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.

The Collection Project: The History of the World in Telephone Numbers

When I first saw Mulholland Dr. (d. David Lynch), I wanted to know what it all meant. This is only natural. From the magnificent early scene set at a diner called Winkies (one of a chain, we're told, adding to the tediously ordinary setting) that ends with a man being frightened to death by a thing behind a dumpster, to the miniature old couple scurrying out of a paper bag in order to harry poor Naomi Watts into [something something SPOILER], the film adds one insane mystery after another, until, on first viewing, I was simply watching closely, desperately closely, hoping for the tumblers to click.

They never did, and still haven't, although I've heard any number of theories trying to explain the plot of Lynch's film. All of these theories are boring, and diminishing. They range from the roughly specific -- "It was all a dream, or half was a dream, or it all flashed through Watts's head as she died" -- to the vaguely thematic --"It's a movie about identity". This last one has become particularly irksome to me, because it seems as though any time a film is described as being about, or having something to do with "identity", the case must then be closed, because the deliverer of this truth tends not to have any follow-through. In Mulholland Dr., Naomi Watts appears to be playing two distinct characters, with some overlap, or maybe not. Maybe she's one character, and the nice one is a delusion, while the nasty one with the gun and money for a hitman is the real person. In any event, apart from the obvious point, which is that people present one version of themselves for public display, while keeping the "real" person tucked up inside their brains, what does the film say about identity? And if it says nothing more than I've just done here, then isn't that hopelessly banal, to the point that it's not even worth mentioning?

Still, though. When I first watched the film, one moment in particular, a line of dialogue, sparked my brain, and I became very excited to see where Lynch would take this idea. In the scene, the hitman (Mark Pellegrino) is meeting one of his shady underworld contacts in the man's grubby office, and the hitman points to a book on the man's desk and says "Is that the book?" The man says yes, and that the book contains "the history of the world, in telephone numbers." What, I thought, could that possibly mean? My interest in shadow histories, as a fictional device, was mightily perked, and after Pellegrino shoots the other guy in the head and takes the book, this element of the film goes precisely nowhere. The book is never mentioned again, and the rest of the scene -- apart from a loose link to the car accident that opens the film -- serves only to introduce the hitman, who will pop up, briefly, later on.

I used to think, and sometimes still do, that if Lynch had the will or imagination to tie all this stuff together -- and not just the stuff I've mentioned, but the thing behind the dumpster, the Cowboy, the midget, the "This is the girl" guys, and so on -- then Mulholland Dr. would be the greatest piece of storytelling in the history of the medium. And maybe, at one time, this was Lynch's ambition. Okay, I sort of doubt that, but given that the film was originally intended as a TV series that, following the network's decision not to pick it up, Lynch reconfigured and added to, in order to turn it into a movie, it's certainly possible that the "telephone numbers" line, and the book, would have meant something more, in later episodes of the series that never happened, than the throwaway bit of strangeness it ultimately is.

But...so what? When I watch Mulholland Dr. now, I simply revel in all that throwaway strangeness, as well as the strangeness that has a firmer grip on things. Like, for instance, the Cowboy (Monty "Lafayette" Montgomery), one of Lynch's greatest creations, one who, for my money, blows the similar Mystery Man (Robert Blake) from Lynch's Lost Highway clear out of the water. The Cowboy is probably one of my favorite film characters, but what to say about him? He's strange and creepy, and what the heck is that guy talking about? Also, did you see him in the background that one time?

The problem is that talking about films, especially films like this one, can sometimes smooth things over too much, and you find yourself stating the obvious things that the film itself left unstated, and whatever grabbed your attention and imagination while watching the screen loses its hold (I'm reminded of a DVD extra on the Criterion disc of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, in which Jonathan Lethem seems to want everybody to know that he recently read a whole book that was all about the 1950s). Worse still is trying to explain what the filmmaker never wanted to explain in the first place. I've said before that, in too many people's minds, the word "mystery" has come to mean "something that is solvable", and that, to me, is the danger of ruthlessly hammering away at a film like Mulholland Dr., in the hopes that it will crack open, and inside will be a giant banner with an answer scrawled across it. You're going to ruin the movie for yourself. Your answer is probably wrong, too, by the way, but that won't matter. As long as you believe it, the film will have no power left.

You won't ruin it for me, though, because there is no answer to Mulholland Dr. I mean, really, there isn't, but there certainly isn't one that accounts for all of its madness. Besides that, I'm over that particular phase of my neuroses, the one that demands an answer from everything (okay, I'm mostly over it). Now, when I think of Mulholland Dr., I think of a story I heard about Lynch, when he was at a press conference for his next film, the even more obscure (which really doesn't quite cover it) Inland Empire. A reporter asked him what the film was about, and Lynch pointed to the poster, which was hanging behind him, and said "It says right there." He was talking about the tagline, which is "A Woman in Trouble". That's good enough for me.

Here We Are at the House

So a few days ago, Marilyn -- whose influence on this blog is becoming absolute -- sent me a letter that said "Hey Bill, I'm too a-scared to watch Jennifer Chambers Lynch's film entitled Boxing Helena, probably because it has something to do with being made helpless. You know who should see it is you. Will you see it and write about it? You are handsome. Also, you are smart. Sincerely, Marilyn. PS - You are funny." Flattered by her compliments, I agreed to give Boxing Helena a look-see. I've always been more than keen on Miss Sherilyn Fenn anyway, and Jennifer C. Lynch is David Lynch's daughter, a fact which only increased my curiosity. Sweetening the pot still further was the fact that the film also featured dismemberment and boxing things up and Art Garfunkel. Yes, this was a movie that needed to be watched. Which I did. And this thing is awful.

Julian Sands, it cannot be stressed too highly, stars in Boxing Helena as Dr. Nick Cavanaugh. I dearly wish there was some way to give you some sense of his line readings, but then again maybe the limits of the English language are, in this case, a blessing. Sands is through-the-floor terrible in this film, and I was all set to tear him a new cornhole, because it's high time someone knocked Julian Sands off his pedestal, but then in one scene I noticed he was wearing a hearing aid. This was late in the film, and there had never been any indication that his character was hard of hearing. So I started thinking, "Is Julian Sands deaf? Is that why he's so bad? Am I discriminating against him? Maybe he's actually a really good actor, for a deaf person. But wait, Marlee Matlin's deaf, and she's pretty good. Was she born deaf? Because maybe that's the difference. Maybe Sands..." And so on. I finally decided to err on the side of caution, and I therefore now consider his performance a courageous triumph. I have to add a little toughness to the love, however, and point out that while Sands sure as hell gives Nick Furlong a run for his money, he's still going to have to put in some hard work if he wants to get to the level of Dakota Fanning.

Anyway. Nick Cavanaugh is a brilliant surgeon who, following the death of his mother, has recently inherited his sprawling family home. He has a long-time girlfriend named Anne (Betsy Clarke), but still obsesses over a woman named Helena, played by Sherilyn Fenn. Nick's best friend Lawrence (ART GARFUNKEL!!) gently reminds him that he only spent one night with Helena, and he might want to think about letting it go. You can never ignore the advice of Art Garfunkel and still expect a heavenly light to ever again shine on your soul, but ignore him Nick does, by inviting Helena to a party he suddenly decides to throw.

Helena, meanwhile, is gorgeous. I mean, look:

I'm fucking pretty as shit

But that soft, angelic exterior masks -- wouldn't you just fucking know it -- a cruel and manipulative mind. At the time of Nick's invitation, she's dating Ray (Bill Paxton), and as we meet these two wide-eyed and innocent creatures, they are engaged in the physical act of love, and Helena gets so mad about her phone ringing in the middle of their humping that she calls a halt to the whole procedure. This upsets Ray, as it would anyone, but he tries to gently coax his lover back into his arms by pointing at his wang with both hands and calling it "Daddy". Somehow, this doesn't work, and Helena continues to treat him badly (although, to be fair, Ray does tend to wear mesh shirts and leather pants, and say things like "It's a big night tonight at the club").

Anyhow, Helena, for some reason, accepts Nick's invitation, but the party goes very badly for Nick, ending as it does with Helena leaving with some twerp, and Nick calling Anne "Helena". Not only that, but Art Garfunkel also pretty much bails on Nick. "Fuck it," Art Garfunkel says, and you know what? I don't blame him.

Fortunately for Nick, Helena left her purse at his house, and she calls and asks him -- insluting him even as she asks for a favor! -- to bring it to her at the airport, where she will be catching a plane to Alcapulco. Nick does this, but the purse is absent her address book, so he takes her back to his house so they can both look for it. And this moment gave me my favorite line in the entire film. We get a shot of the car pulling up outside his house, and Nick says: "Well, here we are at the house, Helena. I'm so glad I was able to tell that story in such depth and detail." I swear to God, that line is actually spoken. We're never told what the story is that Nick is referring to, but I, for one, am glad that these two kids were able to have at least one pleasant conversation before the horror begins.

The horror begins when Helena, who really hates Nick and isn't shy about letting him now that, discovers that Nick purposely left her address book behind, and used it to lure her to his house. She is so upset by this that she storms from the house, and about halfway across Nick's front lawn, she turns to face him, while continuing to walk backwards. As people so often do when they're angry at someone who is standing in a doorway, Helena walks backwards for about twenty feet, right out into the middle of the street, where she's run down by a speeding truck. Nick does the only thing he can do, which is to carry her crippled body into his house and cut off her legs and stop going to work so he can make sure she doesn't escape.

Nick and Helena in happier times

This choice of action really makes Helena angry, and the next half hour or so of the film consists of her calling Nick names (she calls him pathetic, she says she didn't enjoy the sex they had together that one time, but, it should be noted, she never calls him a "Sting-looking, Malcolm McDowell-sounding motherfucker", which is just another one of this film's many missteps), while Nick says, "But I love you! I think you're beautiful! Wup, you just tried to choke me. Let's have those arms off." So he cuts her arms off, an action that actually draws Helena closer to this guy, because she's tired of feeling all, you know, icky, and wants to feel the touch of a man again. And considering that Dr. Nick is, ostensibly, a man, why not just go for it? So Helena goes from saying "You're a loser!" to "You're bad at sex!" to "I don't want to be alone!" to "Touch me!" -- this last phrase being spoken in slow motion -- in about twenty-five minutes. Further upsetting my expectations for this film was the fact that there wasn't a single box in the whole damn movie.

In 1993, Boxing Helena fever briefly swept the nation

That's just completely unbelievable, isn't it? There is simply no way anyone could possibly buy how this section of the story unfolds. But that's okay, because everything that happened after Helena got hit by the truck is (SPOILER) a dream Nick's having after falling asleep while waiting for Helena to get out of surgery. He didn't dismember her after all; he just wants to. And also everything you just saw meant precisely jack-shit. I get the feeling that Boxing Helena was hurried into theaters before Lynch could really go to the mat for her original ending, which featured a final title that read "The End...?", but sometimes artists lose the war, and the barbarians end up running the asylum as the Philistines watch Rome burn, or however it goes. But what we have, like Welles's truncated The Magnificent Ambersons, is still a marvelously engaging work of art, a film whose genius makes itself known in spite of those who might wish to hide it. Good night, and God bless.