Satan in Outerspace

 

 

Sometimes really bad movies take on lives of their own.  Dune is a 1984 sci-fi flick directed by David Lynch that was horribly overwrought and dead inside.  Based on the novel, it was meant to be operatic and regal, but it actually turned out to be a shiny creepy parade that did not make one bit of sense.  It truly is a dream of a movie.  Dreams usually don't have plots, and the pacing in Dune is plotlessly inert, the way it goes when people try to tell you their dream-narratives.   As in Last night I had this weird dream...  They start off really excited but as they tell you they start to realize how boring and unnecessary the dream actually is to anybody else outside of their heads.  Lynch made a movie that isn't a movie as much as a strange combination of textures and cornball voice-overs and costumes that seem terribly uncomfortable and senseless, with characters that aren't characters as much as totems on a totem-pole, and scenery that wobbles away from the camera like blinds on windows accidentally sliding up.  There's a nervousness to the whole shebang, a tentativeness to the way scenes work out.  Lots of talk among people who don't seem to be talking to one another, and not even to the camera.  Just talking. 

 

But:

 

When I was 18, I moved to Tennessee with my mom and sister because my parents got a divorce and my mom was a nutcase right out of a Tennessee Williams play.  We lived in a lower-income apartment complex.  I was working at a steakhouse washing dishes.  My mom's sister was married to a pedophile who had molested his two sons.  So when we moved to Tennessee I had to be around this guy and the whole situation, but we couldn't say anything about it of course.  It was all secret.  I'd dropped out of art school in Indianapolis to move to Tennessee, and I was thinking about going to East Tennessee State, but at this time, December 1984, I was lost and filled with all kinds of poetry that couldn't find a way out.  Then Bill and Al, two of my friends who were still going to art school, came to visit me, and we went to see Dune.  My uncle, the pedophile, wanted to go with us.  So he came too.

 

In 1984 he was no longer doing what he had done to his two sons, but the aftereffects of it were still in the atmosphere.  One son had disowned him, the other forgiven him, and my uncle, who had a large beer-belly and thick blond hair combed back from a wide forehead with keys always jangling on his belt-loop, was living out the rest of his life in a quiet sort of shame, as if everyday he was trying to take back all that he had ever done or felt, but no one was going to help him.  So he just kind of floated through his days as an audio-visual guy at the local high school, working part-time at a local radio station.  He always looked like he was sorry, but also like he didn't know what he actually was sorry for.

 

Bill and Al were my friends, and I was jealous and hurt because they were still in art school, and I felt so connected to them but I didn't know how to say it or even express it on my face.  It was a secret kind of misery in Tennessee for me, and I kept wondering if this was the way I would live out my whole stinking life:  washing dishes, helping my mom and sister, ignoring my pervert uncle, finding a way to escape somehow eventually, but not really knowing what steps to take.  It worked itself out of course.  I eventually moved back to Indiana, went to college, Bill and I started a life together, etc.  I'm not complaining.  It's okay.

 

But that moment in December 1984 when Bill, Al, my uncle and I went to see Dune at the Johnson City Cineplex is kind of burned into my consciousness.  In the movie, Kenneth McMillan plays Vladimir Harkonnen, a total grotesque.  So evil that he floats around in an evil-king-astronaut outfit, constantly in search of handsome boys to kill by pulling their "heart-plugs" (little plugs installed presumably by his henchman into their chests that when pulled release all their blood), Vladimir Harkonnen was a ghost that came out of that movie and into my head, nesting there.  His relentless goofy evilness became a sort of poem when I looked over at my uncle, who was watching the same thing and probably feeling something close to recognition.   I think my uncle was evil.  I don't think you're supposed to say that about people, especially relatives, but I guess he was.  That doesn't mean he should have been shot in the head, but still he did things to people that scarred them beyond scarring, and also his actions created a gaping wound in the whole family that never healed.  His actions destroyed a whole house of people.   

 

Harkonnen cultivated sores on his face.  He had red hair and green eyes and he was morbidly obese.  Something was so wrong with him that no one could fix him.  They could only obey him.

 

My uncle died in 2000 from complications of diabetes.  At the end of his life he looked gray and bloated and sore.  He looked as if he had never known himself, only what he had wanted.  He looked like a king who had been dethroned and cast aside, placed somewhere he could never escape. 

 

Two worlds merged that night when we watched Dune, and there wasn't any kind of epiphany or even insight.  I just felt a message had been delivered to me that didn't change anything but somehow made my life stranger and I could identify with the fucked-up poetry because sometimes that's all you have.  Dune was a very bad movie, but David Lynch's fucked-up poetry gave it a radioactivity, a nightmarish relevance.  I watched it again a couple weeks back, and boy was it bad.  But still Vladimir Harkonnen is in it, floating around like a very particular kind of Satan in Outerspace, in search of what he wants, ready to do whatever it takes to be whatever he is.

Crawl of the Wild

 

Top of the Lake is a Jane-Campion back-woods fever-dream that pulls together the hypnosis and dread of Deliverance with the static, beautiful creep of David Lynch at his best (not just one of his movies, but all of them in different modes and variations).  Campion directed The Piano and Portrait of a Lady, among other movies, but Top of the Lake is a sprawling, crazy, pretentious and gorgeous mini-series (that first appeared on Sundance Channel, and is available On Demand and on Netflix now) that feels like a huge novel, or better yet an encyclopedia of sexual politics, abuse, power, and powerlessness. 

 

Every scene in this thing is a composite of two forces (usually innocence versus meanness, in the guise of female and male) smelling one another out until some horrible repercussions are conjured and dramatized.  All of these scenes take place in a setting that is glamorously rural, menacingly prehistoric:  a haunted New Zealand so beautiful you could swear it's CGI, but then when you look closer you can almost feel it's not.  Elizabeth Moss plays Robin, a police detective with enough skeletons in her closet to warrant a museum.  Her face has a glum, half-crazy bluntness to it that seems to mimic the very atmosphere, and Moss' New-Zealand accent is impeccable, but even better than vocal verisimilitude is the way her acting buttresses the strangeness Campion creates.  Robin is pulled into an investigation of a pregnant 12-year-old girl, whose father turns out to be a tyrant whose horrors are commonplace and petty, the signature of a tortured soul.  Peter Mullan plays the son of a bitch with a menace and a mundanity that allows you to glimpse the cowardly core of his soul and somehow feel completely connected to it.  He is the king of a world made up of gigantic whispering trees and ice-cold lakes the color of concussions, but he isn't comfortable with his power.  He seems terrified of it.  Against that dynamic, Campion gives us a camp of sadly lost ladies sleeping in box-cars next to mountains, shepherded by Holly Hunter's granny-haired ex-hippie.  The women are all examples of different kinds of abuse and neglect (both self-imposed and not), and they all wander around the camp like Diane Arbus subjects in search of whatever they think will get them through life. 

 

All of these elements combine into a sort of Henry-Darger/Nancy-Drew phantasmagoria that somehow, by the end of 9 hours of programming, becomes pure unadulterated art.

 

I just can't forget some of the scenes Campion has filmed, the moments that aren't really plot-related but somehow plot-inspired, or just plain inspired:  the white-trash drug-dealing sons of Matt flinging plastic chairs into a majestic waterfall (all framed in a window Matt is staring out of), the yellow weeds blowing outside the box-car encampment like frayed old hair, a mute-by-choice teen-aged boy with the words "no" written on one hand, "yes" on the other pulling a kayak out of the woods and into a bitter-colored lake.  It all sounds precious and a little too much, and it is, but it also feels uniquely that way, as if meant to be, not fashioned to impress.  I think Campion often seemed contained and a little mannered in her other movies.  In this one, she has let loose the hounds of hell, and they bark and bite in a sedatedly horrifying way.  Campion's vision really benefits from that slow pace, the stare she has going.  You get caught up not in the makeshift and kind of wobbly plot, but in the scenes.  The scenes, in fact, kind of erase the plot as they advance it.  By the end, mainly all you feel is the crawl of the wild, and a sort of awe at how terrible and sweet and nasty and gigantic the world actually is when you look at it long enough.



Wasted Days and Wasted Nights



Evan Glodell has made a strange, vicious, creepy, fascinating, hyper-romantic little movie, a visionary melding of David Lynch's Blue Velvet and David Fincher's Fight Club with a spastic splash of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  High style without losing itself in style, the movie zooms out and back into itself in fire-breathing intervals; the cinematography exhibits symptoms of high blood pressure, each scene and image coming at you in a dizzying swirl of unmedicated colors and textures.  (Joel Hodge, the cinematographer, cannibalized lenses and parts to create a new kind of camera to shoot the film, and the result is both visceral and virtuoso, like a Hot Wheels commercial directed by Lucifer Himself.)

The plot and atmosphere have a major Lynchian scorch without the latter-day Lynchian propensity for self indulgence.  Two dumb-ass buddies in California spend their days building a flamethrower, inspired by their childhood obsessions with a VHS copy of Mad Max.  For a break they go out to get wasted and meet up with two girls who party all the time and wreak havoc the way only white-trash party girls who party all the time can. Glodell plays the main dumb-ass Woodrow, a sweet, kind, enthusiastic dweeb who falls in love with Party Girl Milly (played by Jessie Wiseman, an actress that re-brands the Scarlett-Johanson brand with more junk in her trunk and more innocence in her eyes). 

Eventually Milly ends up hurting Woodrow really bad by having sex with some guy in Woodrow's own bed.  Woodrow catches Milly and the dude and loses it, driving his motorcycle into an oncoming car.  The movie then spirals into a dream/not-dream epilepsy that reveals the madness, ecstasy, torture and glory of lover's scorn transforming into perpetual revenge.  For all its flame-throwing and booze-soaked antics, however, Bellflower is lushly romantic, a sort of meditation on what it means to be "masculine" without caving into the pseudo-masculinity most movies try to reify.  Woodrow is a sadsack Mad Max, adolescent, pouty, and possibly brain-damaged; his gorgeous fury and  nihilism form the center of Bellflower's core meltdown.  The energy of the film-making allows Woodrow's desperation to intermingle with the memories of your own misspent youth.  By the end of this thing you feel like you were at an all-night party in hell with Woodrow and his peeps.  You wake up with a beautiful hangover.