sexism is eclipsed only by its trust in intellectual Europe's opinion. What fearless actress titans from the US need in order to not be maligned domestically is Europe's sanctification. Now that Kristen Stewart won a Cesar for Clouds of Sils Maria she can begin to earn the awed respect me and a scattered few always felt she was due. Maybe we missed something, reason our own critics. So they go back with less provincial-reactionary hostile unconsciously misogynist glasses over the Stewart oeuvre and decide yes, we did believe in her all along.

Another fact about Europe is sex itself, in which standards are far more relaxed. People want to have sex, they do. They don't wait for a Mr. or Mrs. Right they feel they're owed by years of televisual, cinematic, and magazine promises. But there's more to the cultural difference between USA and Europe than just that, for in losing the unrealistic ideals so critical to American conspicuous consumption, the Europeans become less hypnotized, less locked in a state of Lacanian 'pressure to enjoy,' a pressure which all but squelches actual enjoyment in the cradle. There's not a lot of TV commercials in Europe (relative to here, I mean), and what there are are generally more clever, existential and risque, less shrill and incessant.  As a result, maybe, European women aren't as broken down by the staggering sexism that comes from the constant consumerist barrage. I'm sure there are pockets of unconscious consumerism in the East, especially, where it carries anti-authoritarian currency, but socialist education and freedom from the hobbling albatross of an anti-intellectual 'moral majority' voting bloc have helped the West stay progressive. Partying with them when they come to visit us in NYC provides a huge relief from the stultifying cluelessness with which Americans party every day. Finally we can talk about Freud and Jung instead of just pretending to already know them and be 'over' them in favor of banal cognitive behavioralism (as seen in Von Trier's Antichrist).

If she was a guy, she'd be dubbed the new De Niro

I think if a pretty young actress is really leagues above her peers the critical mainstream (in America) is unwilling to take the leap, to climb up and risk being exposed by championing her, to be the first to applaud amongst the booing Moroccan mob when Marlene walks onstage for the first time, to cheer her for having the guts to call into question everything that's grown familiar.

If great acting isn't met halfway it can look like bad acting, just like avant garde music and random ambient noise are indistinguishable, and so great artists must march off to places where they 'get' greatness and can better be contextualized by critics as 'other.' Hendrix was dismissed in the US until he found acclaim in London; crazy-haired Nicholas Ray was just some idiosyncratic journeyman until Godard declared he 'was' cinema, forcing American critics (terrified of being left behind on a trend) to re-evaluate soul-withering explorations of human darkness like In a Lonely Place and Bigger than Life. In other words we respect Europe's opinion so much we're willing to go back and re-evaluate the work of American artists we previously marginalized. Oh now we get it. Now we get Kristen Stewart.

The French critics have mapped out a route through our cinema's past like a museum guide trying to unravel the opaque and meaningless tangle of a Pollack to an incredulous Indiana tourist. The last voice we had in the States with the clout and guts to champion the underdog, Pauline Kael, is gone. Without her, would we even have noticed Bonnie and Clyde or Taxi Driver? Maybe not. She would have loved Kristen Stewart and would have explained and contextualized her work to the point we'd be valuing her here well before that Cesar.

Kael is dead though, and it behooves our new Bonnies and Bickels to go once again back to Europe to seek the recognition they warrant. In the US, alas, if you put a relatively hot young broad in a debate with a stodgy, sexist older man like Norman Mailer (as in Town Bloody Hall), and the broad is more than holding her own, calling him out on his bullshit, she's a dour buzzkill and he's a hero to the lumpen proletariat. In Europe the mixture of different languages keeps everyone guessing and leads to a kind of of eternal now unbound by the past or religious dogma, a now that floats constantly on the cutting edge of thinking and social connection, because language can't grow stale when no one understands each other.

In the States we expect the Ruby Tuesdays in White Plains to be the same as the one in Toledo rather than a unique snowflake. Appearances are measured up to, fit into, the excess cut away. So if we can't rely on the basic maxim that someone in a suit and tie, white, straight and over 60, is more intelligent and worldly than a cute under-30 blonde in a tight sweater, then we can rely on nothing, and are too terrified to pay attention. Our fingers tighten on our pitchforks and torches instinctively. Europeans would just be amused and intrigued--after all, to the young women in Paris white male writers over 60 are sex objects--but Americans froth at the mouth when their obtuse book-by-cover dictums are challenged by cool-headed pretty blonde undergrads. And it doesn't even matter who's right or wrong in a debate, it's that the prettier they are, the more hostile the (middle-aged bachelor) professor gets. He has tenure! Why is he shouting!? It's because she's too pretty, and young and would never in a million years go out with him and anyway, it's frowned upon by the academic senate... at least now, at least here, but if this was Paris '68, oooh chippie, thinks the prof.

And there she is, expecting an A without even so much as sleeping with him once; her intellect an affront to his sense of entitlement, a sense that our outdated counter-productive practice of tenure encourages. And then who has to deal with her? Me, as she comes to my office to complain about him.

I explain to these understandably aggrieved girls that higher learning doesn't always accompany or even encourage self-knowledge. The development of one's own unconscious madness, the source of all genius, is criminally neglected in academia. Higher learning often serves only to convince the teacher that his dull sanity trumps chaotic madness, and why? Because that glint can't be taught and therefore can't be measured so must in academia be devalued. All we need from the higher ed wizard to be a real museum-ready artist is a grant, an endowment, a write-up in Artforum. If we're not going for the grants and endowments then we're either mere 'entertainers' or outsiders; either we get a three picture deal or a prescription to Lithium, either way, the madness that creates genius stops through lack of oxygen. The diploma is awarded... the ship sinks... the guns go silent.

 COURTNEY LOVE, AMERICAN SMOKER

And either way all the reckless energy the hussy young girl genius pours into her career is suddenly sidestepped when she has a kid. That's the moment when I get mad and the drink-counting mothers relax. When a great insane hot mess skirting the lip of brilliance thinks she can put that all on hold to become a mom, eat healthy and quit her vices, and then come back and be the same badass, I know that, like Uncle Paulie when Henry starts peddling the garbage, I have to turn my back on them. They're acting selfish, denying their madness a voice, giving all their love to a newborn instead of me, her public. If, like Courtney Love, she can somehow stay rowdy, raise the child punk rock style, but without that Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match-type negligence, that's a frickin' rarity.

Hats off to Courtney Love, still rockin' and still terrifying the academy and still, as of this post, sober.

She may not still be the siren voice unconscious of L.A. but I listen to Celebrity Skin and remember the last time I was there, whipping too fast around curves up in the hills, wind pulling my hair like a crazy hottie sitting behind me in the car, trying to either strangle me or give me a massage as I cringed in the shotgun seat, the crazy gorgeous blonde driver--who I flew in to visit over spring break--didn't get off her cell phone once during the week I was there, even after the car almost flipped over zipping around those dangerous hills; and "Boys on the Radio" roared to life in the speakers right in the moment we almost "crashed and burned". Love's rock oomph carved a space for a soul inside L.A's bottomless surface, celebrating these same curves and the countless honored drunks and druggies they'd taken, honored the scuzzy bottom feeders photographing the wreckage that is Hollywood's rapture with self-immolation (we wouldn't see a better incarnation until Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars.)

Mark my words, one day, once she's safely dead, Love's letters and notebooks will be researched and archived ad nausea. Dabbing their pens in the theoretical equivalent of Dillinger's blood, the academia will hug themselves with the richness of her life's work, digging numerological cryptograms from her teenage speedfreak Boggle word lists, gin rummy scores, Paglian chthonic feminist poetry.

But only when she's dead and therefore immortalized (and unable to bite them) will they dare appreciate the thing that so scared them when it came roaring up on them alive at a party. "You're brave with a fish as long as it's a dead fish" the cook says in Night of the Iguana.  

But Love's not dead, yet. She'll piss on your luggage and hide the distributor cap and help the sky begin to blanche while you're still struggling for a hip disaffected response to her first question. She's the female Keith Richards, a survivor because she can play guitar and loves rock over drugs, music over sex, and even death, but what's the difference? She's Orpheus descending into the reptilian tunnels beneath downtown LA, armed with a blazing guitar torch. She rides her amp's electric currents high above the glitter, an overdose-surviving valkyrie swooping down onto LA rooftops to collect the beautiful and dying boys about to jump and see if they can fly, for her Valhalla bloody chamber record collection. Let the haters hate, and they do all over the web; to earn such vitriol, from so many losers, she must be doing something right.

Asia Argento (Scarlet Diva)

THE KEYHOLE MIRROR: ASIA ARGENTO

A very unique and raw analysis of what it means to be young, gifted and constantly mauled as an Italian film starlet while roaming through daytime press junkets and financing meetings, photo shoots and hotel room film pitches, and having it be no big deal to smoke while pregnant (and burn herself with the lit end on purpose), Aregento's SCARLET DIVA really unnerved some critics over here. If you read the average Amazon comment it's of the bent that 'Asia's like totally hot but I couldn't get turned on by it,' (i.e. that comment on McGowan's music video) like the film was mispromoted, its promos a tease promising softcore sex and delivering only self-mutilation and nervous K-hole breakdowns instead.


It's like dude that's the point!

That's the only way Europe can sneak art down middle America's throats, on the Trojan horse of sex. Art House cinema as we know it got big in the US in the late 1950s only by promising "European" and "Art" in the same sentence meant the kind of frank openness about sex and nudity our own puritanical censorship forbade. A single nude shot or dirty word could create lines around the block. But eventually they didn't need the promise of 'dirt' because the art had taken hold. Subtitles had a Pavlovian association with lack of censorship, which allowed for more imports, allowing art to take root. And with it, strong intelligent women. The amount of backbone in an actress like Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren or Keira Knightley in England, or Isabelle Huppert and Adjani, Beatrice Dalle, or Sophie Marceau in France, or Monica Vitti in Italy vs. that of, say, Sandra Bullock, Julianne Moore, Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Winona Ryder, even Jodie Foster here is as different as that between a tiger and a house cat. Both are still cool, sleek, stylish, but which could more believably devour you?

I've got theories: I recently saw a Hammer film DVD extra where an old writer or someone was remembering the way Britain and American censorship of the 50s-60s was vastly different - the Americans would demand cuts to the sex, but the violence was allowed; the British would allow the sex but demand cuts to the violence! This ties perfectly into my theory, as exposited in Acidemic #6, that sex is to the French what guns are to Americans, and vice versa. And there's that old Dietrich quote "In Europe, sex is a fact. In America, it is an obsession." And there's no doubt it's much easier to get a gun in this country than to hook up at a party. And vice versa.

My final theory on this has to do with World War Two: Being bombed nearly to death in the 40s made Europe permanently less enthralled with global destruction than we are here in the US, and their more liberal views on sex may well be a result of that too; the result ensures that premarital sex plays quite a larger and more healthily complex sophisticated yet accessible and straightforward part there, and in its way, so does prostitution, which seems more than a few degrees less tawdry in, say, Paris or Amsterdam, than here. We see these demoiselles crop up in French New Wave films, but less in a tawdry Taxi Driver manner (or Liam Neeson manner) and more in a just two casual 'people hooking up' sort of way. It's still no kind of a life for a lady, but for a lonely dude and a cash hungry Parisian of the same approximate age and class, what's the harm?

At least it's regulated to an extent and therefore less overrun by sleazy gangsters, presumably, and the pimps are French, little guys who just get funnier the harder they try to be menacing. Meow, n'cest pas?

Then again, that impression, like all my others, comes from films not France itself, which I have never visited. What do I know about actual reality? I never watch it. From what I have seen, it's a real mess.

And it's my fault, probably, for never looking.

Further Reading on: LANA DEL REY:

America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton
Kiss Me Del Rey

Fool in the Flame: Lana Del Rey "Ride"

 KRISTEN STEWART:

Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS
Choose Death: Revisiting Twilight's Junky Delerium
Bella's Big Bounce: TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART II
Metatextual Exorcist's Assistance: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA, MAPS TO THE STARS

European Art House:

Enhancement of Anguish: Godard's VIVRE SA VIE (1963) on Blu-ray
le rayon bleu Deneuve REPULSION
GIRLS (1968)
Her Body, Her Ashtray: Asia Argento's SCARLET DIVA (Acidemic #1)
Erica Jonrosh's Spoils of the RED DESERT
Hey BETTY BLUE, Come Blow Your Mind (+ INSIDE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY)

Relevant Cinemarchetypes:
The Human Sacrifice

Puella Aeterna and the Cougar
The Anima
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And of course, the four furies:
Pauline Kael
Camille Paglia
Kim Morgan
Molly Haskell

NOTES:
1. Hey STELLA: Do you imagine they would dare show such a complicated monster as Stanley Kowalski in today's draconian PC environment? He'd either have to be an irredeemable brute whose every gesture is amped up with ominous music cues and lewd looks (so there's no possible way we can like him)--the particulars of the rape spread out in ugly rutting and sadistic sexual violence and intensity (instead of just showing a shattered mirror)--or they'd cut it out altogether, block it out of the screenplay, and just turn him into a passive whiner who cockblocks buddy Karl Malden. And now, going back and watching Dean's three film roles, it's hard to understand sometimes what the fuss was about. He seems to mince a lot in Rebel -- stopping the action cold so he can play with little toys or befriend Sal Mineo as if he's a timid marsupial at the zoo he's trying to feed a peanut by hand. He doesn't make a lot of sense - he mumbles - one minute he's cool and playing chicken, and winning, and smoking and putting dirt on his hands, the next he's trying to rat the whole gang out to cops even though even his parents don't want him to (they're not squealers --they're actually cooler than he is). "Just once I want to do something right!" he says. So he wants to drag everyone else down with him so he can be noble. In New Grenada we say something too: "a kid who squeals on another kid is a dead kid." Wanting to call in the cops is almost as bad as not making a more coherent effort to hook up with Carroll Baker in GIANT.