The Collection Project: Keep Doubting

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A young girl named Lucie escapes from...somewhere. We don't know from where, or from what, but her hair has been hacked off, she's dirty, and has clearly been beaten. She's picked up by some sort of orphanage/children's hospital, though her parents apparently cannot be tracked -- we get the sense that she wasn't running from them -- because it is here that she will stay.

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Then we see a house, and are told this is "Fifteen Years Later". A family, consisting of a mother, father, and a teenaged son and daughter, is gathering for breakfast. The mother has found a dead mouse in the plumbing, and says this explains the low water pressure. The daughter has taken a private letter from her brother, a letter from a girl, and is teasing him about it. The mother also mildly berates the boy for his indecisiveness and middling school achievements. Then the doorbell rings, and the father answers it. A young woman is there. She shoots him with a shotgun, and then stalks through the house, blasting away at the rest of the family, killing them all, but pausing, after the parents have been killed, to ask the boy "Do you know what your parents did to me?" He says he doesn't, but he, and his sister after him, are both blown to hell just the same.

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So begins Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, one of the most notorious recent horror films, and part of what some critics are calling the New French Extremity, a movement -- if such it is, which it probably isn't -- that also includes such odious films as Inside and Frontier(s) and genuinely good ones like Fat Girl and Trouble Every Day. What all these films have in common, besides being French (or French-Canadian, or Belgian) is a commitment to showing the viewer the most grotesque, horrifying, disgusting images imaginable, and to do so unflinchingly, with a minimum of gaze-aversion, as well as the atmosphere and examination of whatever world-view such images might imply. As with any genre, or subgenre, or artistic movement, the success of the New French Extremity as an idea is neither important or even calculable. If Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day is an exceptional film -- and I think it is -- but Inside and Frontier(s) are terrible -- and I'm very confident that they are -- Denis's film doesn't suddenly appear to me to be invalidated because the movement into which some critics have lumped it also contains a fair number of films I despise. I don't think "I thought Trouble Every Day was pretty great, but I sure wish it wasn't part of that whole New French Extremism thing they got going now." All of which is to say that I do my damndest to approach the films that fall under this particular umbrella with a mind that is at least partly open. And if the beginning of Martyrs, as described above, signalled anything to me, it was that something possibly interesting was up.

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The young woman is Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï), and her girlfriend Ana (Morjana Alaoui), whom she's known since they met at the hospital, is parked nearby. Ana is shocked to hear that, upon confirming that the husband and wife are the same couple who abused her in her youth, Lucie has simply slaughtered them, instead of calling the police, but Ana goes to the house anyway, where the two women go about disposing of the bodies, and, not incidentally, stumbling over the truth of why Lucie's abuse took place. Getting to that point is a relentlessly grim, shocking, unbelievably violent trip, one that made me far more uncomfortable than just about any other film of its type ever has. Martyrs is a chronicle of almost never-ending suffering and bizarre imagery, to the service of a story that regularly drops out from beneath you.

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Here's the problem with Martyrs: its story ends in a very unusual place (not so unusual that it's never been done before, as anyone who's read Lucius Shepard's The Golden knows, although Shepard actually didn't do much with the idea his story shares with Laugier's film, as in his novel that wasn't the focus), the point where we learn what, exactly, all this mind-numbing suffering has been in aid of, and why the film is called Martyrs. It's difficult to talk about that revelation -- an appropriate word -- without ruining any sense of mystery for those who haven't seen it. And the film really does maintain an air of pretty dreadful mystery, one it actually pays off, which is such a rare thing that blithely exposing it is not something I'm willing to do.

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But the problem, as I was getting ready to say before losing track, is how seriously can I ultimately take the film as a whole? A certain amount of Martyr's sadism is actually justified, but there's also a chunk midway through when Ana encounters a woman who has suffered the kind of torture Lucie did as a child, but worse, and for a much longer period of time. This sequence provides several of the film's most awful images, and it also goes absolutely nowhere. It's a red herring, a waste of ten minutes or so that did nothing but provide the film with more peeling flesh, screaming, pain, blood and bone. Like Inside, Martyrs never stops to breathe, and while I can't claim to have felt desensitized by the violence as Martyrs built to its viscera-splashed crescendo, it was also a little bit difficult to view it with the same amount of weight it would have had if the film had let up for even three goddamn minutes (another for instance: one character dies twice, when once would have been plenty).

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And yet: the ending is not nothing. This is a modern horror film that is pretty much wall-to-wall butchery, but is, finally, not actually about wall-to-wall butchery. Or so it seems, or pretends, or something. Hence my ambivalence, and hence the title of this post, "Keep Doubting", which is a line from the film -- a good one, too, in context -- and also a sort of philosophy for viewing the films of the New French Extremity and their international kin. Like the "splatterpunk" wing of horror literature, this kind of film usually comes presented as a work of intellectual and moral rigor, when in fact they're often blatantly unpracticed in both arenas. But then again, sometimes they are. It helps to be able to tell the difference. When it comes to Martyrs, I'm not sure I can. Still, at least I'm wondering about it.

The Collection Project: From Here On In, I Rag Nobody

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There are moments in Bang the Drum Slowly (d. John D. Hancock) that, frankly, I don't even like to think about. Structured around a fictional professional baseball team's season, the film features Michael Moriarty as Henry Wiggen, the pitcher, and a young, then-unknown Robert De Niro as Bruce Pearson, the team's clumsy, friendly, hayseed catcher who, early on, is diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease.

What's so affecting about Mark Harris's story (he wrote the script, as well as the source novel) is that it doesn't play as a "disease" movie, because for most of it's run-time, only a few people know of Pearson's condition, and, due to the fact that he is both clumsy and a hayseed, the catcher is ridiculed by many of the other players, and kept outside any cluster of friends within the team. Wiggen, as the team captain, does know what Pearson is going through, but can only shield and protect him so much.

At one point, the team is in the locker room, and Piney Woods (Tom Ligon) whips out his guitar and begins singing "Streets of Laredo", which, if you don't know the song, is about a dying cowboy, and includes these lyrics:

Oh, bang the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly
And play the dead march as you carry me along
Take me to the green valley and lay the earth o'er me
For I'm a poor cowboy and I know I've done wrong



At this point, it's become impossible to hide Pearson's illness from the rest of the team, and some of the players, including Wiggen, try to get Woods to stop, without indicating to Pearson why ("Try a different song" "Yeah, I don't like that song" "It's a cornball song!") without making him think more about the lyrics than he's going to anyway. Woods doesn't get it ("Why don't you join in a little, like they do, you know?") nor do some of the other players ("It sounds good!"). Alternately, the camera pushes in on Woods, and on Pearson, who De Niro plays, at this moment, as embarrassed more than anything else. He knows that, as the song lilts by, everybody is thinking about him, and his fate, and he'd rather everybody just act like a baseball team.

But the moment that absolutely destroys me is in the final game in the film, which the team is winning. They need one out, and Wiggen throws a pitch that results in a pop-up between homeplate and the pitcher's mound. Pearson rises, but loses the ball, and turns around in confusion, and exhaustion, while another player (Danny Aiello) swoops in to pick the ball out of the air. This sequence, shot in elegiac slow motion by Hancock, ends with the team celebrating, oblivious to Pearson -- who, since learning he's sick, they've collectively taken under their wing -- still standing there, a bit lost. Except for Wiggen and Coach Jaros (Phil Foster), who push through their teammates to pick up Pearson's helmet and glove -- marching together, and bending down almost as one -- and pat Pearson's back and bring him back into the fold.

I've tried several time to describe why I think this moment is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking I've ever seen, but I'm finding it very difficult to do so without making it sound like a cornball song. Just watch the film.

Bang the Drum Slowly was released in 1973; a few months later it was followed by Mean Streets, and De Niro blew up. Michael Moriarty's career would travel several strange paths before an apparent flame-out. Twenty-seven years ago, they co-starred in one of the great sports films of all time, one I can't watch without crumbling. And the film ends with a line I've tried to use as a guide for my behavior, though I imagine, ultimately, I've been no more successful than your average guy. Those words form the title of this post: "From here on in, I rag nobody." If ever there were words you could live by, that's them.

When the Wolfbane Blooms

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The rap on this year's remake of the Universal classic The Wolf Man (or The Wolfman, as the new version would have it), which was directed by Joe Johnston and written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, seems to be that it's not enough of one thing or another. It's not crazy enough, nor is it enough fun. I've also heard conflicting reports that suggest that Johnston's film runs from the Oedipal implications of the story, and conversely embraces them too earnestly. One begins to think that this whole "criticism" deal is a bit subjective once the actual filmmaking reaches a certain level of professionalism. But in any case, and because of that, I can't argue against much or any of the preceding complaints, except for the idea that a movie like The Wolfman is stepping wrong by taking itself too seriously. In a purely literal sense, I can't deny that this new film does, indeed, take itself too seriously, but I would rephrase that, and say that The Wolfman is not ashamed of itself.

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You won't be getting much plot summary from me here, because, really, how much do you need? Benicio del Toro plays Lawrence Talbot, a man born of an English father (Anthony Hopkins) and a gypsy mother (now deceased), who fled England to New York -- at a young enough age to have since lost the accent -- to become an actor. He's summoned back by Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), his brother's fiancee. His brother, we know (or rather suspect, which suspicion is rapidly confirmed) is the guy who, in the film's prologue, was killed by a werewolf. Nobody knows this yet, and Ben Talbot is at first believed to be missing. So Lawrence goes home, where he's left a lot of unhappy memories and uncertainties regarding why his mother slit her own throat with a straight razor.

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So Talbot's back in England with his dad, there's a werewolf on the loose, and if you've seen George Waggner and Curt Siodmak's original film, you can pretty much fill in the rest. Up to a point, anyway. This remake deviates from that earlier film in a bunch of small ways, and in one big way: this time around, the werewolf that bites Talbot, thereby dooming him to a bestial existence, isn't killed that same night. It's the way of things nowadays to take a basic idea that worked in the past and then double it, but in Johnston's film this actually works pretty well. The Wolfman flirts with the idea of making the identity of this other werewolf a mystery, but gives up on it shortly after Talbot's first transformation, probably because the filmmakers realized they weren't fooling anyone. The moment of the reveal -- or rather, the moment when the last tiny shred of the audience's doubt, which was hanging on only because the movie hadn't come out and said anything yet, is finally removed -- is handled very nicely, in a moment that is genuinely chilling, and that hints not only at how badly the Talbot bloodline is screwed, but also of an evil that has roamed the moors for a very long time.

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Speaking of bloodlines and cursed families and things of that nature, like many classic horror stories, The Wolfman lays its themes right out there. Human nature is referred to as "shiftable", Talbot retreats from his own ill-fated family to hide himself in a profession that calls for him to take on other personalities (we see him playing Hamlet, no less). This subtext-laid-bare approach is an effective one, even time-honored, but doesn't get much respect these days. In the classic horror films of the '30s and '40s, such as the best of the Universal cycle and the Val Lewton films, and even up to the best of the Hammer films, there was often a lot of strangeness and subtlety to chew on afterwards, but just as often the gist of things, the meaning behind the conflict, was plain as day. This kind of storytelling is as engaging as the folktales that led the world to know what the hell "lycanthropy" was in the first place. The mindset that now leads people to sneer at this narrative device is the same one that caused everyone to begin thinking that "melodrama" was a synonym for "bad".

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All of which is not to say that The Wolfman is perfect. There's a lot of dodgy CGI, which is made all the more frustrating by the fact that there didn't need to be any CGI at all. And I should say here that I saw the director's cut, which, in a break from tradition, is actually significantly longer than the theatrical cut, with a full sixteen minutes added. In this form, the film does feel a bit thick (I wonder, though, if Max von Sydow's mysterious and welcome cameo was one of the added scenes?). And either way, the werewolf battle that is the film's unavoidable climax feels a bit tedious, as well as a sop to modern audiences (I was also amused by the fact that the filmmakers seemed to realize that when the two werewolves were flailing around, audiences might have a hard time telling who was who, so they devised a way to make the fight a "shirts vs. skins" situation).

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But the film still works. I remember reading Benicio del Toro say that when he first got into acting, his two dream roles were Che Guevara and the Wolf Man (like there's a difference!*). As Lawrence Talbot, it is true that del Toro occasionally feels like a man out of time -- he's a bit modern for 19th century England -- but boy does he sell Talbot's haunted nature, his doomed-since-birth aura. At one point, after he's completely accepted the truth of his mad situation, he pleads, to a group of men, "Kill me!" Only in a story like this, told by people who, however occasionally misguided in the telling, have the nerve to take it seriously, can those two words read as the equivalent of "Save me!"

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The Collection Project Film of the Day:

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Well, what else? The original The Wolf Man (d. George Waggner) would not be held up by anyone as the crown jewel of Universal's original series of horror films, and prior to checking it out again tonight my comments here would probably be a bit more dismissive than they're actually about to be. My basic complaint had been that as Larry Talbot, Lon Chaney, Jr. is a bit of a stiff, lumbering goof. Somehow, in my previous viewings of the film, I missed two things: 1) that Chaney is not stiff, and 2) while he is a lumbering goof, that is in no way a bad thing.

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Before I talk about Chaney as Talbot, Waggner and screenwriter Curt Siodmak's film does seem to be at war with itself for quite a while, and it may be true that they never settled on an approach to the material. It's very odd to watch the many scenes in the film where the themes are being clearly stated, to hear all this dialogue about the dual nature of man and the particulars of insanity, while we already know that Talbot really is a werewolf. This is when that kind of plain-spoken attitude I was just praising can seem clumsy. In the remake, any talk of man's two-sided nature jibes perfectly with del Toro's basic, tragic demeanor, but Chaney projects a kind of soft-headed, happy simplicity, belying no trace of a tortured inner life. So when his father, John Talbot (Claude Rains), dismisses the idea of seeing mankind in terms of black and white, and that it is the appreciation of shades of gray that feeds the werewolf myth, we can't help but wonder how exactly this ties into the Larry Talbot we know whose life is burning up before our eyes.

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And this is precisely what's so wonderful about Chaney. His Talbot is just this guy. He's been disconnected from his family for eighteen years, and while his return home is rooted in sadness (his brother was killed in a hunting accident), he's happy to be forming a relationship with his dad. He likes this old town, and this big house, he'll now be living in. He thinks the girl in the antique store is pretty, and he wants to take her out on a date, to that old gypsy camp, to get their fortune told. He's a nice guy. And when that date ruins his life, he is scared shitless. He doesn't know what's happening, he doesn't want to hurt anybody -- at times, Chaney's portrayal of Talbot's terror and panic brings him close to tears. It's hard to imagine del Toro's Talbot freaking out like this. Del Toro's fear has a Gothic strength to it, a sense of resignation that indicates in his quieter moments, he has no truly happy memories to make him mourn the life that's rapidly slipping out of reach. As played by Chaney, however, Talbot is a guy who is going to specifically think about, and miss, eating a ham sandwich, drinking a beer, and listening to the Dodgers on the radio. Those are his happy times, and that's what he doesn't want to lose.

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In The Wolfman, you look at Talbot and think, "You're doomed." In The Wolf Man, you look at Talbot and think "You poor dumb bastard."

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*Alternate joke, shopworn but more to the point: "The difference between the two being that one is a blood-thirsty, animalistic maniac, and the other is the Wolf Man."

In the Mood

There won't be a Collection Project write-up with this post -- I just wanted to put the video up. Happy Memorial Day.

The Collection Project: You Oughtta Have Respect for Things That Used to Be

In Hell is for Heroes (d. Don Siegel), Steve McQueen plays Pvt. Reese, a good soldier, uncommonly brave, who brings his squad -- pinned down by German troops along the Siegfried line -- to the brink of extinction. He does so because he's brave, but it's a bit more complicated than that. Reese is angry, beaten, silent. He's shell-shocked, but no one knows his business better. As the hours tick by, and the Germans manage to begin picking off his fellow soldiers, a frustrated need to do something, to take action, and damn their orders, takes hold of Reese, until he's able to talk his new commanding officer, Cpl. Henshaw (James Coburn) into a reckless mission that involves crawling through a minefield after dark to take out the German pillbox that has been raining hell on them for two days.
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Hell is for Heroes is an odd, but wildly successful, mix of typical star-studded WWII Hollywood fare (the almost bizarre cast includes not only Bobby Darin, but also Bob Newhart, whose status as comic relief is made so explicit that at one point they actually put a phone in his hand, so he can carry on a one-sided conversation about morale and entertainment for the troops) and merciless This-Is-War! brutality. The performances are excellent, top to bottom -- honestly, I don't think McQueen was ever better -- and the direction and writing are consistently sharp. But it's Reese's journey from calloused grunt with a keen mind for combat, to arrogant failure, to some kind of redemption, that gives the film its unique punch.

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Because, as I say, Reese fails. Reese has been clashing with Sgt. Larkin (Harry Guardino) about the best way to extract themselves from their seemingly hopeless situation, with Reese pushing for his night-time pillbox assault, and Larkin, who's in command, insisting they wait for the rest of the command that is due to reinforce them, but has been delayed. When Larkin dies, putting Coburn's Henshaw in charge, a window opens for Reese to do things his way, to allow German artillery to win his argument with Larkin for him. Henshaw doesn't know what to do, and believes Reese does. He's wrong.

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The fact that the bitter, war-hardened loner in Hell is for Heroes, the guy who insists he knows better than the brass, does nothing with these traits but bring death upon his fellow soldiers, proving the usually fumbling brass correct, counts as a subversive twist to the Hollywood war movie formula. When the remainder of Reese's squad is finally relieved, Capt. Loomis (Joseph Hoover) lays into Reese:

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You had orders to stay here on the ridge and hold it. You knew that! What about Kalinsky? What about the man you left in the field? And you say you gave the order, huh? Reese, you're a private, you don't give orders, you take them!

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And he's right, clearly, because look what happened? Reese knows it, too -- McQueen's face in this scene is a jittery, sweaty mess, his eyes popping with despair, his mind, you sense, slipping away. Combat is what he knows, or thought he knew. It's the only thing that was left to him, and this is what he did with it. Everything that kept him moving has turned to dust, and men died for it.

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As I said before, a certain kind of redemption does come Reese's way, and while it's real, and worth something, it's also hopeless and grim, the kind of gut-churning victory one only finds on the battlefield.

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Have a good Memorial Day Weekend, everybody, but don't forget what it's all about.

The Collection Project: Rats

There's an internet "meme" that's been floating around since 2008 which takes what some apparently believe to be a sharp shot to the ribs of Martin Scorsese's The Departed, specifically the shot at the end of the rat skittering across the railing. The meme's joke comes from an episode of The Simpsons that I haven't seen, and it goes like this: "The rat symbolizes obviousness!"

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I remember when Scorsese's film came out, and that particular moment was frequently singled out by critics as being a bit of symbolism that was beneath the filmmaker, and as such it made them roll their eyes, gnash their teeth, rend their garments. The problem is that the actual physical rat is no more or less symbolic of Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) than the repeated use of the word "rat" to refer to the kind of person who poses as a member of one group as a means of hurting or destroying that group. "Rat" is in the lexicon with that definition, and actual rats are conjured in our minds every time we use or hear the word in that context, because words have a tendency to do that.

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So, when people saw the rat scurrying by at the end of The Departed and said "Oh, I know what that means instantly, without even having to think about it! How dumb!" they were actually sort of missing the point a little bit. Because Scorsese wasn't trying to be "symbolic", as we often think of the word, which is to say he wasn't using coded imagery to depict a nebulous idea that would otherwise resist physical representation. No, what Scorsese was doing was this: he was making a joke.

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A dark joke, one that, in effect, takes a swift kick at Sullivan's corpse. It's an insult, a mockery of this awful human being: even in death, we'll never forget what you are, and you're still nothing. The guy's just been shot in the face, and the world is still giving him shit. That's what the rat on the rail is. It's not a rat that symbolizes a metaphorical rat; it's a rat that's laughing at Colin Sullivan's body. Nasty, dark, brutal -- in other words, completely in tone with the rest of the film.

The Collection Project: Not Death, but Love

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Early in Mad Love (d. Karl Freund), an audience is seen watching Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) performing in a Grand Guignol play, in which she appears as "The Torturee". This crowd is there to hoot at the wild, over-the-top grotesqueries of what happens on stage, but one woman finds it all too horrible, and buries her face in her husband's shoulder.
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Because the play is not being taken seriously by anybody else, nor was it intended to be, the woman's emotions are found to be amusing by her husband and by the people around her..

Later, Freund will imply that Yvonne Orlac's "Torturee" has been burned by a hot poker somewhere below frame, as it were, and Peter Lorre's obsessive Dr. Gogol, in his usual box seat at the theater, reacts in a way that implies he wishes he were that hot poker. So who's reaction makes more sense: the woman, or her husband? Mad Love will continue on to reach heights of high Gothic absurdity -- which I mean as a compliment -- that might elicit from its viewers the kind of hoots that most of the Paris crowd was directing at Yvonne Orlac's play, and those hoots will have been anticipated by the filmmakers. It will also present, in Lorre's Gogol, one of the truly unique and most unnerving characters in horror films.

All of which makes the choice to drop that shot of the woman cowering against her husband an interesting one. I've mentioned before my interest in horror movies and literature that explore the genre itself as the source of our unease. I can't quite twist Mad Love into enough knots to make it that kind of film, but the woman's disturbance, and the way it differs from the rest of the audience, isn't there for no reason.

As a genre, horror, at least on film, has devolved into something that we're not supposed to take seriously, and to shrink from it (never mind actually objecting to it) is met with anything from mild to severe derision. Or gentle patronizing, which is what the woman's husband offers her. None of it's real, he reasons, and besides that it's all too absurd. He thinks this while overhead a small bald man with protruding eyes who has never experienced love is having his warped headspace filled with the theatrical images below, images that will keep him going until they're taken away. At which point he'll begin to bust loose.

Taking things seriously, no matter how absurd they are, is not always such a bad thing. While I may not share all the same cultural tastes as her, it seems to me that the woman in the audience has a pretty healthy aversion to simulated torture (when you get right down to it, what is there to enjoy in such a spectacle?). Perhaps she's experienced enough real-life horror, or at least ordinary human unhappiness, to not want to seek it out in fiction. Perhaps her reasons are her own. Or perhaps it's the lack of horror in the rest of the crowd, less than what's on stage, that really makes her cringe.

Pull yourself far enough back, laugh in death's face too long, and you might find yourself like Rollo (Edward Brophy). Guilty, remorseless, and facing the guillotine, all he can muster by way of emotion is an admiration of the blade that will soon remove his head from his body. Push yourself far enough back from feeling anything -- because it's not real -- and that remove can extend beyond the theater, and fiction. Soon you might find it useful to apply this distance to strangers. Then to acquaintances. It becomes easier to act only for yourself. Then it becomes easier to intentionally act against others. And the distance broadens to take in friends, family. Finally yourself. Nothing matters. It's all so absurd anyway. Your body's not even your own. Soon it's as if your hands were acting of their own accord.