Affinity #24

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Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

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- Vladimir Nabokov

Remember, Remember, the End of November

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Boy, this has really been a thin month around here, hasn't it? What is this, only my sixth post? I can't remember the last time I've been so unproductive with this blog, and if anybody's sad about that, allow me to apologize. I don't really know what the deal is, but I suppose October took more out of me than usual.
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To add insult to injury, this post isn't going to be worth dogshit, either. I'm only popping in now to say "Oops!" and "I'm sorry!" and "Things will be better next month!" Hopefully, anyway. I should think they'd almost have to be, so I'm trying to stay positive. If nothing else, I'll be itching to post about Black Swan and True Grit when I see them in December, which is two posts locked down, right off the bat. Already things are looking better.
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But I'm afraid that's really it for November. Obviously, I'm going to be tied up with family-type deals through the weekend, and while there's an off chance that I might spark on something to write about before the month is over, I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. So let's just call November a wash, and start fresh on December 1st. Until then, have a great Thanksgiving, everybody.
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PS - Exit Through the Gift Shop sucked. This has been a review.

A Cold Lonely Summer

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I continue to find it very peculiar that Jonathan Levine and Jacob Forman's All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has still not only not been released to theaters in the US, but hasn't even been given a token DVD release. The story behind this is, at least as I understand it, not terribly compelling: using the box office failure of Grindhouse as their primary learning tool, the Weinstein brothers unloaded the much-less-wonky-than-Grindhouse slasher film onto another distribution company, which promptly went bankrupt. And so All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has languished, first as a much-whispered about horror film, of the "I got to see this, but you can't!" sort, talked up by those who'd caught it at one or another film festival, and more recently as a movie everybody has forgotten about because most people aren't easily able to see the damn thing. Of all the kinds of word-of-mouth that can build hype, the highly positive kind that nevertheless can't do anybody any good is by far the most powerful, but that power is finite.

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Talking about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane now, it's hard to know if one should even bother avoiding spoiler territory, and if one doesn't bother, if one should then bother adding a spoiler warning. It's not impossible to see All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and if you already own a region-free DVD player it's not even expensive. But you do have to already own that particular kind of DVD player, and you have to be willing to buy All the Boys Love Mandy Lane just because you want to see it for the first time. You really have to want it, in other words. With no offense intended towards the film, how many people feel enough residual hype now, four years later, to do that?

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At least one, since that's how I finally saw it, which I've now done twice. The second time was today, and the film holds up very nicely. Which is the thing about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane: it is a good movie, almost undeniably solid, and perhaps insidiously powerful -- I say "insidiously" because it plays, with great ease, as a straight-ahead slasher film. But it has a brain, and even a heart, though not an especially warming one. Directed by Levine and written by Forman, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is about the titular female, who is of high school age, and how all the boys love her. Or rather, want to have sex with her. Mandy (played by Amber Heard, who is well cast for all sorts of reasons) is almost the typical perfect girl -- gorgeous, blonde, sweet, humble, completely without affectation and without a mean bone in her body. And she's chaste, too, which is why all the boys want to have sex with her, in particular -- "I claim this land for Poland", and so forth -- and why she's invited to a weekend getaway by a group of friends, one of whom has a farm, or rather his parents do, said parents being out of town. So, drink, drugs, sex. She agrees to go, and I'll leave it up to you to guess if the mysterious killer who shows up on the first night kills them one by one, or all at once.

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Okay, it's one by one -- so there's your spoiler. What's interesting about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is that the smart-ass, off-hand cruelty that is a staple of pretty much all movies about teenagers, not just slasher movies about teenagers, is not merely there, which is usually the case. As the film builds, it eventually becomes clear that this stuff, while not hammered on gratuitously, is sort of what the film is all about. The whole film is practically told in miniature in the first chunk of the film -- not quite a prologue, but near enough -- which involves a pool party, a jock who wishes most ardently to get all up in Mandy Lane, Mandy's quiet, nerdish friend Emmett (Michael Welch), and a terrible accident. Simply saying that I'm going to tread lightly here is already treading more heavily than I probably should, but in order to say anything about this scene, and really the film, I should note that All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and primarily this scene, does benefit from repeated viewings. There also shouldn't necessarily be extra points handed out if you guess early who the mysterious, lurking killer is, not least because the film reveals his identity well before the end. And when you see what he's wearing, you might be reminded of certain violent high school stories you've heard about in the news, and how teenagers can be assholes, but also this hardly justifies certain actions, and so forth.

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Again, though, none of this is underlined very strongly, and this is to the film's credit. Neither Levine nor Forman are so stupid as to neglect their obligation to view, and portray, their story's victims as human beings, no matter how unlikable they may otherwise be. One guy, Jake, played by Luke Grimes, comes off as a right bastard, but before his worst qualities come out he's also shown taking some particularly bad verbal abuse -- bad for a teenage boy, anyway -- with both barrels. And the resident "mean girl", Chloe, played by Whitney Able, is usually seen dishing it out, but has a sad, lonely moment that proves she most definitely cannot take it. It's all surprisingly humane, something that can't often be said of slasher films.

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Jonathan Levine -- who has not returned to the genre since this film, which is pretty atypical of young modern filmmakers who get their start in horror -- landed on a nice visual style here, focusing first on a way to film Mandy Lane, and then radiating out from there. Heard as Lane is photographed in perpetual sunshine, or so it seems -- even when it's night, she still seems to be walking through a summer day. The rest of the film carries that same country summer feel, more so than any of its genre predecessors that chose roughly similar settings (I'm distinguishing the deceptively welcoming climate of this film from the also summery Texas Chainsaw Massacre, whose sun does not warm but rather bakes the dirt all to hell), and certain moments of daylit horror have a bright shimmer that's unnerving in its incongruity.

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That being said, I'm not sure I can say that All the Boys Love Mandy Lane built up a great sense of terror or dread, at least not in me -- at its best, the film felt more like a sad, brutal, moral disaster. It would feel like that even more often than it does if it wasn't for the fact that Levine and Forman apparently felt the need to undercut things a little bit too much, and a little bit too often, with needless, and ostensibly clever, touches. And there's that ending, which even threatens to undercut how we got where we got in the story, but watching it again today I'm not sure that's entirely fair. In one obvious sense, and from one important character's not insignificant point of view, the ending changes absolutely nothing. What the ending does do is cast that beginning section into a new light, a potentially interesting one, and a pretty dreadful one.

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Levine's final stylistic touch is to throw All the Boys Love Mandy Lane back to the grindhouse (I don't know, maybe the Weinsteins had a point after all), which is the thing to do these days, but I have to say he makes it work. He throws it even further back by playing us out with the song from which this post takes its title. It's one of those clever touches, but it works, too.

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So It's Pretty Clear I'm Not Breaking My Ass to Post Something New Here, Right?

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You know how it is. What with one thing or another, and I'm still getting over that one time, which was so hard. But let's never mind all that. Maybe what I should do is simply broach a topic to you, my readers, and see what fascinating conversation flows forth. This doesn't all have be about what I write; it can be about your words, too!

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So here's the topic:

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You guys remember these toys? Sectaurs? Somebody remembers these, right?

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Discuss. By the way, that last one is their castle.

Improving the Classics

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Good afternoon. You are all aware, I assume, that this blog is written and maintained by the author of such accomplished works as the horror novel This and its sequel These, as well as numerous monologues such as How Much is a Hero?, among many other works. If you’re not aware of that, well, I am. Knowing this as you do, your civilian mind might figure that this is plenty, that no mind could be so creative and perceptive of the world around him as to ever wish to – never mind be capable of doing so! – branch out yet further from this already full and foliose artistic tree. I excuse your ignorance, because what would you know of the creative life? But know this now: stagnation for one such as myself is akin to death. To avoid this, I am forever exploring new avenues, or “branches”, of the aforementioned tree, or “city”; I constantly plumb the depths, or “roots”, of my demiurgic well, or “tree”.

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With this in mind, I would like to now announce a new literary project. Although, to be honest, it’s not really “new”. You may be aware of a new genre, these “mash-ups”, I suppose you would call them, wherein a contemporary writer takes a classic piece of fiction and, while keeping said classic intact, adds new characters and narrative possibilities that result in, for instance, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Naturally, everyone has collectively agreed that this is a marvelous idea, and I am no different. In fact, I am so not different that I’ve been doing this for years, for positively ages, long before it became the going thing. My feverish pen has improved upon any number of classics, so that the world can now enjoy The Great Gatsby and Dragons, The Time Machine and Manticores, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Ghouls, La Dispiration and Extraterrestrials, Frankenstein and Ghosts, The Best American Short Stories of the Century and Spiders, and so on. As you can see, my hands have hardly been idle! Granted, not all of these have been published, because I’ve learned that the original novel’s copyright having transferred to the public domain is essential, but rest assured that they’ve all been written and are simply awaiting that great day. Those works which I’ve transformed that are in the public domain are, I promise you, “making the rounds”.

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In the meantime, I’ve been hard at work on my next literary improvement, and just recently completed same. Once known by the fairly pedestrian title Moby-Dick or, The Whale, Herman Melville’s masterpiece of madness, obsession, and cosmic rage will soon be available as Moby-Dick or, The Whale and Wolfmen. Again, the idea here is to take the original text and present it in full, but interspersed throughout will be new material, written by me, which will provide new twists on favorite characters, such as the whale, and the guy who hunts the whale. But it's not all about looking at the characters through a newly-ground lens -- it's also about adding fresh occult subplots about hunting wolfmen. Moby-Dick is in need of a punch-up, is my point, some new juice, some zaz, which will bring young readers and modernize Melville's themes. Genre fiction, specifically wolfman fiction, has a tendency to upend our beliefs, to subvert what we think we know, to teach us truths we thought hidden. This never even occurred to Herman Melville, but, fortunately for him, it did to me.

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I suppose at this point some excerpts would be in order, to whet the appetite of my readers (or wet their appetites, if you will, because of the ocean). So let's begin at the beginning, and please note how seamlessly I'm able to incorporate my own work into Melville's.

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Call me Ishmael. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. Would there be wolfmen around? Probably so, because if there's one thing Dr. Von Armbruster taught me in Vienna when I was studying about wolfmen, is that those things are everywhere. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen (and now I'm talking about sailing again), and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. And any time I see a wolfman, I just kill it, because otherwise my status as the world's leading wolfman hunter would be in jeopardy. That's my main job -- killing wolfmen.

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You see? Seamless. Moby-Dick is known for being a very digressive novel -- a hundred pages can go by with no advance in the plot at all, while Melville dithers around talking about whaling law or colors or some such nonsense. This made the task of revamping this particular book especially challenging, but you know what? I was up for it. Take this section, for example, taken from the beginning of the chapter Melville titled "The Whiteness of the Whale", and which I have renamed "The Whiteness of the Whale and the Brownness of the Wolfman":

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Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.

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And that's to say nothing of the brownness of the wolfman! Any time I see one of those guys, and how brown they are, I just about pee myself. "Why brown?" I always think. It's just so creepy, and it makes me think about how mad I am at God sometimes. And Ahab -- don't even talk to him about the brownness of wolfmen. One time while we were eating dinner on board the ship the Pequod which we were sailing on so we could hunt Moby Dick the Whale, I said to him "Captain Ahab, this meat we're eating is brown, now that it's cooked. You know what that color makes me think of? Wolfmen." And Ahab jumped out of his seat and said "You shut up about wolfmen! Their brownness appals me! Even more than the whiteness of Moby Dick, which I'm starting to think isn't even the point of all this anymore! Whatever else I may be talking about, you can bet your last nickle that what's really up my nose is those damn wolfmen! Why, if we ever happen to come across a wolfman on this trip, I'll just about bust! The thing about those things is..." And so on. It made dinner really awkward, but it's not like he didn't have a point. But anyway, back to the whiteness of the whale. I think the deal there...

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No need to go on there -- I think you see how it works. I bet if you've read Moby-Dick before, right now you're probably casting your mind back to that first (and, let's face it, only) reading, trying to remember if there were any references to wolfmen that you just missed at the time. Well, there weren't, but after reading Moby-Dick, or The Whale and Wolfmen you'll realize there should have been!

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But all this is just talk. No one's going to buy this book hoping to find nothing more than talk about wolfmen -- people are going to want the real thing. Initially, Moby-Dick was a commercial disaster for Melville, and I think that's because he didn't realize that nobody wanted a philosophical, metaphorical wank-job -- they wanted another Jaws! That's probably what he told his agent he was writing, but that sure as shit isn't what he delivered. Well, boy, I'm not making that same mistake. As you can see...

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I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the whale and the ship -- where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy he was exposed to. Unapalled by the massacre made upon them during the night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent blood which began to flow from the carcase -- the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive.

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And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.

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But a wolfman will, and that's just what happened, because Balthasar, our wolfman stowaway who you may remember had been secretly terrorizing the crew even while he pretended to be all nice and not a wolfman whenever Ahab or Starbuck was around, jumped out of the boat and changed into a wolfman again and attacked Queequeg! So what Queequeg did is he jumped on one of the sharks and started to ride it, but then Balthasar jumped on another shark and started to ride it, and the two of them were going all over the ocean like that, fighting each other with their sharks. Luckily, Queequeg still had that mysterious gun that shot knives that Professor Ludwig gave him from before.

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And I'll stop there! To know what happens then, you'll have to buy the book! But listen: you guys know me. You know that this isn't about book sales. I take my writing very seriously, and I take my ability to make Moby-Dick better more seriously still. In the original book, the power of Ahab's rage at God, and his misplaced aggression towards the white whale is not lost on me. I certainly have no intention of taking that aspect of the book and "heaving it overboard". It's just that when I read Melville's words, I think, well, you know, wolfmen have that effect on me too, sometimes. And maybe wolfmen are just a better metaphor -- I think they are! So Ahab's thunderous end is not gone, it's just recontexturalized:

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"...Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale (and don't think I've forgotten about you, Balthasar!); to the last I grapple with the two of you; from hell's heart I stab at first Moby Dick, and then with my other hand I stab at the wolfman; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at all white whales and all wolfmen, who, together, have made a mess of my life. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing you guys, though tied to thee both, thou damned whale, and thou damned wolfman especially! Thus, I give up the spear! Take that, Balthasar!"

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In stores soon.

Severed Heads and Vomiting Cats

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In the world of bizarre films, there comes a time in every such film when the viewer asks him or herself: "What the fuck am I watching?" Nobuhiko Obayashi's House (or Hausu), from 1977, may reach that moment in record time, when the film's title is preceded, accurately but still inexplicably, by the words "A Movie". Then the title, House, appearing as puffed up, living animated letters, rises up, a deep, rumbling voice utters the title, the "O" turns into a mouth with big teeth that chomps down on nothing, then opens again, and from nowhere a severed hand falls from the maw. And we're off.

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House is a true cult item, and it's recent DVD release from the good people at Criterion has turned it into one that all the kids are talking about (some of that talk has included what I suppose were at one time called "wags" wishing that Criterion were instead releasing House, Steve Milner's 1986 horror comedy, featuring William Katt, George Wendt and Richard Moll. Having seen that film, I have earned the right to wish those people would be quiet). However, the most interesting thing about Obayashi's film, at least to me, is that it counts as a cult movie only in the non-Japanese world. At one point in House, a girl goes outside and is accosted by the severed, sentient, flying head of one of her friends. The head zooms around cackling, and bites her friend on the ass. The girl runs away screaming, and the head vomits. Then it turns into a watermelon that all the other characters eat. In America, this is pure, nonsensical madness. In Japan, this is archetypal -- this is Joseph Campbell, Hero With a Thousand Faces-type shit. Or, knowing as I do that in Japan House was a mainstream hit, so I'm forced to conclude.

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A plot summary of House is futile, and would be boring. Outside of noting that the film involves seven schoolgirls whose plans for an outing to "training camp" are upended, so they instead travel to the house of one of the girls' aunts, house and aunt both turning out to be haunted, any summary of Obayashi's film (based on an idea by his 11-year-old daughter) would just turn into a list of its insanities. This review may well turn out to be that anyway, but if so at least I'll go about it my own way. The problem is, I do not know what to do with a film like House. I am aware of some people who've put their bafflement over what Obayashi has offered them to one side, or at least tamped down on it a little, and attempted some sort of critical exegesis. More power to them, I say, but I'm neither capable nor interested in following suit. Put it like this: House goes so crazy so quickly, that an early scene in which the two main schoolgirls, named Fantasy and Gorgeous (Kumiko Oba and Kimiko Ikegami) lovingly embrace led me to think "They're going to kiss. Or turn into kangaroos." It's the kind of movie where, once the guy falls down the stairs, and his ass lands in a pot, and he begins to scoot all over the road, weaving through traffic, on his ass, in that pot, you figure everything else might as well happen, too.

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Don't be fooled into thinking that House is nothing but an incoherent mess, however. It sort of isn't! In terms of narrative, and logic, and all that stuff, sure, but visually -- which you sort of have to sense is what really matters to Obayashi -- it really is pretty consistent. Theoretically, I suppose that's easy enough to accomplish in a film where anything goes, but you can't watch House and not understand that Obayashi is a director who knows what he wants. Whether or not you want the same thing is an entirely different matter, and as captivatingly absurd as the film can be at times, I found it at least as often to be the kind of movie that I wanted to tell to go fuck itself. Though far less appalling, House is not unlike Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, in that it is stylistically relentless, even assaultive, and there are times while watching House, as while watching Natural Born Killers for the first (and only) time, when I became simply bored with Obayashi's fairy tale/comic book/haunted house shenanigans. The big difference is, in House those moments of boredom alternate with other moments of shocked amusement (or whatever -- there are lots of shadings to the reactions you're likely to experience here), whereas in Natural Born Killers that moment of boredom began in minute one out of 119, and never stopped.

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I don't know if House will end up being any kind of Rorschach test for its Western viewers, if one's reactions to its images of man-eating pianos and blood-vomiting cats will come to be seen as revealing of one's inner life. I hope not, and anyway, so far I don't see anyone trying to turn it into that -- it's all delighted confusion, from what I can see. My own delight is more than a little bit tempered, but even so it's nice to watch a film about Japanese schoolgirls being eaten by a house and realize that the girl named Kung Fu (Miki Jinbo) is the resident badass among the secondary characters, and that if the schoolgirls from House were to be interpreted in terms of American action/horror movies, she would be Jesse Ventura from Predator. She was my favorite, Kung Fu was, and I was really sorry when whatever the fuck happened to her happened to her.

Naomi Watts: A Kind of Face You Hate Tradition

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