Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tsukamoto, 1989)

Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Year: 1989
Dir: Shinya Tsukamoto

"Do you see all this rust on my body?"

Now I'm really serious about the whole history lesson thing. I mean eventually I think that I'll have to return to a genre or some specific weird little corner of cinema that I've already shone my piercing light of analysis on and I'll be able to spare you the background junk (I shudder to think what that will do to my post lengths). However, that time is not now, and on the docket today we've got another film that is an exemplar of its genre. Rose Hobart is to American surrealism as Tetsuo: The Iron Man (henceforth known as just Tetsuo) is to Japanese cyberpunk. In fact, the this comparison is perhaps even more useful than simply as an illustration of the relative importance of the two films. In a number of different ways the cyberpunk movement as a whole (and Tetsuo specifically) drew tremendously from the surrealists. Many of the cyberpunk films contain long sequences of purely visual and auditory stimulation with no appeal to character, plot, etc. and at least feel as if they are after the surrealist goal of a sort of purity of the image/experience. At the same time, it is important to note that this sort of almost hedonistic attitude toward images and sensory experience is also partly a product of the movement's links with the Japanese punk culture, which was probably the most purely nihilistic and dionysian of all the punk subcultures that emerged around the world (possibly excepting Sweden). As a general rule (this is, of course, not universally true) Japanese punks got mired in political and cultural struggles much less often than did their contemporaries in Spain or Italy, say, and chose to focus more on bullshit and fucking everything up (this renders the dionysian label even more apt, if we start to think in Nietzschean terms of Apollonian vs. Dionysian force).
So if you want to talk cyberpunk history, just take all that surrealist history we went through last time and add the following punk junk. I won't talk about Japanese punk music (as much as I would love to), but we do need to take note of the punk filmmaker Sogo Ishii. Ishii made some films in the late 70's and early 80's that contributed deeply to the emerging punk culture in Japan, especially the sub-sub-culture of biker punks. Films like 1980's Crazy Thunder Road and 1981's Shuffle really set the standard for breakneck, seizure-inducing punk film early on in the movement. However, it wasn't until 1982 that Ishii would produce his masterpiece, and the film which set the grimy-ass industrial gears of Japanese cyberpunk officially turning. Burst City is essentially a glorified music video/punk musical that was created largely for the purpose of showcasing some of the major punk bands in Japan at the time (notably, The Roosters, The Rockers, and a personal favorite of mine, The Stalin). The film, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic-ish Tokyo, follows a group of biker gangs who are attempting to halt the construction of a nuclear power plant on their turf. The story is told pretty much wholly under the auspices of musical performances and foaming-at-the-mouth, half-psychedelic visuals of concerts, riots and car chases. Bottom line, Ishii got people thinking about new ways to do cinema in Japan.


BURST CITY

One of those people was Shigeru Izumiya (bet you thought I was actually going to start talking about Tetsuo. Yeah right.), who was one of the stars of Burst City. Izumiya, who is a fascinating figure in his own right (he is an established poet and prolific folk singer in Japan), went on after Burst City to direct the next major step in Japanese cyberpunk, Death Powder (1986). The film (which deserves a whole post of its own) follows a group of mercenary soldiers who stumble upon a warehouse, where a corpse sneezes some dust on them. One of the soldiers gets infected by the powder (in some nondescript way) and proceeds to freak the fuck out in the form of hallucinatory Jodorowsky-esque visions and nightmares of hell monsters, slime, disembodied eyes, crude line drawings, etc. The film really represents, as far as I can tell, the height of the surrealist influence on cyberpunk. Burst City was light on imagery, but heavy on punk and insanity, Death Powder is sort of the inverse (though there is no shortage of headache editing and loud music in Death Powder).
The reason I focus on these two films specifically is because, to me, Tetsuo represents a sort of hybridization of the two styles. In one sense, the film drinks deeply of the dirty, dystopian, punk nastiness that had been the bread-and-butter of cyberpunk in Japan since its inception. There are whiffs throughout the film, I think, of Katsuhiro Otomo's manga-opus (GET IT?) Akira, which was first serialized in 1982 and ran through 1990 (the film adaptation was made in 1988). One of the two main characters in Akira is actually also named Tetsuo and ultimately undergoes a violent transformation similar to the one seen in Tetsuo, including absorbing other beings into himself as he morphs. On the other hand, there are significant surrealistic elements in the film as well, including the title sequence itself, which consists of the main protagonist thrashing about in front of/spewing out jets of steam while the title of the film, fashioned out of television static, slowly crawls across the screen. Other surrealistic highlights include cryptic messages delivered to the characters from an unidentified man on a television screen, a funeral in the bathtub that the main character (who is credited in the film as just “Man”, but who I find it more convenient to refer to as the Iron Man) gives to his wife who has just been impaled on his giant drill penis, and a telephone call between the iron man and an unidentified speaker which consists almost entirely of the two individuals saying “Hello” to one another over and over again). And, while it's not explicitly surrealist (or anything else for that matter) it should be noted that Tsukamoto also, in this film, takes the editing styles utilized in earlier cyberpunk films and pushes them even further into nearly avant-garde territory with 16mm zooms, swoops, dodges, ducks, dips, dives, and dodges. This is perhaps most fully realized in his wildly innovative method of filming his characters moving through the streets of the city. Sort of stop motion, but sort of something else, Tsukamoto films the characters standing still or only moving slightly while the buildings and streets rush by choppily and unevenly. It's difficult to describe, so watch the movie silly!




The plot of the film, although this may not be readily apparent from a first viewing of the film itself, is pretty simple and I'll try to boil it down here so we can move along reasonably quickly. We open in some kind of dingy, machine basement, where an individual (credited as the “Metal Fetishist” and played by Tsukamoto himself) is experimenting with shoving pieces of metal into his flesh. Perhaps predictably, one of these insertions doesn't quite take, and becomes infected, complete with crawling maggots and everything. The fetishist has a bit of a freak out and runs out into the street, where he is struck by a car driven by an average Japanese salaryman (who will become the iron man) and his girlfriend (played by Kei Fujiwara, who aided Tsukamoto with filming certain shots and who was really the only person involved with the film to do anything other than act, aside from Tsukamoto, who acted, directed, produced, wrote, edited, and everything else-d the film [the soundtrack, which is a kind of distillation of punk music down to its common denominator of plain racket and metal scraping, was taken care of by Chu Ishikawa, founder of Japanese industrial unit Der Eisenrost], and who would go own to direct a crucial film of her own in the mid 90s, and one you'll see written up on this blog eventually, if you and I both stick around long enough, 1996's Organ). The couple panics and attempts to dispose of the strange body they hit but dumping it into a ditch on the side of the road. Some time later on (there is no real sense in the film of the passage of time), the man is getting ready to go to work and finds a small piece of scrap metal embedded in his cheek while shaving. He attempts to remove it but realizes that it is growing from within his flesh. After this, while waiting in the subway for his train to work, he is attacked and chased by a woman who has become infected by the metal fetishist in some way, and is herself transforming into a big hunk of scrap. The man is able to escape and Tsukamoto-run back to his home, but is pursued by the woman, who has gained huge metal claw hands. He is ultimately able to snap the machine woman's back, but only after he himself begins to exhibit some signs of being infected.
The next major sequence is one which begins as a dream in which the man's girlfriend has grown a large, metal pipe probe in her genital area with which she proceeds to rape the man. After waking from the dream, the man and his girlfriend actually do have sex (and a very bizarre, sweaty meal). However, in something of an inverse of the dream sequence, the metal growths begin to spread rapidly all over the man's body, ultimately producing a fully-functional power drill penis the size of his torso. He becomes very aggressive toward his girlfriend, attempting, it seems, to rape her. Ultimately, she is impaled on the drill and dies, after which the man appears remorseful and gives her a perverse burial at sea in their bathtub. At this point, the man has fully become his iron man form, covered almost entirely by metal, with no recognizable human appendages or features.



The man is paid a visit by the source of his infection, the metal fetishist, who invades the man's television set and plays a recording of the man and his couple hitting him with their car, dumping his body, and proceeding to have sex in the woods mere feet from that body. The fetishist then reanimates the body of the iron man's girlfriend, traveling up through the pipes of their home into the tub to take control of her body, and has her attack the iron man with a knife. Eventually showing himself fully, the fetishist attempts to persuade the iron man that, between the two of them, they have enough power to bring about a utopian world made entirely of metal. The iron man flees but is chased through the streets by the fetishist to a huge warehouse, where the final battle between the two takes place. The fetishist forces himself on the iron man and the two merge together into one colossal metal being with two heads. Finally being able to directly access the vision of the fetishist, the iron man comes to see the beauty of destroying the human world and creating a scrapheap utopia. To a cry of “Our love will destroy this fucking world,” the hybrid machine rolls out to wreak its havoc.
Now this film is usually described as a sort of cautionary tale or parable of some type for a rapidly advancing and industrializing Japanese nation and a culture that was very quickly moving to embrace the new technologies that came along with that that progress. I think that while it is, in one sense, obviously correct to label the film as a type of expression of the fin-de-siecle neuroses of Japanese society, what is more challenging is fleshing out the content of that claim. If the idea is, as seems to be the case in the vast majority of written material on the film online and elsewhere, that Tsukamoto is making a statement about the soulless advancement of machine and digital technologies robbing us of our humanity and dignity and constantly presenting a threat to the safety and sanity of human society, I can't get on board. This seems to me to be a wildly half-baked way of thinking about the film, and has all the markings of what I call stock-analysis, that is, “If a film has characteristics X, Y, and Z, it must be roughly about this!” Here it's something like, Tetsuo is heady, dark, and ostensibly deals with technology, so it must be about technology robbing us of our souls!
I submit that, if we are to make any sense of the film as the unique statement that it is (tossed-off comparisons to Eraserhead or any Cronenberg film seem equally as lazy and pointless as the stock-analysis to me), we need to approach it as a higher-order social allegory rather than as simply a depiction of a nasty possible future (after all, there is no indication in the film whatsoever that it takes place in a future of any kind). Specifically, I believe that Tsukamoto is making a point about the way homosexuals are treated in society, and even more specifically, the role that the AIDS virus plays in that dynamic. At it's core, what is the plot of the film? We have two men, both of whom share a type of strange, incurable infection, one of whom embraces this fact and one of whom tries to run away from it, but both of whom will be shunned by society once they are found out. Furthermore, after becoming disgruntled enough with their cultural milieu, the two men proclaim the fact that their love is capable of destroying the world (both literally in the sense of ending human life, and perhaps as a sarcastic jab at those who predict apocalypse for humanity in a purely moral sense due to homosexuality) and even come to embrace this eventuality. This message at least is clear to me; the effects of the social repression not simply of homosexuality in general, but even more pronouncedly, of the reality of the AIDS epidemic and the lives of those afflicted with the disease can lead not only to self-hatred and self-denial (even the fetishist, who apparently has embraced his status, still actively mutilates his own body) but also to a type of dangerous, but not unwarranted, hatred for the world that has shunned them.




This is the aspect of the film that is most interesting to me; it is not simply that the fetishist and the iron man feel repressed and alienated by their society, but that they come to feel that they can use the very thing that they were repressed for as a weapon against that society. Indeed, the first and perhaps most indelible image that we see of the violent nature of the infection in the iron man is when his penis, the most effective delivery system of the ailment, literally transforms into a weapon, which he uses to kill his girlfriend. In some ways the message is so clear that it seems that Tsukamoto is almost lacking in subtlety. The dystopian world that Tsukamoto points to in Tetsuo is not one in which man and machine have symbiotically joined and man has lost his identity qua man, but rather one in which a large segment of the population has been so mistreated and has become so disgruntled that they opt to engage in a type of genetic warfare against the rest of society, utilizing as their main weapon that which made them outcasts. Tsukamoto actually seems to have been ahead of his time on this point, as I have heard numerous tales (whether or not these are at all credible, though I think some of them are, is irrelevant, as even urban legends can reflect directly the fears of a society) in the last decade or so of people driven mad by their infection with AIDS stabbing other individuals (wives, children, etc.) with hypodermic needs containing their infected blood in hopes of infecting them as well. Tsukamoto offers the idea that this kind of thing could potentially become much more widespread, and perhaps even organized, if homosexual individuals and individuals with AIDS are continually and systematically forced to either live on reservations at the fringes of society or conceal themselves and hide in plain sight, forever keeping their real identity a personal secret.
There are a number of other points that this analysis brings up, none of which I will get into, but a few of which I will mention. Firstly, it is not exactly clear how rational this utopian urge is on the part of the fetishist and the iron man. It may be that they are simply mad with rage at their repressive culture and have become overcome to the point of lashing out, or, perhaps more frightening, they are fully rational and have simply decided that the only way to be accepted in their society is through force and terror (the more general frenzy of the film may be a hint here, although the fetishist is a strikingly calm figure in his discussions with the iron man). Tsukamoto also and importantly leaves the moral status of their behavior open in the sense that it seems possible that the type of holocaust the two characters are about to embark upon is actually justified and perhaps the only way left to deal with their world.
Secondly, it strikes me that there is something unsettling about the way this thought process exhibited by Tsukamoto conceptualizes homosexuals. Certainly the intent seems to be to bring attention to the ways that they are treated in society and the injustices that they have to suffer. However, it's not obvious to me that the best way to gain equality and respect for homosexuals and people infected with AIDS is to point out that if we keep messing with them they could turn into a threatening terrorist force. In fact, I think I'm comfortable saying that's definitely not the best way. Peace through fear of retaliation is not, I submit, the same thing as respect, especially when the retaliation that is feared is genetic, and the fear boils down to one of becoming infected, becoming “one of them.” While it may not be the very worst place to start, it definitely isn't any kind of sustainable way to think about the way AIDS must be dealt with in human culture in a larger sense.

Rose Hobart (Cornell, 1936)

Rose Hobart

Year: 1936

Dir: Joseph Cornell

"He stole it from my subconscious! He stole my dreams!"

For me the exclusion of Joseph Cornell's 1936 surrealist masterpiece Rose Hobart from the original 1001 movies list is one of the more shocking and inexplicable snubs on the entire thing. Beyond the fact that this movie should be the first thing that comes to your mind when you're talking about American surrealism in film and one of the first when you're talking about the American avant-garde in general, there were a few somewhat more obscure (though not necessarily less deserving) films in the same vein that did make the list, e.g. Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic (1957), Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), Ken Jacobs' Blonde Cobra (1963), and, somewhat scandalously (for reasons which will become apparent), Salvador Dali's collaboration with Luis Bunuel; 1929's Un Chien Andalou. Now all of these films are great, some of them are even really great, but not a one of them is great in the way that Rose Hobart is. So when I realized that Cornell's magnum opus had been left off the original list, I was filled with part righteous indignation and part joy, because that meant that I got to write about the thing, which I will proceed to do...now.

Un Chien Andalou. No doy.

I think I'll probably start off most posts about how I don't want to give you a history lesson about (X, Y, or Z) and then immediately proceed to give you a history lesson about (X, Y, AND Z). Today's lesson? American surrealist film. Rose Hobart. Okay lesson over. Alright well maybe it's not quite that simple, but in a major way, Rose Hobart really is the the American surrealist film, and arguably the surrealist film full stop. On top of that, what Cornell did with the film in terms of how he created it was legitimately new and had never really been done in film before. More than anything, Cornell anticipated (rather than drew from) the ideas of other filmmakers who would come later (e.g. Maya Deren, the aforementioned Ken Jacobs, Kenneth Anger, and even Stan Brakhage). However, don't think that just because Cornell was genuinely innovative I'm going to spare you any of the nitty gritty history of surrealism in America. If only you were so lucky. By 1936 (the year Rose Hobart was released), the US already had a long and rich tradition of avant-garde film, which, though I would love to, won't go into (though I will plug the fantastic DVD set “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941” which takes us up and through Rose Hobart in a remarkably thorough and enlightening tour of, well, early American avant-garde film). Surrealism, on the other hand, was still very nascent as a movement. Though it's hardly a clean break between the end of Dada and the beginning of Surrealism, it seems fair and (more importantly) convenient to tag 1924 as the beginning of Surrealism proper. This was the year that Andre Breton published the “Surrealist Manifesto,” founded the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and began working on the first Surrealist journal La Revolution Surrealiste. So lots of stuff came together right around then.

The history of Surrealist film runs very roughly parallel to Surrealism's development overall. A lot of the filmmakers who had been working under the auspices of Dadaism (Duchamp, Hans Richter, Man Ray, etc.) did work that bled over into surrealism, which likely helped spur on individuals explicitly associated with the movement to move into film. This didn't take much doing, however, as the Surrealists were, from the very beginning, keen on film as a medium for expressing the Surrealist philosophy (the abolishment of interpretation in favor of unadulterated image, the pure operation of the senses and perception [as Breton called it “the disinterested play of thought], etc.). Specifically, the capacity of film to capture and impose upon its viewers a strange type of dreamlike state was a feature that was particularly attractive to the Surrealists. Antonin Artuad, the famous Surrealist writer, wrote extensively on film theory and the ways in which the medium could be utilized toward Surrealist ends, calling his idealized version of Surrealist film “raw cinema.” However, Artuad's only attempt at a proper Surrealist film, 1928's La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), for which he wrote the script (leaving the direction to the impressionist filmmaker Germaine Dulac, who shared many of the Surrealists philosophical aims despite not being explicitly associated with the movement), was, in his eyes, a failure and only represented a highly distorted version of his ideas. However, this film is still considered by many to be the first properly Surrealist film. The first successful (from a philosophical standpoint) Surrealist film wouldn't come until a year later, when established Surrealist painter Salvador Dali would team up with unknown filmmaker Luis Bunuel to create Un Chien Andalou, which was universally praised by the Surrealists and is still pretty much universally praised. I think we all know the story here; eye cut, weird stuff, free association, etc. Dali would go on to do his painting thing (though he will make a surprise appearance later in this particular tale) and Bunuel would go on to become one of the most respected filmmakers of all time, and one of the only true surrealist directors (especially in his next film, 1930's L'Âge d'Or).

So what was Joseph Cornell doing during all this philosophical and artistic upheaval in the mid to late 20's, you ask? Working as a door-to-door fabric salesman. This is not really surprising, as the still young Surrealist movement had yet to hit the United States (and arguably wouldn't do so until the influx of artistic asylum seekers [including Breton, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy] during WWII). Cornell's life was dedicated to his family, and specifically his invalid, palsy afflicted brother, and so he worked, not even really starting to make art until the early 30's (making Rose Hobart a fairly early work). Cornell's trademark pieces are his box assemblages, which he made out of, well, different kinds of boxes and various knick knacks that he found around old thrift shops and book stores in New York. This was very much in line with the Surrealist ideal of focusing on the raw image and utilizing incongruous juxtapositions to that end (though Cornell explicitly distanced himself from the Surrealists multiple times). As I mentioned, Rose Hobart represents one of Cornell's earlier works (he wouldn't “make it” till the late 40's, early 50's, after the Surrealist refugee invasion), and it follows his trademark style exactly. The 19 minute film was composed by Cornell from multiple found sources. The source that is featured most prominently in the film is footage from George Melford's 1931 film East of Borneo, which starred an actress named Rose Hobart (Melford was an established director by this time, having made a name for himself with 1921's The Sheik). Cornell had purchased a 16mm print of the film on a whim one day and became fascinated by its leading lady. The creation of the final version of the film as a work of art was not exactly deliberate, and only came about as Cornell slowly came to be infatuated with Rose. Originally, Cornell had only wanted to trim down the film so as to make repeated viewings less tedious for his brother, taking out unnecessary parts, rearranging certain scenes to make things more interesting, and inserting footage from other films (mainly nature documentaries, such as the footage of the eclipse that is seen in the film). Over time, Cornell began to develop something of an obsession with Rose, and the film eventually turned into merely a collection of all the scenes in the original film that included Hobart in them (interestingly, this was not the first such obsession of Cornell's, as he is said to have harbored similar feelings toward Lauren Bacall, as well as various ballet stars he saw perform).

It's not exactly clear how the film was first seen by anyone other than Cornell and his brother, but it eventually came to be included in a screening of some of Cornell's short film collection at Julian Levy's gallery in New York. When the film was screened, Cornell projected it through a blue plate of glass and slowed the projection speed some. He also removed the original soundtrack and replaced it with a pair of songs (“Forte Allegre" and "Belem Bayonne") from Nestor Aramal's "Holiday in Brazil," a samba album that Cornell had also found in a thrift store, keeping with his assemblage aesthetic. This first screening, by sheer coincidence, happened to be taking place during the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and none other than Salvador Dali just happened to be in the audience at Julian's that night. About halfway through the screening of the film, Dali leapt up in a violent rage and threw the projection screen to the ground. He began yelling about how Joseph Cornell had somehow stolen his idea for a film. Dali claimed that he had had the idea for a film exactly like Rose Hobart, but had never written it down or told anybody about it, eventually accusing Cornell of stealing his dreams. Rose Hobart had arrived, and, though Cornell, traumatized by the incident, would not show the film again until the 1960's, its mark had been left.

Salvador Dali: "Fuck you Joseph Cornell, you bitch."

Okay I'll start my discussion of the actual film by asking, does anybody else think Rose Hobart looks a little bit like Maggie Gyllenhaal? Eh? Anybody? Just a lil bit? Whatever.

Come ONNNNNNNNNNNNNNN Maggie=Rose!?

It is difficult to know where to begin with a film like this; the philosophical shell of Rose Hobart is fairly smooth and chink free, making entrance difficult. By “a film like this” what I mean is that it seems to me that much of the content of the film, that is to say, much of the meaning that can be derived from the film, is peripheral to the film itself. Indeed this is to be expected of any Surrealist film, insofar as the film attempts to force interpretation out in favor of pure image/experience, in the Surrealist tradition. So the content of the film (a collection of blue tinted scenes from an unknown jungle film set to samba music) cannot rightly be the focus of any analysis. Rather, we must (can) only keep the film on the edges of our analysis, focusing instead on the raw ideas that serve as the backdrop to that content. We cannot ask traditional film questions about characters, plot, themes, we are forced to examine things a bit more closely, and this, in my view, is what many of the Surrealists wanted in the first place; a new interrogation of reality (Surrealism was always conceived of as an explicitly revolutionary movement, working for change, etc.). Though we may have to work at a bit more, there is, as always, still a feast of meaning to be had here if we really start slicing and dicing.

I think it best to start at the top, i.e. the title, Rose Hobart. Maybe at first glance it seems that this is pretty straightforward. The film consists almost entirely of footage of Rose Hobart, Cornell was obsessed wither her, hence, Rose Hobart. “Why you gotta overanalyze everything guy?” Just hear me out k? I actually believe there is a lot going on here, much of it stuff that Cornell couldn't have done purposefully. First though, even if we take the sort of simplistic artist-and-muse interpretation, a few interesting things still pop up. I mean Cornell is basically prefiguring an entire cultural phenomenon decades in advance, namely the sort of strange fetishist subcultures that grew up around many movies stars during the 40's, 50's, and 60's (perhaps most notably James Dean). Think about all of the magazines and fan clubs that started up around these figures, and even more recently, the plethora of online communities dedicated to big stars. Cornell produced what is essentially the first fan tribute video. Furthermore, the way he did it, collecting and editing footage, coupling it with found music and objects (the blue glass) might just qualify as the very first mashup. I think that the ways in which Rose Hobart exhibits shades of much later cultural developments (including all the folks who totally aped its style in the 60's) is really interesting and is just more evidence of its ahead-of-its-time-ness.

Now you might be tempted to ask “Oh well what is so different about this artist-muse relationship? Why aren't much earlier artists who were inspired by beautiful women they knew the progenitors of today's creepily obsessed fan freaks? You're just pulling shit out of your ass aren't you?” Okay this is where it gets interesting. Clearly there were muses before Rose Hobart. The Greek muses of myth would be a good place to start and many artists and writers had specific women that they knew (e.g. Peter Abelard and Heloise, Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale, The Pre-Raphaelites and Elizabeth Siddal, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke, etc.) who inspired their work. However, there seems to be something crucially different about Cornell's relationship with Rose Hobart that makes it more interesting than any of the other examples I just gave. First,with the Greek muses, any relationship that was had between them and an artist was completely mystical in nature. What I mean by this is that the muses were not discrete figures like any other person would be and they were not interacted with in the ways we interact with everyday people. Rather they were characters, mythic figures who (while they were believed in as one might believe in a God) were posited as having some influence on the world but who could never be picked out or positively identified. So in a sense these relationships were (I am assuming, hopefully not controversially, the non-existence of the actual Greek muses) entirely one sided, in the sense that the muses themselves were wholly fictitious and infinitely interpretable (with some very loose guidelines). On the other hand, the more traditional artist-muse relationships between discrete individuals on a personal level are exclusively corporeal in nature. These real, flesh and blood women, though certainly idealized to a certain degree by their devotees, could never truly escape to the fanciful heights of the Greek myths, being irrevocably anchored to this world by their humanity. Because of this, the relationship between them and those they inspired could, ultimately, never be anything more than an interaction (however complex) between two mortal human beings. What makes the Hobart-Cornell relationship more interesting (and more comparable to the digital idol worship of today) is the fact that, essentially, the figure of Rose Hobart was a hybridization of the classical Greek muses and the more traditional human muses. Obviously the actress Rose Hobart was a real, corporeal being that would live and die along with the rest, so in that respect she was like Salome or Heloise. However, for Cornell, she was also much closer to the Greek figures than any of the classical human muses were. This, essentially, is due to the fact that the only experience Cornell had of Hobart was totally mediate, coming through the medium of film (for me, I interpret Cornell's projecting of the film through a blue glass filter to be a subconscious acknowledgement of this impure, mediate nature of his experience of Hobart. So, in a beautiful sneak-attack, we could say that Cornell [who, again, distanced himself from Surrealism many times], in producing the most praised Surrealist film of all time, smuggled in the very antithesis of the Surrealist philosophy: pure images and disinterested thought are impossible, everything is mediate). Cornell never met Rose Hobart, never exchanged letters with her, never interacted with her personally in any way, and yet he had something more concrete than mythical stories and images, namely, actual film footage. In this way, Rose Hobart straddled the strange line between completely mythic and banally corporeal. Cornell both had the near infinite freedom to interpret his muse and her influences in the way that the Greeks did (but which, I would argue, Abelard or the Raphaelites did not), but also was driven by the classical obsessive fever of knowing that somewhere out in his very world, this figure really existed in some way. This is why it seems to me that the Hobart-Cornell relationship is much more a harbinger of your average obsessive fan today than any previous relationship could be. Take, for instance, your average Robert Pattinson-obsessed teenager today. Most of these people will, it seems to me, go through their entire lives without ever actually meeting Robert Pattinson or corresponding with him in a personal way. Their whole experience of Robert Pattinson will be no more than the sum of his media appearances, the posters on their walls, interviews, and his film performances (indeed, as with Rose Hobart, their experiences of Pattinson will be doubly mediated, first by the fact that all of their experiences will be indirect, and second by the inevitable blurring of on-screen character and actual person that occurs with all actors). For these people, their cobbled together personal vision of Robert Pattinson really is Robert Pattinson. Yes there may be some “real” figure out there to whom the name “Robert Pattinson” can be applied, but this figure is just mythical enough to serve only as the very roughest of guides as to what Robert Pattinson really is to them. This is exactly the situation with Rose Hobart. For Joseph Cornell, his vision of Rose Hobart as he concocted her in his film, really is the Rose Hobart.

You know my steez.

The implications of this particular type of muse relationship that Cornell is likely the first example of are, for me, profound. Let's think about this in terms of personal identity. I think that Cornell is really forcing the issue here (again presaging some of the most pressing questions of the digital age) of what exactly comes to count as a person now that we can all be digitally reproduced and altered to fit any image whatsoever. If we take my thesis that Cornell was presenting this film as the Rose Hobart, then the title of the film takes on a new and interesting meaning. We have now a bit of a conundrum set up, where there is a question about who/what the real Rose Hobart is. Is it the actress Rose Hobart, or is it Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (Rose Hobart without italics?)? This seems to me to be a real question. What is it about the actress Rose Hobart that gives her any more of a claim to being the real Rose Hobart than Cornell's creation? This question becomes even more complicated if we make the problem diachronic, taking into account the historical status of both Rose Hobarts. It strikes me that Cornell's film (which, remember, we are taking to be a contender for the proper name of Rose Hobart) has come to be significantly more well known than the actress which inspired it. When you mention the name “Rose Hobart” you are more than likely to induce thoughts of Cornell's film than of the actress. That is to say, whether we like it or not, Cornell's Rose Hobart seems to have come to take over the name “Rose Hobart” fully, making it as if the actress Rose Hobart is an afterthought of the film; or a shadow thereof, a person inspired by a film, rather than the other way around. Again I think Robert Pattinson is a fair comparison here, taking Cornell's probing questions to their logical extremes. In an age when there is more information about Robert Pattinson readily available to all people instantly on the internet than Robert Pattinson (the person) likely has stored about himself in his own mind, why should we feel compelled to point to the physical form and say “That, and only that, is the real Robert Pattinson.”? This seems pretty much entirely arbitrary to me. At best our physical forms are some small percentage of what accounts for us proper, with the majority of identity (it seems to me) being located elsewhere (memory, psychological data, influences on others, etc.), and today most of this other information about our identities exists out in the world in digital form (through facebook pages, twitter accounts, creepy GPS locating devices, blogs, etc.), and this becomes even more pronounced with famous people. Identity is dispersed and comes up for interpretation and, ultimately, re-appropriation at any time by anybody. This bundle of information is Robert Pattinson, this other bundle of the same information is Robert Pattinson, etc. etc. Which is the real Robert Pattinson? Or perhaps these are all a false choices, as somebody like Jean Baudrillard would have it. Baudrillard suggests that in this type of environment of infinite reproducibility and dispersion of identity, the entire concept of the “original” becomes totally meaningless, and we are left with copies of copies of copies without any original to point to. Everything is copy. We might interpret Cornell in this way too, not as offering an alternative to Rose Hobart, but just another Rose Hobart. This seems equally plausible, and equally challenging, to me. Either way, it seems clear that Rose Hobart is bringing up some serious issues about digital reproducibility, personal identity, and, really, the nature of celebrity, pretty much before anybody else was, so for that reason alone (and because it made Salvador Dali totally jealous), it should be on the list. Plus it's a damn enjoyable movie to watch. A friend once described it to me as the perfect distillation of what a film should be: just the pleasure of seeing. So that works too.

Okay that was shorter right? I hope you don't feel as if I skimped out. I could have talked about some other stuff (the music, the meaning of the inserted nature footage, etc.) or gone deeper into whether the film is Surrealist or not, but I really do think that the film does succeed (in the Surrealist tradition) in forcing those kind of direct interpretive analyses out the door, leaving us to focus on other stuff, which I think I did. I've heard those kinds of analyses of the film before and they always just sound hopelessly awkward. So maybe it is Surrealist in that way, though I think the stuff I pointed out about secret anti-Surrealist messages are very present in the film as well. Also, I hope the spacing/paragraphs are a little bit better.

As always, leave me a comment about what you think, how great I am, offering me jobs, asking why the fuck I was talking about Robert Pattinson so much, etc. I like this clip of like a post every 2-3 days, so I'll try to stick with that. Let me know what you think. Next up is probablyyyyyyyyy Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tsukamoto, 1989), or Glen or Glenda? (Wood, 1953), or Whistle and I'll Come to You (Miller, 1968). How about this, YOU GUYS VOTE! Leave me a comment about which movie you want me to tackle next and I'll do that. If nobody votes, I'll kill myself and make this a Robert Pattinson blog. In that order. Like the new banner? No doy you do.

CU

Creepshow (Romero, 1982)

Creepshow

Year: 1982

Dir: George A. Romero

"Is that camp or kitsch, Harry?" "It's stupid.”

Let me start by saying that I could easily be writing about Creepshow 2 here, and I almost decided to do just that (especially in light of the brutal and brilliant relevance of The Raft these days-“I don't believe in oil slicks man!”). But I'm not. I'm writing about Creepshow. There was just no denying the greatest of the horror anthology films and one of the most profitable collaborations in the history of horror that is Creepshow. Totally superfluous opening--out of the way.

I want to avoid making this a history lesson on the horror anthology (***NOTE*** I totally did make this into a history lesson on the horror anthology. Sorry. If you want to skip it and just read about the goddamn movie already, skip this paragraph and go to the last like 4 sentences of the next one ***END NOTE***), but some context would probably be helpful. On the most basic level, a horror anthology film presents a number of different self-contained narratives (we could just call them short films for convenience), all horrific. Anthology-got it? Oftentimes, these individual tales are encompassed within some larger “wraparound” story. These wraparound stories serve as a sort of backdrop or binding tie for all of the individual stories. So, for example, the wraparound story in Creepshow is that each tale is drawn from the pages of the horror comic books collected by the boy we meet at the beginning (the film is an homage to the E.C. comics of the 50's, such as Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror).

As a genre, horror anthologies goes back much further than most people suspect. The first example of a recognizable horror anthology could be Richard Oswald's Eerie Tales from 1919, which included a rendition of Poe's “The Black Cat.” Oswald would go on to direct another early anthology(ish), The Living Dead aka Ghastly Tales which was actually meant partly as a parody of German expressionist cinema, and, in particular, the legendary Waxworks, directed by Paul Leni in 1924, which is another early example of a horror anthology (Leni would go on to direct one of the most important haunted house films of all time in The Cat and the Canary). One other important early anthology of note is Fritz Lang's (yes, THAT Fritz Lang) Destiny (1921) in which the character of Death relates three stories of heartbreak and loss to a young woman who is trying to reunite herself with her lover. The shocking twist of an ending to the main wraparound story in Destiny is a crucial moment in the development of the horror anthology.

Destiny. It's serious.

After the German anthology boom, there was mainly dead air until the early 40's which saw a few American entries to the genre, as well as perhaps the most influential horror anthology of all time, 1945's Dead of Night. The English production represented the first few rolling pebbles in what would become, in the 60's and early 70's, an avalanche of British horror anthologies. Examples would include the films of Roy Ward Baker (most famous for 1958's A Night to Remember), e.g. The Monster Club (1980), The Vault of Horror (1973), and Asylum (1972), as well as other luminary films such as Kevin Connor's From Beyond the Grave (1973) and Peter Duffell's The House that Dripped Blood (1971). Most of these films resulted from the turf war that erupted between film production companies Hammer and Amicus over the British horror market, which Hammer had dominated throughout the 60's. Amicus was looking for new ways to draw people into their horror films, and so began experimenting with the anthology format. They saw some success with the early experiments, and poof, we have the British horror anthology wave. There were other notable horror anthologies produced during this time throughout the rest of the world as well, including Italian horror genius Mario Bava's 1963 film Black Sabbath and Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1963) (likely the only horror anthology that is ever going to get a Criterion release :( ). Amicus and Hammer squashed the beef in the early 80's(mainly because both companies shifted away from horror films. Hammer because their trademark Gothic-style was becoming less and less popular with the rise of more “edgy,” “sophisticated” fair [e.g. Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, both from 1968]. Amicus because they misjudged the change in horror taste to mean a moving away from horror in general and decided to shift focus to science fiction films, which just fucking never works). This left the good old U.S. of A. to take up the horror anthology mantle, which brings us (FINALLY) to Creepshow. As you may recall from like two sentences of a really long parenthetical ago, George A. Romero had just finished dropping a huge elbow from the sky on the British anthology wave with his Night and Dawn of the deads, and so may have been feeling some pangs of guilty conscience. So he and Stephen King (also a rising star in horror at the time for his books Carrie (1974), Salem's Lot (1975) and others) decided to team up a la LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh (Tom Savini can be Chris Bosh) to make a horror anthology film of their very own. King wrote (two of the segments are based directly on previously existing short stories of his) and Romero directed (Savini, a legendary horror makeup artist and general fan favorite, acted and did makeup). Creepshow was born, and released in 1982.

“So what the fuck is the movie about dude?” Shut up and I'll tell you man. Creepshow consists of 5 main stories, a prologue, an epilogue, and the background of the E.C. comics that I previously mentioned. We'll take the prologue first, and move through the 5 stories, and end with the epilogue, analyzing as we go (and whistling while we work).

The prologue shows us a young boy (Billy, played by Stephen King's real life son), reading some comic books entitled “Creepshow” (the comics they used as props in the film, along with the film's poster art, were all inked by Jack Kamen, who was one of the original artists for E.C. comics), and subsequently getting smacked around by his rampaging father (Stan), who also takes away his comics and throws them in the trash. The usual intellectual decay-style phrases are batted about a bit and the mother suggests that Stan need not be so hard on Billy. Back in his room, Billy is mourning the loss of his comics and notices a sound at his window. A ghostly, skeletal figure hovers outside, beckoning Billy to come closer.

THE CREEP.

This character, “The Creep,” serves as the host for the rest of the stories. A wind blows one of the comic books out of the trash, the pages begin to flip, and the stories start to come to life, with the cartoon frames shading into live action. I can't really explore everything that happens in the prologue because there is a second part to it and I don't want to give it away yet/get ahead of myself, etc. But, a few interesting things should be noted. First of all, we should immediately recognize one of the most common tropes in Romero films in the plight of Billy, namely, the patented Romero-style-social-commentary about the lives of oppressed individuals (as well as those who do the oppressing). This is particularly evident in Night of the Living Dead, if we pay special attention the way race is treated in that film and the cultural events surrounding its release (race riots in most major American cities, assassination of MLK, etc.). With Billy, a similar phenomenon seems to be happening. The character is kept down by his tyrannical father, who, it is crucial to note, states his case in explicitly religious terms, claiming that God's whole purpose in creating fathers was to have them take care of stuff, protect their (who they are is never specified) way of life and their children. By extension, if we keep in mind God's typical status as Holy Father, we can assume that Stan is of the mind that HIS particular way of life is synonymous with God's. However, Billy becomes liberated by the very thing his father (again, by extension, God as well) is attempting to protect him from: The Creep, who also represents the intrusion of the supernatural (similarly, the very thing Stan invokes to justify his disciplining of his child) into the real. For Billy, the supernatural in the form of The Creep is much more real and immediate than the supernatural of his father, namely God. So here, while exploiting the typical comic book trope of generational differences, and his personal interest with repressed populations (in this case children), Romero also seems to be suggesting that perhaps the justifications at the heart of many of these disagreements (be they over trashy comics, sex, violent media, reality tv or whatever else) are merely different tokens of the same type. God is utilized to justify rejection and the world-hopping logic of escapism and immersion is utilized to justify acceptance, but both are ultimately supernatural explanations, in some sense severed from “reality” (which itself becomes a nebulous concept when all justifications become supernatural, as the bleeding of the comic book art into live action illustrates). Like I said, there is much more to say about this prologue, but much of it wouldn't make sense without the epilogue in hand, so we'll put it off until later.

The first proper story of the bunch is entitled “Father's Day” and it was written by King specifically for the film. “Father's Day” is the story of a rich family (the mother Sylvia, her son Richard, her daughter Cass, Cass's new husband Hand [played by a young, sprightly Ed Harris], and their aunt Bedelia) who has gotten together on father's day for their annual dinner, part celebration, part memorial for the family patriarch Nathan Grantham, who as murdered by one of his daughters (Bedelia) seven years previous. Nathan, we learn, was an awful father who was paranoid Stalin-style about his money and gold-diggers trying to get at it. He suspects Bedelia's fiance of conspiring to take his fortune and arranges to have him murdered, which he bills to Bedelia as a hunting accident. The death of her fiance, and her suspicion of her father sends Bedelia over the edge. She murders Nathan on father's day by bashing his head in with a marble ashtray (a prop which has a place in each of the five stories for the discerning viewer. WHO CAN FIND THEM ALL!?) as he screams at her for his father's day cake. Seven years later, she is making her annual visit to his grave on the anniversary of his murder. During this particular visit, the corpse of Nathan rises from the grave to exact revenge on his ungrateful progeny and retrieve the cake he never got. The first to go is Bedelia, who is sitting right on his grave drinking whiskey when Nathan rises up and strangles her to death, screaming hilarious obscenities about his fucking cake (for any literature buffs out there, King seems to include a nod to Finnegan's Wake here. Nathan does not rise until Bedelia spills some whiskey on his grave. As you may remember, in Joyce's novel, Finnegan falls to his death from a ladder as he works on constructing a wall, but is resurrected when whiskey is spilled on his corpse at the wake. Additionally, the word for whiskey in Gaelic roughly means “water of life”).

The family is murdered in turn as Nathan rampages around the mansion looking for his cake, culminating in an incredible finale in which the head Sylvia is presented as the centerpiece of a cake (complete with lit candles and frosting decorations) to her two children by Nathan's corpse. Besides providing some of the most memorable quotes in the whole film, I think there is a lot going on in this segment. I think the nature of returning (to an event, a place, etc.) is at the core of the story. Clearly, we have a classical revenant (a folkloric figure of the corpse who returns again and again to haunt the living) in Nathan, but the character of Bedelia is presented in a very similar light. She arrives in an old and broken down car, disheveled and distant, never making a physical appearance before the family (Ed Harris' character dies after going to look for her when she doesn't show up), all suggesting a ghostly aspect to the character. King/Romero, I think, are here getting onto something profound about our everyday lives. To what degree, we are asked by Bedelia and the family who gathers every year on the same day, are we all revenants? How much of our lives is repetition, coming back for, returning to? If we are to take Bedelia, who returns over and over again to one place and one event on one day every year, as our main example, it seems that the answer is “a great deal.” This, again, is a theme that Romero explores over and over again. Think, for example, of the living dead (a difficult and paradoxical concept that could be explored ad infinitum if we wanted to do that) who, in Dawn of the Dead, return again to the places they spent their living (a word which may not even make sense if we're talking about the living dead) days: the mall. Beyond the commentary about society obvious in this (yes consumerism blah blah), Romero, both in Dawn and here in “Father's Day” seems to be exploring the idea that we are all, at the most basic level, automata; revenants who build our lives out of the constant performing of tiny sets of rituals (holiday celebrations, morning routines, etc.). However, there does seem to be some hope. The one true revenant in the story is not after something general; he does not want to return to his daily routine as the zombies from Dawn do. Rather, Nathan is after a particular, perhaps totally unique, event and a tiny, specific item that was denied to him in life (again a problematic use of the term): a cake. Though we are all essentially creatures who live by rote, it is still the intrusion, perhaps the violent intrusion, as in Nathan's case, of specificity, uniqueness, and distinctness that makes us creatures at all.

The second story “The Lonesome Death of Jory Verrill” was adapted from King's short story “Weeds” for the film. For me this is the main event. The most interesting and dark of all the stories, it makes the film worthwhile all on its own. The story is also perhaps the simplest of all fives main stories, and features King acting brilliantly as the title character. We follow a stereotypical backwoods hick who witnesses a meteor crash into his back lawn. He dreams of selling his find to “the College” (an importantly vague entity, which we'll talk about later) for $200 to pay off his bank loan. He burns his hands trying to pick up the piping hot space artifact, and unfortunately breaks it in half when he tries to cool it off with a bucket of water, likely devaluing it (I just kept thinking “pawn stars pawn stars pawn stars”). He decides to try to sell the two halves anyway, both of which are now oozing a neon blue-green substance. After Jordy returns to his shack, we notice that everything the meteor has come near contact with is covered with a strange, green, plantlike substance. Jordy notices some strange green growths/wounds on his hands, which he attributes to the burn. Eventually, the alien vegetation moves to cover the entire house and farm, growing more clearly all over Jordy's own body.

He becomes manically itchy and can only satiate himself with a bath. By morning, Jordy has essentially been totally taken over the alien life, unable to speak or move coherently. His final act is to shoot himself in the head with a shotgun, revealing to the viewers that the plants had invaded his very brain. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Romero is famous for his social commentary (though I think he works just as well as an explorer of the human experience individually). Here, however, is by far his most powerful exploration of societal relations (I should mention that a lot credit likely ought to go to King as well), and specifically class relations (yes I include Night of the Living Dead here. Oh bring it on). The character of Jordy Verrill, as a stand in for all of the fringe elements of society (poor, insane, underdeveloped, etc.), exhibits beautifully the desperation and fear in the lives of these classes. For example, Jordy shows a profound distrust of modern, advanced society in many ways. First, we have the nebulous entity of “the college” (which we should note is explicitly conceived of as being “up” there, elevated in some way). Jordy has two visions of the college. First, he goes into the “Department of Meteors” office and demands his $200 for the meteor. The college professor tries to rip him off by offering a meager $50 for the item. Jordy stands strong, claiming that his parents didn't raise an idiot. The dichotomy between traditional folk wisdom and the modern intelligentsia is thus framed, with, as is commonly the case on the surface for the outwardly proud “folk,” the traditional wisdom winning out, and Jordy getting his deserved $200 (we need to keep in mind also that this whole episode is put in motion by Jordy's need to repay a bank loan, another common problem for the lower economic classes). However this perfect world in which Jordy gets what he actually deserves is immediately shattered when he breaks the meteor in half. His self-confidence is erased and he refers to himself as a lunkhead, illustrating the deep-seated self hatred that is commonly instilled in those that Jordy represents (Jordy also often comments on how his family's [a family that we might assume is to include all of the outcasts of society] luck is always B-A-D bad). The defiant attitude toward the college is also absent from the second vision, in which Jordy sheepishly brings in his broken meteor and is harshly rebuked by the undeniably more intelligent professor who claims that the specimen isn't even worth two cents and kicks Jordy out. Another instance of this mistrust comes when Jordy goes to call a doctor about the growths on his hands. He has a vision of entering the doctors office, which is populated by strange instruments and moving skeletal models, not to mention a menacing doctor who advises that Jordy's fingers will have to be removed and that it will be very, very painful. Jordy quickly abandons the idea of consulting modern medicine to help his ailment. This beak in knowledge and ways of life between traditional folk and, shall we call them, East coast types, is also illustrated in a short segment in which Jordy has a conversation with an image of his deceased father, who appears in a mirror and instructs Jordy not to get into the bath to ease his itching because, NO DOY, water makes weeds grow. Jordy eventually rejects his father's wisdom and enters the bath anyway, again overriding and undermining the commonsense, traditional approach. Another key to the story emerges from Jordy's conversation with his father, namely, a deep and sorrowful resignation to the hand that has been dealt to Jordy and his kind. After his father tells him that getting into the tub would be like signing his death warrant, Jordy, reverting to a child-like state, gently asks “I'm a goner already daddy, ain't I? Got that stuff out of the meteor on me and I'm gone, ain't I?” Jordy recognizes that there is literally nothing he can do to escape his life, and that he has been doomed from the beginning. Furthermore, this has been orchestrated and brought to be by forces utterly alien to Jordy's life (literally, in this case, but representative of the strange, incomprehensible forces of the stock market, governmental politics and procedures, and the like). At the same time, Jordy also recognizes that, as sorrowful as his state is, it is only getting worse and there is no remedy in site Just moments before the appearance of his father, Jordy resignedly states “I'm growing,” a statement that would seem to refer to a number of growings, e.g. the growing wealth disparity between the rich and poor, the growing numbers of jobless, etc. This resignation is also signaled by a clip from William Wellman's 1937 film A Star is Born that plays on Jordy's television as he is finally recognizing the depth of his problem. The dialogue concerns the nature of the workers of America, who turned the country into something more than a wilderness. The doers vs. the dreamers. The raw work ethic of those who went out to make a new country, realize their dreams and worked incredibly hard, not complaining, enduring the elements, etc. is praised by the old woman who is speaking for most of the conversation. At the same time, this idyllic picture of the American frontier and the protestant work ethic is sharply dismissed as a myth by Jordy when he begins screaming “NO!” as he notices the full extent of the growth outside and over his home, in exact coincidence with the woman in the film asking “Don't you understand all that?” The final straw comes when Jordy has been totally invaded by the alien growth and he lays immobile in a corner of his now totally grass shack, listening to a farm report on the radio. However, this farm report has almost nothing to do with farms as we traditionally conceive of them, but rather is a report on how farm related stocks are doing on Wall Street. It is during this broadcast that Jordy begins crying to God to let his luck finally be good just this once and shoots himself in the head. Ultimately, there is a brilliant type of reversal going on here. On its surface, the story is about how societal outcasts are viewed as, essentially, invasive species, muddying up our utopian modern lives with folk remedies and generally traditionalist ways. Indeed, Jordy, as a representative of these classes, literally becomes an invasive species. However, the film suggests that this knife cuts both ways, as Jordy only becomes invasive after himself being invaded. The alien growth seems to represent the intrusion of modern life onto Jordy's ways of doing things (as we hinted at earlier, when discussing Jordy's resignation in the face of alien forces). I think the final radio broadcast of the so-called farm report that totally ignores the concerns of real farmers out in the fields is the ultimate symbol of this takeover. Lots more could be said here, and there are certainly other ways to take this story (the environmental undertones alone could take up a whole other discussion), but we'll move on.

The third story is entitled “Something to Tide You Over” and stars Ted Danson as Harry Wentworth and Leslie Nielsen as Richard Vickers. Harry has been having an affair with Richard's wife Becky (Gaylen Ross), and so Richard goes to Harry's home to confront him about it. Instead of directly attacking Harry, Richard simply plays him a tape recording of Becky's voice. On the tape, she sounds terrified and is screaming for Harry's help. Richard gets Harry to follow him back to his private beachfront estate, and proceeds to force Harry, at gunpoint, to climb into a hole that he dug in the beach, burying him up to his neck once he gets in. Richard then sets up an elaborate television set in front of Harry's face, which shows him a live feed of Becky who has been placed in a similar situation. Richard returns to his home where he will watch the couple die from remote cameras, leaving Harry to die and watch Becky die as well. Later that night, Richard is at home, just fartin around, when he seems to hear some strange voices calling him. He gets a bit nervous, but figures anything entering his home would have been caught by his arsenal of alarms and security cameras. He takes a shower. We then are shown where the voices are coming from, two strange figures are indeed plodding around Richard's fortress, having eluded his defenses. They are shrouded in a cloud, but they sound wet. Richard emerges from the shower and hears the things. He immediately thinks that Harry must have somehow survived his little game, pulls out a gun and starts yelling (a common reaction to home invasion in film, I've found. Go figure). Eventually he discovers that the two invaders are the living corpses of Harry and Becky, all covered with seaweed and barnacles and junk.

Yikes bikes.

He shoots them, but to no avail. They converge on him, and the film ends with Richard shown buried up to his neck in sand on the beach at night. He screams about how long he can hold his breath, and the story ends. I'll be right up front about this, I think this is probably the weakest story of the bunch, from a philosophical standpoint, but I do think there are a couple things we should take note of. First, in “Something to Tide You Over” we might have on our hands the first explicit consolidation of the idea of torture porn which currently dominates the horror landscape. I mean this is pretty clear-cut. Richard is getting pleasure out of watching two people die in a torturous manner. So the film is interesting in that respect. However, there is also the added dimension that part of the porn, for Richard, is that he is watching someone WATCH SOMEONE ELSE die (specifically a loved one, here). For me this is the most interesting aspect of the film, and seems to be disturbingly prescient with respect to our current culture of voyeurism. It is no longer enough for us to watch torture or other disgusting things on our own, rather, we must also watch others watch these same things, almost as if we have to double (or triple or quadruple) our perverse satisfaction by watchings others experience what we experienced. Take a look at the dramatic rise of so-called “reaction videos” for example. These are videos that record, predictably, the reactions of individuals to other revolting or disturbing videos (many of which receive some measure of fame on the internet). So if I watch a video that makes me cringe, now I can go watch others cringe at the same video. It's a deeply strange and disturbing development in our culture, and one that seems to be presaged in “Something to Tide You Over.” In addition to this, however, the film seems to suggest that there is also a way in which the true horror of this situation escapes our view (as the shuffling phantoms escape the view of Richard's security network). Specifically, it is the idea that, more than we can realize, in viewing this type of material, and, even further, enjoying it, we ourselves come to share more with the subjects of the torture than we might be comfortable admitting. Richard, in the end, comes to share the exact same experience that he put his victims through, and there is a strange, melancholy sort of camaraderie in the voices of the drowned lovers when they beckon Richard to join them in the hole they have dug for him on the beach. Similarly, if we think a bit further about the phenomenon of reaction videos, those who are watched in a reaction video themselves become the subject of a type of torture porn. They are tortured by having to watch another being tortured, and so themselves become the subject of torture porn. It's a very desperate and bleak view on how we come to find closeness with people today in a digital age (don't even get me started), but one that I think strikes pretty close to the reality of things. When actual human contact becomes difficult, we substitute it with extreme and disturbing hypercontact, hoping to forge some type of bond, any kind at all, and it seems to me that reaction videos and torture porn have something to do with this. If I can just bury myself deep enough inside your guts, even via a digital link, we have something. There are also some interesting digs at capitalism in the film (e.g. when Richard states “On the subject of what is mine, I am not sane, at all”), and lots of moral stuff about cheating, societal expectations about relationships, etc. and I could go on about that stuff, but I think the torture porn is the meat of it, and I blew my analytical load on Jordy Verrill just a bit.

Okay next up is “The Crate” which is, I think, the longest of the segments, and probably the most traditional in terms of its story and monster, etc. but also one of the most fun. It is also the only other story based on existing short fiction written by King. The story revolves around a mysterious crate (ah HA!) that is discovered by a janitor under a staircase in a university science building. The crate is labeled as having come back from an arctic expedition in the late 1800's and has laid unopened in the building since then (shades of Horror Express abound, well only for like 2 minutes and if you're crazy). The janitor calls in Professor Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver) to examine the crate with him. Dexter leaves his friend Professor Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook) high and dry at a faculty gathering to go examine the find. Henry's wife Wilma (Adrienne Barbeau) , we can't help but notice, is an insufferable bitch and Henry spends most of his time daydreaming about how to murder her, often doing so to loud applause from those around him. Back at the university, Dexter and janitor Mike attempt to open the crate, hearing strange sounds coming from inside. They finally get the thing open and Mike is promptly attacked, dragged inside, and ATEN. We get our first appearance of the monster, which is big, round, shaggy and nasty lookin (kind of reminds me of the iconic Zuni fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror, an earlier American horror anthology from 1975, but again, this might only hold if you're stupid). Dexter is, understandably, fuckin flipping, and runs out into the hallway to find someone to tell about it. He attempts to convince grad student Charlie Gereson (Robert Harper) of what he has just seen, and finally gets Charlie to investigate himself. When they return to the scene of the crime, the crate is gone, and there is a trail of blood leading back underneath the staircase. Charlie checks it out and then checks out of this life BECAUSE HE GETS EATEN. Now Dexter is really tweaking, and he is too scared to go to the police, so he goes to Henry's house. He tells Henry the whole story, and Henry inexplicably believes every word. Henry gets a bright idea, gives Dexter some sleeping pills, locks him in his study, and leaves Wilma (who was out for the night) a note with a bogus story to lure her to campus (the story involves a student who Dexter was boinking and who is now freaking out and needs a woman to talk to, etc.). Henry gets the building early and cleans up all the blood and guts so Wilma won't be tipped off that anything super creepy is going on. Wilma shows up and Henry gets her under the stairs (the girl is SERIOUSLY freaking out). When she sees that nobody is there she starts bitching and then the frozen ape monster jumps out and eats the shit out of her. Henry then manages to chain the crate up and dumps it in an old quarry/lake. The next morning he and Dexter vow to keep everything secret, because they're tight like that and Wilma was seriously a bitch. The film ends by showing the creature blowing up the crate underwater and, we assume, escaping.

Crate Monster vs. Zuni fetish doll vs. Horror Express yaaaaaa

I think that the film is interesting for its presentation of the professor characters. One of the most prevalent stereotypes in contemporary American society is of the sort of austere, above-it-all, nearly monk-like life of the mind lived by college professors and intellectuals in general. Now I don't know if you know anything about college professors, but fairly often, they're among the most petty, short tempered, sexually deviant people you will ever come across (no offense to all the college professors reading this, yea right roflolmaomg2g). I think the film does a pretty honest and funny job of putting the stereotypical college professor through the ringer. To get a bit more specific, the neuroses that the two professors have in the film are particularly biting considering what they study. Dexter, who is supposed to be some kind of professor of science (biology maybe?) would stereotypically be hard-headed, logical, methodical, Spock, etc. and yet he is quickly reduced to a stammering street guy covered in blood when he is presented with something he cannot explain. To me this seems like a bit of a dig at the so called “objectivity” of science, and a questioning of the idea that science is truly open to any and all new information. That is to say, Romero might be suggesting that there are some inherent, unacknowledged biases within the scientific enterprise itself that, for example dictate what is admissible as evidence in the first place and what is allowable as possible. Science cannot account for the creature in the crate, and is thrown immediately into disarray. In Henry's case, he is a professor English, which has less of a clear cut stereotype attached to it, but I would say something about romance (Romeo and Juliet, romantic poetry, etc.) and having a better idea about love than most people would be pretty close. This is totally undermined by Henry's totally baffled and miserable relationship with his wife, and his murderous inclinations toward her. I think it might be natural to get nervous about the seemingly negative attitude the film takes towards women, presenting Wilma as the typical nagging bitch wife who is good for nothing but monster feed, but for me the focus is more on the fact that it is Henry, a distinguished intellectual, who feels this way, and the implications that has for the rest of society. That is to say, if those among us who are supposed to be our best and brightest are miserable and daydream about shooting their wives, what hope have we?

The last of the five main stories is entitled “They're Creeping Up on You!” and stars E.G. Marshall as Upson Pratt, a bitter, angry millionaire business owner who lives sequestered in his hyper-sterilized, technologically advanced super apartment, isolated from the rest of the world below. Pratt is basically a bubble boy, terrified of any kind of dirt, disease or animal life. His only interaction with the rest of the world comes through his telephone and an intercom system he uses to contact anyone who might be outside his apartment (mailman, doorman, etc.). Pratt receives a phone call informing him that a former employee (Norman Castonmeyer) has committed suicide due to being fired, news that Pratt rejoices at for not having to worry about the former employee complaining to him etc. He's kind of a dick. Pratt, throughout the film, keeps finding cockroaches around his apartment and spraying them with pesticide. He places a call to the building super, pelting him with racially charged language in an attempt to get him to fix the cockroach problem. He keeps finding the bugs and later receives a call from Castonmeyer's widow Lenore (perhaps a reference to Poe's The Raven), who curses Pratt for driving her husband to suicide. Pratt is, predictably, amused by her hysterics and hangs up on her. The cockroaches begin showing up in more and more places in larger numbers, including in his blender, in his cereal boxes, etc. The power goes out and Pratt goes into hiding in his safe room, which, I guess, is SUPER sanitized and sealed off. Once inside, he gets another phone call from Lenore, who screams at him that she hopes he dies over and over. As this is happening the bed breaks open to reveal that it was filled with roaches. Pratt is overcome by the bugs, has a heart attack, and dies on the spot.

His doorbell rings and the voice of the building super comes over the intercom, asking Pratt “Bugs got your tongue?” The roaches burst forth from inside Pratt's body and fill up the glass room. Basically, the story acts as an inverted Jordy Verrill tale, telling the other end of the social narrative. As in the Verrill, Pratt is overrun by an invasive species, which we can take as being the lower social classes that Pratt has gone to such lengths to isolate himself from. Also, like Verrill, Pratt essentially becomes that which invades him, emphasizing the point made in the earlier story that the status as invasive social species can be as readily applied to those at the top of the hierarchy as it can to those at the bottom. The film also seems to suggest that the more one attempts to maintain the barriers between these social classes, as Pratt does by totally isolating himself, the more there will be violent breakings down of those barriers (I refer back to my comments about Night of the Living Dead). Pratt is only fully invaded at the exact moment that he attempts to fully isolate himself. The disembodied voice of the super represents the revenge of all of the oppressed social classes against the manipulation of individuals such as Pratt. At the same time, however, there is an interesting dynamic there because in very basic terms, the super has power over Pratt, because he controls what goes on in the building, where Pratt is only a tenant. So, while the upper classes have control of all the traditional avenues of power (economic, political, etc.) there do exist these strange lapses in the capitalist logic that allow for individuals of a lower social status to gain some control over the lives of those above them on the social ladder. The utilization of a pest (the cockroach) in the film points the idea that if enough of these small cracks in capitalism are exploited, a much larger result could possibly be gained. Again, as in the story of Verrill, a popular myth about the development of American culture, namely the eccentric yet benevolent businessman who lives in an ivory tower (Pratt's apartment is literally pure white) about the rest of the world, is sent up the flagpole and exposed.

The film wraps up with the conclusion to the prologue. The morning after his father threw out Billy's comics, two garbage men (played by Marty Schiff and Tom Savini) find them in the trash and flip through them nostalgically. They notice that an order form for a genuine Haitian voodoo doll has been cut out. We go back inside Billy's house to see his father Stan suffering from some sudden neck pain. We see Billy up in his room stabbing a voodoo doll with a pin. This ending to the prologue represents, first the final statement on the part of the oppressed against the oppressor, and second, a somewhat pessimistic final note that maybe the best we can do against oppressive systems is voodoo. However, this need not be totally pessimistic, as we discussed earlier the possibility of the supernatural encroaching upon the real, a possibility which is validated further here by the fact that Billy's voodoo actually works. I think this is an important lesson to be drawn from the film's ending. Maybe all we have is voodoo, but voodoo actually works.

A couple notes. 1) I don't know if all my posts will be this long. Maybe they will. I had a lot to say about this movie. 2) Sorry for my awful paragraph organization. I just write stuff and then write some other stuff. 3) Stay tuned for the next post, which will be about.....probably Rose Hobart.

Comment. Let me know if you liked this, if it was too long, if you think Creepshow still sucks, if I have no idea what I'm talking about, if my jokes didn't work, or if I have a sexy internet voice.

SEEYANEXTIME

The Idea of the Project-Criteria etc.

So everyone knows about the (in)famous "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die" list/book, right? It's sort of become the gold standard of movie lists, with people devoting whole lives, blogs, etc. to exploring it and seeing as many of the movies on it as possible. That's fine. As any movie person will tell you, making and (especially) arguing about lists is one of the most important and enjoyable things to do with movies (it may even be better than watching them). Basically, this blog will be an indulgence of that tendency within myself to the umpteenth degree. The original 1001 list is not a bad list, and if you watch all the movies on it, you'll have seen some quality film at the end. BUT you'll also have missed at least as much quality as you've found. I want to present an alternative list of 1001 films that either should have made the original cut over some of the one's that are on the list (seriously, you MUST see M*A*S*H, Kramer vs. Kramer, Bull Durham, and Meet the Parents before you die? I feel like I could have gone without those, personally), or you should just fucking watch anyway. Okay, so I'll move on to a quick FAQ (or what I assume some questions that would frequently be asked might be if anyone were to ask me questions about this) about the details of what is going on here.

Q: Do you know that like 10,000 other people have already done this, and it sucked?
A: Yes.

Q: Why won't yours suck too?
A: You'll just have to trust me on this one

Q: What are the criteria for being included on the list?
A: Be a good movie. Don't be on the original list. Also, I'm going to try to avoid just dumping a bunch of movies from one director onto the list to eat up space. I could just say, "Oh you should see every Herzog movie" and do write ups for all of them separately, but I won't do that. I also won't just pick alternative movies from directors already represented on the original list, though if I think a director with a film on the original list did some other work that is either equal to or even better than the film on the OL, I won't hesitate to include it.

Q: Do you have any qualifications for this type of thing whatsoever?
A: No. I just watch a lot of movies.

Q: How will you organize the list?
A: I won't. I'll post the movies in whichever order I feel the urge to. I, for one, hate when movie lists are organized by year, but I don't have a better way, so I just won't bother. If somebody wants to do that when they publish this list as a best-selling book, that's fine though.

Q: How often will you post?
A: Any answer I give you would be totally arbitrary and would probably not hold up after like two weeks. I want to say daily, but that is almost definitely too ambitious, so I'll say probably like 2-3 times a week.

Q: What will the content of the posts be?
A: Data about the movie (year released, director, maybe country, maybe the main cast, shit like that). A VERY short synopsis. Analysis and explanation of why it rules.

Q: Why are all these movies horror and exploitation?
A: Come on, they aren't ALL horror and exploitation, but I love horror and exploitation movies and I think that they get ignored a lot of the time and it's a shame. There is almost always a shit ton going on in those movies that people overlook. So that's why. Just trying to rep.

Q: Why don't you ever like, you know, talk about actual film stuff like camera angles, lighting, plot continuity, epicness, etc.?
A: Because I don't usually care.

Q: What do you care about?
A: Blood, guts, and good ideas.

Q: Do you want to get internet famous?
A: No doy.

Q: Why is this blog so fucking ugly? Can you fix it?
A: I don't know and no. Can you? If so you can tell me how.

Q: What is that banner picture from?
A: The Town That Dreaded Sundown. He's going to stab her with a knife attached to a trombone. Look for a post on it at some future date, obvi.

Leave any other questions in the comments or whatever. Stay tuned for the first post later tonight or tomorrow. Hint: It'll be about Creepshow.