tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-200814082024-03-14T02:00:26.629-07:00The Exploding KinetoscopeFilm: The Deadliest ArtChris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.comBlogger132125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-86983936321364673822014-03-26T21:10:00.001-07:002017-07-14T20:07:43.416-07:00Viewing Notes: SUMMER STOCK (1950)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FJ361dBQ6bA/WWmGxu4FdiI/AAAAAAAAAtc/pe4WL6n7Ur0HCnOb4dg1tWWSNF1kqbvOwCLcBGAs/s1600/summerstock.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FJ361dBQ6bA/WWmGxu4FdiI/AAAAAAAAAtc/pe4WL6n7Ur0HCnOb4dg1tWWSNF1kqbvOwCLcBGAs/s1600/summerstock.jpg" data-original-width="250" data-original-height="392" /></a></div><b><i>Summer Stock</i></b>, 1950, d. Charles Walters<br />
scr. Sy Gromberg, George Welles<br />
with Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Gloria DeHaven<br />
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Conventional Wisdom has it that there's little to see in <b><i>Summer Stock</i></b> but "Get Happy", which, shout hallelujah, is in itself a hell of a Thing to See anyway, even if it was patched in three months after principle photography and found its famous costume among Minnelli's cast-offs. And yet!... There's also a silent Gene Kelly partnered with a squeaky floorboard and discarded newspaper, gliding and hopping and inventing 100 rhythmic gags to an instrumental reprise of "You, Wonderful You" like he's a permagrinning Buster Keaton. And there's the tour de force fight-n-flirt deconstructed-square-dance between Judy and Gene. And Kelly going at tornado speed through a cramped country kitchen, up on the table and practically pushing the fourth wall out past the edge of the set in "Dig Dig Dig Dig for Your Dinner". And, and, and Eddie Bracken and Marjorie Main out comic-relieving Phil Silvers without breaking a goddamn sweat. Point being that's at least enough to justify looking at something for an hour and forty minutes.<br />
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That plot, with Judy (as Jane) trying to run the family farm while her sister's crazy showbiz pals (led by Kelly as Joe) rehearse in the barn, recalls the Mickey & Judy pictures of yore, and maybe <b><i>Oz</i></b>, too. Ironically-ish, the Major Theme involves Judy coming to understand that putting on a show is for reals hard work, just like farm chores, and her sister gradually emerges as a sort of villain whose diva behavior (ahem, sleeping too late, disappearing during rehearsals, running up expenses) threatens to ruin the show. However troubled Garland was during production on <b><i>Summer Stock</i></b> (i.e.: Troubled), she does the buoyant optimist thing, the tough-talking can-do! thing, and the cute funny nervous motormouth routine and there's not a crack in her armor on screen.<br />
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So you've got this slick, bright-hearted, colorful kids-puttin-on-a-show-in-the-barn throwback with a classic roadblocked-courtship plot, at least two truly great numbers and several really really good ones. This being Garland's final film for MGM, perhaps we have a phantom ache for a grander (or more grandiose) send-off — a whole 120 minutes of "Get Happy". The loss in underrating <b><i>Summer Stock</i></b>, I think, is that if MGM musicals are a thing with you, then second or third tier is really not so far from the top shelf. This is rather a primo example of that particular dream machine doing what it did in 1950.<br />
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Under a pink spotlight on a darkened stage, Joe tries to explain his show to Jane. Nestled in the functional segue dialogue before the romantic confession number "You, Wonderful You", <b><i>Summer Stock</i></b> offers possibly the simplest, wisest of explanations for the existence of the musical itself. It's a throwaway moment, sweet and slight, and — in spite of all well-documented effort behind <b><i>Summer Stock</i></b> — it is effortless.:<br />
<blockquote>JOE: We're trying to tell a story with music and song and dance, not just with words. For instance, if the boy tells the girl that he loves her, he doesn't just say it. He sings it.<br />
JANE: Why doesn't he just say it?<br />
JOE: Why? Oh, I don't know. But it's kind of nice.</blockquote><br />
<b>Viewed on:</b> 3/19/14 — DVD (Warner/TCM, Region 1)Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-58351342102295474122014-03-13T04:37:00.000-07:002017-09-21T16:47:07.845-07:00Protected By Powerful Forces: Notes on “Never Leave Me”<b>Notes on “Never Leave Me” — Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7ABB09<br />
Directed by David Solomon<br />
Written by Drew Goddard</b><br />
[ Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2013/11/playing-vampire-towns-notes-on-sleeper.html">“Sleeper”</a> ]<br />
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<b>This again.<br />
She pretty much gives him looks like this through the whole episode.</b></center>
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Monsters! Explosions! Torture! Revelation! Topless Spike in bondage! All this and more! And yet <b>“Never Leave Me”</b> is one of the odd <b>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</b> episodes that does not have a strong, clear dramatic throughline. The DVD packaging summarizes the plot thusly: “Buffy’s interrogation of Spike is interrupted when the Bringers attack her house, while in England the Watcher’s Council comes under attack from The First.” While those things certainly occur, that really only describes two brief scenes. Where the previous episode, <b>“Sleeper”</b> (7.8), curiously lacked resolution and was fuzzy on the particulars, at least it focused on a central plot about getting to the bottom of whether or not Spike was feeding on Sunnydaleites again. <b>“Never Leave Me”</b>, by comparison, is jam-packed with meaty drama, and advances the Season Seven plot substantially, but as a story in and of itself is all over the map.<br />
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If <b>“Never Leave Me”</b> has a unifying dramatic concern, it’s the Seal of Danthazar in the basement of Sunnydale High. You remember the Seal — the one Andrew opened in <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2013/03/spend-night-alone-notes-on.html">“Conversations With Dead People”</a> by killing Jonathan. Except it turns out it didn’t open. When we catch up with Andrew Wells, least competent but last surviving member of The Trio, he’s still in the company of The First Evil, still being directed to open the Seal, now in fumbling Keystone Kops fashion, chasing a sacrificial piglet around the demon portal and doing pratfalls. Besides the general lameness of the conceit, this is symptomatic of the repetitive motion syndrome plaguing Season Seven, and reduces Jonathan’s death to a joke when First-Evil-Jonathan apologizes for being anemic. On the upswing, this loophole restores a measure of dignity to the last moments of a beloved character, as if Jonathan’s ernest repentance rendered his blood too fine to open the evil Seal. That very business — whose side you’re truly on and what that means — is rather the subject of <b>“Never Leave Me”</b>.<br />
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<b>Dangerous murderers fighting in an alley.</b></center>
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Well, if we’re going back to the beginning as we keep insisting, doesn’t a rebooted Sunnydale High need a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pack_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)">live pig running around?</a> Too squeamish to kill the poor animal, Andrew is reduced to buying blood from the butcher’s shop. Here he’s intercepted by Willow, and in an alley the remnants of Season Six’s battling villains face each other for the first time this year. They both end up fronting that they’re still bad to the bone and boasting about their magical<br />
prowess. It’s all a joke, Andrew transparently bluffing “Stand down, She-Witch, your defeat is at hand!” and Will indignantly blustering “I <i>am</i> a she-witch, a very powerful she-witch, or witch, as is more accurate!” Funny, except that in this confrontation Willow is reminded that her own allegiances have been shaky in very recent memory. And here is another recent villain just jabbering “I’m good! I do good things now!…" and changing his mind, "I’m <i>am</i> bad! I’m bad,” and does she sound any different? As she says it, Willow seems to remember the extent to which she really, really is not to be trifled with. Doubt flickers through them both, but at the moment they are on opposite sides and those sides are fairly clear.<br />
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So she packs him up and hauls him back to Scooby Central, which is the other major concern of <b>“Never Leave Me”</b>.<br />
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<b>A house being put back together.</b></center>
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<b>I. GATHER</b><br />
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“Gather them. It’s started,” Robson tells Giles at the end of <b>“Sleeper”</b>. That’s the important message from a dying man in a cliffhanger scene, and it’s the lead-in clip in the Previously On for <b>“Never Leave Me”</b>. Giles won’t appear in this episode, so it’s Robson’s last words to note. Cats are popping out of bags right and left here, so no time to fret over spoilers. Robson is telling Giles to gather the Potential Slayers, and that the war with The First Evil has started. It’s a message arriving too late — the conflict is underway, not about to start. Those cryptic teaser snippets of teenage girls around the world being pursued and murdered, the attempts to open the Seal of Danthazar, Spike’s brainwashing — anything that looked like a preliminary skirmish — was all part of a plan already in execution before the targets know what hit them. The enemy is going to have to improvise right and left through the season, and indeed in <b>“Never Leave Me”</b>, but its battle plan tends toward sneak attack and complex boobytraps. Our heroes are perpetually a step behind The First, chasing an invisible enemy through a plexiglass maze only to find they are being led by the nose.<br />
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The gathering has started, too. Certainly The First has summoned its legion of Harbingers (or “Bringers” — ? well, w/e), and lured Andrew and Jonathan (R.I…P?) back up from Mexico. But the goodies are massing as well. Watchers are assembling at Watcher HQ, and Giles has instruction to round up the remaining Potentials. The Sunnydale Scoobies have been reuniting all season, with Willow returning from England, Spike from Africa. Xander and Anya are increasingly compelled to stay at the Summers’ house. <b>“Sleeper”</b> delivered Spike back to 1630 Revello Drive, and <b>“Never Leave Me”</b> pulls Andrew into the house, too. More core cast and fascinating newbies will be arriving shortly. The teams are forming, and this snowballing effect will continue until the very end of the series.<br />
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Who are you going to gather, then? <b>“Never Leave Me”</b> concerns the matter of two villains, Spike and Andrew Wells, both of whom have recently murdered people. Spike is officially reformed, and tries to demonstrate heroism in his actions but is constantly forced to talk about it and explain himself. Andrew talks constantly about how he is reformed, but demonstrates this by stabbing Jonathan a couple of days ago. Spike killed in a mind-control trance, Andrew of his own free will. And somehow these two blonde killers dressed in black both end up tied to chairs in Buffy's house. Their situations are nearly identical but with poles reversed.<br />
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This “gathering” business isn’t about maternal nesting instincts, or teamwork, or the value of friendship. It’s about which side you pick when it’s time to pick sides. That’s picking sides for a war, certainly; these are bands of warriors being assembled, and the subject of Buffy’s leadership will drive the next act of the season. But gathering is also about who you let into your life, who you have to cut out, and who you choose to stick your neck out for.<br />
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So two interrogations, two allegiances under examination. We’re explicitly reminded that Spike still feeds on blood, while Andrew is uncomfortable procuring it from a butcher. And we’re explicitly reminded Spike has a soul, while Andrew sputters to Willow “I’m evil, but protected by powerful forces. Forces you can’t begin to imagine, little girl.” Team Slayer appears to have the upper hand through the bulk of the episode, as they are in possession of The First’s sleeper agent and current right-hand (or corporeal-hand, anyway) man. There is a take-one-leave-one balance to the events of the episode, but in the war itself there is no balance: this is a string of defeats for the Slayer’s side and all they gain is a tiny scrap of information. But Knowledge, etc., etc., something About Power.<br />
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<b>Sun shines in the bedroom.</b><br />
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<b>II. LOVE</b><br />
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“Suffer love! A good epithet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.”<br />
—Benedick, <b>Much Ado About Nothing</b>, act V, scene 2<br />
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The Buffy/Spike interrogation actually doesn’t get very far in terms of the murders she’s questioning him about. Instead they end up discussing their relationship in a frank manner, and that takes the form of a kind of interrogation. Through the wall and simultaneously, there is another interrogation as Anya and Xander lay into Andrew. But the same thing ends up happening: Andrew is an excuse to look at the current state of Anya/Xander relations.<br />
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It’s called <b>"Never Leave Me"</b>. That’s a line from "Early One Morning", of course, Spike’s "trigger" song, as in "Oh don’t deceive me / Oh, never leave me." In the song, the maiden is singing this lament to a runaway lover. In the context of the episode title, though we have two fractured couples at the center, the phrase reenforces the gathering motif. Who, after all, might be saying "Never Leave Me"? To whom are they saying it? Or, as in <b>"Tough Love"</b> (5.19) or <b>"Dirty Girls"</b> (7.18), is it ironic?<br />
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Apparently Spike is having "withdraws," the craving for human blood described in language that implies it is worse than just a gnawing hunger. This isn’t strictly in line with previous depictions of vamps going cold turkey, but adds an edge of peril and haze of confusion to the scene. <b>"Sleeper"</b> worked a "recovering addict" parallel into its story of Spike confronting his latent vampire bloodlust. Here’s B hand-feeding Spike because he must be restrained; she’s administering methadone. And it’s gross and pathetic, Spike suckling from a bag of butcher shop leavings like it’s some kind of grotesque oral blood transfusion. He’s in enormous discomfort, but Buffy’s there to get him through this (which is, maybe, also a sort of methadone), so hey, hunger hurts, but starving works.<br />
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But we’re not in one of Spike’s crazy basements, we’re not in Angel’s Alley where we fight, or The Bronze dance floor where we court. Not the Library, Cemetery, or Hellmouth. Buffy, it seems, has Spike tied up in her <i>bedroom</i>, and in the last line before the theme song, he warns: "If I get free, someone’s gonna die." Now, that means odds are he’s gonna get free. His words ring down the halls of Season Seven, as the overarching story of Spike himself is the tale of a soul striving for freedom. Where Angel struggles to find reasons to exist, grapples with greater existential purpose, Spike simply yearns to be Spike. He’s not just currently tied to the chair, but bowed under the weight of a sundry artificial restraints: vampirism, brain chip, soul, brainwashing. But he moves toward the light, that one. And if he got free — truly free — would someone die?<br />
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Well, right now, unfortunately, they might. The Buffy/Spike interrogation is the dramatic centerpiece of <b>"Never Leave Me"</b>. It boils down to two scenes, and in both, Buffy only asks a few questions about how Spike might be connected to the mysterious shapeshifting villain before Buffy and Spike are back on the topic of Buffy and Spike. They segue into hashing out personal business with almost comical speed and inevitability, first in her bedroom and then in her basement. And indeed, the sex stuff is up on the surface of things; it needs to be addressed, but something else is down in the deep dark.<br />
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When Spike half-jokes that the trials required to earn back his soul are nothing compared with the agony of being in love with Buffy Summers, it’s bound to set her off. She’s hurt, insulted, takes a defensive, closed-off posture, but lets him talk that way. She calls him self-pitying but generally puts the ugliest possible spin on things like tainting his view of the relationship will help him get over it.<br />
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The bedroom conversation builds to Spike’s accusation to Buffy that "You used me," and how he finally understands this, and that "you hated yourself and you took it out on me." Buffy stonily agrees, and (snidely?) reminds him that she told him this at the time. But that isn’t quite what he’s getting at. His soul is giving Spike the capacity to understand what Buffy was putting herself through during her fling with him. He can feel her pain now — "I get it. Had to travel 'round the world, but I understand you now." Beautiful, lovely, except what he sees is still red: "I understand the violence inside." Ah. He had to learn to hate himself as much as she did to be with him in the first place and awww, who’s feeling sorry for themselves after all?<br />
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Spike thinks he’s being "honest" with himself now, but he’s always generally been an honest guy. Buffy’s acting like it's all self-evident, like she told him over and over that she didn’t care about him, slept with him just to feel something even if it was disgust, used him as a receptacle for her sorrow. So they both realize this now, and that’s painful. It’s also painful because of what they’re not realizing. As a vampire, Spike was convinced B was secretly in love with him, maybe even mythologically <i>bound</i> to him; now with this glowing soul of beautiful light in him, Spike is convinced that she always hated him. Something about these star-whacked romances seems to make people think in extremes, yeah?<br />
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There is a fine joke in <b>"Sleeper"</b>, when Buffy starts to correct the bouncer at The Bronze — it was actually Billy Idol who ripped off Spike’s personal fashions. Besides the laugh, the lovely thing is that it is a rare moment where Buffy acts like Spike is her boyfriend. A moment where she is excited about him and wants to talk about him with other people. Where she acts like she <i>likes</i> him. And it is sad, too, because it comes now, when they appear to be definitively split up. Because it was always there. At some point, they talked about Billy Idol. And we saw it in flashes, but in occasional postcoital cuddles, in the wacky invisible sex in <b>"Gone"</b> (6.11), and point being: These two do like each other, and if they "used" one another in some way, both got something out of that use. We just saw in <b>"Sleeper"</b> a reminder of how Buffy has been catalytic in Spike's growth over the past four years. And if that is true, then Buffy Summers very literally helped William the Bloody save his soul and so who cares if she miseryfucked him a couple times?<br />
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In this scene, she finally asks: "How’d you get your soul back?" Nice of everyone to respect a fellow’s privacy, but given the nature of bartering for souls throughout history, maybe that’s an important question. Spike’s account of reclaiming his soul places Buffy at the center: "Went to see a man about a girl." Aww. But consider that part of his motivation was that he had hit absolute bottom, particularly by this program’s standards. And they’re not talking right now about how she's been a support and inspiration, nor about how his love is so strong and pure that his demon body required an actual-factual Soul to withstand it.<br />
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No, they’re talking about how now he understands the kind of degradation Buffy was feeling during their fling in Season Six, and the residue that still clogs up her self-image. There is not a little bit of emotional violence happening here; they’re getting in subtle digs at each other, alluding to major injuries and mutual distrusts and if they’re getting into it this deep, it’s almost certainly time to head down to the basement.<br />
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<i>You have slayed me, you have made me<br />
I got to laugh halfways off my heels<br />
I got to know, babe, will you surround me?<br />
So I can know if I am really real</i><br />
—Bob Dylan, “Spanish Harlem Incident”, 1964<br />
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The chip isn’t working and the trigger is, and The First appears as First-Spike and sings to Real-Spike, and sends the vampire crashing through the wall to attack Andrew. The First is using Spike to 86 Andrew before he can spill about the Seal of Danthazar, effectively making this a villain using a villain to go after a villain. Following this? Dividers breaking, bedrooms turning into war zones, and the next thing you know Spike’s manacled in Buffy’s basement. This time Buffy’s wiping the blood off of him. Here he is chained to her, and here she is taking care of him. Up in the bedroom the conversation was intimate but grim, and love ended up debased and broken on the cross; down here things look appalling, and these two spit some serious venom, but something else happens.<br />
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This conversation takes some hard zigzags, but the overarching topic is that Spike believes Buffy needs to stake him here and now. Spike’s arguments are honest as always, but he takes the most negative perspective possible to make his point, letting himself be the bad guy as Buffy did upstairs. If she won’t rid herself of him to protect herself and a houseful of loved ones, maybe she’ll stake him for being an asshole.<br />
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Now, if it were any other vampire, he’d be dust, but he’s not any other vampire, and it’s always different. She’s giving him extra lives, more leeway, the benefit of the doubt, and furthermore she’s <i>helping</i> him again. She’s going out of her way to find reasons and ways not to eliminate Spike, like she always has. Later, she’s going to have this thrown in her face by trusted advisors, like it’s a character flaw, like Spike’s a blind spot with her. But she doesn’t look away from him. He’s straight in her line of sight, and Gellar barely blinks during the scene.<br />
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Two land mines go off. Spike pops the first one, and proposes that she can’t kill him because “You like men who hurt you.” I understand Andrew is doing fine upstairs, but nonetheless I believe someone just hit a vein.<br />
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“No,” she counters. But also “Not anymore.” (“I’m not bad anymore,” said Andrew Wells, “I’m good. I do good things now.”)<br />
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What is this? A biting insult? a Terrible Truth? He’s trying to goad her into staking him, but he doesn’t sneer it at her; it sounds like it’s hard to say. Does he even believe it? This is the same bomb he dropped on her in <b>“Fool for Love”</b>: All Slayers Have a Death Wish, here considered as it applies to romance. Spike’s way of cutting people down with a couple of excruciatingly perceptive derisive remarks — that quality he shares with Cordelia Chase — is only useful when he hits the mark. Only knocks his target off-balance when he’s walloping them with something they don’t know about themselves or thought they’d hidden. It’s gotta be insightful. And this time he’s not telling her anything she doesn’t already know. Heck, even Holden Webster knew it. They’re talking about Buffy’s inferiority complex creeping up to devour her superiority complex from below.<br />
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Even if Spike’s just now playing catchup, she’s been dealing with the question ever since Season Six, and just had a breakthrough in therapy two episodes ago. But let’s not dodge the subject: Does Buffy Summers like men who hurt her? Well, maybe Buffy just liked some men who ended up hurting her. Or maybe, yep, he’s right, she’s already identified this pattern in her life, and she is making efforts to address it, as her real response, “I don’t hate like that. Not you, or myself. Not anymore” indicates.<br />
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Or maybe being the Slayer forces Buffy into destructive/impossible relationships because it makes relationships impossible. The "rule" is that the Slayer isn’t supposed to have personal relationships. What’s that even mean though? Whose rule? Who made it? Yeah, nobody tells her what to do and love the earth and woman power, but somehow she’s still stuck in this set of circumstances where her dating life is a fucked-up hell. Because there are the patriarchal "rules" of the Watchers’ Council, but if you ignore those stuffed shirts they’ll blow up on their own. It’s built into the mythos, it’s intrinsic to being the Slayer, it’s the invisible program running inside that leads the One to the Architect. You think you’re free but you’re playing their game. And being the Vampire Slayer, she never asked for that. She might be Chosen, but who chose her? Who wrote her into this story? How the fuck do you get out of <i>that</i>? And where might Buffy find, say, a source of inspiration of her own? Angel? Hm.<br />
<br />
Landmine #2 comes from Buffy.<br />
<br />
Spike keeps trying to downplay the soul further, calling it "window dressing," and he’s kind of angling the conversation that way the whole time. Knowing he’s a risk, he focuses his Inherently Evil Core; it’s not a delusion or a lie, he’s just emphasizing the awful odds that his trigger can be exploited at any moment. Trouble is, by this point he’s actually demonstrated so much strength of character, and he’s so very chained to her basement walls, that the argument just doesn’t fly. Buffy can’t pretend she doesn’t know him inside and out. And if, as she tells him, “You’re alive because I saw you change. Because I saw your penance,” that means that when she looked at him up close and highly personal, she did not just see a twisted black reflection of blah blah blah. She may be talking about the soul specifically, but she’s seen him change over and over. Spike has talked about how he needs to be killed, offed, etc., but “alive,” that’s Buffy's word.<br />
<br />
You can see it in his eyes, once he gets the affirmation he’s needed the whole time. My God, there’s no special effects, but it’s like he’s actually getting his soul right now, again. They’ll always be Cosmic Dancers to this guy, it’ll never leave his system entirely. You can’t cure a romantic, you can only turn them into a cynic. They’re easy to revive: give 'em a little blood. But this isn’t just for Spike, it can’t be. "Be easier, wouldn’t it, if it were all an act, but it’s not." Oh, that’s Buffy talking to Spike, who’s begging to be killed like he's Lon Chaney, Jr., but maybe she can hear herself say it. Because Buffy needs to say it. She needs to say it out loud.<br />
<br />
So say it. Say it like you mean it! And she does: "I believe in you, Spike."<br />
<br />
Well. Close enough for now. Maybe if she’d gone all-in... but no time, for the enemy breaks up the party. Because this is all very nice, but somehow talking about their feelings isn’t proving a critical tactic in this war. OR IS IT!<br />
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<b>Storytelling.</b></center>
<br />
<b>III. FIGHT</b><br />
<br />
There is a pleasing symmetry to the events of <b>“Never Leave Me”</b>. Xander repairs the windows at the beginning, and the Bringers wreck his work again at the end. The Scoobies take Andrew captive at the beginning, and The First's minions take Spike captive at the end. It opens with a discussion of stabbing Spike in the chest and whether he can restrain his vampire nature, and ends with Spike’s pierced breast triggering the release of a "real vampire."<br />
<br />
And so during the Spike/Buffy interrogation, another interrogation. Andrew’s not going to give up crucial intel; he’s stuck in with the comic relief, as Xander and Anya work him over. The captive is just a foil for the couple, and in their good cop/ex-demon cop routine we find a brief reminder of how well they work together, even if terrorizing and beating a hostage is not necessarily the healthiest bonding activity. When Xander is left alone to explain Andrew’s Hard Way options, he monologues about Anya’s resume as a vengeance demon. Rather than focus on her actual history of mass murder, Xander tells a transparently autobiographical story about where he stands with his ex-fiancée:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
XANDER: Well, there was this one guy — there was this one guy, he, uh, he hurt her real bad, so she paid him back. She killed him, but she did it real slow. See, first she stopped his heart. Then she replaced it with darkness. Then she made him live his life like that. But he still had to go do his job and see his friends and wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, but he had to do it all empty. Without anything to look forward to. Ever.</blockquote>
<br />
This account is singularly self-serving, whether it is what Xander is actually feeling or not. If we’ve forgotten, that "hurt her real bad" consisted of leaving Anya at the alter with little provocation and no articulate explanation of how the relationship fell into ruin. He is surely still damaged from the breakup, this we know even if we believe that Xander ultimately broke his own heart. But the monologue shifts blame for his current misery onto Anya, and ties it to the narrative of her vengeance demon career. And how unfair is that, to claim she’s responsible when what he’s feeling is guilt? Because he dumped her, Xander is the eternal heel, right? Maybe it is fair, though. Or at least complicated. It’s always different. Maybe shortly after their still-unresolved split, she got drunk and rebound-fucked Spike. Maybe that wasn’t a technical violation of any terms and bylaws, but maybe it was an insensitive thing to do knowing it might impact someone she still cared about. Maybe she recently went berserk with Jilted Lass Rage and butchered a frat house and had to be put down like a crazy goddamn animal. Got it? Anya had to be <i>killed</i>.<br />
<br />
And maybe this extravagant display of exceptionally poor behavior is actually kind of disappointing to Xander. Now it could be all that, or it could be that Xander simply isn’t fully owning up to why he and Anya are not he-and-Anya anymore. Lotta that going around. Whether we find his position defensible or smacking of denial, Xander is sad, and has Unresolved Feelings for Anya.<br />
<br />
The monologue’s oblique reference to <b>Heart of Darkness</b> links it to the <b><i>Apocalypse Now</i></b> motif in Xander’s dream sequence in <b>"Restless"</b> (4.22). A military presence marches through the shadows of Xander Harris’ psyche, an anxiety nightmare concept that we might say crystalizes his resistance to being forced into a warrior culture. Which is to say: he’s a normal dude who feels compelled to aid in the battle against the Forces of Darkness and that feeds directly into his insecurities. Xander is possessed of an adventurous spirit, but when he sets out to emulate <b>On the Road</b> always finds himself back in his parents' basement. And clearly he’s chosen his side and fights the good fight, but from a certain point of view when things get rough he just hides behind his Buffy.<br />
<br />
The callback to <b>"Restless"</b> via <b>Heart of Darkness</b> connects with the overarching battlezone theme, and reinforces the schema laid out in <b>"Primeval"</b> (4.21), where the (imaginary) Tarot-like deck used in Willow’s enjoining spell assigns each Scooby a sort of archetypal function. The cards describe the roles each member plays in the group; in the spell they become synecdoches for the conceptual cores of their characters. A full accounting of the <b>"Primeval"</b> trump cards is surely lofty and byzantine beyond this point. But Xander was once confirmed to be The Heart. And if he’s no longer able to fulfill his function as the Heart, what is to become of him?<br />
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<b>Fatemasters & Soulcaptains</b></center>
<br />
Speaking of the outmoded and useless…<br />
<br />
Meanwhile in jolly old London (that’s LONDON, ENGLAND), Quentin Travers of the International Council of Watchers refuses to share information with Buffy over the phone, mostly to remind you that he’s a dickhead. Then the whole Watcher headquarters building explodes and they all die. Though this is the shocking death scene of an organization that has figured large in <b>BtVS</b> mythos since the story began, their exit is practically staged as a joke. That’s how irrelevant they are now. The old white man stands up, puffs out his chest and makes a speech about how important he is, backs it up with quotes from “Invictus” and the <i>Bible</i> of all things, and promptly goes kablooey. This isn’t the time to recount the entire tortured history of Buffy Versus the Watchers’ Council, because that time was back in Season Five when she stopped playing their game and told them to go fuck themselves. And now Buffy the Vampire Slayer won’t have to deal with those pricks on the Watchers’ Council anymore. But there’s a funny thing about being apparently trapped in eternal cycles. And, too, about going back to beginnings, which is totally In this season. The Watchers’ Council is dead. Long Live, etc.<br />
<br />
To be clear, it’s not the key to the episode or anything, but when Quentin Travers’ quotes Proverbs 24:6 he cites it by name. These constitute the last words of a long-running recurring character, so let us pay Mr. Travers this final respect and look them over. “O, by wise council you will make your war.” Blam-O. He’s actually paraphrasing; the good old NRSV has it as “for by wise guidance you can wage your war.” QT strikes me as a sturdy Church of England type, and the King James puts it “For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war: and in multitude of counsellors there is safety.” “Council” is pretty standard across various versions, let's don’t sweat the small stuff. The “war” metaphor here (in Proverbs and on <b>BtVS</b>) is about the ongoing spiritual conflict of daily life.<br />
<br />
The scripture quotation is largely present for its immediate subversion. But <i>aren't</i> councils, planners, and advisors important in waging war, even if the wisdom of this particular council is moot? The next section of Buffy’s arc this season will concern her leadership skills, and pretty specifically whose advice she chooses to take, and when; that is, it’s about Buffy and her Council, in war and through life. Proverbs 24 (it’s a short chapter, might as well check it out) starts with a Proverbs 23-esque warning about envying sinners/associating with known wicked persons, uses a house-building metaphor, and addresses the importance of councils in war, advisors in general. Besides broadly outlining <b>"Never Leave Me"</b>, Proverbs 24 is largely about righteousness and judgment; some of its advice Buffy could use, some she will disprove. <br />
<br />
As Season Seven looks back to Season One, at how far we’ve come and how we’re circling the same problems, this is our last check-in with the Watchers’ Council on this plane. As it happens, Buffy’s first acts of rebellion way back when were against the petty authority of Watchers. Watchers and their far lowlier civilian equivalent: Principals. How long’s it been since Buffy had conflict with a principal? The Council, she’s done with. The Principal — she’s still feeling that one out.<br />
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<b>Things half in shadow and halfway in light.</b></center>
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Principal Wood is creeping around the edges of the episode, doing sketchy-but-ambiguous stuff like cleaning up Jonathan’s corpse from the Seal of Danthazar. But Wood has a far more interesting kind of scene in his office, where he deals with two high school vandals in his official capacity. First he offers the juvenile delinquents a choice between repainting the graffitied wall and suspension. The little devils think he’s opening with Bad-But-Weak Cop, and when they defiantly choose suspension, Wood admits his bluff. Instead, he offers, they can repaint the walls or he’ll call the cops. What he opens with is actually a polite, rational face on the illusion of a choice, and when they choose wrong, he follows up by boxing them in. It’s not quite an interrogation, because Wood isn’t looking for information, but as with the Spike and Andrew interviews above, Wood is in the position of authority but needs the compliance of the transgressors in the chairs. So we see he uses his natural charm strategically, and perhaps demonstrates a sense of tough-love justice. Or something like that.<br />
<br />
The squad of Bringers attacks Buffy’s house, tearing apart the work Xander did in the prologue, but the adversary doesn’t obliterate our heroes with surprise explosives. The immediate goal is to retrieve valuable Sleeper Agent Spike, so there are tactical reasons for this, but also a sense that the enemy wants Buffy — and maybe the others — alive for other reasons. They’ve met before. They go way back. And it’s here, dead Bringer at her feet, that Buffy pieces it together, names it as much as it ever had a name. The First. The First Evil. They once faced off in Season Three, episode 10, <b>“Amends”</b>, in which it attempted to manipulate Angel into killing Buffy, and nearly drove him to suicide before he was saved by the power of Christmas. This thing just cannot stay away from these vampires with souls. It wants Buffy dead, but with all these assassins and incendiary devices at its disposal, The First clearly wants to choose the time and place, wants her broken and defeated to its satisfaction. So knowledge is a start, but this is approximately as dire as revelations — or at least Big Bad reveals — come.<br />
<br />
As we officially say hello again to The First, and goodbye to the Watchers’ Council, it is becoming apparent that this is a story about manipulating characters into the deaths they deserve.<br />
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<b>And all the while as vampires feed, I bleed.</b></center>
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<b>IV. BLEED</b><br />
<br />
The Seal of Danthazar’s about to open for-real cross-my-heart this time, so stand back. The seal — basically a manhole with modified Sigil of Baphomet and some vaguely Celtic knots — isn’t literally over the Hellmouth. The Hellmouth is a colorful term for the focal point of mystical energies. In other circumstances, that might read as fantasy gobbledy-gook to smear over any number of sins in plotting mechanics. Lately, down at the convergence point in the basement, the floor plan has become unmappable, shifting, nonlinear. Tricky. And the Hellmouth is nowhere, but does seem to end up manifesting as a hole in the dirt which belches forth unclean things. And the Hellmouth is everywhere, but seems to draw all dramatic focus to the sepulchral caverns under a school. This spot seems to <i>want</i> to be a school or <i>need</i> to be a school. If you burn it down, the Hellmouth pushes a new one up through the rubble. If you switch campuses to UC Sunnydale, you’ll find the Hellmouth’s manmade twin malfunctioning downstairs. When you get close to it, it’s dangerous to take things too literally. The Hellmouth is a concept. Watch your motherfuckin step. "School," I believe a wise woman once said, "is where you learn."<br />
<br />
The First uses Spike to open the Seal, which is where we started with Andrew up at the top. We’re doing this again, opening this seal that we dramatically opened in <b>"Conversations With Dead People"</b>, gathered around a hole in a basement in a school where we’ve been circling the same topics for seven years. The first time we ever went down under this school, it was to visit a particularly old, nasty vampire. The Master and his Order of Aurelias serve as the mythos’ distillation of the enemy, they are the shadow horde and the Vampire King built to scale for a truncated mid-season-replacement-sized story. The Buffyverse is infinite in imagined/implied scope, but very small in on-screen practice. The Master was the first to try to end the world, the one who killed her, who made a prophecy girl of her, and this fixation on preordainment, on things playing out as they are scripted, harkens back to MetaBuffy's own First Vampire King, Rutger Hauer as Lothos in <b><i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i></b> (1992), who believed they were “joined.” All the way back to the beginning.<br />
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<b>As above, so below.</b></center>
<br />
On the next leg of Spike’s journey, his reclaimed soul will help him slough off the muck, layer by layer. It’s going to take awhile — most of the season — for there’s a lot of gunk built up. The first thing to go is that Vampire nature. But... but he’s stuck with that, of course. That magical-matter in the shape of a reanimated dead man is his body and form, and therefore it's all surface. Maybe it’s the <i>least</i> important layer to Spike. He ceased to be a proper upstanding vampire a long, long time ago, and he was never any good at serving evil or serving anything but himself, really. We just got a vivid reminder in <b>"Sleeper"</b> that he may still have the fangs and forehead, but Spike no longer has the vampire spirit, if you will. This is all rather conceptual, compared to, say, if one were to physically remove the violence-inhibiting brain chip. As Spike can’t really shuck the physical reality of his vampirism, perhaps it can be purged in on a symbolic level. Which doesn't mean it's not going to hurt.<br />
<br />
And so a crucifixion — in a basement, no less! Or is it? Spike is stripped to the waist, bound with his arms out, and he's up there to suffer. But you don’t put this guy on a cross; he'll smolder. The only one who puts Spike on a cross is Spike. Hovering above the mouth of hell, Spike is spread-eagled on the Wheel that is both Catherine Wheel and Rota Fortunae. On The Wheel of Fortune, and bound by ancient logics. But don’t speak too soon, the wheel’s still in spin! Where Baphomet’s goat ears would usually be, the Seal is marked with the symbols for Taurus and Libra, encompassing sacrifice, the seeds of growth, balance of body and spirit; equilibrium and possibility. If Spike is going to stand in the light, the demon's got to go. And if it can’t, literally, we’ll purge it in this slightly messier, more abstract, but highly spectacular way. His decision is made. He’s chosen.<br />
<br />
When The First Evil bleeds out this anomalous, most romanticized, pathetic excuse for a demon, something terrible crawls out of the ground, like the humors draining out of Spike are congealing into pure symbol-forms. The First calls this "a <i>real</i> vampire," we only meet it for a moment, a full-body makeup nosferatu-beast clawing it's way from the world-grave. And this is not our sophisticated romantic vampire men, dark mirror of human passions and all that, but a primal blood-eating non-human Thing. The thing that rises is feral beyond even the Van-Tal form vampires take in the Pylean dimension over on <b>Angel</b>. There is no forbidden fantasy lover mixed in there, no bloodsucking stand-in for the patriarchy or aristocracy, no subversive parallel to Christianity. Just the Vampire stripped of all metaphor. What emerges from the hole is a concept. It is the idea of a monster itself. Forces you can’t begin to imagine, little girl. If it gets free, someone’s gonna die.<br />
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<b>Special Thanks</b> to <a href="http://buffyworld.com/">BuffyWorld</a> for sharing their first-class collection of <b>BtVS</b> and <b>Angel</b> resources with the world.<br />
All screen caps courtesy of Buffyworld.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-79002615524295477862013-11-20T14:21:00.001-08:002017-07-14T20:31:06.776-07:00Playing Vampire Towns: Notes on “Sleeper”<b>Notes on “Sleeper” — Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7ABB08<br />
Directed by Alan J. Levi<br />
Written by David Fury & Jane Espenson</b><br />
[ Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2013/03/spend-night-alone-notes-on.html">"Conversations With Dead People"</a> ]<br />
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<b>I. REAL BAD NEWS: “Sleeper”, Structural Issues, and the Slow-Healing Heart of Season Seven</b><br />
<br />
"The Sleeper will wake. The Sleeper will wake and the world will bleed."<br />
—Luke, <b>"Welcome to the Hellmouth"</b> (1.1)<br />
<br />
As an episode in and of itself, <b>"Sleeper"</b> is Season Seven worrying itself in circles. The plot is something of a detective story, with Spike inexplicably killing humans and serving as Monster of the Week. In the Buffy-centered strand, taking a tip from Holden Webster in the previous episode, the Slayer tails the vampire to determine if he's killing people. In the Spike-centered thread, the amnesiac retraces his steps to determine if he is a monster. All Buffy figures out is that Spike is killing people, it does not seem to be of his own volition, and that something bad, unidentified, and with direct access to their heads is meddling with them.<br />
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If we confine ourselves to <b>“Sleeper”</b> proper, there is very little to say about the plot, so we must skip ahead. The sitch is that The First Evil has hypnotically fitted Spike with a mind-control trigger which causes him to regress to his predatory demonic state. This brainwashing likely took place early in the season while Spike was raving in the basement of Sunnydale High, tormented by manifestations of his guilty conscience which were actually visitations from The First Evil. The problem with this is absolutely none of this is made clear in <b>“Sleeper”</b>, and some of it will never be made clear. Any reasonably attentive viewer will grasp a connection between Spike’s fugue states and appearances of the English folk song “Early One Morning”, and likely identify it as the Queen of Diamonds for this Manchurian Candidate. That turns out to be enough to follow the plot, though none of the characters will actually figure it out until the next episode.<br />
<br />
The Buffy/Spike material is the only compelling story throughout Season Seven about romantic relationships. If there is another, it is likely between Xander and Anya. Both these stories are pure fallout and coping, rooted in relationships gone awry during Season 6; namely, they’re still dealing with the Spike/Buffy breakup and the cancellation of the Xander/Anya union (note: we do not use shipping nicknames in these parts, keep moving, hombre). Buffy, in essence, has no designated Love Interest this season, breaking tradition and pattern. Except…<br />
<br />
While these pairings are old business in and of themselves, they are now the stories of exes in the process of negotiating reconciliation. Truce building stories, moving on stories, love stories about people who aren't exactly in love stories. Our third ensemble lead, Willow, is largely excused from duty in <b>“Sleeper”</b>, but her “love story” this season is also about the end of her relationship with Tara, more than it is about so-called new girlfriend Kennedy. Like Buffy and Spike, and Xander and Anya’s personal character arcs, that one’s about learning to care for yourself, to trust yourself, to put your broken shit back together and function, maybe even improve. One might further propose that everyone’s love interest in Season Seven is, really, themselves. Because if you didn’t notice, this is a show about growing up.<br />
<br />
So this is a Buffy romance tale we have not seen before, at least not seen explored with any depth or maturity. While our hero is constantly having to deal with her feelings about Angel, those two are not to be resolved, not to be made stable, and never more together than when they are Officially Not Together. This is because Buffy and Angel kept apart by the very forces of the cosmos is the dramatic center of all Buffyverse romance; the Buffy/Angel they-can’t/they-must dynamic is the core of the mythos. As a very different iteration of Spike once explained, B and A will be in love till it kills them both (even though, of course, they have both already been killed). But we’re not here to talk about Angel, this is about Spike. And where Angel’s thing is to walk away in martyrdom, Spike’s is to constantly insinuate himself into unstable situations and sacrifice himself. So patching things up with Spike isn’t like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Moon_Rising_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)">Oz</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_You_Were_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)">Riley</a> popping up for a one-off special appearance. Whether it’s the game of dueling undying torches with Angel or the moth-to-flame work-in-progress quest with Spike, they’re both long-termers, contractually bound to the very end, and once she meets them, they are woven into the fabric of her life.<br />
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When The First Evil promised in <b>“Lessons”</b> (7.1) “…we’re going right back to the beginning,” that turns out to mean, among other things, that several main characters will be forced to confront issues at the very core of their conception. We’re going to be looking hard at the wounds and wrongs buried deep in origin stories: original sins, traumatic births, first evils. For Spike, this arc is more or less initiated with <b>“Sleeper”</b> and resolved in <b>“Lies My Parents Told Me”</b> (7.17), and deals with how much of Spike’s sense of self-worth hinges on validation from the women in his life. This folds neatly into the Buffy/Spike reconciliation story, at least on paper.<br />
<br />
The episode is all set-up, anomalous in that it isn’t self-contained in any way. Even the most stand-alone <b>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</b> episode is firmly situated in series continuity, and even the most serial-oriented episodes introduce and wrap up some kind of basic plot problem within the hour. This is a Spike episode, and no other character has gone through so many complicated transformations. Much credit to James Marsters for providing the poor lovesick demon with a continuity of character, as Spike is currently: <b>1)</b> a vampire, <b>2)</b> a slightly “different” vampire, having always retained some capacity for love, <b>3)</b> physically unable to harm human beings, due to a violence-inhibiting microchip in his brain, <b>4)</b> late in possession of his Soul, whatever that means, and was <b>5)</b> driven (temporarily?) insane by that process. Thus has the matter of how much free will Spike has at any given point, and if he is really to be held responsible for his actions (positive or negative) has been contentious since Season Four.<br />
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The First’s plan (whatever <i>that</i> is) serves to bypass the various muzzles placed on Spike over the last five years, showing us Spike As Vampire again. This is Spike roughly where we first met him, another sense in which we have gone “right back to the beginning.” For those following along on your scorecards at home, the musical hypnotic trigger is #6, cutting through Spike Exceptionalism Items 2—5.<br />
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<b>II. HOW I ALMOST FELL: Spike In the Dark, Singing Little Songs</b><br />
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“… a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing him to grow. Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”<br />
—Duke Leto Atreides, <b><i>Dune</i></b><br />
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In <b>“Bring On the Night”</b> (7.10), once they've more or less figured out what's going on, Buffy will call these journeys into highly personal beginnings “[facing] our worst fears,” even if it turns out to be more complicated than that. <b>“Sleeper”</b>’s premise is established at the end of <b>“Conversations With Dead People”</b>, where Spike is seen picking up a blonde at The Bronze, walking her home, biting, drinking and killing her on the front steps. This thing, he should not be able or inclined to do, and The First’s trigger provides a scenario in which for all his striving to be a better man, Spike remains nothing but a soulless, irredeemable monster. That is one sense in which the Sleeper awakens. The murder in <b>“Conversations”</b> is depicted as a casual hookup gone horribly wrong; it’s staged as a seduction that erupts into date rape. This seems specifically designed to evoke Spike’s attempted sexual assault on Buffy in <b>“Seeing Red”</b> (6.19).<br />
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Spike, on his own trail and therefore on a quest of self-revelation, gets to see himself from an outside perspective. He encounters one of his recent victims in The Bronze but doesn’t remember her. Doesn’t remember killing her. Doesn’t remember siring her. What is this? “One bite stand,” she tells him, if this weren’t underlined enough. This isn’t just about Spike’s capacity for murder. The blackout episodes are also explicitly linked to his love life. He has either attended his relationships with a casual disregard (Harmony, his date to Xander’s not-wedding) or white-hot obsession (Cecily, Dru, Buffy), and either way it’s always about him.<br />
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To Buffy on his trail and still trying to get over him, it looks like Spike is lapsing, whether or not he’s vampire-relapsing. When the bouncer at The Bronze tells her that Spike is a player who “every night leaves with a different woman,” she’s hurt, and there it is. Hurt for the run-of-the-mill reasons, and disappointed that maybe all the rumor and accusation was true, and this motherfucker hasn’t changed at all. Maybe she was one of those projects to which he dedicates himself with insane abandon, the latest model in Spike’s century-spanning Slayer fixation, and his quicksilver <i>amour fou</i> has shifted already.<br />
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Spike is explicitly called a “bad boy” twice in <b>“Sleeper”</b>. First it’s Anya, who’s been tasked with babysitting Spike as he sleeps. She sneaks into the bedroom to hunt for evidence of evildoing and ends up feigning “nerves and horniness” when he wakes up to find her lurking bedside. It’s a comic scene, but again links Spike’s blackouts to casual sex, his love life, the ugly side of his personal history, and a tendency of his former partners to need to carry wooden stakes. These two comforted each other once, a boozy tryst resulting in disastrous consequences but not quite regret ("Entropy" [6.18]). So it’s a little bittersweet to see that memory turned into a joke as Anya stutters “let’s get it on, you big bad boy!,” and just like last time she ends up with real hurt feelings.<br />
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The next time Spike is called a Bad Boy it’s in an alley, so we’re back there again, at the most primal of Buffy scenes. This time he’s lured a woman into the dark recesses of the 3rd Street Promenade, it’s set up like another skeevy pick-up job, and she’s posing the question as they enter the battleground: “Are you a bad boy?” That’s the matter at hand, and our fully customized and kitted-out Season Seven Spike resists biting her, but it’s Rebooted Evil Spike in this round. Buffy is there, too, somehow, and she’s egging him on: “You know you want it. You know I want you to.” That’s all it takes. We know this is not really Buffy because she is acting transparently evil. The tactic is interesting, though. If The First is trying to seduce or provoke Spike, under what circumstances is “you want it/I want you to” what he wants to hear? It’s the kind of language he used in <b>“Fool For Love”</b> (5.7) to describe the intertwined fates of Vampires and Slayers like they were celestial bodies bound in orbit. This is the guy who thinks he and Buffy are partners in a turgid supernatural danse macabre while he’s actually usually sprawled on his ass in the alley, beaten-down. Love’s Bitch eternal.<br />
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OK so we’re going down to the basement. There’s a lot of that going around, lately, but Spike has a long, rich history of association with basements. He tends to wind up in them when his inborn villainy is flaring up, which makes sense with the subterranean thing and all. But a basement, an underground government lab, a lushly furnished sex-lair, a labyrinth beneath a school — they’re not quite graves, but specifically basements. Sometimes he <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same_Time,_Same_Place">retreats there</a>, sometimes he’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Initiative">forced</a>, sometimes he <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smashed_(Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer)">crashes through the ceiling</a> because he is a dumb guy of easily enflamed passions. They’re id-spaces, downstairs-inside places where he sometimes goes to chain up girls to make them like him, or sometimes to win back his own soul, and for better or worse (really, for better), he emerges transformed.<br />
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Oh, right, so: Brainwashed-Spike has been planting corpses in the basement of a suburban house. They’re all timed to rise at the same moment (?), when Spike brings Buffy downstairs and The First sings the trigger song and then away we go. The First’s plan appears to be to send Spike back to the basement and to drag Buffy with him, to force her to see him like that. The First will debase them both, and Spike will bite her, signaling that everything is lost, he’s gone blood simple and maybe one of them dies, who knows, who knows if it matters. When she sees this, will she wonder — is that all we were ever doing? Not dancing, but killing each other? Was he just dragging her down to the basement this whole time? Down there they could cocoon up and wound each other the only way he knew how. The only way, ever since that false-soul brain chip came and made him dishonest, made him cunning, a masochistic beast on a leash who loved it when she jerked him around until the day when he would inevitably bite her. Was he using her? How could he! That’s what she’s supposed to see. That’s the plan, but…<br />
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Maybe he's simply overwhelmed by searing guilt of being recently used like a common Dollhouse Active in a serial murder rampage. But the basement attack, with Buffy held down by vampires and Spike looming over her, seems to trigger reminders of the bathroom assault in <b>“Seeing Red”</b> and he recoils — “I remember” — and stops. How, after all, could he use a poor maiden so? The mechanics of how Spike breaks through the conditioning don’t make much more sense than how he got brainwashed in the first place, but the lesson is plain. If you can’t abide the convoluted history of Spike’s development, if you want Old Spike back, well… first, what does that mean? How far should he regress, or when should he stop striving? And if you want him back as we met him, here he is (minus Drusilla), but does that really even look like Spike anymore?<br />
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When Anya calls him a bad boy it’s silly — a joke. Under his own power, naked in her bed with Anya on top of him, Spike is kind and even lets her down easy. This is the guy we recognize as Buffy’s boy, not the monster in the alley, not the thing in the basement. From this angle, outside himself, Spike has been able to observe that this is not “him” anymore. Not the casual dalliances, certainly not the murder. By the time we get down to the basement where all the horror and shame lives, it’s not even his basement, properly, and those old bad boy patterns don’t make him happy, they hurt other people, and are, now, beneath him. Yet somehow, with and without the soul, he’s always owned up to who he is and what he has been, so it’s about something else: “As daft a notion as Soulful Spike the Serial Killer is, it is nothing compared to the idea that another girl could mean anything to me.” This “worst fear” is also that this is how others see him, specifically how one person sees him, and God help the boy, it’s still all about Buffy.<br />
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And ultimately down in the basement, she sees through it too. He’s pled his case, she's examined evidence, witnesses, etc., and finish that one yourself. In the next episode she will say that she’s seen him change. Here in <b>“Sleeper”</b> she doesn’t need to say it out loud, but when he’s brave enough to ask for her help, she agrees without hesitation and we cut to Spike swaddled in a blanket. In her home. That’s the thing about basements. They’re underneath something, below a structure, and if you climb the stairs you are among the community again.<br />
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<b>III. LOST IN SPACE: Other Things</b><br />
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“In the end, we are who we are, no matter how much we appear to have changed.”<br />
—Giles, <b>“Lessons”</b> (7.1)<br />
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This is all a slow build to formative incidents centered on Spike’s siring which are revealed/confronted in <b>“Lies My Parents Told Me”</b>, and the story is built backwards, burrowing through Spike’s lifetimes to locate the developmental traumas of his second childhood. But we don’t explain and solve Spike by getting the details on his mommy issues. Maybe it’s more important that we just learned something here and now about Spike as he exists in the here and now. So he’s back in the living room, and it’s cozy scene, no? Spike’s tied to the chair, of course. Because they still might have to kill him for his own good.<br />
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There’s not much discussion on that front. The household has convened and everyone is uneasy, but she’s obviously not going to kill him. Right at the moment his case is buffered as he’s the only clue they have about the thing that turns out to be The First Evil. No, this is a quick one about whether to keep Spike in the house. Xander, Anya, Willow and Dawn note that Spike’s clearly a danger to others, for example the ten people he just killed. If you write those books that use <b>BtVS</b> to illustrate philosophy lessons, now is the time to point out that preschools are not morally obligated to take in every starving Rottweiler on the street. But the deck is stacked here, too: they can’t (or won’t) kill him, and they can’t leave him alone. The issue is basically raised in order to sell the idea of Buffy bringing Spike home but doesn’t put the plot to bed. The divide is about Spike in general and Buffy’s judgment in particular; it’s about trust. So the scene does reestablish the factions in this conflict, and those are basically Buffy and Spike versus everyone else. No new business today. Buffy is soft on ensouled vampires. This is the fracture that never heals entirely.<br />
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In the end, it does not appear that The First intended for Buffy or Spike to die in the basement. The details of that master plan remain forever unclear, and ultimately it will look like the villain is simply lobbing every available attack at the Slayer until it manages to draw blood. Pitting guilt-racked exes against regressed, primitive versions of each other is exactly the kind of tactic The First used against Willow, Andrew, and Dawn in <b>“Conversations With Dead People”</b>. It tugged at loose threads of insecurity and each of them is going to unravel in turn. The shadows of fault lines are appearing in the topography of the greater Hellmouth area.<br />
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Speaking of guilt, there is an abundance hanging over everyone’s head right at this point. The full implications of the folk song are laid out in <b>“Lies”</b>, but “Early One Morning” itself is accusatory. <b>“Sleeper”</b> links it to the season-long back-and-forth between Buffy and Spike about who “used” who. The song is set “just as the sun was rising” over “the valley below”: the maiden’s lament is literally emanating from a Sunny Dale. The musical trigger was foreshadowed by First-as-Drusilla in <b>“Lessons”</b>: “You’ll always be in the dark with me, singing our little songs,” it purred to Spike. “You like our little songs, don’t you. You’ve always liked them, right from the beginning.”<br />
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Besides that haunting trigger melody from Spike’s past, <b>“Sleeper”</b> prominently features two Aimee Mann songs from her 2002 album <b>Lost in Space</b>. Appearing in person and on stage at The Bronze, Mann’s performance is intercut with Spike in the balcony chatting with his “one bite stand,” and the show continues even when the kickboxing starts and vampires are falling from the sky onto the dance floor. Both songs, “Pavlov’s Bells” and “This Is How It Goes” resonate with the hypnotic trigger theme. They are concerned with feeling trapped, bound to repeat mistakes, locked into automatic psychological response cycles, stuck in fate’s web. They are also both about feeling bad about yourself, and the editing practically elides the entirety of “This is How It Goes” into one emphatic “hallelujah” from the chorus: “IT’S ALL ABOUT SHAME!” Spike will soon observe of possessing a soul that “It’s about self-loathing” (<b>“Never Leave Me”</b> [7.9]). Maybe there’s something to that, or maybe there’s a little more to it than that. Let it never be said that Spike has no more room to grow. Trotting offstage, Aimee Mann grumbles “Man, I hate playing vampire towns.” I’m sure it’s a drag, but if only she could see how much she resonates with them.<br />
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A final note before we let our sleeper rest in peace. Minus the cold open, the episode is bookended by a pair of puzzling cliffhanger snippets. In a well-appointed flat in London (London, England), Robed Figures murder two folks we likely infer are another Watcher and Slayer-to-Be (spoiler: they are). They do not return until the end of the episode. Giles enters the place we don’t know and finds the bodies of the people we don’t know and suddenly Robed Figure (as per the script) “SWINGS A DOUBLE-BLADED BATTLE AXE AT THE BACK OF GILES’S HEAD,” roll credits. A kind of hackneyed surprise, but a surprise. This is all a little out of nowhere, or at least of hazy origin, and doesn’t resolve anything or reveal much, which in its way makes it a perfect set of fore and aft epigraphs for <b>“Sleeper”</b>.<br />
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<b>Special Thanks</b> to the <a href="http://buffyworld.com/">BuffyWorld</a> website and their second-to-none collection of <b>BtVS</b> and <b>Angel</b> resources.<br />
All screen caps courtesy of Buffyworld.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-43715364704253630622013-10-07T01:30:00.000-07:002017-07-14T20:32:25.478-07:00Viewing Notes: ELVIS: ALOHA FROM HAWAII (1973)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii</b>, 1973, d. Marty Pasetta<br />
with Elvis Presley, J.D. Sumner & the Stamps Quartet, The Sweet Inspirations, The TCB Band, The Joe Guercio Orchestra<br />
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January 14, 1973: Elvis Aron Presley performs a benefit concert in Honolulu with a setlist fairly representative of a typical early '70s show. Broadcast Live! Via Satellite! to most of the world, <b>Aloha from Hawaii</b> eventually aired in the U.S. on April 4, 1973. Resplendent in the white rhinestone American Eagle jumpsuit (saving the spreading of its bright blue-lined cape for the finale), Elvis is freshly 38 years old, deeply tanned and helmet-coiffed, tosses out one hundred scarves, accepts two hundred leis from the audience, and pours about ten thousand years of pain and passion into this unforgettable show. <b>Aloha</b> is comfortably Elvis' last indispensable film/television appearance; there was to be one more TV special, 1977's <b>Elvis in Concert</b>, which was taped two months before his death, and veers between ghoulish and tragic — often wrenching in its humanity, but frequently difficult to bear. And so <b>Aloha</b> is the restless heart and sweaty soul of the MOR-rock sound Vegas act era, and Elvis' pinnacle late-period performance.<br />
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After a preliminary weird "satellite" beeping-accompanied montage of Elvis' name in every language of the Earth, the man touches down in a helicopter and greets fans, accompanied by the 1965 studio track "Paradise, Hawaiian Style." And I bring this up, because while the song is not inappropriate, and the title number is not the worst song from that film (I rather like it as a lazy fantasy travelogue), it is drawn from the period representing the absolute nadir of Elvis' film career. Any shuddery memories of <b><i>Tickle Me</i></b> aroused by this dispatch from the pit are wiped as "Also sprach Zarathustra" wells up over images of local traditional dance and drum performance groups warming up the crowd outside the Honolulu International Center auditorium. In the <b>'68 Comeback Special</b>, Elvis counteracted this phase of his career with a dismissive joke about forgetting how many movies he's made, and reclaimed his image by reinvigorating his R&B classics. In <b>Aloha</b>, he blares Richard Strauss' fanfare announcing the dawn. A sun, rising.<br />
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Given this context, but really due to the performance itself, looking at the special as a summation of where he is right at the moment of 1973, each song seems to examine an aspect of Elvis' career, personal life and relationship with his audience. This is, for instance, a definitive performance of "An American Trilogy", the thematically complex medley that moves through nostalgic minstrelsy to folk spiritual to Christian hymn built out of an abolitionist anthem, and Elvis guides it through every turn with the required bombast and/or sensitivity, as if drawing together everything he has ever learned about American music. The towering rendition of Marty Robbins' "You Gave Me a Mountain", wherein Elvis inflates the sad-sack country weeper into a personal despair-anthem like an inverted "My Way", is like a promise to himself and us and God and everyone that though there is no way on this Earth he's going to make it in the end, here in Honolulu he's going to try with every fiber of his being. When he'd do "Mountain" for <b>Elvis in Concert</b>, it would be with far different results: though he's smiling and surrendering, there's no way he's getting over that mountain and he knows it.<br />
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There is a little bit of everything on the buffet, but the beefiest material in the show are the big operatic ballads and <b>From Elvis in Memphis</b> era angst-rockers. The 2004 Deluxe Edition 2-DVD set preserves the entire "rehearsal"/backup concert of January 12th (taped in case of broadcast mishap), during which Elvis staggers around and mumbles non sequitur stage patter. He'd do this out of pure musical delirium even in the '50s, but at the rehearsal show seems a little out of it, whether due to fatigue, energy conservation, or other factors. While not as tight as it could be, the rehearsal is not a disaster by any means and occasionally during this show he gets that faraway look in his eyes, loses himself in a song — or even just part of a song — and gives over to the sheer power of the music. He nails "Burning Love" to the wall, for example, despite forgetting the words and swapping verses around to compensate; Elvis stands like a shoreside Easter Island moai as that tidal wave of a song crashes over him. Likewise, during the broadcast "Suspicious Minds" — in blazing arrangement, greatly sped up from the studio version— Elvis drops far too many lines while screwing around with fans for my taste. So here again, I personally prefer the rehearsal performance of "Suspicious Minds," silly crowd-teasing fuck-aroundary near the end notwithstanding. Thankfully, during both shows he offered that sublime alteration to the bridge: "You know I never lied to you/ No, <i>not much...</i>". The ideal <b>Aloha</b> experience is certainly the uninterrupted show of January 14th (also presented on the Deluxe DVD), but for the sorts of reasons above, the slightly off-kilter rehearsal of January 12th is not to be dismissed.<br />
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Those in the 21st Century seeking kitsch in <b>Aloha</b> will typically locate it in the costuming and lung-bursting crooning (and, if I may be so bold, "Welcome to My World", which has never been anything but unrefined schmaltz that Elvis was never able to redeem). But in 1973, "Hound Dog" was a 21-year-old song, and Elvis' recording was nearly that old itself. The '50s hits <i>were</i> the nostalgia act portion of the show, both for audience and artist. There is a common complaint that <b>Aloha</b> pays some disrespect to these classic gold records, as the formerly lean-and-mean rockers are loaded up with full orchestration, and Elvis tends to goof around the most during the older numbers. These oldies are simply not as dangerous as when they first bared their claws to the world, and given the venues and style in which Elvis was performing cannot be given the same kind of new lease on life as the ferocious <b>'68 Comeback</b>. Instead, he connects in a more physically intimate way with fans while lightly teasing the pre-'68 material that might seem a bit quaint in '73, as if reaffirming and reminding them that these silly old songs are the basis of this highly devoted fan/artist contract. Make no mistake, The Hillbilly Cat is my favorite Elvis phase as it is yours, but in <b>Aloha</b> we're not listening to records, we're watching a show, and this show radiates an enormous amount of goodwill.<br />
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Where playing it straight counts the most, Elvis plays it straight, introducing his respectful take on "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" as "probably the saddest song I've ever heard." He would rarely screw around during perennial opener "See See Rider". When he closes with "Can't Help Falling In Love" from <b><i>Blue Hawaii</i></b>, there is no doubt: he is singing it straight at you, you personally, and what you find there is between you and Elvis. As a Hawaiian loanword in English, aloha means hello. Aloha means goodbye. Aloha means peace. Aloha means love.<br />
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<b>Viewed on:</b> 10/7/13 — DVD (BMG/Elvis Presley Enterprises; Region 1)Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-91562825926948844762013-09-21T13:30:00.000-07:002017-07-14T20:33:36.527-07:00Viewing Notes: FOR ME AND MY GAL (Berkeley, 1942)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>For Me and My Gal</i></b>, 1942, d. Busby Berkeley<br />
scr. Sid Silvers, Fred F. Finklehoffe, Richard Sherman<br />
with Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, George Murphy<br />
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For the most part <b><i>For Me and My Gal</i></b> is a by-the-numbers vaudeville backstage musical tracking the romantic travails of up and coming singer Jo Hayden (Judy Garland) and born-in-a-trunk Harry Palmer (Gene Kelly); he's a smoothie and she's guarded, and they make a natural team, see?! The Good Ol' Days of Vaudeville shtick takes a turn for the bleak/weird/propagandistic when WWI breaks out and Harry is drafted, and rather than proudly march off to war like a God-fearing American patriot, he turns draft dodger and has to deal with the consequences. The consequences are everyone thinks he's a piece of shit! Obviously the point is that no matter what the circumstance, fighting for your country when called upon should take all precedence over career and romance. So in the last act Harry needs to face that at various points he's been an opportunist with no loyalty to the ideals of nation, love, and Judy, and scrape together some small measure of dignity. Anyway, in the cinematic highlight Busby Berkeley winds up much flinch-baiting suspense as Harry works up the courage to mutilate his hand so he'll fail his military physical. Will he use his dressing room door jamb? Nah, it's gotta be the obligatory steamer trunk, it's got to be, case… CLOSED. Yikes!<br />
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Otherwise, Berkeley stages the production numbers as realistically small-scale and sedate (our heroes are on the route to the big time, so in these sub-palatial theaters we're not going to be craning up into geometric starbursts of kicking legs). In his first screen role, Kelly does one athletic baggy pants comic dance, and in their first pairing he and Garland do peppy renditions of a handful of jazz standards, mostly can't miss material like "Ballin the Jack" and the title number.<br />
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The musical highlight is Garland's rendition of "After You've Gone," and, of course, no disrespect to Sophie Tucker, Jolson, Nina Simone, or Fiona Apple, for that matter, but Judy milks it dry. "Owns It," I believe they say. The text is already in the "Some of These Days"/"96 Tears"/you'll-be-sorry family. Judy's singing it just as her character has both figured out that she's in love with her vaudeville partner and also he's, er, breaking up the act and plus he doesn't know how she feels about him. So holy shit, she's got story material to work with, and right in the middle you can feel the moment she realizes what she's Really Singing About and instead of crumbling, channels it into the song. Then she kind of spookily makes with the Get Happy right in time for the big finish and turns it back into something bombastic and cheerful. So the performance effectively encompasses every possible reading of the lyrics, save for blind rage and threat. Judy is a magnifying glass for concentrating a song's emotional rays and frying any ant in her path alive.<br />
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<b>Viewed on:</b> 9/21/13 — DVD (Warner/TCM; Region 1)Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-30085643742186707182013-09-21T00:34:00.000-07:002017-07-14T20:34:19.603-07:00Viewing Notes: TRAUMA (Argento, 1993)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>Trauma</i></b>, 1993, d. Dario Argento<br />
scr. Argento, T.E.D. Kline<br />
with Asia Argento, Christopher Rydell, Piper Laurie<br />
<br />
Looking at this mostly for research on a larger project about the problems, pleasures and classification of post-<b><i>Opera</i></b> Argento, so we'll bypass the topic for now. Here we see Argento making his first American feature (after directing half of 1990's Romero collab <b><i>Two Evil Eyes</i></b>), probably history's only giallo set in Minneapolis. Like <b><i>Deep Red</i></b> (1975; blood), <b><i>Tenebrae</i></b> (1982; dark), <b><i>Do You Like Hitchcock?</i></b> (2005; thriller history and grammar, voyeurism, Hitch cultism) and <b><i>Giallo</i></b> (2009; duh redux), <b><i>Trauma</i></b> has one of those on-the-nose titles that announces the auteur is going to investigate a pet theme to the hilt and head on. Nearly all of Argento's stories trace an exploding arc of bloody chaos backward to its origin at the scene of some damaged psyche's inciting incident: it's always about trauma. Sometimes that trauma belongs to the killer, sometimes the detective/investigator, sometimes something in-between. In <b><i>Trauma</i></b> it rains down on the just, unjust, and all of Minnesota alike.<br />
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Not that everyone is specifically, personally born in pain in <b><i>Trauma</i></b>'s world, but it is a slasher with a decapitation theme as its murder gimmick and it opens with a montage of paper models depicting the French Revolution. The Reign of Terror's guillotine recurs in the 20th century midwestern US as hand-held motorized garrote always used in the rain. The wound of history is open from the start, unhealed and forever purging the current moment into existence, the heavens a-weep!<br />
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David (Christopher Rydell) and Aura (Asia Argento) meet morbid-cute when he spots her about to jump off a bridge and talks her down. He's a recovering drug addict and local TV news art director, and she's an anorexic teen daughter of Romanian psychics, who have settled in Minneapolis, as Romanian psychics do. These are our protagonists, both troubled and traumatized, with David covering the Anima-Impaired Artist-Detective duties while Aura picks up the Highly Sensitive Paranormally-Gifted Girl torch from Suzy in <b><i>Suspiria</i></b> and Jennifer in <b><i>Phenomena</i></b>. In short order, Aura is reluctantly remanded to her creepo psychiatrist (Frederic Forrest), her weirdo mom (Piper Laurie) conducts a spooky seance that goes terribly awry, and everyone starts getting decapitated. And as her parents are murdered and she screams in the rain, Aura witnesses the requisite subtle clue that is misunderstood/ignored/repressed/forgotten.<br />
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As the Killer goes about the business that the black-gloved must go about, the victims are largely medical professionals, which would seem to put the physically and mentally not-okay Aura somewhere near the center of the crosshairs. And surely David and Aura become further enmeshed, variously investigating and being further victimized, as that is how slasher/mystery business is supposed to play out. And surely the stalk-and-slash setpieces will be the primary spectacle (Brad Dourif's head severed by a necklace/elevator assault, then plummeting toward the camera in a complex quote fusing <b><i>Vertigo</i></b> and <b><i>Deep Red</i></b>), and they are excellent and lively when graded against typical American thrillers of the period, if less dazzling in the company of classic period Argento murders.<br />
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In this phase of Argento's cinema it is as if the fairy tale logic of the Three Mothers films has seeped into his gialli, which are more traditionally locked into genre strictures. Even Argento's earliest thrillers are atypical Art Gialli, but with <b><i>Phenomena</i></b>, <b><i>Trauma</i></b>, <b><i>Stendhal Syndrome</i></b>, this free-associative strain has fully deformed the narratives. Puzzling themes, apparently unresolved subplots, and inexplicable vignettes jut out at right angles from the main trunk of the plot. <b><i>Trauma</i></b>'s mystery practically plays out in the background as the film is increasingly preoccupied with the afflictions of its fragile split-focus protagonists.<br />
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Protecting Aura from having her head sliced off would not seem directly linked to treating her anorexia, much as the enigma of the eponymous disorder of <b><i>The Stendhal Syndrome</i></b> is not readily tied to that film's primary plot about serial rape and identity disintegration. In David's determination to save her, it all gets bound up together, his life crumbles around this white knight rescue fantasy, and he relapses into drug addiction and despair. (It does happen to all rather <i>be</i> bound up together, actually, Bad Doctors being the epicenter of the Headhunter, the eating disorder, the drug abuse, and so on and so on.)<br />
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As the mystery works its way back to the originating trauma, a disastrous birth ending in death, the protagonists move toward death/rebirths (<b><i>Phenomena</i></b>'s insect theme returns, focused on the butterfly/soul connection, here also constituting an Eros and Psyche motif). Along the path, the film considers Aura's anorexia from various angles. Firstly, there is Aura herself: hostile and tormented, defensive and closed off, placed in the abyss between broken mirrors. Her capacity for trust demolished, she pushes back when offered any assistance, and with good reason: her damaged existence has been sculpted largely by the authority figures (mother, doctors) claiming to help her in the first place. Every helper is corrupt, every savior is suspect, including David.<br />
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As David's concern for Aura grows, a coworker provides a clinical Freudian psychological profile, claiming that subjects supposedly all experience the same recurring incest dream: a horror/wish/memory in which the father looms, about to close in for a kiss. Even if it were accurate, the one-size-fits-all description of a personality type does not address origins of the disorder, practical medical issues or treatment, and is presented as a prurient pop psych diagnosis (and this information, apparently, is all from daytime talk shows).<br />
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After this crash course, David wanders Minneapolis and sees every street haunted by the specters of anorexic girls, the dead, dying and unreachable. This mournful passage moves from the abstract diagnosis of a Problem in Modern Society into a deeply felt sadness, as David begins registering the helplessness of caring about someone who you are not equipped to aid. Still later, after Aura has disappeared again, David is broken and strung out, and stands before a store window displaying John Everett Millais' painting <i>Ophelia</i>. As the designated artist figure of the film, he draws the connections between the drowning young woman driven to madness, the troubled teenager he loved, and himself. The image is of Ophelia at the last moments of melodious lay, it depicts a scene that is described but unstaged, and gives it back to Ophelia. Drowning but not drowned, floating away but afloat. At this, his lowest point, drowning in self-pity, David reaches an empathetic epiphany, and reflected in the window glass, he catches a glimpse of a clue that will lead him back to Aura.<br />
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<b><i>Trauma</i></b>'s closing shot pans right across the final crime scene, past cops sneering at the embracing protagonists, moves down the suburban street and up to a second-story balcony. A reggae ensemble is playing up there, crooning a variation on David and Aura's final dialogue, that nothing can now go wrong, that someone will be loved. And a tall, terribly thin woman we have not seen before dances as the band plays, and she is Anna Ceroli, Asia Argento's two-years-older sister (born to Daria Nicolodi and sculptor Mario Ceroli). And as the credits roll over this mysterious, somehow reassuring image, the upbeat Caribbean dance music crossfades into Pino Donaggio's aching Julee-Cruisesque ballad "Ruby Rain" (The title evokes blood and precipitation, and those lyrics?: "I miss you/ so badly… tears are nothing in the rain/ jewels of pain…"). The camera pushes in on Anna, suddenly bathed in a blown-out golden flare, hair billowing in a wind that has risen from nowhere, just Anna swaying and twisting and dancing in the inexplicable light, in the loveliest, most lyrical of all Argento's closing shots.<br />
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The closing credits fail to announce it, but, you have, of course, been watching <b><i>Trauma</i></b>.<br />
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<b>Viewed on:</b> 9/21/13 — DVD (Anchor Bay; Region 1)Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-83669595126575479262013-09-17T19:40:00.000-07:002017-07-16T15:10:10.482-07:00Viewing Notes: DUNE (1984, Lynch)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>Dune</i></b>, 1984, d. David Lynch<br />
scr. Lynch, from the novel by Frank Herbert<br />
with Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan<br />
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David Lynch dreamwalks through Frank Herbert's information-dense universe in highly graphic, lushly soundscaped style, everything melting and dissolving into everything else. When the Sleeper awakens, you can't be sure the dream is actually shaken off. As to the frequent charges of incomprehensibility, certainly it helps to walk in familiar with the novel, it helps to watch it more than once, or it helps to have spent some time with other Lynch movies. But otherwise I dunno. The finer points of the plot are spelled out in expository dialogue, plus mix-n-match narrators detailing the SF mythology, plus whispery voice over to elaborate on internal character motivations. If anything, this over-articulation is the least typically "Lynchian" thing about <b><i>Dune</i></b>, although the actual mechanics of this info-dumping are frequently disorienting, rather inventive, and occasionally lyrical, as in the mysterious opening close ups of Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) fading in and out against a star field like a spaced-out angel.<br />
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The splendor of <b><i>Dune</i></b> isn't in any kind of traditional pulp-cover outsized imagery of impossible fantasy vistas, but images of water rhyming with billowing sand, human hands in distress and palms open in triumph, close-ups of mouths, the dust becoming spice becoming worm becoming consciousness pried open, as it grasps the chain of connected meaning. [Note: That is a hell of a grandmaster move for a head movie to make btw, as the drug reveals itself by transporting you through the revelation of the drug revealing itself: the Trip is about the Trip.] Where some thoughts have a certain sound and we travel without moving, that's in a dream, in music, and in cinema. <b><i>Dune</i></b> is the slow blade that penetrates.<br />
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Hot Spots the Lynch obsessive ought watch for:<br />
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-The plot hinges as much on conspiracy among the powerful and the training and formation of the superbeing hero as it does visions, emotions and spiritual revelation. This more abstract information is conveyed through expressionistic sequences like avant-garde shorts unto themselves (the Box of Pain, the Water of Life, etc.). The most spectacular of those (and the trippiest by far, if that's what you're here for) is the sexualized Space Folding sequence. These are not all freak-out moments. Paul's waking dream as he stares into the Arrakis night and whispers inside his head "Where are my feelings? I feel for no one" is a melancholy passage as the initiate has stripped away his attachments to body and name and begins one of the most chilling phases of divestment of self.<br />
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-Speaking of, <b><i>Dune</i></b> is probably ground zero for those combing Lynch's work for direct reference or indirect evidence of the impact of Transcendental Meditation; personally, I suggest the interested continue patiently trawling for the bigger fish.<br />
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-A ghastly hole ripped in Jürgen Prochnow's cheek provides the aperture for the signature Lynch ominous push into a black hole.<br />
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-<b><i>Eraserhead</i></b>-esque effect of a planetary sphere blowing apart in eggshell shards.<br />
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-Highly Problematic Depictions of Homosexuality!<br />
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-Not his best performance or even a fully delineated character, but Lynch's cameo as a spice miner probably fits him most perfectly. He's facing certain doom as a sandworm closes in on a spice mining facility, but looks like he's loving it down there in the industrial inferno amongst the massive, clanging machinery. He doesn't want to leave!<br />
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<b>Viewed on:</b> 9/17/13 — Theatrical Cut DVD (Universal; Region 1)Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-70850032296959250972013-09-10T18:17:00.000-07:002017-07-14T21:50:38.201-07:00Viewing Notes: CAFÉ FLESH (Rinse Dream, 1982)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>Café Flesh</i></b>, 1982, d. Rinse Dream (S. Sayadian)<br />
scr. Sayadian, Herbert W. Day (Jerry Stahl)<br />
with Andrew Nichols, Pia Snow (Michelle Bauer), Marie Sharp, and Kevin James as "Rico"<br />
<br />
Rinse Dream (née Stephen Sayadian, whose masterpiece is this or the pretty-much-the-same-thing-but-not-porn <b><i>Dr. Caligari</i></b> [1989]) made this ambitious cult post-apocalyptic SF porn satire that looks like a Devo video with a killer droning synth jazz soundtrack from Mitchell Froom.<br />
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The mean-spirited, highly effective idea is that an audience of diseased Sex Negatives can find no release and only watch the creepy onstage antics of the Positives who perform at Café Flesh. The Bomb made it so that if Negatives try to experience human sexual contact, they start barfing painfully (I guess?). Meanwhile, Positives, being 1% of the populace, are such a commodity that they are <i>forced</i> to perform.<br />
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So, see, that's YOU! You in the raincoat, watching <b><i>Café Flesh</i></b> itself and getting your Gaze totally Subverted! The "backstage musical" approach frames all the sex acts as stage performances, which are all elaborate bizarro production numbers ("the guys in baby drag were a bit much"), but look, it's not Busby Berkeley or anything. These imaginative, already off-putting sex shows (the best one has a guy with a giant pencil on his head and a secretary chanting "do you want me to type a memo?") are constantly interrupted by close ups of Felliniesque pervs licking their sweaty chops and bugging their eyes out like Dan Clowes drawings. The entire affair is based in humiliation, frustration, and desires thwarted, which is, of course, some people's Thing.<br />
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XXXpensive production value as these things go, and every performance is terrible, including Richard Belzer doing a dumb jive-talk routine.<br />
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<b>Viewed on:</b> 9/10/13 — via VCI's terrible VHS-sourced-lookin' DVDChris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-54865821730435961922013-09-09T17:52:00.000-07:002017-07-16T15:11:06.116-07:00Viewing Notes: CITY OF WOMEN (Fellini, 1980)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>City of Women</i></b>, 1980, d. Federico Fellini<br />
scr. Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi, Brunello Rondi<br />
with Marcello Mastroianni, Donatella Damiani<br />
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Fellini does that thing where he dresses up Marcello Mastroianni like himself and then sends him to peep in on The Girls' Room circa 1980. It starts with a dream and a train tunnel, ends with a dream and a train tunnel, and in between visits sundry alien landscape sets swarming with women of all kinds. The problem, if it's not obvious, is that the women are Kinds. If these obscure objects of desire are, as usual, something between Jungian archetype and cartoon sketches of types, that is par for course. So again, Fellini's dream-self avatar pulls out his mental Rolodex of Women I Have Known, thumbing through the cardboard girl-shapes like a flip-book, trying to get them to all exist in simultaneous space-time. Where that happens is dreams and reverie.<br />
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And in dreams, don't you know, he loves them all, all the time, always did. And I dare say, this wistful affection is the reason this isn't disgusting but sort of tragicomically sweet. The second reason is that this Fellini-stand-in, "Snàporaz," specifically, is befuddled, out of touch, and impossibly easily distracted — the picture is gently teasing him throughout, and even in fantasy the Women do not take him seriously. Finally, the reason this is beautiful and true is that he actually knows all of this: not a problem with the film but the problem with which the film is concerned. In <b><i>8 1/2</i></b> terms, <b><i>City of Women</i></b> is the Guido's Harem sequence fully kitted out into a Satyricon of its own, as we might say <b><i>Amarcord</i></b> expands the Saraghina reminisces into a whole town.<br />
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Key episodes: Led down the rabbit hole by a casual sexual encounter in the train's WC, Snàporaz somehow ends up at a freeform feminist symposium in a packed-to-the-gills hotel/commune. This stuff is great because Fellini demonstrates an understanding of second-wave feminism, or at least presents its tenets more or less accurately. Snàporaz wanders through these lectures and pep talks with nonplussed fascination, and even claims he "understands" what is being discussed, even when he ends up in a room of women chanting "Castration! Castration!" Point being that neither Snàporaz nor Fellini takes The Feminist Hotel to be a house of villains, exactly; it is, kind of shockingly, more about how none of these people are remotely concerned with making a middle-aged womanizer feel comfortable in their midst because that's exactly what they're not here to do. This is all a useful illustration of the dangers of confusing the Fellini Alter-ego for an idealized self image, or even Fellini Proper, if you catch my drift.<br />
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The stylish showstopper eye-popper sequence sees Snàporaz hitching a ride with a carload of stoned, disaffected fashion plate teens who drive aimlessly through the abstract rural nightscape like an Argento taxi. Marcello-Guido-Snàporaz perches atop like those crammed-with-papparazzi <i><b>La Dolce Vita</b></i> joyrides to the dawn but now in Toby Dammit's gold Ferrari of Doom, multiplied into a squadron of punk clown cars and barreling toward techno hell.<br />
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Finally, the psyche slides down an infinitely regressing plush chute, breezing past ancient formative crushes, erotic infatuations and masturbation fantasies and lands in a cage to be judged by the court of the City of Women. And he finds out, Snàporaz, and Fellini, and maybe you too, exactly where that City is located, where that tunnel leads. Tunnels go inside.<br />
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And finally, here is yet another example where <a href="http://academic.sun.ac.za/forlang/bergman/tech/glossary/ebert_glos.htm">Ebert's (Hot Air) Balloon Rule</a> fails.<br />
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<b>Viewed on:</b> 9/9/13 — Blu-ray (Masters of Cinema; Region B)Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-33592019331366139142013-03-04T19:50:00.000-08:002017-07-16T17:05:47.664-07:00Spend the Night Alone: Notes on "Conversations With Dead People"<b>Notes on "Conversations With Dead People" — Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 7ABB07</b><br />
<br />
What's Wrong With <b>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</b> Season Seven? The season doesn't sit right with a lot of people, and the issues are not necessarily so surface-level as "I don't like the Potential Slayers storyline" or "It's not so bleak as Season Six, but still too dark-hearted for my liking." Not to discount those complaints, but the reasons the season-story as a whole doesn't cohere might be of a more deeply rooted.<br />
<br />
Season Seven is a tough nut for those who want to make with the cracking. I usually prefer the close read over the critical evaluation, but it's hard to analyze drama that one suspects is dramatically unsound. It is hard to extract meaning when the text is garbled. Up on the Review Level, where we evaluate the quality and qualities of the work, things are terribly cluttered, making it difficult to get down to the basement or up to the towers. That is: The plot is either inelegant or incoherent, the characters are written in confusing fashion, there is a high percentage of what are generally agreed to be weak episodes, and so forth.<br />
<br />
Rather than dismiss these 22 episodes as a text unworthy of scrutiny, I'd like to take some time and care and get to the bottom of What's Wrong With Season Seven?, because it's right there at the end, messing things up, causing caveats, a sinkhole in the giant <b>BtVS</b>/<b>Angel</b> OneStory. Perhaps, like other imperfect spots, it can be redeemed by thorough understanding (<b>BtVS</b> S6) or salvaged by focusing on the positive (<b>Angel</b> S1).<br />
<br />
We begin with <b>"Conversations With Dead People"</b> not because it is where the problems start, but because I perceive it to be a much-loved episode (<a href="http://www.phi-phenomenon.org/buffy/byrank.htm">statistically, the 17th most popular</a>) in which the problems with the season have piled up nicely and are affecting the show on a second-by-second basis. <b>"Conversations"</b> is the seventh episode of the season, a slot that generally closes the first act of the overall season arc. Working backward like the First Evil at the end of <b>"Lessons,"</b> this place in the season structure was previously occupied by <b>"Once More With Feeling"</b> (6.7), <b>"Fool For Love"</b> (5.7), <b>"The Initiative"</b> (4.7), <b>"Revelations"</b> (3.7), and <b>"Lie To Me"</b> (2.7). To indulge a tangent, the two-part pilot episode serves as a "first act" for Season One. At this point the seeds have usually been laid for the season's plot to unfurl, the configuration of character dynamics is in place (Internal and External Conflicts established), the major themes have been laid out, and the end foreshadowed.<br />
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<b>I. STRUCTURE, SUMMARY</b><br />
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"... the only true mystery is that our very lives are governed by dead people." —Kazanian, <b><i>Inferno</i></b><br />
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"Desde abajo te devora." —Jonathan Levison, <b>"Conversations With Dead People"</b><br />
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Mutant Enemy's unconventional, format-busting episodes are fan-favorites and critic's darlings. They're designed to dazzle, and always succeed. What's on your Top Ten Episodes list? Dunno, but odds are you put <b>"Once More With Feeling," "The Body," "Hush"</b> and <b>"Restless"</b> on there, and if <b>"Storyteller," "The Zeppo"</b> and/or <b>"Superstar"</b> aren't in the mix, I'll eat some kind of hat. <b>"Conversations"</b> both is and isn't so show-offy. Five extended dialogue scenes unfold in simultaneous story-time, the series regulars are isolated from one another for the entire episode, and their stories do not literally intersect, but all end up having ramifications for the rest of the season. Or, simply, it cross-cuts five vignettes to tell one story.<br />
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As to the matter of Conversations, two of the vignettes consist largely of what we'd typically think of as "conversation" — Buffy in a cemetery getting free psychoanalysis from newly-sired Sunnydale High alum vampire Holden Webster (Jonathn M. Woodward), and Willow in the UC Sunnydale library visiting with an apparition in the form of Cassie Newton (Azura Skye), the doomed high school poet who the Scoobs were unable to assist in <b>"Help"</b> (7.4). Meanwhile, repentant S6 villains Andrew and Jonathan return to the Hellmouth, doing the hijinx-and-sci-fi-reference-patter thing; their Dead Person takes the form of deceased evil-ringleader Warren Mears, still egging on the weak-willed Andrew. Theirs is a sort of extended tragicomic skit as "conversation." At 1630 Revello, Dawn faces down some kind of poltergeist that is apparently tormenting her mother on the spirit plane or something, with much ghostly spookery and windows imploding. Dawn's bit is conversation as people talking to themselves. Finally, Spike drowns his sorrows at the Bronze and picks up a blonde woman (in his tale, Spike is the Dead Person). Wordless seduction as Conversation.<br />
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TV is talky by nature, this show is particularly chatty, and the point is that this isn't exactly the <b>BtVS</b> equivalent of <b><i>My Dinner with Andre</i></b>. Jonathan and Andrew are engaged in plot-forwarding footwork in conventionally paced scenes. Dawn mostly monologues in terrified screams because of a ghost, and otherwise helps meet the episode's quota on FX and explosions. Spike's story has no dialogue whatsoever. Willow's story is the episode's gushy love scene stuff. Buffy's conversation is punctuated by intermittent outbursts of classic kickboxing combat. So on one hand, this could've been more daring and ambitious, and most of the plot threads are not "conversations" per se. On the other hand, because they are explicitly framed this way, the episode encourages us to understand these conventional <b>BtVS</b> elements as "conversations." The Dialectics of Buffy, if you need some kind of idea for awful papers.<br />
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The cold open sets the stage for each Conversation. We open on a guitar amp being switched on, and an über-rare title card (the only other is in <b>"Once More With Feeling"</b>). Frente! singer Angie Hart does her Julie-Cruise-at-the-Roadhouse thing on the Bronze stage, the Whedon-penned ballad "Blue" uniting the introductions of the main cast. So Buffy's on patrol, shuffling, glum, and tiny in dreamy crane shots over a big blue cemetery. She's a solo act by calling, which is what this is about. Dawn is home alone; her only contact with Buffy is a note on the fridge. She's in need of parental guidance, which is what this is about. Willow is buried in books, or maybe retreating there, feeling unworthy, insecure and unlovable when she starts to nod off, which is what this is about. Spike is wallowing, drinking, and relapsing, which is what this is about. The first gimmick that doesn't quite come off is in a pair of title cards as the band sets up, reading "November 12, 2002" and "8:01 P.M." The idea is that the episode takes place in real time. This bears out, more or less/in a way, with no temporal gaps within each scene, but attempting to cross-cut the stories leads to such implausibility as Willow asking a question of Cassie and waiting in silence for several minutes until we cut back for an answer. That is, the episode cheats just a little too much to say it takes place in real time, but even if it did, the effect probably wouldn't be much of a wow.<br />
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This is either glaringly obvious, or the product of my imagination, but if you haven't noticed, the cold open always encapsulates or points to the larger concerns of the episode. Sometimes there's a cliffhanger button afterwards, but usually the very last line of dialogue, final image, or both — the last moment before the theme song — announces the theme. In this case, Angie Hart sings Whedon's final lyric: "Can I spend the night alone?" and Buffy rejoinders: "Here we go." Wolf howl, organ, guitar, and so on.<br />
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So this isn't about how we commune with the dead (or it is, but a little) so much as it is about being alone. The first discordant note has been hit. Buffy/Holden, Dawn/Joyce, Willow/Cassie, Andrew and Jonathan/Warren, Spike/Blonde. What's off about this roster of players? For starters, this is notoriously the only episode in which Nicholas Brendan does not appear; no Xander, though he is currently feeling as alone as any of the above. We know from legend and lore that a Xander subplot was planned and axed due to time constraints; if it was ever written or just discussed, I cannot rightly say, but it does not appear in the shooting script.<br />
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Here we go.<br />
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<b>II. THE LATCHKEY'S TALE — Home Alone With Dawn</b><br />
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Not to harp on the matter, but Xander's absence from <b>"Conversations"</b> sort of summarizes the treatment of the character throughout S7. Things happen to him occasionally, but he isn't given a subplot of his own, and does not contribute or to the central season plot in a meaningful way. Xander is AWOL all year. The same may be said of Dawn, who suffers through several false alarms before an ultimately non-starting character arc fizzles out on the periphery. As if she were a refugee from <b>Angel</b> S1, Mutant Enemy keeps coming up with concept makeovers for the character: we could follow Dawn and her chums on adventures at Sunnydale High, like <b>BtVS 2.0</b> (this has already petered out by <b>"Conversations"</b>); Dawn could be a Potential in the chain of Slayers (forthcoming). In the end, M.E. opts for: Dawn feels left out and misunderstood, and has a meltdown until someone reaches out to remind her that they care. This is all the writers know how to do with Dawn Stories, and it is because the character was built to tell that story in Season Five and they've been stuck with her since.<br />
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The story on the table is a compact little home-alone-with-a-poltergeist sketch and provides the bulk of the horror business. There is a vampire in Buffy's story, but he is never a serious threat. The plot construction is slick and tidy, with the teasing appearance that Dawn is left to fight the episode's threat alone, until the climactic revelations of each story click into place and set up a villain in every corner except, it would seem, Dawn's. When the windows have blown out of 1630 and the demonic spirit seems to have been bested, exorcised by the scrawny teenage girl, an apparition of Joyce Summers appears to Dawn and offers the cryptic bummer "When it's bad, Buffy won't choose you. She'll be against you." (For Teleplay Class Know-It-Alls, note how that vague, evocative set-up allows Mutant Enemy ample wiggle room for misdirects, mistakes, and improvisation.)<br />
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On this night that everyone spends alone (and alone with a dead person), Dawn's specific sense of "alone" has to do with feeling neglected at worst, at best a peripheral concern to her sister, kept on the sidelines of Scooby activity, and otherwise not-atypical teen angst. In a bit of sloppy narrative housekeeping, we will never specifically be told that the Joyce Ghost Thing was actually shape-shifting villain The First Evil, intentionally misleading Dawn. In a sense, the shape of the episode is not clear until the matter of "Buffy won't choose you" is settled. Throughout the hour, Dawn comes to believe that Joyce's attempts to communicate from beyond are being blocked by an ambiguous force, but she's being distracted and played for a sucker. Instead, (ambiguous force) The First Evil systematically breaks Dawn down, makes her vulnerable, and picks at a scar that was just beginning to heal, all in order to sever the arteries of Buffy's support network. I believe they call this move The Yoko Factor.<br />
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So it is not un-compelling stuff, The First taunting Dawn with images of her dead mother (though Joyce's body prone on the sofa seems more like a moment that would haunt Buffy specifically; likewise, when a radio blares the mariachi music from <b>"Listening to Fear"</b> [5.9], heralding Joyce's "return"). The conversation is a cold-water plunge that sends Dawn back into the immediate, freak-out stage of mourning — the Trachtenberg Screaming Show — and leaves the shaken girl crying at a glimpse of her mother who does not even respond. It is not unrealistic that it might take two years for a child to recover from a parent's death (and a sister's death on top of it, + a bonus pack of additional traumas), but Dawn has not been/will not be depicted as preoccupied with her grief as of late. One might say that the story of Dawn's grief and recovery formed her primary character arc in Season Six and resolved beautifully at the end of <b>"Grave"</b> (6.22). This is inherently powerful material in terms of <b>BtVS</b> lore, but it pops up at a point where it is redundant and in a story about The First manipulating emotions, pushing buttons and taking cheap shots. You just got got.<br />
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<b>III. THE WITCH'S TALE — Willow and the Bad Oracle</b><br />
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<i>"High tide inside."</i><br />
—Angie Hart, "Blue"<br />
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<i>"The moon to the tide / I can feel you inside."</i><br />
—Tara Maclay, "Under Your Spell", <b>"Once More With Feeling"</b><br />
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Unlike Xander and Dawn, Willow has some semblance of a B-story built around her in Season Seven. It might charitably be described as "patchy" or "underwritten," but Willow's arc takes the shape of a recovery narrative. It is also problematic because this Will-in-rehab material is intrinsically linked to the screwy "magic addiction" thread from last season. These issues aren't specific to <b>"Conversations With Dead People,"</b> so we'll deal with them as they crop up.<br />
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As the cat is already out of the bag, we can begin at the end. The First Evil appears as the ghost of Cassie who claims to speak for the spirit of Tara (to that: Jesus, man!). The First-as-Cassie attempts to convince Willow to never, ever do magic again. When that proves difficult, Cassie suggests Willow kill herself. The object of this round is for The First to remove Willow from the playing field. Willow, like Dawn above and Andrew below, is being duped throughout her conversation, and the First Evil plays on its victims' grief and insecurity.<br />
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The first time around we take the conversations at face value, on second pass one can focus on the gamesmanship. Precepts on reading this story: A) It was conceived as an exchange between Willow and Tara's ghost, but either Amber Benson was not available (as per Mutant Enemy) or she didn't want to do it (as per Benson). Television production is nothing if not the art of compromise and resourcefulness, so whichever honorable party one chooses to believe, the result is that Cassie is onscreen and Tara not. B) Looking at what's in and not-in the scene, M.E. could have applied some topical phlebotinum to explain why Tara can't materialize, or more accurately, if/why The First can't appear as Tara. The dialogue offers only First-as-Cassie's explanation "You killed people. You can't see her. That's just how it is. I'm sorry." Oh. Okay, if that's <i>just how it is...</i><br />
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It's impossible to determine the veracity of that claim. The assumption must be made that The First has chosen to appear as someone Willow never met in life. Amber Benson has a point. For Tara's death to carry the weight that it does, the character cannot continue being resurrected in flashbacks, dreams, fantasies and parallel universes; the loss is permanent. Willow knows who Cassie was, but has no real personal connection to the girl, so it is merely "weird" when Cassie appears. The First's gambit is still unbelievably cruel but at least Cassie's presence alone is not emotionally wrenching (as it would be with Tara, or, say, Jenny Calendar). As a Lil' Cassandra figure in <b>"Help"</b>, Cassie spent the episode predicting her own death with calm certainty, and proved herself a prophet. If Willow knows anything about Cassie, it's that she wrote doomy poems and was right about what was going to happen. You can trust her.<br />
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First-Cassie tells Willow it is her own fault that Tara can't be here ("Because of what you did... you killed people"), then says Willow will heal and be strong again. The conversation keeps making these turns, if you're looking for them, where Will is determined to try to own up to her sins and The First bobs around the issues.<br />
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<blockquote>
WILLOW: It was horrible. I lost myself — the regular me.<br />
CASSIE: Well, you were grieving.<br />
WILLOW: A lot of people grieve. They don't make with the flaying. I hurt so many people.<br />
CASSIE: It was the power.<br />
WILLOW: I am the power. It's in me. Did I mention the random destruction of property? The Magic Box is not so much a box now...<br />
CASSIE: The power is bigger than you are.</blockquote>
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First it's "you were grieving" then "it was the power" then The First tries undermining the idea that Willow is personally responsible for Dark Willow's rampage at all. The Rosenberg girl has always had problems coping with unpleasant feelings, particularly loss and guilt. She has a tendency to seek shortcuts and easy solutions rather than march into the house of pain and take a hard look at the root causes (down in that basement, that tomb, that alley, among those monsters; that's where Buffy does battle, because she's different, you see). Here's Willow finally trying to take responsibility, and The First Evil keeps beating her down. Encouraging her to frame the Dark Willow Experience as a possession brought on by temporary weakness — a virus telling a compromised immune system to hate the game, not the player — The First rubs Will's face in her worst self as she is working on embodying her best self. The First wants her to wallow in self-pity, doubt, fear and lazy moral thinking.<br />
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(The Reviewer perpetually on our shoulder whispers that on one hand this hard-won shift in Willow's attitude is rather the topic of this scene, without ever being directly addressed. It's the dramatic core of the scene. Three-Kleenex stuff though it is, this is not about watching Willow cry because she misses her girlfriend. It's about Willow trying to be strong and The First trying to tug her back into the abyss. On the other hand, this epiphany within Willow happened off-screen during those months in England with Giles, and, really, is sketchy even in this very scene.)<br />
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When the real attack comes, Cassie offers up a trademark pre-vision: "You're not gonna be okay. You're gonna kill everybody." If Willow uses magic under any circumstances, she'll be too weak to resist turning into a walking, evil neutron magicbomb. This is just what Willow is struggling with, her bleakest self-doubt being broadcast from right across the table: Tara is not here and that's Willow's fault. In the wake of Tara's death, Will did not honor Tara's memory by remaining Amazon-strong. Any backsliding will mean total failure. Relapse would be the end of the world. <br />
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And that's what we're all wondering, isn't it? Can Willow be allowed to do magic? What are the parameters? She's been off materializing Indian flowers in England and regenerating her stomach skin, and didn't that seem okay? Twice, Willow invokes the authority of Giles, who apparently warned that "it isn't as simple as quitting it all cold turkey." Perhaps he did at some point. More precisely, in <b>"Lessons"</b> (7.1), he explained that no one can take Willow's power away by force, and that "this isn't a hobby or addiction. It's inside you now, this magic. You're responsible for it." Furthermore, Willow, who has undergone more drastic identity shifts than any character save Spike, must be troubled: if she can't be The Witch, who is she? We run into trouble if we forget that The First is bullshitting Willow, but these questions hang in the air, and the subject of what is to be done with loved ones who have transgressed, and who to allow into one's inner circle are central concerns of Season Seven (see under: Willow, Spike, Anya, Andrew, Faith, and, eventually, Buffy).<br />
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As villains tend to do, The First mistakes love for weakness, shifts its approach and suggests Willow kill herself to be reunited with Tara. That is at odds with encouraging her to remain magically straightedge, but most importantly Tara would never suggest it. When Willow recognizes this, the jig is up, The First does some archvillainy taunting business and disapparates. We go out on Will gawping at the sight of First-Cassie literally turning inside out and swallowing herself, but consider who really won here. The First has outed itself, and Willow knows that the enemy sees her as a formidable opponent and has learned that even in the face of temptation and easy succor, she wants to be in this world, wants to live, wants to fight for it.<br />
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[ Note: This handful of scenes is a useful example by which to point out the sketchy way in which "magic" is defined on <b>BtVS</b>. That is, the rules, and mechanics, but also the meaning of magic. How it operates physically is less important than how it operates metaphorically. In the mess of addiction/not-addiction/lost-myself/it-was-the-power/I-am-the-power/no-magic/no-black-magic it is impossible to determine Willow's moral culpability and roster of mortal sins. This was a major issue through the latter half of S6, and continues to spread befuddlement into the present story. If anything "works" in this formulation, it's that Willow seems confused as the rest of us. ]<br />
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<b>IV . THE FOOLS' TALE — Jonathan and Andrew at the Mouth of Hell</b><br />
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<i>"Can I make it right?"</i><br />
—Angie Hart, "Blue"<br />
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"We're outlaws with hearts of gold!"<br />
—Andrew Wells (Tucker's Brother), <b>"CWDP"</b><br />
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Jonathan and Andrew are coming home. Like "power," "coming home" is a Big Theme this season, one that was promised by The-First-as-The-Master in <b>"Lessons"</b>: "... that's where we're going: right back to the beginning. Not the Bang, not the Word, but the true beginning." Roots are being sniffed out, loops are being closed, cycles are, well, cycling. "You keep circling around," groans Andrew in the car, "Just drive straight in."<br />
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So these "former" villains are drawn back to Sunnydale, back to the Little Schoolhouse on the Hellmouth. It does that, the Hellmouth; it lures evil, and so it also summons heroes. It's a focal point for converging forces, appropriate, because it is the subterranean dramatic engine of the series. When it all drops away, as Jonathan says about his memories of high school, past the Bang and the Word, the Hellmouth is Narrative Necessity. It's the reason and excuse for every vampire, every MOTW, every drifting scrap of bad juju. When it all drops away, the high school, the second high school, the 'Dale itself, all are just a manhole over the pit of sorrow, the hole in your world, the very idea of dramatic conflict. The Hellmouth is foundational stuff, and if you're taking the tour, you're gonna have to go down to the basement.<br />
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We won't know where they're headed or why until the final moments, but it seems there's a sort of literal plug over the Hellmouth, the Seal of Danthazar, and the boys know something about it. Jonathan says he is determined to "make it right," driven by a desire to help, an innate responsibility to the rest of humanity, even if this won't quite redeem him, and can't undo what he's done. Andrew keeps trying on comforting, prepackaged narratives that tidy up his messy reality; they're on "a trial by fire — a quest," and when it's complete, Buffy will let them "join her gang and possibly hang out at her house." Now, Jonathan is obviously not immune to the attraction of making up stories about one's self (see under: <b>"Superstar"</b> [4.17)], but his understanding and clarity deepen as he progresses toward quest's end. And when he's on the spot, standing directly atop the Hellmouth, an epiphany: 36-19-27.<br />
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Consider, briefly, the case of Andrew Wells, who is about to stab Jonathan, spill his blood on the Seal of Danthazar, and unleash untold evils upon the world. Now, poor Andrew believes he's being guided by the disembodied spirit of Warren, who promises eternal life and power in exchange for Jonathan as sacrifice. So it's The First again, though that reveal, and exactly what is going through Andrew's head are subjects for another day. What we have is two men walking the same path to the basement, taking the same test — or no, that's what Andrew would say — more to the point, they are faced with the same opportunity. Andrew uses this opportunity to lie and kill his only friend.<br />
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Jonathan remembers his old locker combination, and with it is overcome with affection for his high school classmates, even those that bullied and ignored him — which is everyone apart from Buffy, except when she was bullying and ignoring him. So let us consider the last speech of this well-liked, long-running peripheral character before we say goodbye to him forever.<br />
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"I miss my friends, I miss my enemies. I miss the people I talked to every day, I miss the people who never knew I existed. I miss 'em all. I want to talk to them, yknow? I want to find out how they're doing. I want to know what's going on in their lives."</blockquote>
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This sentiment is colored by nostalgia ("All the cruelty, all the pain, all that humiliation — it all washes away"), but Jonathan expresses an abstract connection to the rest of humanity that grows out of his specific, personal relationships. He has suffered enough (<b>"Earshot"</b>, S1—3), and transgressed enough (<b>"Superstar"</b>, S6 in full) to know from experience what it takes to be a villain — to actively work for the Greater Bad. Jonathan's previous scheming has all been markedly selfish. The boys have been bringing up Buffy all night: should they seek Buffy's assistance? Will Buffy be impressed? Will Buffy be their friend? Clearly the Slayer is on Jonathan's mind, and she remains some ideal of Heroism to which he might aspire, but he's not bound to duty by calling or imbued with magical martial arts skills. So look at that, Jonathan has a little revelation about what it means to take positive action, to help, to fight the good fight because it is the good fight. When Andrew turns cold and sneers "All those people you just mentioned... not one of them cares about you," Jonathan's love proves simple and unbreakable. There's a correct answer to this, and Jonathan knows it: "Well, I still care about them. That's why I'm here."<br />
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And so does Jonathan's Dork/Heel/Face Turn come full circle, and the sometimes-selfish boy dies a man who knows something about selflessness (and psst, hey Angel: ARE U LISTENING?). The question of what it means to be selfless runs through Season Seven, linked to Big Idea themes of Power, Identity and Inevitable Adulthood (if you hadn't noticed, episode 7.5 is helpfully titled <b>"Selfless"</b>). Why, even Buffy constantly struggles with this one, but this sacrifice is pure. And sacrifices? Did somebody say "sacrifice"?... If this seems too little too late, well, after this declaration of universal luvz, Jonathan gets a dagger in his gut, courtesy of his last remaining friend.<br />
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With a demon looking over his shoulder, Andrew watches Jonathan bleed out, opening the Seal of Danthazar, as Angie Hart croons "I fell into the moon and it covered you in bluuuue." As if transformed into one final symbolic illustration, Jonathan's body has fallen into the posture of the twelfth tarot trump, The Hanged Man. Does Andrew see it?<br />
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A range of The Hanged Man's associations may apply. See under: willing self-sacrifice, suspension between planes, the punishment of traitors, a wisdom gained through inward journey. The annihilation of the body is very literal in this particular sacrifice — the blood opens the Seal — but as Jonathan's body fades, the Allegory of the Locker Combination hangs in the air. Does Andrew hear it?<br />
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"Redemption is a bad word; it implies a debt. For every star possesses boundless wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them to the knowledge of their starry heritage."<br />
—Aleister Crowley on Hanged Man traditions, <b>The Book of Thoth</b></blockquote>
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<b>V. THE SLAYER'S TALE — Buffy on the Couch</b><br />
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"No friends. Just the kill. We are alone."<br />
—The First Slayer, <b>"Restless"</b> [4.22]<br />
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Buffy opens up to a vampire, go figure. This conversation is explicitly staged as an informal psychoanalysis session, so this section is largely about what it is about, if you will, and we needn't walk through it beat by beat. It is, however, backbone of the episode, and this nuanced, lengthy voyage into Buffy's skull is nearly as strong as Season Seven gets, so it is due some examination. "Psych 101 alert," Buffy scoffs at the beginning, and, well, perhaps so, but maybe she could use a refresher course, given that her own Psych 101 experience ended with the professor trying to kill her.<br />
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Before we dive in, <b>"Conversations"</b> is a great performance showcase for Sarah Michelle Gellar. Devoid of hysteria, shouting or inconsolable weeping — Big Acting Moments — these intimate scenes are complex and built on seven seasons of Buffy's accumulated history. Gellar gracefully slides around every curve in the conversation, which swerves from comic small talk to dark, confessional monologue and back again and again. The way she absentmindedly fiddles with her massive crucifix necklace when the conversation gets uncomfortable is a personal favorite touch.<br />
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The freshly-sired Holden Webster is a terrific one-off character, the quippy and chatty (and potentially obnoxious) writing rounded out by Woodward's intelligence and geniality. Buffy repeatedly goes deeper than she means to, dredges up some difficult confession, or starts wallowing in self-pity, and Holden meets her with perceptive questions, disarming jokes, and the perspective available only to someone on the outside. That is, as he puts it, and we all know, "there's some things you can only tell a stranger." In part, this is all a move in Holden's battle plan; twice when Buffy arrives at a breakthrough, he takes advantage of the moment to resume their physical combat. Once it's all said and done, after the patient has covered her relationships with friends, boyfriends, parents, her past, her duty, God, sex, death and vampires, Holden's conclusion is simple: "It all adds up to you feeling alone. But Buffy, everyone feels alone. Everybody is. Until you die." And well, maybe also after you die, if one is, say, a vampire with a soul or a microchip or both.<br />
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I haven't any examples handy, but it is not uncommon to hear Mutant Enemy called out for falling back on the Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown stuff but having little to actually say about it beyond that being special sets you apart by definition and the burden of leadership is, y'know, burdeny. However repetitious it may seem, this is a foundational theme, one of the springs that makes the character go, and the tension is built into the Buffy right in the title: Buffy. Vampire Slayer. On one hand, this eternal back-and-forth drives us in narrative circles; Buffy keeps experiencing the same stories of leadership angst, of extremely gifted and misunderstood angst, misc. & assorted angst, etc. When you keep learning the same lesson, you're not really learning it. On the other hand, like Angel's cursed soul, because Buffy's Chosen One gift is fundamental and non-negotiable to the concept of the character, it is a developmental block that the character can never evolve past. To do so would be to conceive an ending. Because, you see, when you're the only Slayer, then there is truly no other soul alive who can relate. And that, I think, is Heidegger.<br />
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The point of this squirrelly aside is that being the Slayer has always caused Buffy some degree of alienation, but by Season Seven the way this manifests has evolved significantly from Season One. The problem with Slayer duty is no longer, say, that it is a chore that prevents her from hanging out at the Bronze on Friday night, or that patrolling cemeteries is not a great place to meet normal boys. Holden's bummer of a conclusion is less helpful than his clinical assessment: "You DO have a superiority complex, and you've got an inferiority complex about it." It's something he spotted early on, and has been prodding Buffy to admit to herself. So yeah, it's lonely at the top and nobody understands, but now it's making her neurotic. You tend to develop messiah complexes when you have sacrificed your life to save the world; and Holden points this out and suggests it these feelings are kind of to be expected ("who could live with that for seven years and not feel superior?"). It's making her hard. It's making her unkind. Unlike Angel, Buffy operates under no edict to help the helpless. Her mission statement is simply to "stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness." There's nothing about life, liberty, or the pursuit of anything in there. Being the Slayer is finally turning her into a Slayer.<br />
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<blockquote>
FAITH: Something made us different. We're warriors. We're built to kill.<br />
BUFFY: To kill demons! But it does not mean that we get to pass judgment on people like we're better than everybody else!<br />
FAITH: We ARE better.<br />
—<b>"Consequences"</b> (3.14)<br />
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"It is always different! It's always complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw the line, and that is always going to be me. You get down on me for cutting myself off, but in the end the Slayer is always cut off. There's no mystical guidebook. No all-knowing Council. Human rules don't apply. There's only me. I am the law."<br />
—Buffy, <b>"Selfless"</b> (7.5)</blockquote>
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Angel's Soul Thing is designed to torture, punish, and possibly to take the vampire out of commission, but his conscription by The Powers That Be instructs him to make meaningful connections with humanity. Buffy's task as the People's Warrior is to combat evil, but tradition instructs her to forgo personal relationships. There actually was a "guidebook" (Giles didn't give it to her) and a Council (she fired them). This is a Slayer waaaay off Standard Operating Procedure. The conflicts laid out above play out across Season Seven in interlocking threads. Buffy as Leader, general of an army of allies and associates, is in conflict with the lone wolf element of the Slayer paradigm — how can you lead, when part of you thinks you don't need your followers? Buffy as The Law, the Slayer as judge, jury and executioner, has always had to deal with the reality that any time, any place, she may have to kill someone she cares about in the line of duty. The first time she did it, stabbing Angel before a portal to Hell (See under: Andrew & Jonathan), it marked her for life, and she couldn't do it again. And so she could not sacrifice Dawn, tried to domesticate Spike, and dithered too much as Willow fell into shadow. After last season, she can't do that again, and two episodes ago ran a sword through the relapsed Anya without hesitation. It's always different!<br />
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As their conversation closes, Jonathan and Andrew discuss those high school classmates that have forgotten them, which is where Buffy and Holden begin their chat. She's forgotten him from school, but they quickly catch up, get chummy and get highly, highly personal. They make fast friends and then she drives a stake through his heart. So much for the "never kill a boy on the first date" policy. Buffy forms bonds with people, and at some point the Slayer ends up having to deal with them. The Buffy/Holden conversation plays out this dynamic in miniature and she has to dust the boy just as he reveals the identity of his sire. As the problem stands right now, this is really all about Spike.<br />
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<b>VI. THE MONSTER'S TALE — Spike Drinks</b><br />
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"The living dead and the dying living are all the same; cut from the same cloth."<br />
— Francesco Dellamorte, <b><i>Dellamorte Dellamore</i></b><br />
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Spike, after throwing back some beers and walking that blonde home, vamps out and drinks her in front of her apartment. This, if you need a refresher, he should not want to do, on account of his having a soul, and should not be able to do, what with the violence-inhibiting microchip in his brain. On the other hand, the fellow has been mentally unstable and unpredictable since regaining his soul. The ramifications will be dealt with for a good portion of the rest of the season, but here it's all set-up and shock ending.<br />
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The hows and whys are complicated, but The First Evil is also manipulating Spike. As with Willow, Dawn, and Andrew, The First has burrowed into Spike's head and dredged up evidence of lingering issues he thought he had moved past (and even without The First's help, Buffy is out there delving into her parents' divorce); their worst traits are pulled up to the surface. The First Evil chips at weak points, gnaws at anxieties you want to think you are above. But from beneath you, it devours.<br />
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A long memory is one of the finer qualities of <b>BtVS</b>. Everything that happens counts, stories grow out of continuities that were set in motion in the first episode, right up to the end. That said, it is appropriate The First appear in the guise of familiar characters, as all of these vignettes revolve around old plot material. Willow and Andrew are at least dealing with logical fallout from their Season Six disasters, if not breaking much new ground. Dawn feeling left out is warmed-over Season Five, and Spike as mad dog killer demon is ancient Season Three history. It would seem that going right back to the beginning does indeed look an awful lot like driving around in circles.<br />
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In the chorus of "Blue," a plaintive request for solace directed at an absent lover — "Can I spend the night?" — becomes "Can I spend the night? Alone" or maybe "Can I spend the night alone?" We hear it as Holden climbs out of his grave and again as he blows away on the wind, leaving Buffy with a nasty revelation and a nastier duty ahead. It's a question uniting all the conversations. How can any of these people make it through the rising darkness and pooling blood, let alone get through this night alone?<br />
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<b>Extra-Special Thanks</b> to the folks at <a href="http://www.buffyworld.com/">BuffyWorld</a>, easily the greatest online Buffy and Angel resource. Their database of shooting scripts, transcripts, screencaps was invaluable in preparing this piece.<br />
All screencaps courtesy of BuffyWorld.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-66303036013112302922012-06-13T16:14:00.000-07:002017-07-14T21:49:57.734-07:00Questions In a World of BLUE VELVET<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Hey, neighbor! If the image above, of Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in <b><i>Blue Velvet</i></b> does not seem to ring a bell, that's because it resides deep in a thicket of footage deleted from David Lynch's final cut. The scrapped scene sees Frank answering Dorothy Vallens' phone to the surprise of young Jeffery Beaumont, and the hunter and prey lock in silent stand-off over the wires. Not that anyone needs to be sold on the merits of this performance, but this moment features some world-class Eyeball Acting from Mr. Hopper, the sort of nuance that's easy to overlook given the wilder outbursts of this outsized character.<br />
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There is plenty more such fun to be had in these deleted scenes, and I delve into some of the highlights and subtleties in this <a href="http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post?id=51152">Guide to the Lost Footage of <i>Blue Velvet</i></a> over at <a href="http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus">Grantland's Hollywood Prospectus.</a> What are you waiting for? Get those chainsaws out!Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-64067571817804059382012-04-24T00:02:00.001-07:002017-07-16T17:09:24.835-07:00In Search Of... Jeff<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>Tell me, Mr. Segel, how do I get out of here?</b></center>
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As pictured above, Jason Segel <i>IS</i> <b><i>Jeff, Who Lives At Home</i></b>, the latest from Jay and Mark Duplass. Here, our hero, big of heart and head out of focus, stalks the meaning of life through a convenience store, which is a lot simpler and more complicated than it sounds.<br />
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Besides being quite funny, in <b><i>Jeff</i></b> the Duplass Bros. get their pop-philosophizing on like lo-fi Wachowskis. In that vein, I have <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/trainwreck-rising-or-jeff-who-is-one-with-the-universe">plenty more to say about the picture,</a> its relationship with your favorite whipping boy and mine, M. Night Shyamalan, and sundry other topics. It all goes down over at the fine <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/">PressPlay blog</a>.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-19648465572542824042012-03-24T18:10:00.006-07:002017-07-16T17:19:18.035-07:00Rule in the Temple of Love: LIVING VENUS (1960)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the grand tradition of qualified hyperbole, let it be said that in its way, <b><i>Living Venus</i></b> is Herschell Gordon Lewis' <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b>. In terms of legacy, impact and notoriety, Conventional Wisdom usually pronounces <b><i>Blood Feast</i></b> (1963) the rather-more-specific <b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> of Gore. To that: fair enough, but we get ahead of ourselves. <b><i>Living Venus</i></b> is Lewis' first feature as director, and the plot traces the professional rise and personal disasters of a thinly fictionalized publishing magnate based on a real world celebrity. As with Charlie Kane, so with Jack Norwall of <b><i>Living Venus</i></b>: a new-breed whiz kid maverick slowly compromises the ideals of youth, and is corrupted by absolute power — or at least, you know, a lot of damn money. Where Welles finds his perfect embodiment for rebel-gone-bloated-and-gauche tyrant (LIKE AMERICA!) in William Randolph Hearst, Lewis takes fellow Hyde Park resident Hugh Hefner as his subject.<br />
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By the film's release in 1960 Lewis had not yet entered the business of nudie pictures proper, though he would, very shortly, with early genre entry <b><i>The Adventures of Lucky Pierre</i></b> (1961), directly on <b><i>Venus</i></b>' heels. <b><i>Living Venus</i></b> begins as lighthearted rags-to-riches comedy, veers into tragic melodrama, peppers the proceedings with a handful of stilted, eerie nude modeling sessions and ends with a man weeping at his wife's grave. This sort of exposé-cum-morality-play is a common exploitation template, one Lewis would visit again in <b><i>Scum of the Earth</i></b> (1963), and frequent producing partner David F. Friedman would fall back on with regularity. It goes without saying that setting a story in the world of nude photography provides in-built excuses for depicting nude photography, but it also justifies threadbare production value and allows the filmmakers to essentially write what they know — not that they necessarily do so with much honesty. More unique to <b><i>Venus</i></b> in this regard is the about-face in tone as it voyages to the dark heart of the Mid-Century cheesecake biz.<br />
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<b>What Kind of Man Reads <i>Pagan</i>?</b><br />
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Lewis-regular-to-be William Kerwin plays Jack Norwall in one of his best starring performances. The big, lanky, leading-man-handsome actor's J.R. "Bob" Dobbs appearance camouflaged a with-it technique; his button-down white dude squareness was always tempered with a slightly seedy, just-fuckin-around,-kids edge. For Lewis, Bill Kerwin would play straight-shooters and scumbags with aplomb, but here he's got something like an actual arc, and it is that of a self-propelled shooting star fizzling out in the void.<br />
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<b>Since 1887</b></center>
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As Kerwin plays him, Jack Norwall starts as bright, creative hustler, his charm turned up past the point of insufferableness. His catchphrase, increasingly suspect with every delivery, is "I guarantee it!" He actually has a great, commercial idea but can't stop acting like he's running a con. Jack quits his job at the safe and stuffy <b>Newlywed Magazine</b> when his editor has the gall/good taste/responsibility to chew out for an entirely inappropriate, dubiously humorous cover photo featuring a "shotgun wedding" gag. "My family has published a first-rate magazine since 1887, and I won't have it ruined by your dirty jokes!," opines the uptight old bossman. The details — that the cover went to press without anyone noticing — may not add up, and one wonders exactly what the guy was thinking.<br />
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By Jack's estimation, he might be the liberator arrived to shake things up, to free the frustrated centerfold-peeping yearnings of the hemmed-in postwar suburban male. That's the gist of his exit rant: "I'm gonna let you sit here and die! I know what the public wants, and I'm gonna give it to 'em... I'm gonna start my own magazine, old man! It'll have everything in it that you don't understand. It'll have imagination! Humor! Aaand <i>sexy girls</i>!" None of which, of course, really belonged in <b>Newlywed</b> in the first place, so while sort of inspiring, by the end we more likely read the incident as an early foreshadowing of a self-destructive streak that is going to spark Norwall's self-immolation.<br />
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<b>The Great Gazoo meets the Godfather of Gore</b></center>
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Thus does Jack exit <b>Newlywed</b> to launch his own revolution in the art of taking pictures of boobs. This is roughly true-to-life, as Hefner did leave a copywriting position at <b>Esquire</b> to strike out on his own. The first <b>Playboy</b> famously coasted to success with photos of Marilyn Monroe, originally taken for a calendar, to which Hef purchased the rights. This not being dramatic enough for the movies, Norwall recruits freelance photographer pal, Ken Carter, who leaps at the opportunity to express himself through naked lady pictures, rather than suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous baby photography. <b><i>Living Venus</i></b> is one of Lewis' rare run-ins with a name, mainstream actor, sporting a debuting Harvey Korman as Ken, who essentially becomes the second lead, and narrates in voice over throughout. Both Korman and Kerwin had previously appeared in Lewis' first work as a director, the educational short, <b>Carving Magic!</b>, which is about, y'know, how to carve a crown roast and stuff. That particular cut of cornball ephemera is more widely available than it has any right to be, as Something Weird Video regularly includes it as an ironically-themed bonus feature on discs of Lewis' gore movies.<br />
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<b>The Stars Shine At Your Shrine</b><br />
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Newly unencumbered by employment, Jack blows off his put-upon girlfriend Diane (Linné Ahlstrand, who does not appear nude, but actually appeared in <b>Playboy</b>, as July 1958's Playmate of the Month. You guys know how to use Google, I am sure), who he will eventually ditch at the alter, and heads out on a brainstorming mission/excuse for a bender. Drunkenly wandering the night in search of inspiration (ever a good idea?), our hero spies a miniature Venus de Milo reproduction in an antique dealer's storefront, and finds the "Symbol" he requires. "That's it! It's the goddess of love and beauty! It's Venus!" The store is closed so Jack groans "I want my Venus," pulls a smash-&-grab and staggers away. As the goddess of Love and Beauty, the Aphrodite statue speaks to the girlie mag magnate in the most obvious ways. So does cocktail waitress Peggy Brandon (Danica d'Hondt), who becomes the second "Venus" that Jack bumps into that fateful evening, and he whisks her off to Ken Carter's dingy studio for a creeperific late night photo shoot.<br />
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<b>Stand not between man and the gods.</b></center>
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But when faced a god, always remember that they do not arrive in color-coded white and black hats. As living metaphor for an essential component of the human soul, every god embodies its aspects in inverse, too: excess and depletion. Venus-Aphrodite is the Goddess of Love, and ain't that sweet?, but when that card lands upside-down she has a talent for inciting jealousy. On that drunken night of invention, Jack Norwall names his new magazine "<b>Pagan</b>" and appoints Aphrodite its mascot. Hefner's bow-tied rabbit (appearing from issue 2 on) may have been selected for its hump-happy popular associations, not necessarily as a trickster archetype, though it has a nice lunar resonance with Japanese and Korean folklore. In these times, the title might evoke finger-wagging Christians slinging pejoratives at native religions and/or robed hippies dancing in a city park, but to the popular imagination of 1960 it signaled something exotic and primal. <b>Pagan</b> is both <b>Playboy</b> and the anti-<b>Playboy</b> — a little taboo, a little titillatingly "backwards" and nature-sexy: the savage fantasy-desires of the sophisticated contemporary male unleashed! Jack can imagine himself as a sophisticate all he wants, but he is tangled up with old, old gods.<br />
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<b>"Everybody seemed to like our first issue"</b></center>
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<b>Pagan</b> launches to instant success, backed by distributor Max Stein, a cigar-chomping, worldly bear played by a Lewis fave, character actor Lawrence J. Aberwood — you know him as the guy spewing the beautiful "down inside you're <i>DIRTY!</i>" speech in the Something Weird logo montage. Max is the only person to whom Jack must suck up throughout the film, and the round, relaxed man with a recliner in his office is another sort of contrast to the scrambling, foolish Norwall. Max gives nothing but frank, sound business advice, and wants nothing from Jack's success but his piece of the <b>Pagan</b> pie, but Jack comes to resent and ignore even this former role model.<br />
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Ken Carter is the story's moral center as Norwall slides into his downward trajectory. In the key relationship triangle, Ken and Jack are something like friends, Jack and Ken desire Peggy, Peg desires Fame, and the model and photographer both work for Jack. Ken and Peggy spend a lot of time together by occupation ("Proximity," a wise friend once put it, "breeds boners"), and so Ken quietly falls in love while Norwall gets busy selling out. Perhaps the girl would choose the kind-hearted, talented photographer who sees her as a person with a future to consider, were it not for the magnetic, wealthy boss, who sees her as crucial to his brand. This plays out as the difference between a potential partnership and a sort of ownership. There is a mutual respect between the two artists, and the photographer strives for a better forum and warns Peg that the gig can't last forever, but Jack promises easy money and a certain kind of fame. It isn't all on Jack, either: "Ken, I'm not the vine-covered-cottage type," she explains as she turns him down, "For the first time in my life I'm going somewhere and I like it!" The exploitation king's "guarantee" is too alluring, the frustrated artist's dreams will require too much effort, and Peggy makes what we might term a Bad Choice. Alas! If only she knew the risks of both paths! She's going somewhere all right.<br />
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<b>You can tell the vine-covered-cottage type a mile away.</b></center>
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<b><i>Citizen Kane</i></b> has Hearst's entire career up through the 1940s to mine for material, but <b><i>Venus</i></b>, produced only seven years into <b>Playboy</b>'s history, traces only the magazine's creation before shifting into fantasy. That is, it imagines the premature downfall of Hugh Hefner. Not that accurate biography was ever the goal, but Lewis can obviously be forgiven for failure to predict the Sexual Revolution (he'd sort of make up for it later [see: <b><i>The Girl, The Body, and The Pill</i></b> (1967)]), and the way Hefner would reinvent the magazine by publishing world-class fiction, interviews, cartoons, and his own Playboy Philosophy editorials. As to whether <b><i>Kane</i></b> or <b><i>Venus</i></b> commits the greater act of character assassination, we might note that <b><i>Venus</i></b> is pioneering in the field of Hefsploitation, implying, decades before <b><i>STAR 80</i></b>, that the publisher might be complicit in the death of a former pinup girl.<br />
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Having decided that Peggy is the muse that inspired <b>Pagan</b>, Norwall turns her into an icon that graces every issue. Whether it is feasible to publish a girlie mag with the same girlie every month becomes a moot point, when, in order to curb the blossoming Peg/Ken relationship, Jack makes the critical error of the Anima-befuddled throughout history, and marries the muse.<br />
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Because she's not the Muse, she's not the Venus, she's not a goddess. She never is, fellows — those are concepts, metaphors, drives and ancient impulses that live in the synapses, chromosomes, and collective psychomyth. Real angels never appear in centerfolds. But Jack tries to lasso the ideal anyway, transfers the Peggy out of the pages of <b>Pagan</b> and insists that his new bride stop modeling and start helping sell ad space as his new Promotions Manager. Poor Ken Carter, too, is removed from service out of spite, replaced by Geoffery Page, a hack (from Hollywood!) who is more interested in scoring with the models than the integrity of the nude photographic arts. This poseur in shades and ascot is supposedly of some renown, but turns out to possess none of Ken's mad skillz: the reputation is hollow, the sunglasses-and-beret get-up an affectation. If Ken is Bunny Yeager, Geoff is Terry Richardson. Where Ken's signature style propelled <b>Pagan</b> to success, The Beret's artless bullshit drives the publication into hell.<br />
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<b>Geoffrey Page Does it HOLLYWOOD STYLE!</b></center>
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In our already-belabored <b><i>Kane</i></b> parallel, Ken is the Jed Leland (a Jiminy Cricket conscience ignored at peril) and Peggy the Susan Alexander (forced on the public, possessed, and driven to drink!). Jack's worst impulses have taken over. He has sapped his creative vision, the magazine now increasingly given over to ad space propping up its indifferent content, revenue generated by forcing his own wife to seduce advertising clients. The happy, hard-working days of doing paste-ups in his bachelor apartment are gone, and with readership dropping off he cannot afford, let alone deserve, his new mansion. Any illusion that his work is dedicated to celebrating the female form is burned away: Jack Norwall has become a pimp, and in order to maintain grip on the Venus that lives in <b>Pagan</b>, he prostitutes his own Living Venus.<br />
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<b>Climb Off Your Pedestal</b><br />
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When Ken sees Peg for the last time, she is stumbling toward a private tête-à-tête with an "advertising" client, and Ken is doing an outdoor "high fashion" shoot, saved by his premature dismissal. He does not say it, but still loves her (he "never married" in the last, uh, year), and offers assistance, if she will accept. Ken's sympathy inspires Peg's momentary resolve to tell off the client but she lurches toward the void alone. Unlike similar pictures like <b><i>Scum of the Earth</i></b>, <b><i>Living Venus</i></b> never attempts to shame, judge, or make tragedy of Peggy's modeling itself, or of the men for publishing a girlie magazine. It is Jack who is undone, and by hubris, not dirty-picture-peddling, Peggy merely the saddest casualty on the way. If Peg is debased by anything, it is mistaking fame for fulfillment, a brand of whoredom associated with marketing, and poor judgment in choosing a partner. She takes leave of her miserable job and loveless marriage to attempt to dry out. Ken watches her go with longing, and in contrast, when Peggy falls to the floor in an intoxicated heap during a <b>Pagan</b> editorial meeting, Jack declares her a disgrace, and leaves her sobbing on the carpet with a dismissive "I think you're an alcoholic." <br />
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As Jack prepares to celebrate <b>Pagan</b>'s two-year anniversary, the ground is eroding beneath his feet. Everyone who he has not shut out begins to push away. Max Stein declares that backers are pulling out and he's going to dump the ailing rag, and recommends that Jack rehire Ken. But ambition has a way of getting tied up with pride, and the party rages against the dying of the light. Future Lucky Pierre himself, Billy Falbo, does a laugh-free stand-up intro, Jack stands with a model on his arm and gives an ominous toast — "Now, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow, who knows?" — and Bob Scobey's Famous Band fires up a jazz inferno and the Pagans bop into one last bacchanalia.<br />
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<b>makin money sellin out makin money</b></center>
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<b><i>Living Venus</i></b> gives a glimpse of another Herschell Gordon Lewis that might have been, a filmmaker more serious about the art, and not so single-mindedly focused on the marketing. Certainly in any conventional sense, the script, written by Kerwin, is stronger than most any of the others Lewis would use in the future, even if it is not as outrageous and keyed-up until the last act, or idiosyncratic throughout. This is a polite way of saying that it is not hilariously stilted, incompetent or indifferent, but also not as entertainingly nutty/dumb. It is hard to say from the very soft-looking SWV DVD-R, but <b><i>Venus</i></b> appears to be photographed with the polish of a rumpled indie, or at least a cut above the depths scraped by later Lewis pictures. Many of the director's sloppier habits are on early display, however. The nude modeling scenes come in two modes, with dialogue scenes awkwardly staged to avoid actual nudity, while more revealing snippets take place in a weird netherworld set with no "photographer" character present. We will certainly see Lewis' career-long trademark/problem of framing with too much headroom or flooring, particularly when characters will be sitting down and standing up during a shot. But for the most part, throughout <b><i>Venus</i></b> the blocking is logical and motivated, compositions convey the intended information, and a few are even, gulp, striking and attractive (e.g. see above, the image of the Venus statuette framed by noir-ish glowing Venetian blinds and looming nude silhouette)<br />
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In his first film endeavor, <b><i>The Prime Time</i></b> (1959), Lewis co-produced with exploitation grandmaster David F. Friedman. Though Lewis and Friedman have made much sport of <b><i>Prime Time</i></b> director Gordon Weisenborn over the years, the problem is not that Weisenborn was a bad director, but that he was a "bad" exploitation movie director, one who cared too much about the material, shot setups, and other niceties. Basically, by Friedman's account, he didn't work quick and dirty enough. Lewis did not ask Friedman's assistance on <b><i>Venus</i></b>, and produced and directed the film alone. Though the reasons are not confirmed, this was probably simply for a larger cut of profits, and Lewis may have assumed he had learned all he needed from Friedman. As it turned out, very few mortals could ever sell an exploitation movie like Dave Friedman could, and the partnership was rekindled for <b><i>Lucky Pierre</i></b>. One wonders, though, if Lewis did not learn something about <i>filmmaking</i> from working with Gordon Weisenborn, only to forget it again during his more lucrative nudies-and-gore Friedman era.<br />
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<b>Scenes from a Pagan Marriage</b></center>
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<b>I'll Never Be Free</b><br />
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The final show-stopper setpiece really belongs to actress Danica d'Hondt, as Peggy, three-weeks sober, crashes the party at her husband's house — the spirit of Venus-Aphrodite at her best is of reciprocity — and this time offers to help him. "I don't need any help," Jack spits, "You had your chance." The woman winces and stares to the invisible horizon, as if she finally sees the map of her fate from a tawdry Olympian view: "I guess I did have my chance. I married you instead." D'Hondt radiates a fatalistic glow as the dejected, demolished ex-ideal slumps down poolside, bottle in hand. One wonders, as she wallows in remorse and/or tries to work up some kind of courage, if she is reflecting back on this moment:<br />
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<b>Partners in doom, now and forever!</b></center>
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During an early date for Jack and Peg, they relax at the lounge where she waited tables. She can see where she's been, and with Jack at her side, see where she might be going, as he talks circulation numbers and toasts "To my Living Venus, now and forever!" The bar's piano man, Harry, plays a special number that he has composed for his newly successful coworker. It is a serenade to Peggy, that contrasts the adoration of the Venus statue "Symbol" ("there's only one Venus/ just one perfect form/ and that one is cold, carved from stone") against the real-world human who may not be an idealized logo made flesh, but has something else to offer. Jack proposes to buy the song for promotional purposes. Harry is baffled — the song isn't for sale, that wasn't the point, and Jack, the supposed expert in celebrating the Joy of Woman, doesn't get it. Lyrics most certainly by Lewis, our favorite auteur-composer: <br />
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<i>You're my Living Venus/ My warm, breathing Venus<br />
You're all that I dreamed you might be<br />
The gods on Olympus created/ the loveliest girl in the world<br />
And they brought her to me<br />
The stars shine at your shrine/ I'm floating on cloud 9<br />
My goddess, I'll never be free<br />
So climb off your pedestal / come down to earth<br />
Show your arms! Throw your arms around me!<br />
You're my Living Venus<br />
Rule in my temple of love!</i><br />
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<b>Nooo, Danica, DON'T!!</b></center>
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D'Hondt shines in the party scene, and in his way, the director does, too. From haphazard location footage of the backyard party revelers, impressionistic inserts of hands opening champagne bottles, and incongruent details, Lewis cuts together a montage to the bleating jazz band in cubist Romero-esque fashion; time and space stop flowing smoothly, frenzy and disorientation mount; a scream, a body floats in the pool, a smash-zoom into a paper lantern looks like a supernova, a drained bottle sinks in the water, and a Venus returns to the sea. In terms of an exercise in style and for actually creating an emotional impact, Peggy Brandon Norwall's may be the best death scene in the kill-packed Lewis oeuvre.<br />
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<b>Born of foam and blood.</b></center>
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The coda exists to curse Jack Norwall for his crimes. At Peggy's funeral, Max Stein tells Jack that <b>Pagan</b> is finished, both Venuses disappeared into the open grave before him. Standing alone by that yawning abyss, a grave that is also his own, Jack screams "I don't need any of you, I created Venus!," but there is no one to hear him. Defiant to the last, burbling through tears of hot rage, he is still singing the same song as when he left <b>Newlywed</b>: "I'll bury all of you in every newsstand in the country! I'll show you all! I guarantee it... I guarantee it. I guarantee it." As Jack crumbles to the ground and the camera rises, two mute Shakespearean gravediggers shrug, make the international gesture for "cuckoo-brains," and start shoveling dirt. Let him sit here and die. You wanna play pagan and tangle with the gods, this is where you end up. I guarantee it.<br />
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<i>Special thanks to the good folks at <a href="http://www.somethingweird.com/">Something Weird Video</a>, from whose DVD-R this piece is illustrated. Please note that technical issues on my end prevented proper screencapping, and the above substandard images are just slapdash TV display photos that do not reflect the quality of SWV's transfer (which is still soft, as noted above, partially due to limitations inherent in the source materials).</i><br />
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Previous investigations into H.G. Lewis:<br />
—<a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2010/08/let-them-talk-let-them-scream-prime.html">Let Them Talk! Let Them Scream!: THE PRIME TIME</a><br />
—<a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2011/05/down-inside-youre-dirty-tribute-to.html">Notes from the New Beverly Cinema's Tribute to David F. Friedman</a>Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-51246126114158091582012-01-08T05:28:00.000-08:002018-11-07T11:05:43.689-08:00L.A. Filmforum's Alternative Projections @ Cinefamily<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Notes from <b>Wallace Berman's Underground</b> + Sundry other thoughts, digressions, etc.<br />
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Throughout January, 2012, <a href="http://www.lafilmforum.org/index/Home.html">Los Angeles Filmforum</a> steps out of its usual fancy digs at the Egyptian and pays a social call to the more living-roomy <a href="http://www.cinefamily.org/">Cinefamily</a> at the Silent Movie Theater. The occasion is <a href="http://www.alternativeprojections.com/">Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980</a> , a continuing Filmforum project with various programing threads weaving throughout town, at MOCA, LACMA, the Armory and so on — the pertinents are linked above — as part of the massive SoCal arts mega-event <a href="http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/">Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.</a> Check that website, because you'll want to see a photo of Ice Cube pretending to smoke a pipe in an Eames chair, no shit.<br />
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That all sounds like an overwhelming amount of, well, stuff, but rather than kick yourself (myself) for missing the "Community Visionaries" program (and "Film/Music/Forms" and <b>"Puce Moment"</b> I mean agrh oh god), look at all the neat stuff still coming! So, have you have any interest in avant-garde film and/or Los Angeles social history, do haul said interests over to the Cinefamily sofa, STAT (they got cupcakes, dude).<br />
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The January 7 program, "Wallace Berman's Underground", focused on films emerging from the Topanga Canyon art scene of the '60s — The West Cost assemblage movement, <b>SEMINA</b> group and associates, buddies and neighbors, and so forth. The entire Alternative Projections project is inspiring, because mid-century underground film discussion tends to focus on New York and, in California, the Bay Area. <b>SEMINA</b> magazine creator and assemblage master Wallace Berman served as the connecting spirit for the assembled films and his son, Tosh Berman, artists Russ Tamblyn, Toni Basil, George Herns were on hand to introduce and discuss their work. So yes, since this is primarily a pop movie blog, <i>that</i> Russ Tamblyn and <i>that</i> Toni Basil; if Los Angeles is good at anything, it is in the overlapping of high art and high glam, inspiring hip circles of weirdo legends to bump into each other like amoebae in a petri dish. So speaking of context, Tamblyn hilariously related the story of how his introduction to Berman via Hollywood pal Dean Stockwell effectively "ruined [his] life" and turned him to a second career of non-commercial art — collage, poetry, and handmade film.<br />
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The most familiar film on display was probably Bruce Conner's <b>BREAKAWAY</b>, but here it is in a particular context — placed in its historical Scene. That's what we're really talking about here, a social scene, an art community, which was, as art communities are, a group of folks making work for themselves and sharing it with each other. Even (especially?) the grungiest of art scenes end up as romantic legends for starry-eyed generations hence. The documentary qualities of a lot of this work help to demythologize the time, place, and personalities, and shape a coherent picture of that particular moment.<br />
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And honestly, with the Cinefamily series, it's also rare fun to see these films outside of a museum or academic setting. The guest speakers made fairly clear that these films were made to be presented at entirely private screenings, typically with audiences of one, projected on walls or, as Tosh Berman noted, refrigerator doors. The Silent Movie Theater is not, from what I understand, exactly the kind of rathole that screened undergrounds in New York, but it is undeniably of cozier charms than Cinematheque theaters.<br />
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SO! To the films:<br />
<b>Aleph</b> (1956-66, Wallace Berman, 6 min, 16mm, color, silent)<br />
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Berman's only film, a pretty steadily frenzied collage, sliced and spliced and rephotographed from newspapers, home movies, other movies — even his own collages essentially collaged into a collage. The mystics in the audience may perk up when the Hebrew letters start to flash and Mick Jagger appears — those murky, secret links between underground film, Kabbalah, and 20th century magical movers-and-shakers are glinting through once more. Somewhere Kenneth Anger cracks his knuckles and Harry Smith strokes his beard. Tosh Berman relates the odd but completely perfect story that his father actually took him to the filming of <b><i>The T.A.M.I. Show</i></b>, where the lad witnessed the Supremes in hair curlers... but rather than shoot live footage of The Rolling Stones, Berman went to a theater when the film came out and shot the screen. Which is, as noted, perfect. P.S., Toni Basil is in <b><i>The T.A.M.I. Show</i></b>.<br />
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<b>BREAKAWAY</b> (1966, Bruce Conner, 5 min, 16mm [transfered from 8mm?], color, sound)<br />
<b>Pas De Trois</b> (1964, Dean Stockwell, 8 min, 16mm [transfered to video], b&w)<br />
<b>A Dance Film inspired by the music of Jim Morrison</b> (1968, Toni Basil, 2 min, color, sound)<br />
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A Basilana trio of sorts: Conner's ecstatic dance film of Basil, set to her 1966 pop single, Stockwell's expressive "making-of" document of the filming of <b>BREAKAWAY</b>, and Basil's own <b>Dance Film</b>. Crackling stuff, all. In <b>BREAKAWAY</b>, Conner's camera flails and motion-streaks and strobes and dances with/at/for Basil — plus if you dig '60s girlpop sounds, you already like this song. Just as the rock runs dry, the action reverses and the film and music play again backwards: Big Bang to Big Crunch with Toni Basil in between. Stockwell's film contains, apparently, the only footage of Bruce Conner in the act of filming. These are the moments that forge important links in our understanding of the story of film history; specifically, here is an "in" for hardcore AIP nerds, a connection for enthusiasts of '60s pop or of New York post-punk, here is a major link between experimental film and commercial cinema, concrete personnel crossover between Old Hollywood, New Hollywood, Camp Corman, early MTV, and... <b>Grizzly Adams</b>.<br />
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Basil's <b>Dance Film</b> (actually set to Hendrix) sees the inventive choreographer demonstrating an early knack for innovative possibilities in shooting dance. <b>Dance Film</b> triple-layers footage of ballerinas and street dancers, shot in a black-box void (black, not white like her stark "Mickey" and "Once in a Lifetime" videos). Screened with Basil's newly appended but vintage, original hand-lettered titles.<br />
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All of this has some added kick for those imagining Dennis Hopper somewhere nearby, trying to put together <b><i>The Last Movie</i></b>, and the shadows of Devo coming into focus in the distance. If I'm romanticizing again, it was bound to happen, this section being so rock-n-roll.<br />
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<b>First Film</b> (1966, Russ Tamblyn, 8 min, 16mm, color, silent)<br />
<b>Rio Reel</b> (1968, Tamblyn, 6 min, 16mm, color, silent)<br />
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And then to the the Tamblyn portion. <b>First Film</b> is a snappy stream-of-consciousness rush through young Mr. Tamblyn's brain immediately after being warped by contact with Berman. As per the filmmaker's recollections, the films were originally shown with vinyl record accompanyment — rock or Bach or whatever was around Chez Tamblyn. So if this screens again, bring your iPod, I guess. We start with a tone-poem of grass billowing in the wind in crosscut weaving patterns and progress to drunken, blurring neon nightlife. The first-time film artist throws in every technique he's got, seen, and absorbed, from Berman-style flashframe editing to Sharpie-on-film animation (McLaren needn't have started looking over his shoulder, but it's charming).<br />
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A surprise highlight of the show, <b>Rio Reel</b> is rather like the city symphony films of yore, an impressionistic document of a time and place. Tamblyn edits with wit and some panache (spinning a sunbather around the beach by changing angles), but nabs an abundance of poetic or simply attractive images (a sapling palm black against a blazing red sky, a wasp crawling into a hole), and lets them flash by (thus: a lion's eyes turn into windmills). Again, per the filmmaker: shot while on location for an episode of the <b>Tarzan</b> TV show, the film includes two memorable but incognito cameos by that program's animal trainer, Dan Haggerty. In the second, his leg is clawed by a big cat. In the first, he moons the camera from a passing auto. Really, there are no words.<br />
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Evident Tamblyn trademark: shooting signage, type, titles, usually only in part, and bouncing the phrases, words or single letters off each other — they make puns, spell "L.S.D.," connect or collide. This starts in <b>First Film</b>, becomes more sophisticated in <b>Rio Reel</b>.<br />
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Selections from <b>Topanga Rose</b> (1960s, George Herms, 22 min, film transferred to video, color)<br />
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Sculptor-poet-etc, assemblage founding father, American Dadaist, more etc., the inimitable George Herms cut together vintage home movies of the community at work, play, meal, and living; the focus is goats and children and water and landscape and making art, always, and constantly. With an excellent clamorous bells-and-piano musical arrangement and Herms growling his fragmented poetry on the soundtrack, <b>Topanga Rose</b> is a shimmering, wistful sort of cap to the program, but it is also earthy, bodily, human. Some of the narration comes from Herms' Genesis theater piece: "The egg of night was floating on chaos, and out of the egg came love. And love, with his arrows and his torch, pierced and vivified all things."<br />
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Again, I want to single this series out, because it's the kind of thing with a lot of potential to bridge the unfortunate divide between audiences for popular art and fine art. There are "hooks" here, there are stories and history that flow directly in and out of commercial film history — this material can be entirely captivating and accessible to anyone with an interest in film, which is effectively everyone. So in a slightly esoteric way, Berman's Underground tells the story of how <b><i>The Boy With Green Hair</i></b> cast grew up, was dragged into a bohemian camp, emerged transformed into Lovecraftian wizards and Gargantua slayers, then worked with David Lynch.<br />
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If one single night of the series is bound to exemplify this nexus of studio product, modern art movements, multiple major film schools, fringe-dwellars and moneymen, future giants and old gods, it will be "Industry Town: The Avant-Garde & Hollywood" (Jan. 14). <b>The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra</b> is a cheat — it's from 1928: BUSTED!, but oh look, here's a George Lucas movie. And as it happens, of the Movie Bratz, Lucas easily showed the most promise at experimental films — better than De Palma, is what I'm saying. So that's my pick for those looking to wet a toe or being otherwise selective.<br />
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Experimental animation is a particularly exciting topic to me (also, ahem, psychedelia), so I point all like-minded to the "Psychedelic Visions & Expanded Consciousness" show; I am familiar with more of the films than in the other line-ups, but it is likely the most retina-dazzling program, unless the optical-printer-themed night has some thing up its sleeve. Optical Printer Theme Night, don't it just make your heart light up, folks?<br />
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Okay, one quick whine to remind us all to check the calendars on the reg: the selected Kenneth Anger films have all already screened. Could've made a whole night of it, even if that's a little obvious and unnecessary. Still, as this is about L.A. and experimental film, then one of his greatest magical works was in helping the city dream a mythology of itself — Kenneth Anger psychically terraformed Los Angeles.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-12605058359705571612011-09-29T21:54:00.000-07:002017-07-14T21:56:40.837-07:00Ray vs. Gumby<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Ray Liotta as Ray Sinclair contemplates the unexpected appearance of Gumby in <b><i>Something Wild</i></b>, 1986 dir. Jonathan Demme, scr. E. Max Frye.</center>
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This three-second bit of business is one of dozen of fine throwaway pleasures in a pretty goddamn rousing performance. Come to think of it, most of <b><i>Something Wild</i></b>'s delights are in a hand-decorated telephone, a background performer's body language, the fluorescent pink letters on a t-shirt; it's a bric-a-brac movie. There is a killer moment in Liotta's final scene as the actor swipes a meaty paw across his pallid brow, leaves a bloody palm print dripping from his hairline, and it looks for all the world as though <i>his brain is bleeding</i>.<br />
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The film undergoes two or three major tonal shifts — part of the fun and sense of play is that one never knows what is going to happen next, even though a capsule summary of the plot would indicate a boilerplate screwball romance throwback in which a free-spirited wacky dame pesters an uptight square until he loves her. So that's Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels) and Audrey "Lulu" Hankel (Melanie Griffith) plugged into the Susan Vance and Doc David Huxley parts, or maybe the Clarence Worley and Alabama Whitman parts, because you never know when someone will get murdered or naked or, more importantly, how serious or cartoony the next curve will bend.<br />
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Now there's a sort of interesting subtext to the final movement of <b><i>Something Wild</i></b>, where bank-robber ex-boyfriend criminal on the lam Ray appears as a dark agent of Lulu's wicked, troubled past and his relentless pursuit has a quality of karmic horror. The first sections focus on Lulu assaulting Charlie's worldview, forcing him to transgress personal boundaries, and assisting in his ego death by way of "losing" his wallet, and helping him self-actualize through fashion therapy and a parade of new identities. Where the opening acts see Lulu broadening Charlie's horizons with the magic of her particular charms, after Ray intrudes the tables turn and the reinvented Charlie has to fight to maintain the relationship and as She fixed Him now He has to fix Her — thesis, antithesis, synthesis and all that. In counterpoint to Ray-as-Lulu's-shadow, it has (sorta) been noted by Demme, it is as if Charlie's sheer <i>niceness</i> through his life provides him with a spontaneous network of helpers — convenience store clerks and scruffy motel owners, rather than woodland sprites, if you will, but we're not here to plug Charlie Driggs into the Monomyth (not right now, anyway).<br />
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Ray is then a golem on the hunt (though this is just a made-up appropriate metaphor, it conveniently ties in with the forehead-wiping upon permanent deactivation — we might compare Ray to a twitchy Terminator or greaser Pumpkinhead; anyway, a vengeful ghoul animated by buried sins of the past). For a moment the universe throws him an omen, the pasty golem contemplates the Zen example of the green clay boy. Ray barks out a spazzy laugh, chucks Gumby out the window and speeds off in a hotwired car.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-52076682032207812322011-05-16T14:41:00.000-07:002017-07-14T20:22:48.589-07:00Synchronicity's Spine Number<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Item: Strange echo found in the cover illustrations of The Criterion Collection's releases for May 17, 2011. A woman's hand presses upon a man's brow and in context neither gesture is particularly soothing.<br />
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Vague opinion: It goes without saying, I hope, that both films are renowned knockers off of socks, and a better use of one's disposable income than attendance at any pictures opening this weekend, whatever the weekend.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-47023216063277823692011-05-03T04:30:00.001-07:002017-07-16T01:12:35.115-07:00Down Inside You're Dirty!: A Tribute to David F. Friedman — Screening Report<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Pioneering exploitation movie producer/ writer/ distributor/ actor/ advertiser/ theater owner/ etc. David F. Friedman died in his hometown of Anniston, Alabama on Valentine's Day of 2011. At the time, I happened to be eyeball-deep in studying his collaborations with Herschell Gordon Lewis (some of which I've written about here), and suddenly found myself at a loss for words. With a sizable filmography, leading the way or producing key films in a number of subgenres, Friedman's influence and import is something of a matter of public record, while the quality and reputation of what he made is rather up in the air. Part of the reason for that is that the audience for the sort of films he produced is an endangered species. While the groundbreaking splatter films with Lewis are certainly his most famous films, Friedman wrote so many of his own scripts that even when paired with a dozen different directors, his voice as an artist is clear as a bell.<br />
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On April 30, Eric Caidin and Brian Quinn of the Grindhouse Film Festival and <a href="http://www.somethingweird.com/">Something Weird Video</a> presented a special Tribute to David Friedman at the <a href="http://www.newbevcinema.com/">New Beverly Cinema</a> in Los Angeles. Seven saucy and shocking films, sundry titillating trailers, and sensational short subjects were screened over the course of twelve and a half hours, and a bevy of special guests shared personal memories and reflections about the beloved exploitation film impresario.<br />
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All told, turnout for this all-day sleaze-a-thon was hearty, if not packed to capacity, with an increase in warm bodies in the evening and severe tapering off after midnight and maybe a dozen diehards making it to the very end. Guests ranged from character actor Bill McKinney (the Ten-in-One owner of <b><i>She Freak</i></b>, whose work you surely enjoy) to L.A. Times critic Kevin Thomas (about whose work you may have Opinions), and Ted Bonnitt, director of the 2001 documentary <b><i>Mau Mau Sex Sex</i></b> read a message from Rosa Lee Sonney (daughter of Dan Sonney, Friedman's partner in the <a href="http://www.sandiegoreader.com/weblogs/bands/2010/jun/29/pussycat-theaters-a-comprehensive-history-of-a-cal/">Pussycat Theater</a> chain). If anything came across in everyone's reminisces it is that Dave Friedman was a tremendous amount of fun to be around, loved his work, and lived heartily. The always affable Mike Vraney was on hand for film intros, anecdotes about his adventures with Friedman, historical contextualizing, and available for pestering on the sidewalk during smoke breaks. Some SWV news was spilt, so to that end:<br />
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Something Weird Blu-rays should be out around September, 2011 with <b><i>Basket Case</i></b> as the first title! Sorry, fellow <b><i>Shanty Tramp</i></b> fans. This will be followed by a Herschell Gordon Lewis triple feature with <b><i>Blood Feast</i></b>, <b><i>Two Thousand Maniacs!</i></b> and <b><i>Color Me Blood Red</i></b> all on one disc. I'm sorry, for whatever reason, I just can't call it the "Blood Trilogy."<br />
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As for the film fest, I might have organized the movies in chronological order and/or selected more representative or important productions for a sort of pedantic Friedman 101 presentation. But I'd have been wrong, because damned if the day wasn't programmed nearly perfectly. Here's the thing: you either enjoy these movies or you don't. I'm mostly talking about nudie pictures here, not low-budget horror or drive-in action, or sundry other exploitation subphylum. I do think they are a (rotten) taste that can be acquired, but there's not something to "get" before they start clicking, unless it's context or nostalgia. To me, Friedman's nudies are the heart of exploitation film, the dividing line of scum that separates the "real" grindhouse from the mainstream. So I'd like to think that everyone in Los Angeles who finds this the Mid-Century Smut anti-aesthetic inherently appealing was in the audience, and a few new pairs of eyes got a baptism by fire. The movies:<br />
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<b><i>Space Thing</i></b> (1968, dir. Byron Mabe as B. Ron Elliot)<br />
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Nonsensical, super-boring, and idiotic, <b><i>Space Thing</i></b> is about a Planetarian alien disguised (somehow?) as a Terranian (e.g.— Earthling, "from Kansas," no less) who infiltrates an enemy spacecraft, learns the art of making out with girls, wanders around a rock quarry, then concludes his mission by blowing up the ship with a bomb that he could have set off the minute the film began. On one hand starting with this movie this is jumping in with both feet, and on the other hand it worked perfectly, infusing a little SF genre flavor into the line-up, and providing the early birds with an opening salvo of interminable scenes of hairy-backed men rolling around on passably cute chicks with bad skin, unsynched audio over MOS footage and extensive whipping of bare butts. Because as much hysteria as it causes the first time, there will be a <i>lot</i> of whipping of bare butts. We do not, as the poster promises, visit the "Planet of the Rapes." If this is some sort of deal-breaker, be forewarned.<br />
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Presented in a print gone 500 shades of pink. Vraney helpfully explained a pointless, non sequitur prologue as an attempt to pad out the picture, which came in short when Mabe was fired. <br />
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<b><i>Scum of the Earth</i></b> (1963, dir. H.G. Lewis as Lewis H. Gordon)<br />
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1963 was a banner year for the Lewis and Friedman team, with a flurry of nudies, the invention of splatter films, and this J.D./ fallen girl/ pornography exposé melodrama in the vein of Ed Wood, Jr.'s <b><i>The Sinister Urge</i></b> (1960). <b><i>Scum of the Earth</i></b> might be my favorite Lewis/Friedman project. It's got the Bill Kerwin/ Mal Arnold/ Lawrence Aberwood acting trifecta chewing things up as crazy characters, the unforgettable "all you kids make me sick!" speech (among others), unconvincingly staged violence, great period cars and clothes, and a turgid, sweaty conviction that <i>feels</i> like it's covered with a coat of slime even though there is zero nudity. Also, 30-year-old Mal Arnold repeatedly brags that he is a minor in the eyes of the law, to the delight of all viewers.<br />
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What I like most about <b><i>Scum</i></b> (this goes for <b><i>Sinister Urge</i></b>, too) is that it is a wholly ludicrous depiction of the adult entertainment business from men who know perfectly well how it actually works. In this respect it is an interesting companion piece to their earlier <b><i>Living Venus</i></b> (1961), which takes a more down-to-earth approach to chronicling the professional workings and moral downward spiral of a Hugh Hefner analogue, and to Friedman's later <b><i>Starlet!</i></b> (see below).<br />
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Presented in a print with consistent scratching but otherwise aces.<br />
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<b><i>She Freak</i></b> (1967, dir. Byron Mabe)<br />
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Okay, I adore <b><i>She Freak</i></b>. It starts with the lowering of a Ferris wheel safety bar, and then we're off! If you want to know what Dave Friedman was about, who he was, where he came from, I suspect <b><i>She Freak</i></b> is the place to look. Whatever else is going on in the movie — loose remake of <b><i>Freaks</i></b>, ruthless maneater melodrama, love and violence among showpeople yarn, 80 minutes of barking for two minutes of horror — <b><i>She Freak</i></b> is head over heels for the carnival — the people, the culture, the lifestyle — and wants to show you in detail every tent stake being pounded, every midway lightbulb being screwed in, every corn dog being dipped. Where a majority of Friedman movies would have ten-minute heavy petting scenes, <b><i>She Freak</i></b> instead shows its carnival setting up, running, and tearing down.<br />
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Presented in quite nice condition, with color starting to go red but not entirely gone over.<br />
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<b><i>A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine</i></b> (1966, dir. Byron Mabe as B. Ron Elliot)<br />
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Hateful, fascinating and feverish, <b><i>Smell of Honey</i></b> sees seductress Sharon Winters (Friedman discovery Stacey Walker née Barbara Jean Moore) drive a string of would-be lovers into a frenzy, up until they try to peel off her panties, at which point she cries rape. And this she does over and over... until she pays the price. The roughie subgenre would obviously produce much uglier, more objectionable products, and Friedman hadn't gotten into <b><i>Love Camp 7</i></b> or <b><i>Ilsa</i></b> territory quite yet. While <b><i>Smell/Swallow</i></b> is no walk in the park compared to the cuties of earlier in the decade, there is enough camp and bitter comedy to make this more entertaining than vile.<br />
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Besides almost working as a metaphor for the degree of explicitness allowable in nudie pictures, <b><i>Smell of Honey</i></b> strikes me as sort of a female counterpart to <b><i>Raging Bull</i></b>: a study of a character with single-minded, stripped-down psychology, a stunted person with one nasty trait that may be observable in real people but here is just hammered and hammered and hammered. Where Jake La Motta's entire sexuality, personality and being are focused down to "he punches things," Sharon Winters is a sadistic tease. Both one-track characters follow their patterns like rats in a maze until they spiral into hell. There's no inciting incident, no exploration, no learning, no excuses, no apologies. There is, however, a fantastic, relentless rock score by "Et Cetera" that might be described as "Exile on Shaggs Street," and a remarkable, bizarrely sexy lead performance by Walker. Cinematographer László Kovács (as Art Radford) and director Mabe are 100% on point, and this may be as close as Friedman ever got to a well-crafted picture.<br />
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Presented in an occasionally jumpy but otherwise excellent print.<br />
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-Short subject: <b>"But Charlie, I Never Played Volleyball!"</b> (1966)<br />
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Fun to see this stupid little nudist camp reel with narrated banter and wraparound story featuring Stacey Walker as an actress hired to judge the Miss Nude Universe pageant. IMDb says that this number, <b><i>Smell of Honey</i></b> and <b><i>Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill</i></b> (all in a year) comprise all of Walker's film work, which is kind of a drag. If you need to see it, check the <b><i>Fanny Hill/ The Head Mistress</i></b> DVD, if you can get a copy.<br />
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This was also the point at which the audience had hit "the wall" and pushed through into "the zone." That is, things started to get a little loopy. Personally, my perspective warped, the dumb jokes became hilarious, and the prolonged softcore scenes whizzed by like they weren't completely stupefying. Case in point, <b><i>Blood Feast</i></b> seemed to move at light speed...<br />
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<b><i>Blood Feast</i></b> (1963, dir. H.G. Lewis)<br />
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This print was just about as close to perfect as one could ask, Blood Color intact and with barely a scratch but for those legs what got cut off. Hey man, it brought down the house like always. My favorite part is when Mal Arnold says "You see, I am an old man!," the same comedy in reverse as when he says he's under 18 in <b><i>Scum of the Earth</i></b>.<br />
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<b><i>The Pick-Up</i></b> (1968, dir. Lee Frost)<br />
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Vraney helpfully provided backstory on the search for this ultra-rarity, a film Friedman had asked him to locate for years, which was ultimately found in a Copenhagen film collector's vault. This nigh pristine print (with Danish subs) is the only known copy, so you can see it on SWV's DVD-R; it's only been screened publicly twice now. I'd enjoyed <b><i>The Pick-Up</i></b> before, but it gained a lot of power in this context, since Friedman has a large onscreen role as stressed-out Vegas crime boss Charlie Rosa. And, bonus, fellow exploitation producer Bob Cresse (you loved 'im in <b><i>House on Bare Mountain</i></b>!) plays L.A. mob boss, Sal. Both producers are extremely entertaining as they stress out about what happened to a missing Cadillac trunkfull of casino skimmings. Meanwhile, the hapless bagmen endeavor to retrieve the twice-stolen cash from a pair of foxy female crooks.<br />
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Besides one over-the-top roughie-style torture scene, <b><i>The Pick-Up</i></b> is primarily a punchy hardboiled crime thriller, stylishly stripped-down like a Richard Stark book or a proto <b><i>Reservoir Dogs</i></b>. I'd say it really cooks along, because it mostly does, but my brain is phasing out on the ten-minute make out scenes. If you've already watched five Friedman movies, <b><i>The Pick-Up</i></b> is wound up like a watch spring. Cool vintage Vegas footage at the top, too.<br />
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-Aaand another goofy-ass short, <b>"The Casting Director"</b> (1968), also starring Bob Cresse, who sexually harasses an auditioning actress in an office full of beautiful, beautiful exploitation movie posters and lobby cards. Cresse mostly pulls faces and pours sweat, in the classic <b><i>Lucky Pierre</i></b>nudie-cutie-peeper style. Due to the lateness of the hour, excessive Junior Mints intake, and coccyx agony, I just kind of couldn't stop laughing. If you must see it, check the SWV double feature of <b><i>Dr. Sex/ Wanda the Wicked Hypnotist</i></b>.<br />
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<b><i>Starlet!</i></b> (1969, dir. Richard Kantor)<br />
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You shoot anything on the old Monogram lot, and I'm there.<br />
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<b><i>Starlet!</i></b> is an epic-scale (100 minutes!) portrait of the exploitation film industry and it feels rather like Friedman's final word on the subject. But it's not — he hadn't made <b><i>Trader Hornee</i></b> (1970), gotten into Nazisploitation, finished making those "Erotic Adventures" films or unleashed <b><i>Johnny Firecloud</i></b> (1975). While <b><i>Starlet!</i></b> isn't technically the end of an era, it does appear as the nudie cycle is winding down and — as metaphorically depicted in the opening scene — transforming into no-holes-barred hardcore. So the movie was a perfect capper for this celebration of Friedman's career, as it is, in itself, a celebration of Friedman's career, full of in-jokes and cameos and requiring of the audience at least a basic familiarity with the genre.<br />
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The tapestry-style story basically concerns the exploits at EVI Studios (the film's real production company, depicting itself within... oh, forget it) as it gears up, shoots, and releases the college-themed nudie smash "A Youth in Babylon" (a title so good or personally meaningful that Friedman used it for his autobiography). The backbone of the plot follows fresh talent Carol Yates (beautiful, funny, articulate Dee Lockwood credited as Deirdre Nelson), who we meet doing stag films for rent money and rises to become EVI's biggest new star. The emphasis is on good-natured situational comedy, but with a dozen colorful characters swirling around the fringes there is room for romance, slapstick, gripping blackmail plots, and <b><i>All About Eve</i></b>-type backstage drama.<br />
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The thing I like best about <b><i>Starlet!</i></b> is its familial, jocular tone, and though the characters are cartoonish to a degree, the film is non-judgmental about who they are, what they are doing, and why they do it. Where <b><i>Scum of the Earth</i></b> depicts a convoluted extortion plot just to get a girl to take cheesecake photos, <b><i>Starlet!</i></b> opens with its strong-willed, likable and down-to-earth heroine being convinced to turn a softcore scene into hard, and rather than weeping and screaming indignantly, Carol just rolls her eyes and shrugs. Insta-crush-object Deirdre Nelson is the rightful Starlet here, but the supporting cast is a great mix of talented vets (Stuart Lancaster, John Alderman, both kinda-sorta-not-really reprising their characters from <b><i>Thar She Blows!</i></b>) and unspeakably wooden topless gals. The overall warm "look what we got away with" tone is darkened and complicated with depictions of artistic frustration, the disposability of aging talent, and violent abuse of power by directors and producers. A particularly effective subplot, not played for laughs, involves a first-time nudie director learning to compromise his vision and morals, and finding out, basically, that joining the carnival comes with some personal sacrifices: those who aren't With the Show will never understand. If the nude squirming scenes were trimmed down, <b><i>Starlet!</i></b> could almost play to a non-weirdo audience, and I believe it belongs in the company of <b><i>Ed Wood</i></b> and <b><i>Boogie Nights</i></b> — a small family of affectionate, good-hearted but complex, conflicted depictions of particular times and places in trash filmmaking history. <b><i>Starlet!</i></b> does not achieve (or aspire to) the same level of fine-tuning and polish as those mainstream masterpieces, but it has something they don't: it was made by the people it is about. They lived this story, even as they filmed <b><i>Starlet!</i></b><br />
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Presented in a... nice print? I was pretty out of it, sorry. Surely it is the same acceptable print used for the SWV DVD-R. Includes much vintage L.A. footage, always a joy.<br />
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Famously humorous and bombastic trailers for classic Friedman product were interspersed throughout the program, usually featuring tie-in glimpses of cast members, locations, or, in one case, a big white dog. I took no notes, but we were treated to trailers for: <b><i>The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill</i></b> (1966), <b><i>Brand of Shame</i></b> (1968), <b><i>Bummer</i></b> (1973), <b><i>A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine</i></b> ('66), <b><i>Thar She Blows!</i></b> (1968), <b><i>Love Camp 7</i></b> (1969), <b><i>Trader Hornee</i></b> (1970), and, undoubtedly, more which are lost to delirium.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-19332342862972894342011-03-27T05:11:00.000-07:002017-07-15T00:07:26.423-07:00I Believe It's MagicSometimes one stumbles onto diverting/cute/inconsequential discoveries but has no longer piece on any related topics in the works where they might be deposited. Rather than lose this one to the wind, I present a nice little flourish from <i><b>Ghostbusters</b></i> (1984, Columbia Pictures, dir. I. Reitman). Or is that "<b><i>Ghost Busters</i></b>," as the opening titles would have it? I usually defer to what is onscreen, but this is plainly incorrect. Moving on then. This is really just about an interesting cut-on-action and as it entirely involves movement and cutting, the illustrations below aren't particularly attractive or, well, illustrative.<br />
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The context, as you surely recall, is that Consolidated Edison, under orders of EPA jagoff Walter "Wally Wick" Peck, have shut down the 'Busters' containment grid and released all manner of spookums. In humorous-eerie montage set to a jittery remix of "Magic" by Mick Smiley, several of the emancipated phantoms rush to indulge in those specifically New York City experiences they must have pined for in captivity. After shenanigans with subways, taxis, and mouthfuls of street hotdogs, we're back to our key players.<br />
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Fig. 1<br />
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Whoosh! Here's a view looking out from the apartment window of one Dana Barrett, lately possessed by Sumerian demigod Zuul, Gatekeeper and minion of Gozer the Gozerian (I type these things because it looks funny, not because you don't already know all this; sadly, we both know all of this by heart).<br />
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This sequence is rather on the cusp of the second and third acts, and designed to pull into position the relevant players who have been scattered to the wind. Namely, at this point the stage is set for the ritual union of Gatekeeper Zuul and Keymaster Vinz Clortho, but Vinz is off scampering around TriBeCa — they can't find each other. <br />
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This is followed by a brief reaction shot of Zuul!Dana, distorted through the window glass and then...<br />
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Fig. 2<br />
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Fig. 3<br />
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The idea here, as explained by Dr. Stanz, is that the building itself is constructed to serve as a massive antenna for PK energy. Hence, a good number of the pink energy balls zip straight toward 55 Central Park West. Those that don't crave hotdogs, anyway.<br />
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Before (F.2) and after (F.3) images are offered purely to communicate what is happening in this shot: the wall explodes out, sending a cloud of gray dust and debris straight at the camera. Match cut to:<br />
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Fig. 4<br />
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A flock of pigeons suddenly taking flight in the foreground. They rise up and exit frame at the top and reveal Vinz Clortho in Louis Tully's clothes staggering around in the middle distance, watching them go.<br />
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Observations, mercifully brief:<br />
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-The student of editing clichés may know that a sudden cut to birds taking wing is not entirely unprecedented. Such theoretical birds are often reacting literally, metaphorically, or both to some kind of violent shock, e.g.— echoing gunshots and a cut to startled birds escaping Dealey Plaza punctuate the opening sequence of <i><b>JFK</b></i> (1991). HOWEVER! While "motivated" by the PKE-charged explosion, the <b><i>Ghostbusters</i></b> pigeons are different in essence. Again, no screencap quite captures kinetic release of this cut, but suffice to say the effect is that <i>the wall explodes into a cloud of pigeons.</i><br />
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-This sequence is a chain of motion, where flocking chunks of energyball/brickwork/birds fly at the spectator. This is also part of an image system throughout the film in which, well, special effects fly at the camera. Obviously, in the twenty-six years since, this is an increasingly typical gimmick, and it was not really new in 1984. Rather than make a case for visual innovation or uniqueness here, I just wish to point out that this bit combos an optical effect (F.1) onto a pyro stunt (F.3) onto real live birds (F.4) to convey several story points.<br />
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-As the music cuts out, the final puzzle piece is laid, completing the story concerns driving this bit. Besides the ghostie hijinks, this sequence is about Zuul moving to the window in anticipation, sensing the arrival of Clortho. Vinz has been wandering the streets and looking to the skies, finally drawn to Spook Central by the swarming spiritual turbulence. The pigeon cut signals the moment that he knows exactly where to go. Now what is interesting? poignant? weird? to me about this story thread is the screenwriter's-delight irony surrounding Louis Tully. The Gatekeeper/Keymaster gag is memorable enough that it garnered a nod in one of those "Sex in Cinema" pieces in <b>Playboy</b>. As the paperback novelization puts it, "She <i>was</i> the Gatekeeper and his key was ready. They sank down in the embrace that had been foretold and blew the roof off the building." Good one, Richard Mueller.<br />
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What the film does not play up explicitly is the character dimension to this, in which the lovesick nerd has universe-ripping sex with his dream girl while they are both under the influence of demonic possession. There is a fair amount of this sort of understated irony in <b><i>Ghostbusters</i></b>, right down in its foundational concept. The film is set in a world beset by real supernatural menace but the protagonist, Peter Venkman, is the sort of sham parapsychologist that skeptical investigators like to make examples of. The point being only that the core jokes of <b><i>Ghostbusters</i></b> are somehow those that get the least attention in favor of, say, smelly ghosts eating ten hotdogs.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-14814923669745446872011-03-16T19:28:00.000-07:002017-07-16T21:42:37.960-07:00Two Zero Zero X: Favorite Films of the Decade Pt. 7 — 2006<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Previously: <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2009/11/two-zero-zero-x-favorite-films-of.html">2000</a>, <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2009/11/two-zero-zero-x-favorite-films-of_26.html">2001</a>, <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2009/12/two-zero-zero-x-favorite-films-of.html">2002</a>, <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2010/01/two-zero-zero-x-favorite-films-of.html">2003</a>, <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2010/03/two-zero-zero-x-favorite-films-of.html">2004</a>, <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2010/06/two-zero-zero-x-favorite-films-of.html">2005</a>...</center>
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Two quick notes, skippable for the disinterested. The Decade Review Revue continues because I always meant for it to take a long time, spread well past when your list-collating people are collating lists of such things. Not because we are now properly in a new decade — as a man once said, "Nobody likes a math nerd, Scully" — but because I enjoy this project and can take my time. See, reviewers and columnist types — those with niceties like editors, paychecks and readers — have to do constant pulse-taking and odometer-checking as they jog their beat. So right about now they're, what?, supposed to be writing about awards and/or festivals and/or generating think-pieces about, like, what celebrities wear to court. Daaamn, that's a harsh gig, but I ain't judgin', I'm just sayin'. Surely this is a stubborn exercise in what my sixth grade teacher politely called “divergent thinking” but the post-mortem on The 2000s is not done till we’ve weighed all the organs and sewn it back up.<br />
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One of the reasons the "Two Zero Zero X" lists take so long to write is that I make a point to investigate a lot of films from each year that I hadn't caught up with and rewatch anything I have not seen in awhile. So, logically, the more recent the year of inquiry, the less time I've had to see everything I'm interested in. But I'm finding that it doesn’t really matter. Gaze, for instance, at <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2007/01/my-10-favorite-films-of-2006-but-not_04.html">this original Best of 2006 round-up</a>, and note that it doesn't look much different from a mash-up of the list below plus a couple of foreign film holdouts from 2005 and a couple of items that would show up on <a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2009/01/ten-favorite-films-of-2007-pt-ii-my-ten.html">this 2007 list.</a> We're entering territory largely already covered, since this journal's inception in 2005. So dread the upcoming day when I have to discover if I really have more to say about <b><i>Grindhouse</i></b> (2007!), but in the meantime, welcome to 2006, which isn't so different from last time we visited 2006...<br />
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<b>The Exploding Kinetoscope — 10 Favorite Films of 2006</b><br />
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<b>10. <i>V for Vendetta</i></b> (dir. James McTeigue, scr. Larry Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, from the comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd)<br />
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Well, you can draw this stuff, but that doesn't mean you can film it. The <b>V for Vendetta</b> comic that Alan Moore wrote between 1982 and 1985 extrapolates a political dystopia out of '80s Thatcherism and sets against it a sort of man-against-the-system freedom fighter missing link between archcriminal terrorist Fantômas and the proto-superheroics of The Shadow. It is an almost-direct-engagement of contemporary political situations by way of enlargement. The polemics on-page are located at the inflamed ends of a spectrum, which is the position from which, gods bless him, Moore always makes sociopolitical argument, which is to say that the comic is about Fascism v. Anarchy. The older and wiser Moore gets, the more he boils human power struggle down to these terms, which makes for compelling art and zero tolerance for, say, American and Australian filmmakers futzing around with his book. Multipurpose metaphor, of course, is how one builds things to last.<br />
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Of the transition from agitprop comic to the McTeigue/Wachowskis/Silver poli-sci-fi film, Moore offered the astute criticism that the metaphor has been remolded to a sort of contemporary American liberal response to neo-conservativism. This is, of course, meant as a complaint, but might as well be a compliment, because, Jesus, ain't that <i>something?</i> Joel Silver surely has his own peculiar voice as a producer, and the verdict may be iffy on the voice of Mr. McTiegue, but part of the Wachowski project thus far has been to dance a highly subversive ballet on the stage of the monolithic studio system without allowing the sundry associated pressures to interfere with their choreography. The decade's preferred commercial spectacle genres were superhero action and nerd fantasy literature adaptation, and, 2006 being Life During Wartime and a Dark Time for the Nation and Post-9-11 and all, <b><i>V for Vendetta</i></b> is rather a break in continuity in this pop art dialectic. It sprays graffiti on the broad, oppressive walls of <b><i>Batman Begins</i></b>, and, because it wears a mask, can walk right up and do its business in broad daylight.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Raq-4HSy2MU/WWw_H2HVB3I/AAAAAAAAA2s/r09S3DDfvvIvaNmUTFB0o2M-l0BelvBMgCLcBGAs/s1600/BB200X.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Raq-4HSy2MU/WWw_H2HVB3I/AAAAAAAAA2s/r09S3DDfvvIvaNmUTFB0o2M-l0BelvBMgCLcBGAs/s320/BB200X.jpg" width="224" /></a><b>9. <i>Black Book</i></b> (dir. Paul Verhoeven, scr. Verhoeven, Gerard Soeteman)<br />
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There is something of the same work being done in <b><i>Black Book</i></b> as in decade fellows <b><i>The Pianist</i></b> and <b><i>Inglourious Basterds</i></b>, in that cine-serious authors with hearty, ironic senses of humor have made deep-probe adventures set in non-battlefront corners of World War II, and largely in reaction to how the war is depicted and discussed at the movies. In their particular ways, Polanski, Tarantino and Verhoeven find their tendencies to puckish perversity roused by an interesting unresolvable tension: war, this war in particular, provides a marvelous toy chest with which to build stories, and is at the same time the most disgusting thing of which human beings are capable.<br />
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<b><i>Black Book</i></b> is then a sort of <b><i>Raiders of the Lost Ark</i></b> with the ark popped open at the beginning, and the whole adventure story scorched by punishing fire. Verhoeven and actress Carice van Houten go on an epic marathon run with heroine Rachel Stein as she tries to outrun the razing of the European landscape, hopping and dodging through story-modes and transforming from refugee to resistance fighter to girl spy to revenger. If John Rambo grunted that to survive war, you have to become war, here are a dozen variations on what he might have meant, and they all boil down to the constant, increasing moral compromise. Whatever you do to survive in the moment, you pay for later. Whoever is on top after the battle needs a scapegoat. If a principle is exhibited in this formula it is the conservation of mass: all that shit is going to end up dumped on somebody, over and over, forever and ever. If there are tips provided on how to survive the ordeal of existence, they are that once in awhile chocolate can save your life, and never climb into a coffin before it is your time. This is Man's Inhumanity to Man as action-adventure spectacle, and a Thrilling Survival Tale of the Enduring Human Spirit in which history is chronicled in one endlessly long black book.<br />
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<b>8. <i>Gumby Dharma</i></b> (dir. Robina Marchesi)<br />
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Shucks, back in 2009 I had hoped <b><i>Gumby Dharma</i></b>, the epic-in-miniature biographical documentary about Art Clokey, would find a good distribution channel and lead to sudden widespread interest in Clokey's animation, and there would be a bunch of exciting articles about Gumby for me to read. None of this happened, and, worst of all, Art Clokey stopped motion on this plane of existence early last year, passing away on January 8, 2010 at the age of 88. The bulk of his work remains poorly represented on modern home video formats and <b><i>Gumby Dharma</i></b> has shown on the Sundance Channel and was finally released on video in March, 2010.<br />
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Documentaries about filmmakers and their work are in no short supply, and in sundry form litter the Special Features menus of a thousand DVDs. <b><i>Gumby Dharma</i></b> is automatically interesting for those who value Clokey’s work, but it also builds a case for its subject as a filmmaker worthy of study beyond just the recognizability of Gumby bendy toys. This work begins by telling Art Clokey's story without flinching, which means personal and professional triumphs are not inflated beyond their context, and death, drugs, disease, loss, abuse and bad behavior — those examples inflicted by Clokey or upon him — are met head-on. If that is not extraordinary for a 21st century documentary, please, please do not forget that we are still talking about Gumby cartoons, and that this is a story that has never been told with such depth and honesty. This is not to paint <b><i>Gumby Dharma</i></b> as some sort of scandalous exposé of Art Clokey; it is, rather, a complicated, naked, and ultimately joyous portrait of a man, an artist, an animator, a filmmaker.<br />
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<a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2009/01/ten-favorite-films-of-2007-pt-ii-my-ten.html#Gumby%20Dharma">Last time around</a>, my notes focused on the film's excellent formal choices and valuable research and historical testimonies, and delicately rendered profile of Clokey. I do not want to lose sight of what I feel is <b><i>Gumby Dharma</i></b>'s overriding thesis, which is that the animator possessed a unique vision of the world and was able to channel that into undulating, speaking, dancing clay. All that passion and pain, curiosity and fear, weirdness and love pulse through Gumby; Gumby skates and plays along the path, and he is the path, the ball of clay, the heart, the part, the enterable book, the blade of grass, the you.<br />
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These things cannot be defined in tidy syllogisms or anything, and this isn't about, like, rules, man. But to help sort things out, we might say that: Obviously not all films about drugs are proper head movies. And at the risk of offending, what I'm talking about with this classification does not include a vast majority of stoner comedies, nor the sort of SFX-heavy audio-visual spectacles one might use as an in-home Laser Floyd show. A great head movie A) is about and/or is an investigation into consciousness expansion and/or warping, and/or B) examines, encapsulates, and/or explains the human experience with an eye that is part anthropological, part philosophical, part spiritual. Hints that the film might open up with a chemical key are optional. Whew!<br />
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<b><i>A Scanner Darkly</i></b> has those qualities, so by my count Richard Linklater has two fine head movies under his belt, and a handful of interesting experiments (the <b><i>Before Sunrise/Set</i></b> diptych and <b><i>Waking Life</i></b>, which are earnest almost-theres, <b><i>Slacker</i></b>, which plays better straight or very caffeinated, etc.) Where the beautiful and fuzzy-hearted <b><i>Dazed and Confused</i></b> wafts by on a Circle of Life/Family of Man buzz, <b><i>A Scanner Darkly</i></b> is paranoid, doomed, tragic, cottonmouthed. Fueled on dread, it is set entirely during that bad moment you are coming down, notice your fingernails are way too dirty, there is a stack of unwashed dishes in the sink, and maybe you're not coming down after all. So get this: undercover agent Bob Arctor goes so deep under that he ends up investigating himself, and watching with a detective's fascination as the twin serpents of Id and Superego begin uncoiling from their cosmic hula around the center pole. Do try this at home, but maybe not in public.<br />
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When last we saw Keanu Reeves on this journey, the effect was opposite: Neo staring back at the threshold of perception, seeing the code beneath the skin, and finally learning to sense the gold that unites it all — no glass, no scanner. If Robert Zemeckis' mo-cap freakout <b><i>Beowulf</i></b> accidentally captures the acid-vision nightmare that humans are weird-eyed puppet husks being jerked awkwardly around too-vivid sets, reenacting some kind of mythological parody, the computer rotoscoping of <b><i>A Scanner Darkly</i></b> serves a not dissimilar function. Here the stage is made vague or simplified with outlines and color planes, while the surface of the players players crawl and squirm; the whole world is covered with a thin metaphorical hide, a construct, a mask, a cartoon envelope that can't quite be peeled back but isn't quite telling the truth. <br />
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<b>6. <i>Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest</i></b> (dir. Gore Verbinski, prd. Jerry Bruckheimer, scr. Ted Elliot, Terry Rossio)<br />
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<b><i>Curse of the Black Pearl</i></b> reformed the theme park ride’s impressionistic story of skeletal pirates, hoarded gold and the wages of sin into particularly buoyant four-quad fantasy action adventure. With the scant narrative materials of the theme park source material used up, <b><i>Dead Man's Chest</i></b> scrapes up the unused themed visuals (fireflies), settings (bayou), and ambiance, then goes about the business of transforming the <b><i>Pirates of the Caribbean</i></b> series from a potential string of cast-connected sequels into a trilogy proper, and that is an exponentially more difficult exercise. That is, <b><i>Dead Man's Chest</i></b> has to connect forwards and backwards to make three scheduled films into a one massive three-chapter story. To illustrate the difficulty and ambition of that task, consider that while remembered as "trilogies," <b><i>The Godfather</i></b> is not built like this, <b><i>Star Wars</i></b> is not built like this, and so forth. <b><i>Pirates</i></b> is outsized, long-form original storytelling, whether it is "branded" as a concern of a major corporation or not. On the business end, where all films are merchandise, someone in a suit seems to have remembered that the merchandise is still art, that despite all their cruise lines and shopping mall emporiums, The Company is still in the business of stories and characters.<br />
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This is all simply to say that despite the increasingly pre-drinking-age milieu of the Summer Movie Game, the <b><i>Pirates</i></b> films are unusually committed to and serious about that game. They are crafted with the belief that an audience is invested in the tale and the world, so every nook, cranny, and cannon is crammed to the brim. Completely, seam-burstingly overstuffed, to be sure, but this middle chapter in particular is a Valu-Pak film; it's <i>so much movie.</i> There is faith here that this story should be dense and all subplots should intertwine and motivate each other, that sets should be rich with detail, every single character should grow or change or be tested — that each of them is someone's favorite player and so should have a hero's entrance, a crowning moment of cool, and a dramatic exit — and that half the spectacle is of actors acting. That makes it noisy and exhausting, but heartening next to most of its glib, insincere competition — say, Universal's <b><i>Mummy</i></b> movies.<br />
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<b><i>Pirates</i></b> is blessed with a glinting edge of perversity— an eye for grotesque design, admiration for mischief, a hard-on for the masochistic dimension of heroic sacrifice, and not a little bit of out-of-the-blue weirdness. It is far more sexed-up than <b><i>Lord of the Rings</i></b>, and more tripped-out than <b><i>Harry Potter</i></b>, breezier than both by several factors. If the comparison to fantasy-lit classics of their kind seems unfair (or unfounded), consider that <b><i>Pirates</i></b> is aiming exactly that high, and that ambition alone is pretty damn cool. With this installment, it becomes clearer that in its overstimulated noggin and wistful heart, this story is about mortality, about the death of imagination and adventure at the hands of global business expansion, cultural imperialism, colonization — about fun withering in the brutal sun of finance. In this light, that the <b><i>Pirates of the Caribbean</i></b> movie overlay onto Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride does a tragic disservice to both the park and the films can only be bitterly fascinating.<br />
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<b>5. <i>The Host</i></b> (dir. Bong Joon-ho, scr. Bong, Baek Chul-hyun)<br />
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The monster is big, but could probably fit in your living room if you have high ceilings. We traditionally read human-size monsters as a warped Us or a feared Other, and the bigguns as metaphors for some pressing sociopolitical terror, both are favorite subjects for extensive probing with psychoanalytic theory, and fair enough to all that. The best of the best, from <b><i>King Kong</i></b> to <b><i>Mothra Vs. Godzilla</i></b>, <b><i>Q — The Winged Serpent</i></b> to <b><i>Jurassic Park</i></b>, find some magical way to make the ground-level, people-sized story as compelling as the beast rampage and about something besides mere survival. That is no mean feat.<br />
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<b><i>The Host</i></b> injects intense big monster mayhem into a droll dysfunctional family comedy, warping it into a search-and-rescue abduction suspenser as the Park family looks for their youngest member who has been swiped by the creature, and frames it all in <b><i>Brazil</i></b>-style paranoid government thriller. Somewhere near the center of this is another superlative performance by Song Kang-ho as Gang-du, the monster-napped child's scruffy nitwit slacker father. Song plays Gang-du something like Shaggy in mourning having lost Scooby, beginning with literal pratfalls and emotional slapstick, until the lovable cartoon dope is hardened and seasoned with hellfire, and somehow coming out on the other side as a lop-sided, smushy-hearted hero.<br />
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So we have here a daikaiju black comedy sprouting agitprop polyps and one can't really predict where it's going, what will happen next. This is not to say that <b><i>The Host</i></b> plays as a crazy quilt mash-up, or is as nuts as, say, #3 below, or dreams of being something other or "better" than a giant monster picture. Instead it dreams bigger, striving to be the best giant monster picture it can be.<br />
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<b>4. <i>The Notorious Bettie Page</i></b> (dir. Mary Harron, scr. Harron, Guinevere Turner)<br />
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You don't get to be notorious all by your lonesome. "Notorious" is a reputation, and that requires observers to cast an opinion. It goes without saying that pinup models are the locus of much fantasy projection — that's pretty much what they're for. Besides the obvious, consider the imagination fuel of even innocuous swimsuit cheesecake photo. We might imagine the scenario suggested by the photo, or the circumstances of the photoshoot itself, the unseen photographer and the photographic apparatus. We imagine those body parts not on display, hidden by wardrobe or pose, imagine the dimensions not captured in 2D. We imagine the model in movement, imagine her voice, and imagine a personality onto the mute, frozen figure. When we look at Bettie Page, we project an imagined Bettie onto her.<br />
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Harron and screenwriting partner Turner begin <b><i>The Notorious Bettie Page</i></b> with a basic map of the strategy that will branch out through the film. Adult bookstore customers inquire about the selection of under-the-counter specialty photos ("unusual footwear" stuff, if that means anything to you), but in short order the shop is raided by cops: one trenchcoat crowd replaces another, and Bettie Page finds herself summoned before Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate subcommittee hearings on pornography and juvenile delinquency. So there we have it, two audiences hunting for the same photos but imagining their own Betties for their own reasons and to their own ends, and the flesh-blood-and-bangs Bettie the cause of it all, or tied up in the middle of it, or maybe just there and being Bettie.<br />
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Now any old model, real or invented, could potentially serve as subject here. Harron, Turner and Gretchen Mol — their flat-out sparkling, bubbling, fully-carbonated Bettie — never indicate for a moment that they've distilled the ultimate secret true story of their subject. Rather, the film suggests that any biography by its very existence imposes a narrative on the raw data of a life and creates a character in the process. To tell the story of Bettie Page is to make Bettie Page into a story. This, <i><b>Notorious</b></i> indicates, has its potential virtues and pitfalls, but is the process by which identity and legend are built.<br />
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It has to be Bettie, or at least she is a perfect subject. Page's latter-day immortality as cult pin-up is the reason this biopic exists, and that interest was stoked by the apparent mystery of What Became of Bettie Page? By the mid-'50s she'd become the most photographed model in the world. She worked in nearly every form of non-explicit adult photography, from <i>Playboy</i> centerfolds to 8mm catfight films to underground bondage photo clubs to burlesque revue movies. That's a lot of audience, a lot of imagined Betties. What Bettie Page meant in the middle of the 20th century is not what Bettie Page meant by the end of the century, by which time she'd become America's retro sex icon of choice, plastered on comics shop walls, motorbike gas tanks, and photobooks destined for the coffee tables of the très hip across the nation. That's a lot more audience, and more Betties. The interim is legend, speculation, rumors, stories. And where was Bettie? Unaware that this was happening, that anyone cared about antique nudie pictures, that so many ghost-Betties had come to life.<br />
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What <b><i>The Notorious Bettie Page</i></b> does that is so intelligent and kind — charitable, really — is suggest that all of our fantasies of Bettie Page — those sexual and political, those that would make her victim or legend, those that would see her in bondage or in angel wings — are legitimate and integral parts of her biography, and her extensive body of modeling work continues to fascinate and inspire, which is the legacy of that work. The photos and films, you can have. The story, whichever you prefer, you can have that too. But only Bettie Page lived the life, and that is not something to solve and explain. That, you don't get to have.<br />
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As she once said in <b><i>Striporama</i></b> (1953), her only speaking role on film, "I'm illusion!" "You mean you're not real?," gasp the baggypants comedians who would possess her. Replies Illusion Bettie: "Of <i>course</i> I'm real."<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HZuGgI_URCY/WWxADR8aVDI/AAAAAAAAA3E/JV3hpBNTZoEFGLp7t48rSwPzYRyUX2hLACLcBGAs/s1600/BUTB200X.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="455" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HZuGgI_URCY/WWxADR8aVDI/AAAAAAAAA3E/JV3hpBNTZoEFGLp7t48rSwPzYRyUX2hLACLcBGAs/s320/BUTB200X.jpg" width="210" /></a><b>3. <i>Brand Upon the Brain!</i></b> (dir. Guy Maddin, scr. Maddin, George Toles, Louis Negin)<br />
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Guy Maddin — the character in <b><i>Brand Upon the Brain!</i></b> and director of <b><i>Brand Upon the Brain!</i></b> — puts a fresh coat of whitewash on the island lighthouse where he grew up, and feverishly reminisces about his childhood loves, traumas and love-traumas, dramatized as careening melodrama/mad scientist/teen detective/wild child/evil mother/incest romance/zombie horror/steampunk melodrama and made in the style of, um, a Soviet montage/German expressionist/Hollywood silent comedy/abstract cheesecake peepshow. That's all literal as it is metaphorical, and though this is poetic interior autobiography and rumination on the nature of Memory and Self, nothing could be more accessible: it's sex-fixated and silly, the plot never stops moving for five seconds and it's a knee-slapper front to back. No doctors or lit majors need to assist with the decoding, as the plum-syrup narration will do it for you, and it's impossible to be inscrutable when everything is on the table.<br />
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Maddin's lighthouse is famously stocked with out-of-fashion early cinema, pulp fiction and avant-garde clutter, but fret not, all you have to do is experience the sight of how that stuff branded his brain, and learn in short order what is so special about all that moldy old stuff. Maddin is, in these blatant ways forever fetishistically gazing at a silver-emulsioned past, a memory eating itself up like nitrocellulose decomposition, but is also forward-thinking, evolutionary. Everybody and their mom knows how to psychoanalyze a filmmaker based on how he frames a shot, can pick out Major Themes from table setting mis-en-scène, and knows which props are phallic and which ones criticize American foreign policy. So what if, asks Guy Maddin, we start with the assumption that this work is already done, and set archetypes and personal symbols on a romp through a story-space that purports to dive straight into the psychosexual miasma of the artist's head? The result is a wholly original breed of comedy, an exciting new kind of storytelling, and cliché-decimating entertainment built entirely out of clichés so disused you've never seen them before.<br />
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<b>2. <i>The Black Dahlia</i></b> (dir. Brian De Palma, scr. Josh Friedman from the novel by James Ellroy)<br />
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Certain crimes — big, terrifying, era-defining crimes, mainly — speak to us with layered voices, at first seeming to be manifestations of some core societal fear, but ultimately telling us more about what we are afraid of than actually confirming those dangers, prejudices and myths. e.g., in the moment it can appear, through spin or sincere interpretation, that the Manson Family crime spree confirmed dark fears about hippie culture, drugs, rock music, California. Certainly those events and those figures spoke to a significant portion of the population in exactly that way. But those crimes were so singular, Manson himself so exceptional, the scene so one-of-a-kind that, really, it doesn’t say such a thing at all. In that case, we’re left with a tragedy about this particular nutjob con man, his brainwash victims and their subsequent non-symbolic coincidental murder victims. This is not a cozy thought, but in the ensuing hysteria and excitement Charles Manson is given a constant public forum, and the families of victims are forever caught in this ugly saga. That Family of victims extends on out along this fractal arm, from Roman Polanski in the micro to the entire Love Generation in the macro. When this feedback loop is turned up loud enough, somewhere in the mix Manson’s code-speak bilious rants end up being made true: you wanted a Devil, he’ll be your Devil.<br />
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After the tawdry facts of a crime, and beyond the personal aftermath for survivors, the further tragedy is in the myth-making. If we’re adept at keeping our eye on the birdie, the underlying theme tends to be how good the media is at finding an angle to sell a story. Even if we’re dealing with the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11/01 or Jeffery Dahmer, data points are not a story: you need a narrative hook. The big ones leave us all scarred, even if that mark is only across the imagination. So:<br />
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Meanwhile, over in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue, Elizabeth Short is transfigured in death into The Black Dahlia. And that particular body, with those particular memory-searing, picturesque mutilations, might have captured public imagination for a few weeks, but that’s not The Story. The Legend of the Black Dahlia is that this poor Massachusetts girl wanted to be in pictures, and ended up in pieces. That seems to say something; about this untamed town that wants to be a desert; about this Boulevard of Dreams littered with the shards of broken would-be starlets; about a Dream Factory that is really a high stakes business running on the blood of pretty young things; about a Tinsel Town adorned with razor wire.<br />
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That would be the legend, of course, and it’s a good one — so good that its whirlpool sucks down L.A. “supercop” and local celebrity pugilist Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart, doing impotent moron in meltdown like a champ). Poor sap only lasts, what? A week?, so caught up is he in dead white girl mania and troubling, circling questions that are not beside the point, but not conducive to solving the crime. What is this strange system by which starry-eyed women offer themselves up to men with money and cameras? Is this germane to the question that James Ellroy says is at the heart of this mystery, which is: why do men kill women? We note here, that this is the kind of thing that Short's murder makes one think about. Blanchard can't reconcile the black alchemy that discards the bodies and leaves the immortal part on a screen and made of light. He can't make it add up, and as is the hotheaded flatfoot's fate, ends up pursuing the Dahlia into Hell — that is, his throat slit and body fed into the furnace by his mob-connected informant. Blowing out of this world as a spectacular, blinding, horrifying supernova is no substitute for the dream of being a star.<br />
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After all is said, done and revealed, Blanchard was scrambling through life to protect an image. His fancy home is funded with stolen money, his career accomplishments puffed up, his promotions earned for their P.R. value, his fame-making boxing win a rigged fight, his live-in girlfriend poses well on his arm but he isn't sleeping with her. In his main squeeze, Kay Lake (Scarlett Johansson who, you know, poses well and adequately fills out an angora sweater), Blanchard has built a perfect rescue narrative; she's an ex-prostitute-gone-gold-hearted, and he helped her go straight. His motivations are not just covering up his culpability, living a lie or faking it till he makes it. He protects the ones with a good Story.<br />
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This is the guy who is "supposed to be the hero," as per the real protagonist, Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett wearing a hat), who holds an ice pack to his aching skull as his partner's corpse is fed into the inferno. Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice, then, promotional nicknames invented by the LAPD, which ostensibly describe their boxing styles, more or less indicate their personalities ("I can't <i>move</i>! I never move!" wails glacial Bucky), and indeed one rages and one is slow to thaw. But it's bullshit, too. "You're a political animal!," the Deputy D.A. chastises the broken-down Blanchard. So are they all, and for the Bucky and Lee it means they're pawns, moved to Homicide and put on the Short case because they're the Supercops. Don't you read the papers? They're characters in someone else's story.<br />
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If Bucky is tortured by Beth Short at first, it is because the media ruckus over the dead white woman — whose link to The Industry is not even a whisper of a dream, whose movie-derived nickname is entirely posthumous and newspaper-invented — is drawing him away from important cases he could be closing. And maybe, he tells Lee, this Beth Short wasn't such a nice girl. i.e., the crime needs solving, certainly, but maybe it needn't be glorified, made legend. As Charles Manson often points out, he wasn't shit until you put all those TV cameras on him. But.... there stands Kay in her underwear, and sliced into her back are the initials B.D. As it happens, that stands for "Bobby DeWitt," her old pimp. It stands, symbolically, naturally for Black Dahlia. That doesn't go away when you blink. "Who are these men who carve themselves into other people's lives?" the V.O. ponders, and as serendipity would have it, B.D. are the initials of a renowned director of thrillers, horror pictures and neo-noirs who happens to be directing the scene.<br />
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The tale connects Paul Leni's Expressionist melodrama <b><i>The Man Who Laughs</i></b> (1928) — a horror film for all intents and purposes — with a (fictional) stag reel starring Short. In direct connection, both are shot on the same set (a frankly insane conceit), the former inspiring the later, a beautiful link in the film's chain of mouth trauma that begins with Bucky's symbolic castration when he loses his choppers in the boxing ring. It is a chart of cinematic lineage, as well, in which German avant-garde technique moves overseas and mingles with hardboiled detective fiction, and the resultant new genre baby eventually grows up and Brian De Palma falls in love with it and has to make <b><i>The Black Dahlia</i></b>. In these and sundry other ways, De Palma implicates and investigates himself among those who mythologize this crime specifically, but more generally cleave bodies on screen and burn images onto imaginations.<br />
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Bucky solves this one, insofar as he learns the details of Elizabeth Short's death. He follows the money, of course. And all are implicated — De Palma and Mack Sennett and the men with the cameras, media and politicians, institutions and underlings, gardeners and carpenters. By the end, Bucky finds the housing development under the Hollywoodland sign was built of rotten wood and hides a film set with a murder shed out back. The very city itself is a façade constructed of corrupt materials. He might've guessed earlier, when the unstable town vibrates in an earthquake. When we leave Bucky, he's still hearing the crows, still seeing that body on every empty lawn. The facts and the legend are both etched on him now. The big ones leave us all scarred.<br />
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The citizens of this Los-Angeles-as-black-hole play at being human beings, covering their faces with flimsy masks to indicate profession, social strata, gender, identity and character (arche-?stereo-?)type. The faster they put on their costumes, the faster they are ripped away by the howling void swirling at the center of <b><i>The Black Dahlia</i></b>. It is blacker than black in there, so black we need the French to name it. We call it <i>noir</i>.<br />
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<a href="http://explodingkinetoscope.blogspot.com/2007/01/my-10-favorite-films-of-2006-but-not_04.html#The%20Black%20Dahlia">More on Bucky in Noir-land, symbol-chains and metafic here.</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="INLANDEMPIRE"></a><br />
<b>1. <i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> (dir., scr. David Lynch)<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--CP3tZ69aN0/WWmePO_hONI/AAAAAAAAAvM/Tw-OCiutLdM3s9jnoBQ2DeRhm0-o-O0BwCLcBGAs/s1600/IE200X.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="456" data-original-width="300" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--CP3tZ69aN0/WWmePO_hONI/AAAAAAAAAvM/Tw-OCiutLdM3s9jnoBQ2DeRhm0-o-O0BwCLcBGAs/s1600/IE200X.jpg" /></a>David Lynch's shot on video horror movie tops the very short shortlist of that lowly genre's unabashed masterpieces. It is not as bizarre spectacle as <b><i>Boardinghouse</i></b> nor as depraved and feverish as <b><i>Splatter Farm</i></b>, but it has many fine qualities and is scarier. <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> was received, ignored, and criticized in a manner that means mounting a defense, writing a simple appreciation and beginning a cursory exploration all amount to the same thing. Insofar as <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> is a difficult work, three roadblocks typically greet those having difficulty, and rather than demerits, they are simply its qualities. 1) <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> is a piece unabashedly shot on digital video, and arriving in theaters with the announcement that Lynch has no future plans to shoot on film. 2) <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> announces itself as a narrative feature and contains abundant plot information but is firmly rooted in modes of avant-garde cinema that include the non-narrative and entirely abstract. 3) The narrative of <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> is consistently oblique, but explicitly links itself to mystery stories. It seems to offer thousands of clues and few conclusions. At its most explicit it seems to suggest that it might be solved, at its most opaque it seems to suggest that something crucial and meaningful is being missed.<br />
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Speaking of solutions, these problems are all, naturally, intertwined. If there is any help to be found below, I would suggest instead that perhaps if you are sitting in front of <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> with your eyes pointed at the screen, then you do understand <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b>. Unless your eyes are closed.<br />
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Lynch often foregrounds the materials used in the creation of his art — like a Jackson Pollack drip painting, the fabric and construction is the subject. Even his figural paintings are dollopped with paint and scribbled on, flat-planed and collaged. Think of the puppet robin meant as real in <b><i>Blue Velvet</i></b> or his film-loop-on-sculpture <b>"Six Men Getting Sick"</b> or the incandescent <b>"Premonitions of an Evil Deed"</b>, a stunt film of poetry and prowess shot on a Lumière camera. <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> is boldly, proudly a video project, exploiting and exploring those things only video can do. The result is Lynch's most abstract feature since <b><i>The Straight Story</i></b> (1999) and most experimental since <b><i>Industrial Symphony No. 1</i></b> (1990). That is, a true experiment of the let's-see-what-happens variety, this one exploring the visual qualities and editorial rhythms of consumer grade digital video, and in shooting hours and hours of scenes with no master blueprint for assembly.<br />
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How to Watch <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> may be, as Roger Ebert once opined of <b><i>Dune</i></b>, to let it wash over you like a dream. This is, in this case: don't fight it. It is the same advice Lynch gave critic Martha Nochimson when they looked at a Pollack together: you do understand it, he told her, I saw your eyes moving across the painting. To engage that dream any more analytically will find one scrambling for purchase, just as in a dream or maybe as when trying to explain one. Some things that happen, you're at a loss to articulate, some are intuitively understood. Anyhow we're squarely (well, asymmetrically) on the shoulders of Laura Dern as actress Susan Blue, who is warned off making the film <i>On High in Blue Tomorrows</i>, and then walking alongside Susan playing Nikki Grace, who is perhaps her own person or several people. An issue that frequently arises when discussing Lynch's film is that the filmmaker finds increasingly sophisticated ways to preserve what he loves about Mysteries, and that love is not in the solving but of luxuriating in Mystery itself. As Sandy asks Jeffrey in <b><i>Blue Velvet</i></b>, "you like mysteries that much?" And Jeffrey answers: yes. So analytical language will be wrongheaded at worst, coy-sounding at best. It is not that Lynch films can't be written about, but the task is like tracing letters in smoke or drawing diagrams on wet paper with a fountain pen filled with perfume. And yet, here we are.<br />
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This free-associative ebb and flow creative process births a work about a film struggling to be born — or perhaps resisting its creation — and documents the challenge put forth to Laura Dern. Never positive during shooting where her character had been, or where she was going, Dern is ultimately playing an actress grappling with a role. This is a film of linking and connection, disparate geographies, identities, chronologies that peer at one another through torn membranes, down dark hallways, through burn holes in fabric, ruptures in spacetime. Passageways are important in Lynch's work, and all of the films contain a signature movement/image in which the camera descends/dives/probes/is-sucked-into a mysterious black hole: moving deeper into Another Place. In <b><i>Lost Highway</i></b>, Fred Madison wanders into a dark corner of his windowless home and emerges somewhere in his own echo chamber head. <b><i>Blue Velvet</i></b> famously tilts down from the sky, dives underground, enters a severed ear, reemerges from a reconnected ear and gazes back to the heavens. <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> is a series of tunnels sliding into one another, connecting back on themselves.<br />
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Susan Blue's task is to fully understand Nikki Grace, and to do so she ventures all the way inside and inside out — for Susan to understand and become Nikki, she'll have to plumb the mystery of herself. Along the journey she finds and embodies a replicating chain of Lost Women, ventures all the way to the heart of the universe to find the most lost of souls, and in the end perhaps she does not fix everyone, but <i>finds</i> them. Susan gathers the lost to her and they rejoice.<br />
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And these are the keys to <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b>, but there are so, so many keyholes to be tested. Like <b><i>Mulholland Dr.</i></b> on back to <b><i>Eraserhead</i></b>, <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> begs to be played with, have its pieces shifted, riddles catalogued and links tested. The puzzle-solver is not on a fool's errand, but is engaging <b><i>INLAND EMPIRE</i></b> as designed: playing an infinite game.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-45207399136323426212011-01-26T00:32:00.000-08:002017-07-14T21:53:14.446-07:00Providence's Garbage CanThe ninth season <b>The X-Files</b> two-parter <b>"Provenance"</b>/<b>"Providence"</b> is pretty much the series' last great Mythology installment, the remaining eight episodes being half done-in-ones and half housekeeping before closing up shop. So not the last of the Mythology, but the last of the story's forward upward thrusting momentum. The plot backbone of <b>"Providence"</b> has Baby William in extreme peril while captured by UFO nuts (who actually <i>have</i> a UFO!), and Scully being rude and closed off as she has been all year, trying to be supercop, scientist, protector, nurturer and mother to the Christ child ALL AT ONCE. She is cracking up, and her laconic chronic-masturbator BFF is still in hiding! As final battle cries go, this one rather has it all, or anyway has the best of the many pleasures of Season Nine for those helpless to its charms. An infant rescued from a flaming pit, Bible quotes, people not appreciating the Lone Gunmen's free services, Deputy Director Kersch being a tightass, A.D. Brad Follmer being an unctuous snot, and some weirdo baby-stealing motherfuckers getting burnt up by a spaceship!<br />
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<b>These are just pictures of heads, and this is still the best-looking TV show.</b></center>
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Since something feels "important" about this one, there are a lot of beautiful giant-head heroic close-ups of the cast which seem to highlight their unforgettable faces with a kind of, I dunno, mythic aura. In these: Agent Reyes looks huge-featured, like a lioness, glowing and wide-hearted and a little manic. Poor Agent Doggett is stuck in a in a coma, of course, because 1) <b>The X-Files</b> puts everyone in a coma, usually several times, and 2) this show especially loves to hospitalize Doggett. Conscious and unconscious, he is chiseled and wound-eyed — a wood-carved self-flagellating saint! The B-story, such as it is, revolves around prayers and temptations offered in the tiny hospital chapel, all interesting but not the point of this missive.<br />
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A.D. Skinner is naturally gritting his teeth, glaring and/or pursing his lips through all of this. That is often Skinner's usefulness as a sort of surrogate for the potentially frustrated viewer — okay, I bought this and this, helped with X and Y, and now you're telling me Z? Come <i>on</i> already. So in the scene below, a task force has been assembled to retrieve Baby William, but Scully storms out because she doesn't trust Follmer and Kersh. After a confrontation with Skinner over this matter, Scully strides off to the elevators to pursue the matter through alternate channels and Skinner watches her go. This is not our last glimpse of the stoic Assistant Director by any means, but the shot in question has a stamped home, iconic quality, sums up this aspect of the relationship between Skinner and his X-Files teams: Scully needs to be unencumbered by traditional investigative technique, and Skinner is sympathetic but entrenched in the institutional culture of the FBI. That is why he is both useful to and forever divided from the X-Files. A nice minor but meaningful image, of Skinner alone in the corridor...<br />
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... or it would be, if there weren't a crew dude wearing shorts crouching behind the garbage can. A gaffe that flashes by but gives the shot a bit of dissonance — the first time I noticed it something just seemed off, and on rewinding it fully creeped me out. The point of the shot is that Skinner is left by himself, yet it is not at all outside the realm of <b>The X-Files</b>' themes that a faceless someone might be spying on a conversation. Here is A.D. Walter Skinner, a man of fidelity, bravery and integrity, who, despite it all, wants to believe in the FBI even if he is the last of his kind within its walls. And here is someone who should not be there, concealed by garbage, tucked in the corner, watching it all.<br />
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This is the typo that enriches the text.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-31857282605187940432011-01-16T04:13:00.000-08:002017-07-16T21:44:36.549-07:00Taxi Schwarzwald<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b>, 1932, dir. Josef von Sternberg<br />
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<b><i>Suspiria</i></b>, 1977, dir. Dario Argento<br />
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Two images of hired autos in the German wilderness, or, as Herbert Marshall says in just before the top image: "As I live and breathe, a taxicab in the middle of the Black Forest!"<br />
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Now, while Sternberg centers a light comedy scene around the parked taxi (that's a 27-year-old Sterling Holloway as a nerd in a goofy hat, pestering the brusque German driver), Argento's cab is on what I believe Wesley Willis might refer to as a "Hellride." These are not by any means the first shots in their respective films, but both are key mini-/sub-scenes in the films' opening sequences. Certainly they are very different scenes about taxis in the Black Forest, from very different films by very different (but secretly not-so-different) filmmakers, but they are also doing some similar duties, those odd parallels that concern us below. <br />
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As Tim Lucas points out in <a href="http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2010/07/buried-pleasures-of-suspiria.html">this fine little piece</a>, a) <b><i>Suspiria</i></b>'s cab ride is not the first interesting scene and b) the section in which the car passes through the Black Forest is all about these trees (also the music), one of which bears the lightning-thrown, inexplicable shadow of a knife-wielding hand just before the car slides out off screen. Incidentally, that sickle shadow is there not just because of its association with Cronus or as chibi version of the Grim Reaper's scythe; the curve-bladed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boline">boline</a> is of the type used in actual ritual magic. In real life these are rarely, if ever, used for cutting up ballerinas.<br />
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The first scenes proper:<br />
<b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b> begins with a group of young women bathing in a pool under the titles, then has a half-page scene of Joe (Holloway) bitching about the length of the hike and bumming a smoke from his companions before they stumble upon the taxi. <b><i>Suspiria</i></b>, of course, opens at the airport where Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) "arrived in Germany at 10:40 p.m. local time." So <b><i>Suspiria</i></b>'s car is carrying its heroine, after she has some difficulty hailing a cab in the thunderstorm. In <b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b> the scene is about how these boys are not able to hire the taxi because the group of actresses currently splashing in the pond has rented it for the day. One of those ladies is Helen (Marlene Dietrich) who will effectively become the heroine, even if we don't know it yet. Point being only that the taxis are hired by the respective female protagonists of each story.<br />
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Now, using both my entirely inept trip-planning skills and highly developed make-believe skills, it seems that the closest international airport to Freiburg is actually in France. Since Suzy clearly lands in Germany, the two closest candidates are Baden Airpark and Stuttgart (as Lucas points out, this was not shot at a real airport). Obviously we don't know exactly where the fictional Tanz Akademie is located in the geography of the city. However, just for laughs, let us pretend the school shares an address with the Haus zum Walfisch (House of the Whale) that provides its exterior and that Suzy arrives at one of the above airports. According to Google Maps, at best, she's an hour from Freiburg. Maybe we're only witness to <i>part</i> of this cab ride, then. But I don't think so...<br />
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As is communicated with some difficulty between Suzy and her cabbie, the Tanz Akademie is situated on Escher Straße: perhaps you can get there any way you choose, perhaps you can never quite get there. The taxi takes an infinite path, an impossible path. In later scenes characters are able to quickly move from the Akademie to perfectly urban parts of the city — first victim Pat and blind pianist Daniel both do so. As it happens, Haus zum Walfisch is only blocks from the forest. But the effect in this opening sequence, which transitions straight from the woods to a shot of the school framed to block out surrounding buildings, is that the Akademie is set deep inside the forest. Parallel to <b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b>, in which dialogue situates the action some ten miles from the next town: the taxis are conveyances into fairyland.<br />
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With color schemes inspired by Disney's <b><i>Snow White</i></b>, and more importantly a primal, cruel logic that makes no sense to the brain but too much sense to the guts, <b><i>Suspiria</i></b>'s fairy tale underpinnings and overtones are fairly apparent to anyone wandering into its path. What with all the taxicabs and prog rock, it might be difficult to ascribe an Aarne-Thompson folktale index number to <b><i>Suspiria</i></b> (for those unfamiliar, that's nothing fancier than the industry standard for cataloging folktale themes and types. If you don't have a copy, er, don't worry about it). It is probably closest to an AT 327 variant ("Hansel and Gretel" being AT 327A, for example), with a slew of selections from the Motif Index. I think it is not entirely unrelated to those "neck riddle" stories found under AT 851 "The Princess Who Cannot Solve the Riddle": Suzy, as per Argento tradition, is offered a riddle in the beginning that she does not even recognize as a riddle until it is time to solve it at the end.<br />
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<b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b> is also a fairy tale. Or at least that might be an instructive way of looking at it. It is not unusual for Sternberg's singular way with ornate <i>mise en scène</i> and Old World grotesquery to lend a certain storybook quality to his films anyway, and <b><i>Venus</i></b> takes as a motif the retelling of its own narrative as a bedtime story.<br />
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The plot here goes that on that fateful hike, American student Ned Faraday (Marshall) discovers music hall star Helen bathing in that pond. They marry and domestic bliss ensues until Ned discovers he is slowly dying, having been poisoned by his laboratory work with radium. Naturally he needs an Expensive Medical Procedure, and Helen is forced back into nightclub singing. With swift inevitability, she finds the fastest way to procure the cash is to sell herself to well-heeled cad Nick Townsend (Cary Grant), and long story short, ends up a Fallen Woman and takes off cross-country, with Ned in pursuit of his abducted son. During those early scenes of the Faradays' happy home life, a family tradition is depicted in which the parents jointly recount their cutely met romance to put their son to sleep, reframing the events in fairy tale terms (e.g. — Helen is a "princess" and the surly cabbie a "dragon in an automobile"). This storytelling is, eventually, also the means by which the couple reconciles. Within the story, then, <b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b> is explicitly tied to fairy tales and variant retellings.<br />
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I recount the plot as a frame of reference, because it seems to me a vague variation on the "Swan Maiden" tale (Aarne-Thompson type 400) with a focus on the story from the Swan Maiden's point of view. In skeletal form, that goes: Hunter (a king, often) enters the woods, finds an enchanted lake wherein swims a magical swan. She turns into a woman — this often happens as the hunter swipes her feathered robe while she swims, and he will not return it — they marry and reproduce. Through some means — usually the playing children reveal the secret hiding place, or a Gypsy pulls some maniacal Gypsy stunt (I know, I know) — the swan maiden gets her feather robe back, and flies away. An impossible pursuit is required should the husband wish to reclaim the Swan bride. Sometimes he embarks on the quest, sometimes not, but if so, it often ends with the task of identifying the Maiden among a group.<br />
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Taking it from the top, in the Black Forest Ned threatens Helen with the very prank that nets the Swan Maiden. Her Swan-ness here is, on the level of surface transposition, her nightclub singing — so read: her association with that glamorous but debauched world and identity as an artist. One level down, this is tied up with sexual freedom, but on the deepest level, down where the Swan has always been paddling, this is about freedom from male control. Sternberg's complicated relationship with Dietrich is one of cinema's great living kōans, where universes are built and destroyed, gods created and desecrated in the course of single shots. In his hands/in her thrall, he makes her/she is a figure of identification, an effigy of contemplation, an ideal and a demon-goddess. The Sternberg-Dietrich dialectic is beyond love-hate. In <b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b>, all sympathies are with Helen as men try to define her, buy her, own her, push her out of society, pursue her, but ultimately cannot live without her. When a detective tracking Helen questions her devotion to her child's welfare, in one of those chilling defining moments she casually scoffs "What does a man know about mother love?" Don't need you, don't need your world! Times like this, it seems Helen ought to head back to that magic pond and leave this mess behind.<br />
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She doesn't, quite, not physically, but returns metaphorically to where she began, reuniting her family mainly through that mythologized version of their shared history in which she is a princess and her son springs forth from a kiss; she resurrects — or retreats back into — the folktale. If this is uneasy, a cop-out, a betrayal of character, triumph or a tragedy, well, why pick one? Meanwhile, at the dance school across the way, Suzy Bannion faces down the nightmare, stabs it in the neck, and burns it to the ground. This closes as she staggers in the direction where there once was a forest, in one of those patented Argento closing shots of someone who just went through Hell and just may have snapped in the process. So both <b><i>Blonde Venus</i></b> and <b><i>Suspiria</i></b>, like any mysteriously powerful folktale, end with all the definitiveness of a Thematic Apperception Test, which is to say none at all.<br />
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As Suzy leaves the Akademie, it has begun to rain once more, and though we seem to have driven for miles on Escher St., we are back where we came in.<br />
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<i>Once upon a time<br />
two taxis drove into the Black Forest<br />
where they dropped off two women<br />
and then the trouble began.</i>Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-4157380364027757062010-12-25T13:00:00.000-08:002018-11-07T11:10:27.569-08:00We Thank You For Your Patronage<center>
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Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-56379451577058125042010-12-09T04:48:00.000-08:002018-11-07T11:14:34.175-08:00TINY TOO Art Show Announcement / Wallet-Size Kaiju<center>
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The <a href="http://gallerymeltdown.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/this-saturday-the-tiny-too-show/">TINY TOO SHOW</a> exhibition at <a href="http://gallerymeltdown.wordpress.com/">Gallery Meltdown</a> showcases eensey-scale work (three inches or smaller) from some thirty-plus artists. Yours truly will also be in the show, and as per usual, the peripheral reason to mention this here is that my pieces are movie-culture-related. As the show is a one-night-only, cash-and-carry affair, the bulk of the art is available for perusal and purchase in the <a href="http://gallerymeltdown.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/the-tiny-too-show-preview-catalog/">preview catalogue</a> <— linked right here. Among these little gems is something for every budget, and as they take up less wall space than a <a href="http://www.newenglandmintcoins.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=106">commemorative $2 bill</a>, make excellent holiday gifts. Direct purchase inquiries to Gallery Meltdown staff, at the links above/below, in person or by phone.<br />
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The TINY TOO SHOW goes up on December 11, 2010 from 6 P.M. to 9 P.M., in the gallery space of <a href="http://www.meltcomics.com/blog/">Meltdown Comics</a>, 7522 W. Sunset Blvd., 90046. Those peculiar persons for whom Wednesday is not synonymous with "New Comics Day" often ask "Where on Sunset is <i>that?</i> I've never seen <i>that</i>," and the answer is "West Hollywood, somewhere between the In-N-Out and that Griddle Cafe place that cooks Oreos into pancakes."<br />
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So below are photographs of my tiny paintings, which depict beloved monstrous creatures from Japanese tokusatsu media. That is, they're all guys in rubber kaiju suits. Each of these oh-so-ironically mini-kaiju are acrylic on 2"x2" MDF. As disclaimer, in person these are considerably more lustrous, not so washed out, and appear less "blotchy" and more "pointillist," as digital scanner or camera simply cannot convey the miniature-ness on hand. Anyway, do consider that you're seeing these rascals at nearly twice their actual size, which completely undoes any in-person effects, but is fun anyway. Away, then!<br />
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<b>Anguirus — 1968</b><br />
Front of the pack, but the most modern design of the bunch, Godzilla's first giant monster foe appears in approximation of his <b><i>Destroy All Monsters!</i></b> design. Anguirus' 1968 incarnation was selected over his First Appearance look in <b><i>Godzilla Raids Again</i></b> (née <b><i>Gigantis, the Fire Monster</i></b>, 1955) because 1) I love <b><i>Destroy All Monsters!</i></b>, 2) the film is in color, which avoids having to paint in monochrome or inventing a color scheme for the beast (the original suit is rumored to have been painted in hues of red and blue!), and 3) later appearances do not try to mask that the design forces the suit performer to crawl around on hands and knees. There is, in my opinion, something charming and a little magical about bent-knee kaiju, a necessary acquiescence to the anatomical reality of the actor, a silent signifier of the Real World that could break the illusion but that is, instead, gradually absorbed as a genre convention. Blessed are the knee-crawlers.<br />
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<b>Kanegon — 1966</b><br />
The most esoteric of this cluster is Kanegon, who appeared in the <b>Ultra Q</b> episode <b>"Kanegon's Cocoon"</b>. Despite having featured in one TV show more than forty years ago, the coin-purse-headed, non-giant kaiju is a readily recognizable icon in his homeland, and is steadily reproduced in vinyl and resin of all size and color. The excellent <b>Ultra Q</b> has sadly never been exported to America, but is available on nice, ultra-pricey Japanese DVD from the usual sources for such things. Naturally it's never been dubbed or subtitled, but you don't entirely need a translation, particularly for this kid-logic fable about the dangers of money lust. Briefly, greedy boy Kaneo finds a pod full of coins, is sucked inside, and wakes up as a Kanegon, which must eat cold hard cash to survive. With some familial resemblance to "The Metamorphosis" and Carl Barks comics, the episode finally goes full-on weirdo in the dénouement, where Kanegon somehow blasts off into space, Kaneo parachutes back to earth, and finds that his parents have turned to Kanegons, too. Anyway, the episode contains several indelible images, including the desperate creature crouched curbside before a dropped safe box and shoveling coins into his maw, as well as one of the more hair-raising stunts I've ever seen, when the suited Kanegon actor falls from a moving bulldozer and into the path of the blade. But vague morals about greed and alien ass-rockets aside, I suspect the episode endures because of a single lyrical shot of the lonesome Kanegon sitting on a quarry hillside at sunset, gazing into the distance.<br />
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As re: the painting, I cop to having backed off on the backlighting and dusky shadows of this scene, in exchange for a clearer look at this classic monster suit. Relatively trustworthy color documentation exists, but I chose to depict the scene in <b>Ultra Q</b>-accurate black and white.<br />
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<b>Mothra — 1964</b><br />
Mothra comes at the suggestion of the lady of the house. Good thinking, since girls like Mothra, and a request I'm glad to fulfill because she lets me keep dozens of vinyl monsters in the living room. Besides a hindwing reduction and proboscis redesign after her 1961 debut, I don't believe that Shōwa Mothra underwent drastic changes in look. Like everyone else, I try to keep up on these things, but claim no expertise.<br />
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The scene in the little picture above comes from her '64 appearance in <b><i>Mothra vs. Godzilla</i></b> (<b><i>Godzilla vs. the Thing</i></b>, for the elderly), as the aging Mothra takes refuge in her sacred cave on Infant Island and rests up for one final, self-sacrificing battle. Mothra has, the Infant Islanders say, chosen to defend Japan against Godzilla, though her life cycle is ending and human greed has endangered her massive, beached egg. There is a quiet majesty to this scene that seems intrinsically Japanese — being, as it is, about natural cycles and personal sacrifice for the good of society. Overhead light streams into the dark cave and rims the beast's gently flapping wings, a melancholy wash of <i>mono no aware</i> clarity and beauty all the more unexpected for being in a tale of giant monsters amok.<br />
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This is among the most moving and delicate scenes in a Godzilla picture — if not top of the list — and one of the many elements that recommends <b><i>Mothra vs. Godzilla</i></b> as a particularly fine installment.<br />
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I've cheated the angle of Mothra's wings, and fudged the interior of the cave, for more dramatic (and square) staging. Do forgive me. And finally, inevitably...<br />
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<b>Godzilla — 1964</b><br />
Speaking of <b><i>Mothra vs. Godzilla</i></b> and its excellent qualities, the street-level story is funny and compelling. Theme park developers claim ownership of Mothra's egg, the working class fishermen who discovered it demand compensation, career politicians try to put positive spin on disasters, and newspapermen have honest-to-God ideological discussions about the degree to which journalists should shape public opinion. That's just a random sample of this idea-rich masterpiece, and <b><i>Mothra vs. Godzilla</i></b> is exactly the counterattack to keep in your arsenal when some chucklehead tells you that a Giant Fighting Creatures movie mustn't/needn't/can't/shouldn't aspire to be anything but stupid, loud, cinematically incompetent, etc. You will need this weaponry in the near future, likely in battle with the <b><i>Transformers</i></b> franchise.<br />
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Back to the point, <b><i>MvG</i></b> also sports one of the very best Godzilla suits, affectionately shorthanded by enthusiasts as Mosugoji, and pretty much the hands-down fan favorite Shōwa suit. Personally, I can't help but feel the most affection for the Soshingeki-Goji of <i><b>Destroy All Monsters!</b></i> through <b><i>Godzilla vs. Gigan/ on Monster Island</i></b>, and there's something abominably creepy about the <i><b>King Kong vs. Godzilla</b></i> suit, but in the end, I cave to popular opinion on this one.<br />
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As for the King of Monsters half of the equation, Godzilla is depicted as an irredeemable asshole in the film, is given one of the all-time, any-movie greatest entrance scenes, a delightfully ignoble comeuppance at the end, and...<br />
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In the above scene, Godzilla slips and smashes into Nagoya Castle, then takes out his rage on the landmark: the coolest Godzilla design lays into one of the Tsuburaya Dept.'s most spectacular miniatures. Ironically/hilariously, restoration of the historic building had just been completed five years prior. So, obviously, that's a good, excruciatingly laborious thing to commemorate in a two inch painting. I can only add that I was a little bummed that to fit both the beautiful creature and castle the scale is such that one can't quite make out the golden dolphins atop the building.<br />
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Finally, for those who read this far and actually, y'know, live in Los Angeles... In grand Bandai collecting tradition, there will be one additional Show Exclusive painting. That is, not available via Internet or phone order, and not available after the show, but available <i>only on December 11 at Gallery Meltdown!</i> <br />
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P.S., the painting will be of Guiron from <b><i>Gamera vs. Guiron</i></b>. Because his head is a knife.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-673003168582802582010-11-20T22:25:00.000-08:002017-07-16T21:54:50.816-07:00Fox and Sam at the End of the Road: THE X-FILES and "Closure"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It is something of a joke, irony or, perhaps, stunt, to call an <b>X-Files</b> episode <b>"Closure"</b>. Firstly, it shares the title with an episode of <b>Millennium</b>, part of a series of crossover and bounce-back between titles of the semi-shared Ten Thirteen Productions universe. Secondly, obviously <b>The X-Files</b> doesn't <i>do</i> closure. Certainly not in the narrative or business senses of the word, where the plot is an endless hanging garden of dangling story threads. The program's picture-making form is driven by denying visual closure. Beasts and bodies are concealed in partial shadow, angels and aliens blaze with intolerable light, and the signature images are two flashlight beams searching about in darkness and a cigarette cherry flaring in the murk. Nor does the show traffic in the sort of psychological "closure" (foothold in our pop psych lexicon gained during <b>X-Files</b> broadcast years) that the episode purports to deliver.<br />
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At its foundations <b>The X-Files</b> lacks epistemic closure, every moment is forever open-ceilinged, shifting and frustrated. Paradoxically, it is a closed loop and always was, relates back, receives information, and speaks meaning only to itself. But if you want my opinion, The Truth is both: <b>The X-Files</b> is deeply, deeply anxious, and obscurationist at heart.<br />
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Now then, the matter at hand is the ultimate fate of one Samantha Mulder, disappeared from her family home at age 8 in 1973, and the resultant impact on the mental state of her brother, Fox. Because <b>The X-Files</b> is an elegantly constructed machine, one thing leading to another and all, the curious circumstances of the abduction witnessed by the elder Mulder sibling provide meaty story materials and internal character psychology, both. Plainly, when we meet Agent Fox Mulder in 1993, he has come to believe Samantha to have been swiped by marauding aliens. The knight's quest to locate the absent sister fuels much <b>X-Files</b> narrative, and as it is, in short order, folded into the larger series-long mechanics of the Syndicate conspiracy and the antics of various space peoples, a story element of central, driving concern. What Happened to Samantha? is not just juicy Mulder backstory, but frontstory. Forward-story.<br />
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Even when not directly inquiring into Samantha's whereabouts, whether tackling concerns larger (global Martian invasion) or unrelated (vampires, mutants, chupacabras), she looms large in Mulder's headspace. Sam is riding on Fox's shoulder and just over the horizon as he chases every Jersey Devil down every blind alley. The memory of witnessing the abduction and the pain of loss catalyze a perfect chain-reaction leading to the Mulder we know: a propensity to regard the paranormal with credulity, a paranoiac bent, empathy for victims, a martyr complex, and so on. Perfect, that is, but for the absent center. Mulder's psychology and belief systems whirl around a cavernous gap and he might collapse in on himself at any moment. He is a man built on shaky premises. Two vital supports that (usually) prevent implosion, though they tend to contradict one another: Scully's devotion to keeping him in check, and repeated evidence that tells Mulder he is right. The kind of closed-loop logic that runs Mulder — no one believes me-> I will make them believe by solving X-Files-> no one believes me because I investigate X-Files — runs all the way down on the basement level of the character and the series. This simple hook with convoluted barbs is summed up by that despairing/hopeful kōan: "I Want to Believe."<br />
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So then, the true tale of Samantha's fate and the passion of Fox Mulder: these are the entwined snakes to which episode 11 of season 7, <b>"Closure"</b>, intends to bring closure. At the end we will hear an explanation, and Mulder will mutter, "I'm fine... I'm free." But maybe the explanation is not an explanation, and maybe Mulder is neither fine nor free, and just maybe there will be no closure. Then again...<br />
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<b>Mulder looks up...</b></center>
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<b>I Saw the Sein</b><br />
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Besides a loathing of plot summaries, a guided walkthrough of the episode is perhaps not the cleanest path through these muddy waters. On first pass, <b>"Closure"</b> seems meandering, its conclusions confusing and confused, to say nothing of dissatisfying and, well, inconclusive. These things may be true, as there seems to be something wrong at every turn, but on the other hand <i>something is wrong at every turn.</i> After much gallivanting around Sacramento suburbs, a women's prison, an abandoned military base, and a fictionalized version of the Skyforest, CA Santa's Village park, a solution to the Samantha Problem. <b>"Closure"</b> says: Samantha T./A. Mulder was stolen from her home, then raised along with Jeffrey Spender at April Air Force Base by the Cigarette Smoking Man. She was likely brainwashed and made subject to medical testing until she escaped and was brought to an emergency room. Before Cigarette Smoking Man could retrieve her from the hospital, Samantha was (fortitude, people...) rescued by benevolent spirits made of starlight, known as Walk-Ins. The means by which the Walk-Ins save the souls of innocents about to suffer brutal, unjust deaths, is to (150 episodes and a feature film leading to this moment) kill them and make their bodies disappear without a trace.<br />
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To this information any reaction is acceptable, but popular candidates include "lame," "that sucks," and "holy shit." Sure, sure and sure, but only in flatly stated summary, because "mercy killed by star-souls" is less than half the story; it answers the What and When but not the Why and How. One troubling thing about <b>"Closure"</b> is that it sees the agents chasing down a lot of information that they have already discovered, as if reiterating the plot thus far for newcomers. So Scully reviews videos of Mulder's regression hypnosis from 1989, Mulder finds evidence that Samantha had been relocated to the Spender household, and the possibility is floated that the girl was victim of an entirely unrelated serial killer. None of this is news to the characters, none of it is entirely new plot material, but it forces all involved to sift through most of the open-ended possibilities yet again. Mulder pays multiple visits to the same abandoned house on April Air Force Base with reshuffled agendas, hours of videotape are pored over, mountains of hospital paperwork shoveled through, moldering secret diaries scrutinized, obscure witnesses tracked down and dozens of graves laid open. The treadmill churns, and, feet pounding the same few inches over and over, Mulder never lets up.<br />
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<b>The X-Files</b> has an ambivalent, relativistic relationship with the concept of truth. To say that "The Truth is Out There" implies a lot of things, including that one is therefore not in possession of that truth, that if it is perpetually "out there," that one cannot know it fully, but perhaps, too, that there is such a thing and a search may not be in vain. For central example, the truth of immediate concern and contention in any given episode tends to be whether or not some kind of supernatural jive is going down. There generally is, of course, paranormal activity afoot, and the audience is nearly always given some kind of "objective" — that is, not filtered through a character's subjective point of view — evidence of such. As such, it might seem that Mulder is nearly always right, while Scully is beating her head against a wall of irrelevant skepticism. It may further seem that <b>The X-Files</b> plays fast and loose — or "cheats," if you prefer — with this phenomenon, implying that there may be some other interpretation, forgetting what it has shown us, or, specifically, regularly allowing Scully to witness the paranormal but not to overhaul her worldview accordingly. A common complaint, that, but it comes a) from viewers outside the narrative, and b) as occasional gripes by Mulder.<br />
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The issue laid out before the characters — and the audience — is less about whether the world is swarming with ghosts and UFOs than it is about what one does with the information before one's eyes. When faced with evidence of Possessed Serial Killer #258, or even supernatural phenomenon that might comfortably fit into her belief system, as when visited by a cherub in <b>"All Souls"</b>, Scully neither shuts her eyes and forgets it away, nor jumps to conclusions. She tries to assimilate that data with extant scientific knowledge, and when unable to do so, will admit she does not know what to make of the event. Mulder occasionally doesn't know either, but more often, faced with the same evidence, simply confirms a conclusion that he has already reached. Mulder and Scully are not symbolic stand-ins for larger concepts — e.g. Scully is not Science or Skepticism or Rationality — but characters with varied, contradictory and complex attitudes and qualities. The series' core subjects are the nature of truth and power, faith, religion, of science, belief, spirituality, the shaky narratives of history, nation and identity, so on, so forth — life and death stuff, as it were. <b>The X-Files</b> does not preach or lecture on these matters. It investigates.<br />
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<b>"Closure"</b> is the second half of a two-parter, following <b>"Sein und Zeit"</b>, which is named, in the German, for Heidegger's <b>Being and Time</b>. The titles give a clue on how to read the episodes, "closure" in its multiple senses stands in contradiction to — but gaining reinforcement in its ironic inverse — reference to Heidegger's study of hermeneutical phenomenology. Now, pardon my butchering of an unsummarizable difficult work, but the relevant concepts in Heidegger would seem to be that a being's inquiry into the nature of being is perilous, cyclical and likely unending. A self-conscious being, by asking such questions, <i>is</i> in nature the thing about which it is inquiring. Absent external frame of reference, interfacing only with beings in the same situation, and wrestling with language that has a different being from that which it describes, a being can only gain understanding through systematic interpretation. The being is defined by past experiences, and while aimed at the future, that future, too, is shaped and framed by the perceiving being in terms of past experience.<br />
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This is more than enough to chew on as regards Fox and Samantha Mulder. Having already explored the ways in which Samantha's abduction in the past determines Mulder's present, is sure to define his future path, in its way is rather synonymous with his person, the remaining key concept seems to be the cyclical, incremental progress of understanding. The two-ep arc is about nothing if not dogged reexamination of evidence, paths in circles, arcs retraced until one being reaches some knowledge of himself, and therefore another being, and therefore Being. Halfway through <b>"Closure"</b>, after weeping over a reading of his sister's newly discovered secret diary (it ends inconclusively), Mulder stands in a late night diner's parking lot. He sees...<br />
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... The void, penetrated by glittering pinpricks of light, which leads to this speechifying:<br />
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<blockquote>
MULDER: You know, I never stop to think that the light is billions of years old by the time we see it. From the beginning of time, right past us, into the future. Nothing is ancient in the universe. But maybe they are souls, Scully. Traveling through time as starlight, looking for homes.</blockquote>
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History, then, coalescing in a brief Now that is soon to be past, a history that was once future, a future always in the present. Time spacialized, existence as never ending search. A universe both lonely and sparkling in harmony, a dark space and a light on an unfulfillable quest. This from cold facts made into the sort of New Agey sentiment that stokes Mulder's fire and brings him a peculiar comfort.<br />
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<b>"Don't look for it, Taylor!"</b><br />
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Earlier in <b>"Closure"</b>, a portent. A certain ape gives advice to a certain spaceman in <b><i>Planet of the Apes</i></b>, playing on a motel television, "don't look for it, Taylor! You may not like what you find." Its function, 1) as a hint: this is about time, about looping back to where you began, about the grieving process, and 2) as a warning: perhaps not to Mulder, but to the dedicated, difficult-to-please audience. We are going out on that beach, an answer will be found, and, well, no guarantees after that.<br />
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To spend any time in the presence of diehard fantasy audiences — "fans" if you prefer, "geeks" if you absolutely must — is to find that they tend to possess memories for minutia like steel traps, a literalist streak and a contradictory apologist streak. Since we may not like what we find and <b>The X-Files</b> seems to know this, we ought to figure out <i>why</i> we may not like it. So, starting at the end and meandering around again, the Samantha File closes with the Walk-Ins. The Walk-Ins are problematic because they have never been referenced before, will never be heard from again. Their participation in the Samantha mystery has not previously been seeded and they yield to no rules of the fictive universe, and scoot in at an oblique angle to the established narrative facts; that is, amidst the warring government conspiracy, alien factions, serial killers and Feds, angelic star-ghosts can kind of do anything they want.<br />
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Perhaps, if these irritants can be weighted, the Walk-Ins' greatest offense is to introduce supernatural element to the central Mytharc storyline. Though <b>The X-Files</b> participates in and/or grabs elements and inspiration from dozens (hundreds?) of speculative fiction subgenres, the Mytharc has always been strictly science-fiction espionage thriller. A fine line, perhaps, but one consistently drawn: no magic in the Mytharc.<br />
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Finally, we may reject the Walk-Ins because they are brazenly sentimental in concept and execution. Color desaturated, double-exposed, and bathed in a shimmery glow, moving in uber-serious slow-mo, the little star-ghost-angels frolic as Moby's choir-and-strings piece "My Weakness" plays, and inspire much earnest Mulder monologuing. In their presence, a lot of discussion of the inherent innocence of children, the sort of Problem of Evil discussions that assume the presence of a watchful God and end up framing the spirits as holy agents. The specific language in the voice over is pure Mulder in sentiment, but uncharacteristic in that it speaks at length about "God," and along with the "My Weakness" sequence is highly problematic as it implies that it is a lovely thing that the purity of murdered children has been preserved in amber for eternity. The Walk-Ins, then, seem something of a cop-out, and a sappy cop-out at that.<br />
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The potential complaints about the Walk-Ins are, however, the very reasons they possess a bit of an edge and nuance that makes them harder to dismiss. "Believe to Understand" — "Crede, ut intelligas," as Scully could likely explain — urges the title card over that gloomy mountainscape where the banner usually reads "The Truth is Out There." There is that Augustinian inscription on how to read <b>"Closure"</b>, and as it unfolds, Mulder is repeatedly warned off his search by the three people with whom his life is most closely intertwined. Scully, his mother, and Cigarette Smoking Man in a private Dr. Zaius chorus tell Mulder not to continue pushing for answers. But <i>why?</i><br />
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<b>The Infinite Samantha</b><br />
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Mulder has, as those paying attention know, been reunited with his sister several times, or, more accurately, been confronted with her physical presence in increasingly disconcerting form. Each iteration of Samantha branches out into new possibilities at least as much as it sheds light on the situation. This begins in <b>"Colony"</b> (season 2, episode 16) where Samantha returns to the family, only to multiply exponentially in the episode's continuation, <b>"End Game"</b>, where she is revealed as one of several clones, and an alien hybrid. This effectively solidifies the link, in literal terms, between Samantha and alien activity, and in a more nagging, unscratchable way indicates to Mulder that if he solves one, can solve the other; naturally, having gotten this close, the slate is wiped: though no real "Samantha" is found or erased, the clones are all destroyed, yet Samantha-possibilities have proliferated before Mulder's eyes.<br />
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Next contact is made in <b>"Paper Clip"</b> (3.2), when the agents uncover a subterranean cache of abductee information, including Samantha's file (once marked for Fox) replete with "recent tissue sample." So there but for the grace of a 3M stick-on label goes Fox Mulder, reinforcing his survivor's guilt, doubt about his parents, and the caprices of circumstance: it could have been, almost was, eventually will be him. He has located a scrap of Samantha's body in her tissue sample, the smallest confirmation that she is alive, or was recently. Closer by inches.<br />
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The season 4 premiere, <b>"Herrenvolk"</b> (4.1) leads to an apiary tended by an army of eight-year-old Samanthas. But clearly they are clones — drones, even, barely able to communicate — stalled at the age of abduction. A reminder, here, that for those who swiped the girl, she was a tool with a function, and that for Mulder, the lost sister is irretrievable; he is chasing the idea of Samantha, and even if she is recovered, she will not be in the same condition as when she last played Stratego.<br />
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Apparently tangential, but straight in line with these replicating hypothetical Samanthas, is the season 4 episode <b>"Paper Hearts"</b> (4.8). The story explores the possibility that Samantha was a victim of child-killer John Lee Roche, and not taken by aliens, not with the involvement of the Syndicate, not with the forced hand of his father. The <b>"Paper Hearts"</b> concept will be floated again in <b>"Closure"</b>. Both rounds, it turns up zilch. Roche even gives a full confession, which stands as the only complete, first-hand account of Samantha's fate... except that it is bunk. The source that appears to be yielding the most information is giving up the least. Again, odd (or discontinuitous) for Mulder to even consider this version of events after gathering (well, witnessing) so much counter-evidence. But he is open to possibility, willing to explore, and interested in dicey information, but not beholden to it, if it does not gel to his standards.<br />
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Finally, in the amazingly-titled <b>"Redux/Redux II"</b> (season 5, episodes 1/2), one more grown-up Samantha visits her brother. This time she is proffered as bait to lure Mulder from government work to shadow-government work, and believes the Cigarette Smoking Man is her father. With that, the final living Samantha disappears from the narrative. Fan speculation tends to agree that this was yet another clone, but all that is certain is that Samantha appears, spends an evening at home, Mulder does not take the Smoking Man's bait, and she is whisked away once more. <i>Possibly</i> the closest she's ever been, <i>maybe</i> he's almost got her back, and <i>could be</i> nothing happened at all.<br />
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As hinted, the crux of frustration and the masterstroke is that the <b>"Sein und Zeit"</b>/<b>"Closure"</b> diptych does not rewrite, overwrite or reconfigure exactly what happened to Samantha. The Truth of this matter, in hard, cold factual terms, is unaltered, and has been fairly firmly in place in most relevant details since, say, the fifth season. Mulder has known this for years, or more importantly, it is the version he believes, and the one we, the audience, also see with the most clarity.<br />
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Samantha was removed from Martha's Vineyard, as collateral in the Syndicate's dealing with aliens. On her return, she was placed in the home of the Cigarette Smoking Man, experimented on, and cloned several times over. This stands, Walk-Ins or no Walk-Ins. To these events, and while stressing the long-term project of the Infinite Samantha, all <b>"Closure"</b> adds to the known facts is: "She died."<br />
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<b>The Smoke-Wreathed Heart</b><br />
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To Mulder's Zaiuses (Zaii?), then. All those concerned for Mulder's well-being take a turn instructing him not to pursue the Samantha matter during the <b>"Closure"</b> arc. Scully, most of all, has to deal intimately with her exhausted and tortured partner, and is attuned as to when to indulge, assist or put her foot down. She and AD Skinner have added motivation to keep Mulder in check, as he is chasing down Samantha via/at the expense of properly solving the child abduction case that spurred the latest tail-chase in the first place. They are right to worry, as by the end, the case is never properly solved.<br />
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More mysterious than the cares of Mulder's colleagues is the Cigarette Smoking Man's visit to Scully with a request: "I want you to stop looking." She will deliver a message, which Mulder dismisses with an accurate "Oh well, he's a liar." Sure is, and keep that in mind, but remember that when so inclined, the Smoking Man tells the truth like few others — a particularly cutting version of the truth because he understands relativism, that subjectivity, and agenda apply to all beings, himself included, and is up front about it. For that, Smoking Man scenes are always dense, and this one's a brief doozy. What the Smoking Man says is: "No one's going to find her... Because I believe she's dead. No reason to believe otherwise." Knowing the ending, and knowing that this is about "belief," note that CSM does not say that Samantha is dead or that he knows she is dead. While wrapped up in the suspense of first viewing, these comments are ripe with insinuation, and continue to spawn possibilities as the plot unfolds. Could be he killed her. Could be he had her killed. Could be he knows that she died due to "testing" — by the Syndicate or by aliens. Could be he suspects that, like his ex-wife, Cassandra Spender, the girl was abducted/returned/reabducted. Could be that he knows only what he saw, which is that Samantha disappeared from a locked hospital room just before he arrived. And now he has come to believe she is dead.<br />
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But this belief is not what CSM asks Scully to tell Mulder. When she criticizes his having withheld, er, whatever it is he knows for all this time, the Smoking Man explains, as he has before, as he will again: "Out of kindness, Agent Scully. Allow him his ignorance. It's what gives him hope."<br />
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Scully thinks about it. Scully doesn't seem to agree. Scully tells Mulder what Cigarette Smoking Man said. He is a liar, after all. "Mulder, why would he lie now?," Scully counters, and CSM had argued the same; that in previous years he was motivated to lead Mulder on to protect the Syndicate's secret work which was effectively destroyed during the season 6 <b>"Two Fathers"/"One Son"</b> arc. Why lie now? Well folks, <i>somebody</i> is lying:<br />
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<b>"End Game"</b> — BOUNTY HUNTER: She's alive. Can you die now?<br />
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<b>"The Blessing Way"</b> — (somewhere on the astral plane or something)<br />
MULDER: My sister? Is she here?<br />
BILL MULDER: No<br />
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<b>"Two Fathers"</b> — SCULLY: Agent Mulder told me he believed he saw his sister. Last year.<br />
CASSANDRA SPENDER: That wasn't her, Agent Mulder.<br />
MULDER: Then where is she?<br />
CASSANDRA SPENDER: Out there, with them. The aliens.<br />
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So from abductees to apparitions to aliens, the weirdoes of the universe seem to believe Samantha Mulder lives and breathes.<br />
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Speaking of misleading information, Mulder's mother, Teena, in typically enigmatic form, shows up a handful of times during this chapter. She has always been more withholding than even Cigarette Smoking Man, and her tendency to occlude information hangs like a pall over the episode. She first appears while Mulder is away in California on a case. Alone at home, Teena burns a photo of Fox and Samantha, leaves a voice mail for her son, asking that he call back so she may discuss things "that I've left unsaid for reasons I hope one day you'll understand," and commits suicide by gas inhalation.<br />
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A hint, here, that Teena Mulder knows something... about something. Scully will discover that Teena was dying from "Paget's carcinoma," which, interestingly may be <a href="http://www.thedoctorsdoctor.com/diseases/xfiles.html">something of a misnomer,</a> or a confusion of several possibilities. Mulder insists that his mother's undelivered message was about his sister, and that she was silenced by the Syndicate. And indeed, both agents have lost family to these particular murderers, and Teena had withheld crucial information before. Without getting too ahead of the game, let us say that Mrs. Mulder's message is never revealed, and Scully would seem to be correct. But why, then, does she burn the photo of her children?<br />
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Certainly she has left things unsaid, and if Mulder tends to categorize the Smoking Man as "a liar," Teena has a pattern of lying as well. The backstory unspoken in the <b>"Closure"</b> arc is that, at minimum, Teena was aware that Samantha's abduction was directly related to Bill Mulder's secret government work: in <b>"Paper Clip"</b>, she revealed that Bill had asked her to choose which of the children would be taken, and she was unable to do so. As per <b>"Talitha Cumi"</b>, she knew that an alien neck-stabbing weapon (a "plam," to those in the in-joke know) was secreted in a lamp in the family home. As she was stroke-striken at the time, and her son, bizarrely, never questioned her on the topic afterwards, none can say if she knew what the space-icepick was, or its purpose. The list of Things Teena Didn't Tell Fox goes on and on, but the extent to which she understood Syndicate/Colonist business is an unknown variable.<br />
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An appearance by Mom's ghost in Mulder's motel room gains no ground either. Mulder is unable to hear or see the apparition, but she appears to police psychic Harold Piller, and meanwhile her son gets a clue via automatic writing: "APRIL BASE." Given these events, all we arrive at are — surprise! — uncertainties and possibilities. The Scully Version is: "Mulder, she was trying to tell you to stop. To stop looking for your sister. She was just trying to take away your pain." Unspoken by both agents is the real possibility that Teena harbored a lifetime of regrets regarding her role in the fates of both her children — Fox's parentage, Samantha's abduction —, hence the burning of the family photo. What Mulder will ultimately conclude is that "I've been looking for my sister in the wrong place. That's what my mother was trying to tell me." This interpretation, predictably, has multiple potential meanings. Possibly Ghost Mom is pointing Mulder to April Base, communicating through the automatically-written note in ALL CAPS, as she once wrote PALM. Indeed, at the abandoned home where Samantha's hands are imprinted in the cement, and her voice is inscribed in a diary hidden in a cupboard, Mulder locates a necessary lead — specifically, that she ran away on the date the diary ended.<br />
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Another Truth is that Mulder doesn't find Samantha at April Air Force Base any more than he found her in the <b>"Paper Clip"</b> file. He already knows, or knows the possibility that she was raised in the Spender household. She told him this in <b>"Redux"</b>, and if she was a clone or a hybrid or a not-Samantha of some kind, the handprints in the cement could still belong to that same clone. At the top of <b>"Closure"</b>, Mulder combs through videotapes found at the Santa's North Pole Village theme park, where a serial killer Santa had buried the bodies of twenty-four children over forty years. Samantha is not depicted on the tapes, not found in the ground. Mulder confesses to Scully that "You don't know how badly I wanted her to be in one of those graves," as it would at least end the search. But Samantha couldn't be there. It would not make sense. Besides flying in the face of the Syndicate plot that the agents have agonizingly pieced together for seven years, Mulder would have some memory of a family trip to California. Should Mulder have found a cold body at North Pole Village, it would not be wrapped with a bow.<br />
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There are two poetical-cum-literal dimensions to the message from Mulder's mother that will unlock the business of <b>"Closure"</b>. There are geographical coordinates provided, but as they lead only to information that is inconclusive unto itself (handprints, partial diaries, shaggy dog hospital reports), what the note really points to is a series of absences. A body, dead/alive or cloned would not be enough and Mulder has literally searched from the South Pole to North Pole Village, from exhumed graves to the astral plane, and Samantha is not Out There. He is looking in the wrong place.<br />
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Secondly, Teena's message is passed to Mulder through automatic writing. That is to say, of course, that it comes from himself.<br />
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<b>Sky-Walker, Star-Killer</b><br />
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In real world New Age contexts, Walk-Ins are beings from elsewhere who have taken up in human hosts, replacing the previous consciousness. <b>"Closure"</b> calls its spirits "Walk-Ins," though this application of the term is unique to these episodes. A walking encyclopedia of the paranormal, Mulder would know what a traditional "Walk-In" is, and demonstrated such in the convoluted episode <b>"Red Museum"</b> (2.10). The creative staff is therefore making a choice to associate the <b>"Closure"</b> beings with run-of-the-mill Walk-Ins. So what is going on here?<br />
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The behavior and motives of the Walk-Ins are complicated and ultimately inexplicable. The cold open of <b>"Sein Und Zeit"</b> establishes the base pattern and "rules," such as they are, and kindly kook psychic Harold Piller names and explains near the beginning of <b>"Closure"</b>; this is the major loop of phenomenon and interpretation in the investigation of the actual X-File motivating the episodes. To the file cabinet, then.<br />
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Six-year-old-ish Amber Lynn LaPierre disappears from her bedroom in Sacramento while her parents are in the house. The name and circumstances echo aspects of the 1996 murder of JonBenét Ramsey, a crime already difficult to comprehend that in the ensuing decade increasingly resembled these no-answers riddles. Mulder horns in on the LaPierre investigation for its superficial links to Samantha's abduction, but besides a child missing with no trace, the incidents bear an important non-resemblance: no bright lights, no levitating girl, no family link to a government cover-up of an interplanetary invasion plot. Scully addresses the transparent psychology at work, and tells Mulder that if sympathy for missing children has drawn him to the LaPierres, he is also stretching to connect the apparently unrelated cases.<br />
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Amber Lynn's disappearance is accompanied by three unusual events. While tucking her in, Mr. LaPierre has a vision of his daughter as a corpse. Immediately before the girl goes missing, Mrs. LaPierre pens a ransom note addressed to herself and her husband, and making reference to Santa. Some time later, Mrs. LaPierre witnesses an apparition of Amber Lynn attempting to speak to her.<br />
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Recalling a similar confounding note in an apparently solved X-File, Mulder visits the jail cell of confessed murderess Kathy Lee Tencate. She does not quite say the words, but allows Mulder to conclude that given the confusing, inconclusive evidence (more automatic writing, another vision, another spirit visit), Tencate has made a false confession in hopes of appeasing the parole board. After some soul-searching and another visit from her ghost son, Tencate suggests to Mulder that Teena Mulder's message was that she, too, had seen the Walk-Ins.<br />
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Here, <b>"Closure"</b> enters that undefined space where metaphor and story events merge, swap out, and wear masks. It is remotely possible that Teena had visions of a dead Samantha, but when? Before Samantha disappeared from home? Years later, before she disappeared from the hospital? In the closing scenes, a retired emergency room nurse who was on duty the night Samantha was taken by Walk-Ins claims that <i>she</i> had the visions. A pile-up, again. The would-be Tencate and LaPierre murderer is given an inconsistent name by the episode closed captioning — "Ed Scruloff" in <b>"Sein und Zeit"</b> and "Ed Truelove" in <b>"Closure"</b> — which is indicative of this open-ended is/is-not pattern. While Scruloff/Truelove nabs victims from all over the country, their bodies are all buried at North Pole Village. The only two of his victims that are named are children he did not manage to kill at all, but likely intended to kill. Whether he ever left a ransom note (or why) is not established, nor is it clear if/how/why the Walk-Ins are leaving such notes. Just as Scully and Skinner indicate, Mulder gets so far off-track with the case's Samantha associations that he fails to notice that none of the evidence is adding up.<br />
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The role of psychic Harold Piller, who guides Mulder through <b>"Closure"</b> is partially expository, laying out the few rules of the Walk-Ins that he understands: the awful visions given to the parents are of the fates their children were about to suffer, and, the masterstroke, that "they will come to you if you're ready to see." But he is not there to circumvent the questions begged by the Walk-Ins, either as metaphor or physical event. When standing amidst the North Pole Village graves, Piller asks a question that plunges straight to the heart of the murk: "My God, why? Why must some suffer and not others?"<br />
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There is a lot of suffering to go around. As it happens, Scully discovers that Harold has previously been institutionalized, diagnosed as schizophrenic, and is under current investigation regarding his own missing son. These things are, of course, not damning, but they complicate things, they throw doubt, they open possibilities.<br />
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Though his own boy disappeared under identical circumstances, Harold does not see his double-exposure spirit, the final confirmation of Walk-In involvement and a tranquil death. But it is Harold's son that guides Mulder to Samantha's diary and escorts him to meet her spirit in the clearing at the end of a dark road. Mulder sees the boy only because he's "ready to see," which means as much and as little as that he Wants to Believe. Piller believes in the Walk-Ins in general, but cannot accept that his son is dead, will not listen to Mulder's advice that "we both have to let go." In his final scene, Harold runs off into the darkness on an endless snipe hunt. The road he takes is the one Mulder has been traveling since 1973.<br />
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The memory of Samantha leads Mulder to Amber Lynn leads to the Tencate case leads to the twenty-four children behind the Village lead to Harold's son leads back to Samantha. A series of infinitely nested X-Files, all bearing Fox's name, pasted over with Samantha's. Mulder is the Walk-In, here, the little girl is lost, but she lives on through her brother.<br />
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While Mulder is off chasing starlight still looking in the Wrong Place, Scully reviews arcane evidence from what will prove to be the Right Place. She watches videotape of Mulder's hypnotic regression sessions from 1989, where he first remembered the events of November 27, 1973. This is, in effect, where we came in. The memories unearthed in these sessions were the first intimate information that Mulder shared with Scully. It is the formation Fox Mulder, Investigator of the Paranormal. At the closing of the loop, the last evidence meets the very first evidence. The FBI psychologist reviewing the tape with Scully evaluates "this is just garden-variety compensatory abduction fantasy." This was always a possibility. The reason for a reminder at this point is to parallel the solution with the inception. In a rather audacious scene of the season 7 finale, <b>"Requiem"</b>, an FBI accountant will ask: whether the Bureau believes it or not, if the whereabouts of Samantha are resolved, and the Syndicate is dismantled, what, exactly, is left to investigate?<br />
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The Walk-Ins may rescue some from painful injustices, but leave plenty of pain in their wake. The LaPierres will likely be convicted, Kathy Lee Tencate remains imprisoned, Harold Piller grieves forever, and billions of souls will not be rescued from earthly death. Why must some suffer and not others? In the final moments of <b>"Closure"</b>, Mulder gazes at the stars once more. Faced with that field of graves, the lost child's empty bedroom, the sky of Infinite Samanthas, Mulder does what we all must do, and reconciles a mountain of ambiguity with an explanation that makes sense to him. His heart comes to rest on the stars, and not the blackness around them. He is finally looking in the right place.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20081408.post-89144022964741253682010-10-29T18:24:00.000-07:002018-11-07T16:08:14.891-08:00Backwards, Forwards, Now to Then: Happy Birthday, Winona!<center>
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A birthday well-wish on this ought-to-be-a-national-holiday, to Ms. Winona Ryder. Her twenty-four years of on-screen work, beginning in 1986, have all been interesting (and yes, a subject of this journal's unbending fascination), and in her thirty-ninth year on Earth, she enters a particularly promising phase in career terms, participating in <b><i>Black Swan</i></b> for Darren Aronofsky (ergh/yay) and a <b><i>Frankenweenie</i></b> remake (wha?/yay) for Tim Burton. Ryder's natural place in the cinemasphere is in contentious, off-beam projects by filmmakers strong of vision and colorful of personality. Because it is nice for work one enjoys to be seen and discussed, let us hope these films catch on in ways that recent endeavors like <b><i>A Scanner Darkly</i></b>, <b><i>The Ten</i></b>, <b><i>Sex and Death 101</i></b> and <b><i>The Informers</i></b> did not. But if not, no sweat, for Ryder's performances enrich those very entertaining curiosities, and relative stardom is not a measure of artistic success. At any rate, the actress appeared rested, healthy and glowing at recent premieres for <b><i>Swan</i></b>, and that is happy news enough.<br />
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The image above comes courtesy of 1999's <b><i>Girl, Interrupted</i></b>, of course, some three minutes into the picture as Susanna Kaysen (Ryder) undergoes psychiatric interview with Dr. Crumble (an unctuous Kurtwood Smith, doing a caring, patronizing variant on his timeless signature sentiment "Bitches, leave!") following an Incident involving a bottle of asprin and a bottle of vodka. Susanna is decked out in natty nautical stripes, a sort of cartoon convict uniform that echoes her looming imprisonment at Claymoore Hospital. Nerves bundled, she tries to maintain the keel of the conversation, but Ryder shakes her voice on selected notes and makes clear how hard it is to stay above water. She's playing it on Levels, attempting to plainly explain her mental experience while aware of how she's being interpreted and the consequences of each word, and thus takes it slow, pained and honest. She spends most of the scene looking through the doctor, probably appearing spaced out, but really spaced too far in.<br />
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Explain what happened? Moving into close up, Ryder doesn't exhale her smoke, but lets it puff out of her mouth and nose as she speaks, an uncontrollable cloud that pops out in embarrassed spurts that she cannot contain: "Explain to a doctor that the laws of physics can be suspended? That what goes up may not come down? Explain that time can move backwards and forwards and now to then and back again and you can't control it?"<br />
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And here a dog barks, further distracting Susanna, as the doctor asks "Why can't you control it?" Ryder winces hard trying to make sense of the question, determine if she's reading too much into it, and to be heard over an internal din that is bothering only her, asks a little too loud: "What?"<br />
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Dr. C: "Why can't you control time?"<br />
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And to that, a patented Winona Ryder look: aghast, disgusted, and terrified at once. How about it, lady, why can't you control time? — not a bad sentiment for birthday times, that. A beat, one blink, and she breaks the brief eye contact.<br />
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The scene also has probably the best possible answer to the age-old question "Are you stoned?" (that is: blank stare). As the only sort of birthday present I am qualified to offer, I celebrate this Winona Ryder screen moment, and add it to the collection of randomized masthead images at the top of this page. So to <b>The Exploding Kinetoscope</b>'s favorite actress, happy birthday again, and hey, don't worry too much about that controlling time thing.Chris Stanglhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06300723935864517305noreply@blogger.com0