The Lady Vanishes

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) reminded me of Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel in a way.  A group of middle-class people find themselves in a nightmare world bounded by the edge of a room, or railway car, from which they cannot escape.  This one has a happy ending.

The movie gets off to such a slow and corny start, I almost gave up on it.  There’s the rich playgirl, getting ready to return to London to settle down according to Daddy’s wishes, and marry a “check-chasing blueblood.” A pair of stereotypical, cricket-obsessed Brits who keep up a steady idiotic patter, a charming, handsome, and brash musicologist  studying local folksongs, and a slightly batty old English lady governess.  They are all trapped by an avalanche in a remote backwater of some fictional central-European country, waiting for their train connection back to England.

   

Once on the train, the playgirl and the governess become friendly, and when the girl wakes up from a snooze, the old lady is gone.  Simply gone.  Everybody claims to have never seen her!  It becomes a somewhat labored cat-and-mouse game between the girl and the passengers:  she trying to get evidence that the woman did exist; they implying or saying straight out that she’s crazy.  A bit of physical evidence convinces the music man, and they make a team.  It turns out that the passengers are in a conspiracy to abduct and kill the old lady with an elaborate switcheroo involving a fake medical expert, a nun in black high-heeled pumps, and an Italian circus performer.  Then it gets weird.

After the heroes rescue the governess, the bad guys separate the train cars and direct the passengers and the engine onto a small line that runs into the forest.  They stop the train and surround the car with armed men.  After a failed ruse to get the passengers to disembark, they direct a fusillade at the car.  Why are all these people suddenly fighting for their lives in the middle of nowhere, trapped in a rail car, simply because of some old lady? 

A pretty woman with her lover, both fleeing spouses, demands that her man use his gun to defend them.  He thinks it’s all insane – the only sensible thing is to surrender and explain everything.  She grabs his gun and starts firing.  The two Brits rise to the occasion, without visible emotion of course, and turn out to be crack shots.  One grabs the pretty lady’s gun saying, “I’ll put it to better use,” and proceeds to pick off the attackers.  With each shot, the woman starts with fear while he, surveying the situation, calmly remarks, “I’m sure that there’s a rational –bang!- explanation – bang! – for all of this.”  Indeed there is.

  

Happily returned to London, the playgirl abandons her gold-digging fiancé and surrenders to the ill mannered, but charming music man in an embrace that is not what I expect from a Hitchcock film

        

Exterminating Angel

Another Bunuel film:  this one about a group of upper class (bourgeois) in Mexico City who come to a dinner party and can’t ever leave.  They can’t leave the room – can’t step over the threshold to the next one where the front door is visible.  Nor can anyone outside come in and get them.  Nobody knows why.

Not all that unlike those discretely charming ones I was watching last week.  They too are immobilized, in time, in the world, in their little world, and undone by dinner parties.  As Bunuel said in the interview printed in the pamphlet that came with the Criterion Collection DVD, “I am a man of obsessions.”

While the guests are “trapped” in the parlor, they slowly descend towards savagery.  The idiotic and not so idiotic pretensions of their upper crust culture fall away and are replaced by despair, hunger, the desire to find a sacrificial victim, and rank disgust with one another.  Not a new theme, not a deep theme, but a good theme!  And treated with humor and biting sarcasm by LB.  Of course, lots of strange, inexplicable images too, like why did that guy tie a blindfold on a sheep that got into the room?

One other thing about the interview that struck me was that the critics often presented rather involved or esoteric interpretations of things in the film, asking for a “Yes, that’s it“, or a”No” from Bunuel.  Most of the time it was a “no.”  We are so eager to explain, or have explained to us the weird or the mysterious.  Especially from artists, whom we assume must know what they mean and have a clear message (even if it’s a clunky Cold War political allegory that seems utterly incredible – one explanation of the bear’s antics in the adjoining room – he represents the USSR threatening the bourgeoisie!)  More often than not, Bunuel said something like, “Well, I just wanted a strange image,” or “it just happened that way, and I really liked how it looked.”

Life imitates art

     

That’s what Oscar Wilde said, life imitates art, not the other way ’round.  I’ve been watching some Luis Bunuel films, and both he and Oscar would be amused by this pair of images, or appalled, maybe.

The one on the left is from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie from 1972.  The one on the right is of the Bush Gang on his ranch in 2007.  A similar, but better image appeared on the front page of the NY Times and I immediately thought of the lost souls of la charme discret,  walking, walking, walking, never getting anywhere… [In the Times' image, Condi was facing 3/4 backwards, as if beckoning to Georgie Bush to c'mon...]  Were the editors and photographers of the paper thinking what I’m thinking now?

The movie is mostly dreams, some dreams within dreams, of two French bourgeois men who can’t ever seem to get time to eat their dinner or to have proper sex.  They are always being interrupted by…reality?  In one sequence, the ambassador from the Latin American nation of Miranda is at a party and repeatedly asked uncomfortable questions by guests:  Is it true that Miranda has the highest homicide rate in the world?  The greatest infant mortality?  That poverty is at an all-time high?  No, no, no.  Exaggerations.  Not that bad at all.  Finally, the importunate questioning is too much, and he shoots one of his tormentors…and awakes.

They are all liars, hypocrites, criminals, and frauds and criminals.   They deal in cocaine and denounce the degradation of the times over cocktails.  The priest is deeply pious, and he even grants absolution to the man he confesses who turns out to be the killer of his parents.  Then he shoots him with a shotgun. 

Jim Woodring and …

Jim Woodring is the latest comics artist to come to my enthusiastic attention.  Though he no longer does comic strips, he is legendary for his color and black and white stories about Jim – autobiographical I guess – and Frank, a humanoid figure who wordlessly moves through a landscape that exceeds the bounds of  the surreal.  In fact, to use that term, “surreal,” to describe him is to sink to cliche.  His stories of Frank are dreamlike and terrifying, but in a way that lacks the self-conscious arti-ness of so much surrealism, while being no less powerful.  I’d say, his images smack more of what I have experienced in my rare spells of delirium, but his stories all make sense, often moral sense.

The color page below will give you an idea of the eerie weirdness and humor that “Frank” brings to the world.  You can visit this link to see a faithful animation of his Frank character, but I think I like the regular old ink-on-page comics better.

The black and white page is from an issue of his “Jim” comics, and as usual, it is more structured along the lines of a wordy narrative…but of course, there is that giant talking frog!  I love this story for its wit, subtlety, irony, and sly philosophy.  It reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino’s story, “The Aquatic Uncle.”  The mastery of tone in this page, keeping to a steady highminded satire while portraying a sexy “girl-form,” a pompous and sensitive frog…prince? philosopher? demon?…and a tense socratic dialog on fear and human potential is amazing.  BRAVO!

…and gore…

Yes, somewhere there is a graduate student laboring on a Ph.D. dissertation on the comparative treatment of gore in Richard Sala, Tony Millionaire (two other of my favorites) and Woodring.  Consider first, Richard Sala:

His “noir”, Edgar A. Poe-esque adventure stories are filled with hacking, stabbing, decapitation, skull crushing violence.  Still, it evinces a laugh because he works within a genre and its anti-universe, always keeping it at a considerable emotional distance from us.  When I see those knives flashing, or helter-skelter piles of semi-clothed dead maidens…I chuckle or leer.

Tony Millionaire goes for the grand guignol, with a devilishly funny twist.  He’s not trying to scare us out of our seats.  More likely, he’d like to get us up and running to the can to vomit in disgust,

even as we nearly choke for laughing.  When I look at his sliced up bodies (Everything always seems to grow back fine for the next page!) and buckets of throw-up, I grimace with disgust and chortle.

Then there’s Jim Woodring.  His violence is cool, often wordless and soundless.  Sometimes we don’t even know what is devouring or mutilating what.  Sometimes, however, it’s just straight out barbarity, but with no visual change in tone from the other actions.  Consider below:  Manhog observes Frank having a picnic with his dolls and grows distraught at his exclusion from the fun.  He rushes in and upends Frank’s picnic spread and runs off.

Later, Frank walks alone, despondent, but he happens on the debauched Manhog sleeping.  Watch him take revenge!

Is there any more clinical depiction of the savagery of human violence?  It is truly disturbing, distilled to its terrible essence by the magic of the strange, ridiculous incongruity of the cartoon format.

I wonder if we do and say the right things…

…You mean about the children?

David Bowie as Mr. Newton, in The Man Who Fell to Earth, is abducted.  His long-time attorney and corporate manager is murdered by being tossed out of his apartment window.  Cut from his fall to earth to the man who planned the killing as he dives into a pool to the sound of unearthly music.  After he puts his children to bed, he says to his beautiful wife…

Kubrick – Falling Woman

On my noir journey, I just watched Stanley Kubrick’s first film (oh, second – he removed his first feature from circulation himself), Killer’s Kiss. The title doesn’t make all that much sense to me, despite the labored voice over on the theatrical trailer that leads up to announcing it, (“Her Soft Mouth Was the Road to Sin-Smeared Violence”) but the film is pretty good.  Not great, not even really good, in fact, it’s seriously flawed, but Kubrick is so imaginative, and it has such great location shots, and so much weird and fascinating imagery, that I like it.  Of course, I am a huge fan of Stanley K.

The film is short – 67 minutes – and is narrated by Davy while he waits for a train in Penn Station, NY.  The use of that glorious setting, now long gone, gives the film an unintentional kick for the architecturally aware.  Davy is a nice guy and a boxer, but a has-been boxer.  He’s just had his last chance in the ring, and he failed.  He needs to start fresh in life.  Kubrick shows boxing as unglamorous and brutal.  Just the shots of Davy being prepped by his trainer are disturbing.

Davy lives in a tiny one-room apartment across an airshaft from a pretty girl who works nights in a sleazy dance hall.  They are aware of each other, and intrigued – they watch each other through the window, each unaware of the other’s gaze.  Voyeurism, objectification of women, mediation of sex – the usual Kubrick drill.  Here Davy watches her undress, and later she, in a perfectly composed shot, watches him.  Kubrick’s background as a Magnum photographer shows here.

At the dance hall, we are treated to the sight of the advertisements showing busty women, “Couples Invited,” “Dance with Us!”  More women as objects for sale.  And the girl’s name is Gloria Price.  She’s the not-so-willing lover of the owner of the hall, Rapallo, and they watch Davy’s last fight on TV together.  At least one of them is getting very turned-on by the spectacle of a man being beaten…and Rapallo suspects that Gloria may be keen on him anyway…

When he returns to his apartment to rest after his defeat, Davy gets a sympathetic call from his uncle.  As he talks to him, he looks at Gloria undressing across the way.  In this wonderful sequence, Davy looks out at us who stand in the space occupied by Gloria.  We see him looking at her in the mirror behind him.  You can barely make her out in the bright window in this still, but he’s watching!  Space, mirrors, the two lovebirds watching each other through windows and on TV…will they ever get together?

Davy falls asleep, but awakes from a nightmare of driving through Brooklyn to the jeers of the audience at his last fight.  The dream is in negative, another Kubrick favorite.  Remember that trip to Jupiter in 2001? 

When he awakes, he hears Gloria screaming as she is threatened by Rapallo.  He rescues her, and that’s the start of their romance.  Rapallo is the jealous type, so he orders his thugs to rough up Davy, but they grab his manager by mistake, and then kill him.  This all happens in Time Square, the source of some great NYC location shots c. 1955.  At times, the camera is hand-held and jumpy.

From there, it gets nasty, as Davy uses his wits and brawn to get even.  Rapallo has kidnapped Gloria, so the fight is over the woman too.

Talk you scum!  Where is she!?  They drive to a deserted loft neighborhood.

There’s a chase over the roofs of NY that is remarkable again for the location shots, and then the final duel to the death between Davy and Rapallo in a mannequin warehouse.  As they fight, female figures are hacked to pieces, skewered, used as weapons, and tumbled upon.

As a surreal commentary on this brutal chivalry, these body parts tremble in the dark, silent and mysterious like a de Chirico painting.

In the end, he gets the girl…

Mental Montage

Ooops, turn off the audio!  Sorry…

Why did you resign? Who is No. 1?

I have posted on The Prisoner before, but the show continues to occupy a prominent place in my pop-cult consciousness, and it keeps coming up in odd places. The opening sequence is tremendous, combining as it does adventure, mystery, and the awful weight of obsessive nightmare, the endless replaying of the “resignation scene.” There he is – cool, angry, totally self-confident – swinging open the doors to the evil sanctum to set himself free, or so he believes.

“Why did you resign?” That one little question distills the essence of the totalitarian program. Just tell us that (and then you will tell us whatever we want to know.) And The Prisoner, now known as No. 6, replies with the obvious rejoinder, “Who is No.1?” He never breaks, and they never give up – the game goes on for about 17 episodes. We never see No. 1, not really, until the end. We never find out why The Prisoner is No. 6 - where are No.s 3, 4, and 5? .  No. 2 runs the village…

I remember when I first heard of this show – I was in elementary school, and a friend who watched a lot more TV at later hours than was permitted me told me of a very “weird show,” in which a “big blob” patrolled an island, and attacked anyone who tried to escape. When I finally saw it, I was hooked for life. This doesn’t necessarily put me in good company. I don’t believe that this show is a piece of deeply complex philosophy – I don’t think it warrants exegesis on a par with what scholars give the works of Dante, and I don’t even think most of the episodes are all that good, but the idea of it, and Patrick McGoohan, are great.

The show is cast in the mold of a standard adventure series, but it has a very large dollop of satire and sly wit thrown in, along with some sci-fi aspects, many of them pretty hokey. The quality of the episodes varies wildly from awful (The General) to absolutely exquisitely developed (A, B, & C). These two, my least and most favorite, have the odd circumstance of using the same actor to play No.2. Usually a different actor takes the role each show, indicative of the displeasure of No. 1 at their inability to break No. 6. The form of the shows varies as well – some are straightforward adventure, but often with a very clever twist (The Chimes of Big Ben), some are more satirical (Free for All, the episode in which No. 6 runs for the office of No. 2: “So, No. 6, will you run?” “Like hell, first chance I get.” Always joking…) , some are like fantasy-fables (The Girl Who Was Death)

My favorite, A, B, & C is the story of an attempt to break No. 6 by drugging him and manipulating his dreams. The three letters refer to three individuals whom No. 2 is convinced may hold the key to why No. 6 resigned. In a series of dreams, which they have the technology to project onto a large screen and into which they can inject themselves, No. 2 and his assistant try to prod No. 6 into giving something away. They fail of course – or is there nothing to give away? Did he just resign because he was sick of his job? Was he really just going on vacation?

In desparation, No. 2 gives a super dose to The Prisoner, and the dream takes on the giddy, crazy aspect of a classic 60’s hallucinatory experience, complete with a posh party a la 007, and corny pop music. It culminates in a confrontation in a dark plaza that is as great a surrealist set piece as anything Bunuel ever did, and the denoument is devilishly clever, as No. 2 watches the dream, and then watches No. 6 walk out of the dream, past him, and back to the village. Then…cut to the endless replay of the doors swinging open in that dark room in London…

Nightmare on Main Street

There I go again, alluding to cultural cliches in my post title, but I could not help myself. I get positively giddy when I see nightmares and surrealism going mainstream in the news. Of course, surrealism has been mainstream since the 30’s, and you could argue that it forms the aesthetic bedrock of much of the advertising industry. Well, anyway, the NYTimes Science section is featuring dreams and bad dreams – most dreams are bad, it seems – in today’s paper.

And speaking of bad dreams, a mare is a horse, and a nightmare, well, Henry Fuseli showed us what it all means with his famous pictures, one of the best known shown here.

And this strange, bloody eye, right from the page of the NYTimes! So common in horror shows these days – I just saw it last night while I peeked at my son’s favorite TV sci-fi melodrama, Heroes. To the right, we see its ancestor in that opening sequence from “Un Chien Andalou,” (An Andalusian Dog) the landmark of cinema and surrealism by Dali and Bunuel – a woman gets her eye sliced open as a thin cloud passes before a full moon…and the dreams begin. Rotting donkeys on pianos, hands stuck in doors with ants, lots of ants, sex, death, music…the usual stuff.

Not as well known to the public, because it doesn’t make for shocking juxtapositions in pop culture, is the surrealist preoccupation with l’amour fou, deranged love. This image from “L’Age D’Or” (The Golden Age) shows one of the more fetishistic aspects of this trend.

And while we are on the subject of images in the media, here’s one from todays online NYTimes. A house going up in smoke, combining with oxygen, as Mr. Rosewater (God bless him) would have it, in southern California. To me, it has an apocalyptic cast, reminding me of the final scene from that noir pulp classic, “Kiss Me Deadly,” when the scoundrels open up The Box and are illuminated with deadly radiation. End of the World, anyone?

Nothing to Do…

An image of the lost souls in Bunuel’s film, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” as they stroll along the country road, wondering, “What in hell are we doing…here?” And well might we ask, all of us, what are we doing here? Nothing at all. There is nothing to do. There is nothing to accomplish. There is no end. There is no goal. Look to the slimy things of the mud, the crawling vermin of the forest floor, the mayflies that live a few hours, the barnacles – look to them for the answer. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a reply.

Make a list of things to do, cross them off happily, flush will a feeling of accomplishment as you do them…and the list grows back. One damn thing after another…until you’re dead, that is. Personally, I find this liberating and uplifting. It means you cannot fail. You cannot do the wrong thing in life. There is no standard against which you can be measured when your ’success’ and ‘failure’ is toted up in the end. Not a very Calvinist view, not too sympatico with the Saint Peter at the Gate judging you point of view. It just means that whatever you do with your life is okay, as long as you think it’s okay – do you?

It also means that any person’s life is just as good, as full, as worthwhile, as valuable as any other’s. Compare the affluent life of a New York city professional to that of a street beggar in Bombay – no question of which life most people would prefer to have as their own, but that’s not the point I’m making. Anyone who would say that the beggar’s life is less of a life than the bourgois’ is wrong, I’d say. Is the life of one bird, one bug, one blade of grass ever worth more than that of another? No, who would bother to even try to evaluate such nonsense! We are no different. If anyone’s life has value, all lives are equal.

Duchamp: What is Given…

I went to Philadelphia to see the Dali exhibit the other day, and while there, stopped in to see one of my favorite works. Calvin Tomkins, author of a wonderful biography of Duchamp, considers it to be the weirdest piece of art on exhibit in any museum in the world. I agree.

If you are in the area, stop in, go to the big room with the Duchamp pieces, and venture into the room way at the back…and prepare for something very strange and unsettling.What you will see is the door shown above, set into a wall. And on the door, two holes drilled, just right for peeping through with both eyes. And once you have situated yourself into this Peeping Tom position, feeling that you are somehow degraded by your transformation to a voyeur, you will get a shock. You will see in front of you the something like what the image below shows:

Just what is that…! Is that what I think it is?!! You never see her face, you can’t. Are you really seeing something? Is it pornographic? (Yes.) Is it some weird spoof or comment on porn? (Yes.) Is it repulsive? (Yes.) Is it fascinating? (Yes.) Is it real? Looks real…That waterfall in the back, is that from some tacky advertisement? Well…maybe. The lamp, the arm, whaaa?

This work walks that razor line that Flaubert knew so well, the one between art and kitsch, the one that shows what is and what the artist thinks about what is, the one that doesn’t show anything but the obsessions of the artist and the world that is not by the artist…

Duchamp, the one who denounced the ancient western tradition of “retinal art,” subverted it with his ready-made urinals and bicycle wheels. The one with his bizarre-Dada construction, “The Bride Stripped Bare,” the one who retreated from the art world to play chess, who scorned movements and art history – he gives us something that looks…sort of…like a soft-core porn postcard from the late 19th century, or a perverse image for an early 20th century advertising campaign. Was he thinking like the Buddhist who says:

When I began to meditate, I thought there were clouds and mountains; when I learned something of Zen, I saw that there were not really any clouds and mountains; and when I was enlightened, I saw that there were only clouds and mountains.

As Duchamp said, “There is no solution because there is no problem.” There is only what is, the things given (L’Etants Donne in French, the name of the piece).

Never to be Forgotten

This is how I was introduced to Luis Bunuel. Salvador Dali facilitated the intro, and Wagner’s liebstodt provided the soundtrack. This is the opening of the Dali-Bunuel 1924 film, An Andalusian Dog. In the next second, the woman’s eye will be sliced open with the man’s razor (Bunuel’s the man, I believe), and from there, it only gets, well, more surreal.L’Age D’Or was Bunuel’s next venture with Dali, and it is a full-length film, while Un Chien runs a mere 20 minutes – could you take more? L’Age is also easier to watch, focusing as it does more on l’amour fou than rotting donkey carcasses on pianos, ants, and ocular torture. Soundtrack courtesy of Schubert’s Unfinished.

Today I watched Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones) which Bunuel made in Mexico in 1950, and about which I had heard much, but never seen. Bunuel worked productively in Mexico for many years after dropping out of sight for quite some time before and after WWII. Los Olvidados packs a terrific wallop. It’s about boys in a gang in Mexico City, and it’s brutal, totally unsentimental, and filled with images from his bizarre, personal imagination. There’s the dream of the boy Pedra in which his mother approaches him with a huge piece of red meat hanging from her hands; there’s the funny moment when the food vendor looks at Jaibo, takes his order, doesn’t see the policeman appear, and looks back to see Jaibo has…disappeared, as if by magic. The image of the blind singer-medicine man stroking the naked back of Pedra’s mother with a white dove to draw out her pain is another.

The sequence that sticks with me – even more than the last frame showing the hero’s body being dumped unceremoniously onto a garbage pile by an innocent family who don’t want to be mixed up in his death – is the one when Pedra leaves his reform school. The director, who is wise and compassionate, realizes that Pedra can go straight if he’s given half a chance and shown affection and trust. To quell the anger that Pedra feels at being in what he feels is a prison, where he has been placed unjustly, he gives him money and shows him the unguarded gate. He asks him to go into town to do an errand for him. He wants to prove to him that he is free, and that his life’s direction is up to him. We see Pedra running into town, smiling, only to be collared by the throughly depraved Jaibo, who steals the money from Pedra. Pedra starts on a quest to get back the money, but it only ends in his death. That scene is the last we see of the school and the director. What was he thinking all this time while Pedra was out trying to get back the 50 pesos?

What I love about this is that Bunuel doesn’t go for the easy ironies that are cliched. No scenes of the director shaking his head a few days later, ruefully acknowedging the failure of his experiment as days pass with no sight of the boy. No scenes of his assistant saying, “Well, boss, I guess you were wrong about that one, right? Can’t win ‘em all.” Bunuel gives us all the ironies before the whole sequence starts! As the boy runs out the gate, the director and the assistant have a conversation in which he says that if he’s wrong, he will pay for his mistake with 50 pesos. “All mistakes cost something, ” he says. That remark hangs over the remainder of the film – he didn’t make a mistake, but will he ever find out? Will he know that? Just one example of why this film seems as fresh as if it were just released.