written and directed by Paul Morrissey

Criterion #28.

I just read this weekend’s New York Times profile of Anne Carson and I step away from it with a strong feeling of envy. The privilege of being gnomic and still listened to! I have known a few people who hold to that path, artists to the bone — or should I say to the skin — whose every utterance is riddlesome. Who probably aren’t really being understood by anyone but who seize their leisure at its height anyway. They pluck from the root because the fruit is lovelier whole, nevermind that the husk may be impenetrable. I envy the Anne Carsons of the world their impractical dignity.

So why not just (re)claim it? [I wrote some other stuff here but it’s gone now because I can’t actually convince myself that there’s any more to it than this:] Fear of being isolated by incomprehension. I fear that the admirers of the impenetrable are in it for the wrong reasons. The people I tend to enjoy — and thus would most like to reach — are the people who tend not to indulge such stuff. That is a bind. (Perhaps the problem is tied up in “and thus would most like to reach”; perhaps it’s the ideal of symmetry that is stopping me up.) But I am trying to face this fear.

Of course, isolation is the extreme case; less extreme is mere elitism. I think I fear that too. Some things that are incomprehensible to others are comprehensible to me. Over the weekend we saw Roman Polanski’s The Tenant in a theater. When I first saw it a few years ago, I took to be sort of intuitive and fanciful, dreamy, irrational, not to be comprehended fully. This time I found (to my horror) that I understood everything in it quite vividly, like someone was speaking directly to me in a clear voice. Based on their quizzical murmurings I don’t think the other people in the theater experienced it that way. I tend to feel sorry for the movie that it has so few true friends, and likewise for myself. But perhaps that ought to be behind me as well. This is my truth and here’s someone speaking it to me. Isn’t that good enough? If you gotta ask, you ain’t got it, so why fret about those who gotta ask?

I agonize a lot, too much, about where to draw the line in writing on this site. I would love to erase the line entirely, but that’s a big step up for my little legs, and while I’m waiting to get there, a lot of things seem like strong evidence for the prosecution and shake me.

This entry is, in form, my effort to stick to my dignity no matter how far off the menu it orders; and in substance is about that, because that is, not coincidentally, what it is ordering. (It is also what The Tenant is a cautionary tale about, and why I understood it.)

My Flesh for Frankenstein entry read (and wrote) like one of my late-night term papers, the sort I still have to write in my nightmares. It was self-indulgent but only by principle. Here in Blood for Dracula I am hoping to err on the side of actual indulgence.

This is of course all an exercise.

(It’s no shock for that to appear here, on this site, because you all already know it, but it might be an interesting thing to find in the middle of a novel.)

So the substance of the substance, which in my mind ties this all together: these two movies (Flesh and Blood) are themselves both inscrutable utterances, easy to misunderstand and probably impossible to understand, and more than ever I believe them to be that way because Paul Morrissey is an artist of integrity. Which as suggested above has nothing whatsoever to do with quality. Here it is quite at odds with it.

“All bad poetry is sincere,” but most bad movies are not. Movies tend to be bad because they are oblivious, lazy, cynical, evil. Not these. These movies are bad because an artist followed his gut and made them that way. They are folk art, a one-man culture in themselves.

I admire his dignity but not his art.

Or — should I say that I do admire his art, because it and his dignity are one and the same thing? (I did after all kind of enjoy the movie.) Or does it mean that I do not admire his dignity, because it led him astray? (I did after all enjoy the movie only from within the knowledge that it was terrible.) Or does it work another way entirely? These are rapids for me.

Blood for Dracula is a lot better than Flesh for Frankenstein. Understand that I use the word “better” only because it is the closest word in your Earth language for describing a direction in the fourth dimension of taste where these movies live. This one has no spilled intestines, no facelift ladies, and is all filmed on lovely location rather than in a studio set that looks like a toilet. That alone would make it better. It also has a gonzo melancholy atmosphere that makes it almost soothing. Unlike Flesh for Frankenstein its crappiness is immediate and warm. In this respect, it comes closer to satisfying the standard expectations of camp viewing: garbage as comfort food. Like Little Debbie, Blood for Dracula approaches junk edibility, while still remaining fundamentally alien.

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Okay, okay … fine, I’ll just do the slightly grudging thing I usually do, since I’ve already typed up most of it. (Maybe the next entry will be more consistently kooky. I always think that.) Here goes.

Generous synopsis: Dracula (Udo Kier again!) is sort of a sad sensitive type. He is dying because he can only drink the blood of virgins and there aren’t enough virgins left in this debauched modern world (= vaguely the 1920s). He goes searching for one good woman whose blood he can safely suck but finds only hypocrisy and amorality, which are poisonous to him. At the last minute he finally identifies a good old-fashioned girl and makes her his blood bride, but then he is staked dead by the angry young laborer (Joe Dallesandro again!), who makes revolutionary talk and hates Dracula because he typifies the old aristocracy, living off the blood of the people. The newly vampired girl, heartbroken, throws herself on the stake (!) and dies with him.

But a summary is misleading. The effect of the movie stands apart. So here are a couple more tidbits instead.

* This movie was made immediately after Frankenstein. They started it one day in the afternoon after they finished Frankenstein in the morning.

* This one has a good deal more sex, graphically (if unconvincingly) simulated. The extremely dubious sexual politics are ripe for analysis, but why should I? It would all come back to speculation about Paul Morrissey again. See previous entry.

* Udo and his sidekick mostly say “wirgins” instead of “virgins.” This comes up not infrequently.

* Like Goldilocks, before Dracula gets to the wirgin who is just right, he first tries the blood of two of her less virtuous sisters. In both cases, when he realizes that he has been deceived about their wirginity, there follows an extensive sequence of him vomiting up blood. On and on, all over everything, making wretching sounds. This is pretty much the only “horror” effect in the movie, most of which has almost no atmosphere of horror at all.

* Except at the end when all four of his limbs are chopped off one by one in the course of a quick ridiculous chase scene. Spoiler alert.

* Vittorio de Sica — you know, the distinguished director of Bicycle Thieves — plays the father of the girls, and gives some extremely strange speeches about the linguistic splendor of the name ‘Dracula.’ Morrissey says that de Sica wrote most of his own dialogue. Having been hired for only three days, he departs suddenly in the middle of the movie, saying that unfortunately his affairs must take him to London… but “not to worry my dear: I didn’t want to tell you but I’m getting the analysis of Count Dracula’s urine made by Professor Benson. The result will be positive, I am sure — more than positive!”

Just in case you still don’t understand what kind of movie this is, let me make clear that this is the first and only reference to urine. Or to Professor Benson. Morrissey, on the commentary, says that he loves this line because he finds it so utterly bizarre and has no idea where it came from. Don’t ask the writer/director, he just works here.

* Hey, speaking of Roman Polanski: Roman Polanski suddenly turns up for a cameo! He proceeds to oversee a little business clearly of his own devising, and such is his charisma that for a moment it seems we might be in a Polanski movie. This is not coincidentally the best scene. Here it is. I assure you this has nothing to do with anything that comes before or after it.

* I was wrong about composer Claudio Gizzi, last time, when I said he didn’t compose for any other movies. He also composed the score for What?, the movie Roman Polanski was making nearby at the time (which is why he was around to make a cameo). I was also wrong about his talent. Blood for Dracula confirms the impression that he is not practiced in film scoring and is making it up as he goes, and also that he is a clumsy composer; but this time some of the things he does clumsily are sort of tender and sweet and give the movie a good deal of its strange sympathy. Here is the main title. Compositionally it’s amateurish, an awkward attempt at sentimentality that isn’t properly worked out. And yet juxtaposed against a movie that is the same, it becomes sort of affecting. The emotions we have no good reason to feel sometimes have a special power, because they are born free.

* What is the real one degree of separation between this movie and The Tenant? They were both produced by Andrew Braunsberg. He’s the guy at the end of the table in the Polanski cameo scene you just watched.

* Criterionity: First of all, let me note with some satisfaction that I am now finally really out of these woods at the beginning of the Criterion list, both in terms of availability and of quality. Of the next 20 movies, only one is out of print and only one is Armageddon.

Blood for Dracula was unavailable from any legitimate source so again I watched a rip (so again no menu image above) and I missed some kind of gallery feature. But I did hear the commentary track, with the same dramatis personae as last time.

The commentary on this one was for me a particular pleasure. Here are Paul Morrissey’s final thoughts at the very end. Imagine a lot of ambivalent pauses and nose-sighing:

Whatever it is, it’s some sort of a vampire movie. And I think it raises more questions than it answers, But horror movies are not really in the business of answering questions. They’re just sort of strange little fables, that are supposed to have certain resonances, perhaps, outside of their own immediate narrative. I think that’s what Blood for Dracula actually is: a kind of strange trip into a horror-movie mentality. And a little bit horrible. In some parts. In other parts, enjoyable. And never exactly one simple thing.

But it’s Udo and his accent that are the real star of the commentary, as of the movie, so I’ll let him have the last word. He sums it all up: click here.

written and directed by Paul Morrissey

Criterion #27.

Good lord.

In her classic essay on “camp,” Susan Sontag differentiates between two types, “naïve and deliberate,” and says that only naïve camp is satisfying. I agree.

The formulation “so bad it’s good” should properly denote cultural artifacts that are genuine failures but that intrigue because their failure happens to take a spectacular form. They are “bad” judged by their own intra-cultural terms; “good” judged from a broad, curious perspective that doesn’t subscribe to any particular narrow culture (or at least purports not to).

Generally, what makes campy failures compelling is that unlike garden variety failures, they are internally coherent; they have a delectable dream logic. In most cases this coherence is not just a lucky coincidence; it arises from the artist’s actual philosophical outlook and creative priorities. And skewed as these might seem, they’re almost always part of a real culture, even if one shared by only a few people. The artist had to come from somewhere. The supposed “failure on its own terms” is actually a failure on the terms of the beholder’s culture, not the creator’s. Camp is really a form of culture clash.

So the responsible question about any specimen of camp becomes: what kind of legitimacy should we afford the “absurd” culture? The slightly uncomfortable thing about a mass-consumed bit of “camp” like the Double Dream Hands video is that it actually emanates from a robust, well-populated sub-culture. So when we all laugh at it for being campy, we are not really aligning ourselves with some kind of broad and curious anthropological perspective; we are just aligning ourselves with the dominant culture and ridiculing with impunity. Not all that different from ethnic humor, etc.

(Reader A’s preferred example of this sort of thing is JonBenét Ramsey. Here’s another one for you.)

Lest this sound prickly and political, let me clarify that I do think that Double Dream Hands is absurd, and that responding to absurdity with amusement isn’t necessarily a cruel, bigoted response; it can also be a warm, human, admirable one. It can indeed be broad-minded and curious and joyful. But as to what qualifies as absurd, I tend to take a more Camusian attitude: nearly everything about every culture is absurd! The truly open-hearted attitude Sontag describes (“Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature”) should be so all-encompassing as not to need naming. It is a kind of lightness. That’s an attitude to which I aspire.

But that’s not what is generally meant by “camp,” and certainly not by “so bad it’s good.” These encourage us to subscribe to a culturally-validated notion of what is campy (i.e. Double Dream Hands and child beauty pageants but not Facebook or, say, the White House), which converts camp into just another arbitrary cultural charade, no less absurd than what it mocks.

Which is why what Sontag calls “deliberate Camp” always strikes me as sad, or worse. Deliberate camp is the attempt to bring about the pleasures of camp by intentionally trafficking in culturally-validated “campy things.” At its most innocent there is something foolishly fetishistic about it: it’s like a primitive ritual to gain the favor of some god by dressing up like it and dancing around. At its most offensive it is a complete inversion of the significance of the camp attitude. “Oh god campy things are amazing and we love them so of course we want to put on our own show that’s just as amazing as all the truly campy things that we love.” This, far from being a broad-minded and curious, is actually a deeply hypocritical cultural conformity, embodying none of the values it claims to cherish.

Okay, okay, I know what you’re wondering: “Which is he going to say Flesh For Frankenstein is, already?”

Have I got a surprise for you!

I have no idea what this movie is. I really couldn’t tell you what we’re dealing with here. I have watched it twice now, once straight and once with commentary, and I am just befuddled. My gut tells me that despite the obvious it may not be any kind of camp at all. I feel disoriented.

Flesh for Frankenstein has many of the standard camp trappings: very bad acting, very bad writing, constant “exploitative” nudity, sex, gore, etc. If I thought its intention was to be a traditionally effective movie, I would consider it true camp. Alternately, if I thought this movie’s being a dense nexus of outrageous trashola was clearly no accident, I would assume it to be a rather on-the-nose case of deliberate camp (bearing as it does a passing resemblance to The Rocky Horror Picture Show of two years later, all-time standard bearer for deliberate camp).

But I genuinely don’t know what it is.

The strange impression I get is that much of its monumental garbageosity — not all! — is in fact intentional… but that the intentions are not those of deliberate camp; they are far more eccentric. And less hypocritical. Which means I am stymied: it’s not naïve camp because they knew what they were doing, sort of; it’s not deliberate camp because the thing they knew themselves to be doing wasn’t “being campy.” There’s sort of an idiot-savant quality about it. Or maybe I mean savant-idiot.

Let’s watch that clip again.

In the commentary — which is by writer/director Paul Morrissey, star Udo Kier, and an obligatory academic, in this case a guy named Maurice Yacowar — Morrissey and Kier (and maybe Yacowar too; I mostly tuned him out because he was ridiculous) both talk about the movie in terms of “comedy” and “humor.” I would be tempted to accuse them of “outsider” opportunism (“yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket, it was supposed to be funny!”) except the specific things they mention as “jokes” — particularly absurd gore, particularly absurd lines — do indeed seem to be intentional. And yet the overwhelming inadequacy of the movie still requires explanation. Is there anything more confusing than crazy people trying to be funny?

Then there’s the strange issue of sex. The movie goes through standard inane porno scenarios in very slow motion (the sex-obsessed baroness scolds the sullen strapping peasant lad and tells him to report to her bedchamber, which he does, she tells him that he’s to be her private servant, etc. etc.) but then when they eventually take off their clothes, the movie seems immediately bored and disgusted. We get all the idiocy of the buildup with no actual erotic payoff. In fact the ultimate “sex scene” between the baroness and the peasant lad is intentionally made ridiculous and gross: she buries her face in his armpit while we hear outlandish slurping noises.

At one point Baron Frankenstein makes a speech about how disgusted he is by ordinary sex, by “overdeveloped women” with their “filthy movements.” This is part of the portrayal of the Baron as a hopeless pervert, an evil mad scientist obsessed with eugenics, who is only turned on by corpses and internal organs… and yet, oddly, the movie seems to sympathize with his disgust. From the speech, we cut away directly to a dumpy whore rather ridiculously washing her pendulous breasts. The message, essentially, is that the Baron was right, sex is indeed ugly and stupid! I was reminded of the scene from “The Singing Detective” when the psychiatrist reads the writer a sex-phobic passage from one of his books and points out that such a passage sticks out as psychologically revealing because it “doesn’t belong in a detective story.” Here one is similarly caught off guard by the inappropriateness. Believe it or not, you are watching a sexploitation movie made by someone who hates sex.

Here’s what Morrissey says about it on the commentary:

There’s always a sexual element in these stories, I think because I think that sex has become such an absurd thing in modern life that it lends itself to all sorts of comical interpretations or versions… Whatever people’s sexuality is in a story in a movie I make, it’s usually an absurd sexuality; it’s not sincere, it’s not really important. It might drive their lives but it almost is as inconsequential as the breakfast cereal they might have. It’s all reduced in my movies, very intentionally, to something that in effect has no real meaning.

Now, you could write a whole awful thesis on the homosexual “subtext” of this movie (in fact the movie seems to exist solely to provide material for such a thesis) but I’m only going to touch on it briefly. The movie screams “queer!” in a hundred ways (do I really have to defend this impression? don’t make me), and yet oddly enough, for all its tiresome “transgressiveness” (sibling incest; the creepy children of sibling incest voyeuristically watching their parents’ sex lives; evisceration rape, for crying out loud), homosexuality still dare not speak its name. It isn’t mentioned or depicted in the script and it doesn’t play any explicit part in the plot. But here’s the core of the story: there is a beautiful sad-eyed young man who wants to become a monk and isn’t interested in sex with women. Once or twice we see him glance expressionlessly at his friend the strapping farm lad. His head gets cut off and gets put on one of Frankenstein’s monsters, but disappoints the Baron and the Baroness because they each want the monster for sex — the Baron wants it to mate with his female monster; the Baroness wants to have sex with it herself — and he has no sex drive (the Baron got the wrong guy’s head; he really wanted the head of the horny friend). In the end, the boy, in his new monster form, kills the Baron and has a chance to return to the world. But the tragic ending is that he says no: he can’t explain why, but he must die here. Then he tears his own guts open and dies. The only real moral I can take away: even in this incredibly debauched world of absurd garbage, there is still no place for a homosexual, and no place for the sex-positive feelings that the strangely repressed homosexual filmmaker has had to hide far away.

I say strangely repressed because surely in Andy Warhol’s coterie (see below) there was no stigma whatever attached to being gay, and you’d think that being drawn to such a world would be a sign of readiness to open things up a bit. I mean, these are the people who took a walk on the wild side! (Flesh‘s strapping lad is in fact the Little Joe of the song, and Paul Morrissey “discovered and signed The Velvet Underground.”)

But here’s a quote from Andy Warhol that I just found: “The running question was, did he [Paul Morrissey] have a sex life or not? Everyone who’d ever known him insisted that he did absolutely nothing, and all his hours seemed accounted for, but still Paul was an attractive guy, so people constantly asked, ‘What does he do? He must do something…”

So I think I got it right and this movie is a sad document of repression far weirder than the norm. Let’s move on.

Yeah, so if you didn’t know, there is an Andy Warhol connection here. The movie was originally released as “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein” because he had some small amount of money in it and consented to the use of his name for promotion. But that’s about it for his involvement. Morrissey had been ghost director for Warhol’s various experimental films, and then was in charge of film production for “The Factory,” Warhol’s half-baked all-purpose culture operation -slash- poser party. This movie, made in Europe, marks the start of Morrissey’s complete artistic independence from Warhol.

Naturally it’s tempting to explain the movie’s disorienting is-it-camp-or-not tone as an extension of Warhol’s brand of faux-naif faux-art, but this turns out not to lead us anywhere because in the commentary Morrissey claims full responsibility for the Warhol films:

I borrowed from those early experiments, that’s for sure, but that aesthetic, it’s just something peculiar to me. There was no other person involved in the making of the films. The producer, Andy, certainly was involved in the sense that he wanted an undirected film, which I would be gradually evolving away from, but certainly for a year or more I did something like an undirected film. But his ideas were so simple that they didn’t have… you had to try to analyze them yourself and figure what they might be. But if you knew Andy, you knew that he didn’t have many ideas.

Here’s what he says about acting:

My objection to so many American movies [is] this dreadful idea that an actor is a good actor if he’s incredibly sincere in front of a camera, if he really lives the part, means the part… all this garbage idea about acting which is really the worst kind of acting. I think the most important thing in acting is it look natural and it be the evidence of a very distinctive personality who is getting the chance to be in front of a movie camera.

This while we’re watching some undeniably distinctive personalities undeniably getting the chance to be in front of a movie camera. To the degree that we are enjoying them – and it’s hard not to enjoy them a little bit – we are basically in agreement with him.

Our stars are Udo Kier, who is terrifically photogenic, has a hilarious cartoon German accent, the acting instincts of a 7-year-old, and a great deal of enthusiasm. All of which is, admittedly, magnetic. (Go watch the clips again and tell me you don’t agree.) As his sister and bride we have a lumpy society facelift named Monique van Vooren, vamping like a pro and exposing her breasts despite looking creepily like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Her accent is also a doozy. And finally we have Joe Dallesandro, who never gave it away, lumping around with dead eyes like a guy in a porno here to fix the TV ma’am. His utter and hopeless New York accent is perhaps the best of all, flopping into every scene like a huge hamburger that crushes everything in sight. He is exactly like one of the cutouts from Our Lady of the Flowers.

Kier’s commentary is just as cheerful, guileless and cartoonish as his performance: “I sink Joe is a very natural actor. Like Andy Warhol told me once — we were talking about acting and Andy said ‘There’s two kind of actors, there’s natural actors like Joe and there’s dramatic actors like you.’ So Joe is Joe. And he’s very good in bofe of the films, I sink he is totally fulfilling the personality he’s playing. But I’m I sink more the dramatic kind.”

Here’s what we said during the movie and this is still about the best I can do to describe its effect: The movie feels like one of those willfully inscrutable high fashion shoots that go beyond deliberate camp into genuine intentionlessness, into an apotheosis of hypocrisy — a transcendent hypocrisy that creates a taste smokescreen behind which the transcendently needy can curl up and hide. Which isn’t a bad description of Andy Warhol’s M.O.

But perhaps it’s just the opposite. Perhaps was made in Sontag’s spirit of true camp appreciation, which is to say with a heart so big it doesn’t fit into any culture. Udo Kier has the ditzy purity of someone who grew up as a sex object, and he seems to have loved working on the movie in a very sincere way that was not unduly concerned with whether the movie was serious or campy or comic or what. He just loved working on it. His passion shows, and that passion is watchable.

And heck, maybe the admirers of this movie — they exist — admire it exactly in that spirit. Who am I to say? It is a true cult movie. If you can hear its voice clearly enough to comfortably understand what you are hearing, it is for you. It is definitely not for me, because it confused me. All I’m saying is that I heard it clearly enough to know that if you think you get this movie because it’s “so bad it’s good,” you’re wrong. Or at least not entirely right.

So that’s that for my attempt at insight. For everyone else: this movie is a huge heap of garbage. There’s a companion movie, exactly like it, that I have to watch next. So that’s more than enough for now.

(The Criterion Edition is out of print, not held at libraries, and used copies are unacceptably expensive. All I could find was a “rip” of the movie and commentary, which is why there’s no menu image above. I apparently also missed out on a “gallery of stills” feature. I’m not concerned.)

Oh right the music. Here’s the main title, your track 27. (If you insist on knowing what those sound effects are, it’s the creepy kids cutting open a doll and then guillotining it. You didn’t need to know that.) This is by Claudio Gizzi, an arranger that Morrissey encountered at Cinecittà who hadn’t scored any other movies and didn’t go on to score any other movies (except for Criterion #28, coming up). Apparently he was intimidated by the assignment (or didn’t know how to get away from a temp track), because he immediately resorted to plagiarism. I seem to be the only person in all of Google to know what this is a rip-off of! Now you all know too. He rips off the third movement later in the movie. And he uses Tannhäuser for every scene having to do with the Baron’s eugenic fantasies. Lame.

Oh and also I forgot to mention: this movie was originally released in 3D. Guts needlessly come right at the camera several times. I would have preferred to see it that way, of course. But now that I’ve settled for flat Frankenstein, I’m done here. This is not my cult.

written by Barrie Keeffe
directed by John Mackenzie

Criterion #26.

This isn’t a movie I’ve heard much talked about. But it’s a winner. And you can stream it on Netflix.

There were a number of moments when I thought, “Well! I’ll be sure not to forget about that when it comes time to write it up!” (Which is a needless, distracting thought that I wish I would never have.) But now that the write-up has arrived, I realize that pretty much every one of those things I wanted to mention would be spoilage of one sort or another, and why would I do that to you? Describing things that surprised or entertained me is just a way of stealing them from you, or at least diminishing your pleasure by interposing myself. And I’m skeptical of my motivations — I think at some level I’d be trying to get credit for the things by being the one who saw them first. That’s no way to be. If I’m going to get people to love and admire me for a blog entry on The Long Good Friday, I’m going to need to do it all on my own, and not e.g. by mentioning that OMG you guys this movie has a kind-of-amazing scene where ____ (you know, ____ from ____) and a very young ____ look like they’re about to ____ in a ____. But then ____ ____ ____ instead. (Do you love me yet?)

Here are a few things I can say without getting in your way:

* The music is awesome, and I use the word advisedly. Not literally, of course, but advisedly. Click and be enlightened: the Main Title. (Being your Criterion mixtape track 26, naturally.)

That tune has been running in my head near-continuously since I watched the movie. The score is by Francis Monkman, who has almost no other film credits, which seems to me a real shame. Because while this may just sound like typical cop-show syntherie to you, it is actually very carefully calibrated and serves the movie memorably well. I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say that the relationship of what the music is selling (drive, glamour and grit, cynicism, knowingness) to the characters and the action is not fixed; it serves in different ways over the course of the movie. It’s really a top-notch score, given the style. By the end you will think so too.

Or not. I just saw someone on Netflix singling out the score as distracting and saying that it ruined the movie. Well, not for me.

* Admittedly, there is one sequence where creepy, icy music seems to denote the ominous underworld of HOMOSEXUALS. Though, well, maybe that’s not what the music turns out to mean after all. But it certainly is meant to play off the viability of that association. The scene would certainly be scored differently today. (Obviously the entire movie would be scored differently today, as the sample above should make clear.)

* The whole thing looks like a liquor ad from a 70s magazine: cold white highlights on warm dark wood, the luxury of everything tending to black. This is a basic appeal, not to be underestimated.

* Criterion Coincidence: Oddly enough, Alphaville star Eddie Constantine is in this one too! He’s not so great.

* The movie is far from perfect by present-day standards. But its imperfections were very comfortable for me. There have been major shifts in filmmaking priorities since 1979. The aspects of writing, directing, acting (yes, and music) that today seem corny or sloppy or unrefined about this movie just don’t seem important to me. Whereas it has a kind of calm purposeful quality, taken for granted in 1979 and now strangely rare, which is to me incredibly valuable. I enjoyed watching this movie because I can benefit from the things that era took for granted. That’s the basest, most indiscriminate form of nostalgia, I know (“I’m totally obsessed with the 19th century”) but who’s to say that isn’t one the primary functions of the cinema? It’s genuinely useful to be exposed to other ways of feeling and being, artifacts of times and places when those ways of being were unconscious and uncontroversial; the better to assume them, if one chooses, in a time when they need be conscious and potentially controversial.

* Not that I want to be like anyone in this movie. But I’d like to walk at the same pace they do; I’d like the shadows in my life to be as black as theirs were. When they pick up a glass to have a drink, I’d like to pick up a glass that way.

* The only extras on the (out of print) DVD were previews. There is however a recent “documentary” on YouTube, perhaps from a more recent DVD edition, and I watched that. It’s not all that great. In it Bob Hoskins confirms what one suspects, watching his performance — that he’s really just playing himself. Except as a crime boss. This is basically why the movie works and why it catapulted him to, well, a Bob Hoskins level of fame: even his exaggeratedly pop-eyed, clench-jawed reactions are watchably natural. This gives him freedom to do some very subtle things as well.

* Helen Mirren’s presence is as (similarly) reassuring and easy as ever, but her performance per se is a little inconsistent, which surprised me. Luckily in this movie’s world it doesn’t matter. Maybe I imagined it. She’s fine. Who doesn’t like Helen Mirren? Maybe I take it back.

* There’s a tiny bit of unpleasant violence. Reader B, there is a scene with exactly the thing you hate the most, but it doesn’t last very long. However the movie does sneak up on you and become surprisingly intense despite how casual it all seems. That’s praise. I’m just giving a parental warning.

* The story is fairly standard gangster fare on the largest structural level and the smallest (i.e. in individual scenes) but at the intervening levels are some interesting ideas that set this movie slightly apart thematically and tonally. I don’t think I’ve seen many other British crime movies so I don’t know how unique it really is, but word on the internet is that this one is at the top of the British heap. The script is from the golden age of sturdy screenwriting and has many nice little touches.

* The movie starts with 6 minutes of stuff that you don’t fully understand and won’t until much later. What’s that money for? Who’s the guy? Where’s he taking it? Who are those guys? What’s going on? This is a once-standard device for movie intrigue, to draw you in and turn on your brain (though not frequently used anymore, it seems to me). It needs to be handled with care, and I think it is, here; it offers just enough thread to follow that we don’t mind not knowing what it’s tied to or what direction we’re following it. But it struck me that while it’s customary for the action in such an opening sequence to be inherently intrigue-worthy (i.e. a briefcase full of money, murder, a coffin, etc.), the technique would work just as well with anything. A man is carrying a carton of milk. Where’s he going with it? What’s the milk for? If you drag that out for six minutes it would feel like you’re watching a fascinating mystery. And then when you suddenly cut away elsewhere to the main action of the movie, it would give just as much spice to what followed. Why did we see that at all? When are we going to find out what the milk was for? Highly intriguing. You could probably make a whole movie consisting only of different sorts of mundane nothing, and create a strong sense of suspense just through editing. If one of you can name an existing such movie please do.

* You’ll just have to accept that you can’t understand all the Cockney. “Grass” means informer. (Grass, grasshopper, copper.)

* I know this is an awfully pedestrian entry but that’s what you get for not wanting spoilers.

* Hey, if you do watch it, come on down to the comments.

written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Criterion #25. End of the first page of the listing! (26 pages to go. Having spent 1665 days on the first page, I calculate that getting to the end will take about 119 years. Though of course they’ll probably have released some more movies by then.)

My first actual Godard. But his style is of course familiar from parody. Which it lives up to.

Alphaville is intellectualist through and through. It privileges concepts over things, both in technique and in content. It is, shall we say, not obvious.

In approaching such a work there are two modes of critique: the naive and the like-minded. The negative naive response is “meaningless drivel.” The positive naive response is “stylish dream.” The negative like-minded response is “sophomoric symbolism.” The positive like-minded response is “brilliant allegory.”

(There is actually a hybrid third category: the naive response that believes itself to be like-minded. e.g. the feminist who, of any sufficiently obscure work, readily sees that it is about feminism.)

To attain to a genuinely like-minded response, one either lucks out and finds that one happens to be like-minded, or else one makes an effort to decode. My cynical impression is that lucky sympathy is rare, and most comprehension of high symbolism is not organic but deliberate. That’s not to say that it is false; only that it requires a kind of effort on the part of the audience that it did not require on the part of the creator, who generally arrives at his obscurities by a pleasant flower-gathering in his own personal garden of associations.

You will hear it clucked by admirers of things high that naive responses are not just naive but irresponsible: incurious, philistine, lazy. In this moral system, failure to make the effort to decode is failure to give intellect its due. (These sorts of people are usually frustrated by how little respect their own intellects have been accorded and thus are compelled to act out the values they found lacking in the world: tireless devotion to intellect, disdain for those unwilling to be so devoted. (, he psychoanalyzed sweepingly.))

However not all obscure works are equally obscure, and the community trying to put moral pressure on the world to make the interpretive effort varies in its size from work to work. If you could find the ratio of naive to like-minded responses for a given work (some whiz at Google Ngrams can probably rig that up, right?), and then listed works by ratio, I imagine that a broad spectrum of obscurity would be completely represented, all the way from very obvious children’s books that nobody (of writing or speaking age) has ever thought to blame for causing their incomprehension, to Finnegans Wake, which can be decoded but about which even most professors of literature — professional decoders — will say the effort is a waste of time. Beyond that, a broad swath of amateur poetry and the like, stuff that nobody apart from the author will ever take the time comprehend fully; and then, further beyond, surrealism and other work intended only to be comprehensible naively. And at the far end, random or otherwise depersonalized work.

If the number of works at each ratio were graphed, I suspect you’d see a huge peak at the low end, where most works live (or perhaps just above the low end, since absolute explicitness isn’t actually prized and is probably not possible), and then a downward slope as the works got more obscure. At the far end, where the surrealists et al. live, there would probably be a smaller peak, of works broadly understood to be basically intuitive and abstract.

It’s the middle of the graph that I’d be interested to see, because I’m not entirely sure what it would look like. Does the graph of obscurity taper steadily, or is there a point beyond which adding further obscurity to a work means that the audience willing to make the effort suddenly becomes exponentially smaller? Are there local maxima, customary degrees of obscurity around which works cluster? I really don’t know.

What’s important is that if there did happen to be such bumps and tipping points in the graph, they would reflect demographics, not aesthetics. Or, to put all of this another way, obscurity is in the eye of the beholder, so the only possible objective standard of obscurity is a census of beholders, regardless of whether the distribution is smooth or lumpy.

This needs pointing out because we (I) need an antidote to the shaming of the cluckers, as well as my own internal clucker. When I hear people saying that Moby-Dick is stupid and boring, or that black and white movies are stupid and boring, and that anybody who claims to like them is just posturing, or whatever, I can’t help but think “come on! grow up.” When I hear people saying that I should come on! and grow up! for thinking that, say, Godard is stupid and boring, I can’t help but think, “well, you’re just posturing.”

But because I am capable of self-awareness, then I immediately feel wary. Wait a minute, what am I saying? I don’t want to be caught being a Philistine! That’s not me! Don’t I want to give the intellect its due? Am I really so lazy and self-satisfied that I can’t put in a little extra muscle and figure out what Godard is doing? Come on! Grow up! You might learn something, jerk! Okay, fine. And so I do, priding myself on the effort.

But this is what needs an antidote. It is wrong to look at the graph of obscurity and say that the objective is to encompass it all in like-mindedness, because that is dishonest and impossible. And it is wrong to take the opinions of others as your compass because there will always be voices from just above you saying “come on! grow up! typical American! civilization down the tubes!” Whether or not they are posturing or authentic is beside the point. (Most likely they are not posturing per se, but they have exerted great and strenuous effort to get where they are, an effort that they would rather not acknowledge because it was motivated by having been shamed themselves, he psychoanalyzed sweepingly again.)

The point is this: everyone draws his own line of demarcation somewhere on that graph; everyone has his own ratio and clucks from where he stands. It seems right to me personally that my ratio should privilege like-mindedness and empathy over stubborn incomprehension, but only slightly. I think the golden section would be a good guideline here. So: I deem it morally incumbent upon me to make the effort to decode and comprehend works that are 61.8% obscure or less, and no more. My retort to the cluckers in the regions beyond will be that they have been driven by shame into a life out of balance, beyond the golden mean. As I myself was for a long time.

Alphaville is, I would say, about 70% obscure. Temptingly close to the line, close enough that I can hear it murmuring: come on, kid, you only need to think a little harder to get your gold star!

Well, for the first time in a while, I am braced to shout “Screw you, pusher-man! You don’t know me! PRETENTIOUS DRIVEL! STYLISH DREAM!” This is a moral victory. I am, accordingly, not going to say anything about what this movie is about about.

(Though, ironically, what it’s about is the supremacy of feeling over “logic,” and is thus applicable to this discussion. Seems to me Godard gets it all wrong by being blatantly stuck in a self-regarding intellectual mode himself, not recognizing that as far as art is concerned, his attitude isn’t so far from being in cahoots with his “logical” computer supervillain. Oops, I talked about it. Well, that’s just my hazy view from 9% away, and that’s how it’s going to stay. My toes didn’t go over the line. And I kept this in parentheses!)

Is it a stylish dream, though? Yeah, kinda. It’s “stylish” in the cavalier mode of the Nouvelle Vague, which overlaps significantly with amateurish sloppiness. Is it possible that it is actually just amateur and sloppy? Yeah, kinda. Does this general sloppiness add to or detract from the charm of the more refined compositions that crop up here and there? It depends on your mood. My mood fluctuated.

Here’s what I enjoyed: the feeling of slinking arbitrarily around the bland modern lobbies and corridors of Paris circa 1965, in nocturnal black and white. And I enjoyed that overlaid on that meandering was an easygoing intention to riff on pulp conventions. My favorite part was envying Godard the luxury of actually carrying out his half-baked project, which felt relaxed. It put me in mind of high school days, when some whim and a vague sense of adventure would give rise to long, mysterious nights of pointless driving around. Like American Graffiti. Or Nighthawks. You’re not going to figure out what it means by thinking about it or talking about it.

Which is why this movie didn’t work for me. If you’re going to have that kind of fun with no name, Monsieur Godard, shut up already. Nobody cares about your asinine evil computer story or your speechifying, least of all you, so stop pretending. It’s very clear, as you surely knew it would be, that this movie is really just an framework for a variety of indulgences, not least of which is spending some quality camera-worship time with your ex-wife. You could have had the decency to just follow through on that instead of making it purport to be some kind of well-formed movie with something important to say.

Accordingly the best part of the movie by far is the first 10 minutes, in which a ridiculous succession of noir tropes is strung together deadpan and we don’t yet realize that we’re supposed to take it at all seriously: the trench-coated protagonist drives into town, grimly checks into a hotel, a pretty girl shows him to his room, takes off her clothes, a bad guy emerges from the bathroom and the hero fights him, the hero photographs the girl while she poses for him, the hero shows off his marksmanship by using a magazine centerfold as target and firing two bullets through the breasts without looking, while reading a copy of “The Big Sleep.” All of this to wonderfully overcooked noir-in-quotes music by Paul Misraki. I was delighted. I thought I was going to be delighted by the rest. But the rules aren’t what I thought. One is expected to follow along and care. Nope.

To the degree that the movie is fun, it’s because the music shows us how. Here comes your sample. For the first time I’ve done a bit of editing. Reluctantly, but I had to. Godard, not content to let any of his borrowed tropes run for too long without aggressive conceptual interference, edits the music with raw, amateurish stop-and-go cuts, and there’s not a single major cue in the whole movie that he uses in its entirety without overlay of dialogue. However, the same piece of music is used over and over. So what I’m offering here is a splicing together of the uninterrupted bits of music from the first 2 minutes of the movie to form a continuous excerpt that constitutes more or less the main material of the score. The two splices, which hopefully are unobtrusive, correspond exactly to reuse of the same section of composition, so I haven’t done anything invasive to the music itself – this is really how it goes, and it’s all audio from the movie. That’s the disclaimer. Do listen, because this is good stuff: Track 25.

The casual, no-budget visuals juxtaposed with this outsize orchestral sturm und drang reminded me of my absurdist adolescent video projects, which would set undistinguished Video8 footage of my friends strolling around the suburbs to intense movie music. Which always struck me as hilarious, because it almost starts to work! and then your brain suddenly gives up because it’s just too stupid. There’s some kind of joy in that exhaustion, renewing and intensifying one’s awareness of silliness. Those charms are almost the charms of Alphaville, and how fond I was when I found them there! Alas, too seldom.

directed by Akira Kurosawa
written by Hideo Oguni, Eijiro Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Akira Kurosawa
based on the book King’s Ransom (1959) by Ed McBain

Criterion #24. Now that’s more like it.

Crime noir goes to Japan, blends in, disappears.

Here we go again:

天国 = “tengoku,” meaning “heaven” (or “The Kingdom of Heaven”)
と = “to,” meaning “and”
地獄 = “jigoku,” meaning “hell”

So Tengoku to Jigoku, meaning Heaven and Hell. Which, you’ll notice, rhymes in Japanese, and makes me wish it did in English too. Like if the word for hell was “Bevin.” That would be great.

(Actually this probably doesn’t count as a rhyme in Japanese. They don’t really do syllable stress the way we do. And, as I’ve just now read, if your standard for rhyme is that the final syllables share vowel sounds, nearly every Japanese sentence “rhymes” with every other because they all end with the verb and their verbs have standard endings. Which means that the concept of “rhyme” as we know it is almost meaningless in Japanese. Apparently none of their lyrics or poetry “rhymes.” Maybe it’s no surprise to you, but the idea that “rhyme” isn’t a universal is new and shocking to me!)

The standard English name of this movie is not Heaven and Hell but High and Low. One wonders what anonymous person gets to casually come up with such things, and leave a mark on someone else’s movie forever. Some guy in an American distribution office? The Criterion disc contains both the original Japanese trailer and the American trailer, and the differences are instructive, if unsurprising. The Japanese trailer basically resembles the movie in tone and rhythm, while the American one is cut much faster, incorporates some new Saul Bass-style graphics, and places an emphasis on movement, no matter how senseless. It’s all-around pretty trashy. And I’m not ashamed to say that I found the misleading, mercenary, incoherent American trailer much more enticing than the Japanese one. In fact the American trailer almost got away with triggering a retrospective revision of my impression of the movie. “Hey, this movie looks pretty weird and exciting! I guess I have to admit that it was kind of weird and exciting!”

And I do! I do admit that. I enjoyed the movie. It has a patient, cared-for quality that I am starting to think might be the Kurosawa signature touch. I felt exactly the classic art-house satisfaction of having taken in something both genuinely nourishing and genuinely foreign. I think I even preferred it to Seven Samurai. Fewer samurai, for one thing.

The widescreen is used with intelligence and quality. The movie is attractive. (And I’ll note that black and white widescreen movies are a rarity.)

What the American trailer suggests is a noir-ish crime drama, which is more or less accurate, though the impression of a lurid beatnik wildness is obviously false. What the American trailer intentionally obscures is the spirit of formalism that haunts the whole thing, for good and for odd. The movie is around 2 hours 20 minutes. Nearly the entire first hour is a one-room melodrama in a large modern living room, staged and performed like theater and shot with geometric vigor. It reminded me of the serious-minded teleplays of the same era; it has the same portentous spareness, the tense buzzing silences. As stage melodramas go, it is bold and effective: will the rich man pay a ruinous ransom to save someone else’s son? I found it riveting and I was drawn into the ethical questions, boldface and unlikely though they were. I also found it very peculiar.

In the bonus materials we learn that Kurosawa’s method was to rehearse and perform long scenes in their entirety, filming them with two cameras both at a good distance from the actors, and then make it cinematic by crosscutting in the editing room. He believed that the theatrical approach to shooting tended to give better, more fluid, more committed performances. We also hear from a number of the actors and crew that the atmosphere in the living room set was incredibly intense, with so much silence through so many very long takes (up to 10 minutes at a time). All of this is very clear in the finished product. The actors are operating on high-stakes theatrical time, but the director/editor — not to mention the audience — is on cinematic time, which is more compressible, more personal. Long passages of the tensely rehearsed, collaborative rhythms of the stage, subtly artificial, will be suddenly shot through with a burst of editorial rhythm: a single observing mind, free to bound through the action at the speed of thought. The movie has two very different sorts of heartbeat, coexisting. The effect makes up for what it lacks in dramatic efficacy with what it offers to the conscious mind — it’s intriguingly strange! But I’m not sure this is a trade-off he meant to make.

After almost an hour of very, very slow build in this one room, there is suddenly a change of scenery to a moving train for a 5-minute Hitchcockian sequence of high impact that exploits and releases the accumulated tension. The effect is splendid; a very symphonic sort of thing to do, though on an even grander timescale. (No symphony has an hour-long first movement! No reputable symphony, anyway.)

Then, just after the one-hour mark, the movie goes around a corner and becomes a manhunt procedural that wanders freely around the city, the kind with occasional cutting to the as-yet-uncaught bad guy (you know, a la Silence of the Lambs). This is a structure with its own characteristic energy graph, and again Kurosawa’s version is askew from the standard.

I’ve always thought the generic term “procedural” was a little silly, but here it seems right; Kurosawa’s interest in procedure itself is quite pure. At one point we are treated to a ten-minute scene of the cops giving a status report on the various leads they’ve been investigating. This goes beyond even Law and Order, where such scenes are usually livened up by unlikely revelations in the course of the conversation. These status reports are really status reports! The guy on the commentary track says that Kurosawa may have been interested in the incremental, methodical nature of a police investigation because it resembled his work as a director. This jibes with the impression of Kurosawa I got from the other interviews, as well as from the work itself. Patience, always!

And his genuine interest comes through and is accessible to the viewer. I was never bored; my attention was always naturally drawn near to the place it was meant to go. On the other hand, a kind of specter of potential boredom was usually nearby to worry me. “What kind of a thing am I watching, exactly? Is this actually working properly, or am I only finding this interesting because I am addicted to paying attention to things no matter what?” That may just be my anxiety du jour, but it’s related to longstanding art-house angst and I want to keep voicing it as long as it holds. The pretentious sorts would have it that the conventional practices of American movies are limiting and deadening. But conventions offer a stable context, and stability is necessary for grounding more elaborate experiences. Encountering the new and unusual is stimulating, sure, but stimulation pales next to communication. “Interpretation” is interesting work, but shallow.

Though actually, that sort of pretentiousness is probably on the outs, what with Vertigo being the new best movie of all time.

And in any case, High and Low is hardly the movie to have this discussion. All things considered, this is a very easy movie with a basically undistracting technique. It’s based on American material and American models. And the extremely patient attitude doesn’t deaden the standard suspense-value of the investigation; it simply prolongs it and encourages us to smell the flowers as we go. Imagine a single episode of Law and Order expanded to 2 1/2 hours, but without adding any new scenes or plotting. Probably some flower-smelling would start to happen.

The aforementioned American material is an undistinguished novel by the prolific pulpster Ed McBain. I coincidentally had my first encounter with Mr. McBain last year after being gifted a pile of arbitrarily selected Hard Case Crime paperbacks. Make no mistake: the book was junkola. (This one on the other hand was surprisingly good.) Based on its non-reputation within McBain’s extensive output, I imagine that King’s Ransom, from whence High and Low, is equally junky. But the premise that Kurosawa latched on to — that the wrong person is kidnapped but the kidnappers still demand a ransom — is exactly the kind of nugget of genuine inspiration that makes pulp fun to read. Plotting is its own sort of art, and one that is very seldom done at the highest level. Ambitious works tend to downgrade it and commercial works that keep it in the spotlight often tend to hold it to lower standards. Seeing a kernel of inspiration scooped out of the junkpile, where such inspiration is so often born, and then put straight to work in the art-house where plot is just skeleton, I feel a pang of frustration: will this idea never be given its place of honor in a full-fledged, fully artful plot? Probably not.

I could go on about plot and its neglect as an art, but this is all another entry for another time.

This is starting to drag on so let’s move on to the other stuff on the disc. The commentary is a fine specimen of the academic sort. The guy seems mostly to be reading a script he wrote for himself, full of research into: Japanese kidnapping cases and police procedure, socio-economic trends in postwar Japan, Kurosawa’s techniques, interests, and possible motivation, and a very few bits of behind-the-scenes trivia that are duplicated from the Japanese TV documentary on the second disc. He seems to have a pretty good attitude and nothing he says is forced or blatantly irrelevant. But it’s still an academic commentary. Its tacit assumption is that we have “interpretation” to do.

I’ll repeat: “Interpretation” is interesting work, but shallow. Can’t everybody see, by now, that abstracting to the historical or the political is just a quickie device to get credit for “digging below the surface”? And that the very fact that this analytic pocketknife is universally applicable is exactly why its application should be viewed with intense skepticism? Just as the more applicable a molecule of humor is (Garfield’s hatred for Mondays is applicable every Monday), the less likely it is to be funny.

I’m not saying that “historicism” is an error and that “aestheticism” needs to be opposed to it. I’m just saying maybe we should try to hold ourselves to a higher standard and not say things about art just because they can be said. Because it’s very hard to unhear things. If someone made some arbitrary case to me about how High and Low is actually a coded allegory of the history of Japan — or the mind-body problem — or the story of Adam and Eve — I’d have a very hard time wiping the slate truly clean to watch it properly again. Interpretation in bad faith is a kind of mental vandalism. So what I’m saying is, Shut up everybody, unless you really mean it. It’s the sense that they don’t really mean it that frustrates me. And of course academics don’t really mean it — their interests couldn’t be more conflicted.

(I do believe them about global warming, though, just for the record.)

In addition to the Japanese TV documentary I mentioned, we get a new interview with Tsutomu Yamazaki, who plays the Norman Batesy kidnapper, and also a quirky 1981 appearance by Toshiro Mifune on “Tetsuko’s Room,” a daytime TV interview show with the same pastel mindset as, say, Regis and Kathie Lee, but Japanese. Mifune talks about his childhood and wartime experiences; doesn’t mention High and Low once. Tetsuko asks Mifune why his pants are so short. He looks at them in surprise and says that they are old.

Something I learned from disc 2 is that it is standard for Japanese interviewers to constantly make breathy sounds of awed fascination while the other person is talking. Presumably this is to comfort the interviewees as they pass through the valley of the shadow of speaking aloud. I also had occasion to reflect on how differently the Japanese relate to fear generally. The stigma (as per my RoboCop entry) does not have the same sway over there, or at least didn’t for the older generation. Nearly every one of the aging men reflecting on his High and Low experience talks wide-eyed about how scared he was about messing up. “I was so nervous! I was shaking!” It seems like one after another of them wants to pronounce his own frailty and chuckle — like it’s great fun, or even just common courtesy, to make mention of one’s own crippling timidity. Is a culture of false strength better or worse than a culture of false weakness? Trick question, I hope.

Okay, I’ll be fair: I actually think the title High and Low is pretty good. The scheme of the movie is that heaven is a wealthy guy living in luxury on a hill, and hell is the poverty and resentment of the criminal in the city beneath him, so unlike “heaven and hell,” “high and low” applies directly in terms of both geography and class. Plus it echoes the phrase “searched high and low,” which suits the action, since the second half of the movie is a manhunt. And the religious overtones of “heaven and hell” are pretty much not to be found in the movie itself, whereas the abstraction of “high and low” feels suited to the slightly geometric, formalist style. And “heaven and hell” is simply more cliche.

Then again, Heaven and Hell sounds more like pulp noir. You decide: which title does this main title track sound more like? This is by the very prolific Masaru Sato, in the middle of a string of well-known Kurosawa movies. I don’t know what it’s doing exactly but it’s something. From what I just sampled of his work on Youtube, it sounds like it all has the same spirit: West meets East meets conservatory meets TV; we’ll be right back after these messages.

directed by Paul Verhoeven
screenplay by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner

Criterion #23.

Yeah, that’s right. This thing where I watch the Criterion Collection in order. Making great time so far!

I have postponed addressing RoboCop for many months because I’d fallen out of touch with some basics.

I knew after 10 minutes that I disliked the movie, but I was ashamed of the vulnerable, sensitive level on which I disliked it. Ashamed because the movie makes such a concerted appeal to insensitivity. To be merely disgusted by it is to miss its adult intentions, it seems to be saying, and appeals like this have a strong effect on me. I very very passionately don’t want to miss the point of things.

Only recently has it begun to occur to me that this passion for getting the point is an exploitable weakness. Missing the point of things is actually vital to self-preservation.

It seems to me that all really true and valuable responses to art have their roots in pre-articulate childhood impressions. Nothing that can be really felt waits for adulthood to make itself known. A child is sensitive to everything; no child sets aside any amount of noticing for later. All the important observations are made early, and well.

This may be obvious but it bears stating because many of these early impressions contain some component of fear, and fear is stigmatized in adults. It takes considerable conviction to cling to one’s timidity solely because it is authentic. But this is what is called for, I think, in artistic experience. (Not to mention generally.) So I could stand to keep saying it out loud: the childlike response is the one.

Anyway, of late I think I’ve straightened things out. So I’m ready to face RoboCop.

Emanating from RoboCop is a very strong, pure draft of sleaze. I could couch this in adult terms but it is not actually an adult impression; it is a warning signal from my child-antennae: Do not trust the people from whom this comes, or to whom it goes! This is the country of bad people, bad ideas, bad feelings, bad mojo. Leave the room, close your eyes. Beware.

This is the root truth, and I want to dignify and honor it, rather than just start looking beyond it. Looking beyond is very easy, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first a word on behalf of the innocence that cringes at blood squibs, recoils from existential roughhousing, feels menaced by the company of open prurience. These reactions are, I daresay, right and good. What is it to have “a moral sense” if not this? There is poison in the desensitization that generated this movie, and poison in the desensitization it engenders. My fear ultimately is not of the carnage but of the poison. My body rejects this.

And if one watches the whole movie, one inevitably begins to take in some of the poison. Yeah yeah, more squibs. Yeah yeah, that guy got a huge spike in his neck and a pint of blood sloshed onto the other guy. Yeah yeah, loveless coffin world, I can’t go on pretending I don’t know how not to mind you. It’s actually easy. Yeah, maybe that was actually a fun flick, kinda dumb, I dunno, who cares.

No. That first raw nerve is the thing. The rest is a philosophical danger zone. It’s only safe to venture there if you leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Movies like this are made by people who ran out of their own breadcrumbs long ago.

But that’s just it: The fascinating thing about my experience with RoboCop was that as soon as I went back to the beginning and turned on the commentary, my moral clarity disintegrated. These were nice-sounding men, speaking genially. My childhood alert system quieted on its own terms. Sleaze is always only in the eye of the beholder; real people all have their reasons. Behind the curtain, as usual, are just some folks.

This is the psychological truth behind all shit. I enjoyed delving into it. By the end of my time with the creators I felt, to my great surprise, sympathy for the movie. It’s a stimulating sort of dichotomy to at the same time be quite certain that it is repulsive and that I do not approve.

And ultimately my opinion ends up in the same place: these people may not be sleazes, but by not knowing better, by thinking they knew the difference between humane and inhumane but getting it quite wrong, they showed themselves to be unreliable.

During a movie, I am reliant on it. I need it to be reliable. Beware.

So what does RoboCop get wrong? It is in fact the Salo problem all over again: the medium is the message, so there’s no such thing as an insincere movie.

Actually the principle is even more obvious than that: The content is the message. If you show cruelty as comedy, you endorse the showing of cruelty as comedy. There is no amount of satirical intention that can outdo what you actually do. That’s simply how movies work.

The really grotesque thing about this one in particular is that not only does it have an untenable attitude, but it doesn’t even have it consistently. It’s genuinely not sure whether its worldview is Brazil or Superman or Dirty Harry or what, which pretty much spells philosophical doom, or at least sincerity schizophrenia. It has occasionally gotten credit (from the sort of people who enjoy giving too much credit) for a sophistication that is actually just heterogeneity born of confusion.

I know, there’s a school of criticism that doesn’t care why a movie is interesting just so long as it’s interesting. And yeah, I guess I would agree that it’s a particularly interesting specimen of what it is, which is a cruel, bad movie.

And I could talk about what makes it an interesting specimen, but that would feel dirty and would I believe be ultimately unenlightening. I’d prefer to be clear: they should all be destroyed.

Indulge me my hammering on this point once again:

The fear of awfulness cannot be exorcised by creating awfulness!

I read a profile of Michael Haneke recently in which Funny Games was explained, essentially, as what I already understood it to be: a sensitive soul responding angrily to the experience of being brutalized by trying to amp it up — so that even the insensitive masses will feel the horror he feels at ordinary movies, and comprehend the error of their ways. It is an all-stops-out attempt to elicit a shocked “Yo, man, that shit ain’t funny” from the terrible hordes who always seem to think that kind of shit is funny.

I already knew this, and yet somehow seeing his research-librarian face next to the words really crystallized the fact for me: depictions of brutality are almost always the attempted revenge of the sensitive on the insensitive. The irony of course is that the “insensitive” they so resent (fine, we so resent) are usually just like them.

The early scene of “black comedy” in RoboCop, in which an executive in a boardroom is machine-gunned to death by a malfunctioning robot, depressed and alienated me on first viewing. Why is this so proud of its callousness? I thought. Who are these awful people who must flaunt their insensitivity? Revenge begins brewing in my sensitive heart. Turns out, when you listen to the commentary, that the amiable-sounding writer came up with the scene while working in a corporate environment and finding it alienating. The murderous robot is his revenge on the suits in his psyche. (And, he makes sure we understand, on the reported horrors of American tactics in Vietnam.) Well, sure, I hear all that. But why did I have to watch it and imagine the “Yo, man, that shit is wack!” target-audience guy breathing down my neck?

The director Paul Verhoeven — the Dutch PhD in mathematics who wants to direct a life of Jesus but instead directed RoboCop and Basic Instinct, a fascinating figure to contemplate — acknowledges his psychology outright in the commentary. He describes real horrors of his childhood in occupied Holland: “growing up in a completely violent atmosphere, where you were forced to walk among dead people by the Germans because they wanted to show that hostages would be killed if there was a problem… they forced you when you came home to walk among Dutch people that were killed a couple of hours earlier. And sitting at the table and suddenly the window was blowed onto your plate because there was a bomb falling on the three or four houses next to you. And in that atmosphere of violence it’s probably quite natural that I’m really interested in violence in the movies, because for me it’s like getting even with things that happened to me at a child that I still have problems probably to accept.”

Good. You nailed it. And in that light, RoboCop and its ilk seem like a very impotent and childish form of coping indeed. I think I could find such things pitiable and sympathetic, if only they weren’t movies, which are so utterly psychologically opaque and thus intimidating. Behold the great and powerful Oz! BLAM! When the blood gets spurting, you don’t imagine a meek guy with a pen cowering next to you, snickering nervously.

(From now on I’m going to try to. But when I do, I’m just going to want to say to him, “Hey, if you don’t like this either, why don’t we just turn it off? Life doesn’t have to be this way!”)

The moral is that conceptual revenge doesn’t work. Someone must break the cycle of bullying!

I’m afraid I can’t muster the grace of a Punky Brewster and love the evil spirit away, but I can set down my machine guns.

Here as a peace offering are some things I liked about RoboCop.

1. The lighting is effective and the colors are nice and warm. At the time, nobody would have called them warm, but that’s because they hadn’t yet seen the blown-out future. Movies today rarely have nice color anymore — directors have all been spoiled on the cold thrills of computer-controlled palettes. This looked like, you know, people, in, like, rooms. And that felt like a cozy throwback.

2. I think this is the only action movie I’ve ever seen where a ridiculous room-destroying gun battle is followed by a scene with a lot of people cleaning up, sweeping up debris with brooms.

3. I may be wrong but I suspect that a not-insignificant part of the reason that people like(d) this movie is that the end credits are cards in a really big bold font, there’s booming hero music over them, and they slam in rhythmically after the last line. You go out tricked into thinking, “well, that was sure dumb, but it sort of had something!”

4. The future equivalent for a videotape is correctly depicted as a DVD. This is done so casually that on first viewing I just took it for granted. The commentary, recorded in 1995, the year the DVD was born, does not yet recognize this as the right choice; the screenwriter muses that a 3.5-inch floppy would have been a better choice than “a CD.” Wrong!

5. I enjoyed the (out-of-print) disc itself. Like I said, the commentary was shockingly pleasant, and I also got a kick out of the long illustrated article on the special effects. Strange to consider the labor that went into pseudo-computer effects, like the robot’s-eye-view where he sees picture-in-picture playback and text overlays. Nowadays this is a 20-year-old technological commonplace, so it’s hard to remember that we were just imagining it first, back when it still meant painstaking hand-measurement and multiple passes through an optical printer.

On which note, I don’t know how to wrap my mind entirely around the fact that tablet computers look exactly like — nay are — the magic-screen computer panels from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The daydreamy part of my mind that knows the latter has no idea what to do with the fact that the practical part that knows the former is willing to corroborate it. It’s sort of like my old childhood thought-experiment: what would it be like if something impossible, like ghosts or aliens or time travel or whatever, really happened? Would it feel real or fake? How would people really respond? (Sadly I’ve since learned the answer: everything begins to go equally gray. I don’t know if you guys have heard but apparently the polar ice caps are melting?)

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Two free-floating bits that I couldn’t fit into the structure above, such as it is.

1. These corrupt corporate towers of 80s movies have a tone of horror that seems extreme. Maybe it’s just that I associate them with the reckless gore of the same era, but there’s something potent in the power-claustrophobia itself. Well, not claustrophobia, some other -phobia. What’s the word for “fear of night skylines and black lucite”? It was somewhat operative in Dead Ringers, too (and much moreso in other Cronenberg, I know). The idea that glistening architecture goes hand in hand with gore and nightmare has a very obvious cultural “meaning,” but it really is its own aesthetic-conceptual package. I was aware of it and frightened of it long before I had any capacity to contemplate the actual anxieties of corporate life. Just like I encountered videogames teeming with post-Giger vagina dentata long before I encountered vaginas, and came to understand them on their own horrible terms. Damn 80s.

2. While we’re watching our hero shot literally to bloody pieces, at great length, in the commentary Verhoeven first says that the scene is so horrific because it’s supposed to be like hell and/or the crucifixion, and then adds that there’s a second reason: that killing off the protagonist so early creates a problem of dramaturgy, since we haven’t had enough time to care about him, so “that’s why his death is so gruesome. So it has two – it’s a crucifixion, but it also has the dramatic function… to implant this man forever in the brains of the audience.”

That forever is right and it’s a problem. I had never actually seen this scene before, but I already knew about it because I remember very clearly having had it described to me by my traumatized peers in 1988 or so. “He gets shot so much his arm comes off!”

Just like I vividly remember the moment when two friends gave this report: “Tell him about Indiana Jones and the heart!” “This guy pulled out a guy’s heart with his hand!” “And his chest wasn’t even open!” That is word-for-word accurate, 27 years later. Confusing, yes (when is anybody’s chest ever open?), but unforgettable. That poor guy was implanted forever in the brains of the audience, and even, in my case, the non-audience. Is this a good use of the powers of cinema? It seems more like a kid recklessly waving a magic wand and accidentally turning people into frogs, or disintegrating them. Oops! Movies are that kind of power.

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All right, and if you’ve been following along (= M, B, A, sometimes D and E, and, for sure, future me) you know that for each Criterion I am grabbing a track of music. This is your Criterion Collection track 23, a standard end credits suite. I editorially removed the words “super-stupid” and “plodding” from the mention of the theme music above, so that I could put them down here instead. This is by Basil Poledouris, who made a minor name for himself, for a while there, writing in this sort of primitivistic shadow of the Jerry Goldsmith school.

Good night, RoboCop. May you continue to age poorly.

directed by David Lean
written by H.E. Bates and David Lean
based on “The Time of the Cuckoo” by Arthur Laurents

Criterion #22.

Whew, this was really a long time ago. There have been several times here where I’ve written about books nine months after reading them, but I don’t think there’s a precedent for writing about a movie so late. I believe I watched this in September 2010.

Which do we forget faster, books or movies? My instinctive answer is books, but I think that might be an illusion.

When it’s only a few weeks after finishing a book and all I can remember is the general feeling and a few disjunct details, that seems like a shocking act of forgetfulness to have perpetrated against all those words and pages and hours spent. And since there’s no content measure of a movie corresponding to a “page count,” I think I intuitively compare them in terms of time: a book is a 10-hour experience that I have managed to forget where a movie is just a 2-hour experience that I have managed to forget, which is why the book seems like a greater loss. But movies are actually much denser with content than books (by a factor of 10,000 x 24 ÷ your reading rate), the vast majority of which drains away almost immediately. I need to remind myself, here, that being able even partially to summon up something like this picture in my head is in fact a feat of significant memorization earned only over many years and many rewatchings, equivalent to retaining not just a sentence but several paragraphs. (And, let’s be honest, I still couldn’t tell you anything about the upper half of the image.)

SO: I probably forget everything at the same average rate.

More interesting and more mysterious is to try to identify what exactly has been retained. My recollected images of Summertime are of course quite vague in the most literal spot-the-difference sense, but I can still visualize the general staging and sense of quite a few shots. Let me count.

[he counts…]

Well, my estimate is that the number of particular shots I can readily call to mind is somewhere in the 30-50 range. But somewhere in there I lost count because I began to wonder if some of these “memories” were more reconstruction than retention. Between “remembering” and “not remembering” is the wide gray stripe of “tricking yourself.”

I can also summon up a general aural sense of several of the main scenes — a subconscious impression of the music and ambient sound, and of the voices — but not of any particular moments in sound, or spoken lines. And revisiting actual kinetic motions is very hard for me — maybe five movements in the whole movie can be projected at speed in my inner screening room, and even they require hefty restoration to make them really move.

Sometimes when I am trying to fall asleep I challenge myself to really picture some motion that I know extremely well (a classic test case: the original Mario running, jumping and punching a block). I tend to find this very difficult, though not impossible.

Are these memory strengths and weaknesses typical for everyone or is this just my own profile? Comments are welcome.

Anyway, what was I talking about?

(Get it?)

Summertime is the movie adaptation of the 1952 play “The Time of the Cuckoo.” (“Do I Hear a Waltz” is a musical version of the same material.) There might be some minor tweaks but it seems like the basics are the same: An American woman, middle-aged and long single, goes on vacation to Venice wanting to feel alive; is offered a chance at romance with a handsome Italian (married) man, after much protesting takes the chance, but then departs alone. Has she somehow changed her life? Has this been enough?

Oops, spoiler alert. Sorry. But I think this is one of those stories that only gains force when the end is known.

Katharine Hepburn, of Katharine Hepburn fame, has never entirely convinced me that I love watching her as much as TCM and the like inform me that I do. She has a metallic and gooselike quality — yes, thank you — that impedes sympathy. All that jabbing force seems like a defense and I get uncomfortable. I know that the idea in all those romantic comedies is that she is hard because she can’t count on love, “but don’t worry, she’s going to get the love she needs” — but I’m not so sure she will. Her hardness seems to go deeper than any movie happy ending can actually set right. It stems from beyond the script. But here in Summertime it all worked for me, more than it ever has, because this character’s fierce pride was revealed as both symptom and cause of a desperate, perhaps incurable loneliness. The movie won me over by acknowledging that Katharine Hepburnism is pitiable.

The people I know who act like Katharine Hepburn remind me more of the troubled character in this movie than of the timeless icon of stage and screen etc. etc.

The drama of the movie is of the risk of self-reliance vs. the risk of connection / the romance and the folly of pursuing “the genuine article” — and these themes are approached by a metaphor of tourism, which is an especially inspired conceit for a movie, since it means that the pure cinematography of Venice has real resonance. The sense of place is the point, moreso than the playing-out of the melodrama itself, and the obvious care that David Lean has put into the scene-setting pays off. It is a tasteful and thoughtful movie, but at such an unobtrusive and quiet level that the surface remains fairly conventional — which can be seen as either an asset or a drawback, depending on your taste.

David Denby’s essay for Criterion is a good one, but he starts by saying that the film exemplifies the “long-running idiom” of “the Continental lover”: the idea, soon to go out of fashion, “that Americans needed Europeans for sensual instruction.” This is certainly true to a degree, and yet the movie is really telling us that what Hepburn’s character is looking for could in fact be found anywhere, but that she is only receptive to it while on vacation, surrounded by her own ideas of beauty. It is made very clear to us — and to her — that contrary to the fantasies in which she has invested her own romantic feelings, Rossano Brazzi is just some guy who happens to be there; “the Continental lover” has no exotic authority after all. Only she can make the decision to open up, if she dares; it can’t be done to her by any amount of tall dark and handsome.

There’s a slowness and an old-fashionedness about the script and I felt a bit like I had to will myself not be indifferent while watching most of it. But having reached the end and suddenly felt its impact — which like the ending of The 400 Blows earlier in this project affected me by its genuine agnosticism: Dare we hope for this person? — I see greater depth in what preceded. I think a second viewing would actually affect me much more than the first did.

The opening credits are a stylish overture-in-paintings of her European travels thus far, set to sprightly music that I considered posting here but which has a few too many sound effects and no ending. The only real stand-alone track is this exit music version of the love theme, such as it is, known as “Summertime in Venice” in song form. There’s some wobble in the audio but oh well. Here’s your Criterion Collection track 22. Composer is Alessandro Cicognini, prolific in Italy (he was De Sica’s regular collaborator) but hardly any English-language films.

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.