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Wednesday, August 25
HIGH COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
by
Lloydville
on Wed 25 Aug 2010 03:16 AM PDT
Before the anti-Western there was the twilight Western -- a series of films which seemed to sense that the genre was almost played out, or at least that America no longer looked to it for wisdom and inspiration. The iconic Western stars were becoming old men in the 1960's, and no figures of comparable stature were riding in to replace them, with the possible exception of Clint Eastwood (who would start the important part of his journey far from Hollywood) but the older stars still had box-office pull, for some part of the audience.
So we were given Westerns about the passing of the West, the last days of aging heroes. These Westerns continued to affirm the traditional values of the genre but acknowledged that the world might no longer need them, or if it did need them, no longer understand them.
The twilight Western really began with the last shot of John Ford's The Searchers in 1956. Ethan Edwards, a somewhat deconstructed hero, walks off alone, having performed his last heroic deed -- there is, at any rate, a suggestion that no more such deeds await him.
Ford continued the deconstruction of the Western hero, and offered a look at the times that made him irrelevant, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence -- a film told mostly in flashback. Budd Boetticher had previously made a series of brilliant films starring the aging Randolph Scott, still noble and implacable in virtue, but always alone -- not just a lone wolf, like many Western heroes, but marked with a sadness for lost times. The Boetticher-Scott Westerns are uncompromising in their celebration of traditional values, but haunted, too, by a sense of something coming to an end . . . by the idea that Scott's stoic hero may be the last of his breed.
This idea is made explicit in Sam Peckinpah's first Western (and second feature), Ride the High Country, from 1962. Scott (above on the left) plays an aging hero who loses faith, at least for a while, in the code he has always lived by. Joel McCrea (above on the right), almost as old as Scott, holds on to that code, knowing full well that the world no longer gives it much credit, if it ever did.
The
film is an elegy for and affirmation of this old code of
the Western hero -- a combination that is both inspiring and poignant.
It's a new kind of Western, too, in its treatment of its female lead, played by Mariette Hartley (above). She offers, as in many Westerns, an occasion for testing the gallantry, and thus the true worth, of the male characters, but Peckinpah makes an effort to get inside her head, to let us imagine what the test means for her. One can't really call Peckinpah's perspective feminist, but it's a step in that direction.
Ride the High Country has taken on a deeper emotional significance over the years, since we now know that the end of the Western genre it seemed to sense was in fact just over the horizon. Curiously, the most successful revivals of the Western have gone back to the twilight theme -- Lonesome Dove and Unforgiven, for example, have aging heroes out for one last adventure. It's a pattern also followed in two modern-dress Westerns, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country For Old Men, both starring Tommy Lee Jones, of Lonesome Dove. The title of the Coen brothers' film might have served as the title of Ride the High Country as well. Both films suggest that with the passing of the old men, some hope for the redemption of the new world coming into being has been lost.
Sunday, August 22
PULL MY DAISY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 22 Aug 2010 10:43 AM PDT
Paul Zahl (of this site's The Zahl File and his own marvelous PZ's Podcast) observes beats and a bishop cavorting on screen in a strange document of the Fifties:
SNAKE-DANCING BISHOP
Pull My Daisy, the 1959 "beatnik" movie by Robert Frank and Alfred
Leslie, with narration by Jack Kerouac and music by David Amram, has
one amazing character in it, unique, I'll bet, in American literature. The character is a Christian
bishop possessing, to put it mildly, wide-ranging interests.
Pull My Daisy is a casual treatment in film of Act Three of Kerouac's
1957 play entitled Beat Generation. The play was not produced. It
concerns some Lower Manhattan beatniks, played by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and Larry Rivers, who receive a chaotic
visit from "The Bishop", played by Mooney Peebles. During the visit,
the beatniks, especially Allen Ginsberg, try out their ideas on this
religious man, and variously try to tease him.
Here is Kerouac's narration of the Bishop's grilling:
"And Allen is saying, Is ignorance rippling up above the silver ladder
of Sherifian doves?
"(The Bishop) says, Yes yes yes, Sherifian doves, yes . . . In any case
we are not concerned one way or the other about what we're thinking about,
about anything in particular. But perhaps we sit in some kind of quiet
bliss. And he goes on trying to explain it because he really knows
what he's talking about."
Later, the filmmakers, in a high reflective pause, somewhat lengthy,
show The Bishop leading the women and children of the beatniks in
prayer and song, all standing out in front of the Third Avenue loft
building where the visit is taking place. Kerouac voices this over:
"The angel of silence hath flown over all their heads."
Towards the end of Pull My Daisy, The Bishop excuses himself in order
"that I go now and go make my holy offices (laughter): if you know what
I mean."
But Wait! There's more on this Kerouacian Bishop.
We learn in Act One of Beat Generaton, on the third act of which Pull My Daisy is based, that The Bishop's denomination is "the new,
ah, Aramaean church."
We also learn The Bishop is wonderfully weird. He says to the Allen
Ginsberg character, "We cannot expect solutions, or nirvana, eh, if you
wish to call it that, without making some eff-fort in the direction of
God, some movement (AND HE TWISTS)"
IRWIN (Allen Ginsberg): Ooh you twisted just like a snake then . . . Yes
your movement then was exactly like a supernatural illustrated serpent
arching its back to Heaven . . . I mean that was the hippest thing I've
seen you do tonight."
The Bishop also praises the Kerouac character, whose name is "Buck":
"You're making sense and you do drink (LAUGHTER)"
Our "Buck" has the last word on The Bishop:
"Bishop, let me say, you're positively right in everything you say and
you're a very sweet man."
BISHOP: My disciple here!
Behold, then, dear Sisters and Brothers, a hip bishop, snake-dancing
with the beats over on Third Avenue. May his tribe increase.
Tuesday, August 17
PALPABLE SPACE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 17 Aug 2010 12:16 AM PDT
This is the eighth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.
Susan Barry was born with slightly misaligned eyes, which couldn't both be focused on the same object. As is common for people with this condition, "normal" vision produced an image in which objects situated in different spaces were superimposed on each other, and distant objects seemed to vibrate. So her brain, as is also common, learned to disregard the image from one eye, for greater clarity. But this meant that she could not see in stereo, in three dimensions -- she could not perceive the spatial relationships between things, except by inference.
In her 48th year she trained herself to focus both eyes on the same objects -- something that was previously thought by medical science to be impossible. Suddenly she could see in three dimensions. It's wonderful to hear her talk about the joy of this. Before, she had seen falling snow as a flat screen of moving white dots, the branches and leaves of trees as a flat pattern of shapes. Now, she says, she can see the "palpable spaces" in depth between the snowflakes, between the branches and the leaves.
It's an interesting choice of words, since palpable meant originally something that can be physically touched. It comes from the Latin word palpare, to stroke, and has the same root as palpation -- now mostly a medical term for a doctor's examination of a patient by touch. (It can be used aesthetically, as well, as in "the beauty of the female breast is best appreciated by palpation.") You can't physically touch the spaces between things, of course, but Barry was using the word palpable correctly, since it is now often used figuratively for anything that is obvious, readily perceived.
And yet . . . there is something "palpable", in the original sense, about space. If you close your eyes and move your hand between two objects, it's the absence of feeling something you can touch that tells you how far apart they are. This is a kind of "negative touch". And if you close your eyes and try to navigate around, the absence of objects that can be touched tells you where you can safely go. Empty space always has the potential to be filled, occupied, by something that can be touched.
You can think of space as the kind of mold used in casting an object out of bronze or plastic. The mold receives the impression of the model, which is then removed, leaving a negative space. The mold is next filled with the material to be cast, and when it hardens the mold is removed, leaving the cast object. The mold is a kind of negative (solid, palpable) impression of the space around the new object.
In practice, we think of objects and the space around them as both "palpable", since they both deliver the same kind of information to us about the physical world. We take this "palpability" of space for granted, see it as emptiness, just as we throw away a casting mold when we've made what we want from it. But Susan Barry's joy at "palpable" space reminds us of what a wonder it is -- perhaps reminds us of our joy as infants in learning to use the "palpability" of space as a prime way of understanding and navigating the world around us.
It seems to me that paintings and photographs which convincingly convey the illusion of space, and all the plastic arts, from dance to architecture, which celebrate the wonders of "palpable space", work in large part by reprising and tapping into the joy of these first discoveries -- reminding us of the beauty of a spatial palpability we come to take for granted in the course of time, but which Susan Barry had never learned to take for granted.
Movies are the art most wired into this beauty, the beauty of spaces. Movies are flat images, but when people and objects move through the spaces depicted on screen, or when the camera moves through those spaces, the wondrous palpability of space is reborn for us. At the end of his life, D. W. Griffith lamented that movies, in the post silent-film era, had lost touch with this beauty, the beauty, he said, of leaves rustling in the breeze. And it is the beauty of leaves rustling in the breeze, along with snowflakes, that Susan Barry cites as the things she most enjoys now that she can see in stereo.
Griffith didn't mean, of course, that there should be more trees in movies. He meant that movies needed to reconnect with the phenomenon out of which their fundamental magic arises.
[Susan Barry's book about her recovery of stereo vision, Fixing My Gaze, has just come out in paperback, and Oliver Sacks devotes a chapter to her case in his forthcoming book The Mind's Eye.]
Friday, August 13
A WESTERN MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Fri 13 Aug 2010 12:09 AM PDT
Thursday, August 5
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 05 Aug 2010 12:22 AM PDT
 Paul Zahl takes a look here at two films instinct with what might be called "atomic-era anxiety". In America, this anxiety produced the classic films noirs, the neurotic suburbias of Sirk and Ray, the mystical flight of the Beats and countless low-budget sci-fi visions of impending apocalypse. Italy and Japan, losers in the war that the atom bomb ended, seem to have confronted the post-war angst more directly. [As Paul notes, one of the films he reports on, Rossellini's Europa '51, will be showing on TCM this Friday -- you have been alerted!] Paul's thoughts on the two films:
TWO FUGITIVES ON THEIR WAY TO THE SAME PLACE
It's always fun to discover something new. In a world I got to know once, the world of academic theology in Europe, you could make your doctoral dissertation in basically one of two ways. Either you could find a new source, some text that nobody knew about
before; or you could mark a new approach (Ansatz) to familiar material.
I was surprised the other night to see, or seem to see, a new approach
to some familiar material. My wife Mary and I were watching the 1955 film by Akira Kurosawa entitled I
Live in Fear, about a Japanese businessman seized by an obsessive fear
of the atom bomb. The man becomes unhinged, insane, you might say; and
his actions make sure he is committed to a psychiatric hospital. The
question of the movie, however, voiced both by a family court mediator
and an attending physician, is whether the hero, hospitalized and
finally very sick, is the insane one; or whether the world around him,
the citizens of which are going about their business, is insane.
Kurosawa leaves it for you to decide.
That made me remember Roberto Rossellini's wonderful film with Ingrid
Bergman entitled Europa '51. In this one, made four years before I
Live in Fear, a young mother of means, living in Rome, suffers a
personal catastrophe that unhinges her completely. Initially, she goes
to work, as part of her recovery, on the shop floor of a great factory.
She tries Communism, you might say, in the aftermath of Fascism's
collapse. The well-intended experiment fails. As the implications of
her loss grow clearer and louder, the Bergman character becomes more
and more withdrawn. Finally, after a brief stay in a psychiatric
hospital, where she finds herself identifying, through surges of
empathy, with the inmates, she begins to get better. But, as Rossellini
spins his tale, she decides to make a firm decision to stay in place.
She decides not to return to the world. The final close-up of Bergman,
gazing out from her hospital cell, portrays her as a saint.
As I compared these two films in my mind -- they are of roughly the
same date and both come from environments of defeat, which you could
spell with capital letters -- they came together. They both point to
heroic "prophets" who renounce and repudiate the values of the world.
Their renunciation is dramatic. In Nakajima's case, the hero of I
Live in Fear (played by Toshiro Mifune [above] in effective old-age makeup),
an act of industrial sabotage becomes the desired route.
In the
Bergman character's case, it is her conscientious refusal to be
discharged from the hospital, a protest that she is able to carry off
insofar as her husband, played by the English actor Alexander Knox,
finally loses patience with her. In both cases, the renunciation of
the world is dramatic.
Europa '51 is scheduled to be shown on TCM this Friday afternoon,
August 6th, at 6 o'clock EST. I caught it early one Friday morning in
2006, taped it, then gave away the tape to a student, who kept it.
Damn! Needless to say, one is living for the sixth of August. I
believe you will like this movie.
Then go out and Netflix I Live in Fear, in its new Criterion
(Eclipse) edition. I think you will be amazed at the parallel. Oh,
and listen to the score of Fear, which is only heard during the
opening and closing credits. It's Godzilla-ish, with a theremin
front and center -- if that's the right expression for a theremin --
and just breathes the . . . Atomic Age.
Endlich can I add a post-it to this post?
There's a line in T. S. Eliot's play The Family Reunion which sums up
these two movies, works of art, I think, just right. It goes like this:
In a world of fugitives, those going in the opposite direction appear to be running away.
Saturday, July 31
THE CRAB
by
Lloydville
on Sat 31 Jul 2010 05:08 AM PDT
A strange, dark, oddly moving film co-produced by my friend Craig Schober, collaborator on the Majestic Micro Movies.
Check out the web site here:
The Crab
And the trailer here:
The Crab Trailer
Wednesday, July 28
LA RONDE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 28 Jul 2010 12:29 AM PDT
The Golden Age of Vienna, the decades just before the Great War, remains a potent image for the modern world. Everything was splendid in the Austrian capital then, and everything was rotten. Everyone seemed to know that it was all about to come crashing down in horror. This produced two responses from artists and thinkers -- a deep penetration into the pathology of the modern world, and a sort of prospective nostalgia for the sweetness of what was gay in the present . . . a presentiment of what the world would be like when it was gone.
The pathology of Vienna in that era remains -- this sneaking suspicion that our culture is rotten at its heart, that all its supposed splendors are trash. The gaiety is gone -- replaced with a manic consumption of things and experiences, each act of which devalues the currency further. Beauty, sex, love don't even look real anymore, even from a distance, however skillfully the lighting is arranged.
The Viennese playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler (above) combined a bit of both reactions in his art, though it was mostly diagnostic. Schnitzler was a doctor, and had a cold side, partly professional and partly perhaps the result of wanting to insulate himself from emotional infection by his patients. In respect to his work, we are the patients, receiving the worst news a doctor can give, and though he gives it with great elegance, he gives it straight -- he doesn't mince words.
Movies have been based on Schnitzler's work since the silent era. Max Ophuls filmed two of his plays. The last film Stanley Kubrick made, Eyes Wide Shut (above), was based on a Schnitzler novel. Of course, all of these adaptations, except perhaps for Kubrick's, have been either Bowdlerized or softened in some way. Schnitzler is hard to take straight.
Ophuls's 1950 film La Ronde, based on Schnitzler's play Reigen, is softened only a little. We still have the merry-go-round of sexual encounters, all basically sad, all tending to demolish both romantic dreams and the various social pieties about love and marriage. But in the extraordinary final episode of Ophuls's film, the director allows us to believe that in the most degraded acts of sexual intercourse there is a tiny trace of human exchange that is redemptive -- or might be redemptive, if the participants could credit it.
The feckless count in that sequence, struggling to remember a drunken night of love, is bewildered by what he feels for the whore he wakes up with. The whore, with her sweet acceptance of his confusion, offers a kind of benediction. There's a grace present in their exchange which doesn't quite seem to point the way to anything -- but it's something, a little something, and it's very moving.
I'm not sure that that little something is still with us, in the utterly degraded culture of the present day -- but perhaps a trace of it remains, like the lingering scent of flowers from a corsage lost in a ballroom where brilliant waltzes were danced.
Tuesday, July 27
A WOMAN'S FACE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 27 Jul 2010 04:42 AM PDT
It's amazing what you can do with a camera and a woman's face. It's a wonder anyone ever bothers filming anything else.
-- Ron Salvatore
Saturday, July 24
THE FUTURE
by
Lloydville
on Sat 24 Jul 2010 12:58 AM PDT
Facebook friend Ray Sawhill poses a "Question For the Day":
"The work of which
filmmaker(s) says 'This is pointing the way to the future of cinema!' to
you?"
I say:
Movies will be saved, and find a future, through a renaissance that
will work pretty much the way the Italian Renaissance worked, looking
backwards and "creatively misreading" what's seen there. No one
currently looking ahead for "the next new thing" (after Gothic
sculpture, as it were) will see it coming or be part of it.
So to answer the question in brief -- John Ford.
Thursday, July 22
LORD LOVE A DUCK
by
Lloydville
on Thu 22 Jul 2010 03:39 AM PDT
[Warning -- some plot spoilers below.]
The peculiar brand of cinematic lunacy that started when Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis teamed up in the Fifties reached a kind of apotheosis in George Axelrod's Lord Love A Duck, from 1965. Audiences of the time recoiled from the film, and in a way it brought that particular comic tradition to an end. It was only partly Axelrod's fault.
Tashlin and Lewis, together and separately, found a way of making self-reflexive movies -- movies that called attention to themselves as movies -- which embodied an extreme critique of popular culture, satirizing the taste of the very audience which supported their films. They got away with it because the films were very funny, because audiences of the time clearly shared on some level the filmmaker's distrust of their own culture, and because those audiences didn't resent films which mocked them as long as the filmmakers mocked themselves in the process.
Perhaps most importantly, it was clear that Tashlin and Lewis had an appreciation, even love, for the culture they were deconstructing -- they weren't standing outside and above it, pronouncing judgment.
In Lord Love A Duck, though, as in Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid, the savagery of the critique, the revulsion of the filmmakers for the society they were satirizing, got too raw. The collapse of the post-WWII American male had been treated almost affectionately in Axelrod's script for Wilder's The Seven Year Itch, co-adapted with Wilder from Axelrod's Broadway play -- just as it was in Tashlin's The Girl Can't Help It.
In Lord Love A Duck, as in Kiss Me, Stupid, that affection has evaporated and been replaced with disgust. In Kiss Me, Stupid there is still affection for the good-hearted women who must deal with the collapsed male protagonists, but the dizzy dame who drives men mad in Lord Love A Duck, played by Tuesday Weld, gets only a bit of pity in passing. The satire has gotten too close to the bone, and offers more frissons than laughs.
Axelrod goes for the jugular very directly in his film. The absent father in Tuesday Weld's life has become a barely human caricature of the guilty parent, with a false camaraderie which quickly escalates into babbling oedipal hysteria. Weld's mother, the abandoned wife, mocked for what she has to do to support her child, kills herself. The portrait of the father is still within the realm of comedy, of a very savage and disturbing kind -- but the portrait of the mother is sickeningly sad.
Roddy MacDowell, as the magic nerd who makes all of Weld's dreams come true but hasn't got the male authority to win her love, becomes a mass murderer. Weld herself is not the sweet bombshell Monroe played in The Seven Year Itch, nor the corrupted girl next door MacLaine played in The Apartment. Weld is a bundle of empty desires, destined to be used and discarded by the men she uses.
As I suggested in an earlier note on Kiss Me, Stupid, when the critics of male insecurity start to hate women for putting up with it, the possibilities for comedy have been exhausted.
The magic nerd that Axelrod created in Lord Love A Duck would be resurrected, more benignly, in later high-school comedies like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Napoleon Dynamite. The Coen brothers would find a new way of making savage fun of 60s middle-class culture in A Serious Man, which somehow manages to portray the same moral desolation and social absurdity without the corrosive and alienating resentment.
Lord Love A Duck stands today as a powerfully resonant film, whose creator has arrived at a kind of cultural crossroads and is paralyzed by his inability to decide which direction to take to bring his vision home. It's a crossroads which has become for him, and for a certain tradition of American comedy, a total dead end.
Wednesday, July 21
AN EXPLOITATION MOVIE POSTER FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 21 Jul 2010 12:45 AM PDT
The horror. The horror.
Tuesday, July 20
BUCKING BROADWAY
by
Lloydville
on Tue 20 Jul 2010 12:14 AM PDT
Bucking Broadway, a John Ford silent Western from 1917, is included as an extra on the new Criterion DVD edition of Stagecoach. It's a real revelation.
One of the earliest films Ford directed, it has a rather lame plot. A cowboy in Wyoming loses his girl to a visiting Easterner, who takes her back to New York to marry her. The girl has second thoughts about the guy and sends for the cowboy, who shows up in New York with some of his cowboy pals to rescue her and thrash the Easterner, who turns out to be a drunk, a lout and a creep.
The New York sequences were shot in Los Angeles, so Ford doesn't get to have much fun visually with the idea of cowboys on Broadway. Most of the city action takes place in a big hotel, and the donnybrook between the cowboys and the swells at a big society party there is clumsily staged and unsatisfying. There are a few iconic shots of the cowboys riding horses down the middle of a city street, but there's no more action than this in the urban exteriors.
It's the first half of the film, before the scene switches to the city, that offers the revelation. It's made up of a series of stunningly beautiful images of ranch life, dynamically composed shots that have real poetic power. Even back then, when Ford was just getting started, he had an eye for cinematic composition, for the choreography of movement within a frame that rivaled Griffith's. One could even make a case that his eye surpassed Griffith's by then, just a year after the master directed Intolerance.
Certainly the first half of Bucking Broadway is one of the great achievements of silent cinema, visually speaking. It transforms a simpleminded tale into a lyric poem about the West as lovely as any passage in any film Ford ever made.
Saturday, July 17
KISS ME, STUPID
by
Lloydville
on Sat 17 Jul 2010 11:23 PM PDT
Prompted by Tom Sutpen's insightful thoughts about Kiss Me, Stupid, posted at Illusion Travels By Streetcar, I finally watched this 1964 film by Billy Wilder. Posing as a sex farce, the movie is actually a poisoned-pen letter to the American male -- full of bitterness and bile.
As Tom pointed out, Wilder's great sex comedies, like The Apartment, poke fun at the puerile obsessions of American males, but also offer humane female characters who forgive them and to a degree redeem them. The dynamic is at work in Wilder's darker dramas, too, like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, but the women don't forgive in those films and the men are not redeemed -- they are simply released by death.
There is bitterness and bile directed towards weak, collapsed males in all these films -- it's just a question of what, if anything, balances the equation.
Kiss Me, Stupid is unique in that the equation is hardly balanced at all, and in only the most perfunctory way -- and yet it is, nominally, a comedy. "Kiss Me, Stupid" might serve as the title for most Wilder films about collapsed males. Its frankness as the actual title of this one seems to reflect Wilder's inability to restrain his contempt for the modern male to any degree at all.
The film opens with a nightclub performance in Las Vegas by "Dino", played by Dean Martin, parodying -- or incarnating, depending on your point of view -- his stage persona as a horny, alcoholic hipster. He delivers some patter about the showgirls in the act -- cheap sexual innuendo masquerading as humor. The waiters looking on laugh like jackasses at the prurient jokes -- the exaggeration of their stupidity is disturbing, totally undercutting the "glamor" of the show and the venue.
It's a kind of set-up for the rest of the film -- suggesting that anyone who finds it funny is an imbecile. Wilder has moved from despising the American male to despising his audience. It's a radical act -- perhaps not entirely conscious. Kiss Me, Stupid is a film that seems to be powered on some level by a hatred that's gotten out of control.
The women in the film are decent, sensible human beings -- like Miss Kubelick in The Apartment. They offer a running commentary on the brutish imbecility of the men. But for once Wilder doesn't give us any avenue leading towards sympathy with the men. "Dino" remains a cartoon boor. The doltish protagonist is played by Ray Walston, who lacks the charm of a Lemmon or a Ewell, which took the edge off of their stupidity in The Apartment and The Seven Year Itch, respectively.
Kiss Me, Stupid ends with the Walston character "humanized" by his encounter with a good-hearted prostitute called Polly the Pistol, played by Kim Novak, but the change isn't convincing -- it plays like a sop to audience expectations that comes too late, unfelt and under-dramatized. You sort of hate his wife for settling for a dimwit like him, even if she's found a way to manipulate him into being an acceptable mate.
The film is commonly regarded as an unpleasant failure, but it fails only because Wilder didn't follow his venomous vision to its uttermost ends. But how could he -- at least in what purported to be a mainstream comedy? You get a feeling in Double Indemnity that Wilder truly hates his lead couple -- not for their criminality but for their bad taste, cheap banter, infantile desires. In a drama, he could resolve this hatred by killing them. In the "comic" world of Kiss Me, Stupid he has to leave his dumb males in their nihilistic hell. The barely perceptible glimmer of hope, of redemption, he felt compelled to offer them reads as a confession of artistic bafflement by Wilder.
You can't kill off every collapsed male in America, after all -- but for most of Kiss Me, Stupid you get a feeling that's just what Wilder wishes he could do. He settled for humiliating and degrading them, and in the process humiliating and degrading anyone who might find their predicament amusing.
Kiss Me, Stupid is, finally, an ugly film about ugly men. Some fun, huh? Well, not exactly -- but damned interesting, if only as an example of what can happen when an artist is unhinged, deranged by the very passions that, controlled and balanced, fueled his best work.
Friday, July 16
THE ETERNAL FEMININE SUSPENDED
by
Lloydville
on Fri 16 Jul 2010 12:44 AM PDT
Images of women suspended vertically in transparent capsules captured the imaginations of fantasy writers in the 20th Century. Above and below, illustrations for the covers of pulp science fiction magazines.
And here's the same idea in a classic Hollywood horror film, The Black Cat:
I guess it's just a variant of the glass coffin in which many a fairytale princess has slept her enchanted sleep:
Originally, I suppose, the image suggested a virginal state, from which the prince's kiss would awaken the maid, a kind of sexual initiation. I'm not sure what it signifies in the modern age, but probably not that -- more likely a vision of woman as pure image or possession, safe, contained, unthreatening . . .
Thursday, July 15
THE CINEMA, THE SEA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 15 Jul 2010 12:20 AM PDT
Imagine cinema as the sea. Imagine being picked up and hurled bodily
into that sea. Some films are like that. Suddenly, you no longer have
a picturesque ocean view, or a pleasant medium for transporting you on
a vessel from here to there. You are wet from head to toe, you are
part of the ocean, and you must swim or sink.
Greed is a film like that. The Last Laugh is a film like that.
Here are some others -- Intolerance, Touch Of Evil, The
Conformist, The Searchers, Chimes At Midnight, The Rules Of the
Game, L'Atalante, Titanic, Vertigo, Seven Samurai, Sherlock, Jr., The
Band Wagon. These are not films you can just look at -- you
have to navigate them, exert yourself to keep your head above
the surface of them.
I'm not talking about films which merely overwhelm the senses or the emotions
(and certainly not the intellect), but films so alive with cinematic,
that is to say plastic, invention that you find yourself ravished by
the medium itself -- aesthetically overwhelmed, as it were.
It doesn't really matter what you think of such films, just as your opinion of the ocean is irrelevant when you're thrown into it.
You are forced to react to it, on its own terms, not yours, one way or
the other. You accept those terms or you drown.
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