Through the looking glass (11/11/99)
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Producer and former Playmate of the Year India Allen on her acting career: “I always got scripts for movies in which I took a lot of showers... I wasn’t a particularly good actress, but I was a very clean one.”
Fight Club. [David Fincher; screenplay by Jim Uhls, from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.]
The Student Of Prague meets
The Lord Of The Flies. Not at all what I’d expected: maybe it was the way they established the equation of the banking system with testicular cancer that won my heart, or maybe it was that homage to Allen Ginsburg. — Brad Pitt does G. Gordon Liddy and Helena Bonham Carter does Courtney Love; do we still need the originals?
Devil In The Flesh. [Steve Cohen, 1998; screenplay by Kelly Carlin-McCall, from a story by Kurt Anderson.]
Rose McGowan, exemplar of everything no one wants to hear about the contemporary high school girl, develops a romantic fixation on her writing teacher that provides all the excuse she needs to kill everyone that crosses her path, including her sweet silverhaired granny and her granny’s dog. — I can’t believe even Marilyn Manson has the nerve to sleep with this chick.
The Sixth Sense. [M. Night Shyamalan, 1999.]
Really scary, and not simply because Bruce Willis is playing a shrink; but can Hollywood finish reinventing the gothic before the end of the century? It’s still a long way to
Melmoth the Wanderer. — And wasn’t this the kid that Lucas needed?
American Beauty. [Sam Mendes; written by Alan Ball.]
A pastiche: Mena Suvari plays Denise Richards in
Wild Things, Annette Bening plays Kathleen Turner in
Serial Mom, Wes Bentley plays Timothy Hutton in
Ordinary People, Kevin Spacey plays William Holden in
Sunset Boulevard, Jack Lemmon in one of those patented midlife-crisis roles, and Jeremy Irons/James Mason/Humbert Humbert in
Lolita, and Thora Birch plays Christina Ricci in practically anything, Despite occasional moments of outrageous hilarity, on balance this is good but not great. Still, no one can shoot roses like the old master Conrad Hall. — A note in protest: after everybody’s favorite scene in
The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, Terry Gilliam told Uma Thurman “It’s all over for you now. You can’t go back to high school; I’ve taken your clothes off in front of the entire world.” — And it was still a joke. — It isn’t a joke anymore. The two little girls are cute, obviously, but I can’t watch them pulling their shirts off without feeling as depraved as, well, one of the producers who insisted that they do it.
Three Kings. [David O. Russell; story by Russell, screenplay by John Ridley.]
Everyone knows the story of the Warsaw uprising: how in August, 1944, with the German army in headlong retreat on the Eastern front and the sound of Russian guns audible across the Vistula, the Polish underground rose up against the Nazi occupation — and how the Red Army stopped within sight of the city and halted its advance for two months while the Germans systematically slaughtered two hundred thousand people; refusing, incidentally, the use of their airfields to the British and American attempts to fly supplies to the resistance. — This was a monstrous act, and by itself an adequate casus belli for the ensuing Cold War. — Forty-six years later, by way of putting a period to the perfectly splendid little police action that ushered in the New World Order, George Bush encouraged the inhabitants of Southern Iraq to rebel against Saddam Hussein; and, then, by refusing to come to their aid with the formidable army that had routed Baghdad’s legions only days before, ensured their martyrdom. He did this not because he was like Stalin consciously wicked; not because he wanted to work evil with malice aforethought, as Stalin did, not because he was like Stalin a man who knew what he was, who was what he was. Rather, Bush did this because he was a rudderless imbecile with no grasp of the consequences of his actions: that quintesentially postmodern creation, that soulless cipher, the American politician.
Perhaps this explains why Special Forces malcontent George Clooney is pissed off at the way the Gulf War has been so abruptly concluded as this narrative commences; and why, when Marky Mark and Ice Cube turn up a treasure map pulled from the ass of an Iraqi prisoner, one indicating the location of a stash of Kuwaiti bullion stolen by the Republican Guard and destined for the coffers of Saddam, he improvises an inspiring peroration about the role of Necessity in human affairs which seems at first an appeal to an ethics of convenience: if no one can tell them what they’re doing here, why shouldn’t they seize the moment and get rich? Moved by his eloquence, they all hop into a Hummer and — pursued by that stock character of Hollywood postmodernism, the Ambitious Female Television Journalist — take off across the border to grab the loot. — Thus far, obviously, we have a simple warzone caper movie, the kind of ironic exercise in the style of Tarantino that allows [very amusing] exploration of such questions as the relative political correctness of “towelhead” and “sand nigger”, what happens to a steer that steps on a cluster bomb, where the electrodes should be placed to facilitate the employment of modern interrogation techniques, and whether it is Lexus or Infiniti that makes the convertible. — But David Russell, unlike Bush or for that matter Tarantino, has no problem with the vision thing; and it becomes apparent that, as his heroes inevitably become entangled in the civil war they’ve been ordered not to intervene in, the dramatic arc he has designed has a moral dimension beyond the grasp of his supposed mentors: indeed though the situation of the first act is one of ironic detachment from reality, the conflict of the second, characterized by an explicitly surrealistic cognitive dissonance, can only be resolved by a re-establishment of the reality principle in the third; and you arrive gradually at the realization that Clooney’s appeal to Necessity isn’t at all a nod to some kind of vacuous relativism, but an acknowledgement of fate or destiny, of what must be, and must be done; something like the recognition of the will of the gods.
So this isn’t, finally, about whether you get to shoot the guy who tortured you, or whether black guys can play quarterback, or even whether American GIs with hearts as big as the land that gave them birth can still hand out candybars to darkeyed war orphans and teach them in their needful hour the power of hope. What it is about, rather, is what Nietzsche called the revaluation of all values — the transformation of reality, the reinterpretation of appearances: you have a glimpse however brief of another reading of the phenomenal text, of an alternative world, one in which the cinema offers moral choices and the foreign policy of God’s country can accomplish the liberation of oppressed peoples; a world with a different ethical map, one that wasn’t pulled out of somebody’s ass. — If Buñuel had lived to make this movie it would have been better; but I’m still tempted to call it a great motion picture. Check it out.
Paris, Texas. [Wim “Wild Buffalo” Wenders, 1999.]
Exterior. Desert. Day. The barren landscape of the American Southwest. Empty, desolate. Nothing moves...there is no sign of life...save perhaps...there: a faint distant dark speck stirs in the white expanse at the right edge of the frame. — The camera is perfectly still; it waits with infinite patience. — Gradually, the blot grows larger. Finally we can make it out: a human figure, clad in hat and trenchcoat despite the desert sun, the burning heat. It walks toward the camera...closer...closer...finally close enough that we can make out his features [for indeed it is a male figure of a certain age]. It is John “Wild Buffalo” Craig [played by Harry Dean Stanton]. He stumbles toward the camera, apparently oblivious to his surroundings, his eyes fixed on something impossibly remote, infinitely distant. — He lurches through the frame. — He passes on.
Later. A desert highway, twolane blacktop. A car hurtles past. The camera turns to follow it and fixes on a highway sign: “Lubbock: 300 miles.”
Another car approaches; slows, and pulls off the highway onto the shoulder. The driver lights a Lucky Strike and studies a roadmap. It is Douglas “Mad Dog” Hoye [played by Dean Stockwell]. He takes a pull from a flask of bourbon. Perhaps he is lost.
He plucks a cellular phone from his pocket and, after dialing a few dozen digits, converses at length with parties unknown. We cannot hear what he is saying, but infer from appearances that he is consulting either satellite reconnaisance or the Psychic Pussy Network.
Presently he concludes. He restarts the car. He drives on.
The camera follows the car into the desert sun. Fade up into white and out. Try it with that cool whooshing noise.
Fade in.
The Starlite Motel. Late afternoon. The sun is sinking behind the low mountains beyond a row of cabins to the West. The Dog’s car pulls into the parking lot.
Within the office, the exotic beauty behind the desk [Sherilyn Fenn] explains: “We found him two days ago, wandering in the desert. He does not move or speak. He chainsmokes Camel straights and consumes a quart of gin every four and one half hours. Bimbos find him strangely irresistable.”
By the pool of this desert oasis, amid an assortment of cheesy lawn furniture, John reclines upon a chaiselounge. Half-a-dozen bikiniclad starlets [Maria Ford, Monique Gabrielle, Andrea Dorian, Michelle Bauer, Nikki Fritz, Griffen Drew] surround him. They affect a variety of arresting postures as they adjust his umbrella, fan him with stadium programs, bring him drinks, and apply cool towels to his fevered brow. He stares straight ahead into the distance.
“John,” says the Dog, with evident emotion.
John makes no response.
In a lengthy monologue which shows the influence of the Hong Kong cinema and the campaign speeches of Fritz Mondale, the Dog describes his search for the errant scribe, which has led him to every drivein burger joint, billiard parlor, and roachinfested whorehouse in the Southwest. “We might never have found you,” he says, “had not the proprieters of this desert oasis not recognized you from a picture in the
Enquirer.”
John stares at him blankly.
Fade out.
Fade in.
Montage at poolside:
The Dog talks patiently to John, who makes little response save occasionally to light another cigarette.
The Dog shows film of upcoming opponents: the Sooners, the Huskers, the Serb militia, the House Judiciary Committee.
The Dog displays his latest recruiting posters, which feature stampeding buffalo and live nude coeds.
The Dog holds up a football, demonstrating how to hold it, the proper alignment of the stitches, the appropriate throwing motion. The bikiniclad babes run elaborate routes around the pool, illustrating his intricate offensive schemes. While the Dog explains their various assignments with pointer and blackboard, the babes all run into one another and fall down; strangely, he does not seem to notice. John chugs another pint of gin.
The Dog plays a medley of stirring football melodies upon the electric piano. The babes sing backup.
The Dog watches, making noises of encouragement, as John reaches for the football...picks it up...turns it over in his hands with unaffected apelike curiosity...makes a few tentative passing motions...and then flips it to one of the girls, wide open all by herself at the end of the pool. In slow motion the ball describes a perfect spiraling arc toward the babe, who, laughing in excitement, jumps up and down [with remarkable concomitant mammary oscillation]...until the ball arrives and she freezes like a doe in the headlights and the pass bounces off her hands into the shrubbery. — The Dog claps enthusiastically and shouts words of encouragement. — John smites himself on the forehead and reaches for another drink.
Fade out.
Fade in.
The motel manager [Dennis Hopper] hobbles out on a cane. After declining the Dog’s offer of a full scholarship, he tells a tale in flashback of a long voyage by dirigible, a crashlanding on a desert isle, a race of genetic deviants half man half beast whose mad-genius creator had been banished from the civilized world for performing forbidden experiments, a volcanic eruption, a week adrift on a floating coffin listening to the Fugees on a tinny Walkman, a rescue by two couples on a passing yacht, a passage to California fraught with murderous intrigue and sexual tension, a shipwreck on the beach at Venice, a drug deal gone bad, a firefight in a warehouse, a long motorcycle ride into the rising sun, and a couple of decades of cheap whiskey and cable television. This inspires the Dog to hypnotize one of the pool girls, who retrogresses to a past cinematic life in which [as Allison Hayes] she was burnt at the stake for witchcraft after being subjected to a variety of colorful medieval tortures by a leatherhooded assistant to Vincent Price. Exerting the techniques of mesmeric influence taught him by his Tibetan masters in a dangerous attempt to meddle with the integrity of the temporal continuum, Dog tries to use her to interfere in the Satanic ceremony in which the founders of the Nebraska football dynasty sold their souls to the Devil, with the intent of thwarting the Huskers’ rise to dominance. Alas, the evil necromancer Doctor Tom Osborne perceives this plot developing in his magic retroscope, and, placing a phone call on his private line to Satan, confounds the Dog’s scheme and ensures that a curse will descend upon Buff football that cannot be raised until a coach sacrifices his firstborn at an Alumni Black Mass. The ensuing double-reverse flashback traps the Dog and several assisting starlets in the second act of
Satan’s Swinging Cheerleaders, and many twists of the plot must be resolved before they can find an egress.
Escaping this cunning snare, the Dog flees even further backward into the mists of time, into a lost-world epic in which stampeding dinosaurs pursue the starlets; who, clad in skins, strike arresting poses and brandish spears.
John meanwhile has wandered away again into the desert, and at a massage parlor in nearby Las Vegas, New Mexico, dictates his memoirs [“Blood, Sand, Astroturf: Camus, Valentino, and the Way of the Tantric Buffalo”] through a one-way mirror to Nastassja Kinski, who listens in motionless silence; obviously still consumed by guilt for having abandoned him at the postgame party at the Orange Bowl of 1990.
Returning from their expedition into lost time, the Dog and his assistants commence a pool party which lasts for several weeks.
After adventures too numerous to relate [and which the viewer may in any case steal as easily as I or Corman from Homer, Ariosto, and Edgar Rice Burroughs] John is initiated into the Masai tribe in a torchlit pagan ceremony and, after slaying a lion with a homemade spear made from a pool cue and a canopener, drags the carcass back to the Starlite Motel for a midnight barbecue. There he discovers that Albino has jilted the Dog and made good on her threat to wed Slobodan Milosevic, Gary Barnett’s
Buffalo Stampede has acquired a new time slot on the Comedy Channel between Ben Stein and the
South Park reruns, and, capitalizing on the notoriety she has acquired from the publication of John’s memoirs, Nastassja Kinski has signed a three-picture deal with ESPN.
Drunk on the gin of the Dog and and clothed in the skin of the lion, John wanders off again into the desert. The Dog tries to restrain him, but John brushes past with his eyes fixed on the horizon. “Got to keep moving the chains,” he mutters. “Got to keep moving the chains.”
The camera pulls back from the side of the pool, from the Dog, staring after John in frustration and tossing his gameplan into the air, from John, stumbling off into the empty badlands, from the bikiniclad babes, loading a microbus with gin and potatochips and a satellite TV and taking off after him, from the great state of Texas, from the vast emptiness of the Southwest...with an abrupt reverse zoom from this microscope slide in the laboratory of God the camera recedes to a bounding surface at infinity, a place beyond space and time...beyond even football, if that were possible.
And fade out.
Later.
____________Smoke gets in your eyes (10/20/99)
