127. Bungled Shame

It's been so long since I've written that I'm afraid all I'll be able to manage is, as Smash Mouth sings in "Pet Names," "an itsy bitsy tiny little almost inaudible squeak." Still, I will clear my throat and let fly with a note or two.


I watched some instructional films from the 1950s and '60s, the foremost being Lunchroom Manners, made famous by Paul Reubens' comedy club version of The Pee-Wee Herman Show ("Was that a big enough piece of cake or what!?"). But as I watched Phil and the other towheaded Children of the Damned beaten into submission by firm instructions peppered with the adverbs of conformity--"quietly," "politely," "neatly," "slowly," and, of course, "thoroughly"--I found my derisive laughter growing forced, as I succumbed to a flickering 1959--when I was three--in which kids who were never really all that quiet or polite or neat moved in soft fluorescence amid the featureless Alphaville of modernizing education, an All-Purpose Room of squared-off spongy linoleum along which Eames contour chairs glided like beige geese, and the furthest horizon had the quiet lines of a simple geometry problem. Watching Phil deciding not to cut in line and breaking off a piece of his cookie (rather than offering a bite), I realized I knew that kid, and that he, in part, was me. After first grade, and before seventh, I cultivated a dutiful demeanor, with a little daydreamy quietude thrown in--at least in school. To this day the thought of a classroom bathed in light while a stormy day darkens the big windowed wall makes me feel as cozy as an English cat by a glowing fender. Those were good days to be in school, as the meandering quiet of a 1962 classroom passed in lazy ovals, number-two lead spiralling across my yellow sheet with a Crucifix and "J.M.J." drawn at the top, Palmer Method penmanship class slipping with a small wink into Art--a minimal line of endless circular movement, forming a gray tunnel, almost a burrow.


The more I thought about Lunchroom Manners, the more I realized that cinema's delirious power lies in its assertive idealizations: images of blocky shoes planted firmly on the ground while nice ladies restock the milk, a world sad and beautiful, just as Roberto Benigni insisted in Down by Law (1986), narrow and soft, stern and sleepy--and gone forever. And watching the final scene--as Mr. Bungle (the puppet who couldn't use a napkin correctly if his rubber head depended on it) grew "ashamed" for being, well, a bungler--a part of me whispered, "'Gone forever,' all right, and good riddance." But the pencil-fine ovals turn, while the noses get picked, and the feet never stay firmly on the ground, and I START FILM again, just to see.

126. Back-to-School Special

Yesterday was my thirteen-year-old son's first "day" of school--two hours, actually, just enough time to tell his teachers that we have a new dog--Frankie the pug; dear Patty the mutt passed away earlier this summer--and to forget to bring home a reading list we could've gone over. And they're off.

I usually like to mark such events with something special; so of course we watched three movies and ate junk food. This also marked the first time I've seen the original Alien on DVD--and not really "original," since we opted for the "director's cut," seeing three or four scenes that weren't in the theatrical release. (I don't want to write about this new cut right now; I'll simply agree with Ridley Scott that, while the deleted scenes have merit, the original release is better.) And it was interesting watching it after Silent Hill (2006)--and before Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). I'll leave Jack Sparrow alone for now;* I'm more interested in comparing the two horror films.

Silent Hill is based on a video game, but that isn't necessarily a problem. Yes, video games can employ a narrow, first-person point-of-view; but so do some movies, even good ones, especially mystery/suspense and horror films; so the horse still draws the cart, since video games in large part mimic movies--seek/chase movies in particular. I don't think watching The Wages of Fear (1953) and trying to picture it as a video game automatically demeans the film, because the best games distill--not merely "simplify"--the suspense, shock, and chase elements of genre pictures and combine them with the pleasures of the arcade shooting gallery. And I'm old enough to remember games with small tin geese arcing uncertainly and tiny lurching deer heads poking out from two-dimensional tree-trunks in the foreground, while you fired away with your swivel-mounted miniature rifle at what you hoped was their general vicinity. And I loved them, and just writing about them makes me want one in front of me right now so I can hear that Bang! and watch the silhouettes flip backwards. And yet: go back in a time machine and bring the kid I once was any contemporary shoot-em-up video game (in which the game shoots back!), and I know I'd be crazy for them--after being scared to death by their gore and violence, and thoroughly flummoxed by the split-second eye-hand coordinations necessary to stay alive for more than ten seconds.

Well, I've written about this before, when I saw the Doom movie--which I liked. Silent Hill, on the other hand, seems flat and boring--despite some appropriately startling monsters. It's the same old story: lazy writing abetted by a cynical attitude toward the audience. For instance, within five minutes of the movie's opening titles, the woman is venturing alone with her sleepwalking, obviously disturbed child to the mysterious--heck, hellishly combustible and rats-in-the-walls/dwellers-in-darkness Lovecraftian--town of Silent Hill (which the girl seems to be seeking in her somnambulistic, suicidal forays) and immediately losing the child, just so the movie can start the chase. I could see the marketing wheels turning, convinced that the audience does not want to care about the characters--after all, gamers often skip over the cut scenes (or, more tellingly, cinematics) that introduce or stop the game to advance a storyline, establish characters, and so on--but I don't think even the gaming audience only wants the movie simply to start throwing monsters at them. Imagine if Silent Hill had taken fifteen minutes to allow us to see how deeply troubled the little girl is, how desperate her mother, how convinced her father that the doctors know best, all snowballing into the foolish, panicked decision to abscond with the little girl and seek the source of the nightmares. We now have people--more or less--to worry about; and no matter how simpleminded one might think is the audience for video game movies--and to be fair, no matter how simpleminded it might actually be--the movies any audience likes best are the ones that have good stories with people they remember, all presented with a visual sense that fits plot and character. Even Doom recognized this, painting--and yes, with the broadest of strokes--the various characters' alliances and attitudes well before we watched them blasting monsters.

Meanwhile, Alien (like Jaws two years earlier, and a number of others since) knows that, while its audience wants to be shocked and terrified (remember the teaser trailer--was it the first of its kind?--in which the egg cracks open, the sickly green light bursts all over, and the tagline informs us that "In space no one can hear you scream"?), the viewer also wants to feel that some semblance of real people is in peril. Alien may do this in shorthand, but we are given more than cutouts in the crosshairs.

But beyond character, even plot, a horror film depends on mood. And watching it yesterday, I was reminded how much mood Alien has, thanks to the monster design, the music, the sets and costumes, the lighting and camera movement; and more than that the film's pacing, especially before the monster bursts (sorry) on the scene. Nothing you looked at or saw seemed innocent; and everything that did, seemed in imminent peril. In Alien's first fifteen minutes, Scott generates tension and dread, and a serviceable feeling of concern for its victims. Silent Hill just tosses CGI effects at you.

And that is the final failure of so many contemporary horror films. In the lazy decision that more is more, the filmmakers present us with a cavalcade of creeps dutifully marching across the screen, each more outlandishly blood-gushing than its predecessor--and all in the end merely empty blood fireworks displays, so unbelievable they become cartoonish (in a bad way) and dull. I'll admit some of Silent Hill's monsters seem almost beautiful in their surreal awfulness, but they tromp and jerk around in a movie without tension, without purpose, let alone pacing or integration with character and plot. At one point, we even get a "cinematic" of sorts, to outline the town's history. OK, it is cleverly presented as grainy newsreel or hidden video--and in itself is well-crafted--but, as in a game, the movie has to come to a dead stop to make room for a movie-within-a-movie to fill in for a real narrative. Now, I can understand the thinking behind the cut scenes in video games, but I'm always suspicious when the same thing happens in a film, even one based on a game. We're being told that the monster rally is all they have, and that any story--or idea behind the story--is incidental. And again, loading us up with mere visual excess is not enough. The scariest stuff in Silent Hill comes in the small touches: the lurch of a monster's gait, the mewling sounds of another, the sense that one is moving in a dream. Like Val Lewton with a budget. A good horror film is waiting there, but we don't get it.

So my son and I watched Alien, and while it does depend on shocks, its commitment to mood and character makes it a much richer experience than Silent Hill. The crew of the Nostromo have distinct personalities--again, sketched quickly, but clearly. Geez, the two women (Rhada Mitchell and Laurie Holden) who search for the little girl in Silent Hill even look the same; but there's no way one is going to confuse Tom Skerritt with John Hurt or Ian Holm, or Sigourney Weaver with Veronica Cartwright, let alone Harry Dean Stanton with Yaphet Kotto. How smart to give us such disparate shapes and sizes, and to add to them variant senses of duty, humor, and morality. That way, when the monster shows up, we know who's in trouble, and we worry accordingly.

There's more to consider, not the least of which is the element of Freudian sexuality running through both movies, and which nicely illustrates their points of contact as well as differences. Good horror pictures do tend toward that crazy old Austrian; he provides an easy but potent (sorry again) subtextual machine, part organic, part cold logic--a regular cyborg--atop which the movie runs, as on slippery grease, keeping those diabolical wheels turning. Alien evokes male sexual fantasies (Sigourney Weaver) and fears (everything else), and capitalizes on misogynist views of orgasm (the sound editing is especially distressing, not to mention Weaver's brief encounter--sorry once more--with the alien at the film's climax--oh, I give up), while Silent Hill opts for Freud's assertion that women "laid the foundations of civilization by the claims of their love"--for their children and the maintenance of the home, since they have been "forced into the background by the claims of civilization" and have adopted "a hostile attitude towards it" (Civilization and Its Discontents).

This mother-urge in Silent Hill--strong as Ripley's in the first sequel, Aliens (but done with more depth and poignancy in the latter)--has potential, especially when we see that one of the sources of evil in Silent Hill is the witch-burning matriarch (Alice Krige), who seems to be the antithesis of the Freudian mother--or maybe, even better, simply its doppelganger--as she defends civilization by sacrificing its children, and thus becomes opposed to the maternal need to keep the family united; after all, one cannot build a civilization by staying at home all one's life (unless by "civilization" we mean chat rooms run by husky guys way past twenty, hunched over in their parents' basement rec room, Comicon t-shirt doubling as a napkin, stained with Cheetos-dust; and that may be the next step).

But as it stands, the Freudian element of Silent Hill does not generate much interest--unlike that of the horror-movie queen (if I may use the term) of all this, The Shining (1980). And heck, let's not forget that the computer in Alien is named "Mother," and is willing to kill the crew to save the alien--raising the question of whose mother the ship really is. Again, though, Silent Hill simply asserts mother-love, then tosses monsters and speeches at us. And I want more, even from a horror movie.

---

*I'd like to mention, though, that the real joy of this second viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean was assuring my son that pirates really did have a code--codes, really, depending on where you did your pirating, and with whom--and that some of them dressed as outlandishly as Jack Sparrow, and that others had the kinds of delusions of grandeur of Sparrow's nemesis, Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush)--and I want a movie in which both he and Ben Kingsley are villains; straight or camp, those two know how to make with the villainy--and that there really is a Tortuga, and that pirates really were hung and left to rot along the harbor. At least according to David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag, the only pirate history I've ever read--aside from some background information in a book I owned when I was a kid--and which I hope is still waiting patiently for me in a box in my basement--with, if I remember correctly, the self-evident how-to title, Hunt for Sunken Treasure.

125. "You know--for kids."

Well, I got my wish from the last posting, and saw The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) again. I've always thought of it as a movie nobody really liked, and confirmed my suspicions by checking out some reviews. Roger Ebert's is particularly telling: He frames it as a debate between the angel on one shoulder who loves the way the movie looks, and the devil on the other who complains it's "all surface and no substance." He gave the movie two stars, because the angel wanted to award it four and the devil wanted to punish it with zero. And so on.

Of course, as a comfort movie, such hollowness is not only unimportant, it is an asset. Like Seinfeld--heck, like Gilligan's Island--the best entertainments are about nothing. (And let's give credit where due: A good friend of mine, Gene the bigshot lawyer, a million years ago in college taught me to disdain "socially relevant" TV shows like All in the Family and M*A*S*H--at least those elements of the shows that aspired to seriousness--and to recognize that the fundamental image of the satisfied TV viewer is an enraptured kid wearing a coonskin cap. And I think comedy in general works best at this level. Seinfeld was on Letterman once, and said something simple and true: that his show was so successful because they held to a basic rule: Don't do anything that isn't funny. At first blush, that seems a bit reductive, like the classic advice on how to sculpt a horse: Get a block of marble, and remove everything that doesn't look like a horse. Or Steve Martin's breathless, excited revelation of how to become a millionaire: "OK, first, get a million dollars, then ..." But of course, Seinfeld is right. There are no moral dilemmas in the show--at least none that stop the comedy--no concerns outside of immediate, personal ones, no depth of thought whatsoever. And Seinfeld was always careful to point that out, as it inflicted all kinds of damage on individual selves and their communities, and at times the very fabric of society, without any qualms, without the slightest regrets. In this morally free space, one could go anywhere, ruthlessly cosmopolitan, and point and laugh at whatever, whoever, came one's way.

The Coen brothers have always known this. And this is one reason why I love their movies so much: They are a vacation from the moral universe, the "burden of freedom," the weight of tragedy--let alone the "eternal delight," as Blake would put it, of the ecstatic recognition of one's power and glory. And while the Coens pay attention to the comic possibilities of such weighty matters--consider the grave figures of their movies, watching the wheels turning, proclaiming a world bigger than any dope in a Coen brothers' picture could ever hope to recognize--those figures themselves are goofy, sometimes out of synch with the heartless machinations of the leading characters.

But wait; maybe the Coens make something more than Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld's "comedy about nothing." Because I find myself as attracted to those moral voices in the former's movies as I am the cads and dipsticks. And I think it is because the Coens have managed a pretty good trick: The integration of dazzling-but-meaningless stylistics with moral imperatives. I enjoy their hollow bounders because the Coens force them to lose, while doofuses like Tim Robbins' Muncie booster, Norville Barnes, end up on top. Yes, it's always some thunder-stealing deus ex machina--consider the cartoon-perfect stoppage of time in Hudsucker, as Norville's downward plummet is stopped--twice!--by the omniscient caretaker of the Big Clock, Moses (Bill Cobbs)--and for now let us pass over (ha ha) that name. This is a true comic world, open-hearted and optimistic, in which lovers are united, fortunes made--and even when the villains are punished, it often occurs with a grin, or at least a solid sense of righting things, of asserting the need not only to be funny but to do the right thing. I need a separate post for something with a bit more gravitas like Barton Fink (1991) or Fargo (1996), but it needs to be noted that even in their flat-out comedies the Coens remember that comedy works best when justice and mercy have as much say in matters as satire and glee.

The "all surface and no substance" charge, then, only works as far as one is willing to accept it--and the Coens do give the viewer ample opportunity to keep things light, to disregard all substance. But I've noticed that what makes me grin at their movies is not just the freedom of tennis without a net but the sweet joke of success, as silly as the losses suffered, but with the added advantage of rescuing one from the cruelty that is inevitable when the surface really is everything. And from the music the Coens choose to the performances they encourage, I think they find in their comedies a satisfying balance between heartless glee and order restored. One more look at Moses, the "Clock Man." His position at the top of the Hudsucker Building gives him the opportunity to know everything, and to observe the Coens' world with a rub of his chin and a slight shake of the head. It's silly, but it has rules, and it needs tending. And as he does, he exercises ridiculous powers that nonetheless tidy up the mess, and give everybody a break. Now that's comfort for you.

124. Uneasy as Pie

It seems every culture has its carb-based foundation-food, usually in the form of a flat cake or dumpling: tortillas and samosas, frybread and potstickers, hotcakes and crepes, gnocchi and kreplach, pierogi and spaetzle. Just typing them out makes me simultaneously hungry and full. They're simple, familiar, and easy--depending on who's doing the cooking in your house, of course, but you know what I mean. And cinema is full of movies like that, ones you could watch every week, old reliables always welcome. The genre doesn't matter, nor the country of origin nor year released. For me, it's The Maltese Falcon and Forrest Gump, Glengarry Glen Ross and White Heat, Alien and Diner, anything by the Coen Brothers or Hitchcock, Scorsese or Felinni, Kubrick or Lang. I can tuck 'em in over and over, good eatin' every time.

My wife has her own version of this: The Fifth Element and The Lord of the Rings, Fried Green Tomatoes and As Good as It Gets, Star Trek: First Contact and anything British, from the Age of Enlightenment, on through the general neighborhood of the Sepoy Rebellion, and stopping somewhere in the tree-dappled vicinity of Howard's End. I share some of her comfort movies--except a more recent one, Cast Away (2000). Twice was nice, three times OK. But it didn't seem to stick to my ribs; instead, it--oh, I don't know; I'm already beginning to feel trapped by this culinary analogy--skip it; I won't even make the attempt. Let's put it this way: I didn't want it on the repeat-viewing queue. From my first viewing, I insisted Cast Away would've been a better film if it had ended at the moment of Chuck Noland's rescue, with his hand raised into the frame, the ship gliding by, the alarms sounding. I felt the final act was simply a protracted epilogue that diminished the mythic power the movie had achieved in its long silence on the island, and Hanks' minimalist expressiveness. I still think his face works as hard in Cast Away as it ever will, but I'd always griped about the return, the loose ends tied up, the Gump-like ending, Noland's face staring, while a feather is pursued. Mighty labors--or labored.

And so of course, what happens: I come home from work, and my wife and two of my children are watching it. I walk in just as he loses Wilson on the open sea, and so the movie I get is practically all epilogue. But a funny thing happened: I found myself deeply moved by it, breathless in dismay. In his farewell to his wife, Chuck confronts death without paradise. He sees everything he loves taken from him, with nothing in its place. He remains as still as he can, stiff in the presence of a snake that is going to bite him--but it doesn't matter: He's already dead, and the only "afterlife" he's given is a brief parade of what he has lost, a futile embrace, and then the dark.

It scared me, that scene; and I realized that, in the final moment, in which he delivers the package and stands--as we all know, ready to follow the beautiful redhead--Cast Away grants a reprieve and becomes a movie once more, blessedly fictional, easy as a stack of flapjacks. But for one moment--at least today, seeing it divorced from the rest of the movie--Cast Away's epilogue made my heart stop, and asked it to contemplate the loss of everything it yearned for--specifically, the one I love, who for her part was calmly watching it for the umpteenth time, proud to say she was the only one who, albeit squinting, watched him ice-skate his tooth out. Ah, a movie moment, the lucky woman, and she wolfed it down. But the Cast Away I saw, twenty minutes long, told me it was all going to go, and I was going to have to take it. This will happen one day, and paradise has nothing to do with it because, as Socrates noted, you don't know if you're going to get it until you do. And as one's life moves, knowing only life, not knowing is simply not good enough. All the faith in the world--at least, all the faith I have--does not lessen the depth and dark of that hole into which--not you, but everything you love--must drop.

As Tom Waits sings, "Even Jesus wanted just a little more time / As He was walking Spanish down the hall." Cast Away, for a few minutes there, takes away that time, and gives me nothing but what must be. I think it's safe to say that this is the opposite of comfort food. Cripes; I really need to get myself in front of The Hudsucker Proxy or Coppola's Dracula or something; any silly dumpling will do.

123. A Temporary Dream

Back on July 17, I wrote about Anthony Hopkins, starting with Magic in order to work my way toward The World's Fastest Indian. Well, after many years I finally watched Magic again (written by William Goldman, directed by Richard Attenborough). And my memory of it, at least those reflected in the July 17 post, seems to have been pretty accurate. Hopkins does do Karloffian pathos, but with a hyperactive vocal register, the Richard Harris-style "loud voice" so perfectly parodied many moons ago on SCTV. But in Magic it seems to fit, given the nervous in extremis situation. It was startling to watch Hopkins and the dummy yell at each other: Fats, the dummy/alter ego, raging in a keening voice that also managed to be as gravelly as Burgess Meredith's, who plays Corky/Fats' agent, Ben Greene--"Gangrene," as Fats calls him. All in all, another one of those 1978 creepy crawlers I mentioned the other day, Hollywood part-revolution, part-misfire oddities I will always have an affection for, especially if I "squint a bit."

Except for Ann-Margret. For the original kitten with a whip, it's eyes wide open. I'll admit I'd forgotten--sort of--how, ah, taken I was with her in that movie. Oh, let's be honest: not forgotten at all. In my late teens and early twenties she swam around in my head like Ahab's whale, except without all the, ahem, harpooning. No, Ann-Margret--and I am not telling anyone anything new here--exists in a rarefied atmosphere, the prettiest girl in school you--all right, I'll speak for myself--I would never have spoken to, let alone known. And so in 1978, three years after the Oedipal wigout of Tommy, there I was, watching Magic and finding myself identifying with Hopkins' character. Urg. Well, it was difficult to resist: in high school Corky had had a crush on her--loved her--but had never spoken to her. And then there he was, crazy as all get-out but finally getting lucky with--I kid you not--ex-cheerleader Peggy Ann Snow (Goldman, you have a twisted little mind). Again, if movies are dreams, and dreams are wish-fulfillment, this one came to me without metaphor, symbol, or sign, but unfiltered and flat out. Watching it today, I reminded myself how much I'd enjoyed those scenes of Corky and Peggy in love, and how temporarily soothing a movie can be. It's sad, I know, but it fits with every other emotion generated by the movies, no matter how awkward their origin or foolish their expression.

So when Corky falls apart, loses not merely his sanity but Peggy, it served me well, because his frustration was played out with such hysteria that I was able to leave the movie, in 1978 especially, with my own thoughts tucked away in relative safety--because I could feel I was not crazy like Corky, even though my mind had its own ripples and currents, not the least of which the illusionary movie-induced conviction that some guys have all the luck. Today, though, half a lifetime later, I can report that Magic provides merely the memory of a temporary dream--although I cannot deny its power, since it was a dream that held me over until my real life could begin.

122. Squeak and Gibber

Appropriately enough, Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion (1945) begins with a dream: Paul Cartwright (Jimmy/James "Henry Aldrich" Lydon) walks with his mother and sister, while a shadowy father and Other go with them; and a train approaches, and sudden sentences are uttered, and anxiety builds. This is how I like to think of all of Ulmer's best movies, especially Detour (1945), The Strange Woman (1946--with a strange Hedy Lamarr performance), The Man from Planet X (1951), and his early masterpiece, The Black Cat (1934): dreams all, with a dream's low budget and big drop. Strange Illusion is perhaps the "lightest" of the films mentioned, although its smooth Hamlet references and queasy villain, Brett Curtis (part Bluebeard, part--believe it or not, in 1945--child molester, played with comforting '40s oiliness by Warren William, his pencil-thin mustache and low-rent Great Profile almost reassuring: after all, such an obvious cad--you know, more than kin and so on--looking like something Tex Avery might draw to chase around a hapless babe, is bound to be defeated--not to mention Paul's "sensitive" nature, played by Lydon with his usual gee-whiz faintness, all give Strange Illusion a decidedly tilted posture; like its dream-pursued, melancholy hero, it seems more than a little light-headed.

But chock-full of plot. The Hamlet-lifting serves it well: Paul's judge/criminologist father is killed in a train "accident," and Paul, markedly attached to him--and his mother (Sally Eilers, just hefty enough to look like a widow, but young enough to provide a Freudian whiff)--is haunted by a dream--which propels him to find his father's killer: Curtis, of course, pursuing Paul's mother, charming his sister--but creeping out his girlfriend, who suffers Curtis' deep-end affections in the pool--not shown, of course, but related to Paul as further evidence that Curtis is the movie's pre-nuptial Claudius, with an even bigger appetite than Shakespeare's killer. Curtis' confederate, a crooked psychiatrist, adds to the Ulmer-esque weirdness of the movie as he, Svengali-like, guides his former patient through the machinations necessary to get him married to the judge's widow--and thus ensconce him in the only family that could prove who and what he is (remember the dead father was a criminologist). Again, this is a plot that needs no thickening; from its dream beginning, it's one thing or another.

My only regret is that Strange Illusion ends up loving its plot too much, giving us, as one "bmacy from Western New York" put it on the Internet Movie Database, a "Hardy Boys" movie. I guess I wished for something more delirious, like Detour's clueless descent or The Black Cat's full-blown dementia. But Strange Illusion does provide a clear sense of Ulmer's strengths: his ability to keep things moving, his affinity for abnormal psychology, and his affection for shadows. And, in a Saturday-afternoon kind of way, it is enough, another Ulmer effort set "in the dead vast and the middle of the night."

---

From Lydon's 1941 high school yearbook: "A redhead Irishman who likes nothing better than a good argument. His aim is to be a pilot and a motion picture cameraman. Jim becomes positively poetic about roast lamb and apple pie." This is someone I would've liked to have known.

121. The Burden of Freedom

(WARNING: spoiler in 3rd paragraph)

Despite the title of this post, the topic today is not Kris Kristofferson--although, in its recognition of the slim thread by which our convictions hang, his song might not be a bad place to start. On the one hand, the one who seeks salvation is "bitterly" damned and condemned by those who "don't understand"; and on the verge of freedom--in the midst of its burden--he asks for the strength to forgive them. But by the end of the song, while he seems saved, he hopes to be forgiven for wounding "the last one who loved me," and himself ends up not understanding.

This song comes up a lot in my head, as it did last night, watching V for Vendetta. And here's another coincidence (although the film insists there are no coincidences): It ends with a song that contains excerpts from Malcolm X's "On Black Power," particularly those famous words about the virtues of self-defense "by any means necessary." While V for Vendetta presents some thoughtful ideas--the kinds Orwell handled so well in his seminal fables of totalitarianism--I'm made uneasy by V's (Hugo Weaving) dependence on violence, his appropriation of the enemy's strengths to assert not merely the truth but his need to revenge himself on those who unmade his life--and society at large. It is a simple objection I raise against the perpetuation of violence, "the chain reaction of evil," as Martin Luther King described war.

And then there is V's torture of Evey (Natalie Portman). Now, I won't deny the power gained by stripping oneself down, and the freedom earned through suffering. But Evey is not given a choice; and she is not punished for her convictions, but punished to create and hone said convictions. Martyrdom is one thing; coercion is another. And yes of course, V's society is venal, an opium-dispenser the likes of which Marx only glimpsed. But again, I'm simply unable to reconcile might with right. And I worry in these new nervous times whether terrorism--perpetuated not only by governments and groups but also individuals; the whole lot of them--should be extolled as a virtue. I'm not sure whether V's demolition of the Old Bailey or the Houses of Parliament is half as effective as his words. And there, then, is my last cliche: Speak the truth, live the truth, and you will give it to others, and make it so. Simple vendetta is not the truth, but an indulgence. You wouldn't have tragedy without the impulse for revenge, but you can accept the burden of freedom if you learn forgiveness.

And that leads me to one more thing: V for Vendetta is correct that death is not the worst fate. But I will not deal it out to others to achieve salvation; I cannot see the truth through such a curtain of blood. Instead, I hope, as in Kristofferson's song--and I guess I'm not just starting but ending with it--that I can be wounded and not succumb--or wound and be forgiven. C.S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory discusses some of this, including the joys of humility, in which one is pleased to please. At the end of Spike Lee's Malcolm X, Malcolm sends his bodyguard away, telling him he will not allow black men to kill black men; and in that final submission, in his own putting down of the sword, I think he shoulders freedom. And while V dies by his sword, I'm afraid the lasting image is the triumph of might.

I'll admit I'm still trying to decide exactly what to make of this movie. But I cannot deny the anxious voice I heard while watching it, the one that warns me against the misuse even of the truth and virtue. Maybe V for Vendetta loves Evey more than V; but she does cover his body with roses and propels the train toward Parliament. And the film seems too careful to portray it as a fireworks display rather than death and destruction. Someone must've been killed by such a use of force. And one is too many. That, too, is the burden of freedom.

120. Purely Academic

I work--ah, "work" is such a dry word to describe the cornfield glories of my career amid the missionaries and muckrackers; but it'll do--at Knox College, which requires its incoming students to take First-Year Preceptorial (FP), a common course that uses a variety of texts--including films--to "discuss broadly based, fundamental issues that define the human condition and inform significant choice." You know, the small stuff. Since 1993 I've been working with students writing papers for the course, and since last year I've had the chance to teach it. FP is one of those split-decision courses: those who teach it often love it, while those who take it often don't. And while some become exasperated with the course materials, or the students/faculty, or the course itself--oh, the bane of anything "required"--others keep the FP fire burning in their hearts throughout their teaching careers or educations--and beyond: I've had students who've graduated and told me that FP crops up at the oddest moments, especially the ethical dilemma ones, or human nature ones. You know, the big stuff.

Me, I'm one of those who love FP. Geez, that sounds like a bumper sticker, but I canna help it: Over the years, FP has excitedly asked students to play with all kinds of firecrackers, from "Heart of Darkness" and Things Fall Apart to The Moral Animal and the Book of Genesis (the falling-down parts). We've heard Rousseau rail against civilization even as Hobbes raised the beast to secular godhood. And Frankenstein tried to make it happen, Cap'n, while Joyce Carol Oates asked the students where they're going and where they've been--and Marx told them exactly where, and what to do about it--the weatherman is always right, yes?--while Darwin inherited something more than the wind. And we've watched Kane let everybody know who he is, while Alex and his droogs ate much more than lomticks of toast, their eggiwegs swinging with the force of tawdry doom.

And speaking of watching, this year a pro-movie swell is rolling by the Good Ship FP, so over the past few weeks some of us have been watching films that might fellow-travel with our main readings (Kwame Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Mary Doria Russell's novel of Jesuits in space, The Sparrow; we also have The New Humanities Reader, for picking and choosing, well, readings in the humanities that are, more or less, new). So far we've watched Costa-Gavras' Amen, Hotel Rwanda, Rabbit-Proof Fence, and Spike Lee's Malcolm X biopic. (Next week is The Battle of Algiers and some docs.) Of course, I'm a hunnert percent behind the effort to include films in the course, but a funny thing keeps happening after we watch a movie: We think of ways the film under discussion would not work. Now, some of these objections make perfect sense: Does the film add to our discussion? Are its ideas self-evident, or is it not "cinematic" enough for us to focus on technique, structure, editing, music, and so on? It's a sad but true winnowing, in which there seems more chaff than wheat.

But we continue to fan the breeze, viewing Malcolm X (1992) last night. I hadn't seen it in five years or so, and was determined to watch closely, to draw to the surface Lee's best touches, his most enduring contributions to the story. And I did see--and hear--much I had not remembered. From the opening title sequence, in which a flag covers the screen, while Lee cuts to scenes of the Rodney King beating--fresh wounds in 1992--and the flag eventually burns, slapping us with the left hand of Patton--to Malcolm in his final moments, his head literally spinning as the camera rotates 360 degrees. And I saw many Scorsese-like touches, in which Malcolm positions himself as Jake LaMotta stripped down to raw muscle, or Christ leaning toward, then away from, last temptations. And the soundtrack always supplies the perfect song, whether as complement or counterpoint--with Terence Blanchard's score, bold in its percussive, symphonic flourishes, willing to take chances: In the Mecca scenes, for instance, he generates a kind of post-Les Baxter exotica mood that never slips into kitsch. And there are individual moments, especially early on and in its final scenes, in which Vincente Minelli and Oliver Stone seem to vie for Lee's attention and, to the movie's benefit, get it.

We were still not sure, though, whether we wanted the students to watch the movie. We discussed showing individual scenes, or breaking it up in two, or making it an ancillary film, off to the side somewhere. But the more I think about it--and write about it now--the more I trust Lee's movie. We could not fail to notice Denzel Washington's achievement, as he captures Malcolm's charisma--or Angela Bassett as his wife Betty, who naturally is the first to see that misogyny ends in lies and shame. I think we should show Malcolm X--or at least I will, and take the time to offer FP students a chance to recognize the visual/aural contributions of a "film experience." And we won't even need to do so by any means necessary; just a handful of good movies.

119. Maul Rats

My son and I continued with his consumption (ha ha) of Romero's Dead trilogy with 1978's Dawn of the Dead--and I'm beginning to realize what a weird year 1978 was, both personally and cinematically. As I've written elsewhere--most recently, July 17--it was the year I graduated from college--and promptly took off a year, ostensibly casting about for the right grad school, but in practice engaging in some of my least satisfying loafing of a loaf-ridden life. No wonder I can remember so many 1978 movies, including a number I've written about--Midnight Express, The Fury, Magic--but also, now that I'm thinking about it--and looking it up on IMDb (which explains why the following are in alphabetical order) ...

Animal House
The Big Fix
The Boys from Brazil
Coma
Damien: Omen II
The Deer Hunter
The End
Every Which Way But Loose
Eyes of Laura Mars
F.I.S.T.
Foul Play
Go Tell the Spartans
Goin' South
Halloween
Harper Valley P.T.A.
Heaven Can Wait
Hooper
House Calls
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kauffman's remake)
Jaws
The Lord of the Rings (Bakshi, of course)
The Manitou
Movie Movie
Paradise Alley
Same Time, Next Year
Straight Time
The Swarm
Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?
The Wiz

Now, these are the ones I went to the movies to see; it doesn't include the 1978 movies I soon after saw on cable or video:

Coming Home
Corvette Summer
Days of Heaven
Gray Lady Down
Grease
Interiors
Piranha
Pretty Baby
Up in Smoke
Warlords of the Deep
A Wedding
Who'll Stop the Rain?

(I'm not even counting the few--Debbie Does Dallas, The Driver, Faces of Death--I have never watched, but that remain in the job jar.)

I suppose the same dizzying variety would show up in any year, but something about 1978's movies--at the least the ones I watched--combine to produce an uneasy blend of reverence and embarrassment.

And so it goes for Day of the Dead, which I originally saw in the early-to-mid '80s. I'll admit that was close enough on the heels of its original release for me to accept its view of American culture--at least in 1985 the haircuts and music weren't distracting--but seeing it after Alien, released just a year later than Dawn, it did creak a little in the fright and tension departments. Still, I've always appreciated Romero's movies, and have forgiven their clunks and lurches. After all, the man never seemed to have two pennies to rub together, and was doing the best he could.

Or was he? Watching Dawn recently with my son--and after slogging through a few decades of all kinds of living-dead mayhem, which may be a distinct factor here--I was struck by some of Romero's off-notes, especially the over-dependence on a kind of macho posturing that seemed a little too easy even back in the mid-'80s, and that weakens the film today. Even my (now-)thirteen-year-old kept wondering why they were making obvious mistakes, and I got tired of saying, "They think they're tough" or "They're all pumped up from the situation they're in." Yeah, sure. Listen: Even when I first saw it, I cringed whenever the men whooped it up, all excited to have guns and free candy. And worse, the social satire always seemed a bit self-evident, as when they spot the mall from the air and describe it as though it were a relatively new phenomenon: "It looks like a shopping center, one of those big, indoor malls"; and then there's the famous line explaining why the zombies--"ghouls" in the first picture; so much better--are returning to the mall: "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives." That's more than a little condescending--magnified by the cartoonish Muzak that plays over the wandering-zombie sequences.

Now, I'll admit some of those moments resonated; but mostly I think Romero drops this particular ball more than he should have, at least given some of the stronger lines and scenes in the film. Again, as in the first Dead picture, Romero nails certain aspects of the dread of this situation via the media response. With my most recent viewing, I am still struck by the mad insistence of the scientist: "This is down to the line, folks, this is down to the line. There can be no more divisions among the living!" Or another expert's succinct explanation of what's happening: "Every dead body that is not exterminated becomes one of them. It gets up and kills! The people it kills get up and kill!" I can still hear a down-to-the-bone delirium in these lines. And then there's the occasional wit of the protagonists, especially Peter, as when he quotes his grandfather: "'When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.'" Or admiring a rifle they've looted: "The only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it." It's no coincidence that Romero has teamed up with Stephen King a few times. Both sporadically display a talent for capturing the honest face of the pulp figure, trapped but grinning--grimacing, more like it--while, literally, all Hell breaks loose.

In the end, Dawn does retain some of its strength for me; but I'm convinced it's in Day--and Land--of the Dead (1985 and 2005--twenty years later! Talk about a franchise with, ahem, teeth) that Romero's voice is most clearly heard--and it makes a wet, tearing sound, as close to lunacy as Romero dares, a place where his urges toward both social satire and inexorable nightmare plant themselves like talons, tenacious and cruel. My son and I are halfway there. "Down to the line, folks."

118. The Altogether

Ever see something weird? How about Something Weird, the movie (1967)? Or Something Weird, the video distribution company? If you've seen the first, it was probably courtesy of the last, which named itself after the second. Weird.

Along with the sainted supergeeks of Rhino, SWV keeps alive the odd corners of cinematic delirium, where they save Hitler's brain and ask to be colored blood red, where jungle women and killer tomatoes--and shrews--attack, where one can enjoy not only a smell of honey but a swallow of brine; in short, a trashbin with aspirations to be an archive.

And every once in a while I admit I dive into this 16-millimeter dumpster, fulfilling long after midnight the hesitant, half-admitted, guiltiest pleasures of my life in movies. And unfortunately--and inevitably--the actual experience of watching one of them is not often as, ahem, satisfying as I'd hoped. This makes sense; after all, there is something quintessentially adolescent about the impulse to watch movies with titles like Orgy of the Dead (1965), Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), or The Rebel Set (1959)--"Today's Big Jolt about the Beatnik Jungle!"--let alone Primitive Love (1964), The Bizarre Ones (1967)--which promised exactly what I wanted, "A Change from the Normal Life"--or what may be my favorite title in all of exploitation cinema (not the least because two dear friends once gave me a postcard-book of movie posters with this title), Lost, Lonely and Vicious (1957). These movies capture the humid little soul of exploitation: All the entertainment you're going to get occurs before the movie actually starts--aside from the quasi-condescending fun of making fun of the damaged, defenseless thing itself.

But it is precisely the adolescent nature of the urge to watch such movies that drives me back to them, despite evidence to the contrary that this time things will be different, this time I'm going to be plunged into a grainy dreamworld of unselfconscious id-exposure, where "camp" and "kitsch" wilt in the high-contrast glare of the sudden lurching fulfillment of cinema's persistent promise of a glimpse of the First Image, in which society and self disappear, and all that's left in the secret garden are the tender shoots, almost emergent, but vague in their final, pure shape.

And some of these movies get close, at least in moments. But I so often get only stuff and nonsense that I am forced to remind myself that the people who actually made these movies were simply sticking their stubby little fingers into movie-marketing's shallower niches, and their dogged desire to cash in makes their films as empty of potential as their big-budget counterparts, both so cynical in their intents that their movies have no room for any persistent images.

Unless I make them persist. I watched The Monster That Killed Women (1965), working in a sub-genre--nudist camp--that is particularly unlikely to provide evidence of cinema's substrata, if only because of its self-imposed restriction to provide redundant nudity within set parameters, most of which involve activities that allow women to sit on the ground together, huddle in bunk beds together, or play endless games of volleyball--not to mention the, shall we say undulatory effects, of the physical actions attendant upon reaching for objects--beach towels, board games--inexplicably placed on high walls and shelves. And even more inhibiting are the demands of what we can call with Continental delicacy La promenade en deshabille, in which figures pass the unmoving camera so that the viewer can receive a flat, semi-unobstructed perspective as they saunter by.

But it was here, in the promenade, that I heard a whispered hint of exploitation cinema's hold on me, more than in all the campfire sing-alongs, changing-room confabs, and shuffleboard matches combined. The women* walk away from the camera and make their way over a small hill or behind some foliage, or toward the camera--but in this case filmed from the waist up, or at such an angle that we cannot visit the Netherlands, if I may be discreet. These shots are so nonchalant, and so often repeated, that the fact of voyeurism is absolutely exposed, so to speak. No metaphors remain to provide ironic--let alone erotic--distance, no membrane separates the watcher from the intent to watch. And watching this movie myself, I wondered at what point in my life I would not have been bored by these scenes. And that of course would be in adolescence. At fourteen, I would have found the promenade to be the center of these films--the kinetic dynamics of volleyball notwithstanding--and I can easily see myself disappointed when the movie reluctantly returned to its "plot."

Because, watching it now, the promenade of course is the plot, if "plot" equals "point." And, as I watched the individual promenades--three or four of them--of The Beast That Killed Women (and for now I will not discuss the self-evident, nasty connection in these movies between violence and nudity), I found myself passing beyond boredom and into a dimly lit quiet place, where my adolescent libidinal instincts looked up at me from the bottom of Time's hill to remind me that, as in the myth of Sisyphus (something I seem to get back to all the time), climbing that hill precipitates returning to the hollow, the shadowed low place where I can rest for a moment, but which I also know I need to climb back up. It is a promenade itself, beautiful and foolish, for me a necessary circuit--because I swear the hill gets higher every time I climb it; all I can hope is that I get stronger with every climb. After all, they say walking is the best exercise.

---

*And men--but they don't count; the men in these movies are often wearing swim trunks (which I would guess was a relief to the nervous, at the least slightly damaged males who were the target audience for these movies), and, given the frontal nudity restrictions that apply to both sexes--nothing below the belt--even nude they offer nothing more (boy, is this getting creepy) than Charlton Heston already had in Planet of the Apes (1968)--or, come to think of it, Cornel Wilde in The Naked Prey (1966) (by the way another movie that resides in my memory as a primordial film experience; I fear, though, that if I ever see it again it, too, will become a triviality).

117. This Time, Eyes Wide Open

In an effort to describe my reaction to Pride and Prejudice (2005), I will submit to convention and use the word "feminine"--and by that I suppose I mean exasperation mingled with anticipation, and hopes--some foolish, some practical, some so sharp they seem almost necessary for sanity or survival--mitigated by the frustration of curtailed thought, passion, and opportunity. My generalized description here is a simple attempt to avoid stereotyping--but that is impossible, if one is to make it through any movie, no matter how "enlightened" or "iconoclastic" it might be. A First Principle of movies is that they invite the receptive viewer to wear a mask--no, something less active: to watch what it's like to be interestingly fictional, and in doing so to invent a self, and not just for the characters--or monoliths, or penguins, or whatever--but for the viewing self, "in" the movie just as the eye is "in" any objects it views--but more intimately in moving pictures.

Such inventions of self--and self-inventions--are also by nature narrow, so as to fit any number of needs: those of the frame, of course, but also the need for a "dramatic arc" (even if it's just watching something like the Empire State Building, as Andy Warhol did, for eight hours, in Empire (1964); the act of filming it, even with a stationary camera, imposes a narrative). And the subtle but insistent needs of culture, gender, race, class, and so on shape the film and the response to it; but as narrow as the space may be, it is still inviting, as any life would be that is limited, yes, but also given a shape by the act of being filmed. As a result, as I watch P&P I can "become" the young girl, the thwarted lover, the pursued and irritated, the yielding or adamant woman--and yet not a woman, but a set of dramatic/cinematic causes and effects, drawing me into these invented lives so that I can take out the hanky and have a good cry, no matter how strange the changes are--of circumstance, culture, gender, class, and so on--that allow me to be someone else.

But this cuts both ways: The movie also becomes me--and I don't mean it looks good on me--although that might be a clever-clever turn worth exploring--but looks better because I'm the movie, if I'm lucky. So I'm not crying just for Jane Austen's characters, but myself.* It's like those mind-transference gizmos in assorted shorts, animated or otherwise, in which Bugs Bunny or Curley changes place with a chicken or an ape. (And I'm sorry I even brought up these allusions; they threaten to distract me with a picking-through of such plots, how they're played as farce, but as I watch them I want to be able to do it myself; and so it becomes deeply important, that decision to get lost in someone else. I just watched the X-Files two-parter in which Mulder gets zapped and changes place with Mickael McKean's Area 51 Man in Black. Suffice it to say, even Curley learns something from jumping ship. Back we go.)

I will confess, if that cinematic someone else is a young Englishwoman a couple of centuries ago, I feel a bit selfconscious. But P&P knew what it was doing--and OK, I've read the novel, and so I was ready to let the film do it to me--but it was a pleasure to be done so thoroughly (all right, I'll stop now), and to fret over the restrictions of my gender and class. Then again, those restrictions do not necessarily seem so foreign. I will not presume to "know" anybody in the real world--at least for the sake of this argument--but literary/cinematic art invites me to give it a try--or provides a shorthand profile I can examine--no, a mask I can wear--no, no, more of a temporary pass, so that I can fret and fume, laugh and love, etc.--a vacation from me that also instructs me about me, at least in terms of what I'm willing to consider, where I'm willing to take my sympathies.

Which seems pretty far. P&P reminded me of my perfect willingness to get all worked up over domestic storms and the plight of the unmarried young woman torn between her insistence that she should find the person she should love and her desire to be rid of all the bother of doing so. I usually don't watch these kinds of movies--and it's a shame I don't, because when I do, more often than not I get my money's worth. Just a few days after P&P I watched again Little Women, the 1949 one directed by Mervyn LeRoy and sustained by that great cast: June Allyson, Margaret O'Brien, Elizabeth Taylor, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor, Peter Lawford. It was on Turner Classic Movies, and I was just surfing along, but I let it linger, all the way.

I had done the same less than a year ago--and then it was in a way an even odder experience, since I was home alone, and could not "excuse" my watching it by hiding behind the sexism of having my wife and teenage girls' present as the "primary audience." Which is silly; after all these years of watching any old thing, it's a bit late to have to draw myself up to my full height (and those who know me appreciate the joke) and get all manly and fist-clenching about it. Feh; I grew up with an older sister, so it was Shirley Temple Theater right before Dagwood and after The Bowery Boys on rainy Sundays. Lucky enough to have grown up in a watch-without-discernment household, I can work up a good cry with the best of them. Again, watching P&P so close after LW, I recalled watching the latter on my own last winter, and bawlin' my little eyes out over the March girls' tribulations.

It was a "good cry," too, again as much over myself as them--and as much for real people in all kinds of trouble as for the movie's clever constructs. And more than clever, because my feelings are real, even if the catalyst isn't. Now, my betters have covered this pretty thoroughly--Aristotle's mimesis, Coleridge's "suspension of disbelief," the Lacanian infant's jubilation at seeing himself in the mirror, Herman Noodicks and his theory of--sorry. And someday I simply must read their books. But for now I'm happy to report I can keep up with Margaret O'Brien's lachrymal marathons, if only because my own jubilation before the "special mirror" of the movies allows for every association, tearful and joyful, wolfish and seraphic. So get out your handkerchiefs, or laugh like an idiot, or scream in terror--just, at least this once, don't cover your eyes. It defeats the whole purpose.

---

*Of course, I cannot let this comment go by without mentioning G.M. Hopkins' poem, "Spring and Fall," in which he asks the child, "Margaret, are you gríeving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?" and ends with what we knew all along: "It is Margaret you mourn for." I will be getting to another Margaret in a few paragraphs. It is a happy coincidence.

116. Blind Love

I was lucky to have Fr. Jack as a religion teacher in high school. This was in the early '70s, at an all-boys Catholic high school--OK, they called it a "preparatory" school--and OK again, I think they did prep us for college pretty well; but what I mostly remember was the charged atmosphere of the place, especially once you factored in a pretty strong contingent of rich Italian kids, little Sopranos whose fathers were building contractors and funeral home owners (yes of course), all of them sharp dressers who could curse like sailors--as we all did, but never in front of adults--and each mamma mia's son of 'em loaded for bear; the fights were fierce but quick. I cannot watch a movie fistfight without disapproval because in high school, when someone was hit real hard, they fell right down, fast, without ceremony, like dropping--no, throwing--a rock. And the teachers were physical creatures as well, tossing us around pretty easily, casual and businesslike as they threw us against our lockers or rapped us on the heads with ballpoint pens or yanked us from our seats by the hair on our temples to kneel at the blackboard in front of the classroom--where the crucifix was--to pray for forgiveness for talking during study hall. I was relieved when these things happened to me; such treatment raised one, no matter how temporarily, from the substratum where victims languished. I was not smart enough to be among the ultra-honor students, who were generally ignored, so being manhandled by teachers mimimized peer-handling. Watching Goodfellas the first time was a bit unsettling. Sixteen years after high school, and I still cringed as Henry Hill reminded me, "If we wanted something we just took it. If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again." Funny guys.

But this is not what I wanted to write about. I started with Fr. Jack--his last name escapes me--and I can say unselfconsciously he was a cool teacher, a laid-back post-Vatican II type who looked like Dean Martin--and acted like him, with his casual, head-tilting grin, his pompadour'd hair glistening, his eyes serene. I remember him proctoring an exam and letting kids go to the bathroom whom we all, Fr. Jack included, knew were going to look up answers. He'd just shake his head, half-smiling, and wave his hand after them. Their loss, I think he figured. He once held up his priestly keychain--not like Peter's, but crammed with the way in to every place on campus--and talked about how he wouldn't need them if we really were good Christians. And I'm happy to report he didn't say "man" at the end of such proclamations; he didn't need to, he was so cool.

Actually, the coolest: In religion class he showed us Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). This was, if I may use such language, a transfiguring experience. Remember, the original recording of Jesus Christ Superstar was released in 1970, so the "rocks and stones themselves" were singing all over the place--in fact, I can remember my class going to a weekend Retreat where at one point we simply sat around and listened to that boss album. But Fr. Jack de-commodified the Jesus Happening with Pasolini's docu-drama of a straight-faced Jesus Who was as much man as God--a true theologic achievement, the mathematically impossible doubling--100% one, 100% the Other--that the nuns told the truth about when they said it was a Mystery of the Church. And Pasolini seemed to accept this Mystery, whether it be Joyful or Sorrowful, so that he could forge ahead.

What I remembered for decades later--having only seen it that one time until just now--was the matter-of-fact way Pasolini's Jesus* expressed Matthew's words, even the hard ones--but I was especially struck by his scorn for the rich, his insistence on keeping children at his feet while he held up the eye of the needle, a taunting dismissal. In 1971 or so, when Fr. Jack screened the movie, this is exactly the Jesus I needed. At the time, I was ready to accept a secular, self-invented savior--you know, the great philosopher, the wise man, on whom I could depend for recognizable advice--because there I was, also reading Siddhartha, already yearning for any kind of righteous, selfless life. And I hoped I could manage it without the burden of Mystery.

Pasolini's film nudges along that hope--except he leaves in the miracles. And seeing the film again I saw how realistic they were as physical actions, as real as any of the words of Matthew's/Pasolini's poet-reformer. Roger Ebert points out that the "miracles are treated in a low key." For instance, when Jesus walks on the water, there is "[n]o triumphant music, no waving of hands and shouts of incredulity, no sensational camera angles -- just a long shot of a solitary figure walking on the water." Watching the film in high school, I was able to take advantage of this approach and focus on the social message, and in doing so hold on to some version of my faith for just enough years to keep it, wrestling partner and friend, always right there before me, as much lit by Fr. Jack's bright eyes as scolded by his rueful grin at my own trips to the liar's lavatory, where all employees must wash hands before leaving.

And watching it now, one more thing is added, something that took me completely by surprise, and froze me in my tracks once again: In high school I had not noticed that Pasolini used all kinds of music in his movie, including Bach, Mozart and Prokofiev, and also a recording of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"; but in addition--and here it is--Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night--Cold Was the Ground" (and I should mention in the hymn the line ends, "on which the Lord was laid"). I'm sorry Willie Johnson's version seems to be passing into cliche, but as one of my college professors was fond of pointing out, cliches become so because they are so true we can't stop using them. And so it is with Blind Willie's song; Wikipedia reminds us, "Johnson's recording ... was included on the Voyager Golden Record, sent into space with the spacecraft in 1977, and ... [also] was used in [Carl Sagan's show] Cosmos." The site goes on to mention the song's appearance on The West Wing, Walk the Line, and The Devil's Rejects, and to point out that Ry Cooder, who "based his desolate soundtrack to Paris, Texas" on the song, "described it as 'the most soulful, transcendent piece in all American music.'"

Geez; that is a lot of weight to put on a three-minute, wordless "moaning song." But "Dark Was the Night--Cold Was the Ground" can take it--even if I almost can't. Pasolini uses it when the leper approaches Jesus to be cured. I found myself suddenly tearful. How did Pasolini know that, even as a doubting teenager, I was--and still am, despite my vacillations and fear of "God's Silence"--moved more than I can say by the curing miracles, especially those involving lepers, who always scared me when I was a little kid. They were always depicted like Karloff's Mummy--and worse, their disease was all about decay, which made them the original Living Dead, shambling horrors that could enlist you in their hopeless number with a mere touch, like Judas' kiss. And speaking of which: To hear about saints not only caring for but embracing, even kissing lepers, was terrible, because I knew it was expected of me, like being ready to endure Chinese Communist torture, just like those martyred nuns and priests who were getting it plenty while I was safe at home, with clean clothes and hot meals and parents who loved me. Oh, boy. These were heavy loads--and let me say I do not entirely regret them, as dank as they seem. The "problem of pain"--I will be getting to Shadowlands in another post--of course never goes away; it is as central as the problem of love--and so close they end up, at their human best, leading one to the other, completing each other.

And so hearing Johnson's song about Jesus' burial as He cured the leper was particularly moving. I suddenly imagined that Jesus' cures--all the way to poor Lazarus--were moments of poignant indulgence, opportunities to provide for others what He could not for Himself: rescue from the dark night and the cold ground. And more: Signifiers of the Promise. I will not handle this too much; it is fragile, and I need it. But I do love that song, and will not apologize for my tears. And I thank Fr. Jack for showing me Pasolini's movie, and giving me one more light. The last line of the hymn Willie simply moans--because his audience knew the words--enjoins us to "Awake to watch and pray." It is the least we can do; after all, the night is dark, the ground is cold, and we should not leave each other alone.

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*He was played by a grad student named Enrique Irazoqui, who showed up one day to talk with Pasolini about his work--and thank goodness, because that mad Marxist was all set to cast Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg as Jesus. (Annals 'o Civilization Narrow Escape No. 1,345,926!)