Only You Could Have Made This

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William Lustig and Joe Spinell's Maniac, from 1980, begins with a murder. It progresses from that murder to another, and then to another, and then to another. The first of these murders (actually a double murder, as is one other later on) is relatively brief, centering on the two victims, a man and woman, on the beach only long enough to set a mood of doom before the killer arrives with his knife. After that, the killer -- Spinell, also the co-screenwriter, playing Frank Zito -- is shown either stalking his prey, with very little to no surrounding dialogue (or ancillary characters), or alone with the victim, who is not aware that that's what they are, as he waits for his mind to dissolve sufficiently to carry through with his plan. These scenes, these almost context-free killings, amount to about forty minutes, roughly half the film. In this sense, Maniac -- a film that is, at least by general reputation, a sleazy, exploitation gore film -- finds its closest relative in Alan Clarke's Elephant, a film about Ireland's Troubles that, in its entirety, lasts about forty minutes, and consists entirely of one murder after another.

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Clarke's film was made nine years later, and though I don't know for sure I feel safe in assuming that Clarke was not aware of, let alone influenced by, Maniac. Even so, Lustig and Spinell's film gets a bad rap, in that even many of its admirers chalk it up as a well-above average bit of exploitation. Which it is, I guess, but Maniac stands out for me for a number of reasons. The gore is there, courtesy of (but of course) Tom Savini, though there's less of it than you might think, and also virtually no nudity. There's also almost no plot, no mystery, no cops hunting Zito down, and the closest we get to a story, as such, arrives in the person of Caroline Munro as a fashion photographer who goes all Cybill Shepherd on Zito by befriending him (he's a photographer, as well) and even flirting with him a bit (does she?), but this is only plot in that she leads to his downfall, and that only comes about because she has a healthy flight instinct and a strong pair of legs (which can be seen also in Starcrash, also featuring a (dubbed) Joe Spinell. Caroline Munro must have the most ridiculous/wonderful filmography of all time).
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Maniac is grimy, it's cheap (it looks good though), and it takes place in the parts of 1980 New York that would have the kind of movie theaters that would actually show a movie like Maniac, but if there's one reason the film is regarded now as an exploitation classic, it's because the film is about murder. Serial murder, specifically, but murder in general, as a topic for art, has an odd place in cinema history. I think we can agree that murder, while it's unlikely to happen to you, is a major, let's say, problem. Most of us will never be homeless either, but you'll give up before you get to the end of films that try to tackle that one with sincerity and a noble spirit. The problem with murder, though, is that you can't pin it down. One guy gets drunk, and gets angry, and stabs another guy in the neck. This guy over here got drunk, got angry, and stabbed nobody. The guy finds his wife in bed with another man and he shoots them both. This guy walked in on the same scene, turned around, and walked away. This person was raped and beaten as a child, and grew up with a dozen blown fuses behind his eyes, so that now he sits in a van at night waiting for a woman to walk by alone. If he ever took pills, he's stopped. Another victim of hideous childhood abuse somehow moved on, or if he, too, blew fuses, he never stopped taking his pills. If he does stop, he punches walls and breaks windows, but doesn't stalk women with a knife.

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If murder is a problem -- and it is -- it's a cosmic one. It's a hard thing to trace, the moment, if there even is one, when a soul goes black. So what you don't get are movies about the "problem" of murder. Films about the homeless, or racism, tend to be made by people who naively believe there is an achievable goal in the distance, that their film, or their film accompanied by hundreds of others like it, can push towards, I don't know, a cure for racism. I won't say they're shocked when that doesn't happen, but they still hang tight to that possibility. Foolish as those people are, I'm not aware of anyone foolish enough to think there's a cure for murder, through film or any other means. They might believe that their are sources that, if obliterated, would take murder along with them.

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So the closest you're going to get is something like Maniac, a horror film that is about murder, and a murderer. Frank Zito kills his victims and scalps them, and we see him nailing those scalps to a blood-streaked mannequin he sleeps with, all the while talking to the mannequin about how there's not too much blood, and she looks good anyway, but also he has to stop this, this is "silly", they're going to find out. The best line Roger Ebert has ever written is from his review of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, where he says "[John McNaughton] raised the budget for Henry from Waleed Ali, a Chicago home video executive, who wanted a horror film but reportedly was surprised when McNaughton gave him the real thing..." This gets to the heart of why a film like Maniac occupies the place it does: it's a horror film that offers you nothing but horror, and doesn't even have the decency to employ the metaphor of ghosts or vampires so that we can pretend it's about something other than it is. (The fact that Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer enjoys a slightly more respectable realm, even though it is, in essence, the exact same kind of film as Maniac, is not so easily explained. It's not because one film is well-made and the other isn't, because both are well-made. Perhaps it's because, by the time Henry came around, the grindhouses were gone.).

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When Maniac came out, it was met, predictably, with outrage from various groups, most prominently feminist groups who claimed the film was exploitative and misogynistic. The misogyny angle is absurd, because I don't suppose you'd get far with anyone trying to make a film about a serial killer who loves women, never mind that the most lingered-over bits of violence in the whole film are the deaths of two men, one of them (Tom Savini) a victim of Zito, and the other Zito himself. Though the phantasmagoria of Zito's death is a feverish hallucination he experiences during his suicide, it's also by far the bloodiest sequence in Maniac, and the specifics of what we're shown have perhaps gone unnoticed by those who would label the film misogynistic. But I guess that's how it goes.

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The question of Maniac's exploitation is a little bit different, however, because the question there is, how far does the film go, and is there any worth in the fact that it goes as far as it does? I think I have the answer, though, and it’s this: well, that all depends. In Maniac, there is an, I guess, instructive scene. Appropriately, it is a murder scene, and it involves a young woman, in her apartment, getting into the bath. This accounts for the film’s only nudity, and the fact that the woman is young and attractive is not not worth pointing out, but neither is the fact that she’s not nude for long, nor is she nude when she’s killed. This is splitting hairs, no doubt, and anyway isn’t really my point. After she gets into the bath, the camera pulls away, out of the bathroom, backing down the hallway outside, with the ajar bathroom door receding. There’s no credit to anyone guessing what her fate will be, and eventually the camera stops as Zito’s hand looms into the right side of the screen, and he’s holding a knife. It’s hard not to be put in mind of Anna Massey’s murder in Hitchcock’s Frenzy, where the camera leaves Massey and Barry Foster, her killer, entering her apartment, as it backs away, down the stairs, out of the building, and across the street, as if to leave them to it. This shot is, to me, one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces, and the genius of it is in the grim, even mournful, elegance of the camera’s withdrawal. Had this less ambitious but similar shot in Maniac signaled the end of the scene, the audience would have gotten the picture, but Maniac is not about looking away, and Lustig and Spinell go further, so that we subsequently see what Hitchcock chose not to show. And so the question would be, is this choice better, or worse? Well, it’s not better, in the sense that, whatever his genuine skill, Lustig is no Hitchcock, but the question is, or has become, because some demand it, a moral one. And to be fair, it’s not true that there is no such thing as immoral art – Oscar Wilde couldn’t be right about everything, after all – but in the same way as there’s nothing immoral about filming an erupting volcano simply because we have no way of stopping it, it’s also not a given that depicting the kind of rancid violence we’re about to witness at the end of this scene is immoral simply because the Frank Zitos of the world are going to do what they do until they get caught.
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For his part, Joe Spinell was mortified by the charges of misogyny that greeted Maniac’s release. His solution, which was possibly not terribly well-thought-out, was to make a sequel called Maniac 2: Mr. Robbie. Bearing no relation to the original outside of Spinell's presence and violent death, the film was to be about the host of a children’s show named Mr. Robbie (Spinell) who is flooded with letters from his young viewers, despairing over the abuse they suffer at the hands of their parents and other adults. Not terribly stable in his own right, Mr. Robbie takes it on himself to supply violent retribution on behalf of these children – and rescue, as well, or so the idea goes. I’m not sure this would have satisfied any of the people who objected to the violence in Maniac (though there would doubtlessly have been few to no protests), but the film wasn’t made in any case because Joe Spinell died suddenly – though probably not surprisingly, to those who knew him – in 1989 (it’s probably worth pointing out that trying to undo the supposed damage of Maniac nine years after the fact was, in all likelihood, putting the horse way beyond the cart). Spinell was able to complete a short film version of Mr. Robbie, at seven minutes amounting to, and intended as, a kind of promotional film which would be used to secure funding. You can watch it on Youtube here, along with an introduction culled from the very worthwhile short documentary The Joe Spinell Story. Mr. Robbie, the short, has some nice touches -- such as Spinell holding up his end of a conversation while sprawled across a bar, an authentic moment quite possibly pulled from Spinell's life experience -- but if any problems are signaled it's that Mr. Robbie was trying to frame its violence with something greater, child abuse. Although, who's to say that really would have been a problem, and I would dearly love to be able to watch Mr. Robbie in its entirety. It's just that Maniac was after something more nebulous (and if it eventually found itself ringing certain chimes with Elephant, it also did with Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven, a film not exactly like Maniac, but it's out to depict a similarly jacked-up psychology, from that psychology's point of view), and Mr. Robbie wanted to be something, or seemed to want to be something, more concretely satisfying.

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A curious bookend to Maniac and the films it’s influenced – or seems to have, but really probably didn’t – is the moment in the film that very explicitly quotes Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (in which Spinell has a small but memorable role). It’s a brief bit, but Caroline Munro and Spinell are talking, and Spinell responds to something she says by saying “You talkin’ to me?” He says it with a smile, and the camera lingers, so that the audience can’t miss it – not only the reference, but that Zito is knowingly making the reference to Munro’s character. The two films don’t have a hell of a lot else in common (outside of the aforementioned Munro-as-Shepherd aspect of Maniac), because Travis Bickle is a different kind of killer, one who believes himself to have a moral compass, but both films ride through the same rain-spattered streets of New York’s darker and grubbier corners. So while Maniac may be carving its own path, Scorsese is still sort of all over it, as he was in so many other low-down and violent New York films of the time. Not one to miss out on his own brand of Scorsese influence was Mr. Robbie’s director, Buddy Giovinazzo. At the time he worked with Spinell on the Maniac sequel, Giovinazzo was, and remains to this day, best known for his own low-budget bit of psychotic nastiness, called Combat Shock, from 1986. Owing its very life to Taxi Driver (and its most memorable visual to David Lynch’s Eraserhead), Combat Shock is about another mentally diseased Frank, this one Frankie Dunlan (Ricky Giovinazzo, the director’s brother), whose own psychosis seems to be the result of his exposure to Agent Orange while fighting in Vietnam. As if that weren’t enough, he and his wife have since had a child, a one-year-old in the form of a writhing wad of animatronic clay with a face and the cry of a busted air-raid siren. Frankie is jobless, a drug addict, crazy, and on the verge of homelessness.
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Shot in the dirt-and-grass lots and burned out fringe neighborhoods of Staten Island, Combat Shock is a product of Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Films, and man does it show. Combat Shock is an ugly movie, in ways both intended and not, and I can’t pretend that I think it’s very much good at all. While Maniac had a cast of decent-enough actors anchored by a tremendous Joe Spinell, Combat Shock has nobody, plus the visual sense of Toxic Avenger, and very nearly the tone of same, minus the terrible jokes. What it does have going for it, however, is a genuine lunacy – it’s a very strange film, filled with verbal non-sequitors (check out the scene where Frankie goes job-hunting), blunt sentimentality (Frankie’s desperate call to his dying father, who is wheeled to his phone in what appears to be a forgotten meeting room at the local Shriners hall by a male nurse played, it would appear, by Freddie Mercury) and equally blunt cruelty (Frankie’s wife is quite unbearable, at one point saying of Frankie, in reference to their deformed baby, “Only you could make this!”). Add to that occasional psychedelic flashbacks of the Vietnam variety and an appalling synth score, and you have a film that has been referred to as an accidental masterpiece, though I’m not sure about either part of that phrase. Combat Shock ends in massive violence, both of the Taxi Driver and Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? sorts, but for all its strangeness (whatever it owes in concept to Eraserhead, that baby is still friggin’ nuts), Combat Shock is still skittish in a way that Maniac, and even Taxi Driver (I’ve never been convinced that Bickle’s status as a Vietnam vet explained, or was meant to explain, all that much) is not. Combat Shock ties its violence to societal ills, as if to say “Well, if we hadn’t treated this guy like that, this wouldn’t have happened.” Yeah, but then again maybe it would have. And in any case, it does, all the time, all over.
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I have to give Giovonazzo credit anyway, though, because Combat Shock has to be some kind of pinnacle for Troma. For a company that seems to treat filmmaking as a form of hoax, Combat Shock strikes me as at least sincere. Plus, if I may presume for a moment, I doubt that the men behind Sgt. Kabukiman and Poultrygeist followed up the non-breakthroughs of those films with a series of novels, as Giovonazzo has done. The problem is simply that Combat Shock (along with all its other problems) follows the path of so many films before and after it, by pretending that murder is part of a giant puzzle of problems (as does Elephant, though in that case you would either have to have been in the middle of the problem, or do some digging afterward to know just what's going on there), and that by fixing all these more readily understandable problems, people will stop shooting each other in the face. But no, it’s not like that. Murder is like the sun – it will always be with us.

Do What I Like, Not What You Like

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I'm not exactly sure why this news story should break me out of my writing doldrums, but a few days ago Steve Martin was hosted by the 92nd Street Y, where he was interviewed by art critic, historian, and etc. Deborah Solomon. The place was sold out, 900 people paying $50 a pop, plus this conversation was streamed on the internet. The topic was art, and art history, both of which have been a, let's say, major league hobby of Martin's for decades now, and are also the subject of his new novel An Object of Beauty, which had been released just days prior to the 92nd Street Y gig. So that's what they talked about. You can read about the ensuing controversy more completely here, but basically what happened is the paying audience, or anyway a portion of that audience (probably an important point, actually), both in person and on-line, did not much like the fact that Steve Martin was talking about art -- not to mention his fucking novel -- and not about what it was like making The Lonely Guy, or what he thought the Festrunk brothers might be like now, in this modern world of 2010, or whatever it is they wanted for their fifty bucks. They so disliked this that they registered their unhappiness right then, as the conversation progressed, via e-mails to the 92nd Street Y, and, I'm assuming, through hissed whispers to that venue's staff.
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More alarmingly, the higher-ups in that staff agreed that this art talk must not be allowed to continue and went so far as to pass a note -- again, all while Martin and Solomon were conducting the talk they were being paid for -- to Solomon asking that she steer the conversation towards the earlier, funnier portions of Martin's career. The upshot of all this is, the evening has been written off as a debacle, to the extent that the 92nd Street Y has offered refunds to all 900 paying customers, and Solomon and Martin are left to defend themselves against charges of boringness, and of not meeting the 92nd Street Y's "standard of excellence."
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There are a lot of different ways I could begin talking about this, many of them less long-winded than the path I'm about to go down, but I find it very curious that so many people would be willing to lay down fifty dollars, not only to hear Steve Martin talk about the earliest phases of his career yet again -- he sort of wrote a whole memoir about that called Born Standing Up, which I recommend, and plus there's thirty-some years of archival interview footage that's probably just a click away -- but to pay that money even though they're evidently unaware that Steve Martin long ago changed from this person:
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...to this person:
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Now, granted, Martin himself has confused the issue by his film work, which at some point changed from the more personal stuff like Roxanne, A Simple Twist of Fate and L. A. Story, films that, whatever you might think of them, gave a pretty strong indication of where his own creative drive was taking him, to what would appear to be straight paycheck gigs like Bringing Down the House, The Pink Panther movies, and so on. But Steve Martin is not a hermit, and you don't need to be a superfan to know that his personal sense of humor has leaned, over the past several years, to the very dry (and I do not believe, by the way, that Martin, during this 92nd Street Y gig, completely stomped down on this humor in favor of some dull, professorial demeanor, but maybe I'm wrong). Not only that, but his interest in art is very well documented, and references to it stretch way back to his absurdist days (see the Winslow Homer piece in his first book Cruel Shoes). The point of all of this being that the 92nd Street Y -- who this month will be hosting an evening with the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Octet, and later another one with Ian Frazier and John McPhee (who will be talking about families and rocks, I'm guessing), and even later still will evidently be the site of live broadcasts of The Rachel Maddow Show (I recommend audience members for those nights demand their refunds in advance, as a time-saving strategy), but nothing, so far as I know, on a night of comedy with Carrot Top, or any kind of evening that requires a warning that members of the audience will get wet -- hired Deborah Solomon, a woman who wrote a biography of Jackson Pollock, thinking, apparently, that she was going to ask Steve Martin if it was a lot of fun making My Blue Heaven, and then got all pissed off when she didn't.
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Oh, there are more specific things that the complainers have pointed out, such as the fact that a large chunk of the discussion was about Martin's brand new book, which nobody in the audience would have had a chance to read yet, but I guess the folks making that complaint are entirely unaware of the tradition of authors promoting their brand new books by giving live readings. There's also the question of how the evening with Solomon and Martin was marketed. Well, here's the page for it on the Y's website, and I'll admit it's a bit vague, though I feel the biography of Solomon offered at the bottom of the page offers some interesting clues.
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Regardless of all that, the real problem is this appalling desire that an artist be only what we perceive them to be, and to do what we both perceive and prefer that they do. Steve Martin talked about art; I wanted him to sing "King Tut" again. Give me my goddamn money back. Now listen, I completely understand the impulse to want an artist you've liked in the past to keep doing those things you've liked, especially if the more visible work they're currently doing doesn't seem to be as good (for the record, I haven't been interested in a Steve Martin movie since Bowfinger, and haven't really liked one since he appeared in David Mamet's The Spanish Prisoner, but I find this personal, sideline work -- his novels, his banjo music -- really interesting and appealing, though I've experience not too much of it thus far). And you, and I, and everyone, has every right to wish an artist would do whatever the hell we might wish them to do. What nobody has the right to do is demand that they do it, even if we're putting our money down in the misguided hope that they'll read our minds.
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The analogy isn't perfect, but what this reminds me of (apart from that episode of The Simpsons when Homer goes to see Bachman Turner Overdrive and demands that they play "Takin' Care of Business" even though they'd just finished playing it, and then once they start it again tells them to "skip to the 'workin' overtime' part") is all the pissing and moaning from people who think that Robert De Niro has sold out. By turning up in two sequels to Meet the Parents and one sequel to Analyze This (which was no great shakes to begin with), as well as Hide and Seek and all that other stuff, I suppose, technically, he has sold out, but the attitude from some people is that De Niro has sold us out, as if by thinking he was so amazing in Taxi Driver we were somehow doing him a favor, one he's now refusing to make good on.
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Often, the line on this is that De Niro is "tarnishing his legacy." To those who say such things, let me first say "Fuck you, and until you've built up a legacy of your own, don't think you have any right to tell someone like Robert De Niro how they should go about handling theirs." After that rant, I would say that De Niro made films like Taxi Driver because he was a brilliant actor, and he wanted to make those kinds of films. Evidently, he no longer wants to do that. I don't want to get all slobbery and stupid and say that those dozen or so (or whatever, I'm not going to count them) astonishing performances De Niro gave in the first half of his career were his "gifts" to us, but I am grateful to him, as a fan, for doing that work. But I'm also not so delusional as to think he, or any other artist I like, owes me anything more, or even owed me what I've already gotten. Taxi Driver might have sucked, you know -- you buys your ticket and you takes your chances. The fact that it didn't can really be chalked up to our good luck.
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Artists don't belong to us. We have no rights in these matters. Be happy you can watch The King of Comedy whenever you want, or The Man With Two Brains or Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Skip over what doesn't interest you, but maybe give An Object of Beauty a look, because who knows, maybe it's pretty good. Either way, don't buy a ticket for something you don't understand and then bitch about the fact that you don't understand it.

Dostoyevsky's Lonely Man - Part One

So, you remember in my last post how I said that you might find posts on my blog about Fyodor Dostoyevsky? Man, I wasn't fucking around, was I?

First, I have to come clean about one thing. In that previous post, I realize that by casually dropping the great Russian novelist's name like that, it might be inferred that I'm some sort of amateur Dostoyevsky expert, or perhaps that I might simply have read a few of his books. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. No, in fact, despite being, I feel, a pretty well read guy, I have one (at least one) giant literary blind spot, and that's the Russians.

The Russians are the only group of writers to be so labeled; you never hear anybody say "Have you ever read the French?" or "You simply must read the Japanese" or "I feel the greatest novelists in history are the Americans". Yet you could conceivably hear people say all those things about the Russians. How many writers really fall under that heading, I'm not sure. For instance, I'm pretty sure the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would not be included, despite the fact that he was, without a doubt, Russian. But he was a 20th century writer, and the Russians, I think, need to be from the 19th century. So Dostoyevsky's one, and Tolstoy, and Chekhov, and Gogol. And Pushkin. Who else?

Anyway, as I say, this had been a huge blind spot in my reading life. I've read two plays by Chekhov (The Seagull and Uncle Vanya), and several years back I took a valiant but otherwise doomed stab at reading Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. And that's been it...until now.

Yes, two days ago I started reading Crime and Punishment, and I feel pretty good about my chances this time around. Sure, the names are a chore (I've counted three different "Ivanovna"s so far, but for all I now that will be important later), as is the fact that these Russian bastards are quite intent on telling you every last bit of the story. A character doesn't decide to go somewhere, and then suddenly the scene changes to that new location. No, the character decides to go somewhere, and we follow him every step of the way. I'm also not sure I'm reading the best available translation. But this particular novel is, so far, basically like a 19th century Russian version of Taxi Driver, and once I realized that I perked right up.

Raskalnikov, like Travis Bickle, has gone mad well before we first meet him. He's a poor, unemployed ex-student (a fact which he seems to think carries a lot of weight) living in St. Petersburg, away from his beloved mother and sister, the latter of which is engaged to be married to a man of whom Raskalnikov does not approve. And as Raskalnikov goes through his empty, daily grind, he finds himself increasingly horrified by the world around him, and by the people who inhabit it. However, he does care about those who he feels have been kicked around and had their faces rubbed in the dirt, people whose lives seem even worse than his own. Like Bickle, he seems particularly concerned with the plight of St. Petersburg's prostitutes: at one point, he comes across a drunk young woman on the street and assumes she's a prostitute, and tries vainly to help her; he's also concerned that his sister might go down that same road if he interferes with her marriage.

Raskalnikov seeks justice, even though he realizes that the path to justice he's chosen is garbled, unfocused, and possibly evil. That path -- his "project" -- is something he's been thinking about for a long time, and it consists entirely of murdering, with an axe, and old woman to whom he's pawned certain possessions when he's found himself desperately short of cash. This woman has a younger sister, who Raskalnikov knows faintly, and who he's heard suffers terribly under her older sister's wrath. So he will kill this old woman, steal all her money, and use it to help the city's poor and downtrodden.The murder turns into murders, and are far more graphic than I'd expected. Like the final gasp of bloodshed at the end of Taxi Driver, the violence in Crime and Punishment is sudden, brief and gruesome. But unlike Taxi Driver, we feel the full moral horror of what Raskalnikov has done. Critics of Taxi Driver sometimes complain that Scorsese's film ends on a note that might imply the filmmakers condoned Bickle's actions. I've never bought that, but can we be honest about one thing? How many of you really felt a sense of moral outrage over what Bickle does. The men he kills are violent, pedophile rapist pimps. We can say that Bickle should not have done it, that this was not justice, that the police should have handled the situation. But if we read a story in the newspaper about a similar shoot-out taking the lives of similar victims, would a single one of us think, "Oh, those poor men"?

In Crime and Punishment, however, the violence offers no such catharsis, no matter how grubby and shameful. Raskalnikov is completely lost, even further adrift than Travis Bickle. Bickle, in his breakdown, was nevertheless able to focus his rage on one goal: saving Iris. The best Raskalnikov can do is crack open an old women's head so that he can take her money and divvy it out, Robin Hood-style. And this last, "altruistic" element of his plan becomes nebulous and evaporates almost immediately.

So maybe Raskalnikov and Bickle aren't so much alike. But they're both completely alone, partly by choice, and partly because they don't know how to not be alone. And they both see the world crumbling around them, and both can only imagine one way to make things right. One picks up an axe, the other picks up agun.