The Unbustable Film

Happy Halloween, everyone. I haven't had as much time this month for horror movies as I usually do but this morning I found myself watching Ghostbusters during breakfast, by which I mean the original 1984 film. I wonder if anyone rewatches the reboot. Why has every attempt to follow up on the original film been unsuccessful? It seems a question worth asking considering yet another attempt has just finished shooting. Directed by Jason Reitman, son of the original film's director, Ivan Reitman, and a successful filmmaker in his own right, the new film looks to be avoiding the controversy of backtracking on the all female reboot by making a family the central focus, a mother and her kids.

I hope it's a good movie but I suspect it'll miss the mark once again. If it's a good movie, it'll be a very different kind of good movie than the original film. Ghostbusters has always been a fantasy but a story where children are the heroes is a fundamentally different kind of fantasy. In such stories, children typically need to act more like adults or the world around them has to make allowances for them being children or the story has to be something in between. Central to the success of the original film, that every subsequent film has missed, is the credible feeling of the world of adults. The first half moves at such a fast pace with some kind of rough spots--like the transition in the beginning from the theme song over the title to Venkman administering his ESP test. It gives the film a natural feel, quick and dirty, miraculous given its budget. The idea of such an unprecedented film getting made to-day seems impossible. The pace and roughness gives the film an incidentally personal quality--one senses the characters talk about taxes and mortgages and New York dialect as much because these things were intimately familiar to the filmmakers as for any other reason. And they're adult issues--they're the problems of people trying to navigate life in the city without a roadmap or a safety net.

A few weeks ago, I was watching a video by a YouTuber named Lindsay Ellis (whose videos on the Hobbit movies are really good) who points to a fundamentally 80s capitalist message in the film. It's true, it's a story about a bunch of guys who start a new business and become wildly successful. Of course, when I was a child, I didn't think of it that way. I just remember thinking how great it was these funny guys beat the scary ghosts and demons. But if that's all a kid sees, why didn't kids like the 2016 film as much? Well, there are a whole lot of other reasons. But I think you could say that the kids respond better when the filmmakers feel personally connected to the story, even if the kids don't understand why.

A strictly economic reading of Ghostbusters is a mistake, in any case, as narrow applications of critical theory usually are. Any good work of art is too much of an interplay of details, too much of a tapestry for a single thread to be pulled out alone. More generally, I think it's a movie about faith. I was stuck on the line from the Ghostbusters's commercial--"We're ready to believe you." I can imagine that really being comforting for someone who just saw a demon in their refrigerator like Dana Barrett did. The team of guys would certainly know all about that after having been kicked out of the university because the administration doesn't believe in them. One of the reasons Bill Murray's performance works so well is that it reads as a kind of masochism coexisting with hope. That scene where he almost sings talking to Ray about how they're going to get the money--he sounds encouraging but also like he's laughing at himself slightly and at poor Ray. It's actually kind of a beautiful leap of faith moment because you can see that it's not a blind leap. Venkman is no fanatic.

It's hard to imagine the new film supporting an emotional subtext like that. But I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Communicating Sexual Problems with Cat Symbols

You have to keep an eye on sexuality or it'll turn into a leopard and kill you. 1957's Cat Girl is essentially a British remake of the 1942 American film Cat People but, while the original film is about dangerous repression, Cat Girl is more about the dangers of no repression. The 1942 film is superior for its subtlety and for not being married to a specific interpretation but Cat Girl has some terrific mood and a sweet performance by Barbara Shelley in the lead. Certainly, too, its warning against the idea of throwing aside sexual restraint is a worthy message.

Leonora (Shelley) travels with her husband, Richard (Jack May), to an old country estate she's about to inherit. It turns out she's also going to inherit a curse giving her a strange connexion to large carnivorous felines.

Her uncle, Edmund (Ernest Milton), takes her into a room where she was forbidden to play as a child. In there, he introduces her to the leopard he keeps caged. The dialogue in this scene is very difficult not to interpret a certain way:

EDMUND: "Touch it, Leonora. Let it know the the feel of your hand. It will be the servant of your mind and the strength of your body. Touch it!"

LEONORA: "No! I can't! I won't!"

EDMUND: "Touch it!"

Leonora pets the leopard's head gently.

EDMUND: "Do you not feel as it feels? Lithe and savage?"

Edmund is impressed by her ability to control the animal already but he warns her the family line needs to die out here. He tells her not to have any children or they're liable to become killing machines.

When we were introduced to Leonora earlier in a diner with her husband and their friend, Cathy (Patricia Webster), Leonora had seemed a bit of a wet blanket in her conservative attire, irritated by her husband's urging her to relax. Cathy is shown, by contrast, happily dancing for the men assembled. Where Simone Simon in Cat People had to deal with physical frustration as her husband was busy having chaste meet-ups with his female co-worker, Barbara Shelley has to deal with her husband's not so subtle, constant lust for a promiscuous bobby-soxer.

For some reason, when they arrive at the mansion, Edmund insists Barbara occupy a single room, alone. It's clear later why, because of his secret motives, but it's a little surprising no-one wonders why Leonora and her husband can't share a bed that clearly has room for two.

Also surprising is Leonora's choice to sleep naked, the first real sign that there are hidden sexual depths in this woman.

Murders occur much earlier in this film than in Cat People and the latter half of the film involves a psychiatrist, Dr. Marlowe (Robert Ayres), trying to convince Leonora she's not turning into a cat and killing people. Ayres' performance is so gruff and kind of mean it's almost funny. It seems impossible this guy doesn't see how lousy his bedside manner is. I couldn't blame Leonora for feeling frustrated with him--less understandable is the fact that she wants to fuck him. The subtext seems to be that, having had the normal psycho-sexual barriers destroyed by her uncle, Leonora wants to express her passions sexually or murderously. Shelley gives such a good performance that you feel really bad for her predicament. A final sequence where she stalks Dr. Marlowe's wife (Kay Callard) is clearly meant to be a splashier version of Cat People's famous walking chase scene and is less effective because Leonora has become a simplistic villain at that point. But I don't think the film's entirely wrong in its comment on sexual confusion. Cat People centres on a woman who wants to express her sexuality only with one man and can't understand his lack of sensitivity to her ideas of loyalty. Cat Girl is much more about the legacy of abuse and manages to distinguish itself from Cat People pretty well that way.

Cat Girl is available on Amazon Prime.

Things the River May Conceal

Sometimes less really is more. This is demonstrated by the juxtaposition of two stories in H.P. Lovecraft Selects, the collection of stories drawn from Lovecraft's famous essay on supernatural horror. "The Waters of Death" by Erckmann-Chatrian and "On the River" by Guy de Maupassant are both stories about death in water but while the former involves numerous corpses and eventually a giant spider and pyrotechnics, the latter story involves little more than one man's almost inexplicably troubled night alone, stuck in his boat on the Seine.

Often horror fiction achieves effect by crafting a train of thought. Like the suggestion planted by the discussion of terrible things at the beginning of "What Was It?" or the protagonist's feelings of isolation and displacement in Carnival of Souls. Many good horror writers have realised the dread of the anticipated horror is more effective than the completely random appearance of a new horror. Still, leading up to the appearance of a giant spider crab with the characters in "Waters of Death" talking about how much they're afraid of spider crabs may have been a bit too on the nose. In that essay on horror, Lovecraft has only this to say about that particular story:

“The Owl’s Ear” and “The Waters of Death” are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar overgrown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists.

He has a lot more to say about Guy de Maupassant and he has a pretty persuasive idea of precisely what makes "On the River" so eerie and good:

The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvellous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness.

Maupassant suffered from the effects of syphillis towards the end of his life and this seems to explain more than anything else how he could conceive of such an idea as "On the River". It's a story in which really very little happens--a man takes his boat out on the river, decides to relax in one peaceful spot, drops anchor, and then is forced to remain in the spot a while after his anchor gets stuck.

The fog which, two hours before, had floated on the water, had gradually cleared off and massed on the banks, leaving the river absolutely clear; while it formed on either bank an uninterrupted wall six or seven metres high, which shone in the moonlight with the dazzling brilliance of snow. One saw nothing but the river gleaming with light between these two white mountains; and high above my head sailed the great full moon, in the midst of a bluish, milky sky.

There's nothing especially sinister in this or in the sounds of frogs perceived by the narrator. Though I would think having to spend the night stuck in a boat like that, with no shelter, certainly might be uncomfortable. When the hint of supernatural finally does come, it's so subtle that it's almost merely a tease. The story ends so abruptly on that note that the reader is compelled to second guess the assumption of supernatural. Maybe the river at night is terror enough, though the idea that throughout the ordeal something more lurked beyond the edges of perception does enhance the story considerably, in my opinion.

Twitter Sonnet #1292

Entire courts of ghastly runts arrive.
A purple bat asserts the right to rule.
No worser gang could twisted hand contrive.
A cleaner cleaver's never half so cruel.
A walking clock discovers hands and feet.
The velvet curtains clasp a hiding man.
Between the walls a spirit hid the meat.
Behind the house a creature swiftly ran.
Adrift between the rivers, floods arise.
A shaking storm disrupts the poison bog.
Exquisite hands decay in life's reprise.
As yellow eyes observe along the log.
An anchor caught where giant spiders lurk.
A goblin pair retreat beneath the murk.

A Good Question

We all have a certain set of ideas about how ghosts, and ghost stories, are supposed to behave, whether it's quiet apparitions or restless and angry souls. Fitz James O'Brien's 1859 short story, "What Was It? A Mystery", is effective in how it seems perfectly ordinary and yet absolutely weird. One of the stories collected in H.P. Lovecraft Selects, stories drawn from Lovecraft's essay on horror fiction, it presents what can at best be called a haunting yet really defies any so easy definition.

A boarder at a purportedly haunted house describes being attacked one night in bed by an invisible entity. The being tries to strangle him until the narrator overpowers it and eventually ties it up with the help of a friend and fellow boarder. Can you do that with a ghost? Not traditionally.

The title of the story certainly reflects accurately the naturally compulsive response to the tale. What was it? There aren't many clues, for the reader or the characters. This, oddly enough, adds an aura of authenticity to the tale--how many strange things in life do have explanations? The story was published the same year as Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and I wonder if that's just a coincidence. The description of the entity, once the protagonist has used a plaster of Paris to create a mould, sounds like something between an ape and a man.

It was shaped like a man,—distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I had ever seen. Gustave Doré, or Callot, or Tony Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter’s illustrations to “Un Voyage où il vous plaira,” which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should have fancied a ghoul to be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.

Maybe it's meant to be a ghost of a human ancestor?

Another possible clue as to the creature's nature is the context. Before the encounter, the protagonist takes opium with a friend and, instead of one of their normal, blissful sessions with the drug, the two find themselves speculating on what might be the most horrible thing one might encounter. Was the creature somehow conjured by this? If not, why does the author spend so much time relating the conversation? The story is marvellously successful at provoking questions. The strangely anti-climactic end to the tale only seems to make it more intriguing.

Nothing is Futile with Gold

Who would've thought the Cybermen's big weakness would be gold? Gerry Davis, that's who. He wrote the 1975 Doctor Who serial Revenge of the Cybermen, the final serial of Tom Baker's first season. It's canon but I guess I can't blame future episodes for not frequently referencing this flaw in Cyberman tech. As I said last week, I tend not to like Genesis of the Daleks as much as most people, and I think my fondness for Revenge of the Cybermen is almost as strange.

It's true, as the first appearance of the Cybermen since the Second Doctor era, it's a bit of a letdown. These new Cybermen are a bit more emotive, especially when it comes to the Cyberleader played by Christopher Robbie, well known as a presenter and announcer. His take on the character is of the typical, teeth gnashing, fist shaking, pulp serial villain variety and, along with the slightly silly vulnerability to gold, does a lot to undermine the sense of threat projected by the eerily quiet, inexorable silver figures in The Invasion and The Moon Base.

There's also the not entirely organic reuse of the sets from The Ark in Space. Set thousands of years before that serial, Revenge of the Cybermen finds the the station was once simply a "beacon", a sort of space traffic coordination and research depot. You'd think it would've changed a lot more over a thousand years.

But, again, I like this serial. Mainly for the Vogans, the civilisation living on a previously undiscovered moon of Jupiter. It's so rare for aliens in this era to actually look like aliens and after the cheap looking Genesis of the Daleks it's nice to see that all of the members of this species are outfitted with makeup and facial prosthetics.

They have an aesthetic, too, that goes along with their ample gold supply. Of course all their interior decorating is built around gold, too, and it gives a definite sense of the culture.

Like Ark in Space, Revenge of the Cybermen features references to politics, in this case the Vogans are split between unmistakeable liberal and conservative factions with the liberal leader being the villain.

Vorus (David Collings), the liberal leader, is in charge and a bit of a tyrant. Like a left-wing dictator, he talks about "liberating the people" even as he imprisons suspicious characters like Sarah (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry (Ian Marter) on no evidence. He's also intent on expanding the Vogan presence in the galaxy and derides his opponent's isolationism, mocking him for wanting the Vogans to remain underground. The caves where the serial was shot are pretty impressive, though, and lend the serial some great atmosphere while further contributing to the sense of the place as an alien world.

The conservative leader is the kinder and gentler old man, Tyrum (Kevin Stoney), who frees Sarah and Harry and is actually willing to listen to them. Of course, the failings of one leader and the virtues of the other could as easily be swapped and Davis doesn't make any real substantive argument for the superiority of conservative philosophy. But the characters work well enough.

Tom Baker is particularly good in the serial, too. His bug eyes when Sarah says it's good to see him and he enigmatically asks, "It is?!" is one of many examples of how Baker could so effectively use his physical features and subtly creative line deliveries to great effect.

The Marriageable Lycanthrope

I've loved werewolves since I was a kid so I was looking forward to the two werewolf stories included in H.P. Lovecraft Selects, a collection of influential short horror fiction drawn from an essay Lovecraft wrote. The first werewolf story is "The Were-Wolf" by H.B. Marryatt, taken from a collection of ghost stories published in 1918. There's a nice folk tale quality to the story, it has the motive often found in such tales of warning the reader about subtle ways the Devil might try to trick you.

Set in eastern Europe, the story is told in first person by a narrator speaking of a period from his childhood. His father fled from Transylvania with his three small children after murdering his wife and her lover. I really like how the story begins at this level of instability--the father's already racking up sins but his kids are still dependent on him and have implicit faith in him, even though he beats them. And he ends up not even being the villain, instead it's a mysterious, beautiful woman in white fur who seduces him to become step-mother to the children. It's not hard to see she's the were-wolf referred to by the title.

We all three trembled, we hardly knew why, but we resolved to watch the next night: we did so—and not only on the ensuing night, but on many others, and always at about the same hour, would our mother-in-law rise from her bed, and leave the cottage—and after she was gone, we invariably heard the growl of a wolf under our window, and always saw her, on her return, wash herself before she retired to bed. We observed, also, that she seldom sat down to meals, and that when she did, she appeared to eat with dislike; but when the meat was taken down, to be prepared for dinner, she would often furtively put a raw piece into her mouth.

Like in a lot of great, weird horror fiction, the trouble isn't spotting the monster, the trouble is that the horrible, insurmountable threat becomes undeniable. Their father invited the woman into the house and made a pact with the spirits of the mountains when he married her, pledging even the lives of his children if he betrayed her. The lesson is clear; if someone asks you to invoke demons in your marriage vows, don't do it.

Twitter Sonnet #1291

A hollow engine burned the pumpkin car.
Developed crypts were flipped to sterile stones.
Dejected ghosts could joke when 'long the bar.
The zombie starves 'till humour hits the bones.
Intoning bronze adopts the storied scowl.
Descending lines engrave a ragged face.
In shaded niche the looker goads a howl.
Contorted claws support a stony base.
Extended nights became a greener state.
The brittle leaves have seemed to move themselves.
A weirder glow emerged from 'neath a grate.
A row of eyes replaced the quiet shelves.
Another bowl contains the candy now.
The sugar waves embrace the rotting prow.

Marvel at the Standard

Are Marvel movies cinema? Several media outlets have boosted this conversation since Martin Scorsese gently opined they aren't and Francis Ford Coppola more stridently called them "despicable". Semantically, I disagree with them but in spirit, for at least most Marvel movies, I have to agree, though I like several Marvel films.

For many people, the word "art" implies a level of quality along with describing a mode of human expression. I don't see it that way--I believe "bad art" is not a contradiction in terms. So I think it's perfectly possible to have "bad cinema", with cinema simply being movies. But Scorsese and Coppola are artists, not critics, so it's not incumbent on them to be precise with their critical terminology. They have the right, like Captain Marvel, to act on their feelings instead of their intellect, in fact it's part of their job, and it's a job many Marvel films won't do, like Captain Marvel.

Many Marvel movies don't feel like movies, they feel more like episodes in a long running television series. Ant-Man, Dr. Strange, and Infinity War don't really have distinctive visual styles or stories that stand alone outside the collective continuum of the series. Though I would argue the first Iron Man, the Guardians of the Galaxy films, and the first and third Thor movies, are all films with their own ideas, thematically and stylistically.

I guess I see the word "art" as being as neutral as the word "food". We'd be better off if we acknowledged most MCU films are junk food. One point a lot of people bring up in this debate is that, back in the 70s, genre films weren't seen as art, that arguably, as a gangster film, The Godfather was an example of how genre could not only be good art but high art. Of course, concurrent to this, in the 1970s, Deconstructionists were beginning the academic movement which has become an institution to-day, one that argues that good and bad are entirely subjective and meaningless when it comes to art. To a Deconstructionist, it's just as valuable to analyse "Manos" the Hands of Fate as it is to analyse Blade Runner. For everyone else, Star Wars posed a solid argument that great works of art could exist in the realm of genre fiction and so were worth attention and acclaim. But it's worth remembering that Star Wars is a better movie than Laserblast.

Of course, I'm pulling examples from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 for bad knock-offs, and unlike the standard Marvel gruel, these films were never popular. But I suspect most Marvel movies occupy the place Roger Corman movies once occupied in the 60s, a director with whom both Scorsese and Coppola worked early in their careers. Churning out cheap horror, science fiction, and exploitation films, Corman's films left a lot of space, a lot of blanks for the audience of teenagers to fill in. Into this void would be the opportunity for making out. To-day, instead of making out, the average teenager may be more likely to text. In any case, yes, most Marvel movies don't provide a full course meal to the mind and spirit but sometimes all you want is something cheap and greasy. Like popcorn, for example. Though I think Marvel movies could stand to include more grease.

The One and Only Scorpius

Scorpius' back story is explored in another episode of Farscape that focuses on the fraught nature of new or atypical forms of family. In the case of Scorpius, as you might imagine, his atypical family history doesn't have much to recommend it.

Season Three, Episode Eleven: Incubator

We already know that Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) is a product of a union between a Sebacean and Scarran, two peoples now locked in a precarious cold war. We see in this episode a young Scorpius (Evan Sheaves), bearing more extensive facial disfigurements, being raised by a brutal Scarran woman in the absence of either of his parents. She tells him that it was a Sebacean who raped a Scarran who then gave birth to him.

The episode sadly doesn't explore how and why Scorpius received a value system that would have objected to the idea of a Scarran raping a Sebacean. From what he learns later, his Sebacean mother was raped as a part of an ongoing series of breeding experiments that implied the Scarrans saw Sebaceans as inferior species with no claim to the rights presumably afforded to sentients.

Flashbacks showing Scorpius' mother aren't quite as effective as I'd have liked and seeing her encounter with the Scarran has less impact than hearing about it second hand.

More interesting are parts of the episode focusing on Crichton (Ben Browder) and Scorpius' continued pursuit of wormhole technology. Scorpius' back story is shown to a residual personality imprint of Crichton in the neural chip, essentially putting a copy of Crichton in Scorpius' head like Harvey lives in Crichton's. Which means there are now three copies of Crichton running around.

Scorpius feels he needs to win over this copy of Crichton to unlock hidden parts of the wormhole knowledge. But the head scientist working on the project under Scorpius, Linfer (Jo Kerrigan), thanks she's figured out how to stop pilots from liquifying when going through the wormholes they've made. She, rather unexpectedly, attempts to defect to Moya where, very unexpectedly, Pilot (Lani Tupu) and Moya trust her implicitly based on her species, much to Crichton's frustration.

Come to think of it, I'm not really fond of that subplot, either. This episode was written by Richard Manning, who's done better. I do like how it further muddies the villain waters and how it makes it harder to see the Peacekeepers as simplistic baddies.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan
Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .
Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B
Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel
Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations
Episode 6: Eat Me
Episode 7: Thanks for Sharing
Episode 8: Green Eyed Monster
Episode 9: Losing Time
Episode 10: Relativity

Various Reasons to Wear Black

Sometimes your little English town hides a satanic cult, or sometimes vampires, or sometimes beatniks. And every now and then it's all three at once, like in 1965's Devils of Darkness. Despite the buffet of sinister weirdness (the head vampire is even called Count Sinistre) this movie has an oddly routine feel. The sets and lighting give the movie a sort of Hammer vibe but it lacks the splashy decadence and free-roaming imagination of the films from that famous studio.

William Sylvester stars as a Paul Baxter, a wealthy man visiting a large estate belonging to one of the supporting characters, I'm not clear on which. A lot is left a little unclear in the film, as in one scene where Paul rapidly seduces a beautiful Beatnik (Tracy Reed) into going home with him, then seems to forget about her, and then suddenly realises she went missing a few days later and desperately tries to look for her.

PAUL: "If you get hungry I know a place where the scrambled eggs are great."

KAREN: "I never eat breakfast. Still, if it's as good as you say, maybe."

PAUL: "I cook in a non-stick frying pan."

KAREN: laughs "Well, eggs make a change from etchings."

And she agrees to sleep with him. Obviously, eggs are pretty enticing but I think credit also has to go to the non-stick frying pan.

Sylvester moves through this film with the preternatural blandness that would three years later inspire Stanley Kubrick to cast him in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Before and after that break, he was a staple in B-movies, no less than three of which have been featured on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. But there is something intriguing about his mannerisms, his almost star quality. He does hold my attention.

Meanwhile, Count Sinistre (Hubert Noel) is painting Karen nude and his former consort, Tania (Carole Gray), is getting jealous. Nearly all the worshippers around the count seem to be women so I'm not sure why Tania feels especially threatened by Karen. Though Karen is gorgeous and there's something kinky about the way the movie starts her off wrapped in black with enormous sunglasses and gradually undresses her further and further.

With that kind of buildup, a good climax would be nice but the movie can't quite reach that sensation of completion. We get just a bland showdown in which Paul wrecks everything the Satanists are doing by the sudden appearance of his implacable ordinariness. Still, it was nice to be watching a 60s British horror movie again. Devils of Darkness is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1290

Parades of bones begin to build the hulk.
The wire roots appear appointed now.
'Twas leaves and earth contrived the fleshy bulk.
And dizzy worms disturbed by rusty plough.
Surprising pots became entire nights.
Containing tea became an artful gift.
Behind a cloak were tiny flick'ring lights.
In morning sky's a tiny moonish rift.
A flashing eye presides on cherry fields.
Approaching roads absorb the busy cars.
In travel dreams the black and yellow yields.
A dozen groups of ghosts inhabit Mars.
Collected vamps construct the beats and drinks.
Their coffin phones converse by bloody links.

Everybody's Jokers

Obviously, Joker is securely in the success category. It's already the fourth highest grossing R-rated film of all time and it hasn't even finished its theatrical run. This is despite a barrage of hostile reviews. One of the reasons I think some people were disappointed in the film is because they were expecting Joaquin Phoenix to be essentially playing Heath Ledger's version of the character. Director Todd Phillips has commented on the different potential takes on individual comic book characters: "Oddly, in the states, comic books are our Shakespeare it seems, and you can do many many versions of ‘Hamlet’ . . . There will be many more Jokers, I’m sure, in the future.”

Phoenix's version doesn't take anything away from Ledger's which didn't take anything away from Jack Nicholson's. Though in each case, the interpretation was so amazing that it seemed hard to imagine anyone else reaching the same heights. Has any other comic book character in the realm of superhero fiction achieved this kind of impact so frequently? What is it about the character that makes him such fertile ground for interpretation? It really originates with The Killing Joke.

Of course, I'm leaving out Jared Leto's interpretation. I don't have a strong opinion on Leto as a performer but, as written, his Joker is much the simplistic, pre-Killing Joke, laughing gangster villain. For the most part, Mark Hamill's celebrated voice role as the character on the animated series is the same. Though one of the few positive qualities of the animated Killing Joke from a couple years ago was the surprisingly complex performance Hamill delivered. But while Tim Burton's Batman, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, and Todd Phillips' Joker aren't adaptations of The Killing Joke, each one rests on the central thematic conflict Alan Moore introduced in the comic. The conflict between chaos and order, between the Joker's belief that, underneath, everyone is the same madman waiting to happen and Batman's implicit belief that individual personalities matter. Some people are more destructive than others, some people are heroes, some people are capable of horrible crimes.

If you read some reviews of any of these movies that makes you wonder what axe the critic has to grind, if he or she seems to be complaining about irrelevant or non-existent plot details or failing to see very simple connexions made within the story, the real reason might be a 1961 book called Civilisation and Madness by Michel Foucault. One of the foundational books for Deconstructionists, it presents Foucault's perspective on the history of madness as a concept to essentially make the argument that madness is merely a social construct created by the Age of Reason the field of psychology. For many critics, where the atheism of post-modernism is paradoxically the bedrock of their faith, the concept that someone would be a villain for being mad is deeply offensive. Even worse, the Joker seems to be presenting almost the same argument as Foucault, the idea that reason is the enemy and madness is a natural state for the human mind.

Heath Ledger's Joker obviously embodies this. Part of his mission is to draw a comparison between Batman and himself. Because Batman went outside the established system of reason he has to fight even harder to justify his existence and actions. One of the things helping him in this argument is that Ledger's Joker is a hypocrite. He tells Harvey Dent that he's just a dog chasing cars, he doesn't make plans, but of course he's lying. He tells Harvey he didn't orchestrate Harvey and Rachel's kidnapping but of course he did. Ledger's Joker isn't an agent of chaos, as he calls himself, he's an agent of fear. His insight is correct that people are more afraid of atrocities that don't go according to plan. But he's not really trying to reduce the world to chaos, he's getting off on the fear and destruction he's causing. At bottom, he's a sadist. But he's a charismatic sadist, and that's one of his tools. His jokes are genuinely funny--the disappearing pencil trick is horrible but also genuinely clever. He has real talent and a kind of beauty.

That's the biggest difference between Phoenix's Joker and Ledger's--Phoenix's Joker, like the one in The Killing Joke, isn't funny and he has no charisma. When he mimes shooting himself in the head for Zazie Beetz, his desire for affection overrides any creativity in terms of the essentials of comedic timing or craft. Even on that basic level, he doesn't work for what he wants. Maybe he can't or doesn't know how. I've certainly met plenty of wouldbe artists like that, who think creating art is entirely about satisfying themselves. That is important but part of true satisfaction as an artist is in creating something that someone else can appreciate.

Of course, if the Joker isn't charismatic or clever, he's not as likeable. And, as much as I do love Ledger's take on the character, I think that's one of the truly brilliant things about Phoenix's.

The Acidic Fruit of Emotional Attachment

Series creator Rockne S. O'Bannon, after not writing any new scripts for season two, returned for season three to write an episode featuring a reunion between Aeryn and her mother, Xhalax. It makes sense for him to write it considering this story is one that returns to the fundamental themes of the series about non-traditional family groups and exile in a new way.

Season Three, Episode Ten: Relativity

The story shifts back to the Talyn crew and we find the young gun ship recuperating on a swamp planet with healing vines. But the Peacekeeper retrieval squad headed by Aeryn's mother, Xhalax (Linda Cropper), has found them thanks to the help of two wicked looking trackers.

Not quite as horrifically framed as the one introduced in "Thanks for Sharing" but these puppet head costumes are still standout works from the Creature Shop.

The episode's plot is roughly split into three dialogues: Aeryn (Claudia Black) and her mother, Crichton (Ben Browder) and Crais (Lani Tupu), and Stark (Paul Goddard) and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy). The last of these is more or less comic relief though poor Rygel suffers an impressive wound after an uncharacteristic act of heroism.

Crichton and Crais essentially return to the conflict of Crichton understandably being unable to trust Crais. This episode begins by showing us that Crichton and Aeryn are now sleeping together regularly so a lot of the tension from "Green Eyed Monster" is gone. It's kind of left Crais out in the metaphorical cold and it adds some suspense when Crichton uses Crais as bait for the trackers.

But the main event is Aeryn versus her mother as the younger Sun has to contend with the fact that her mother bitterly regrets the transgression that led to Aeryn's conception. There's some unspoken significance in that Aeryn's relationship with Crichton is an "emotional attachment", a break from Peacekeeper sexual protocol, similar to Xhalax's relationship with Aeryn's father. Aeryn's fledgling model for her transgressive family dynamic is falling apart. Claudia Black plays the grief really well.

Xhalax offers no comfort and once again Aeryn, like the rest of Moya and Talyn's crews, is left to make sense of life on her own.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Season One:

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan
Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part II: With Friends Like These . . .
Episode 21: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part III: Plan B
Episode 22: Die Me, Dichotomy

Season Three:

Episode 1: Season of Death
Episode 2: Suns and Lovers
Episode 3: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part I: Would'a, Could'a, Should'a
Episode 4: Self-Inflicted Wounds, Part II: Wait for the Wheel
Episode 5: . . . Different Destinations
Episode 6: Eat Me
Episode 7: Thanks for Sharing
Episode 8: Green Eyed Monster
Episode 9: Losing Time

Dalek Babies

1975's Genesis of the Daleks is one of my least favourite Dalek serials on Doctor Who. I don't hate it--the last three episodes are especially good and as much as the next person I love the Fourth Doctor wrestling over the moral question of killing the Daleks at inception. But at a total of six episodes, the serial feels a bit padded, particularly in the first two episodes. And I like the longer serials, usually.

The whole sequence where Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) is forced to work on a Thal rocket could've been lost though I do love how she takes charge, makes an escape plan, and then nearly falls off the scaffolding because she's so frightened. That would be pretty scary.

But this sets up too much the serial can't pay off later. How can Sarah Jane and her Muto friend switch to being allies of the Thals so easily when the Thals had put them to hard labour? The intent seems to be to show that neither the Thals nor the Kaleds are the unambiguous force for good, and I like that, but there's not enough development on that idea.

I don't really like the production design, either, and the whole serial looks especially cheap somehow. Maybe all the budget went to Davros' (Michael Wisher) makeup and the baby Daleks. I know the idea was to make everyone look like credible military but I missed the distinctive visuals of the original Dalek serial. I missed the big foam Ys the Thals will apparently one day wear.

Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen, and Ian Marter are great, though. I love Four repeatedly asking for a cup of tea when they're first captured by the Kaleds.

Twitter Sonnet #1289

Percussive stairs repeat for heavy shoes.
Electric mirrors cheat the glowing face.
A monster swam through cluttered greens and blues.
Graffiti cars create a faster pace.
In placing names, the map allots the land.
Accustomed ranges sort the mountain park.
For all the sea was filled with shelly sand.
Beneath the waves the water's very dark.
Consistent cash arrives in oyster shells.
Recalled militia mount a baking firm.
In airy space the spirits fill the wells.
Another wheel began another term.
A hurried tea assaults a cooling tongue.
I thoughtful nose supplies the empty lung.

More on the Mad

The same day I saw Joker I also watched 1946's Bedlam, part of the legendary series of horror movies produced by Val Lewton. Far from the heights of Cat People or Isle of the Dead, Bedlam stars Boris Karloff as the master of London's infamous Bethelem Asylum, or Bedlam, and, honestly, it can only just barely be called a horror film, being much more of a simplistic political polemic. Dealing as it does with issues of mental illness and economic class disparity, it served as a fascinating companion viewing to Joker. The cinematography and production design of Bedlam is marvellously detailed and as evocatively gloomy as Lewton's previous films and Karloff gives a great performance but Joker offers the more complex take on the same issues.

The film centres on Lewton regular Anna Lee as Nell Bowen, a "protege" of a wealthy man named Mortimer (Billy House). It's hinted that she used to be a street performer and now Mortimer keeps her in his household and retinue for her entertaining wit--she denies several times the suggestion there's anything more to their relationship than that but I assumed they were having sex. Mortimer provides funding for Bedlam in exchange for Karloff's character, Sims, keeping his enemies under lock and key.

Sims gives Nell a tour of the asylum, explaining with sinister obsequiousness how the mad are really animals, applying analogous animals to several examples, from the pigs who wallow in their own filth, to the tiger (a violent man kept in a cage), and to the dove, as Sims calls one beautiful, expressionless, and mute young woman (Joan Newton). It's hinted as strongly as a 1946 movie can hint that Sims rapes her routinely.

The film is based on William Hogarth's wonderful "Rake's Progress" series of paintings and there are many nice details of mid-18th century England. There are street merchants advertising wares with improvised songs; the aristocrats at their lavish dinners are shown with the same decadent heedlessness of the cartoonish characters from Hogarth. Even the liberal Whig leader, John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson), is shown laughing at one of these dinners though ultimately he proves to be a straight forwardly good character.

It's the simplicity of the film's argument that made Joker work so much better in comparison. When Nell is eventually locked up for trying to force reforms for the asylum, she finds each and every inmate is really a kind and decent person who wouldn't dream of hurting her. Even when Sims locks her in with the "tiger", the big fellow ends up being as gentle as a kitten. As though if just one of these people laid a hand on her it would invalidate the argument for reforms in mental healthcare. That's the genius of Joker--not every victim of injustice is a hero or a secretly upstanding citizen, though sometimes it's that injustice that exacerbates their problems.

The Joker Awoke

Joker is the most important comic book film of the decade. Striking the right mixture of fantasy and realism, it achieves a provoking reflection of modern social issues of economy, society, and violence. A brilliant performance by Joaquin Phoenix is perfectly served by razor sharp filmmaking.

One of the ways you can tell the movie's so good is by how much difficulty critics are having in writing about it. "Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital," as Oscar Wilde once wrote. "When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself." I'm not sure I believe this applies as universally as Wilde implied but it's certainly true in the case of Joker. When the film received a standing ovation at Venice, certainly there didn't seem to be much disagreement, but when director Todd Phillips said he didn't like Woke culture, the tide of backpedalling reviews betrayed a panic that indicated the fault-line on which the film is perched. Is the film anti-Woke? If so, how could no-one have known until Phillips said so?

One of the negative reviews came from a critic who's normally one of my favourites, Michael Phillips, who offered this opinion I find to be a bit disturbing: "Except for one murder committed off-screen in the epilogue, everybody this proto-Joker kills in 'Joker' has it coming. His killings are emotionally and even morally justified in the filmmaker’s eyes." To say this isn't at all the impression I had would be to put it mildly. Despite abuse the Joker, Arthur, suffered at the hands of one particular victim, I hate to think most people thought Arthur was morally justified in smothering her to death with a pillow. Why would anyone think this is presented as okay unless they're predisposed to interpret the filmmakers' intentions a certain way? Todd Phillips' comments on Woke culture were published a day before Michael Phillips' review.

Joker isn't the movie I expected. From the way people talked about it, I expected Arthur Fleck to be sort of like an Incel but he doesn't seem to be particularly horny. He has a delusional fixation on his neighbour played by Zazie Beetz but that seems much more about a need for emotional support than sexual satisfaction. None of the crimes he perpetrates seem to be borne of sexual frustration, either. But broadly speaking, sure, he's a lonely guy taking out his anger on a world in ways it doesn't deserve. Many of the reviews and reactions I've seen have either expressed disappointment over not being able to identify with the Joker or criticism that the Joker is too sympathetic or, most of all, condemnation of the film for vacillating between the two. But anyone who's paying attention, particularly to Joaquin Phoenix's performance, would know that it's terribly appropriate for Arthur, like Travis Bickle, to be man filled with contradictions; a man compulsively concerned for his mother or a woman on the subway also perpetrates terribly selfish acts.

Simply put, Joker is about a mentally ill man who has an extreme reaction to social problems. For this reason, my feeling was that Arthur is much closer to a leftwing extremist than a rightwing one, particularly a group like Antifa. Certainly the people who follow him at the end of the film have a very Antifa vibe about them.

In the film's climax, Arthur claims not to be a political person before launching into a diatribe about the disconnect between rich and poor. Of course, to him, this wouldn't seem like a political issue. For him it's personal. It's personal that he's lost his already inadequate mental healthcare due to a loss of funding. He feels the effects of this again and again in the loss of his job and the humiliation he regularly suffers from rich and poor. I've seen leftwing memes that say you should regard all billionaires as villains, that there's no moral justification for being wealthy when people are suffering from poverty. It's not a big step to the claim the Joker more or less makes in the climax that it's okay to murder such people.

Michael Moore has praised the film, saying that it's a danger to society not to see the movie. It's worth remembering that Moore predicted Donald Trump's election when no-one else did because Moore, who seems to stay close to his working class roots in Michigan, understood the anger of working class voters who felt abandoned by the left. At the time, Moore suggested this support for Trump is not about having a coherent policy alternative but about saying "Fuck you" to the entities that had neglected them. In the same way, Arthur Fleck is of course not presenting a viable alternative means of government; and neither is Antifa or the compulsive deconstructionism of radical left commentators. As he says in his climactic speech, he has nothing to lose. So he may as well get what satisfaction he can from mindless destruction.

In his book on 17th century England, The Stuart Age, historian Barry Coward talks about the variety of perspectives on the volatile political, religious, and social situation in the 1630s and 40s before the Civil War.

. . . because [King Charles I] and his court became increasingly isolated from the mainstream of contemporary religious, intellectual, and social life, the policies pursued by Charles and his ministers went unexplained and were consequently often misunderstood. As often in history, what people believed to be true was more important than the truth itself in influencing the course of events.

Arthur may be wrong about any responsibility the television host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) or Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen) bear for his unhappy life. But it's how he sees it. And Thomas' misunderstanding of the situation in Arthur's social stratum would seem particularly cruel when Wayne lives a comfortable life; Murray's misunderstanding seems cruel because of Arthur's identification with Murray through his television show. Both older men are presented as potential father figures for Arthur, underlining Arthur's impression of injustice in his exclusion.

But he never articulates any of this in a particularly political way until the end. He's no philosopher, he's more like a test subject. I listened to some YouTube critics this morning talking about the film--Russell Brand describes the culmination of Arthur's story as "self-actualisation". Which, in a way, I agree with. But one of the things I liked about Phoenix's performance is that he makes it clear that Arthur's compulsive laughter really is a mental condition that doesn't accurately reflect his internal emotional state. His transformation into the Joker gains steam when he declares that it does. His "self-actualisation", his "werewolf", as he puts it, is to give himself up to the physical urges and mechanisms he can't control, abandoning the higher function of things like the social contract or civilisation. The thin leftist philosophy he spouts briefly is only a convenient pretext.