The Cronenberg Series Part 1: The Mad Dermatologist

In 1969 and 1970, David Cronenberg began his career as a feature filmmaker with two movies, each coming out to about an hour-long each, called Stereo and Crimes of the Future.  I use the word "career" advisedly, because while Cronenberg seems proud of both films, in editor Chris Rodley's book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, he says they're "not films to build a career on," and that they "were a dead end for me."  As good or bad, depending on your take, as Stereo and Crimes of the Future are, it's not hard to understand what Cronenberg means -- you can't watch either film, let alone both, and imagine the director using them as a resume' to help finance his next project, and begin to make a living making movies, which is the distinction Cronenberg himself makes.  But regardless, these are his first two films, what he himself would consider the beginning (there were short films before this, which, with a selection of his TV work, I hope to get to later in this series).  And they're joined at the hip, pairing off together in a way that almost seems deliberate, though some of their peculiarities, such as, or especially, the absence of dialogue or synchornized sound, the only words spoken coming through extensive narration, were, according to Rodley, decisions made in part for practical, budget-and-equipment reasons.  Still, again, they both time out at about an hour, they both use narration to the exclusion of the on-screen actors speaking to one another, they're both about science (in the way that science fiction is often about science, by which I mean, satirical, critical, cold, and nervous), and they're both balls-out crazy.  This is to be expected, being the work of David Cronenberg and all, though even with all the madness that has followed over the course of his over forty years making movies, Stereo and Crimes of the Future manage to stand alone.  They're experimental in a way that even Naked Lunch and Crash don't try to be.  Somehow, Cronenberg has managed to build a career on films like those two, but not these two.

Speaking of Crash, but not really Crash...speaking of J. G. Ballard, rather, and I've said this many times before, it is frankly baffling to me that Cronenberg and Ballard only ever joined their creative forces once.  I don't think I've ever before encountered two artists from different mediums who so directly compliment each other.  In Cronenberg on Cronenberg, the filmmaker says of Ballard "We're so amazingly in sync.  We completely understand what we're both doing."  Yet Cronenberg has only adapted Crash.  Perhaps to keep returning to that well would seem almost too on the nose, I don't know, but it almost doesn't matter because so much of Cronenberg's early films that will seem recognizable to anyone who has read at least a couple handfuls-worth of Ballard's novels.  There's a lot of Ballard's High Rise in Cronenberg's Shivers, for example (which I only bring up now rather than in the next post so that I won't seem to be beating this particular dead horse too severely), but I'd like to make clear that I don't believe either man is deliberately pilfering from the work of the other.  I believe and agree with Cronenberg that it's simply a matter of he and Ballard being remarkably in sync.  To get to the point, Antoine Rouge, Crimes of the Future's unseen "mad dermatologist," feels like something Ballard never realized he'd invented, and therefore never go around to planting in the jungle of a world dying by crystallization in The Crystal World, or as the centerpiece for one of the stories from Vermilion Sands.  In any case, the upshot of all this is, watching Crimes of the Future and, to a lesser extent, Stereo are very Ballardian experiences.

So, to double back so that I might do this chronologically, Stereo takes the shape of a report, almost, on the results of an experiment conducted by scientists from The Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry (that's a J. G. Ballard-type institute if I ever heard one). The subjects of the experiment are a group of young telepaths. The thesis has been provided by an unseen and mysterious parapsychologist named Luther Stringfellow. The experiment itself, and the results thereof, are laid out step by step through monotonously clinical narration by the scientists themselves, whom, it probably goes without saying, we never see. We do see the telepaths going about their tedious daily business, which involves games, staring into the distance, and sex. Sex being key, and the hoped for, and even enforced, bisexuality among the group. The idea being that these telepaths, employing their unique gifts, and aided by the insular nature of their environment, will form their own society. And so they do, of a sort. But eventually the humanity being messed with leads to I guess we'll call them setbacks.

Shot in black and white by Cronenberg himself, Stereo, like Crimes of the Future, is a dense and complex hour. It's ambitious and even confident -- how many young filmmakers would assume they could make something like this play? It does play, too, though my experience was that it worked best as a tumble of images -- the silent opening shot of a helicopter landing on the grounds of the institute is especially captivating -- depicting the slow destruction of the psyches of the subjects by their unfeeling, or anyway indifferent, hosts. The narration works best when it's joining the images and keeping the tone cold and removed even as things fall apart. About Stereo, Cronenberg tells Chris Rodley:

"It was partly my own strange feelings about the academic life and the life of psychology. I never studied it, but I had friends who did; that attempt to somehow control, by understanding, very subtle and complex things. Maybe impossible, and also funny, but worthwhile trying. And sociology: the way it tries to trap phenomenon with words."

If this, to Cronenberg, is funny, he's got a strange way of showing it. But his larger point, about controlling complex things through the act of understanding, comes through, yet what he leaves unsaid, and what came through most clearly to me while watching the film was the inability of the narrating scientists to understand in some key areas what their experiments are doing to the subjects. Their voices express no bafflement or even concern when things go tits up -- probably because a strict adherence to the scientific method can result in anything but results, whatever they may be -- and they clearly do understand on some levels what's going on with the female telepath who turns her consciousness inside out in an attempt to keep her true self private, ultimately at the cost of her own mind, but they don't understand life outside of a lab environment. They can't understand true communities and be so intrusive and manipulative. And while I said before that at a certain point things fall apart, the truth is everything does not fall apart within this group of telepaths. For some, yes, but one of the interesting things about Stereo is that it doesn't end in some grand conflagration. It ends with some private and individual conflagrations, but from a scientific point of view perhaps what remains is the answer.

Though the Cronenberg quote excerpted above doesn't appear to be seething with anger, Stereo does nevertheless strike me as enormously critical not of science, exactly, but of scientific remove, and of scientific myopia. Historically, labs are pretty cold and unforgiving places, after all. Similarly, the narration is appropriately dry, even satirically so, although, really, "dry" doesn't cut it. Which is a problem, for me at least. If part of what Cronenberg had in mind was to sock academia a good one in the jaw, and I believe it was a consideration, he perhaps succeeded too well. Academia, as I think we all know, has a habit of taking what interests it and presenting those interests in the most hideously turgid way possible, and Cronenberg's narration nails that. Okay, but in my long ago and not-at-all-lamented days of reading academic prose, my eyes had a tendency to slide right off the page so they could stare at a naked light bulb or something. Watching Stereo reproduced a similar result, but with my brain this time. The narration became a hum, in other words, and I could imagine the scientists turning off their recorders and the end of a day of narration and going to sleep standing up in the corner of an empty room, only to wake up, eat a breakfast of white bread and water, and starting up all over again.

To the extent that there is one, Ronald Mlodzik is the star of Stereo. He takes the same role, but much less ambiguously, in Crimes of the Future. Cronenberg says that Mlodzik was a major influence on both Stereo and Crimes of the Future. In the Rodley book, he describes Mlodzik as "a very elegant gay scholar, an intellectual who was studying at Massey College" whose "medieval gay sensibility" -- and "medieval" is also how Cronenberg describes both Mlodzik's Catholicism and his sense of style -- "very directly connects to [Cronenberg's] aesthetic sense of [Mlodzik's] space..." So there's that. It is true, though, that Mlodzik cuts a very alarming figure in Crimes of the Future, not explicitly medieval but I think I know what Cronenberg means by that. In Crimes of the Future Mlodzik plays Adrian Tripod (which, okay), the protege of the deceased mad dermatologist, Adrian Rouge. Rouge was the founder of The House of Skin, a kind of hospital that caters to patients suffering from vague, but apparently severe, skin ailments brought about by modern cosmetics (I'm telling you, Ballard is everywhere). Rouge's real legacy, however, is Rouge's Malady, a terrible disease, the victims of which Rouge was Patient Zero. The most notable symptom is the discharge of a white foam. The second most notable symptom, or maybe this is the first most notable symptom, is death. About halfway through the film, we learn that Rouge's Malady has taken the lives of "hundreds of thousands of women."

In a weird way, Crimes of the Future is a plot-heavy film, but it's the kind of plot that piles up the strange incidents and information on the way to a cumulative psychological result, rather than an A-to-B-to-C cause and effect story. Though at first Crimes of the Future seems like it will be about the goings on at The House of Skin, Tripod will soon travel away from there and on to The Institute for Neo-Venereal Disease, where he discovers a former colleague is quietly growing a series of strange and functionless new organs, which are removed and jarred. From there, Tripod hooks up with the Oceanic Podiatry Group and takes part in their homoerotic, foot-based therapy, and through all that finds himself a member of a cult of "heterosexual pedophiles." Based on what we've seen up to this point, neither "heterosexual" nor "pedophile" would seem to describe Adrian Tripod, but as we proceed there the audience is given some reason to believe that he is in fact turned on by whatever. Which would further link this film to the "polymorphous perversity" of Stereo. In any case, the goal of this cult of heterosexual pedophiles is both described by how they identify themselves, and specifically centered around one particular little girl. Hence, I believe, the "crimes" part of our title here, except is it? The world of Crimes of the Future is either a version of a post-apocalypse where some societal function remains but everyone has gone insane, or it's pre-apocalypse: almost all the women are dead, and perhaps continue to die at a rapid clip as we watch Adrian Tripod stumble through this queasy nonsense. But what order? What crime?

Crimes of the Future is narrated by Adrian Tripod, and what's interesting to me, when paired off with Stereo, is how his voice attempts to achieve the detachment of the scientist narrators of that earlier film, but can't actually manage it. Alarming figure though Mlodzik may cut as Tripod, he is nevertheless quite human; it is however possible that he doesn't fully understand that. Much as he'd like to study what's going on, and as much as he seems convinced that's all he's doing, he becomes absorbed in the proceedings. Some of those proceedings add up to not much. The Oceanic Podiatry Group therapy, for example, seems to me to be nothing but a joke, one whose punchline is "This is weird, right?" It strikes me as the kind of thing Tom Robbins would think was funny. Regardless of that, that cumulative psychological result I mentioned earlier is quite something, and the final moments of the film are among the most disturbing of Cronenberg's quite disturbing career. Except! Reading through Cronenberg on Cronenberg, Cronenberg does say something about the ending that I can't say I picked up on. The evidence for it -- and obviously Cronenberg knows how his film ends, but the evidence for it that he provides to the audience as described in Rodley's book doesn't communicate this vital element all that clearly, as far as I'm concerned. Which I suppose is not in itself the problem, but it does render the hideousness of what we can infer happens after the film ends far more abstract and fantastical, and therefore somewhat...I can't find it within myself to say less hideous. But inexplicable, certainly, which cuts into the hideousness. So...what crime? Perhaps this is the idea. I don't know. I do know that as much as Cronenberg has happily categorized many of his more famous early work as horror films, it's become more and more apparent to me that he is probably the foremost science fiction filmmaker of the past forty years. And when the horror is there, as it often is, Cronenberg is merging the genres in a way that bears a much more striking resemblance to how science fiction works than to how we've come to think horror works, on film anyway. That is to say, the subgenre science-fiction horror commonly presents itself as monsters in space, and instead of the monster killing, one by one, people who live in an apartment building, they pick off, one by one, people who are astronauts. Cronenberg's unique hybrid of the genres finds the horror part elaborating on something that is known in the world, something either meant to be benign or known to be malignant -- in Stereo, perhaps it's the scientific method; in Crimes of the Future, maybe pedophilia -- and imagining how such a thing would exist under extreme circumstances. A simplified definition of science fiction, perhaps, but with telepaths in Stereo and an absence of adult women in Crimes of the Future, everything begins to tip over.

Maybe the most curious thing about these two films, when set against all the films Cronenberg would subsequently make, is their visual style. Yes, they're very static, by design, but in terms of composition they feel actually rather more advanced than, say, Shivers and Rabid. Those movies can be fairly clumsy at times, and while Cronenberg has grown into one of the most elegant directors working today, you can see him clawing his way there, from Shivers on. But in Stereo and Crimes of the Future, the elegance is already there. It's a curious thing I can't quite figure out. Cronenberg has never been known as a blatant stylist, but his work 1969 and 1970 would seem to indicate a course set in that direction. But as he said, he had to reset after that, in order to build a career. Maybe that has something to do with it. Whatever happened, Shivers, a film I like more than either Stereo or Crimes of the Future, finds him starting from scratch. It's fascinating to watch him start again.

Psychoplasmics: An Introduction

In the February 1987 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, in his film column "Harlan Ellison's Watching," Ellison dropped a little announcement of sorts, stating that in his next column he would begin an in-depth study of the film's of David Cronenberg.  Cronenberg, he said, alone among the "wise guy directors currently assaulting us, had "the intellectual virility and talent to become sui generis" and had "become a writer/director with a voice and a view of the world that could be as important, in its own bizarre way, as that of Hitchcock, Ford, Wilder, or Woody Allen."  Ellison's next column was published that April, and it wasn't about Cronenberg.  The problem, Ellison said, was that he was trying to track down Cronenberg's early films -- specifically, Stereo, Crimes of the Future, and Shivers -- not to mention the uncut version of The Brood, all of which, at that time, were rare items.  Ellison next mentioned the project in his July '87 column, but all he said in that case was that he was still working on it.  If you know anything about Harlan Ellison, you'll know that the fact that his following sentence included a status update on The Last Dangerous Visions sort of metaphorically tells the tale of where you might hope to find his completed in-depth study of the films of David Cronenberg.

I bring all this up not to ding Harlan Ellison, really, though he's a writer I've been at war with in my own head for about twenty years now (he is likely unaware of this).  But way back when I was reading Harlan Ellison's Watching, a collection of Ellison's film writing published in 1989, and I came across that original announcement, I thought something along the lines of "Oh good."  So my subsequent trip to that book's index, only to discover that the number of pages in which Cronenberg was referenced tapered off drastically, with no range of pages -- say, 372 - 381, or something -- anywhere to be found under his entry, was quite a disappointment.  But the seed, at least of desire, for such project was planted.  Which is somewhat counterintuitive when you consider that back then I wouldn't have called myself a fan of David Cronenberg.  I would have liked The Dead Zone, and would remember how the ending of The Fly had left me weeping, but other than that I'd found Cronenberg off-putting, weird to no end I could see, plus some other stupid things I can no longer remember.  Yet I thought about him a lot, and was curious enough to be excited to read a long essay about him by a writer I admired.  It would still take a long time for me to get to where I am now.  In case you don't know where that is, my last post should give you some idea.

Undoubtedly, a near-endless number of long essays and career-overviews about David Cronenberg have been written since Ellison bailed on his, but I haven't read them.  There's no use trying to figure out why, mostly because it would just reveal me to be some kind of sourpuss or something, but I can say that it has something to do with not much liking the way most people write about David Cronenberg.  That doesn't mean there's not something terrific out there, but if there is I don't know about it.  And I haven't spent any time at all looking, which sounds smug and dismissive, but in truth it's just, well, the truth.  I might rescue myself from charges of smug dismissiveness by pointing out that I have wanted to write a career overview of David Cronenberg for a very long time, certainly longer than the five months Ellison spent teasing his own, and the specific seed for that, at least the idea to do a career overview of somebody, was planted in 2006, when Dennis Cozzalio began his Robert Altman project.  I really enjoyed that series, and it was exactly the kind of thing I wanted film bloggers, among whose number I could not then count myself, to be writing.  Then later I started this blog, and would sporadically remember that I was free to write this sort of thing myself.  And so, a mere five years later, here we are.

This announcement -- which is what this is, I'm going to write a career-overview series on the films of David Cronenberg, by the way -- functions primarily as insurance that I will follow through.  When I hit "publish" in a few minutes, I'll be locked in.  I have available to me all the films Ellison had to dig for, and while this announcement has been postponed due to certain research materials not arriving when they should have, everything is now squared away.  Which, yes, I'll be using research material.  Sort of.  I'm going to be pulling information and quotes from two reference sources:  Cronenberg on Cronenberg, edited by Chris Rodley and originally published by Faber & Faber in 1992, and then in a revised and updated form in 1997 (I'll be using the 1997 edition); and David Cronenberg:  Interviews with Serge Grünberg, published by Plexus in 2006.  I chose these books, and these books only, because I want only Cronenberg to influence my thinking about his strange films, if anyone's going to.  It's also my plan to read the three novels Cronenberg has adapted into films that I haven't already read, the possibility of squeezing that kind of thing into the course of the series being increased by the fact that I'll be writing and posting these pieces whenever I damn well please.  Not that I expect this to take all that long, but I'm not going to rush it, either.  Each piece will take things as I think they should best be taken, which will mean some films will be written about in pairs -- certain phases of Cronenberg's career allow for this quite smoothly -- while others will stand alone.  There won't be any unifying structure here, unless there is.  I don't know.  Planning is not my strong suit.

But if I don't post this now, I could very well find an excuse not to post it tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on.  So here it goes.  The first post could go up as soon as next week.  I might have another post, which will have nothing to do with David Cronenberg, go up before that, which is the other thing about this -- this series will be on-going, but I won't be neglecting anything else I might want to write about until it's done.  I'll write about Cronenberg when I want to write about Cronenberg, and I'll write about whatever else when I want to write about whatever else.  Not that you care, but I just want to be clear about how this is going to work.

So that's how it's going to work.  Stay tuned.  Ha ha ha to Videodrome or whatever!

Cronenberg

My Kickstarter Campaign

Kickstarter is a "crowdmoney" website that provides artists such as myself the means, nay, the obligation, to figuratively walk up to members of their public and say "I want to do something.  Do you have between five and eight thousand dollars?"  The answer, alarmingly, is usually "Yes," so with that in mind I have decided to get in on this.  It's my understanding that people who fund their projects through Kickstarter usually offer incentives, or rewards, to those who donate money, and the greatness of the reward is exactly equal to the amount donated by a particular person.  So my thing right now is, I can't figure out how Kickstarter's website works (I'm currently hung up on the "Learn More" button -- I'm like "Huh??"), but I'd really like to get the money soon, so I'm going to post here what you, my future donors, can expect to receive as a reward.

Project Name:  I Don't Know, Maybe a Book or Something? Details Pending

Donation/Reward Tier Chart:

$10 donation - When I get your money, you will be able to see that the amount of money donated has increased by $10.

$20 donation - Does Kickstarter have a comments section? I'm not that far into it yet so I don't know, but if it does all donors of $20 will get a personal message in the comments section that reads "thx [YOUR NAME]."

$50 donation - Should you and I ever pass each other on the street, I will acknowledge your presence with a single nod of my head.

$100 donation - A letter, written on notebook paper, dictated but not read by me, that will say something to the effect of "If you can afford to donate $100, surely you can afford to donate $150."

$150 donation - A letter, written on notebook paper, dictated but not read by me, that will say something to the effect of "That's more like it."

$300 donation - I will personally come to your home.  You can show me around your town if you want, but I think it would be more fun to just hang out at your place.  Watch some TV.  IMPORTANT:  If you have dogs, they must be locked up for the duration of my visit.  IMPORTANT:  If you have children, don't even bother donating $300.  Donate $500 and spare me the hassle.

$500 donation - I will buy you an Arby's sandwich of your choice, from either the "Roast Beef" or "Turkey Roasters" portion of their menu.  Before you even think of asking me about their Ultimate Angus or Market Fresh sandwiches, maybe first ask yourself if I could just buy any random schmo an Arby's Three Cheese and Bacon Ultimate Angus, why would I even need Kickstarter in the first place. (PLEASE NOTE:  You will need to eat your sandwich on the bus on the way home.  Alone, I might add.  I have a book to write or maybe a movie? The possibilities are endless with your generous donation!)

$1000 donation - You will get to sit next to me for one half hour on three consecutive days (that's a half hour each day!) and watch me create.  Let's say I'm writing a book.  Depending on when you get here, you might see me open up Microsoft Word and contemplate which combination of words I should use to begin my work.  Or if you're there during the middle of the day, I might have chosen to take a break from writing.  I could be watching a movie, I might not even be home.  Should the latter be the case, you will sit by my computer until the half hour is up, and then you will leave.  You are being monitored. (I WILL NOT PROVIDE SNACKS)

$2000 donation - You will be able to have a say on my book or movie's title!  I might ask you, "Well what about On the Eve of April's Dawning?"  And brother, you had better answer "That sounds great!" (SNACKS PROVIDED)

So there you go!  LOOK AT WHAT YOU COULD BE A PART OF!  Remember that rich broad who kept giving James Joyce money?  She won't be shit compared to you!  LET'S KICKSTART THIS MOTHER!

Those Who Are Lost in the World of the Tower Apartments

Well, this is more like it, or it's near enough to being more like it that I'm not about to complain all that strenuously.  I'm referring to the films of Jean Rollin, which, when last I checked in with thoughts, had found my enthusiasm for the man and his work dampened somewhat by the not-at-all-interesting-in-fact-pretty-bad Zombie Lake and Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, those two having just been released to Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.  Kino Lorber is at it again, though, with the releases tomorrow of Rollin's The Grapes of Death and Night of the Hunted, two films he made while in the middle of his run as a director of porn films.  I'd have said something like "while lost in the wilderness of porn," or something equally evocative, which is to say "not very evocative," except that at least one of those films, Phantasmes from 1975, is a film Rollin took as seriously as any of the many other brilliant horror films we all know and love him for (so I learned from the essay by Tim Lucas included with both Blu-rays).  That's also the only porn film Rollin put his own name on, so maybe otherwise he did consider porn to be a wilderness -- the softcore Schoolgirl Hitchhikers certainly didn't indicate much interest in that form.  But what do I know.  Maybe Kino Lorber will get around to Phantasmes some day, too.  In any case, and speaking of "what do I know?", here we have these two films, from 1978 and 1980 respectively, and if neither one struck me as quite worthy of Rollin at his best -- a statement that implies far more negativity than I'd like --  it could be to tread on very thin ice to try and make much of anything out of that particular thought, in terms of how Rollin was earning most of his money at the time, because sandwiched in between The Grapes of Death and Night of the Hunted is another "pure" Rollin film, the one called Fascination, which might well be his masterpiece. So subjectivity, and all that stuff.

Night of the Hunted - But, you know…sorry, I’m taking these in reverse chronological order, plus I’m going to get hung up on something slightly irrelevant, but, you know, how good, as a movie, can Phantasmes really be?  I’ve seen a few of the somewhat current almost-trend of arthouse films that contain scenes of unsimulated sex, and it’s difficult for me to take, for instance, 9 Songs seriously as a real, like, movie-type movie.  And that one wasn’t even filmed as porn, stylistically speaking, which I can only assume Phantasmes was.  This is all perhaps my own hang up, though I assure you whatever hang up it is, if it is one, is not Puritanical in nature.  I just think the concept of 9 Songs is stupid, and, further, I think the whole idea of unsimulated sex in regular movies with actors in them is usually backed by a juvenile impulse masquerading as “Well why can’t we just be honest?” art-douche posturing.  Then again there’s Antichrist, a film I like a great deal, which comes very close to justifying its own compliment of brief hardcore sex scenes.  That doesn’t mean they’re not backed by the same juvenile impulse – this is Lars von Trier we’re talking about, after all – but they do provide certain events towards that film’s end with with a certain explicit causality. If you get me.

Anyway, I bring all this up in relation to Rollin’s non-hardcore Night of the Hunted, partly because certain questions along these lines are, I think, unavoidable when talking about his films, and European horror of a certain era in general, and partly because I wonder how similar this film, and other Rollin films like The Demoniacs, might be in terms of style, structure, and the employment of their sexual component, to Phantasmes, a film I might as well confess to really wanting to see.  What I’m getting at here, as far as Night of the Hunted goes, is that all of the sex and much of the ancillary nudity in the film is entirely gratuitous, to the point of being goofy, and it feels almost entirely removed from the action of the film.  The film stars Brigitte Lahaie as Elisabeth, who we first see running in a hospital gown down a highway at night, where she is picked up by Robert (Vincent Gardere), a good man who genuinely only wants to help this woman who, it turns out, is suffering from a terrible form of amnesia that allows her to remember scraps of what she was running from, but not why, or anything before that, or, just a bit later, back in Robert’s home, how she came to meet him.  It will turn out that she escaped a scientific/medical facility known as The Black Tower, along with a young nude woman named Veronique (Dominique Journet), in which are housed dozens of men and women suffering from the same affliction as Elisabeth.  When Elisabeth is inevitably dragged back to The Black Tower, she and Veronique, who has also been re-captured, almost immediately embark on another escape attempt.

The strange environment of The Black Tower, the escape attempt, and the aftermath are the whole film, which is of course plenty, though that escape attempt takes up the bulk of it.  As a result, that strange environment becomes the show, a not unusual approach from Rollin – it includes, most affectingly, stories of despairing patients who practically beg anyone nearby to tell them who they are.  The best of these involves a woman asking if anyone knows the name of her daughter – the fact that she has one is the only memory she retains.  It’s a wonderful scene, and it reminded me very strongly but also very vaguely of another scene in another movie, which I have thus far been entirely unable to pinpoint.  So this is either a false memory, or I’ve just lost the thread.  Either way, pretty fitting.  Also included are scenes of sexual violence, or sex that becomes violent, which adds a hint, as Tim Lucas notes, of Cronenberg’s Shivers from 1975.  The big difference there, though, is that in Shivers those scenes relate directly to what that film is.  In Night of the Hunted, all Rollin offers is the information that the severe memory loss is merely a step towards total mental disintegration, which itself can reasonably be said to lead to the sexual violence.  But that doesn’t make those scenes of the film.  To some degree, that element of the film exists because Rollin knew he might be forced to market the film as a softcore sex movie.

Despite how it might sound, I mean none of this as a judgment against the film, or not in any condescending or moralizing way.  But it’s a reality of Rollin’s career that I find interesting -- and which I would find a good deal less interesting if I didn’t think he was so brilliant – that I see no reason not to acknowledge as an occasional barrier to hurdle.  Night of the Hunted at its best is nowhere near Rollin at his best – and, again, as noted by Tim Lucas, Rollin would agree with me about that – but it does have a quiet, dreamy menace to it.  There’s something reminiscent of J. G. Ballard to all this, too, with this giant modern office building containing within it obscure and abstract dangers presented as, and possibly even literally existing as, a cure for something even more obscure and abstract.  There’s a heavy dose of politics in here, which Lucas lays out in his essay much better than I could, any in any case isn’t the kind of political element that would reveal itself to a viewer who didn’t seek out facts about Rollin and his beliefs, as well as his specific thinking while putting Night of the Hunted together, but without that we’re still left with a reveal that all of this has something to do with a minor nuclear disaster.  None of this comes across very strongly as a statement about anything, but the film’s ending, which brings two characters to the same level and leaves them there, might remind you, as it did me, of the act of living your life every day as though the world was not collapsing all around you.

The Grapes of Death - Which leaves The Grapes of Death to say what about, exactly?  It’s more successful, from top to bottom, than Night of the Hunted, but is also perhaps has less going on in it.  By which I mean both good and bad stuff, though it does also contain a hint that nuclear power can lead to horror, though in this case it functions in about the same way as “this happened because of a comet” would in its place.  A sort of zombie film, The Grapes of Death is about a young woman, another Elisabeth played by Marie-Georges Pascal, on a train trip with her friend, played by Evelyne Thomas.  They’re apparently the only people on the train, save one conductor, a man with some terrible and fast-spreading skin disease, who attacks them, killing Elisabeth’s friend, before she’s able to escape.  Stranded far from either her destination, a town called Roubelais, where her fiance’ owns a vineyard, and from her starting point, she now has to try to work her way to Roubelais on foot.  But everything on that route is death and madness, as she encounters one person after another with the same vile condition as the conductor, and possessed by the same bloodlust.

One of the things I found so effective about this film is how merciless it is towards its supporting characters.  Don’t get attached, is what I’m saying, but it goes a bit beyond that.  The Grapes of Death does achieve a level of shrieking horror in this way, if that’s not overstating the matter.  But it is merciless, and, for example, there’s a decapitation scene that is shocking because of who is decapitated, when they’re decapitated, who decapitates this person, and, most importantly, the clumsy, messy fury of it all.  Being able to see the strings, as it were, does nothing to dent the chilling, spurting frenzy of the moment.

Like a lot of zombie movies – which, again, this sort of is – the power of The Grapes of Death is in similarly visceral moments, and in its relentless march towards a not very happy ending.  Not as bracingly surreal as many of Rollin’s best films, it’s close to being as grimly haunted, with a final minute that’s close to brilliant.  I don’t believe Rollin ever fell back on any kind of typical horror ending – even if the climax is a flurry of violence, he closes it all out with a moment of chilling grace.  Hell, if I remember correctly, even Zombie Lake took a shot in that direction.  In The Grapes of Death, it’s rather uncertain what will happen after we cut to black, but any number of things could and we’d remain secure in the knowledge that the damage has been done.  Grace like this is not something that is often sought in horror – it’s not even respected, not now, anyway.  But if you have it, it’s immensely powerful.  Rollin had grace.

Ordinary People

In the booklet that comes with Criterion release of Repo Man, which hits stores tomorrow, there is a quite enjoyable almost-but-not-quite-comic-strip retelling by writer-director Alex Cox of the path that led to this very unlikely 1984 film being made -- the turning point of it all was the very unlikely backing of former Monkee Mike Nesmith. Anyway, as I say, it's enjoyable -- sarcastic, self-deprecating, complimentary of at least some of his collaborators. He does take a shot at The Monkees, though, which strikes me as a bit ungrateful, given that their popularity essentially gave Cox his career, Repo Man being the film that kicked things off for him and everything. In the commentary track on the Criterion disc, Cox is as chatty and friendly and as excited to reminisce as anybody else in the room, which includes Nesmith, who, I'll grant you, even if he does know about the "they were terrible!" crack in the booklet, could probably not give less of a shit about it if he tried.

I bring up all this irrelevant stuff simply because I have in my mind a certain image of Alex Cox, exemplified by an anecdote he told somewhere or another about being approached by Steve Martin to direct Three Amigos. Martin pitched the idea, and Cox said something to the effect of "Obviously we'll have to put something in there about the American goverment's foul political history with South and Central America." This, Cox said, ended the interview, and his association with Three Amigos. From this I've taken two things, maybe more than that, and at least one of which I should maybe keep to myself, having to do with how much time I would want to spend around Alex Cox, should the opportunity to do so ever present itself, which it won't, and that's at least one of the reasons I feel like keeping it to myself. But from that anecdote I've mainly taken that Cox is far more happily married to the idea of film as a tool for social change than I, personally, am (I'm trying to be polite here), and Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, and so forth apparently got as much out of Repo Man as I did. (Anyway, Cox evidently funnelled his exasperation over not getting the gig into Walker.)

The point of all this being that, having recently rewatched Repo Man for the first time since I was a kid, it is my unhappy, kind of, duty to inform you that I think it's just fine. There are few films that so clearly illustrate what a "cult movie" even is, and Repo Man is perhaps the clearest of all. Not so strange as to potentially separate itself, at least not aggressively, from any of the viewers who might wander by, as we can probably assume films like Eraserhead and El Topo have done, but certainly strange enough to inspire the kind of reaction from those who do see it that is the lifeblood of this kind of thing, that is to say it causes people to exclaim, not altogether unhappily, "What the hell is this??", Repo Man almost feels calculated, almost cynically so, to stake its ground with a certain kind of paying audience. None of which (even the cynicism, if its there, which I don't really think it is) I begrudge the film or Cox or anybody. God knows I begrudge Harry Dean Stanton nothing on this Earth. It's the story of a young punk named Otto (Emilio Estevez) who is sick not only of his whitebread suburban home life (of course) but also in the useless California punk subculture into which he's immersed himself, so sick of it all in fact that when he brushes shoulders with the world of automobile repossession, in the person of veteran repo man Bud (Stanton), he decides the money he needs to get out of town might as well come from there as anywhere else, particularly since it's highly improbably that it will come from anywhere else. So Repo Man is at first a comedy, almost a goofball comedy, about a kid growing up in this strange, dangerous, but real environment populated by the likes of Sy Richardson, Tracey Walter and others, with several snide potshots at the alternative "square" life delivered along the way.

Snide potshots aside, and more on those in a bit, this is Repo Man at its best, as far as I'm concerned. This is when the movie's funny, and even when it's not funny it's lively, and the performances -- especially by Stanton, but even by Estevez -- are all easy-going and lived in. The funniest line in the film comes from a scene where Tracey Walter, as a more-eccentric-than-usual member of the repo man circle, tells Otto everything about the true ways of the world, to do with space aliens and conspiracies and the like, and at one point he ends one particular line of nonsensical thinking with "...and UFOs are? You got it...time machines." I really love the way Walter's character is shown to believe that Otto is not only listening to what he's saying, but is buying into the logic. Along the way, though, Repo Man establishes its cult credentials as the plot takes over, said plot involving a mysterious Chevy Malibu that is pegged for repossession not just by Bud and his colleagues, but by the bumbling and villainous United States Government, too. It has something in the trunk that kills people when they open it -- the light and smoke and shriek that precedes the person being vaporized is a clear wink at Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, but here it's played for laughs, or rather for satire, which never guarantees laughs as far as I can tell. For satire to succeed, it is enough simply that you agree with it, so the reverence in which the form is held has always been easy for me to regard with some suspicion. This allows much, most, satire to be as thoughtless as an insult, and the satire of Repo Man is essentially no stronger than "The U. S. Government...what a bunch of squares. And squares? Don't even get me started!"

One of the most famous and most-quoted lines from the film is "Ordinary fuckin' people...how I hate 'em," and Cox convinced me, for all Repo Man's relative light-heartedness, even in the face of the violence that takes over the final stretch, that he does indeed hate what- or whoever he considers "ordinary people" to be. They don't like punk music though, probably, because that's all over the soundtrack, and inside the film itself (Zander Schloss of The Circle Jerks acts in the film), and if Cox thought for a second that "ordinary people" liked punk he'd move on to some other genre in a blink. Or so I'm guessing. All I know for sure is, Repo Man, as a film about repo men, is pretty good. Repo Man, as a film about What the 1980s Mean to Me, is tiresome.

We Walked Up the Steps

Terrence Malick's To the Wonder arrives -- arrived to me, anyhow -- with a built-in reputation as his most abstract and inaccessible film to date. It's quite possible that there is no arguing with this. His first four movies, Badlands and so on, may not be for everyone, but when you get right down to it, narratively they're not that wonky. Those who found themselves put off by Malick's work, and their numbers have grown with each subsequent film, tended to object to things like pacing, and his use of narration, and long stretches of the film in which these people would say nothing much happened. Malick's not trying to shake you off his tail at any point in those first four, though. It's worth noting, however, that narratively those films did start getting wonkier, especially if you view pacing as a narrative consideration (I don't myself, but never mind) -- if a traditionally tight focus on A to B to C storytelling is your thing, The Thin Red Line and The New World -- and don't even get me started on if you're one of those "narration in films is a crutch!" -- can seem like the quietest of assaults. All of which led to 2011's The Tree of Life, Malick's long-gestating meditation (a word I don't often like to use in this way, but in the case of The Tree of Life it's almost literally applicable) on childhood, the 1950s, Texas, moms, dads, death, God, Christianity, memory, acceptance, and the creation of the Universe and all life within it. As a piece about memory, Malick takes the way human memory works as his guiding cinematic style, and so The Tree of Life manages to somehow be both slow and fast, with quick scenes of, some would argue, Not Much Happening, but of course it's all cumulative, and also about forty minutes in the Earth is created. The Tree of Life was famously divisive, to the point that some theaters had to post signs saying they wouldn't grant refunds to patrons who'd bought their ticket with the expectation that this was a regular movie, not a fancy movie. Nevertheless, that film did appeal to a great many people, and there is an undeniable warmth to it all, even to the darker moments, due to Malick's grasp of the specifics of childhood, some fictional version of his childhood specifically, and the environment being so strong.

Pretty cleary, I should hope, none of the above is meant as a judgment of Malick's style, as I'm a fan, but he does have a unique gift for shedding supporters with each subsequent film. And To the Wonder is hacking away at those who remain like a madman. According to some, anyway. Me, I liked it. At under two hours, it's Malick's shortest film since Days of Heaven, but within that he's assembled a jumbled, intentionally so, and oblique, intentionally so, I guess romantic drama, would be the genre category you'd be looking for here, about Neil (Ben Affleck) who brings his French girlfriend Marina(Olga Kurylenko) and her daughter from a previous relationship (Tatiana Chiline) from France to Texas, but his inability to commit to marrying Marina, as well as his wandering eye, finally drive them away. Or not finally. The film drifts from Neil with Marina, to Neil with Jane (Rachel McAdams), a despairing, lonely farmer he'd known when they were children. Jane pretty evidently needs somebody, but with Neil she, like Marina before her, pretty clearly thought she was getting somebody else. Neil is one of those people who is basically a nice guy who's kind of an asshole, and one of the surprising things about To the Wonder is how unflinching -- without quite looking squarely at the thing, if you see my distinction -- it is about the damage one person acting upon their moods, who are guided by their selfish myopia, can wreak.

That all makes the film seem fairly straightforward, though, and it isn't. The warmth of The Tree of Life is not entirely absent from To the Wonder -- it's even occasionally heated -- but Malick achieves a chilly kind of warmth here. There's an occasional awkwardness, too. It's a film packed with perfectly observed scenes of idle playfulness and everyday existence, such as a brief moment of girls talking and skipping and bending outside of an elementary school, or a very young boy lying perfectly still on the ground as someone outlines him in chalk (sounds creepy, but it's charming), but it also has weird moments like Neil, Marina, and her daughter, in happier times, frolicking around with lampshades on their heads, shining bare light bulbs at each other, which seems like a thing that no one has ever done to entertain themselves. The idea we have of Malick, or have learned to have, is of a guy who shoots an immense amount of film with the plan of finding his movie in the editing room, at the expense of entire characters and subplots, and here even a Malick fan like myself must acknowledge that sometimes it seems like he should have kept looking. But this is a film that is more nakedly grasping at its own sense of these people and their situation than anything Malick has made. He may have been mystified by the killers in Badlands, but I believe in that case he understood that theirs was an existence you couldn't understand unless you were pulling the trigger, or tagging along for the ride. To the Wonder, like The Tree of Life before it, is Malick trying to be universal, but in doing so he has to acknowledge that universal, or at least not uncommon, experience can still carry with it a dose of inexplicability. The result of such grasping can include the occasional whiff, is my point, but the grasping is still the show.

And of course Malick goes about all this, and much more, in his own way. A question that is sometimes asked by screenwriter types, or students and enthusiasts of same, and here I should specify screenwriting of a very specific and traditional kind, is "Who is this about?" The character, they mean, the main character, our point of view, and so on. To the Wonder does not exactly seem to ask this question. For instance, for all the talk about Ben Affleck having very little to say in the film, he's in more scenes than he isn't, and it's his actions and inaction that fuels everything. When Neil is with Jane, Marina is gone. When Neil is with Marina, Jane is gone. At the same time, unlike Jane, Marina has much to do and think and suffer through when she's alone. And if Neil fuels the action, such as it is, it's Marina who fuels the style. Kurylenko is rather terrific in the film, and she'd better be, because if Malick's camera has to hitch itself to Neil on occasion, it would quite blatantly rather spend its every second with Marina. Malick regards her, and Kurylenko, to be as much a part of the natural beauty of the world as the birds and beaches turtles and leaves and sky and horizons and oceans that have over the years spread from the background of his films to the foreground. The camera quite literally follows Marina throughout the film -- never have I scene a film where a character is so relentlessly photographed from behind. I do not mean this in the lascivious way it might sound, but at the same time I'd be lying if I didn't acknowledge that a certain...Godly lasciviousness wasn't a part of it. Boy that doesn't sound right, but To the Wonder is the kind of film that connects a whole lot of things that most people would consider disparate, but which aren't, at least if you hold a certain philosophy. Anyhow, the camera follows her (Jane, always waiting to be shattered to bits once again, is seen head-on) -- she's always walking ahead of Neil, and us, spinning and playing at the best of times, looking back at Neil, and at us, and it's hard to think we're not, in some way, pursuing her. We are, but Neil may not be -- Neil's fickleness needn't be our own, and doesn't seem to be Malick's. This would seem to place Marina on an uncomfortably high pedestal, but she somehow still manages to register as a real human being. She is gorgeous and mysterious and life-affirming in her very presence, but if you follow her around with a camera long enough, you're going to see how profoundly frustrated she is, or has become, during almost every waking minute of her life.

To give you some idea of the way To the Wonder otherwise presents itself, when it's somewhat less concerned with Kurylenko, among the things I thought about while watching it are Werner Herzog's Stroszek (both films are strange, neither film approaches strangeness with the same philosophy, but both films do stand still and look at America all around them and are somewhat dumbstruck) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, due, admittedly, to one particular cut from one kind of naturally landscape to another, utterly different kind. But it's a film that invites a great tumble of connections that don't need to achieve a one-to-one comparison. For example, John Prine's "Unwed Fathers" ran through my head, even though Neil, the guy that would pertain to, isn't really the guy in that song. But he has a profound ability to make Marina unhappy, and even though his relationship with Jane is not presented as just some dude looking to change the old oil, there, even prior to her introduction Neil is shown to be a man who is weak in the face of his capacity to attract women. It's shown with a glance here and there, at a woman passing by, and through certain cryptic things Marina says, but it's unmistakably there. Add to that the fact that at the time of his affair Marina and Neil aren't married, and it becomes surprising that To the Wonder reveals itself to be, at its heart, about the sanctity of marriage. Very much marriage as a religious sacrament, I mean. If Malick's obsession with the natural world can be explained, as I believe it can, by the Tom Waits line "God's green hair is where I slept last," then it should surprise no one that his view of love, including sexual love, manifests as the pursuit of something holy (pursued as if by a cameraman, you might say). It's what Marina is pursuing, and not the in the Cathy "I need a man! Ack!" way, but in the "love is a celebration of God" way. This is evidently not Neil's stance on the whole issue, even though for his own peace of mind he appears to have chosen to deny everything about himself, or near enough, otherwise he'd live his life crushed by guilt, and who has time for that?

But God's everywhere in this film, and is at least as big an issue as in The Tree of Life. Javier Bardem is also in To the Wonder, playing a priest named Father Quintana, who goes through his life doing good for the needy and outcast, and delivering sermons at the church attended by Neil and Marina, but wondering where in the hell God is. His crisis of faith reaches a resolution of sorts, the word "everywhere" being the key there, and in a way Malick charts his progress -- his narrative arc, if you really insist on calling it that -- in the regular three-act way some people castigate Malick for abandoning. Not only that, but stylistically To the Wonder illustrates Quintana's story more directly than it does the Marina-Neil-Jane triangle. So God and Quintana form the buried engine of a film about the sanctity of marriage in which no marriage occurs until late in the film, and man, it doesn't seem very sacred really, by the time the credits roll. But it's the words that make it all make sense, Malick's much-derided narration that even many of his admirers say is something you have to just sort of deal with. And it's true, when you have Kurylenko (who does most of the narrating here) say in three different ways, one after the other in a row, that her love with Neil had made two people become one, it can become hard to take it seriously, and think it will be better for everybody to just focus on what works. But it's always been true, and here maybe more than ever, that Malick's narration provides the philosophical context that provide significance and weight to the images. They may be on the nose, even trite -- though by no means always, I'd argue -- they work almost as hypnotic, and spoken aloud, stage directions. It's part of the hum of Malick's films. If anyone agrees with me about the "stage directions" business, I can imagine them stating that they do NOT like it when movies tell them how to feel. But Malick isn't telling you how to feel. He's telling you how he feels. He made these movies, not us. That's their power.