What People Do with Themselves

A group of adoring women surround Hitler in a photograph. Milena, a young Yugoslavian communist, keeps the photograph framed in her home as a potent reminder of how women sublimating their sexual urges can facilitate tyranny. Misdirected sexual energy in society and politics forms the subject of 1971's W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. Half documentary, half fictional narrative, the film, especially in its fictional portions, is a sometimes effective meditation on the root of human hypocrisies and their violent consequences.

The documentary segments feature American disciples of Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst and associate of Sigmund Freud whose books on the nature of sexuality were burned in the 1950s by order of the U.S. government.

Watching one of his followers use one of Reich's "accumulators", a wooden booth with a metal interior designed to focus positive energy, it's hard to believe U.S. authorities were perturbed by such a kooky and harmless philosophy. Though the fact that Reich and his followers met with such violent reactions in itself suggests there is insight in Reich's work.

The documentary segments also feature a man roaming New York City with a rubber rifle he pretends to jerk like a penis, which is amusing if rather obvious, and an artist who paints live, masturbating models. Which is interesting but feels something like a tangent. There are also interview segments with Jackie Curtis, a transvestite and associate of Andy Warhol, about his relationship with a man who proposed to him, which are sort of interesting as historical documents but the relevance of the scenes to the rest of the film isn't clear.

The fictional segments portray Milena (Milena Dravić), the Yugoslavian woman, initiating a relationship with a famous Russian figure skater, Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidović). Milena is shown holding court in her apartment building, preaching the necessity of free love in a glorious Communist society.

In the film's best scene, Milena brings Vladimir home and the two discuss the nature of Communism while Milena's nude roommate Jagoda (Jagoda Kaloper) serves cookies.

In the middle of Milena advocating unrestricted physical love, a neighbour, a "veteran worker" that Milena despises, breaks through the wall with a pick axe, drunkenly sings a song about the workers and locks Vladimir in a wardrobe--to Milena's frustration but to Vladimir's and Jagoda's amusement.

This scene, like a few others, nicely emphasises the endless ambiguity of the subject.

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Sofa indications pile onscreen.

Makeshift blockades net the arrest warrant.

Houdini is much older than eighteen.

Paprika infiltrates the fried sonnet.

Too cooked candy bleeds Valentine syrup.

Buried drugstores tally dirt pills for worms.

Horse cow hybrids moo at a slow gallop.

Tiny elephants agree to Pooh's terms.

Thicker gobans win passing praise from Cat.

We saw the bad dentist fall on someone.

Humming havarti rings taunt Saturn's rat.

Winds at the cold beach baked the cookie sun.

Repeated whispers remix the newscast.

Balloon jellyfish aim their limb ballast.

The Department of Nudity Prepares You for Space Travel

So you and your buddy have decided to build a space craft in your garage to explore the moon. But what if the moon is ruled by topless women? Have you even thought about that? 1961's Nude On the Moon is an unvarnished portrayal of such lack of forethought. And by unvarnished I do mean we behold every second of small talk shared by the guys on their leisurely drive to the launch site.

One of them decided to see a movie the night before, they both remark on how nice a day it is in Miami, crucially never discussing the potential of encountering a lunar nudist colony.

Actually, they're not sure the place where their rocket ship takes them is the moon because they both fall asleep in flight, being exhausted from the night before. Shouldn't have stayed up for that movie, Professor!

Incredibly, they land in a place eerily reminiscent of Miami except for the lumps of gold lying on the ground. The elder of the two men, the Professor, picks up a nugget the size of a baseball and decides to take it back with him despite fears the extra weight could prevent their ship from taking off. The two continue gathering rock samples happily until a topless woman hypnotises them with a blue tulip wand.

Eventually deciding the Earthlings are friendly, the alien nudists (except they wear panties) decide to let the humans roam free. The Professor cautions his young comrade to remember he's a scientist, that he shouldn't talk too much with the lovely Queen, that he ought instead to take pictures of all the women. Unfortunately, the young man falls in awkward, starchy love with the vaguely bored beauty.

You'd think those boots would liven the party up a little at least.

Nude On the Moon was co-directed by Doris Wishman, one of the few women working behind the camera in sexploitation films. The film feels very much like a group of amateur filmmakers having a nice little holiday. The dullness of its unimaginative compositions and vacant long takes is diminished a little by the earnest ridiculousness of the concept. Though it maybe would have been better if the topless women showed up sooner than around three fifths through the film. On the other hand, the vintage colour footage of Miami is kind of interesting.

The Heart's Indoor Bloodthirsty Giant

In talking about the recent film Magic Magic, Caitlin said in her blog a few days ago that it, "treads that same liminal space between civilization and the forest primeval, between sanity and lunacy" as movies like Lars von Trier's Antichrist, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer and Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. I suggested to Caitlin that she make a list of "Top Ten Films that Tread the Liminal Space Between Civilisation and the Forest Primeval, Between Sanity and Lunacy". Naturally, I immediately started thinking about what I'd put in such a list myself.

Thinking about what this particular conceptual dividing line meant to me in relation to the movies Caitlin mentioned--and mind you I haven't seen Antichrist or Magic Magic--it seemed to me to imply a film that showed modern human civilisation to be painfully absurd or meaningless for juxtaposition to nature, or a depiction of nature overwhelming or infecting mental processes in a delicate framework of culture considered civilised by the characters in the film. This is actually a fairly broad definition. I wrote down a very long list of movies, most of them great movies, then I narrowed it a great deal by refining my definition to something more instinctual.

So here we go.

Top Ten Films that Tread the Liminal Space Between Civilisation and the Forest Primeval, Between Sanity and Lunacy

10. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

A relevant quote from my review:

Familiar aspects of the self are a catalyst for a chain of dream logic terrors . . . The self, both physical and mental; an unexamined every day intimacy with flesh and blood is teased out into a cunning, gleefully beautiful and grotesque nightmare.

9. Onibaba

Stories of war are good candidates for this list because they often take place in hostile, unfamiliar, natural settings where the characters are painfully forced to abandon culturally instilled values for things more basic and animalistic. In Onibaba, two peasant women take to murder and plunder and soon their lives become even less civilised than that. The strangeness of their brutality is represented by a hole in the ground where they dump the bodies of their victims. From my review:

[T]he film uses elements of myth to tell a very effective, very raw story of regular people adapting to a beastly reality. A reality where old moral perspectives become brutal, arbitrary traps.

8. Picnic at Hanging Rock

One of the films Caitlin mentioned, it's a simple story that crushes its characters with its simplicity--in the Australian wilderness, a small group of girls completely disappears and there's no explanation. Beautiful and ominous footage of the enormous and strange rocks in the area seem to suggest something that can never be put into words, a truth in nature that exists outside the bounds of the structured reality of the Victorian characters who find their efforts utterly and heartbreakingly feeble.

7. L'Avventura

In a premise similar to that of Picnic at Hanging Rock, L'Avventura features characters dealing with the unexplained disappearance of their friend, Anna, on a small island. Like Picnic at Hanging Rock, beautiful shots of the natural rock formations providing no answers seem to be the environment's peculiar way of rebuffing the most basic needs and desires of human beings. As the film progresses, the characters begin to seem as though the values of their society have taken on a frighteningly insubstantial quality. From my review:

As the friends struggle between deciding what the flighty and selfish Anna might have done, or what terrible accident may have befallen her, the land and the sea shown in the shots dwarf everything partly because of this tortured confusion. The natural and silent beauty emphasises the small, insubstantial society and the elusiveness not just of Anna but of Anna's personality.

6. Apocalypse Now

As I said with Onibaba, war makes a natural context for a madness exacerbated or produced by a natural environment, seemingly triggering something in the characters more deeply real than everything they've ever been taught.

5. Aguirre, the Wrath of God

A lot of Werner Herzog movies could go on this list but this one seemed most fitting as the desires for conquest and rule that arise in Kinski's character are in their basic structure patterned after his contemporary culture. But it's the alien and oppressively natural environment of South American jungle that sharpens his ideas to a point sharper than anything society would condone.

4. Neco z Alenky

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland would belong on this list but Jan Svankmajer's 1988 adaptation belongs even more than the source material would. Svankmajer's use of animal corpses and his more sadistic, wolf-like Alice take the film to a much more bestial, less satirical place. From my review:

This is a pretty gruesome Alice--maybe not as much as American McGee's but this one makes more of an impression for its better constructed character. Instead of the trite story in McGee's take about childhood trauma, Neco z Alenky knows that kids are quite cruel enough already.

3. Black Narcissus

The vows of a group of nuns are tested just by the heady environment of a monastery and former pleasure palace in the Himalayas. They're horrified to find their deep convictions are insubstantial compared to the mountains, memories of lost love, and lust.

2. Through a Glass Darkly

The breakdown of boundaries and meaning in a family begins with the onset of schizophrenia in the daughter. Her perspective on God as a sort of monster hidden in the upstairs wallpaper has about it a terrible insight.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey

This is the film that probably best suits the criteria, beginning as it does with humankind's significantly more bestial ancestors and portraying evolution of the intellect as sort of alien madness of incalculable scope.

Here are a few more titles in no particular I think could have been included on a longer list:

Prometheus

Ponyo

End of Evangelion

The Descent

Tideland

And here are some very good films that I didn't think would fit as a whole but which have one or two aspects I think are dead on:

Videodrome

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

The Night of the Hunter

La Notte

Viridiana

Spirit of the Beehive

Oldboy

Stray Dog

A Few Morning Thoughts for Fake Worlds

It'd be nice if the elves in The Elder Scrolls Online looked as good as the wood elf in the trailer rather than uniformly bearing the facial structure of Darkness from Legend. Not saying Tim Curry's character from the Ridley Scott film doesn't look great but cheekbones and brows you can cut granite with detract from the fundamental appeal of an elf maiden.

It's nice to see the Imperial City from Oblivion in the trailer. I hope this is a sign the colour palette will be as lush as Oblivion's rather than generally greyed out, as in Skyrim. I fear, though, once bitten by the muted colour bug, designers tend to keep going back to it.

My friend Tim pointed me to the trailer last night. I can only hope the game itself is as good. From what I have seen, I'm excited so far.

I really like that the gameplay is as hands on and kinetic as the other Elder Scrolls games rather being the more abstract, stats based combat of other MMORPGs. Though I will say I'm continuing to enjoy Guild Wars 2, in the meagre amounts of time I've actually had to play it--so far no more than around five hours a week. Despite this I've managed to get my character up to level 20 without any of the tedious grinding MMORPGs are notorious for. It doesn't seem like anything as dynamic as Elder Scrolls Online appears to be could possibly have that problem--that sort of thing seems to be on the way out. Yet World of Warcraft maintains its dominance of the market which suggests to me there is something addictive about the level grind. Well, it makes sense--gaining power and prestige through easy, repetitive action. 

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Brilliant modems blind the amber bloodline.

Sovereigns stepping through bluer mist breathe shade.

Bank vaults hum behind the chrome crinoline.

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Unchecked brown leaves are no longer present.

Don't mind unmentioned unimportant pens.

Bullish staples stumble in a crescent.

That quill in the orange juice is Ed Wynn's.

Zorro sells no houses below China.

Tea set porcelain pertains to caffeine.

Tesseracts take the fifth Carolina.

Spice racks spill into the cocktail ravine.

Donald Duck stands at the end of the hall.

Cracked cartons pinned to paintings on the wall.

Real Tranquiliser or Tranquilised Reality

Here's an oddly gentle dream of murder and rape. Otto Preminger's 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder has been lauded for its realistic portrayal of a murder trial--it's based on a true case, the film an adaptation of a book written by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice who served as the Defence Attorney in the actual case. But the film is more interesting now for what it implies about late 1950s attitudes regarding murder and rape. On the one hand it is a well made, engrossing drama, on the other it's a sort of fascinatingly naive perspective on human nature.

The film stars Jimmy Stewart as Paul Biegler, a laid back country lawyer who loves contemporary jazz and fishing. He plays piano in his free time, which is connected to my favourite aspect of the film, the soundtrack by none other than Duke Ellington. Ellington has a cameo as "Pie-Eye", leader of a band with whom Biegler briefly is shown playing piano.

I would describe Ellington's work generally as alternating between an atmospheric melancholy and a sublime peacefulness--one hears more of the latter in Anatomy of a Murder and with the affable Mr. Biegler exuding maximum Jimmy Stewart charm, the desire to hang out with Biegler and Pie-Eye disproportionately dominates the film.

Ben Gazzara (looking oddly like a young Jack Kerouac) plays army lieutenant Frederick Manion who shot and killed a man named Quill in retribution for Quill having raped Frederick's wife, Laura (Lee Remick).

Laura's introduced as a ditzy kitten with an enormous libido. Aside from a black eye, there's nothing about her to suggest she'd been physically assaulted in any way. One could speculate Laura has repressed her feelings in an act of psychological self-preservation but that wouldn't explain why no-one around her, including Biegler, seems to expect she would feel much significant distress after what she had gone through. Biegler along with most of the men in the film seems comfortable even flirting with her.

George C. Scott as the prosecuting attorney Claude Dancer is thoroughly, and obviously intentionally, disgusting when he confronts Laura on the witness stand with suggestions that she slept with Quill of her own free will. He refers to her sexy clothing and flirtatious personality with the obvious intention of casting blame on her for the rape and the movie seems to feel Dancer doing so is wrong. One could say the very fact that we're clearly meant to want Frederick to go free for killing Quill is an indication the movie is aware of what a horrible thing rape is. And yet, its attitude is so blasé. There's the lawyers arguing about how to refer to panties in the courtroom, Laura Manion's unperturbed partying while her husband is in jail.

The movie is based on a true story though one is inclined to wonder how much the real Laura Manion resembles her book or movie counterpart. I suspect the real woman may have been looking for emotional support or oblivion in behaviour similar to what is shown in the film which the movie portrays as carefree and innocent. Maybe that's exactly how the real Biegler saw it or had trained himself to see these sorts of behaviour in order to avoid facing the real horror intrinsic to the crimes with which he had to deal regularly.

The Wikipedia entry has an interesting technical analysis of the story's legal mechanics--apparently the film was included by the American Bar Association in a list of 12 best trial films. The sparring lawyers, particularly as they're portrayed by Scott and Stewart, are fascinating to watch. It's nice to see Stewart chose to go all in with Biegler's emotional manipulations in the court room. The laid back by nature attorney grandstands with every ounce of Jimmy Stewart's acting talent.

The Abrupt Whole of History

The world is populated by amoral, ravenous monsters who do not respect class or beauty. This is what one may take from 1959's Suddenly, Last Summer, a movie about two women who passionately love a dead man who was by accounts somewhat cold in life. There is one great scene in the film but for the most part it performs well below the expectations one may form based on the film's credited writers--Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams--and its cast which includes Katharine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor.

The brilliant scene is near the beginning, when the resident brain surgeon of an insane asylum, Dr. Cukrowicz (Clift), visits the wealthy Mrs. Venable (Hepburn)--I'll resist the temptation to say "the venerable Mrs. Venable" but I think that's something Tennessee Williams probably meant to tease our ears with. We first see her descending from the ceiling in a little elevator, telling Cukrowicz that, unlike the Byzantine emperor whose throne would rise to impress onlookers with his divinity, she prefers to descend to her guests because she lives in a democracy.

Of course this leaves the implication that she's descending from some place spiritually as much as physically, that her natural place is in the heavens. We soon find this manner of her speaking, pointedly conveying things by saying their opposites, is characteristic of her.

She takes Cukrowicz into her deceased son Sebastian's extraordinary garden of tropical plants and proceeds to tell him why her niece requires a lobotomy.

Hepburn is terrific, taking full advantage of a monologue of a graceful woman whose concealed intentions are perhaps sometimes perceptible on purpose, sometimes perhaps accidentally betrayed by her own madness. Her son was a poet, a languid, cool, atheist we gather from her descriptions and later the niece's. In one great moment, she tells Cukrowicz about Sebastian forcing her to watch birds devouring helpless baby sea turtles on the beach, telling her how it signifies the real nature of the world.

She tells Cukrowicz that he reminds her of her son though the movie does not spend much time on Cukrowicz's character, using him more as an audience surrogate to investigate the story behind the two women and the poet.

This was one of the movies Montgomery Clift made after his disfiguring car accident in 1956. The accident changed not only his appearance but the nature of his performances. Supposedly he had trouble remembering lines but to me the layers of expressed emotion are so much more complex and genuine in his post-accident performances. Even in this role where he really doesn't do very much there's an intriguing, quietly plaintive vulnerability in him that was not there before. John Huston put this quality to perfect use in The Misfits.

After the interview with Venable, Cukrowicz insists on meeting the niece before he decides whether to operate. The niece, Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor), is being kept in an asylum run by nuns and it's quickly apparent that Catherine's supposed insanity is a lie carefully and/or incidentally constructed by Venable and the rough hospitality of the nuns who don't allow her to wear her own clothing or to smoke.

Tennessee Williams complained about Taylor's casting in the role and one may see he has a point when Taylor's sanity is perhaps too apparent and her self-confidence too evidently strong to be manipulated by Venable and the nuns. But the primary failure of this film is the limited commitment of its director, Joseph Mankiewicz, whose imagination takes a story about a cruel mechanism of reality and makes it into a somewhat artificial feeling spectacle.

Ironically, this film based on a play by a gay man with a screenplay by a bisexual man was permitted by the Hays office to explicitly allude to same sex relations because the censors felt the depiction was a lesson in the fundamental evil of homosexuality. Their bias apparently blinded them to the fact that the worst things done in film were done by heterosexuals.

Guilty Bodies

When Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Henry Daniell get together you can expect villainy to occur. Val Lewton's 1945 film The Body Snatcher, directed by Robert Wise, is based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story which in turn was based on a series of real life murders that occurred in 1828 when two men were found guilty of murdering people on the street to provide a prestigious doctor with anatomical specimens. The Body Snatcher effectively taps into the fundamental classism at play to achieve its horror.

Daniell plays Dr. MacFarlane who receives corpses robbed from graveyards by the sinister carriage driver Mr. Gray--played with a keen sadism by Karloff.

Karloff is really brilliant in this film and the story essentially revolves around Gray who takes pleasure in tormenting his connexion, the wealthy and respected MacFarlane. MacFarlane at first explains away to himself and his assistant, Fettes (Russell Wade), signs that Gray has begun murdering people on the street to obtain fresh corpses. Gray, a working class man, describes the hold he has over MacFarlane as the only thing making his life worthwhile--the same innate feeling of superiority over the lower classes that makes MacFarlane comfortable with desecrating corpses makes him terrified of the social disgrace Gray can blackmail him with.

But Daniell isn't portrayed as just a rich prig. He wants one corpse in order to research a spinal surgery he needs to perform on a young girl paralysed from the waist down. He genuinely wants to help her and he's impatient with what he sees as being the antiquated morals that prohibit his use of the otherwise useless dead.

This makes Gray all the more effective of a character. He's the manifestation of a devil we're not sure MacFarlane deserves to have on his back and the uncertainty intensifies the fascination with his character.

Bela Lugosi plays a hunchbacked servant, something one suspects the prideful actor rather resented. But he and Karloff have an interesting scene together where Lugosi's character tries to blackmail Gray.

The film is beautifully shot and the end is a nice rainstorm nightmare.

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Cheese broken by choices burn in port seas.

Battlefield sherry'll steel the boar king.

Green hail barraged the good soil with peas.

Twelve rainbow trout are gathering to sing.

Bowed freeway gulls await ape congestion.

Bent origami conveys the bypass.

Sprinklers sob above at flame suggestion.

Ants energise the six digit compass.

Icy pawns pack the fresher bishop fish.

Good mad Queens don't waver for a knight fork.

Elephants forget the rook's dearest wish.

Clarinet regales the wine king pipe dork.

Crook elbow pipes distort the dream plumber.

Unexamined flowers wait since summer.

The Tangled Freeway

I didn't make my appointment yesterday--my plan was to take the Interstate 5 to the 101 to the 23 and to Moorpark. 5 connects with 101 basically in the middle of downtown L.A. and when I got there a sign told me it would be another 40 minutes until I got to the 23 junction due to the traffic which I thought would be lighter on the weekend. Silly me. I was probably already hopelessly late--the appointment was at 1pm and at that point I think it was noon. But I'd been needing to pee for about an hour at that point and I just couldn't hold it anymore. I turned off at a sign labelled "Burbank" hoping there'd be a McDonalds or something just off the freeway. But all there were were flower kiosks and apartment buildings. I drove a long time, past a Warner Brothers lot, until I ended up in Griffith Park, something that seemed rather fateful since I'd been listening to the Black Tape for a Blue Girl song about that park yesterday morning. Well, okay, I'm a bit superstitious.

Anyway, the speed limit in Griffith Park is 25 miles per hour and I had to wait for people on horseback to cross the road. I didn't find a place to park until I got to a golf course. There were a lot of guys there in sweater vests. The bathroom wasn't labelled but somehow I found it, finally accomplishing urination. Then I had a Clif bar from my purse while watching people golf a bit. I got back in my car, tried to find a quicker way back to the freeway, ended up on Sunset Boulevard and finally Chinatown and I knew it was over. "Forget it, Sets, it's Chinatown."

The appointment was for an exam for a DMV job which, even if I passed the exam, I wouldn't have a chance of maybe getting for at least a year, maybe two. So it wasn't a big tragedy.

I felt like I wanted something to show for yesterday so I stopped on the way back south on the Interstate 5 and took pictures of some rather bold sea gulls. I wished I had some bread for them.

 

I got home and made a margarita and read the new story in The Sirenia Digest, a wonderful meditation on haunting called "IDYLL FOR A LIMBO DANCER". There's a line in it about how the previous residents of the house taught it to have a certain awareness, a nice way of expressing how effective hauntings work in fiction. The story involves a protagonist musing over the former residents, a pair of possible witches, in the form of a discussion with an acquaintance who isn't actually present. The layers of haunting work beautifully, reflected nicely in a dreamlike Tarot deck made of bizarre, antique Halloween photos.

Good Ape Vibes

I'm glad to say I have at least one good class this semester. I went to the first session of Physical Anthropology yesterday, an almost three hour class that goes from 9am to 11:45am. I don't relish the idea of spending all Friday mornings on it until summer but at least the subject matter is genuinely interesting--human evolution and non-human primates. The class comes with a twenty five dollar four month zoo pass which I intend to put to good use.

And I like the teacher a lot, Margaret Rance, a soft spoken, self-possessed woman between 60 and 70 who seemingly quieted a room full of normally noisy college students for hours with just her demeanour. She really seems passionate about the subject, telling us how she got her masters by studying an Iranian family living in Los Angeles and talking about how she loved studying chimpanzees and orang outangs. She told us her idol was Jane Goodall but that was kind of clear without her mentioning it.

Well, I don't have much time for an entry to-day. I have an appointment in Moorpark to-day, north of L.A. I need to leave soon if I want to eat lunch at a decent time. I don't expect I'll be home until this evening. The list of things I'd rather be doing to-day is rather long and even includes things like cleaning my apartment. I am not fond of the drivers on Los Angeles freeways.