Friday, February 3, 2017

The Ninth Configuration

A bizarre mess, William Peter Blatty's The Ninth Configuration contains enough material for a half-dozen films.  In fact, Blatty himself cut and re-cut the movie both before, and after, its 1980 release, never really settled on a final draft for the film, and seems to have had irreconcilably opposing intentions with respect to several important themes in the picture.  Any version that you see must be regarded as provisional -- Blatty's ability to re-edit the movie is now curtailed by his recent death -- but the film has the characteristic of being wildly incoherent, a collage of material that can't be unified.  The director, who also wrote and produced the film, never exactly determined its ending -- the version that I saw, released by Hen's Teeth Video --is anomalous:  it's a baroque Catholic tract in favor of suicide.  (Other versions repudiate this theme.)  Like Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, the movie is vastly more ambitious than its director was skillful -- the result is the most curious of all artifacts, an unintended cult movie. 

Blatty, most famously the author of The Exorcist, was raised by the Jesuits.  Despite pretenses to the contrary, he is not a deep thinker -- to the contrary, his ideas are very, very shallow:  Blatty's principle innovation was that he accepted literally ideas inculcated in him by his Jesuit teachers:  unlike most of Hollywood, Blatty believes in metaphysical Evil engaged in eternal combat with metaphysical Good.  In other words, he is Manichean, essentially apolitical and disdainful of sociological/historical explanations for the sorrow in the world.  Blatty sees the pain and cruelty in the world as the result of the Devil's intervention.  Furthermore, he accepts the Christian notion that only a divine sacrifice can atone for the misery caused by people succumbing to the Devil's blandishments.  As a result of these ideas, The Ninth Configuration has an airless quality -- the viewer has the sense of being locked up within a claustrophobic allegory:  it's a bit like William Golding or Flannery O'Connor -- it's interesting, inhuman, and schematic, material that works best in a short format.  This sort of allegory is most palatable when severely abbreviated -- otherwise, the sermonizing becomes tedious.  And this is the case with The Ninth Configuration -- the movie lags horribly in its soft, gooey Jesuitical center:  although I've now watched the picture three times, I find much of the quasi-philosophical discourse (which I know only by reputation) between the principals Kane and Cutshaw literally soporific.  Cutshaw played flamboyantly by Scott Wilson is so aggressively outspoken as to virtually define the concept of boorishness; by contrast, the catatonic whispering Kane is so soft-spoken that you can't hear much of what he says and his affect is so muted that it makes you sleepy just to look at him.  These criticisms aside, it must be said, that The Ninth Configuration is a film like no other, a completely baroque concatenation of spectacularly bad ideas presented as a mishmash of farce, surreal comedy, epigrammatic debate, and over-the-top violence. 

The Vietnam war, we are told by a voice-over, resulted in many instances of spectacular and debilitating madness.  The Department of the Defense felt that this insanity was largely feigned as an excuse to avoid combat.  Accordingly, the military has established 18 treatment centers where different types of therapies are applied to the shell-shocked troops.  For some incomprehensible reason, about 22 crazies are confined in a medieval castle located in a rainy gorge in the Pacific Northwest.  (For byzantine reasons, the film was shot in an actual castle in Hungary -- this has to do with PepsiCo providing funding for the movie in exchange for some sort of concession relating to a bottling plant in Budapest.)  The castle is filled with spooky medieval carvings, religious artifacts, and grotesque mournful figures that look like the hooded and caped statuary in Gotham City in a Batman movie.  (Someone says -- "it's not exactly a therapeutic environment.")  The lunatics in the movie are film-land crazies -- the kind of wacky, zany folks who inhabit movies like Phillip de Broca's King of Hearts.  In other words, they are nothing like real people really suffering from mental illness with the exception of the taciturn and scarily depressed Kane.  Mental illness, of course, is not funny although half of the movie aspires to comedy.  This means that the antics of the madmen have a curiously staged and insincere aspect -- it's like Yossarian's mental illness in Catch-22 or the crazies inhabiting both Altman's MASH and the TV show of the same name.  (Altman's exuberantly staged Brewster McCloud also seems a source for the movie.)   In fact, this aspect of the film is artistically meaningful -- a key issue litigated in the movie is whether the mad men are really mad or just acting, a matter that is the subject of scholarly debate and much allusion to Shakespeare's Hamlet.  (Was Hamlet really mad or merely feigning?)  This conversation occurs in the context of a mad man who is staging Shakespeare plays with dogs as his actors.  As will be evident from this example, much of the film is comprised of pretentious and tedious whimsy, albeit interspersed with moments of actual horror and genius.  (There is a nun who exorcises a pop vending machine; a man who talks in nothing but tag-lines from Hollywood pictures -- "that's the kind of hair-pin I am"  from Strawberry Blonde for instance; one guy mimes an Al Jolson song in full minstrel black face.  The wacky inmates are harangued by a tough sergeant who looks just like Lon Chaney in Tell it to the Marines, in fact, a role played by a much-decorated veteran, the haggard and gruff Neville Brand.  Cutshaw, the manic foil for the morose Kane, is an astronaut who has fled from NASA due to fear -- he imagines the interstellar space as signifying the loneliness of the universe without God.  For some reason, Cutshaw calls God "Foot" or "the Foot", an attempt at whimsical blasphemy that is not too funny and excessively surreal.  Ed Flanders, a reliable character actor, plays a relatively sane doctor responsible for managing the place.  Kane, who is portrayed as a psychiatrist, turns out, of course, to be a god-obsessed madman, something like a character in The Brothers Karamazov.   

The film's last quarter seems to belong to another movie.  Cutshaw flees the asylum and ends up in a tough roadhouse where a mob of vicious bikers are partying.  The bikers are led by a malevolent thug who wears eye-shadow under his dark glasses and seems to represent the ne plus ultra in Satanic Evil (with a capital E) as far as Blatty is concerned.  The bikers torture Cutshaw and sodomize him.  Kane shows up and kills everyone in sight.  It turns out that Kane has gone mad because of similar massacres that he committed in Vietnam, including one in which he cut off and, then, fondled the head of a little Vietnamese boy.  Kane, then, commits suicide or allows himself to bleed to death, depending upon the version of the film endorsed by Blatty, an act intending to prove the existence of God by showing that human beings are capable of pure altruism.  Exactly how pure altruism and selflessness can be construed in light of the ludicrously violent bar scene -- Kane kills about six men and two women -- is unclear.  Furthermore, the logic of the ending is so completely woozy that it makes no sense and, in fact, Blatty cut and re-cut the movie apparently in recognition of this problem. 

This is a movie produced so chaotically and, then, remade repeatedly by re-edits that it is important to look at the outtakes and deleted scenes -- first, some of these explain puzzling references in the movie, remnants of dialogue referring to previous scenes that were cut.  Viewed in light of the outtakes, the structure of the film, with Kane flashing back repeatedly to the massacre in Vietnam, seems devised as an echo of Mike Nichols' Catch 22, a similarly chaotic movie, in which Yossarian continuously has visions of the dying Snowden, eviscerated on the floor of the bomber, and interspersed with the action.   Although the movie is garbled and often ineptly staged, it has scenes of real power.  In one shot, Cutshaw comes down some medieval steps carrying the huge corpse of Kane in his arms -- you wonder how the relatively slight Cutshaw can carry Kane and, when the camera cuts to Kane's face, it is just about the deadest-looking, most awful thing you have ever seen on screen.    

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