I don’t know whether Guy Cimbalo of LowCulture.com likes the new Strokes record or not, but boy howdy has he humiliated everyone else who’s written about it. He’s assembled a hugely entertaining list of the rock-journo cliches employed by reviewers of the album. Vicious! (That Lou Reed reference is just to get you in the mood.)

Thanks to all this horror stuff I’ve been a bit behind on the comics beat, I know. Why don’t let’s play catch-up?

First of all, I’d like to call everyone’s attention to the current Dave Gibbons/Lee Weeks Captain America run, which is just as entertaining as hell. While the stolid, cramped continuity-wonking of 1602 gets tons and tons of attention, this little unheralded storyline sticks the various Marvel Universe heroes in an alternate-timeline donnybrook about a billion times more entertainingly and convincingly. Plus, they fight Nazis. Plus, it’s called “Cap Lives.” It’s good, is what I’m saying.

The Pulse brings us a characteristically grumpy-sounding interview with Erik Larsen, creator of the improbably long-running superhero series Savage Dragon. I think there’s been something of a slump in quality in this series recently, but generally this is one of the most entertaining, unpredictable superbooks out there. Paradoxically, it’s also one of the most reverent AND most iconoclastic regarding the conventions of superherodom. I think it’s fantastic that Image has planned to get trades of the entire series in print, because it’s really best read from the beginning, preferably in during a Lost Weekend of junk food and booze.

Dirk Deppey has been sparring with some retailers lately regarding his theories about manga, graphic novels, and the bookstore market, and seems to have done pretty well for himself for the tussling. He and Graeme McMillan (permalink pending) have also been trying to wrap their heads around Marvel’s apparent decision to make collections of some of their manga-ish Tsunami series available only to bookstores–Dirk blames peevish vindictiveness against the Direct Market, Graeme credits a Machiavellian plot to drive up Marvel’s bookstore-market share. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a little of both, and in both cases I’m having a hard time getting upset. This kind of move isn’t likely to sink Marvel, the DM, or even the books themselves–what it amounts to is a relatively inconsequential but totally unmistakable kick in the nuts of the DM, an entity that needs its nuts kicked hella bad. Meanwhile, Shawn Fumo reports that the bookstore-only collections might not materialize at all. Frankly I’d trust Publisher’s Weekly before some dude on a messboard, but u-decide.

Speaking of message boards, J.W. Hastings seconds my emotion regarding the comparative utility of messboards and blogs, and is even tougher than I am on the silliness that goes down at the Comics Journal’s board.

But in the interest of even-handedness, if you’re looking for the best superhero comics to read, you could do worse than to follow the suggestions on this TCJ.com thread on the subject. The discussion is staying almost unbelievably civil so far.

Back on the J.W. Hastings front, the blogger commonly known as Forager pits Frank Miller against Alan Moore in a superheroes-for-grownups grudge match. Looks like Moore will win, in J.W.’s eyes, but for me it’s all Miller. Miller’s work is one thing I will probably never be able to write intelligently about, because I love his stuff so much that it’s pretty much inarticulatable for me.

D. Emerson Eddy offers a mixed verdict on the debut issue of the Azzarello/Risso Batman story. I’m of two minds on this myself: Risso draws Batman as well as anyone who isn’t named Frank Miller, and Azzarello is smart enough to show him beating the snot out of a criminal for his opening scene, thus eschewing the fall-back position for Batman writers of just making the caped crusader suffer all the time. (I’m tired of watching Batman being hunted. He’s Batman, not the fucking Fugitive.) On the other hand, the noirish narration just doesn’t fit with the operatic character himself, and even taken as noirish narration the constant Clever Turns Of Phrase wear incredibly thin after a while. I noticed this tendency of Azzarello’s in 100 Bullets recently, which is why i stopped buying its monthly installments–everyone talks like they stayed up all night writing down clever things to say. Witness this exchange from the Batbook:

BATMAN: And you are…?

PRETTY LADY: Margo.

BATMAN: Margo?…

PRETTY LADY: Farr. And to the wall for my man.

BATMAN: You seem to be backed up against it.

PRETTY LADY: If it looks like what I’m up against is a wall, you’re the one that’s backed up.

Verbally, the gymnastics these two go through to have that conversation are just as dextrous as the ones they apparently endure to get into their respective outfits. They’re also just as realistic, but not nearly as much fun to watch. Sigh.

Alan David Doane has an experience similar to the one I had months ago at his local Borders. His seems to bode well for American comics–not as well as for manga, but still.

Two bits of snark to wrap things up:

1) Has anyone else noticed that Citizen Soldier from Micah “Fightin’ the Man, Bitchin’ about Everything” Wright’s StormWatch: Team Achilles is just Nuke from Miller & Mazuchelli’s Daredevil: Born Again with the flag on his face painted upside-down instead of rightside-up?

2) The Warren Ellis Self-Parody Watch continues….

First Kill Bill, now Rite of Spring: is it me, or is ol’ James Lileks’s aversion to unpleasant art getting a little tedious? He honestly seems to see such things as a threat to Civilization As We Know It. I’m not the smartest student of human history, but it seems to me that people who freak out about such things always end up looking like priggish schmucks as the mighty river of time flows by. I know that as a horror fan I’ve got something a vested interest in defending art that reveals horrible truths (put truths in scare quotes if it makes you feel better); and it’s not like I myself don’t draw the line someplace about amoral art (I personally think action comedies are loathsome–Grosse Pointe Blank is one of the most reprehensible films ever made, f’rinstance); but seriously, chill out, James. Maybe everything isn’t all happiness and light here in The Modern Age. There’s value in depicting unpleasant behavior and ideas in art, one that does not equate to endorsing those behaviors and ideas. I know there’s a war for Western Civ on, and I’m as In For The Big Win as the next guy, but is this idea really that difficult to accept?

Meanwhile, thanks to Big Sunny D and Eve Tushnet for the kind words on The 13 Days of Halloween. Relapsed Catholic is enjoyin’ it too, except for all them SAT words I keep throwing in. I know that the reviews have been a little flowery, and that was not planned at the outset, I assure you–it just kinda came out that way. My guess is that I love these films so much I can’t help but wax rhapsodic about them. Glad to hear that, for the most part, people are enjoying them anyway.

On the horror comics front, Big Sunny D praises Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, one of the most beautiful books out there. There’s an ineffable creepiness to this title, despite the rock’em sock’em action and the deadpan sense of humor, that’s what keeps me coming back. I tend to think of it as a more action-packed version of Jim Woodring’s Frank, a comparison that probably makes sense only to myself. Also, Eve Tushnet is the latest person to fall in love with the horror manga title Uzumaki. I guess I’m going to have to pick this book up, huh.

Jason Adams keeps on defending Ginger Snaps, and comes to the realization that straight horror filmmakers find female sexual organs frightening for some reason. Where would David Cronenberg be without the vagina dentata, for example?

Finally, how awesome is RetroCrush’s 100 Scariest Movie Scenes countdown?

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 9

5. The Ring, dir. Gore Verbinski

For once, I don’t have to recount my first time watching a movie. I already did so a few months back, on this very blog. The movie was The Ring, and I was scared as hell.

The most recently made film on my list, it’s very much a product of the genre’s history. The Shining, Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, The Blair Witch Project, Shivers, Videodrome, Candyman, Psycho, Rear Window, The Silence of the Lambs, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Scream, Poltergeist, and The Sixth Sense are all referenced (as are creepy moments in Fight Club, Blow Up and The Conversation, for that matter). Astoundingly, though, the film manages not to be at all derivative or lazy. It’s simply too relentless for that.

This is a film that deploys the Monumental Horror Image with almost unbearable regularity; to paraphrase a famous review of Stephen King’s It, The Ring is to the Monumental Horror Image what the Sears Roebuck catalog is to things to buy. A chair, a ladder, a television set, a tree, a well, a mirror, a girl, the ring itself–they all stand there in the center of the screen, mute indictments of normality, sanity, reality itself. They should not be, and yet there they are, over and over and over again, each time imbued with more menace than the last.

This is also a film that embraces the horror of the small detail, the little things that just don’t seem right: defaced pictures, distorted photographs, a fly on the TV screen, unexpected phone calls, static on the television. (It seems safe to say that this film will have caused more people to have nervous breakdowns when the cable goes out than any movie since Poltergeist.) Just as the monumental horror images shatter our composure, these “minimal” horror images undermine it. No scene is “safe,” because the filmmakers establish that horror can be found anywhere, in anything. (Especially, thanks to one of the all-time great shock moments in film history, in closets.)

It’s interesting to note that they do so from the very beginning of the film. I’ve found that many of the best horror films begin with a long, slow build-up of tension, with some hints of the horror to come but very little actual action in that direction. Here, however, we’re only five or six lines of dialogue into the movie before the central horrific conceit is introduced. Sure enough, the opening sequence doesn’t end without claiming a victim.

The filmmakers are also smart enough to tie the discovery of horror directly into the plot, which is essentially a search for information. The protagonists are a reporter and a videographer, and the instruments they use to capture and convey information are lushly fetishized throughout the film: lines of type, pens, paper, videocassettes, televisions, editing decks, telephones, cell phones, answering machines, files, microfilm, frames of videotape, photographs, cameras, hands and fingers (with which we write and type and press play and record), and, of course, eyes. With televisions, telephones and a videotape as its central vehicles of horror, this is a prime example of Information Age anxiety in art.

But the most disturbing facet of this intensely disturbing film is, as is often the case with great horror, one of cruelty. When you think about it, it’s actually kind of obvious that all horror is about cruelty: “Look at what we’re doing to your precious status quo. Look at what we’re doing to everything you believe. We’re destroying it. We’re destroying you.” But this is a different status quo than that of the small towns and suburbs that are so often the locus of horror. I’m not referring to the traditional business wherein the kids who smoke pot and fuck get chopped to pieces by the masked killer–no, not at all. This isn’t rebellion that’s being punished by the motiveless agent of horror–it’s a whole new status quo that’s being destroyed, one of leveling, of comfort, an “I’m OK, You’re OK” world. Our hero, Rachel, is a foul-mouthed absentee parent who has her son Aidan call her by her first name. The kid’s father, who Rachel insists must “grow up,” talks to Aidan as though they’re on the same level: “I just don’t think I’d be a good father,” he explains to the little boy the same way he’d explain it to Rachel, or to one of his buddies. Moreover, Rachel views the terrifying supernatural occurrences that befall her as a mystery she can solve, preferrably with comforting life-lessons about love and acceptance. She believes that heartless psychiatric workers and a domineering, abusive patriarch are to blame for it all, and that the murderous “sickness” that has infected her world can be soothed away through understanding. The filmmakers aid us in buying into this, slowly transforming the movie into a relatively traditional beat-the-clock mystery.

In the end, though, we understand nothing.

I won’t go into it any more than that–I don’t want to spoil this film, which should be viewed as unspoiled as possible–except to say that depictions of evil and malice as purposeless and uncompromising as this one are rare, perhaps mercifully so. Mockeries of goodness, of the soporific means of understanding the presence of badness in our world that we feed ourselves, are rarely this vicious, this unrelenting, this frightening. We’re scared, alright. And we’re more scared still, because we’ve been shown that the presence of that which scares us will never, ever end.

I think a great Toby Keith song title would be “You’re Pissin’ Off Jesus.”

Amanda needs help interpreting her recurring dreams. If you think you can be of assistance, give it a try.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 7

7. Lost Highway, dir. David Lynch

I’m finding it difficult to come up with something interesting to say about this movie, arguably the most critically divisive film in the already divisive ouevre of David Lynch. The first time I saw it I spent its duration riveted, then felt that give way to borderline outrage after the credits rolled: What the hell just happened? Was it the work of a genius, or just lousy storytelling? And can we please get that scary fucking man with no eyebrows out of my head before I have to go to sleep?

I probably don’t have to draw you a map from there. I’m a horror guy, and this movie scared the bejesus out of me. Anything that frightening deserved another viewing. So I gave it a second chance.

And a third. And a fourth. And God knows how many others throughout my entire college career. Lost Highway was not so much a film for me and my friends as it was a five-hour experience: two hours to watch, three hours to think and talk it over. We advanced all sorts of theories to explain the bizarre leaps in narrative logic, the nature of the various doppelgangers and doubles, and the origin of the Mystery Man (Robert Blake in his second-most disturbing performance ever). We marvelled at the gorgeous cinematography, which particularly in the first segment of the film gives everything an elegantly morbid, textural feel, like immersing the palm of your hand in a vat of black nailpolish; and at the brilliant use of sound, which coaxes as much menace and emotion from the sound of breathing as it does from a soundtrack that’s at turns ambient and roaring (one assembled by nine inch nails mastermind Trent Reznor). We compared the film to other Lynch efforts, the most germane being the surrealist mood piece Eraserhead and the supernatural horror of Twin Peaks and its theatrical prequel Fire Walk with Me. We’d stay up until the wee hours going over every line of dialogue, every move of the camera and change of lighting. And then we’d go to bed, and we’d only be a little scared that we’d turn around to see a stranger’s face. “It looked like you, but it wasn’t.”

Honestly, pretty much every other movie I’ve tackled during this month’s marathon, I feel like I could make a good case for–that if you saw it and didn’t like it, I might be able to bring things to mind that’d make you reconsider. This one, I’m not so sure. Experience suggests that even among fans of difficult cinema in general and/or Lynch in particular, this is a movie you either love or hate. (Though it’s tempting, I won’t say “you either get it or you don’t”–some people have definitely told me that they got it, alright, but it was still stupid.) For me, there’s just so much to love. The gallows humor, for instance–this is not something that usually appeals to me, but from Mr. Eddy’s lesson in highway safety to “Dent Head,” it’s there and it works. As I said earlier, the film is extraordinarily well made, and that alone makes it worth studying. Patricia Arquette is just stunning throughout the film, and gives the whole proceeding heat. (By the way, the steamy eroticism is not the only thing this movie has in common with another favorite horror flick of mine, Della’morte Dell’amore–I like to describe that movie as Lost Highway with zombies.)

And the horror is played flawlessly. Lynch, who proved himself the equal of Hitchcock at constructing tension on film in scenes like the closet sequence in Blue Velvet does it again here. He wrenches amazing tension and dread out of the accoutrements of modern living–phone calls and videotapes especially. In several deeply frightening scenes, no violence is involved, no monster or maniac pursues anyone–characters simply hear someone’s voice on the line, or watch something on their VCR. What they see and hear is self-evidently wrong, wrong enough to terrify character and audience alike. It culminates in a scene near the end, when the Mystery Man produces a video camera and tapes the our hero, who attempts to escape. As he struggels with the ignition of his car, we cut to the videocamera-eye-view, seeing the car draw closer and closer as we the Mystery Man approach faster and faster. We’re a part of this horror film now, even if we can’t make sense of it. Funny, but that’s pretty much how I felt ever since I first watched it.

(POSTSCRIPT: For a PDF version of paper I wrote on Lost Highway‘s complicated narrative patterns, click here.)

Believe it or not, there are still people who care about things like “cred” and “selling out” and general “my favorite band’s better than yours” stupidity of the type you thought you left behind, along with gym class and algebra, in high school. Amanda subjects one of them to a righteous beatdown. More power to her.

In a related post, this one inspired by stupid arguments made about comics as well as music, Big Sunny D dishes out wrath akin to Amanda’s. Great minds, etc.

I couldn’t agree more with both of them. It’s taken me forever to get to the point where I’m not worried about being a poseur, or feel the need to accuse other people of being one, or make sweeping judgements about entire genres of music or comics or their fans. Now that i’m there, I feel so much better and, um, wiser, as a person and a fan and an artist and a critic and everything. It’s just… stupid not to engage a given piece of art on its own terms, on its own merits. It’s stupid to make your mind up about How Art Works and spend the rest of your miserable life jamming everything into your framework and chopping to pieces whatever doesn’t fit. This is not to deny the value of categorization–it’s just to recognize that the categories spring from the qualities inherent in the individual works, not the other way around. Categories are descriptors, not set-in-stone definers. Basically I’ve boiled all this down to a little maxim:

Life’s too short to hate emo.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 8

6. The Silence of the Lambs, dir. Jonathan Demme

For years I wrote this movie off. “It’s not really ‘horror,'” I argued, “it’s just a thriller.” Thrillers are about cat-and-mouse games and things jumping out at you and (in my opinion, mere) suspense, not the genuine dread and hopelessness and irreversible transgressiveness and awful certainty of true horror. Horror was the stuff of nightmares; thrillers were detective work. Bo-ring. I saw the movie once back in high school and quickly forgot about it.

Then the nascent Film Society at Yale got hold of a print and had a screening. I thought it might be fun to give it another viewing, knowing what I’d by then learned of filmmaking. Also, it was a good excuse to get high and sit in the dark in a theatre and watch an ostensibly scary movie with one of my roommates. So that’s what we did. And this time I realized that something was going on here. Seen in the proper aspect ration on a big screen in the dark, the intelligence of Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography became far more apparent than it ever did on a little TV screen in my basement. Sucked into the world of the film in the way that only stoned college kids can be, I quickly noticed that the conversations between Jodie Foster’s Agent Starling and Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, Lecter’s face was always framed much tighter, allowing him to nearly fill the screen and dwarfing Starling by comparison. Some more thought had gone into this, I realized, than just working out the business of whodunit.

The final step in this film’s path to rehabilitation in my eyes took place about a year and a half ago. This is back when The Missus and I were engaged and still living separately. She has to get up hours earlier than me for work, so after saying goodnight to her the night was still young for me. Usually what I’d do is rent a movie, grab some fast food (I tended not to eat dinner till after 11), go home, and eat and watch. One night I decided to give The Silence of the Lambs one more go. (Actually, it was a bit of a hassle–I had to go back to Blockbuster when I discovered the DVD I’d rented was fullscreen. “Didn’t you check before you rented it?” the clerk asked. “Why on Earth would I assume a DVD is fullscreen? What the hell is the point of a DVD that isn’t widescreen? If a DVD is fullscreen it should be in great big block letters like a Surgeon General’s warning!” I got to exchange it for a widescreen version for free.) So, biting into my Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, I cued up the movie.

I ended up doing this every night for about a month.

(Granted, people seem split on what aspect of this is more horrifying–the fact that I watched The Silence of the Lamb every night for weeks, the fact that I ate McDonald’s or Taco Bell with similar regularity, or the fact that I did both these things at the same time. But I digress.)

Even to this day, I literally cannot believe how good this movie is. That’s not meant to be hyperbole, you know–it’s just an accurate description of how I feel about this film. Watching it today, I found myself near tears twice, not even by anything particularly heart-wrenching or tear-jerking, but just by how well the film portrays a world that is thoroughly sad, sad down to the air and the water and the soil. If there’s a more effective depiction of the horror of living on film than this one, I’ve yet to see it.

My guess is that a plot recap is not necessary, so I’ll just say that this movie is about how miserable it is to be a woman in a man’s world. No, honestly, listen: Watch the way Demme and his cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto (who also worked on Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense and Signs) frame the close-ups of the men who come in contact with Clarice: Agent Crawford, Dr. Chilton, Barney the guard, her fellow agents during combat training, the cops at the funeral parlor, the SWAT team lieutenant, and especially Hannibal Lecter himself–they all stare directly into the camera, making the viewer as aware of the power of their gazes as is Clarice herself. Eyes are weapons in this world; witness the night-vision goggles that give Buffalo Bill both a practical advantage and a psychological feeling of super-poweredness, goggles that are employed in one of the most terrifying audience-identification sequences since Halloween, or even Psycho. The threatening nature of the looks Clarice receives are brought home when compared to the gazes she does not find threatening: of all the looking-directly-into-the-camera/at-Clarice closeups we see, only her friend Ardelia (a woman) is stared directly back at by Clarice herself. They’re on the same level, and we as the viewers are permitted to join them as, in their carved-out safe haven (Clarice is even wearing pajamas), they unravel the clue that cracks the case. There’s also the two goofy entymologists Clarice comes to for help–like many of the other men in the film, they clearly desire her, one even going so far as to admit he’s hitting on her, but this time Clarice takes it in stride. The explanation is visible: one wears coke-bottle glasses, and the other has a lazy eye. Their threat is thereby neutered. After all, as Dr. Lecter points out in his explanation of Buffalo Bill’s pathology, he kills because he covets, and “we covet what we see.” Seeing is not believing–it is destroying.

If I’m making this all sound like some hamfisted attempt to adapt Laura Mulvey’s theories on the male gaze whole-cloth, I’m doing something wrong. The points being made here are specific ones, tied into the plot, and not just reflexive pseudofeminist wonkery. Clarice Starling is a woman in a governmental agency dominated almost entirely by men. The very first time we see her, she’s climbing uphill; and before long we discover that she’s running an obstacle course. Her boss slights her in order to curry favor with local authorities; a psychiatrist hits on her, then dismisses her reason for being sent in to see Lecter as simply “to turn him on.” Meanwhile, Buffalo Bill, though on the surface a transsexual, is (as Lecter assures us) nothing of the sort; rather, he began killing women because he apparently couldn’t have the one he wanted. His behavior is littered with signs of pathological misogyny and homophobia. Those who criticized the movie as homophobic itself apparently missed the fact that his lisping limp-wristed routine is a mockery of gays, that as a serial killer of women he can reliably be presumed to be a heterosexuality, that there are even pictures on his wall of him cavorting with strippers. Lecter spots these manifestations of misogyny and works them for all they’re worth, repeatedly suggesting that the men in Starling’s life have sexual designs on her, and ruthlessly mocking the maternal actions (and power suit) of Senator Martin, the mother of Buffalo Bill’s latest kidnap victim. The thorough contempt for women is made plainest by Bill himself, when he mocks the screams of his victim, pulling at his shirt to simulate breasts. To me, this is as grotesque as the famous scene in which Bill tucks his penis between his legs to ape the body of a woman. In both cases, what’s being condemned by the filmmakers is not inappropriately feminine behavior, but raw hatred of women–which is nothing more or less than a socially acceptable form of hatred itself.

If I seem to be ignoring the most commonly discussed aspects of this film–the thrills and the performances–I apologize, because in both cases it’s as good as everyone says. The garage sequence, the escape sequence, and of course the big switcheroo and visit to Bill’s basement at the end of the film are as riveting and pulse-pounding as thrillers can get. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins simply disappear into their roles. Foster gives a performance of excruciating melancholy. Hopkins delivers each line so well one can hardly imagine them being spoken any other way–if his subsequent scenery devouring in movie after movie were to put him on the path to thespian Hell, this role insures he won’t go any lower than Purgatory, methinks. And please don’t forget the criminally overlooked Ted Levine, whose pathetic mania is both skin-crawling and, in a weird way, heartbreaking.

I think that the greatness of this movie is often lost in the minds of the public–lost amidst the thrills and chills, or the countless “Greatest Villains of All Time” hype about Hannibal Lecter and the concomitant overemphasis of the fava beans bit and the gag at the movie’s end. But this is a real horror movie, about real horror. It’s scary and haunting and so, so sad, all ruined towns and wasted lives and regret. That’s what I realized when I watched it over and over again–I think it makes us scream so that we don’t end up crying.

Okay, here’s the deal. I think it’s awesome if you go out and rent one of the movies I’ve been talking about based on what I’ve said–hell, I encourage you to do so, they’re all awesome, rent ’em all and go crazy. But I worry that you’ll end up disappointed and feel like I oversold them. It’s important to note that these are my favorite movies of all time. Okay, favorite horror movies only, but I’d be lying if I said they weren’t a disproportionately large chunk of my favorite movies period. So keep in mind that I’m pretty freaking enthusiastic about all of them because I looooooove them and want to have a million of their spawn babies.

On a related note, what is up with DVDs having menu sequences that reveal key plot points and climaxes of the films they contain? That is lame with a capital LAME. I understand that DVD purchases were once largely the domain of film buffs who likely had already seen the films they were buying, but now the things are available for rental, and are generally the format of choice for gifts and so on. As someone who doesn’t even read newspaper reviews or back-cover synopses for movies he hasn’t yet seen, you cannot imagine my fury at imagining someone having a movie spoiled by the DVD of that movie itself. So, word to the wise, particularly the wise who plan on renting Jeepers Creepers or Barton Fink–try to have someone else cue the movie up for you, or just mute it and close your eyes and just start hitting play frantically on your remote and then wait a few seconds until you’re reasonably sure the movie has started. And Hollywood–please, knock this off. This is the modern-day equivalent of that trend a few years ago where all the movie trailers were ungodly loud and gave away the endings of the films they were advertisements for. STOP IT.

Anyway, here are a couple more essays I dusted off and turned into PDFs for your perusal, both of them about the last two movies I reviewed. Here’s one about mind/body duality in Hellraiser and its sequel, the just-as-good Hellbound–it touches quite a bit on Cronenberg, too. And here’s one about the complicated narrative patterns of Lost Highway. This one betrays its origin as a very specific applied-jargon assignment in a film studies class, but I actually think the jargon I was made to use (syuzhet and fabula, meaning the plot as directly shown in the film and the larger, more cohesive narrative we construct in our heads from all the information gleaned from the syuzhet) helps to unravel this film quite a bit. Grab a beer or something and have fun finding out what those student loans of mine are still paying for.

Also, Jason Adams defends Ginger Snaps. Sorry, my friend, but not only did I not find this movie scary, but I didn’t find it moving or even involving, either. I thought the performances of the two lead girls were genuinely annoying, and in the case of the non-wolf sister, pretty much movie-killing. (I kept hoping she’d be replaced with a Dollhouse-era Heather Matarazzo halfway through the movie. No luck.) And believe me, I really wanted to like this film. Good, teen-girl-centric horror is impossible to come by, and the feminist magazines I read (Bust and Bitch) lauded this flick to the heavens. Unfortunately they were too preoccupied by the fact that the movie was “empowering” (and by the way, was it? the lycanthropy does not exactly work out well for everyone. I guess their point was that the movie depicts culturally-dictated female-teen virgin-whore sexuality as a death trap, and kudos for that; but these are the same folks who get angry about movies like The Craft for punishing girls for using supernatural powers indiscriminately (uh, hello guys, that’s not sexist, that’s just sane, not to mention par for the genre course–ever hear of “with great power comes great responsibility”?), so how they could miss the implicit message behind Ginger’s fate is completely beyond me. Digression over) to notice that it wasn’t particularly well done. Also, why aren’t werewolves furry anymore? They always look like mutant hairless rat fetuses now. Wolves are furry, people. Werewolves should be furry. Am I wrong? Are we not civilized people here?

Finally, Johnny Bacardi breaks his self-imposed silence and takes on my whole 13 Days of Halloween list, film by film. I’m doing pretty well by him so far–he agrees with my assessments of 3 out of 7, and offers conciliatory gestures on a couple more, so if this were being calculated like batting averages I’d be doing Hall-of-Fame numbers right now. I’m certainly not surprised to see my praise of movies like Eyes Wide Shut and Barton Fink throwing Johnny for a loop–like Lost Highway (see below) they’re divisive films by already divisive directors. I think in the case of all three, plus The Wicker Man (another one Johnny wasn’t quite down with), my love of the long take plays a role. Folks, nothing gets my film-lover Donkey Kong going like a luscious long take, the quieter the better, lots of slow movement and facial expressions and such. Mmmmm, Andre Bazin-y goodness. Unbreakable is practically porn for me. Ahem. Anyway, what I like about Johnny’s counter-list is that even where I disagree with him, I see the point he’s making. It forces me to reengage with the movie itself, to see if my conclusions hold water, or if they need refining or even abandoning. And my appreciation of the films, and of film, gets that much richer. See how that works? Hooray for blogs!

(As for his claim that The Shining is Kubrick’s career worst, let’s just say we’ll be having words in a few days…)

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 6

8. Hellraiser, dir. Clive Barker

Like Eyes Wide Shut, Hellraiser is a movie about the horrors of desire. Unlike Eyes Wide Shut, it is also a movie about the desire for horror.

Clive Barker, who adapted and directed the film from his novella The Hellbound Heart, made these dovetailing preoccupations explicit throughout the script. The titular hellraiser, an amoral, hedonistic wanderer known as Frank Cotton, talks of his search for “Heaven or Hell–I didn’t care which.” The creatures he finds at the end of that search, the Cenobites, offered him not some new level of orgiastic gratification, but endless, excruciating torture. In Frank’s words, they gave him “an experience beyond limits–pleasure and pain, indivisible.” The erudite leader of the Cenobites, the memorably mutilated demon known to his fans as Pinhead, describes himself and his order as “Explorers in the further regions of experience; demons to some, angels to others.” If for some you are still not convinced of Barker’s intentions, remember that the truth comes out in jest: Barker has often jokingly described this parade of murder, monstrousness, and dimemberment as “the story of what a woman will do for a good lay.”

That woman is Julia Cotton, played to icy black-widow perfection by Clare Higgins. Married to a kind but ineffectual doof named Larry, Julia moves with her husband into the house he grew up in, abandoned since the death of his mother. There they find evidence of Larry’s ne’er-do-well brother Frank, who appears to have disappeared abruptly, (they assume) one step ahead of the law. In reality, the house is the site where Frank solved the puzzle of The Box, the means by which particularly devoted and tireless hedonists may summon the Cenobites. It was in the house that Hell claimed Frank’s life; and when a chance spilling of blood enables Frank to re-enter our world, it’s in this house that more blood must be spilled to help him escape the clutches of his tormentors forever. His assistant in this endeavor is Julia, who the night before her wedding had a torrid bout of lovemaking with Frank and essentially promised to do anything he wanted if he’d stay with her. He, of course, split, but now that he’s back, she intends to keep that promise. And that means killing.

For a first-time director, Barker’s proficiency with imagery is startling. Julia’s transformation into a cold-blooded killing machine is depicted masterfully, using harsh, sterile lighting both in the bar where she picks up her first victim and in the flourescent-lit bathroom where she washes off his blood. The scenes are especially effective through their juxtaposition with the damp viscerality of the room in which Frank, now little more than a skeleton with muscle, fat and tissue dripping off of it, devours the victims Julia slays for him. This visual interweaving of the artificial and the grotesquely natural is present on such basic levels as the Cenobite’s costumes: The crisp black leather of their cassocks and the metallic wires, blades, and pins that are their trademarks are literally woven into their seeping wounds. On every level Barker forces us to try to reconcile our warring drives–our lust for pleasure and our voyeuristic enjoyment of pain, the trappings of modernity we use to ignore our bodies and the inescapability of those bodies, our desire for happiness and our willingness to make others suffer to insure that happiness. He’s the anti-Zoroastrian, acknowledging the black and the white but forcing them not to fight but to embrace. (He seems to pun on this, even, in a scene in which Larry’s daughter Kirsty, who has discovered the nature of the relationship between her stepmother Julia and her living-dead uncle Frank, is hospitalized; as the Box is solved and the Cenobites appear, the tiles of the hospital-room wall are shown in reverse-negative–black is white, white is black.)

As Barker’s career progressed, he’d take this juxtaposition to its logical end-point and make the monsters the heroes of his work, as he did in his film Nightbreed. However, he does so not by offsetting or undercutting the monstrousness of those monsters, but by celebrating it. Yes, they’re horrific, and that’s what makes them great, and worth loving. And no, we humans who encounter them seldom escape with sanity or self intact, and in some way, isn’t it worth it? In Hellraiser, Frank and Julia are destroyed for their connivance, treachery, and hubris–these are negative qualities in Barker’s world as they are in any other. But Larry is destroyed too, seemingly for the crime of being boring. It goes deeper than that, though–he’s punished for his refusal to see, for his inability to connect with things greater, deeper, lower, higher than himself. His daughter Kirsty, however, is able to encounter the Cenobites and live to tell the tale. She sees, and instead of going mad or giving up, she accepts the reality of them and in fact bargains with them, making their rules her own. And so she survives, intact, but not unchanged.

And if that’s not an apt description of a horror devotee, then what is?

(POSTSCRIPT: For a PDF of a paper I wrote on mind/body duality in Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, click here.)

Real-world events prevented me from getting to a computer to blog yesterday, but I did watch the 6th movie on the 13 Days of Halloween list, which means I’ll be doing double-duty today. Sit tight.

The big day is drawing nearer, and horror thoughts abound in the blogosphere. A lot of them are in response to stuff I’ve written, which is, in the words of Charlie Meadows, “a pip.”

Bill Sherman reviews Pet Shop of Horrors, a horror manga targeted at girls. Good for it, but let’s hope it manages to be frightening as well as female-centric. I’ve found that people who go into their project with the noble goal of making it feminist (or at least femme-friendly) end up doing so, but pay little attention as to whether or not the thing is actually, y’know, scary. The teen-girl werewolf movie Ginger Snaps falls into that disappointing category.

And as I mentioned earlier, Bill also chimed in on my reviews of The Wicker Man and The Birds.

Big Sunny D, meanwhile, responds to me and Shawn Fumo‘s thoughts on David Lynch. Sunny focuses on Lynch’s penchant for dream logic and voyeuristic camerawork.

Eve Tushnet recommends an unlikely horror comic–Love & Rockets. This is not the first time I’ve heard folks praise L&R‘s occasional forays into the dark side.

Eve also has a lengthy post responding to several of the films I’ve been talking about. She challenges the sexiness of the pagan religion in The Wicker Man, the scariness of the dead people in The Sixth Sense, and the lack of sympathetic characters in the film version of The Shining. It’s interesting to see how Eve and I are sort of running on parallel tracks when it comes to what we appreciate in horror–we move in the same direction but never reach the same destinations. I think the appeal of the pagan religion in TWM is maximized if you’ve been raised in a religion that denies the worth of human sexuality, which is what I got in my years of Catholicism. (Eve’s experience as a Catholic convert is vastly different than mine as a born-and-raised Catholic who went to a Catholic high school. I only realized how different when I started reading Homage to Catalonia and mentally cheered when Orwell described how all the churches had been destroyed. CLARIFICATION: I was not terribly proud of this feeling.) Regarding the ghosts in The Sixth Sense, no, they’re certainly not as scary as the ones in The Shining, but then they’re not evil and the Shining ones are. (There is at least one great nightmare image in TSS: the woman in the kitchen.) But mainly The Sixth Sense is a sad movie first and a scary movie second. As for The Shining, Eve, have you seen the TV-miniseries version of The Shining, scripted by King himself? Sympathetic characters shoved so far up the viewer’s ass you can taste the vanilla. Ugh. (Props to the dead-woman-in-the-bathtub scene, though, which is almost as scary as Kubrick’s version–the only really scary part of the whole minseries, actually.)

Jason Adams has been quite the busy little horrorblogger, thoughtfully writing about Books of Blood, Donnie Darko, and the remake of Texas Chain Saw–the latter two of which, along with Kill Bill, I still have yet to see. Sigh.

Shawn Fumo comments on my review of Heavenly Creatures, saying he loves the film but isn’t quite sure it’s horror, classifying instead with the brutal-but-not-scary work of Lars Von Trier. I’ve only seen Dancer in the Dark, but my sense is that Von Trier simply piles abuse on his protagonists for no good reason other than the ability of critics to mistake melodramatic misogyny for Saying Something About Life. I know that’s weird coming from someone who lists The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as one of his favorite films, but I’m weird like that.

According to John Jakala, in comics, zombies are the new electroclash trucker hats flash mobs Howard Dean candidacy Friendster Britney-Madonna kiss Wesley Clark candidacy oh, I give up.

Johnny Bacardi apparently began to respond to some of my 13 Days of Halloween entries, but scrapped it. Thanks for the kind words, but c’mon–bring it on back, Johnny!

Finally, I’m appreciative of Slate’s apologia for the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but maybe next time the writer in question could take five minutes to actually watch the film before writing the article, thus learning that half the information he was planning on putting into the article was taken from the film’s sequel. Sheesh.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 5

9. Eyes Wide Shut, dir. Stanley Kubrick

When I wrote my senior essay on horror films, I was responding in part to what I saw as myopia on the part of the horror criticism and theory establishment. It seemed to me that scholars and critics focused almost exclusively on the role of violence in the genre, leaving other sources of horror largely unexplored. And even violence received a fairly one-dimensional treatment, discussed primarily in terms of displaced sexuality.

One of the films that inspired me to try something different was Eyes Wide Shut. It’s ironic, then, that this movie is in a sense the traditional horror theoretician’s dream film: It takes that displaced sexual anxiety and mania and puts it back where it came from. It’s a horror movie with sex instead of violence.

The last film that Stanley Kubrick would ever make, EWS stars then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as Dr. Bill & Alice Harford, a wealthy and attractive couple who live with their young daughter on Central Park West. Drunken flirtations with other people at the Christmas soiree of a friend of Bill’s precipitate a pot-fueled fight between the two of them the following night. During the argument Alice informs Bill, whose cocksure arrogance regarding Alice’s presumed-inpenetrable fidelity has infuriated her, that she once came this close to throwing away their life together to pursue sex with a handsome stranger. Though she ended up not even so much as talking to the man, the revelation of her desire so stuns and angers Bill that, after being called away from the fight by business, he begins a nighttime odyssey of sexual pursuits. His encounters get progressively more bizarre and, as he soon finds out, exponentially more dangerous.

EWS did not do as well as expected, either with audiences or critics. In part this is due to its billing as an erotic thriller–the thinking person’s Basic Instinct. But folks hoping for detectives, icepicks, and hot lesbian action were no doubt disappointed by the film’s glacial, peripatetic pacing. Expecting a roller-coaster, they instead found themselves in a fable, a grim fairy tale involving the frightening adventures of an attractive, naive young hero as he journeys through the dark forest of his own sexual urges. All of those urges manifest themselves as monsters, ready to devour “the good doctor”: infidelity, cancer, drug abuse, prostitution, pederasty, venereal disease, cult-like ritual dominance and submission. Sex is the pale horse upon which a panoply of menacing riders ride, promising Bill pleasure but offering only ruin. I can’t help but be reminded of (are you sitting down?) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, another film that dispenses with logic in order to depict a series of macabre visions each more nightmarish than the next.

“Heat”? “Sparks”? There are few to come by here (perhaps only when Dr. Bill meets Sally the roommate, but that’s brought to as screeching a halt as possible). Indeed, Kubrick seemed to be visually mocking the very concepts with the gauzy yellows, arctic blues, and sickly pinks that illuminate so much of the film. (The pinks in particular–try to count just the decrepit Christmas trees with those odd pink lights bleeding out of them and you’ll see how prominent a role they play. Then there’s the gang of toughs (from Yale!) who gaybash Dr. Harford (a pun on Harvard? maybe I need to get out more) while saying he must be playing for “the pink team.” And I don’t think I need to go into the other connotation of “pink.”) And people looking for them missed the point entirely. So did those who complained “That’s not Manhattan!” (my God, how did Kubrick not realize he was shooting on a meticulously crafted replica? Stop the press! Alert Warner Bros.!) or even more amusingly, “That’s not how the rich and powerful have orgies” (I was always tempted to intone “he added knowingly” when I saw a critic kvetching about that). The point was to show a man led off the path of what he knows to be right, only to learn the lesson that what’s not right is, in fact, wrong. (And for this condemnation of sexual infidelity, the film was labeled reactionary in some quarters. I found that more sad than amusing.)

It’s worth noting that the source material for the film was a 1926 book called Traumnovelle—Dream Story–by writer Arthur Schnitzler. Viewers who can’t get around the episodic surreality of Dr. Bill’s wanderings might be well advised to view everything between the argument and the final conversation as a kind of detailed dream, one that veers slowly from would-be wet dream to full-blown nightmare. Note the dreamlike structure, with its jarring leaps from one place and time to another (this was common source of complaint against the film, but it only served to underscore the dreaminess of the narrative). Note the somnambulistic quality of Dr. Bill’s wanderings. Note his dreamlike superhuman powers: the ability to get anything he wants by saying the magic words “I’m a doctor,” flashing his magical 5000-megawatt smile, presenting the magical talisman known as his medical board card, and reaching into his magical bottomless wallet; the power to be irresistably attractive to anything on two legs–models, prostitutes, little girls, hotel clerks, roommates, anyone. Note that the recitation of Alice’s dream is the film’s central scene. Note the references to dreaming and wakefulness in the last scene. Note the title.

It’s also worth pointing out that Schnitzler was a contemporary and fellow-traveler of Freud’s, as images of the Freudian uncanny pop up everywhere. There’s the automaton-like women in the mansion. There’s the red-robed masked man with black holes for eyes. And there are doubles galore: Nuala and her friend, the two Japanese customers of Mr. Milich’s (themselves doubling genders with their transvestitism), the alliterative names of the two men who lead Bill and Alice into trouble (Nick Nightingale and Sandor Szavost respectively), the masks and the faces beneath them, the two notes of the ominous Ligeti music. Even the daughter of Dr. Bill’s dead patient and her husband serve as a sort of tragicomic, less attractive doubling of Dr. Bill and Alice themselves (note the placement of both the bereaved daughter and Alice in front of blue rooms, their similar hair color and style, etc.).

The final bit of doubling is another source of great vexation for the film’s detractors: the repetitive dialogue. Time and time again, Bill will repeat a line just spoken to him by another character. “Maybe had Kubrick lived he might have spotted this in editing,” they say–oh yeah, I’m sure he had no idea that was going on. What was he trying to achieve with this effect? Repetition is doubling, and it’s also an instance of the Freudian uncanny unto itself, calling to mind non-human processes of cognition and communication (cf. the dialogue of the “twins” in The Shining). It also yields a certain narcotic, mind-altering rhythm after a time, connoting inward-facing obsessiveness and detachment from reality (cf. the “I will destroy him!” scene in Barton Fink). But there’s a simpler reason, too: Bill needs things repeated to them because he simply does not understand anymore. His customary method of looking at the world has been rendered nonsensical, irrelevant, not even by deeds but by mere words. So he struggles to find a new way to frame things. He needs to repeat the new words to help make them real, to clarify them, to open his eyes to the new reality he’s trying to explore. And when he does have them opened, what he sees is horrifying. That’s the dream, and then that’s the nightmare.

Or, “Close Reading for Fun and Profit.”

Alfred Hitchcock was a member of a very exclusive club, that of directors who did nothing by accident. (The only other members I can think of–limiting the pool to the English-speaking world since I just don’t know enuff about them other folks–are Stanley Kubrick and perhaps the Coen Brothers, but mainly Kubrick.) This means that even the most insanely close reading of a given aspect of one of his films will produce richly rewarding insights into the meaning of the film.

I made two forays into close-reading of Hitch during my bright college years, and here they are:

The first, which I’ve linked to before, is an analysis of the use of sound in The Birds, ranging from the electronic bird-noise “score” to run-of-the-mill sound effects to dialogue and lack thereof. After rereading it myself, all I could think was, “Man, that guy could make a goddamn movie.”

The second is just an outline for an oral presentation I gave, but I think it still makes for an interesting talking-points memo. It’s an examination of design in Vertigo, centering on the central tropes of spirals/circles and towers/verticals. The amount of thought that went into this stuff was just staggering. Look and see.

How good does Joy Division sound when played very loud?

Answer:

Joy Division sounds really super good when played very loud.

Does the Medium Contest have a winner yet? If so, is the winner a haiku?

The conventional wisdom about Marvel’s Tsunami line of comics, wisdom promulgated by Marvel itself, was that it was designed to capitalize on the success of manga in capturing a large American audience. Mainly this consisted of bringing in manga-style artists from the Americas to handle the penciling chores, but to an extent it also involved the types of characters the books centered on (mainly teenagers of both sexes or women) and the pacing of the stories (in mainstream-comics parlance they’re “decompressed,” in that they tell a lot of story over the course of several issues instead of packing each individual issue with a lot of plot, let alone with a self-contained story). This kind of storytelling is also known as “pacing for the trade,” referring to the trade-paperback format in which longer runs of single-issue comics are collected. Pacing for the trade made a lot of sense for the manga-inflected Tsunami books, considering that the legions of manga buyers out there don’t know single issues from Adam, instead buying their comics in the far more user-friendly, cost-effective, attractive, and generally look-like-an-actual-book-ish squarebound paperback format, and doing so at regular bookstores where single-issue comics are hard to come by. Indeed, it was sometimes assumed (by me, at least) that when Marvel produced Tsunami trades, they’d be in manga-sized dimensions, rather in the larger size that’s standard for American comics collections. It would only stand to reason, after all.

What to make, then, of Marvel’s decision not to collect any of their Tsunami titles into trade paperbacks at all? It’s tempting to berate the House of Ideas for not having a clue, but it seems safe to say that Marvel editorial, particularly fluent Japanese speaker and Tsunami steward C.B. Cebulski, are fully aware of how comics should be packaged and produced for maximum appeal to the manga market. Instead, I suggest we see this as a cautionary tale for mainstream American comics companies trying to break away from the stranglehold of the comics-only Direct Market and their pamphlet-junkie fanboy audience. We’re at a weird stage in the history of the business where for a variety of reasons (from aesthetic to literary to financial) single-issue comics don’t make sense anymore, but where for a similar variety of reasons it’s next to impossible for companies to react accordingly. Financially, Marvel, DC et al are beholden to the Direct Market, the bread of which is buttered by single-issue superhero comics. Any attempt to deviate from this norm is greeted with deafening silence. Nevermind Marvel’s attempts to manga-fy itself–even real manga, the most popular type of comcis in America, has made barely a dent in the D.M., which as a group is so conservative and retrograde it makes the College of Cardinals look like a bunch of coke-fiend anarchosyndicalist orgy enthusiasts. This means that the big companies simply can’t afford to take the risk of ignoring weak single-issue sales in order to gamble on a potential bonanza in trade-paperback format. This goes double if the comic in question is even slightly different from the superhero standard, and triple if those trade paperback sales are theorized to be strongest in the regular-bookstore market, one that those companies are having a notoriously hard time cracking.

Simply put, when it became clear that the Tsunami books aren’t selling as single issues in the Direct Market, Marvel realized it couldn’t afford to put them into TPB form–but it’s only in TPB form and outside the Direct Market that comics designed like the Tsunami ones could sell.

A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.

UPDATE: Looks like Marvel’s cutting that Gordian knot after all! Turns out they’re skipping the traditional trade paperback format and going straight for the manga-sized editions. (Link courtesy of Franklin Harris.) Ballsy, and exactly what should be done. Here’s hoping it works.

The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 4

10. Barton Fink, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen

Bill Sherman has kind words for the first couple of entries in The 13 Days of Halloween (yes, I will continue to put that phrase in bold; no, I don’t think it’s over the top at all, but thank you for asking). Mixed among them is Bill’s assertion that The Birds, which I peg as the Master’s masterpiece, falls short of the Holy Hitchcock Trinity (Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho–also known as Hitch’s “O” period) because of the lack of great performances. I really meant to comment on this in my post on the film, but it just didn’t fit structurally: I like the fact that the characters are annoying, and played annoyingly. You’ve got a heroine who gallavants around Europe spending Daddy’s money, then blows an entire weekend in order to show up some hot guy who made her look stupid–she’s the early-’60s equivalent of Paris Hilton. You’ve got a hero who combines smugness and arrogance with being an incurable mama’s boy. You’ve got mama herself, who’s only slightly less cloying than Mrs. Bates. (Okay, so Suzanne Pleshette’s character isn’t so bad, but she has the unfair advantage of a voice that could melt butter.) And all these characters spend the bulk of their screen time having mannered, formal, phony conversations and quarrels with one another. As I said in my essay on the use of sound in the film, the dialogue becomes so irritating that you end up being grateful for the intrusion of the birds, who are all but less noisy by comparison.

And that’s when Hitch has got you. He’s enmeshed you in a conflict between people who are difficult to like–you know, sort of like real people–and birds who, by the end of the film, are impossible not to loathe. How dull a film this would be if it starred the usual assortment of the troubled-but-good, the brave-under-pressure–the cliched stock in trade of the people-under-siege film. Give me Tippi, Rod, and Jessica anyday, man. They’re… unpleasant, and that’s why I care.

(PS: I actually like Rod Taylor a lot. I think he’s sort of a precursor to Mel Gibson, who I also enjoy–particularly in Signs, a film not coincidentally modeled after Hitchock generally and The Birds particularly. And you’ll have a hard time getting me to complain about having to watch Tippi Hedren in a movie, too.)