directed by David Cronenberg
written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider
based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland

Criterion #21.

Jeremy Irons as identical twins played as queasy nightmare: I was really, really enthused about this premise. But the execution is pulpy, and that dampened the effect that I had hoped for.

It’s pulpy in that there is nothing here other than the ideas. The characters speak only about the premises and the plot; every peripheral detail (e.g. the images on a TV, the objects on a desk) feels very much placed and curated rather than genuinely incidental. There is no full reality here, just a complex of concepts. This all creates the impression of a pornographic motivation rather than a dramatic one.

A reductively focused script can work well in a movie that functions as a dreamy sensory experience. But for all its stylized production design, this movie wasn’t visually rich enough for me to see it as a heady unreality instead of as a rather insufficient reality. It was, at best, in a sort of uncanny valley between the two. I suppose it’s possible that David Cronenberg relishes exactly that double-insufficiency. Such an impression of thinness can enhance the sense of horror — pornographic impulses feel unsafe and suggest the monstrous (fetishes being essentially social mutations) — but to my mind, there’s no getting around the fact that it diminishes the work.

In the middle third, the concepts get their full exposition and we are drawn into them — and for a while there I thought maybe my diagnosis had been wrong, and that the ideas alone were in fact enough to sustain the whole undertaking. But in the final section, the pacing felt clearly wrong — once we can see that our trajectory is downward into darkness, we are ready to skip to the end, but the movie prolongs the descent, seemingly in the interest of savoring the “story,” which is an impossibility because there is nothing there. Had we developed a richer sense of this world, the slow burn would be fascinating rather than annoying.

However, having carped, I will now return to my initial enthusiasm, which was based on a quote from Cronenberg that I read before watching: “Dead Ringers is conceptual science fiction, the concept being: ‘What if there could be identical twins?'” Even now, it still excites me to read that. Yes! The movie equivalent of saying a common word until it sounds weird and wrong! There should be a whole genre of horror based on defamiliarization.

An eerie pair of cold, brilliant twins who think of themselves a little too much as being the same person is a fantastic idea. And their scenes together really are very effective in the matter-of-fact way they blur the line between being the inner monologue of a single character and an encounter between two opposing individuals. That aspect of the movie I can wholeheartedly endorse. The rest — gynecology and horrific surgical tools and drug addiction and all that — is less markedly inspired. If these aren’t your hangups (and they aren’t mine), the relationships among the elements can seem pretty arbitrary — just a few items chosen off the long list of “icky” stuff David likes to think about.

When he and others talk about the serious issues inherent in the icky fascinations of his movies, there’s no doubt that they’re right — there is potential substance behind the ick. But the pertinent question is whether the movies themselves are actually delving into that substance, or are just indulging themselves. The stuff in this movie all felt like the indulgence of nerdy fetishes — wherein intellectual associations are an equally superficial part of the overall superficial appeal. (Not unlike, say, steampunk.) The opening credit images, in the style of Renaissance medical illustrations (see title screen above), set the tone: cool as design because of the aura of learnedness.

The movie’s emphasis on gynecology (and the pointless plot element that Geneviève Bujold has an unheard-of mutation in her anatomy) seems particularly puerile to me. I gather that the movie is particularly horrific for women to watch because of the gynecological associations. But I’d venture to guess that the gynecological content is here solely for how it might strike men as creepy, and that ultimately this movie is fairly indifferent to the perspective of actual women, for whom the female genitalia do not have any particularly alien connotations (or shouldn’t, anyway). And I’m all for defamiliarization horror, but come on! — basing it on vaginas is way too easy to be interesting, says Dr. Freud.

(I was about to type “like shooting fish in a barrel” but after running it through my unintended-meanings alert system I got “proceed with caution” so decided against it. Here it is in parentheses instead.)

On the commentary track, Jeremy Irons points out that though playing twins might seem like a demanding trick, the feat of acting is not all that unusual — managing two different characters at once is a skill from doing theater in repertory, and playing to an imagined partner is what happens in all reverse angles, in film. True enough. What’s most impressive about his performance is how very very similar he allows the two portrayals to be: it gives a sense of close-up magic to the endeavor. He says at one point on the commentary that he thought of the more confident alpha twin as being centered in his forehead, and the beta twin as being centered in his Adam’s apple. I think hearing that nifty little tidbit of technique may have been my favorite part of this whole viewing experience.

Geneviève Bujold seems undertrained for this sort of thing — too naturalistic to seem at ease in this very un-naturalistic movie — and there is the sense that this sort of woman would never, ever, ever, ever actually be interested in prissy icebox Jeremy Irons… but the presence of a person just sort of walking around onscreen being herself in the middle of all this clinical weirdness is itself interesting to watch.

The other girlfriend is no good.

Music. Here’s the main title. This is pretty good work on Howard Shore’s part; definitely superior to his prior showing here. I actually liked it much more before I listened with headphones and realized that each of the four notes in the main figure is repeated, and that the harp articulates absolutely every beat. I had thought I was hearing something extremely still and simple, which was more compelling to me.

It sounds like there’s terrible hiss, but I believe it’s an intentional effect created by the synths in the instrumentation — the soundtrack of the movie was very clear, as you’ll hear at the very end of this cue when a door clicks open to start the movie. (There was an uninterrupted version of the same theme at the end of the movie, but somehow it wasn’t mixed as well, and tacked on to it was a long, long dull vamp to run out the credits, so I picked this opening version instead).

directed by Alex Cox
written by Alex Cox and Abbe Wool

Criterion #20.

As this one approached, Beth warned me repeatedly that I wouldn’t like it. Turns out she was wrong! But I can’t blame her. In fact it surprises even me, to think that I enjoyed this. Nothing about it would seem to be much to my taste. Either this movie has some uniquely transcendent quality hiding below the surface, or else this was just one of those fluke experiences where circumstances conspire to trick me into having a good time that I should never have had.

Doing something arbitrary like watching the Criterion collection in order encourages a certain kind of wide-open-mindedness, particularly given the extreme eclecticism of this particular list — and having an open mind is, unfortunately, more or less the same thing as exorcising oneself of one’s personal tastes. For better and for worse, that’s part of what drives me to do stupid things like this. And I don’t want to understate the simple satisfaction of seeing the next movie on the list after having invested it with several months of anticipation. I have perused the first several pages of the list many times, at this point, so all the titles start to seem like they will be special treats of one kind or another.

So that’s probably the why of it. But in any case, I found this compelling viewing despite having no interest in the subject matter nor any affinity for the implicit worldview (of the characters or of the type of people who would be moved to make a movie about them). The crucial saving grace was that the movie felt to me like it had absolutely no agenda, nothing to sell — not even the idea that this was a story worth telling. There was plenty of room left for me to have any thoughts I wanted about these people, up to and including that they were people of no significance and that their story was of no significance. And under the circumstances I felt tremendously grateful for that space.

Even the more poetic, romantic filmmaking gestures were presented quite coolly; I never felt that my experience was being prescribed. Of course, maybe I never felt that because some hormone or other was low in my brain that day, and not because of the movie, but that’s the way it went down.

I’m gonna put the music selection up here so I can talk about it as it relates to this thought. This little cue, track 20 for your imaginary album, kicks in behind the movie’s signature shot, where the two leads kiss in an alley while garbage falls from above in slow motion. (The music is by Dan Wool, the screenwriter’s brother, credited here as “Dan Wül” of “Pray for Rain.”) There’s not a lot of score in the movie, but what there is is in a similar vein.

On the one hand, this sort of music has a clear, strong emotional impact. But to me, the characteristically 80s aesthetic out of which this music comes is actually sort of pre-emotional, or sub-emotional — the feeling it creates is not of a particular kind of meaning, just of the impression of meaning itself, of lines that extend forever in a space that precedes reality. The Romantic message behind such music might have been meant as “their love was tragic and their story is forever,” but to me at least, it says, rather, “this story, like all stories, is just a kind of a pattern, to which we might try to apply meaning, but in truth it is something geometric and alien.” That depersonalizing tendency of the 80s vibe, intentional or not, put this movie into a relatively pure place, for me. I can’t think of any positive claim that could have been made about these two wretched people that wouldn’t have turned me off the movie. But in the absence of any explicit claims, I was able to feel my own heart, and let it touch down on what I was being shown, however tentatively or ambivalently. And that makes for a positive movie-watching experience, even when all you’re watching is some people being incredibly pathetic.

At first I thought the point of the movie was to depict “punk” — its culture and its ideals — and that these two characters were just convenient historical hooks. My sense was that people probably didn’t live exactly like this, but that they lived somewhat like this and toward the same ideal, and that this movie was giving us a sort of ideally streamlined “punk” milieu, where (as Greil Marcus points out in the commentary track) the historical context is left completely unexplained and the mindset is depicted in itself, without any external cause or purpose.

That mindset, as portrayed in this movie, seemed to be something like that of the Underground Man — these people are offended by the obligation to do just about anything other than exist. They smash things not out of any kind of political protest but simply as a way of acting out against the responsibility not to smash things — the responsibility to protest would be just as much of an imposition.

Generally, the offensive thing about youth cultural movements like these is not their nihilism or irresponsibility so much as their their implicit arrogance. These people invented nothing, discovered nothing — Dostoevsky lived 100 years earlier, after all — so their stridency is undeserved. Yet, at least in this cinematically perfected punk world, they do not in fact want attention or fame or respect; they want nothing other than freedom. Not even the implicit obligation to seize that freedom if they can. And so there is no arrogance, just pure, filthy being. Their stridency is only a part of their disdain for anything other than their momentary impulses — if the disdain includes themselves, it can’t count as pride.

But if the ethos is some kind of inverted Buddhism — the transcendence of earthly cares through an all-encompassing bitterness and anger — then why did these people form bands, dress up, do anything? They too had ambitions. The fact is, there is no such thing as the unchecked id — the pursuit of that kind of purity is a recipe for becoming a hypocrite. Someone’s slogan seen lipsticked on a mirror in one scene: “NO FEELINGS.” By falling in love the characters betray the cause and are doomed. I don’t feel like the characters are hypocrites but I feel like the writers might be.

Ah, but these thoughts mostly refer to the first half of the movie. In the second half, the movie more or less reveals the impossibility of the ideal, as it shows Johnny Rotten moving toward normal society and Sid Vicious dropping below any kind of willful punk insolence into pure heroin-addled degradation. Good.

The movie doesn’t seem to care all that much about the Sex Pistols as a band, and the performance scenes feel dutiful and a little drab, which is unfortunate because there are quite a few of them. But had they been truly charismatic, they would have been harder to think about. Of course, maybe I just don’t get how charisma works in this world — Greil Marcus specifically says that the performances are surprisingly effective as performances, moreso than in most rock and roll movies. More on my probable incomprehension below.

The young Courtney Love, we are reminded all over the internet (when we google Sid and Nancy), was very seriously considered for the role of Nancy, and was given a bit part when the producers insisted on casting an established actor. When she appears, there’s the clear sense that there are two viable Nancys onscreen. I couldn’t help but think, “oh, Courtney Love would have been so much more appropriate.” She has the actual vampy drugged-out quality that would seem to be in order, whereas Chloe Webb is all whining and screaming and seems like the most annoying crazy person in the room. But I’m not necessarily saying the movie would be better. Having watched the clip of the real Sid and Nancy that is included on the DVD, I can see that what Webb does is conscientious and, perhaps, a more interesting distillation of the real Nancy than something less grating would have been. Her performance is absurd and unpleasant but she pushes through to the point of being sort of engaging as such. If the characters were any less transparently pathetic, the focus wouldn’t be as clear.

For the first time in a while, we have a full-featured DVD, with various extras and a good solid commentary track, which I enjoyed. Gary Oldman seems a little reserved and above it all but is game to say a few words; Chloe Webb is loosely, extrovertedly thoughtful in an actor-y way that, in my dealings with actual actors, I have come to find sympathetic. There are a couple other people on there, but the most memorable, as evidenced by my references above, is historian Greil Marcus. Yes, his tone is a little bit pretentious, but most of what he says is pretty compelling, right or wrong. Basically, he talks about his thoughts as an audience member as he tries to work out what this movie conveys, which means that he is speaking directly to my experience. His need to tie everything to historical precedent feels a little like a tic developed during a career of trying to give weight to denigrated popular art, but his cultural-critic attitude serves him well in making his comments relevant to the viewer. Unlike the guys on Amarcord who seemed like victims of the delusion that “analysis” means “puzzle-solving” and that academically legitimate criticism consists of extracting symbols and archetypes until you can say something that seems “socio-political” enough. Ugh.

However: Marcus’s perspective is very much a fan’s perspective: it takes for granted that this material is of great mythic weight of one kind or another. At one point he praises the movie for showing that these characters were not making grand generational statements but were simply motivated by normal desires to have the money or drugs that they wanted. But that’s only an interesting point to people who are pre-inclined to read a grand story in rock & roll doings. Otherwise it’s kind of a duh.

It’s possible, in fact, that the reasons I found the movie approachable and interesting — because, essentially, it eschews any kind of muddled rock pantheon mythology — are also why I actually don’t get what this movie really is, because it’s a movie by and for people who love the Sex Pistols. The real point of the movie, I suspect, is in its exact balance of myth-making and demythologizing, and since I come to it with no preconceived myths whatsoever, I may not be seeing what I am supposed to see. I think that in this case, since I enjoyed it anyway, I can live with that.

The filmmakers are apparently people who were such fans of the band, the music, the rock-and-roll-ness of it, that to them these characters were satisfying, meaningful, beloved characters… and in making this movie they felt they were making a fully rock-and-roll movie, because Sid and Nancy are a part of rock-and-roll. They’re like action figures from a set. But if you only have one G.I. Joe, is he just an anonymous soldier, or is he still fighting Cobra? This is like a movie about a Lando Calrissian figurine, and I’m someone who’s never seen Star Wars. If Lando Calrissian falls in the forest, does he make a sound? I’m here saying I appreciated the quiet, but maybe that’s just because I’m deaf.

See, I didn’t even know that the surreal scene where Sid sings “My Way” was based on a real video until I listened to the commentary and they referred to it as though it were common knowledge. Well, maybe it is, but it wasn’t to me. I just watched the original on YouTube. It made clearer to me the exact nature of what Gary Oldman is and isn’t doing in this movie. The real Sid Vicious comes off as pretty straightforward — a jerky, fucked-up kid being as much of an asshole as he can, on cue. Gary Oldman’s character is much less clearly motivated; he seems more pure and more unearthly, which basically entirely misses the point of punk. He acts like an asshole because that’s his part, but he never feels like he relishes being an asshole, the way a real asshole does. Sid Vicious’s real video makes him seem like a real asshole. Gary Oldman seems more like Edward Scissorhands — a visitor.

written and directed by Samuel Fuller

Criterion #19.

Fine, Criterion Collection, you win. This one made me grin.

This movie popped out of the same can of mixed nuts as The Naked Kiss, but it had a little more punch to it. It wanders even farther into deep left field, and though it may not have been “kind of amazing,” it was certainly a wide-eyed head-shaker. And I can go for one of those every now and then.

I try not to do plot summaries but in this case I think it will double as an aesthetic summary.

In order to solve a murder at a mental hospital, an overambitious reporter goes undercover: he pretends to be insane and intentionally gets himself committed. His ultimate goal is to win the Pulitzer Prize, which is mentioned frequently as the inevitable outcome of this adventure. He first spends a year being coached on how to impersonate a madman, and then puts the plan into action by having his girlfriend — a stripper — pretend that she’s his sister and turn in her “brother” for threatening her with his violent, incestuous impulses. The girlfriend does this but only under pressure; she hates the whole scheme and fears for the reporter, as well she should. Once inside, he turns his attention to the only three witnesses to the murder, each of whom is a delusional schizophrenic. Each has been driven mad by being the victim of a contemporary American problem — communism, racism, and the nuclear arms race, respectively — and is now in a bizarre state of denial that inverts the problem (for example: a young black man who couldn’t handle the pressure and abuse of attending a newly desegregated school now believes he is the founder of the Ku Klux Klan). But each of the three is eventually coaxed into delivering a looking-into-the-distance soliloquy that reveals his underlying true story, after which our hero spits out the unrelated question “who killed Sloan in the kitchen?” and gets some fragment of information just before the witness lapses back into his insanity. After a series of tribulations — which include receiving electric shock treatment (= montage treatment) and being brutally attacked by the inhabitants of the “nympho” ward — the reporter solves the crime, battles the killer in a prolonged pots-and-pans-everywhere brawl, and finally maybe wins the Pulitzer Prize… BUT AT WHAT COST? For, you see, in the process, he himself has gone mad. Ironic enough for ya?

It’s not? Really? Tough crowd.

The cockamamie concept and undisguisedly clonky three-bears structure wouldn’t be out of place in a comic book, or a radio play of 15 years earlier. Almost every element here feels like it was plucked from the mainstream of kitschy sensationalist hackwork. So once again, the absurd effect — and this one really does feel absurd — is mostly due to the heightened expectations that a feature film brings.

But notice I said almost every element. When Constance Towers (yes, it’s her again) begins her striptease by singing a sexy tune through the feathers of a boa that completely encircles and obscures her head, looking like something from Mummenschanz, there is no getting around the fact that this movie and this director have, of their own volition, strayed from the road well-traveled. And a few touches like that go a long way; once you’ve seen a thing like that, it becomes harder to remember whether, say, a coven of haggard nymphomaniacs murmuring “he’s mine! he’s mine!” is a cliché, or whether it’s a brand new experience. The impression that this movie was a brand new experience hung in the air longer than it did with The Naked Kiss, and that was good enough for me. If the movie you are watching on TV with no expectations turns out to be Shock Corridor, you are in luck! (I offer this sentence as a clean press quote for the marketing people to put on the poster if they so choose.)

Once again, Fuller incorporates what seem to be his own 16mm tourist movies, inserting them whenever a character remembers having been to a foreign country. Economical and self-involved. The hero’s climactic fight with insanity is portrayed with the full force of Fuller’s art: first the reporter is seen flopping around in the hospital corridor set, as it fills symbolically with the rain in his mind. He shrieks and bangs helplessly on the doors; then he is zapped by animated lightning like Luke Skywalker and falls into a crazed Vertigo-style montage…. revolving principally around color home movies of Niagara falls.

That’s right, I forgot to mention: the home movies are in color, in the middle of a black-and-white film. To no particular effect. Apparently these had been separated from the rest of Shock Corridor until Criterion came along, so good for them. One character introduces his flashback by saying that he can see it now, “in color,” and another says that he dreams about it every night, “in color.” As usual, the choice itself might be weird and arty (and/or folk-arty), but the handling is pulp 101: everything must be stated and complete with exclamation points. These movies feel like the work of a very proud man.

So I’m supposed to talk about the themes? Like, “is modern America, what with all its problems and such, kind of like an insane asylum?” or “who’s to say who’s really sane?” No, sorry, not going to do that. I have my dignity.

People who make claims for the deep artistic quality of this movie because of the serious intent and serious issues at its heart: what’s wrong with you??? If I put on a 5-foot stovepipe hat with a sign on it, it doesn’t matter whether the sign says “the soul of the American nation is tormented by its own hypocrisies” or “eat at Joe’s”: no matter what it says, it’s still ridiculous. This movie is wearing a 5-foot stovepipe hat. I am not going to discuss the damn sign. Not in this company!

I will discuss this instead: just before administering shock therapy, a doctor grimly pronounces “puberty” as “pooberty,” which of course prompted me to look up the legitimacy of that pronunciation. OED and Merriam-Webster both say no way, never. But I did find plenty of people reminiscing about their embarrassing high school teachers — and Johnny Carson — pronouncing it that way. Sounds like it was a moderately widespread mistake in middle America 50 years ago. Considering the time and place, I imagine it was the sort of word for which many people had to guess the pronunciation, and then go for years with no opportunity to have an error be heard or corrected… at least not by anyone with more authoritative knowledge. And for the uptight, “pooberty” probably does seem like a more dignified reading. The y-glide in “pyube” seems vulgar in some vague Nabokovian way, whereas the Latinate syllable “poob” has ancient Roman associations.

Peter Breck looks sort of like Alec Baldwin in deadpan mode, and somehow he has just the right manner and magnetism for this impossible material. As with Alec Baldwin there’s the sense of a well-suppressed smirk, which, under the circumstances, is highly sympathetic. And he’s willing to shriek like a melting witch in nearly every scene, which is a plus. (Also he has a slight Han Solo quality, yes?)

I also want to single out the opera singer lunatic as having been engagingly naturalistic. I think my favorite moment in the movie was the color scene where he feeds our hero a lot of chewing gum in bed, telling him that chewing it will make his jaw tired and help him fall asleep. That guy’s performance is the closest in the movie to the style of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to which I was tempted to make comparisons for a while until it became clear that none were called for.

Once again it seems likely that for most people, the trailer will be just about the right amount of Shock Corridor. Though be warned that this is one of those trailers that shamelessly misrepresents the movie. Luckily you’ve got my handy summary to set you straight.

Your track 19: Main title. Another middle-of-the-road mushfest from Paul Dunlap.

written and directed by Samuel Fuller

Criterion #18.

This is a very dated, very B movie from 1964. Criterion doesn’t quite say so outright, but it seems clear that this movie is being offered up to present-day audiences so that we might say, “Whoa! This is crazy and wild and surreal in some weird 60s way!” I think this movie has been kept in the public eye by people who think it’s an “it’s kind of amazing!” type of artifact, if you know what I mean.

I don’t deny that it’s a strange movie. It’s erratic in terms of tone and content and technique, and it freely wanders beyond the bounds of taste in many different directions. It is basically riddled from top to bottom with stylistic “errors” — so densely that it begins to feel mysterious and foreign, like maybe it’s actually a forceful and cohesive work by an alien. The lack of good judgment is so thoroughgoing that one’s mind goes seeking for some deeper, weirder guiding principle. And yeah, if you let yourself get lost like that, you can have an “it’s kind of amazing!” experience with this movie.

My problem with it is that I didn’t get very lost. Its weirdness wasn’t quite mysterious enough to revel in; I basically knew where it came from and what each of its pieces was, and why. Its misjudgments are specific to a certain time and place and culture; in their proper milieu they may still have been misjudgments but they probably weren’t particularly striking.

It’s sort of like a piece of folk art. I’ve never been all that affected by folk art, for this same reason. Generally, whatever peculiar aesthetic power it has is too obviously unintentional; I can’t help but be aware that the most interesting juxtapositions are inadvertent symptoms of the artist’s environment (and personal shortcomings). I suppose in a really exceptional piece of folk art, the force of the aesthetic effect would be so great that it is indistinguishable from an intentional effect. That’s a very rare thing. Maybe Henri Rousseau qualifies, but that’s exactly why he’s not thought of as a folk artist. Anyway, I didn’t think The Naked Kiss rose to that level.

I read a guy’s essay online where he was essentially saying that for him, The Naked Kiss does rise to that level, that its peculiarities form a mysterious and transcendent whole that enraptures him with inscrutable dream emotions. I absolutely sympathize with the phenomenon and I can see how this movie might offer it, for some people. But not for me. I just didn’t think it was quite idiot or quite savant enough to escape being merely a dated pulp confusion. I get who this filmmaker was and what was on his cluttered 1964 mind.

Apparently some French filmmakers of the era thought Samuel Fuller was a fascinating auteur because his movies felt so archetypically American. I think that’s probably because work that doesn’t make sense on its own terms is more purely the sum of its received terms; an artist who is only a muddle-headed product of the prevailing culture feels like the distilled essence of that culture. Bad jazz often sounds more like the concept of “jazz” than good jazz, because good jazz always sounds specific; mediocrity offers fewer distractions. I recognize that this movie, in its primitivism, does offer that kind of raw cultural transparency. But I feel like it’s important not to confuse a cipher with a visionary. Samuel Fuller may have made confused movies, but unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have been the least bit nuts.

That’s all my justification for why I don’t think this is a work of lasting value. But as something to watch once, was it divertingly unpredictable? Absolutely. And in the moments when I was caught off guard by aesthetic whiplash, I did have glimpses of the “it’s kind of amazing!” experience. Then they would fade, as soon as I steadied my head and figured out what sort of garden-variety foolishness I was really dealing with.

I guess you wanna know what the movie is about. Ugh, fine. It’s about a hardened prostitute who, after looking in a mirror and touching her face, decides to go straight and become a nurse in a small town, at a hospital for handicapped children. She fights prejudice and the forces of immorality, and finally finds love with the richest, biggest-hearted, weirdest-looking man in town… but then (spoiler? alert?) walks in on him molesting a child, and, while in shock, kills him with a single whack of a telephone receiver. The police don’t believe her when she explains that he was a child molester, because she was a prostitute, but then the child in question is finally located and cheerfully says oh yes, yes he was. Thus exonerating her in the eyes of the town.

So you see it’s a combination of pulp morality, like an afterschool special, and pulp sordidness, like a paperback with a painting of a woman in a slip and the shadow of a gun on the cover. There are other elements in the mix too — including pulp “class,” in the form of gratuitous references to Beethoven and Goethe and a faraway-look talk about the wonders of Venice — but they all have in common that they would have been second nature to an enthusiastic, unselfconscious middlebrow hack circa 1964. The visual style follows directly.

As is typical of pulp, the title is mostly a lurid non-sequitur — but the film does eventually attempt a sort of explanation. Just after our heroine has fallen into her first kiss with the creepy man of her dreams, she briefly pushes him away with a troubled look in her eye, as though sorting something out for herself… before smiling again and letting passion take them where it will, pan to her curling toes. In watching the scene I assumed that she had to realign herself inwardly to actually enjoy a man’s touch for the first time in many many years — she had to think first and melt her inner ice. But no, that wasn’t what was going on, and I guess I should have known better, because that would have been too psychologically interesting for this movie. After the man turns out to be a child molester and she kills him, she explains to the police:

Once before a man’s kiss tasted like that. He was put away in a psycho ward. I got the same taste the first time Grant kissed me. It was a … what we call a naked kiss. It was the sign of a pervert.

If that kind of dialogue gets you going, this movie has what you’re looking for. But I think for most people, watching the trailer is probably a better choice than watching the movie. It’ll get you there and back in 2 minutes.

Incidentally, our next selection is Samuel Fuller’s previous movie, Shock Corridor (seen all too obviously on a marquee in The Naked Kiss), which I think might be about that very psycho ward she mentioned.

It’s hard to judge the acting as such, but Constance Towers certainly acquits herself well enough, and given the broad range of nonsense that is asked of her, that’s a real achievement. Look, she’s still going strong!

I didn’t know about Samuel Fuller before this. Having read up on him, it’s still hard for me to tell just how obscure he and his movies are. A problem with the internet is that if you look anything up, you’ll find out plenty about it, be it Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Dufelmeier. Sometimes all you really want to know is whether it’s worth knowing. The internet can’t help with that.

Music is by Paul Dunlap, who just died a few months ago. A prolific composer of scores for undistinguished movies. Here as your compilation track 18 is the rather dull main title. This is that soupy post-war branch of The Hollywood Style that I find very difficult to process with my analytical mind. How many times would you have to listen to this to be able to hum the melody? How many times would you have to listen to this to be able to recognize that it has a “melody”? Or a “rhythm”? For me, in this style, somehow all the basic concepts of music get lost in the mental wash. Without pressing down hard on my attention, I feel like I am failing the musical equivalent of a colorblindness test. All I can hear is what I was meant to hear: drama, drama, drama, drama, drama, drama, drama, drama!

Hm. I just listened again now and this time it seemed pretty straightforward. The mind can be a funny thing.

I was actually torn in choosing this as the music selection, because by far the most memorable and prominent musical cue is not this bland title theme but an icky, painfully sentimental 4-minute song sequence in the middle, sung by a group of kids on crutches who are all wearing pirate hats. I couldn’t bring myself to make it the selection because it’s just too long and unpleasant to listen to, but part of me feels like choosing anything else is a lie: that is the tune from The Naked Kiss if anything is.

So I am relieved now to have learned that the song in question is not original to this movie — it’s “Little Child” by Wayne Shanklin, 1953. So it obviously wouldn’t have been right to choose it over something from the original score. That’s another rationalization, anyway. The bottom line is, I didn’t want to hear those kids singing ever again.

written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
screenplay collaboration by Sergio Citti
based on the novel Les 120 journées de Sodome by Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (1785) [uncredited]

Criterion #17.

I did not watch it. I will not be watching it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t engage with it and respond to it. Herewith, some words on why I will not watch Salò.

First a quick explanation of what the deal is with this movie, offered as a public service so that you don’t have to go investigating.

It is an adaptation of the “most notorious” work of the Marquis de Sade. I am no expert on the subject but my personal impression is that the Marquis de Sade was a more or less insane person whose circumstances (being born an aristocrat and living in revolutionary times) happened to allow his obsessive writings to be published, and whose obsession (taboo behavior, mostly a conflation of sex and torture) happened to provide convenient fodder for later philosophers, who found that “taking Sade seriously” was an expediently provocative stance. He’s now a household name because his psychosis and literary bent made him a useful point of reference to sane people, but that doesn’t mean his output is anything other than raving insanity.

His 120 Days of Sodom is the epitome of the “insane work” — it is basically a long list, rigorously organized and out of all proportion to any possible reader’s interest or attention, of every torturous depravity Monsieur de Sade could think of, in ascending order, up to (and well beyond) murder. The “story” is: four incredibly powerful and wealthy evil men organize a huge orgy of perversion in a castle, and this is how it goes… Sade’s writing principle seems to have been “think of the worst possible thing you can think of. Now top it.” When I described it to Adam, he said, “so it’s like The Aristocrats,” and that’s exactly right, down to the specifics. Everything The Aristocrats do in passing, Sade catalogues in ten different combinations. For him, it is important to distinguish between the case where the mother is raped while pooping on the dead body of the daughter, and the other way around. Or whatever.

As with The Aristocrats, these “flights” of “fancy” are not actually meaningful as anything other than an indulgence of the inward experience of the broken taboo. Which obviously can have a strong grip on people. (I am reminded of Maria Bamford’s bit about “unwanted thoughts” wherein she “kills her family and chops them into bits and then has sex with the bits and then eats the bits.”) But these are not symbols of other things and they are not artistic creations. They are just one madman’s compulsive dips into his inner vault of “complete awfulness.”

Here is my anecdote about The 120 Days of Sodom, and god help me that I even have one. One summer during college I stayed at school to do theater, for which on-campus housing was provided, all of us in the same little building. The atmosphere there was, as you might imagine, even more goofy and carefree than the ordinary dorm environment, which is saying something. One day a bunch of us were sitting in the common area and being exuberant, and someone noticed that an old library volume of the “works of Sade” was sitting out on one of the tables — how collegiate is that? — and picked it up and started looking for dirty passages to read aloud. Even in those pre-Wikipedian days, I somehow had heard that 120 Days of Sodom was supposed to be the dirtiest, most outrageous one, so I flipped through to find it for him. The guy took it out of my hands and read us a couple of Aristocrats-worthy scenarios, involving people being farted on while being poked with hot irons or something, and we laughed at the ridiculousness of it. Then he flipped forward a few pages… and suddenly sort of went quiet, and then put it down and said, “I’m not reading this anymore. That stuff’s not funny.” And that was the end of that.

Of course later I had to pick it up and see what he had just read! And yes, it wasn’t funny. The point is this: if you really and truly want to think of the worst thing you can think of, you will think of things too awful even for The Aristocrats, too awful even for laughing at their own overcooked absurdity. Too awful for you, but not for an actual torturer, and not for the actual Marquis de Sade.

So that brings us to this movie. Pasolini took Sade’s text, set the action in 1945 in the waning days of the Italian Fascist state (headquartered in the town of Salò), reduced the 120 days to about three, and then, well, filmed it, and apparently filmed it pretty well. The transposition to the fascist context and to the relative realism of film is intended to give the proceedings political and philosophical resonance. I imagine that it probably does.

The resulting film, as has been widely reported, is extremely extremely extremely unpleasant. I have read quite a few reviews and responses to this film, and not one of them fails to warn the prospective viewer that the film is perhaps the most disturbing ever made, is likely to induce actual vomiting, should absolutely not be viewed if the viewer is at all squeamish. In short, that the film is not just about horrors but that to watch it is itself a horror, a genuinely traumatic experience that will never be forgotten, and one that you may well regret.

Noted! Many people apparently find it difficult to actually take such advice. Not I. I believe that this advice has been offered with the sincere intent to help others, and I choose to benefit by it. I’m a person who frequently can’t fall asleep at night because I’m unable to prevent my mind from obsessively replaying mildly frightening imagery, over and over, until I am completely consumed by senseless terror. So I really can’t afford to let in the most poisonous imagery of all time.

Furthermore, though, even if I could trust my stomach and my mind to handle it, I have an ideological objection, one that goes to the heart of what movies are worth. I believe that this film was made in good faith; which is to say, not in contempt of its audience. Nor as a cheap exploitation wrapped in ideological hoo-hah. I think Pasolini meant what he said about it, and that his tongue was not particularly in cheek when he included a highbrow philosophical “recommended reading” list in the opening credits. I believe while he no doubt enjoyed being provocative, the impetus to make the film really did stem from a genuine horror at man’s inhumanity to man/fascism/political power/consumer culture/whatever — i.e. real social-philosophical issues. But there is no getting around the fact that the film is an expression of cold rage, and in my experience, rage is an illegitimate subject for expression. It devours communication and renders itself worthless.

When I was growing up, my father would sometimes become infuriated by something on the TV news — who knows what — and would say something along the lines of “people like that should be shot!” to which my mother would then object for the kids’ sake, i.e., “That’s a terrible thing to say. Nobody should be shot,” and my father would then generally agree, for the kids’ sake, “you’re right, I shouldn’t say that. Of course nobody should be shot” — unless he was really too angry to acknowledge it, in which case we’d have to take the retraction as implied. (Don’t worry, dad — and mom — we did.) The important thing is that my mother was right: since he obviously didn’t think anybody should really be shot, my father’s outbursts were utterly worthless as communication. They were symptoms of his anger that thus revealed his emotion to us, but they expressed nothing in themselves. They would have been better unsaid.

But I know the impulse. When I get really, really furious at someone, I have the reflexive desire to confront him, and if possible shock him, with the severity of my emotion — to force him to see what he has engendered through his unkindness. And then, after I have realized with acute frustration that in most cases, a truly unsympathetic person will be able to shrug off the fact of my pain, I want him to be aware of an equivalent pain that cannot be shrugged off. When some asshole would be cruel to me for no reason in middle school, my mind would go wildly searching for a way to get through to him how wrong that was, and upon reaching the impasse that it was impossible to get it through to him, I would become agitated with the sense that I was confronting a paradox, a thing that should not be.

Pain thinks it must be transferable, translatable — because otherwise how will I ever be rid of it? This is why aggrieved people want murderers to go to the electric chair, right? “You apparently can’t experience how awful the thing you did was for me, but I’ll bet no matter how callous you are, you think being zapped to death with electric current is just as awful for you, so that’s how we’re going to make ourselves known.”

So Sean Hannity, for whatever twisted reason, only smiles smarmily when he finds out how angry and upset he made me. Positively inhuman, right? But being shot – ha-HA, Mr. Hannity, I’ve got your number now!

The problem is, what do we do in our fantasy when it turns out that, say, “the abuse of power” doesn’t even experience pain upon being shot? What??? But I hate it so!!! Or that, say, “human cruelty” will keep on chattering away cheerily even after being forced to eat shit and then raped? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? Goddammit, there must be a reciprocal to my rage.

But just as you cannot divide by zero, there is no amount of atrocity you can put in a movie that will really sock it to the concept of atrocity. No matter how merciless a death my father dared imagined for the hateful people on TV, the only people hearing him were his own children. No matter how much shit-eating Pasolini puts in his movie, the only people seeing it are his audience, and once again, the real villain sneaks away smirking like Hannity. GODDAMMIT! Meanwhile we and the Criterion Collection end up sitting here having a really thoughtful conversation about art, which is ultimately beside the point.

I am skeptical of any work of art where the motivating sentiment seems to be the same as Charlton Heston shouting at the Statue of Liberty: “You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Can you imagine how much eye-gouging and scalping and so forth he would have to put in his Salò to express that level of outrage? Too bad it’ll still only be apes seeing it.

It would be another thing if Salò were meant as a realist kick-in-the-imagination to pampered audiences. “Take a good look, pansies, because this is what goes on behind locked doors in torture chambers around the world.” Yes, that would be the “contempt of audience” form of bad faith I mentioned earlier, but it would at least serve a quasi-documentary sort of purpose — a call to action. But, though surely just about every horrible thing imaginable and more has actually happened to some poor soul somewhere (well, except for the kind of stuff that happens in the Saw movies), the reenacted atrocities in Salò are totally literary, a dreamlike pageant of ritual awfulness of no documentary value. For all the essays I’ve read about it, I haven’t seen a one that described it as a call to action. What action?

I don’t need a kick-in-the-imagination — please, please trust me on this one, art world! — but what I really don’t need is a manifestation of evil made vile so as to spite evil itself. What?

Pasolini apparently said his intent was to make an “indigestible” film. But such a film, like unwearable clothes or a pitcher with holes in it, is not a film per se but rather a piece of conceptual art, best displayed under glass at a museum, in a canister. By viewing it we err.

And if Pasolini would agree with me… well then, I pass the test! Hooray, I nailed it!

Funny Games is even more misbegotten and I promise never to watch that either. I resent having been made to even see the trailer while out in the world, innocently going to see a real movie. At least Salò is well tucked away in its lovely packaging, where only the willing will see it or even need to think about it.

The Criterion edition seems to be extremely well curated, with tons of bonus material that people say is fascinating. I seriously considered getting the second disc and just watching that, but then I thought better of it. All I ended up doing was watching the first 10 minutes or so on youtube, the pre-atrocity part where the victims are rounded up, about which one paragraph:

An obscure movie, a movie that you’ve only heard of around the fringes of things — something like this — part of the horror is always that when you see it, it’s not just some vague thing that you read about in some footnote somewhere, but is fully existent, and every moment recorded on it represents a moment that really occurred somewhere in space and time. Digging into the bottom of the basket of movies is like digging into the bottom of the basket of moments, and I get a sort of vertigo about the infinite nooks and crannies of time — this movie didn’t originate in obscurity, it originated in reality. This is the essence of the horror of the “snuff film” type — somewhere, at some point in time, this was, as much as I am now. Even just having watched the first few innocent minutes of this movie… it’s shocking how utterly existent it is. The sky in it is blue, the flesh is real, the images hiss with prosaic actuality. All that stuff I read about is going to happen in this space? Okay, I don’t need to see any more.

I don’t think I need to write any more either. I feel that I have honorably discharged my duty toward this Criterion Collection title without actually touching the disc.

So, without further ado: the track for your album. Main titles.

This deserves a little comment. I gather that nearly all of the music in Salò is borrowed and unattributed, but the esteemed Ennio Morricone is credited as music supervisor. This track seems to be his own very slight variant (to evade copyright?) on the standard These Foolish Things. Though some writers have investigated the thematic relation between the lyrics and the film, I think mostly this is just a straight romantic song and the point is that it’s a straight romantic song. Get it? Just like “We’ll Meet Again” at the end of Dr. Strangelove, this sardonically pleasant bourgeois smoothness has been put here out of pure, giddy fury.

It’s pretty darn catchy!