Too Many Movies: Everybody Is All About This Death Thing Lately

This week, Matthew Brady checked in with Terry Gilliam's Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, Joe McCulloch double teamed Brakhage's The Act Of Seeing With One's Eyes and Live To Ride, Ride To Live, while Tucker saw himself some Killer Inside Me.

The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson Created Alcoholism, 2010
Tucker Stone

"Nobody has it coming. That's why nobody sees it coming."

There's never been a film made out of a Jim Thompson book that fully captured the experience of reading one of them, and there never will be. Unlike some other noir classics, Thompson's stories are made to be ingested on a personal level, they're best received when spat directly into the reader's brain. His protagonists have to talk to you, at you, they have to be permitted to wrap themselves around you the same way his women wrap themselves around the men they screw. Anything else is a poor substitute.

That fact doesn't necessarily have to result in bad movies. Coup de Torchon worked. A lot of people have a soft spot for The Grifters. Ali MacGraw notwithstanding, The Getaway is solid. And if Marilyn Monroe's life had lasted a little bit longer, there would've been a version of Killer Inside Me featuring her teamed up with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando, and there's no way that wouldn't have been a must-see. Instead, there was a Stacy Keach version few people watched, and now there's this, a Michael Winterbottom version that gets to trumpet the "faithful" card while ushering in the latest installment in the violence-against-women controversy.

First things first: yes, it's pretty faithful to the novel's plot. Lou Ford walks and talks in an archaic, aw-shucks manner, while never really trying to conceal the pleasure he finds when his behavior is questioned. As played by Casey Affleck, Ford's greatest joys seem to come from his numerous run-ins with people who have begun to grasp the depths of his insanity. Even when he's passively confronting the people he believes are out to get him, Affleck can't help but aggravate their suspicions--and when he's called on it, when a pointless and mis-used cliche gets thrown back at him by a fearless Elias Koteas, he reacts like a child: sulking, pouting, clamming up. If you aren't going to play, he seems to say, then just leave me alone.

In Jim's book, the audience is forced to live inside Ford's head. The violence that he deals out--beating a woman to death, beating another closer to death than one would think is possible--is witnessed from the inside out, resulting in a private kind of hell. But in a film--maybe not any film, but this one in particular--the violence is purely spectatorial. Cutting back and forth, from the fist to the fact, the aggressor to the victim, the wide shot and the squelch, all the violence becomes no different from that which fills less "artistic" films of the genre. It's shocking, upsetting, hard to watch, but unlike when it occurs in the novel, it comes across as fundamentally unnecessary. Compared to a scene much later in the film, when Affleck adopts an ambiguous grin while watching a dying woman urinate on the floor as she weakly grasps for her mislaid purse, the brutality of the film is made even more questionable. The look on his face, the expanding puddle, her jerking motions--that's scary. That's horrifying. It's exactly what the book created--a world of claustrophobic anxiety and fear, a sensation of a file cabinet packed with insanity that had just locked into place--and Thompson did it on every page. Here, with all the talent that money can provide, Winterbottom is only able to manage it for a few minutes.

The movie has its moments, for sure. A one-scene explosion of Bill Pullman's late career weirdness, Elias Koteas in yet another perfect performance, an angelic and heartbreaking Kate Hudson, and Tom Bower blowing a lazy Ned Beatty out of the water in the "done this before, but here it is perfectly" department, all of it in support of Casey Affleck, who defiantly proves that his surprising turn in The Assassination of Jesse James wasn't a fluke. But when the film ends, with a bunch of shoddy digital effects and a cut to the all-but-guaranteed "period" soundtrack, what you're left with is a bag of functioning machinery that never proved its usefulness.

Complaining aside, Jim wouldn't have cared. Hollywood's tried for years, and they haven't fucked his books up yet. I know, because I can see them right now--they're over on the shelf, where they belong. 

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Terry Gilliam is still on shrooms, 2010
Matthew J. Brady

By this late date, one knows what to expect in a new Terry Gilliam movie: eye-popping visuals, people in rags, faces leering at the camera, lots of mumbling, and usually a fairly incoherent story, probably having something to do with the power of imagination. "Indulgent" is the go-to phrase, but if any filmmaker has a visual sense worth indulging, it's Gilliam, and when things go right, that can lead to some sublime imagery and fascinating ideas, or at least some crazy, pretty shit to look at for a while. This particular example of his penchant for brightly-colored weirdness manages to work pretty well, even considering the setback of Heath Ledger's untimely death, which forced Gilliam to use the likes of Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell as replacements for certain scenes, which manages to be a lot less jarring than it could have been. But really, while Ledger gets top billing, he's kind of a secondary character here, doing good work in his scenes but stepping out of the way for the other players to bear the real plot.

And that plot is pretty nuts, seeing Christopher Plummer play a thousand-year-old monk who has been reduced to touring the back alleys of London, drunkenly playing shows in a horse-drawn cart that opens up into a stage, similar to the one Richard Dreyfuss tooled around on in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but more elaborate and Gilliam-esque. He's accompanied by his fetching teenage daughter Valentina, a perpetually squealing Verne Troyer, and some other guy who he apparently picked up off the street, and they try to lure people into a cheap-looking fake mirror which is actually a portal into his head, or to the world of their dreams, or something. It's really a chance for Gilliam to go nuts with the crazy imagery, and holy cow does he ever. A drunken lout gets hauled away by gigantic flying jellyfish, a stuck up rich woman enters a world of gigantic shoes, purses, and pearls, a kid visits a crazy candyland where he can shoot everything with his Game Boy, and so on, and so on.

The plot really kicks in when the troupe picks up Ledger, who they find hanging by his neck from a bridge. He claims to not remember who he is, but it turns out he's a disgraced charity head who ended up embezzling money and getting mixed up with the Russian mob. That's only slightly touched on for the most part though, as the real plot ends up being a series of wagers that Plummer has going on with the devil, who is played memorably by Tom Waits, who sports a bowler cap and John Waters moustache and keeps showing up to screw with Plummer's head as the deadline for when he is supposed to spirit away Valentina, as compensation for the loss of one of a long series of bets, approaches. Waits is hilarious here, always mumbling and wheedling Plummer, more interested in the wagering than in actually collecting on Plummer's losses. All the best visuals involve him as well, from the flashbacks in which he first approaches Plummer (wearing some awesome Mole Man goggles) in a gigantic monastery that appears to be carved from a Himalayan mountain, or when he ruins Plummer's idyllic romance by turning a boat ride with his ladyfriend into a trip through a corpse-riddled, toxic-waste-filled river. Later, he turns into a giant snake to menace the Johnny Depp version of Ledger's character, pilots a crazy robot version of a stereotypical Russian babushka in order to capture some murderous thugs, and tangoes with Valentina in the midst of a flurry of huge floating mirror shards.

The Ledger stand-ins manage to work pretty well too, taking his place whenever he enters Plummer's fantasy world. Johnny Depp works well enough, although his scene is the briefest, but he does charming and handsome, as always. Jude Law is probably the worst, playing a sort of superstar businessman version of the character, and sporting that gleeful grin he does that doesn't really match Ledger's portrayal, but when he literally comes down to earth, he manages to infuse himself with some sort of Ledger energy, somehow not looking ridiculous in a goatee and ponytail. Colin Farrell gets a nice bit of casting as the sexual conqueror of young ladies, and his subsequent star turn as the head of the charity works, as does his panicked flight when it all goes wrong. The whole thing holds together surprisingly well, although the character does take an odd turn into villainy at the end that might be the result of a Ledger-lacking script rewrite.

But whatever, this is one hell of a fun time, the sort of thing that Gilliam should probably be doing these days. It's an excuse to indulge his strangest fancies, while managing to combine them with his flair for grime and grit, and a way to make incoherent plotting and prancingly goofy characters work. May the weird shit from Gilliam's mind keep flowing, and I'll probably keep lapping it up.

The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes
Directed by Stan Brakhage, 1971
Joe McCulloch

A lot of people think this is a totally serious movie, being mostly documentary footage of corpses getting disassembled and all, but the title’s actually a little joke. It’s a literal translation of the Greek “autopsia” (from which “autopsy” is derived), while also functioning as a small, delightfully reductive summary of Brakhage’s attitude toward the cinema - his camera, the filmmaker’s eye, is indeed seeing things, but its visions are inevitably subjective, personal, metaphorical and oblique. If you’re like me when you think “Brakhage” you probably imagine layer after layer of superimposition, or objects taped down to film stock, or painted footage run like brutal abstract animation. These intensive mechanisms ironically make Brakhage one of the most accessible of the ‘major’ experimental filmmakers, in that nobody can possibly get the impression that Jack Smith is just having people randomly jump around in front of the camera, or Ken Jacobs is editing ill-fitting footage into evasive, compromised narratives. Brakhage is almost always, undoubtedly, at the slightest glance doing something completely strange and pretty, and that’s the uncertain viewer’s ‘in.’

This one doesn’t have any of that. This one’s famous for the corpses. Brakhage had wanted to make a film like this since he began making films, but it wasn’t until middle age put the fear of death in him that he requested access to a Pittsburgh mortuary following the completion of two other films of societal operations across the city: Eyes, following police officers on the beat, and Deus Ex, set in a hospital. Yet despite the seemingly verité nature of the series, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is very much of a piece with the filmmaker’s other works, because it prompts contemplation of human function through scientific means, to the ends of deeper understanding through those functions: understanding the many pulsing, allusive stacked images of Dog Star Man (let’s say) requires the viewer to actively interface with Brakhage’s timed-out deployment of cinematic techniques, understanding that what you’re being shown through creative technical means is a way of overcoming traditional narratives and their objectivity, their dictation, the master-servant relationship between creator and audience.

What he does here, instead of disrupting accepted filmic ‘reality’ by plastering stuff across the screen or editing beyond accepted boundaries, is make it all literal. So, what we’re seeing is the human body itself, physically taken apart by scientific means, forcing the viewer to… wait for it… look inside themselves. This is an immensely tactile film, constantly veering in close to study the texture of skin and hair, the feel of entrails. Brakhage is not an impartial observer; his editing builds the action from a sort of prelude of clean naked bodies being poked and prodded into the building action of increasingly messed-up, bloody corpses, the camera lingering on odd, humane details like the black panties of a dead woman peering out from her pants, or shifting viewpoints contrasting the bounce of an undressed man’s hips against the trousers of his living attendant. Brakhage had to agree not to show any corpses’ faces straight-on, so he sometimes fills one corner of the frame with an eye, or skims the terrain of a face by shooting towards the chin. It’s this lack of identification that most perfectly contrasts the bodies with living attendants, whose faces we do glimpse (if not often), as surely as the film’s famous image of a lonely fly skittering across a placid dead toe.

After about ten minutes, Brakhage inserts an image of a nearby photographer snapping a picture, like a self-reflexive chapter heading, and the dissections begin in earnest. Nothing is left to the imagination; you see skin-stripped skulls sawed open and shiny brains pulled out, and then you peer into the brightly green and white-speckled bloodless cavern of the empty skull. The action becomes non-chronological, almost musical, though as with most of the filmmaker’s work there’s no sound whatsoever, to better focus the viewer on the images. Instead it’s flurries of backward pans of rows of bodies on tables or images of organs being placed on tables or stuffed into jars that form the work’s passages, punctuated by canny disruptions of all-grue-all-the-time expectations, like a sudden pull from an opened torso to glimpse busy works milling in the background, or, to flip it, the camera bobbing to one side of a stolidly narrating profession to let a half-sawed head peek out from behind him. After all, the living and the dead are made of the same stuff, so it’s fitting they be together.

Many viewers are initially grossed out by all this activity, but I’ve heard more than a few report becoming unusually calm after a few minutes: this is all we are, right? We’re just collections of goopy stuff arranged in an efficient manner. But we can think while we’re alive, so Brakhage’s close studies of bodily gunk invite us to associate the play of light and color and fluid with everything else in nature. Soft, rubbery guts; rich, fatty skin pulled away cool, snow-white and bloodless; meat, cuts, chops; empty bodies like smooth plastic. There’s even an (eek!) sexual interrogation, as a young woman’s skin is gently hosed off to a soft and lovely golden shine, her breasts hanging fully to each side of her red and open chest. Hey, what you see is what you see, and what you best take from that here is only that we’re part of everything, and dying is just partitioning. Truly the feel-good film of the year, though what exactly you feel is naturally your individual sign of being alive, and the Brakhage cinema was tirelessly dedicated to investigating that life, that uncertainty.

Ride to Live, Live to Ride
Produced by The Suicide Club, 1971
Joe McCulloch

You know what made Brakhage fearful? Symmetry. Dreadful shit, denoting design and formula; even Brakhage’s most grounded works sought to undermine those concepts by grasping at the invisible mess of the human interior, even if by way of editing rhythms or other science - at least the viewing mind could draw forward and activate the simulacrum, rather than laying back and accepting direction from traditional narratives.

But if we were to map out the Anti-Brakhage Equation, perhaps it wouldn’t look like a Hollywood movie. No, perhaps it would be strange and confrontational too, yet impossibly acceptable to the chaperones of wide society. I refer, of course, to the great American driver’s education gore film, the most wild descendant of all the mighty mental hygiene movies of the mid-20th century, which themselves were offshoots of so-called ‘sponsored’ filmmaking, i.e. movies made for some instructive purpose by a sponsoring entity. Brakhage made a few of those for money starting in the late ‘50s, around the time Richard Wayman began attending community meetings and county fairs with a slideshow titled Highways of Agony, culled from photographs taken at crash sites around the state of Ohio and accompanied by a police lecture on automotive prudence. In 1959 similar elements were collapsed onto film and allowed to move, and so Signal 30 showed an honest-to-god dead man crunched under vehicular metal and booming soundtrack horns to anyone of sound mind in need of enlightenment from ably participating police officials. “This is not a Hollywood production as can readily be seen,” proclaimed the opening title card, following corpse #1. “Most of the actors in these moves are bad actors and received top billing only on a tombstone.” If only so much could be said of experimental filmmakers!

Ride to Live, Live to Ride (aka: Death on the Highway) was not one of Wayman’s projects; it was a west coast production, with lower production values that had a way of making its intent all the more direct. There is no music, no sound but for a clippy, dropout-prone narration. On my copy, there aren’t even any credits or titles, save for The End. It just starts like a shot, with self-identified narrator Dean Robinson (“President of the Suicide Club”) narrating monotonously over patched-together documentary footage of road workers prying people out of ruined automobiles, or staring at bodies laid out off to the side, or directing onlookers away. Every so often our viewpoint changes to accommodate still photographs of corpses: a woman with her brains spattered on the sidewalk or a man cut clean in half, and then the camera zooms in closer.

Listed dispassionately, these techniques aren’t so dissimilar from those of the silent Pittsburgh Brakhage; they’re used ‘artlessly,’ but that doesn’t foreclose on effect any more than Brakhage securing the cooperation of Pennsylvania medical professionals (as opposed to the state police) invalidates his own works. But the intent couldn’t be more different, and the secret is in the photographs and the narration - you get very, very, very close, but never contemplatively. The objective isn’t to unravel the flesh but to freeze it in its unraveled state, to frame it in a manner so as to emphasize the horror of upset skin, and blood. To say “this is disgusting,” and to allow the viewer to imagine the agony that must be accordant to such ugliness. Some films of the type would edit in real accident scene screams, or lay down heavy guilt for drivers that killed people, but not the Suicide Club. They were cheap and pure; their narration doesn’t even give safety tips beyond the vaguest slow-down, watch-where-you’re-going admonishment, like you’d get after being pulled over for a dead headlight. It doesn’t matter, but death matters; Robinson notes that cops told him there’s hardly any need to watch the roads after a big fatal accident, because everyone’s so careful then.

Divorced from capable, substantive instruction, the true intent is revealed: pure taboo-building. You are going to die, you are going to die, you are going to die, you are going to die, YOU. Are going to die someday. But if you’re scared to die, authority can practice control. And sure, if you’re not scared to die you can be pressed into violence for all sorts of shitty reasons, but I think there’s still a latent fear, a fear of something buried in there, and here in this film we can see terror distilled into simple, purposeless bodily violation.

Luckily, though, the Suicide Club is famous among mutants who watch bloody classroom instruction films for a reason: they tampered with this almost primal stuff of cinema and this unbelievably deep-cutting taboo subject matter like mad scientists fucking around in god’s domain, and it all went wrong. There’s two reasons for that:

(1) Dean Robinson appears to be bullshitting. Specifically, he sounds like he’s recording commentary while watching long stretches of the movie at a time without any script or prompting whatsoever. He’s hesitant and scattered. At one point he miscounts the number of corpses on screen, which is actually an alternate angle on material seen earlier in the film, though he doesn’t seem to notice. The footage itself seems older than 1971, which is confirmed when Robinson begins making reference to earlier versions of the film in circulation. He also cracks an Emily Post joke; she died in 1960, which leaves you wondering what era exactly it is that Mr. Robinson hails from. Regardless, he is the only sound in the movie, and if Brakhage was fond of pointing out sound’s dominance over visuals in cinema, here we’ve got a voice of authority that couldn’t sound less trustworthy.

(2) They mark up the photographs. Like, they paint or dye them. They augment them with colorization, and highlight the blood to be as red as possible. They’re real bodies, real brains, authentic lost limbs, serious blood, but - it looks like Photoshopped photo panels out of a superhero comic, or promotional stills from an H.G. Lewis feature. It’s uncanny, because the documentary footage is in color, fairly quick-cut, and untouched. Every so often, then, we enter a state of hyper-vision where our eyes can only see painted-over still images, which account for every bodily close-up. If death movies are the last taboo, this is the transfiguration of taboo into kitsch at a most crucial moment, on the most sensitive level.

The final effect is ferociously bizarre and off-putting; in the end we see nude children spread out on a slab, a boy and a girl, the boy’s arm hanging off his body in a blossom of rich tomato red. Brakhage once remarked if they’d brought in any kids to film he’d have fainted. Tiny black bars hand over their eyes, like in magazines. Dean Robinson insists these are the children of a neighbor of his, and we can’t possibly believe him. The implication climbs up behind you at your desk and whispers “they’re lying.” It’s self-destroying authoritarianism -- screened in schools?! was this ever seen by anyone?! -- that I cannot set aside the possibility that the Suicide Club was in fact a gang of madcap Situationists hell-bent on undermining the American education system by making a Real Death Movie it readily accepted for broadcast to minors. These people were heroes. Dean Robinson should receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. This is the most beautiful film I’ve seen in forever.

-Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[david brothers]

You mean to tell me that Casey Jones is in The Killer Inside Me? That just shot up to must-watch.

[John Pontoon]

This site surprises me pretty often. I'm awful jaded, too. I always assume I'm pretty much the only person who's seen Tavernier's "Coup de Torchon," or Stoppard's "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead" (which is roughly a hundred million times better than "Shakespeare in Love," right?) but obviously there are tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of people who have seen each. Or maybe not. Shouldn't I be asleep?

[Matthew J. Brady]

Oh man, I love Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. I think I still have a VHS copy somewhere around my house. It can't be that obscure, can it, what with Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Richard Dreyfuss starring? And yes, It's so much better than Shakespeare in Love, full of great jokes, rapid-fire dialogue, and "what does it all mean?" existentialism. I love it; it's probably one of my all time favorites.

Jog: Holy shit, those movies sound awful. I don't think I could stomach them; even your descriptions make me a little queasy. It's funny, I have no problem with gore in movies, probably because I know it's fake, but real stuff like this grosses me right out. Even surgery footage, or shots of people getting Botox injected into their face or whatever gives me the heebie jeebies. I dunno, fear of death and all that, I guess.

[david brothers]

R&G is my favorite play (I still have the book I stole from high school because I wanted to keep it) and the movie is pretty good, too. I'd join that fan club.

[Tim O'Neil]

Another voice for R&G! One of my jobs is screenign Shakespearean films to undergraduates, and probabyl the most anticipated & well-received film of every semester is R&G. Even moreso than Romeo+Juliet, which has grown on me but whic halso seems really dated; even more than McKellan's Richard III, which is still fantastic; certainly more than Taymor's Titus, which was and is awful and which I've had to sit through at least seven times now.

[Tucker Stone]

I'm in too, as long as I can bring the much-loathed Hapgood with me.

[John Pontoon]

"I kept waiting for you to delve!"

[nrh]

The funny thing is, I remember falling asleep during one screening of "Act of Seeing...", and that it was a really peaceful sleep. It wasn't the first time I saw it, but that experience had a pretty big impact. "Deus Ex," the surgery stuff, that's rough. Not nearly as bad as the one where he shoots his beloved dog decomposing over the course of a year (Sirius Remembered, I think), but there it is.

Your description of the Suicide Club stuff makes me think of the first film by J.J. Murphy, who'd go on to make "Print Generation" - it's called "Highway Landscape" and it's just a fixed shot of a dead rabbit on the side of the road. It's from '71, the same year as the Pittsburgh trilogy, and while it wasn't in the very first wave of structural film it always struck me as the perfect anti-Brackhage.

I still think Carl Dreyer's "They Caught the Ferry" is the scariest anti-driving PSA ever made, though.

[Tucker Stone]

They Caught The Ferry! Man, I haven't thought of that movie in years. I think i'm throwing that on with breakfast tomorrow. Classic!

[Chris Jones]

I read the last two movie reviews while listening to Cosmic Jokers at 3 in the morning.

Needless to say, sleep was hard fought.