Monday, October 29, 2018

hEllO mOthEr!

Okay, is two times the charm?

Darren Aronofsky's mother! (so capitalized) seems nice. A amiable and unassuming domestic family drama.

Were it so. This Molotov cocktail, designed intentionally to incite, was insufferable to me the first time I watched it, and also as fascinating, broken, and audacious as anything else I used to obsess over when I wasn't quite sure what the actual rhetorical, industrial, or genre rules were in filmic story-telling.

We would watch The Man Who Fell To Earth, Blue Velvet, Plan 9 From Outer Space, or Special Effects not because they were particularly insightful or moving. Because they seemed to come from another planet. People who stuttered and couldn't get their consonants out. Films circling around some metaphoric truth but unable to speak the right language.

They're all genre films. But they don't follow the rhetorical rules. They lurch and fail to explain. They spend too long motivating what's already understood. They hide their intentions poorly, say the quiet part loud, and obscure the loud parts in hyperbole, or hysteria, or drowned out in even louder noise.

It's often blamed on the unintentional failure of the proper emphasis. How boring would Blue Velvet have been if Sidney Lumet directed? Or if Pulp Fiction had been told chronologically? I'm all for movies that go off the rails, or maybe have no rails to begin with.  Aronofsky seems to have embraced the "hysterical" part.

I don't think there's anything unintentional about mother! It pretty clearly screams early its uber-trappings as idyllic domestic drama as ripe for decoding. Visions of beating hearts and bloody floor openings presumably aren't to be taken literally, and a rogue's gallery of arbitrary visitors into the kingdom of the needy creator (Bardem) lead to the destruction of his talismanic crystal egg in his study, which he thereafter shutters closed, ensuring no one else will enter. Should our lead character (Lawrence) take this seriously or personally? A disorienting, hyper-subjective mise-en-scene centered on our heroine frustrates and compels us to watch. Wondering when the rabbit scene is, waiting for him to pull out an axe, or even just the mother part.

The real screams come soon after.

It helps to know your film history. It also makes you impatient with ground already trod. Mr. Aronofsky clearly had big metaphors in mind, and relishes the cognitive challenges of making plot into thesis, philosophy into conflict. He's made dreams carnal, reality into hallucinations. From Pi to Noah, he reduces (elevates?) plot mechanics using literal metaphor into character studies. He strips his symbols of literal meaning by making them too literal.

In mother!, I feel he's stripped his metaphor of outside meaning and all he has left are the symbols. It's a POV fallacy, which leaves us looking in the wrong direction, but the plot's hiding in plain sight. As an afterthought, detritus of the grand experiment, scratches in the bark that mean nothing to those who don't know what they're looking at. Have some more water.

No wonder people hated it. Both too confrontational and weirdly obvious, mother! boldly breaks what we would consider proper emphasis between text and subtext. The first and best hint is in the title font itself, a lowercase one-word title misdirecting you to a pretentious yet quiet drama of domesticity and yet insisting on its self-importance by that exclamation point.

I swear, it made me miss the restraint of Larry Cohen.




Friday, April 13, 2018

Damned

Here's a still from Losey's The Damned, a rather rare cold-war SF-y film to see, at least up to now, from 1962.

I remember where I first saw this shot, published I think in John Baxter's 1970 Science Fiction in the Cinema. People nowadays don't remember such things, but before home video, let alone IMDB, most of the information you could get about films was from survey books like Baxter's, Carlos Clarens' Illustrated History of of the Horror Film, the various volumes of the Barnes' International Film Guide Series, and any number of those Walden Books' pictorial histories.

Make no mistake these were basically picture books, and in the pre-internet days, a good picture would capture your imagination like no collection of words possibly could. And for the most part that was all these authors had. That and old trade reviews, barely remembered viewings when they were younger or other 2nd hand sources. They couldn't exactly rent the things at the local Blockbuster either.

These stills served as visual relics in thin volumes of holy palimpsests. It was only later, when you discovered the late night listings in the TV Guide, your ability to program the VCR, or the rep house 15 miles out of your way, that you pulled those books down again to review where, exactly, you might have first learned about the Quartermas Xperiment.

Or Curse (Night) of the Demon. Or Myra Breckinridge.

You slowly managed most of the films in the supposed "canon," as deemed by these writers and these publishers. There's an entire generation who learned about classic horror films from Clarens, for good or ill, with wonky plot summaries, the mistakes and the omissions practically hard-coded into our (non-)memories of these films. I poured over the Tantivy Marx Brothers: Their World Of Comedy (1968) by Allen Eyles (the 6x6 square British edition) before I ever had access to the rest of the Marx films, trying to make sense of my first accidental viewing of A Night at the Opera one night on TV. Imagine reading that mad and short book about their career before having seen any of their other films (and trying to imagine Duck Soup only through a print description).

Stills from Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate made you hunger for any Frankenheimer you could find.  (Birdman of Alcatraz was your solid base hit.) Atkins went on about Metropolis, with pictures and everything in his book. And would we ever see the uncut The Wicker Man? And who the hell was Carl Dreyer?

Being a film aficionado, let alone a completist, was a long difficult journey, often involving drives to theatres in nearby towns, evenings in scary triple-bill houses on skid-row (how I saw Count Yorga after reading about it in Cinefantastique), and decades.

Danny Peary's Cult Movie books were more specific and unlike many of the others from the '60s, clearly written by someone who had actually seen the films rather than only read about them in other, older books.

When at last you caught up with a film that you had lodged in your head for years, since that first compelling, impossible black-and-white still while browsing the used bookstore shelf, it almost didn't matter whether it lived up to expectations. You began to write your own book in your head, with your own plots, your own omissions, your own canon.

The Damned is due to come out from Indicator/ Powerhouse sometime this year on blu-ray. Finally. It turns out it was already released on a Hammer "Icons of Suspense" DVD collection since 2010.

I could have satisfied my curiosity 8 years ago. Damn it. I'm not sure I want to see it anyway. Its power as a still, with the man in a rubber suit, the child looking at a flower on the edge of a cliff. What power this unseen post-bomb Hammer film from the early '60s has by remaining undefined, unseen. Lost.

Damned to obscurity and a cultural mis-remembrance. Embalmed in a book, out of print, and etched by a still in a generation of older film goers who couldn't see it for 40 years.