Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me

David Lynch's films are chimeras constructed of grossly disparate materials. In a typical Hollywood film, classical decorum is observed with respect to style and substance.  Ciizen Kane or The Best Years of our Lives are all of one piece and, therefore, emotionally coherent.  Even work made by independent film makers observe this principle of stylistic unity:  a movie by Kelly Reichardt or Harmony Korinne may violate some norms of studio film production -- but the pictures themselves are emotionally and stylistically consistent.  Lynch's pictures violate these rules in the most flagrant ways possible -- I can't think of any director whose different stylistic and thematic elements are so remote from one another.  In 1992' Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk with Me, at least, five distinct sensibilities can be readily discerned within the film's lurid, crime-film format.  First, there is Eagle Scout Lynch:  this material is weirdly banal, somewhat like a deranged episode of the Andy Griffith Show -- Eagle Scout Lynch admires dedicated government bureaucrats, hard-bitten sassy waitresses, firefighters and cops, cups of boiling hot coffee and pie.  Second, we encounter creepy uncle Lynch -- this aspect of the director's sensibility is obsessed with underage girls, frilly underpants, girlish diaries and the transgressions of barely post-pubescent young women.  Then, there is Lynch de Sade, a pornographer who seems to enjoy the torture of his jailbait victims and takes obvious sadistic pleasure in dramatizing their misery.  Lynch de Sade uneasily jostles up against Soap Opera Lynch -- this is the director specializing in complicated teenage love affairs, with kisses rendered against swelling, swooning music.  The music reminds us of another avatar of the director, MTV Lynch -- this is the sensibility that pauses the action in his films to spend four or five minutes simply observing Isabelle Rosseliini crooning "Blue Velvet" or Julee Cruise, seemingly in a trance, whispering incantations against a lush buzzing drone of legato chords.  Finally, we have Brakhage Lynch, the uncompromising experimental film maker who dissolves images into clouds of color, intercuts anatomical footage of screaming vocal chords into his mise-en-scene, and sends characters catapulting through eerie fields of energy -- Experimental Lynch shoots images through microscopes and telescopes, runs voices backward on his soundtrack, and prosecutes odd essays into complete abstraction.  (At least an entire one-hour program on Lynch's majestic Twin Peaks, The Return was almost completely abstract -- generally experimental films are terribly tedious, but, somehow, Lynch's abstractions, because rooted in a narrative, avoid dullness.)  I said that there were five distinct versions of David Lynch -- so let's count them:  Eagle Scout Lynch, creepy uncle Lynch, Lynch de Sade, Soap Opera Lynch, MTV Lynch and Brakhage Lynch:  in fact, I guess, the director is even more versatile than I thought, manifesting in no less than six wild divergent avatars.

In many ways, Fire Walk with Me is a work of great significance to an understanding of Lynch's central themes.  In this movie, Lynch's obsessions are displayed in their essential form without dilution or obfuscation.  Lynch's persistent subject is the duality of human beings -- everyone has a public persona and a dark private self.  (Lynch characteristically expresses this concept by using Doppelgaengers:  the best example, perhaps, is the bifurcation of FBI agent Cooper into loathsomely evil and transcendentally good characters in Twin Peak:  the Return.  (In fact, if I recall that series correctly, Cooper was split into, at least, three selves:  good, evil, and the strangely dimwitted insurance salesman under assault by demonic entities in Las Vegas.)  Lynch's concept that every person has a solar and lunar self is formally expressed by sharp divisions in his films -- often, a Lynch film will suddenly split apart in the middle, the narrative inexplicably traveling down a completely different (although obscurely related) path.  This is the structure in Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and, of course, Fire Walk with Me.  The latter film begins with a peculiar apparent indirection -- somewhere in Washington State, a young woman, said to be a "drifter", has been murdered, her body wrapped in plastic, and thrown in a river.  Two FBI agents are dispatched to investigate the murder -- exactly why the FBI would be involved is unclear:  we don't recognize these agents, although one of them is played by Mel Ferrer (and will be very prominent in The Return 25 years later) -- the other naif is no less than the very young Kiefer Sutherland. The agents encounter unpleasant law enforcement officers who seem to be the evil side of the helpful and kind cops in the original Twin Peaks series.  An autopsy of the corpse is conducted and, then, one of the officers inexplicably vanishes.  (I am leaving out characteristic Lynch grotesquerie including the apparition of a woman in a skin-tight outfit whose dance can be decoded as indicative of the first half hour's plot in the film.)  David Lynch appears as FBI agent Gordon -- he literally, as well as figuratively, directs the action in the movie.  After the disappearance of the FBI agent (played I think by Kiefer Sutherland), the film abruptly shifts gears with a title that says "one year later."  The swooning Twin Peaks theme by Angelo Baldamenti takes over the soundtrack and we see, to our surprise, Laura Palmer, the dead woman from the earlier TV series, walking down a sidewalk in the idyllic small town of Twin Peaks.  Gradually, it becomes apparent that we are witnessing a prequel to the events in the original TV series.  For the next ninety minutes, the film documents the last week in the life of Laura Palmer, showing us how she came to be murdered by a nightmare figure that she calls "Bob."  Palmer has been raped from the age of 12 by her father and she is horribly damaged.  We learn that she is addicted to cocaine and moonlights as a prostitute -- this is notwithstanding the fact that she is a prom queen and loved by two young men, the evil and belligerent Bobby Briggs and the gentle, rebellious  James.  Lynch's narrative structure is complex with frequent flashbacks.  But we gather that Laura's father, Leland Palmer is on the verge of a crack-up.  In fact, when he plotted an orgy with his teenage girlfriend, who turns out to Theresa Gates, she intended to set him up with two willing and nubile girls -- when Leland glances at the half-naked girls, he sees that one of them is his own daughter, Laura.  This causes Palmer to beat Gates to death -- thus, providing us with a solution to the murder mystery posed in the film's first half-hour.  As the film progresses, Laura is more and more abused and degraded until, in the end, Bob, the evil avatar of her father, beats her to death.  This is very dire material and, I think, critics were put off by Lynch's graphic depiction of something that the dream-characters call Garmonzio -- that is, "pain and suffering."  In an interview on the DVD, Sheryl Lee (the actress who plays Laura Palmer) says that since she has become a mother, she has been very alert to the fact that Lynch shows innumerable clues that Laura is the victim of violent, soul-destroying rape -- "Bob has been doing this to me since I was twelve," she wails to one of her friends.  But, as Lee points out, no one helps her.  Thus, the film can be read as an indictment of a particularly horrible kind of child abuse.  But the problem with this analysis (to which Sheryl Lee is blind) is that Lynch glories in the abuse -- he presents Laura Palmer's sexual degradation pornographically, as, in fact, erotically thrilling.  Thus, there is an enormous divergence between the grievous subject matter and Lynch's pornographic approach to this material -- he wants us to be come sexually excited at what happens to Laura Palmer and, indeed, presents many of the sex scenes (Lee is naked for about a third of movie) as glamorous and titillating.  Thus, we have a complete fission between the good Lynch, who is telling us something important and tragic about his heroine, and the evil Lynch who designs his shots to estheticize the sexual violence and, even, sadistically delight in it.  The closest analog to this film that I know is G.  W. Pabst's Pandora's Box -- in that film, Pabst shows Louise Brooks in all of her unforgettable glamour and allure, while, simultaneously, chronicling with a great deal of sadistic pleasure, her ultimate sexual abasement including her being butchered, at the end, by no less than Jack-the-Ripper.  I make this comparison advisedly:  I would argue that Sheryl Lee's performance as the doomed Laura Palmer is one of the most startling, erotic, and terrifying images of a young woman ever filmed -- she is simultaneously victim and destroyer of men, simultaneously pathetic and intensely seductive.  The ambiguities in her performance, Lee's eyes half closed in some kind of dreamy ecstasy, are astonishing and the acting is non pareil -- in fact, Lee says in the interview (she's 52 now) that the role all but destroyed her and her willful misunderstanding of the movie as a warning against child abuse and incest seems something that she has constructed to preserve her own sanity. 

Of course, the film is often difficult to understand and Lynch complicates the material with all sorts of supernatural events.  The supernatural occurrences are intended as commentaries on the action or embody some of the film's more perverse concepts -- these flourishes act to distance the otherwise grievous material and keep the film from becoming too tragic to be entertaining, that is, too tragic to be a work of art.  The one-armed man's missing limb has become a dwarf who speaks in very slow and garbled cadences.  A white horse appears to Laura Palmer's mother, the beast standing aloof in her bedroom.  At the same time, Leland Palmer is bringing a tall glass of milk to his half-crazed long suffering wife, we see Laura inhaling vast amounts of cocaine, writhing in her lingerie as she awaits rape by Bob.  At an orgy, an evil whoremaster says:  "I am the great went." to which Laura responds:  "and I am the muffin."  A whole series of objects symbolize the action:  there are the coded rings worn by the sexual perverts, eerie paintings that come to life, the rotor of an ominous ceiling fan, a cheap picture of children at a table protected by a hovering angel.  Nightmare winds stir the dark forests of the Pacific Northwest and there are rocky peaks descending in cliffs to cold rivers and lakes   Like all great film actresses, Sheryl Lee can look like a half-dozen women -- sometimes, she is childish and naive, in other shots, she looks like a vamp from the silent era, sometimes, she is just an ordinarily teenage girl, but, in many images, she seems to be in some kind sexually induced trance verging on coma.  At the film's apotheosis in the so-called "red room", a space of pure fantasy, Laura Palmer looks like the most beautiful woman ever shown on film, like Helen of Troy, idealized with her hair and make-up exquisitely done, an angel hovering in the air extracted from a child-like picture in her room, the winged white form praying for her, as her evil father, Leland Palmer floats in the air.  Bob, Palmer's monstrous alter-ego, rips a pouch of blood from Leland's belly and naming it Garmonzio, throws the gore onto the lightning zig-zags on the tile floor.  The gore somehow vanishes.  Agent Cooper stands next to Laura Palmer, the embodiment of reason and compassion, a sort of secular Bodhissatva, also protecting her.  This film was universally derided when first released.  It's impossible now to see the cause of this rage and derision.  In fact, as I have earlier argued, this film is the central work in the canon of Lynch's films.  On its own terms, it's close to flawless. 

Nothing Sacred

Apparently, Carole Lombard specialized in getting knocked-around in her films.  In 1936, FSA photographer, Walker Evans, made a famous picture of two decrepit houses in Atlanta.  On a hoarding in front of the houses, big mural-sized advertisements have been posted for movies.  The ad in the center of the composition shows Carole Lombard sporting a black eye and smiling seductively:  the name of the movie advertised is Love before Breakfast. Nothing Sacred (directed by William Wellman) was made two years later in 1937.  Contemporary ads show the two stars, Frederic March and Carole Lombard, squaring off like professional boxers and the poster cries out:  "See the Fight!"  At the climax of Nothing Sacred, Frederick March punches Carole Lombard so hard that she is knocked-out.  But, no worries:  she revives and hits March in the jaw so hard that he's also out cold. 

Nothing Sacred is a scatter-brained screw-ball comedy, so diffuse that it almost evaporates before your eyes.  Shot in technicolor, it's a handsome film and Lombard is fantastically beautiful.  A scene in which the two beautiful stars occupy a white sailboat running upriver and posed against the Manhattan skyline is iconic:  it doesn't matter that the shot is executed in rather unconvincing rear-projection -- the intent is clear and the concept is fabulous.  Furthermore, the film is casually surrealistic and, therefore, the dream-like character of some of the imagery fits the picture's general tone.  This is a movie in which one main character is described "as a cross between a Ferris Wheel and a werewolf."  A quack doctor produces eggs from a half-dozen pockets, pierces them and urges the hungover heroine to suck out the contents.  Several important scenes are played with Lombard resplendent under a big fireman's hat.  At the end of the movie, the lovers are safely aboard a cruiser with an incandescent sunset casting a red-orange glare over all of the proceedings -- the dipsomaniacal doctor wakes up, looks out his porthole at the flaming sunset and the equally brilliant sea and cries out:  "The hotel is flooded!"  At a cabaret, the theme is "Tootsies of all Nations" and mostly naked Walkyries on horses ride out from backstage to stand in statuesque tableaux among broken columns underneath a huge chandelier.  The sets are lavish Art Deco confections with towering fluted pillars and enormous windows looking out on the skyscrapers of Manhattan.  Everything is grandiose, elegant, over-sized, acres of curtains cover walls and hotel rooms seem as large as bowling alleys.

The film's premise is a little queasy-making.  A journalist (Wally played by Frederick March) is in hot water because he promoted an Oriental potentate as a patron of the arts.  The potentate turns out to be a fraud -- a shoe-shine man from Harlem.  As punishment for his gullibility, Wally is put in the newspaper's basement where he is assigned writing obituaries.  Wally learns that a girl at a clock factory in Warsaw, Vermont is dying of cancer -- the radium used to paint the dials of the clocks is eating away her bones.  Wally finagles a trip to Vermont to meet the woman (Hazel Flagg played by Lombard) and offers her a trip to Manhattan -- the idea is that she will have a good time in the bright lights of the big city before she succumbs.  But Hazel has just discovered that she's not sick at all.  The radium isn't killing her.  Nonetheless, she wants the free trip to New York City and so, with her small-town doctor, she connives to maintain the illusion that she is dying.  (The premise makes light of a real tragedy -- the horrible deaths of many women and girls who worked painting radium on clock dials in Elgin, Illinois.  It is said that geiger counters still trigger when the graves of the dead women are approached.)  In the big city, Hazel is wined and dined and given the keys to the City.  Of course, she falls in love with Wally, the journalist who is squiring her around town.  In a misguided effort at publicity, Wally's paper brings in famous European specialists in radium poisoning to try to cure the girl.  But, of course, they discover that the celebrated and tragic young woman is not sick at all.  Hazel decides to feign suicide and flee with her corrupt and drunk small-town doctor.  She ends up in the river and has to be pulled-out by a fireman with Wally who has ineffectually jumped into the drink with her -- he can't swim.  Hazel now decides to fake her death from pneumonia and escape.  Just before she can vamoose, the famous doctors, all of them comically bearded and speaking like Bela Lugosi, appear.  Wally decides to fool the doctors into thinking that Hazel is really feverish by fighting with her -- this results in the exchange of punches that leaves both stars with swollen jaws.  The big fight scene, celebrated in the movie's posters, really adds nothing to the plot.  Hazel and Wally flee the city and we see them last on their honeymoon on a cruise ship in the tropics -- the sun is wildly orange and red that they both wear sunglasses. 

There's not much to the movie although the dialogue is consistently witty and bizarre.  The film decries tabloid journalism and the ease with which readers of this stuff are manipulated.  In fact, the trade of the journalist is identified as purveyor of fake news, an unsettling pop culture trope that haunts us today.  Wellmann, curiously enough, hides his stars in some crucial scenes -- he interposes barriers between the stars and the camera.  In an early scene set in Warsaw, Vermont, a tree limb completely hides the heads of Wally and Hazel as they discuss traveling to New York -- it's a surrealist image worthy of Magritte:  we've paid to see Lombard and March and, yet, during this crucial piece of dialogue their faces are hidden.  In another scene, March and his editor have a colloquy hidden behind huge bouquets of flowers.  A pivotal love scene is played-out in a kind of lathe packing box that entirely hides the stars.  In a later scene, Hazel is shot through the black veil of a woman who has come to denounce her.  This is part of the general surrealist ambience:  Hazel's funeral will involve 30,000 cars and a half million mourners.  In Warsaw, a feral child darts from behind a picket fence and bits Wally on the ass.  A children's choir sings a morbid tribute to Hazel scored to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  In a final scene, Wally says that Hazel's plight will be forgotten:  "You were just another freak like the Bearded Lady or Jojo, the dog-faced boy."

The Lost Squadron

The Lost Squadron is one of five movies directed by George Archainbaud in 1932.  Ingenious and exciting, the film is about 80 minutes long.  Despite its modest running time, the film is a first-rate production starring Richard Dix who shows a stiff upper lip and is gallant to the end, the very young and baby-faced Joel McCrea, Erich von Stroheim at his most villainous and Mary Astor playing fickle, ambitious actress.  The script is so good that the film cries out to be remade -- it could be produced effectively in any post-war era and, in our modern history, we seem to be always post-war.  (In fact, I think the movie may have been remade in 1975 as the The Great Waldo Pepper.)  The picture is consistently entertaining and stands up well almost eighty years after it was produced -- it is astonishing the amount of narrative and characterization that Hollywood craftsman could include in a movie well under 90 minutes.

The Lost Squadron begins on the Western Front, a minute or two before November 11, 11:00 am armistice in 1918.  The three surviving pilots in the squadron are dueling with their German counterparts high in the sky -- the film identifies the nationality of each combatant by a superimposed emblem in the lower right side of the screen.  After some spectacular aerial shots, the war ends and the combatants wave adieu to one another in a jaunty way before landing and getting drunk to celebrate the end of the War.  The squadron, reduced to four men by casualties, is comprised of the braggart Red, Captain Gibson, the commanding officer, Woody, an avuncular drunk (today we would says that he is badly damaged by Post-Traumatic Stress) and the mechanic, Chris.  Returning home, each pilot finds that, notwithstanding the speeches of the politicians, there is no real place for them in the peace-time world.  Red resigns his job so that another older man who supports a family will not lose his position with the company; Captain Gibson finds that his upper-class girlfriend, who now is an ambitious Broadway actress, is living with a fat, tolerant banker who supports her acting; Woody has been defrauded by a business partner and is impoverished.  The three pilots and their mechanic vow to always assist one another.  The economy crashes and Red, Captain Gibson, and Chris end up as hobos riding the rails.  They climb off the freight train in Hollywood where Woody, now a doomed alcoholic, is flying stunts for war pictures -- he gets 50 dollars a day and suggests that his buddies join him on the set where Von Furst, a megalomaniacal director (Erich von Stroheim of course) is making a West Front war movie.  Von Furst, who struts around in cape carrying a nasty-looking cane, is rumored to beat "the bejeesus out of his wife", the actress Foliette, who is Captain Gibson's old flame.  The men go to work for Von Furst who quickly grasps that Captain Gibson still admires Foliette.  (There is a subplot involving the "pest", the kid-sister of Woody. A romantic triangle ensues in which both Captain Gibson and Red vie for the girl's affections.  Red wins out to the dismay of Captain Gibson who is too noble to show his friend any trace of jealousy).  Von Furst tells his camera crew to "keep cranking" in the event of a crash -- this will add to the picture's luster.  Woody is now drinking too much to fly safely, although he, ultimately, takes to the air in a biplane that Von Furst has sabotaged -- the evil director is trying to kill Captain Gibson. This aircraft is flamboyantly decorated with a skeleton wielding a scythe. The plane crashes spectacularly and Woody is killed -- this leads to Red murdering Von Furst.  The movie's high energy lags a little in some suspense scenes in which a detective inspects the film set where Von Furst's body has been stashed.  (This part of the movie shot mostly in the dark reminds us that Archainbaud would make a series of mystery movies beginning later in 1932 and that he specialized in the genre before directing Westerns for the next quarter century.  Archainbaud, a studio hack, ended up in the Valhalla of all studio hacks, that is TV making Westerns for the tube.  He seems to be an efficient, reasonably ingenious director, although many of his scenes are simply shot proscenium-style with the actors playing to one another ensemble-style.  He seems to have been the reliable kind of workman who was as good as the actors and the material that he directed -- in The Lost Squadron, it all comes together, a stellar cast and an excellent script and the result is a very good film.)  The movie, made pre-Code, contains the first image of someone being given "the finger" that I have seen in film and has gorgeous aerial sequences -- the bi-planes seem as light as kites and they execute loops and turns against majestic towering clouds.  When a plane falls out of the sky, the little aircraft drops like a leaf shed by a tree in autumn, wobbling plaintively and spiraling end-over-end:  the immediacy of these scenes reminds me of the exquisite aerial ballets in Only Angels have Wings and, later, the aircraft plummeting out of the stratosphere in Phil Kaufman's The Right Stuff.  The final shots, showing two ghost planes realized in negative, flying through stormy skies are jaw-dropping.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Marielle Heller's A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019) labors mightily to avoid cloying sentimentality and, in fact, succeeds in this endeavor for about two-thirds of its modest length.  The last twenty minutes of the film doesn't tell us anything we don't already know and seems to me wholly predictable -- this is unfortunate because the most of the movie is pretty good.  As everyone knows, Tom Hanks plays Fred Rogers, the host of a long-running public television show for small children.  Hanks does a good job until Rogers' sheer saintliness drowns him in bathos.  He's very good when portraying how strange Rogers must have been, how unworldly, and, even, irritating.  But as the film's messages proliferate (all of them good I hasten to observe), the film loses its way, slipping into a generic story of man's redemption.  (There's a nice touch at the end:  Hanks as Rogers' says that he deals with anger by pounding out low chords on his piano.  After finishing the day's shoot, Rogers plays the piano on the set and, suddenly, unexpectedly beats out some scary thunderous chords in the instrument's low register before returning the sweetly placid melody that he was otherwise doodling on the keys.) 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is loosely based on an Esquire magazine article written by a journalist named Tom Junod.  As it happens, Junod's essay about Fred Rogers ultimately evolves into his redemption story, a narrative about how interaction with the holy man saved his life.  In the film, Junod is named Lloyd Vogel.  Vogel is a hard-driving investigative journalist whose "gotcha" detective work seems to arise from his rage at his own father's betrayal of his dying mother and his sister.  This anger has inspired Vogel to ferret out evil-doing in others and his cynicism about human motivations makes him good at this work.  Vogel is married, has a nice, forgiving wife, and an infant son.  There is the slightest hint that Vogel's journalistic bag of tricks has become a little annoying and, even, rote -- he has, perhaps, lost his edge.  His editor assigns him a 400 word caption on Fred Rogers  for an Esquire heroes edition and, after a calamitous wedding in which he punches his own father, Jerry (played by a haggard grey-faced Chris Cooper), Vogel, still hungover with rage, goes to Pittsburgh to interview the children's TV host.  Rogers takes an interest in Vogel, perceiving that he is wounded, but essentially a good man.  Ultimately, Rogers turns the tables on Vogel, interviewing him in his persistent, wheedling way and the journalist admits the source of his grief and anger.  Vogel still can't reconcile with his father, but, when the old man collapses, he seems to hallucinate and travels to Pittsburgh where he has collapses on the floor of the neighborhood TV set.  Nursed back to health by Rogers, he returns to New York City, reconciles with his father, and, at last, achieves some degree of peace.  Rogers comes to the bedside of Vogel's dying father and comforts everyone with his simple goodness.  The  magazine story about Mr. Rogers is a huge success and Vogel is praised by all; he commits to his wife that he will take time off work to parent their baby boy and all is well in the neighborhood. 

The film is an odd-couple buddy movie a bit on the order of Green Room, although here all the learning, counsel, and advice goes one way -- Rogers dispenses platitudes to Vogel and the long, uncomfortable pauses in their conversations urge the journalist to explore his own anger and the sources of his bitterness.  In the end, the film is too easy by half.  Not only is Vogel redeemed to be a better man, but his marriage is saved, his own relationship with his baby son seems put on a firm, loving footing, and he is rewarded by immense success in the world -- everyone loves his article about Mr. Rogers and, no doubt, he  will be richly compensated for the life-saving counsel administered to him by the saintly TV host.  In other words, Vogel's goodness has no cost at all -- it is all beneficial, there is not even a hint of a downside in his interactions with his new friend, Fred Rogers.  Vogel is never confronted with any conflict.  All he has to do is follow the counsel of Mr. Rogers and he will become a good man, and by doing good he will do well.  In fact, I assume goodness comes at a price and that some of the people who knew Fred Rogers in real life either detested him or found his otherworldly goodness too virtuous to be tolerated.  That said, the movie is excellently made, for 2/3rds of its length, charming and, even, faintly surprising and compared with most garbage that Hollywood produces (superhero movies and the like) well worth watching.  Hanks is fine and the picture is imaginatively constructed -- it plays out as an episode in the neighborhood with Mr. Rogers introducing Lloyd Vogel (we first see him with his face cut and swollen from fisticuffs with his father) as someone who will become our new friend for the duration of the film.  All transitions are managed with tiny miniature sets that simulate the neighborhood shown in the TV shows opening scenes -- these effects are charming and humorous, something that is welcome because the movie is resolutely serious, grave, and without any real comic relief.

Here are some things I learned during my trip to Mr. Rogers' neighborhood:

1.  People who are mad are acting out of sorrow or grief or pain;
2.  Always remember what is is like to be as vulnerable and fearful and curious and joyful as a child;
3.  Interact with children not on the basis of what we hope they will become but as they are now;
4.  Spend one minute a day silently remembering "those who loved us into being";
5.  Everything human is mentionable; everything mentionable is manageable;
6.  Pray for people using their names.

This is all good advice and I'm glad that the movie showed me these things.

Cold War

In an interview transcribed around the time of his work with The Band, Bob Dylan talked about the folk music made in "the old weird America", recalling songs about people turned to swans, suitors throwing their girlfriends into rivers to murder them, and lovers from whose graves sprouted entwined roses.  On the evidence of Pawel Pawlitkowski's Cold War (2018), there was an "old weird Poland" as well, characterized by folk songs that sound like ragged, atonal Blues with similarly morose lyrics.  This kind of music informs the opening scenes in Cold War -- Wiktor, a pianist, travels through a wintry and desolate rural Poland collecting folk songs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.  With Wiktor is an older woman who seems to be his lover -- we sense this from the way that they casually share cigarettes -- and an apparatchik, a chubby and unprepossessing man named Kramczarek. Far from any towns, Wiktor discovers a ruined church, it's dome an open oculus to the sky -- the church stands in a barren woods and is like an apparition from a Tarkovsky film.  God's eyes are all that remains of a painted fresco -- these huge glaring eyes remind us that we are watching a movie from a perspective that neither of movie's hapless protagonists can achieve.  The folk song collectors end up at a damaged country estate where they audition young people for Mazurek, a folk song and dance company.  During these auditions, Wiktor encounters Zula, a beautiful young girl -- she's not well-prepared for her audition presumably intending to deploy her sex appeal to win a spot in the troupe.  She sings the obligatory folk song with another girl, but, then, performs a show-tune from a Russian musical, the song "Two Hearts" that will reoccur as a leit motif in the film. (Polish-speaking critics note that she sings the song in Russian, poor form for a company that intends to specialize in Polish folk music.)  Wiktor falls in love with Zula during training and rehearsals -- he plays piano for the company.  Zula is the toughest of tough cookies -- she is reputed to have murdered her own father, although she blithely tells Wiktor that "he mistook me for my mother and so I taught him the difference with a knife", noting that the man is still alive, although, perhaps, not in one piece.  Zula also blithely advises Wiktor that she is "ratting on him" to Kramczarek, the Communist party man, although not telling him anything too harmful.  When Wiktor walks away from her disgusted, she throws herself  into the river and like Millais "Orphelia" drifts placidly downstream -- at this point, the audience grasps that Zula is something like the woman played by Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, casually lethal and inescapably seductive as well as half-crazy and, indeed, the film looks a great deal like Truffaut's classic, shot in lustrous black and white in the old Academy ratio (4:3).  Mazurek goes on the road and, after some successes, suffers cultural (mis)appropriation by the Stalinist regime -- the music becomes politically inflected and, in Warsaw, the troupe performs under a huge banner showing the handsome and benevolent Papa Stalin.  The woman who accompanied Wiktor during his forays into collecting folk songs protests, Wiktor doesn't support her, and she seems to be purged -- Wiktor seems weak and ineffectual.  In Berlin, he persuads Zula to defect with him -- but she gets drunk instead, apparently too profoundly Polish to leave the Eastern Bloc.  Wiktor goes to Paris and joins a jazz ensemble playing in a club called L'Eclipse.  he travels to Croatia to see Zula perform -- she's now the featured star in Mazurek.  Apparently, the Communist officials are afraid that he will persuade her to defect and, so, they politely escort him to a bus at intermission and sent him back to Paris via Zagreb.  Years pass -- titles inform us that the movie takes place between 1949 and 1959.  While Wiktor is recording spooky music for a murder scene in a movie, Zula shows up.  She's now married to a Sicilian and has used her husband to secure a visa to Paris.  Zula and Wiktor have sex and, once again, become lovers.  (She sings "Two Hearts" in a jazz version, sounding a little like a female Chet Baker, in Eclipse with Wiktor's ensemble.)  Wiktor wants her to become a recording artist and encourages her to seduce a smarmy producer named Michel -- he has told everyone that she danced for Stalin and murdered her own father:  these exotic details, he tells her, will enhance sales on her records.  Zula despises Paris and is jealous of Wiktor's previous love affair with a poetess and she has a brief sexual encounter with Michel, more or less as Wiktor has proposed.  The lovers violently quarrel and Zula disappears.  When Wiktor confronts Michel, who is now with another young girl, he learns Zula has gone back to Poland.  Wiktor is disconsolate and, despite warnings about what will happen to him by an official at the Polish embassy, he crosses the border to Poland.  In his home country, Wiktor ends up in a labor camp and, apparently, has the fingers on his right hand cut off during torture.  Zula bribes her way into the camp and vows to save him.  She marries Kramczarek and even has a child with him as a bribe to secure Wiktor's release.  We next see her dressed up in a ridiculous costume, her breasts mostly exposed, performing some sort of bizarre tribute to Cuban and Latin American music -- it's some sort of cultural exchange cooked-up by the Communist party.  At a concert, Zula gets so drunk that she almost falls off the stage -- she and Wiktor finish a bottle of vodka in the toilet.  Then, they escape together into the countryside to the ruined church from the opening scenes, a location that represents the doomed Slavic destiny of the Poles.  Zula pronounces them married and they take an overdose of pills.  Waiting for death, on a bench near the road, Zula, gets restless, and says "Let's cross over to the other side.  The view is better there."  They get up from their bench, exit the screen, and, then, after a beat, the wind rustles through the wheat field to signify their passing.

Although this plot summary suggests that the film is a bit sordid, in fact, Pawlitkowski shows perfectly good taste -- his movie is a brilliant piece of art and he elides the vicious stuff, leaving the viewer to imagine what has occurred between brief tableaux-like scenes:  we don't see the love affairs with other people or the torture or any of the squalid betrayals:  all of this occurs off-screen in the intervals between sequences, marked by long black pauses.   The director emphasizes the musical performances and dancing -- in effect, the film is a kind of darkly despairing musical; the picture's grand passions and the theme of love unto, and, perhaps, surpassing, death make the film seem rather operatic.  Indeed, the music imparts a sort of distance to the material.  In a scene in L'Eclipse, the band plays Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock" and Zula dances ecstatically, climbing up onto the bar to kick her legs in the air after whirling around with one man after another.  She is a force of nature and we can see that poor Wiktor is inadequate, too much older and without her exuberance, and, yet, he believes that she is "the woman of (his) life", an emotion that she reciprocates even when she is in the arms of another man.  The couple is miserable when living together and miserable when apart.  Pawlitkowsky was inspired to make this movie by the example of his parents, a couple whose turbulent relationship resulted in them living apart mostly married to other people, although in their old age, sick and dying, they reunited in Berlin where they committed suicide together.  (Pawlitkowsky was 31 at the time.)  The Cold War, of course, refers to both the political conflict that separates the lovers physically as well as to their violent and destructive relationship.  At one point in the film, Zula insults the French poetess with whom Wiktor lived before she emigrated to Paris -- she mocks the notion of "metaphor".  But the film is beautifully constructed, devising visual metaphors or symbols, for its themes.  Ruined, devastated Poland is symbolized by the smashed Orthodox church.  Wiktor's aspirations as a Bohemian are demonstrated by the starving artist's garret that he inhabits in Paris -- city also symbolized by a tracking shot showing a statue in looming overhead in front of the Louvre.  The ridiculously decollete costume that Zula wears in the Latin rhumba number is a metaphor for the degradation that she has experienced in prostrating herself before the cold, serpentine Kramczarek to save Wiktor.  (In this scene, the actress playing Zula is willing to look sloppy and fat to further make this point.)  Even the final scene, with Zula's remark that "the view will be better (from the other side)" seems metaphoric for the many border crossings that the picture depicts.  Viewed in a certain cynical light, the film might arguably be said to be about alcoholism -- we see Zula chugging shots of vodka at a Parisian party and, then, stealing the bottle to get drunk in the toilet.  But Pawlitkowsky's use of music and the exquisite beauty of the film's compositions give the picture a transcendent lyricism that redeems the sordid aspects of the narrative.  Even the movie's music after the final scene seems perfectly considered:  We hear Glenn Gould playing one of Bach's Goldberg variations -- the precise almost mathematical clarity of the piano playing is accompanied by Gould's spooky, half-whispered crooning:  an abstract musical theorem is interwoven with an anguished human voice.  Pawlitkowsky is a Pole who has lived most of his life in England where he has made many highly regarded films (the BFI is one principal producer for this movie) -- his previous film, Ida, about a supremely religious young woman, a novice nun, who discovers that she is, in fact, the daughter of murdered Jews was also a dire and brilliant picture (it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Picture).  This movie, less than 90 minutes long, is both brilliant and heart-breaking.  The acting of the two lovers played Tomasz Kot and Joanna Kulig, who performs like s Slavic Marilyn Monroe, is beyond reproach

Ford v. Ferrari

In one of the interviews with the director of La Flor, a 13  hour Argentinan movie, the film maker extols the virtues of old-time Hollywood B movies -- she says that she aspired to make the kind of modest, entertaining thriller that Hollywood "used to make in their sleep but can't produce today."  This remark applies to James Mangold's Ford v. Ferrari (2019), the kind of formulaic high-budget star-driven action film that Hollywood used to make without any apparent effort fifty years ago but can't quite get right in the 21st century.  The picture starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale, both immensely charismatic, is ostensibly about the rivalry between Ford Motor Company and Ferrari with respect to designing and building race cars sufficiently well-tooled to be competitive at LeMans, the famous 24 hour race in France.  The picture involves all sorts of conflicts that, of course, must be resolved in the course of the furious action at the race-track:  Matt Damon and Christian Bale quarrel, at times violently over various issues, Henry Ford II vows revenge on Enzo Ferrari when the Italian insults him by proxy, the corporate suits battle the rugged individualist driver, Ken Miles (Christian Bale) and so forth.  But the movie is fatally lacking in its convictions with respect to these conflicts and, in fact, the narrative, which seems slavishly bound to facts about which only hardcore gearheads care. consistently subverts these conflicts.  In the end, the picture seems, more or less, a muddle.  In old Hollywood, the screenwriters would have fictionalized everything but a few names, would have combined characters into effective composites, and would have made sure that the film was thematically coherent -- but Mangold and company can't quite pull this off.  The result is an oddity:  the movie is designed like an old fashioned Hollywood epic and has a distinctly retrograde feeling (in particular, the role played by Ken Miles' spunky wife would have seemed conservative in 1955; and,, further, the part played by Miles' adoring son would have seemed old school in the era of D. W. Griffith), but the director complicates things unnecessarily, make the film too long, and can't bring the picture home (or across the finish line to use car-race imagery) without confusing things and leaving the audience to wonder what exactly the director is trying to convey. The movie is reasonably entertaining, primarily because of the star power of Damon and Bale, but, in the end it's not nearly as good as it should be.

Ford v. Ferrari has a simple enough premise.  Ken Miles is a tough British race-car driver, apparently a bit embittered by his experiences in W. W. II -- he doesn't like Germans and refuses to drive for Porsche.  Miles is a hard-nosed individualist, a role that seems a little odd, because he is required to play against Matt Damon, a successful former race-car driver sidelined by health issues.  (He has something wrong with his heart and chugs a bottle of pills from time-to-time to illustrate his malaise.)  Damon playing Shelby Carroll wears a big cowboy hat, speaks with a Texas drawl, and seems to be the character that we would expect to adopt the John Wayne stance in this movie -- the rugged cowboy who can't be coerced.  But, in fact, Damon plays his part cautiously, throughout about half of the film, he's a pawn of the suits and, in fact, even betrays his brother driver, Ken Miles, on one occasion.  (This is an example of bad screenwriting based upon adherence to facts no one knows or cares about -- Carroll is told to not let Miles drive in the first LeMans competition and, in fact, accedes to corporate pressure. This results in everything happening more or less twice:  Carroll betrays Miles in the first race, but stand behind him in the second race.  This lengthens the film but doesn't improve it.  In Old Hollywood, the conflict would have been worked out in one race at the climax and not involved two iterations of the LeMans contest.  Another example of screenwriting incompetence is the development of two corporate villains Lee Iacocca and some other bad guy named Leo -- this is just bad scripting:  there's no reason the two villains couldn't be combined into a composite figure representing big corporate wickedness; again, at this moment in history, no one alive cares whether Lee Iacocca was a bad guy or not -- but the film pointlessly complicates this issue.)  Henry Ford II is not doing well -- he gives a Patton-like speech to his assembly line workers (this is utterly ridiculous) and, then, send Iacocca to Modena to buy Ferrari -- the company is facing bankruptcy.  Iacocca gets duped by Ferrari who makes some flamboyant insults against Henry Ford II ("ugly little cars made in ugly factories").  Henry Ford II vows to bury Ferrari at LeMans and, then, the film slides into the always pleasing narrative of the heroes putting together a team to best the Italian car-maker on the race-track.  Although Ken Miles is unnecessarily abrasive and not a good corporate representative, he is the best man for the job at LeMans and, after the misfire of the first race (when he is betrayed by Shelby Carrroll) gets to prove his mettle on the race-track in France.  There are two long racing sequences, one at Daytona and the other at LeMans.  Shelby Carroll has been appointed the head of the American racing team and is responsible for developing the cars that ultimately prevail in France -- he spends the middle half of the film feuding ineffectually with the businessmen in Detroit about whether the obnoxious Miles should be allowed to drive the race car.  Although the script is weirdly convoluted, when, in fact, the issues are pretty simple -- the cars go around in a big circle and the one that goes around fastest wins -- the build-up to the races, the technical details as to engineering the race car, and the duel between Ford and Ferrari are well done.  Unfortunately, the film seems to forget its own title during the middle ninety minutes -- in that part of the movie, the film is really about the clash between the cautious corporate businessmen (whom Miles has insulted) and the rugged individualist drivers and their crews.  The whole Ford v. Ferrari premise goes by the wayside for more then half of the movie -- nonetheless things hand together reasonably well.  (It's always a bit rich to view a big budget Hollywood film, seemingly scripted by a committee, attacking corporations for their cowardice, when the film itself embodies the same compromises denounced by the script.)

During the climactic race, things go haywire.  First, the American team cheats to defeat the Italians -- Carroll steals their stop watches and, then, drops a lug nut near their pit, apparently, to make them think they didn't get the tires on one of their cars properly.  (This plot point is left pretty unclear.)  More egregiously, the Americans exploit a loophole in the rules to change-out their brake assemblies in their entirety, something that seems questionable and that defeats the whole concept of the Americans winning fair-and-square because their car is better engineered and built.  Second, the entire theme involving individualism versus corporate group-think gets muddied at the climax.  Ken Miles is told to "slow down" so all three Ford race-cars can cross the finish line simultaneously -- this costs him his victory.  He does this -- an act of self-abnegation that the film seems to celebrate.  But doesn't this vindicate the men in the grey-flannel business suits?  And, therefore, doesn't this celebration of corporate teamwork undercut the entire theme of the film?  (And what's with the weird sun-flare on the lens in the penultimate scene shot on desert test-track -- the flare looks exactly like the Chevrolet logo?  What is this supposed to mean?  If its just a random mistake, it's mighty odd.)  The racing scenes are the worst thing in the film -- they are, more or less, dull.  The races involve lots of close-ups of Christian Bale squinting at the road, quick inserts of his tachometer and his foot on the pedal; sometimes, we get a shot of him shifting gears -- this is interspersed with interminable repetitive shots of the race cars hurling either to or away from the camera.  The staging of the race scenes is both repetitive and unimaginative to boot -- furthermore, unless you're a motorhead, the viewer doesn't know how these races are conducted.  The film posits the LeMans 24 hour race as the ultimate test of man and machine -- but the drivers, apparently, only drive the vehicles in four-hour shifts and, so, for half the race the hero, Ken Miles, is sleeping.  (We don't find this out until the climactic race).  This also undercuts Miles' achievement -- someone else drove half the race, and, therefore, doesn't that driver who is scarcely seen and scarcely named deserve half the credit for the victory?  Old-style racing movies of this generally showed a couple of brutal and fatal accidents in the first hour or so -- therefore, sharpening suspense and upping the stakes for the final race.  Mangold is too sophisticated for this strategy -- he deliberately de-emphasizes the danger involved in the races, a bold approach to a movie like this, but ultimately a choice that subverts the film.  Finally, the movie is full of shots of Shelby Carroll and Ken Miles driving like maniacs on quiet residential boulevards or through small California cities -- these shots are simply infuriating.  By what right, do these race-car drivers threaten others on public highways with their antics.  How are we supposed to respond to one of the heroes, for instance, making a u-turn in city traffic and nearly causing a half-dozen wrecks.  Are we supposed to applaud this audacity.  I was appalled.   

The Creeping Garden

Slime mold does not seem a promising subject for a feature-length film, but the documentary on this subject, The Creeping Garden (2014) is certainly compelling -- indeed, the fact that the film is so interesting and, even, moving is crucial to the picture's central theme.  Simply put, slime molds are wonderful and the sense of wonder is integral to what it means to be human.  In fact, as the movie shows us, the emotion of pure wonder is itself a powerful incentive to the human imagination and its activity in the world.  (The picture is the work of UK filmmakers Tim Grabham and Steve Jaspar.)

For most of history, slime molds have been regarded as a kind of fungus.  In fact, they are  completely different from fungi, sharing only the characteristic that they are propagated by spores -- depicted abstractly in this movie as little amber-colored cubes spinning in a black void.  The molds were once thought to be animals because they move with apparent intention, even, intelligence.  The molds expand as networks of moist yellow or pink or white cells creating delicate lattices or strange alien-looking protuberances on tiny stalks,  In some forms, the molds become globular, reddish or yellow tumors the size of softballs growing on dead wood or under logs.  The molds have a peculiar circulatory system that flushes fluid through tiny capillaries in both directions, the flow reversing every four or five seconds.  They are in constant motion although this activity is invisible to the eye -- the film is principally shot in time-lapse photography so that we can see how the molds throb and throw out translucent slime tentacles as they search for food.  Slime molds are exceedingly efficient in developing pathways between objectives -- they minimize energy use by selecting the most direct and efficient route to nutrients.  (In the laboratory, they eat flakes of oat meal.)  The path-optimization characteristics of the mold cause their networks to closely resemble human-made roads -- also structures that optimize connections between points.  (One shot shows a slime mold superimposed over a map of the United States with major cities marked by bits of oat-meal -- the mold approximates the freeway system in the U.S.(in fact, the path from Chicago to Seattle angles across Wisconsin, through Minnesota and, then, courses west exactly on the route where Interstate 90 runs.))

Very quickly, it becomes apparent that enormous realms of human endeavor can be considered in light of the humble slime-mold.  It turns out that the early time-lapse films made even before 1900 were devised to depict the curious pulsing and tentacular growth of these molds.  (This part of the film shows us ancient time-lapse films and how they developed from magic lantern nature lectures.)  The molds are too inconspicuous and, seemingly, inconsequential to have inspired much interest by professional scientists -- accordingly, the picture also provides a discourse on amateur or citizen science:  most of what we know about these molds is the result of study by people simply poking about in the woods, an activity that we see from time to time as a hobbyist (with a disconcertingly heavy rural English accent) searches a tangled thicket for these entities.  The fractal growth of the slime molds can be used for bio-computing -- in other words, the slime molds can be used as a kind of circuit board for conveying information.  This application leads the film into episodes in which the growth of the molds triggers certain electrical signals that can play a piano and, indeed, compose music -- since the mold's growth is not chaotic but follows certain clearly defined patterns.  Weird-looking human heads, lifelike mannequins, are hooked to the slime-mold samples and, then, make singing sounds through rubber or plastic lips -- this is all very eerie and in keeping with the interest that some artists have shown in using slime-mold growth patterns as templates for abstract paintings.  It is suggested that the way slime-molds grow may be an emblem for "grass-roots" political activism -- that is, organization from the bottom-up as opposed to hierarchies dictated from above.  In one sequence, human test subjects are persuaded to mimic slime-mold behavior, forming affiliative links through tethers between people and, then, must attempt to navigate mazes without use of verbal cues.  The crowds of people tied together don't do materially better than the molds in running through labyrinths.

The theme of the film emerges only in the documentary's final minute or two.  A scientist notes that slime molds play no known role in the ecologies in which they exist -- if all molds suddenly vanished from the earth it's not at all clear that we would notice the difference.  Unlike fungi, the molds don't break down organic matter and aid decomposition -- they merely graze on the bacteria on the surface of decomposing organic matter (if anything slowing decomposition).  Nothing seems to depend upon slime molds.  So what are they for?  Here the film implies a leap of faith that is anthropocentric (but necessarily so since all of our thought is by definition man-centered.)  The film seems to suggest that slime molds represent a pure "gift" to humanity -- they have no known utility, but are beautiful in their own right; they are a wholly gratuitous aid to the human imagination inspiring wonderful art and artifacts (the bio-computers) -- we don't need them except as impetus for remarkable flights of the imagination, of which the film is one example.  We don't need slime molds, but, then, don't need Mozart either.

In form, The Creeping Garden is an ecstatic documentary of the kind pioneered by Werner Herzog in his films about cave art or volcanoes or Antarctica.  The human specimens on display in the film are odd-looking people, far less attractive than the molds that they admire, and they are often filmed from peculiar and unflattering angles.  Of course, the time-lapse imagery of the molds themselves is alien, grotesque, and beautiful.  (The extras on the CD are worth exploring.  One short film is called "Activating Memory" and it is extraordinarily moving.  The film is about bio-computing in that a group of four paralyzed men and women are invited to compose musical themes using their eyes alone and their brain-waves. These themes can be woven together to interact with a live string quartet.  The resulting composition called "Activating Memory" itself is quite beautiful and affords an occasion for people who are wholly "locked-in" to work cooperatively to create a thing of beauty, the musical composition that is performed for an audience at the Royal Neurological Hospital. This film is very short but it is majestic.  This film dovetails with the themes in the feature-length documentary suggesting that humans exist to explore their world and create beauty in their interactions with it.)

Manhunter

In 1986, Michael Mann, then famous for directing Thief (1981) and the TV show Miami Vice, adapted Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon for the big screen.  Red Dragon is the gruesome page-turner that introduced the psychopathic Hannibal Lecter to the world.  Mann's version of the novel, the first adaptation of Harris' cycle of novels featuring this character, is called Manhunter.  (The producer didn't want people to confuse the film with Michael Cimino's box-office failure Year of the Dragon.)  Mann's movie was too far before its time, and, so heavily stylized that most critics mistook it for a kind of music video, pretty but superficial, and, so, it flopped at the box-office.  I was apparently one of the few people who saw the movie on the big screen -- I recall being irritated by the picture's aesthetics, but some of the scenes in the film have stayed with me all of my life.  (In particular, I recall a very scary sequence in which a man strapped to a wheel-chair is lit on fire and rolls down the ramp of an underground parking lot, the figure engulfed in flame blasting forward right into the face of the viewer; another sequence, involving a runner, is so audacious that no one ever mentions it, but, when I saw the film on TV, sure enough the sequence, which I thought I might have dreamed, is right there on-screen, part of the movie.)  Later, The Silence of the Lambs made this material popular and a series of films featuring Lecter and Harris' other grotesque serial killers ensued with the result that Manhunter was remade, this time under the story's proper title Red Dragon (2002), the name of the source novel.  Manhunter is different from the other versions of these stories and, in some ways, better -- as the charismatic  Lecter character is elaborated in subsequent novels and film adaptations, he becomes a sort of super-hero, vested with semi-magical powers and involved in ever more outrageous and baroque plots, none of them even remotely as convincing as Lecter's cameo role in Manhunter and the novel on which it is based.  Mann shoots the film with characters posed against neon-haze or voids that glow like Rothko paintings -- whole sequences are shot in completely unnatural light, the figures tinted by the deep violet or sunset orange.  Slow-motion is deployed to extend and delay action and the climactic shoot-out is filmed by cameras keyed to record the mayhem at different speeds -- this gives the violence an odd stuttering, slightly off-focus effect:  it seems both hyper-real and unreal at the same time.  There are lurid effects:  a couple visualized by the murderous psychopath seems to radiate blinding light.  Corpses with mirrors stuck in their eyes and nostrils and mouths look like strange angelic beings, vessels blazing with glacially white radiance.  When the two investigators debate the facts and, ultimately figure out the villain's modus operandi, the hero is posed against a window that opens onto a towering skyscraper with a halo of neon-white around its summit, a rococo image for the illumination that the character experiences when he solves the crime (it's the Mann-equivalent of a cartoon light bulb suddenly appearing next to a character's head to signify a moment of intuitive brilliance.)  The murderer's pad is equipped with a wall-size mural of Mars, the red planet on which "Red Dragon", the killer's totemic icon, seems to dwell -- at the climax, the killer tooting a sawed-off shotgun bursts through the mural, literally emerging from the Martian landscape.  (Otherwise, the killer's home is full of interesting abstract still-lifes: a clay jug on a shelf is lit like a painting by Morandi.)  There are shots set in laboratories where film is developed and, so, the characters are imprisoned in weird darkness or ultra-violet or infra-red light.  The sky is always glowing with sunset and the houses where the killings have occurred are ultra-chic modernist palaces, pale and curvilinear with strange jutting balconies, cantilevered steps, odd white piers (the architecture looks like the work of Venturi and Rauch, seaside villas with gleaming white walls -- apparently, one of the scenes was shot in Robert Rauschenberg's home on the water somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico.)  The entire film is a sort of assault on the senses -- there is a constant drone and throb of techno-rock, buzzing undertones with coruscating pulsing rhythm:  the whole soundtrack, which is continuous, wall to wall, under the images, doesn't illustrate the action but rather acts to distance everything, giving the whole film the sense that it is some kind of music video.  (The technodrone music is like Tangerine Dream, who scored Mann's Thief, and the industrial hum of the music often sounds like the Phil Collins' song   but without the lyrics.)

The plot is pretty much standard stuff, although this level of graphic violence and horror in a mainstream film was unusual in 1986.  A psycho-killer is murdering whole families, apparently posing the bloody corpses with mirrors stuck in their eyes and mouths.  A heroic FBI man, Will  Graham, gone into retirement after almost being killed by the cannibal Lektor (as the name is spelled in this film), is enticed into trying to solve the murders and capture the villain, dubbed the "Tooth Fairy" by the tabloids.  (The bad guy's insanity is almost comically over-determined:  he uses golden dentures to bite off  his victim's faces, suffers from moon-madness (the full moon induces his killings), worships William Blake's terrifying image of the Red Dragon and the woman of light, imagines his home to be Mars, and has a number of other bizarre quirks as well.)  This walking, talking manifestation of insanity, however, passes as normal and has a job as a photo developer, a trade that allows him to study in detail the intimate details of his victim's life, all so that he can better plot his murders.  (He spends hours screening home-movies of the families he intends to kill.)  Graham and his side kick, played by Dennis Farina, set out to capture the Tooth Fairy and prevent him from killing again.  In order to psyche-out the motivations of the insane Tooth Fairy, Graham trains himself to experience states of madness (sort of homeopathic approach to crime detection) -- he embarks on the questionable practice of trying to enter into the villain's mind.  (This is a standard trope today -- you have to think like a serial killer to catch one -- a questionable, if highly melodramatic concept, invoked by shows as disparate as CSI and Mindhunter, but it was a relatively new idea in 1986).  Graham enlists the help of his old nemesis, the Dr. Moriarty of serial killers, Hannibal Lecter.  Lecter is so intimidating that Graham flees him, picturesquely running down huge ramps in some kind of post-modern panopticon insane asylum, another example of Mann's borrowings from the esthetic and architectural motifs found in Antonioni movies.  Lecter gets in league with the Tooth Fairy and the bad guys threaten Graham's blonde wife -- she looks like a fashion model -- and his cute tow-headed son.  This makes things personal for Graham and he intensifies his efforts to catch the bad guy.  Tom Noonan playing the huge Frankenstein-like monster,  Francis Dolarhyde (the Tooth Fairy's real name) is excellent, conveying somehow both hideous rage conjoined with a fragile, almost infantile vulnerability.  Harris is a maximalist as a novelist and just keeps piling melodramatic situations on top of one another.  Not content with having the Tooth Fairy plotting to kill a whole family, Harris' novel introduces a love element into the story -- an aspect of his "throw in the kitchen-sink" kind of narrative that seriously disfigured the later Hannibal Lecter novels.  (Harris never knows when enough is enough -- in one of his books, he has a guy who literally drinks cocktails made from the tears of tormented orphans).  Manhunter bogs down in a love story in which the Tooth Fairy romances a blind woman -- yes, that's right, a blind woman.  (The woman is played very well as mixture of helplessness and true grit by Joan Allen).  The sex scenes between the monster and the woman are among the best things in the film -- Dolarhyde reverts to sucking the thumb of his lover, all of this tinted in some garish neon-color by Mann's cinematographer.  With his forehead furrowed and his eyes expressing unutterable loneliness, Dolarhyde's madness is so manifest that these scenes probe the kind of ultimate damnation that one can glimpse in the granddaddy of this genre, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.  Ultimately, there's lots of blood shed and the bad guy is riddled with bullets so that blood gushes out of him giving the dead body the sort of scarlet wings that Blake painted in his horrific image.  Mann studiously, even, pedantically works out metaphors about blindness and seeing -- the mirrors in the eyes of the corpses, the dark rooms and laboratories where film is developed, the villain endlessly watching home movies, our own desire to see and yet not see, and, at last, the oldest gag in the book:  the monster menacing the beautiful blind woman.

About one-third through the film, Mann pauses and comments on his own stylistic antics.  The cops set up a sting and when a running man appears, there's a big chase with drawn guns, almost all of it filmed in iconic slow-motion.  The running man turns out to be just a black jogger.  When he's asked why he fled the advancing cops, he says something like "What would you do if saw a bunch of guys comin' at you in slow-motion?"  The scene is wonderful and hilarious but everyone pretends that it doesn't exist. You will never find this moment mentioned in any mainstream summary of the movie  but it really the best thing in the film.       

Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War -- 1965-1975

Artists Respond is an exhibit of art relating to the Vietnam War on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  The exhibit may be of some minor interest to people born after this war.  For those of us who recall the Vietnam War as reported on TV and the political turmoil that the conflict engendered, there is nothing in this show but ugly objects with painful memories attached to them.  Some of these artifacts may have limited interest historically ' but with no real exceptions, however, there is no art in this show -- merely nasty forms of anti-war propaganda.  Even if you opposed this war, as most of us did, more or less reflexively, the art in this show is completely uninspiring -- it doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know.  The Vietnam debacle inspired some minor literature, a few interesting films, and one genuine and mysteriously moving masterpiece, Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall in Washington.  There's nothing in this show that remotely compares to any of these few things. 

Most of the stuff in this show is, more or less, hideous.  There is a big mural showing women and babies murdered by American soldiers at My Lai, images of wounded and disfigured soldiers, a couple of large wall-sized paintings that represent Pop Art in its crudest forms.  We have magazine covers manipulated to show happy suburban families enjoying their leisure while atrocities are committed just beyond their windows, lots of posters decrying the barbarism of the war, and some unpleasant "happenings" or conceptual art:  poor Yoko Ono sits passively while people snip off her clothes -- the label tells us that, although Yoko was not Vietnamese but Japanese, she's still an Asian woman and so somehow the video-tape of this event is relevant.  Carolyn Schneeman gets sort of naked and coats her body with adhesive and some sort of white flaky substance -- this is fairly disgusting but only tangentially related to the theme of the show. (A better example of this kind of stunt are souvenirs of the so-called "mud man", a fellow who coated himself in goo and, then, walked for 18 miles along Wiltshire Blvd in LA -- this agon is documented by a number of pictures and a huge stack of wooden branches, also covered in mud, that the man carried on his march.  These things are genuinely disturbing.)  Predictably, the best works in the show are by established artists who provided the equivalent of "occasional" work relating to the war.  There is a spooky interior by Ed Kienholz with a TV embedded in a tombstone and another work that apparently involved strewing 50,000 war surplus uniforms over some fields to simulate the number of casualties in the conflict.  The best canvas in the show is Philip Guston's image of Dick Nixon scarlet-faced with swollen nose and jowls, shedding a single tear from his one cyclopean eye, as he drags the montrous pillar of his phlebitis-swollen leg across a desolate plain -- this is an effective image and brilliantly painted.  Barnett Newman's barbed wire fence encased in a steel framework casts some pretty shadows when properly lit -- the assemblage has something to do with the fighting in Chicago during the Democratic Convention in that city in 1968.  A lot of collages displayed on the walls look a little like the Weimar Republic work of Hannah Hoch or John Heartfield -- but are less accomplished.  There's a big predictable mural by Leon Golub and a few other atrocity pictures.  Jim Nutt's "Summer Salt" is effectively hideous and grotesque -- the canon for inclusion in this show seems to be that if something is really, really ugly it gets admitted to the gallery, even though it's actual connection to the Vietnam War is questionable. 

Curiously, some of the best things in these galleries are not part of the MIA show itself.  Two galleries at the end of the exhibit display works by Hmong artists -- these things seem to be part of a Smithsonian show accompanying the MIA exhibition.  There are a number of childishly colorful images of combat in the Hmong territories adjacent to Vietnam -- these folk art items, related to Hmong tapestry and fabric work, have a barbaric intensity that makes them quite effective.  In addition, there are some startling images of Hmong people in Virginia engaged in exceptionally realistic-looking war reenactments, apparently a popular activity -- these include images of napalm exploding, downed helicopters, and snipers shooting a patrols of other Hmong dressed up as Viet Cong or NVA soldiers.  Finally, three Louisville Sluggers bats have been painstakingly carved into images of the monk, Thich Quang Duc, self-immolating himself -- these miniature images cut into filigree in window-like openings in the broad part of the bats are very exquisitely made, and look like they have been carved into ivory.  These are beautiful and memorable objects unlike almost everything in the MIA show. 

Parasite

Bong Joon Ho's Parasite (2019) is so convincingly crafted and gripping that its various contrivances  (a disabling allergy to peaches, for instance, and plot points telegraphed in Morse code) seem, either, invisible or charming.  The movie, that plays like a deranged mash-up of Kore-Eda's Shoplifters and Jordan Peele's Us, seems just about perfect while the viewer is under its spell.  Only later do some slight reservations arise on the basis of the film's slightly absurd plotting -- but the film's classically lucid narrative style, and, ultimately, its densely allegorical implications override objections.  Allegory requires symbols, objective correlatives, and bizarre plot twists to make its point.  When we read Flannery O'Connor, we are conscious that the odd things that occur are interesting because grotesque in their own right, but, also, as emblems for the narratives deeper meanings.  On some deep level, Parasite is like Flannery O'Connor -- it's grotesque plot is devised to communicate to us troubling intimations about inequality in society.  The film is so pertinent to the decade in which we live that I expect the picture will be remade in Hollywood within the next 18 months -- with a cast that is half-Latino or African-American, I suspect that the film will resonate even more deeply in this country than South Korea.

Parasite is the story of two families.  The Kim family live in a semi-basement apartment that has cockroaches, with a smelly-looking and bizarre bathroom raised on tile platform in a niche, and a perfect vantage to observe drunks urinating against the alley wall outside.  The Kim's are not exactly industrious -- they eke out a living by petty crime and piece-work folding pizza boxes.  Far above the Kim's (both literally and figuratively) are the Park family -- they inhabit a vast post-modernist mansion designed by a renowned architect in a compound that includes a spacious back yard and huge fortified walls.  The Park family are self-satisfied, very wealthy, and not too smart.  (As used to be said about the younger George Bush, they were born on third base but think they hit a triple.)  Mrs. Park, an attractive somewhat child-like woman, is the doting mother of two children; she is the kind of mother who is not satisfied unless her kids are both precocious and, also, slightly unwell, that is, neurotic.  The enterprising eldest son in the Kim family takes over as English tutor to the debutante daughter in the Park clan.  (The original tutor has gone to study abroad.)    Kim Jr. circumspectly accuses the housekeeper of concealing tuberculosis from her employers -- in fact, the poor woman is hyper-allergenic to peach fuzz and he has seeded her hair with the stuff.  When the miserable, sneezing housekeeper is fired, he arranges for his mother to take over that position.  The clever and attractive Kim family daughter has already insinuated herself into the good graces of the Parks' -- she purports to be an art teacher and art therapist, recognizing in the bratty little boy, as she says, a "Basquiat-like genius" as well as the signs of profound childhood trauma.  (As it happens, the little boy has seen a ghost emerging from the basement of the mansion.)  Miss Kim discretely removes her panties and places them in one of the Park family's Mercedes Benz sedans.  This maneuver results in the firing of the chauffeur, who is, needless, to say replaced by her father, Kim Sr. With every member of the family gainfully employed by the Parks, the Kim clan are in an excellent position to prosper.  Although not acknowledging that they are all related, and each equipped with elaborate cover stories, the Kim's make the mistake of exploiting their new-found prosperity by celebrating on a dark and rainy night when the Park family has gone "camping" -- more like "glamping" or "glamor-camping".  The four members of the Kim family are feasting and boozing it up in the Park's mansion when they receive word from the lady of the house that the campground is flooded and that theyhave aborted their weekend venture wealthy and are are returning home, indeed, only eight minutes away.  And, it's at this point, about midway through the movie that things start to go horribly wrong, a concatenation of events that leads to a gory massacre at the end of the film.  These misfortunes arise because in order to finagle their way into the Park household, the Kim's have accused the servants already working in the compound of misdeeds, loathsome illnesses, and the like.  These actions have consequences and they are spectacular.

Spoilers follow:  During the illicit feast, the discharged housekeeper replaced by Mrs. Kim appears, bedraggled in the driving rainstorm.  It turns out that the house is equipped with a secret bunker deep  underground, a sort of panic room qua bomb shelter which is unknown to the Park family.  The woman's husband, a thug, has been secretly living in the hidden cellar.  When she was fired on the basis of a TB scare, he was trapped in the secret bunker and, in fact, starving.  The maid frees him and a brutal brawl ensues -- the discharged maid plans to blackmail the Kim interlopers with the result that people get beaten up, hurled down concrete steps, and, ultimately, tied-up in the concealed bunker.  The downpour floods the slums and when the Kim family returns to their "semi-basement apartment," it is all underwater with the toilet on the tile pedestal periodically erupting in geysers of human excrement.  Kim father and son are forced to spend the night in a noisome gymnasium full of refugees from the flooded slums. They conspire, presumably to murder the inhabitants of the secret bunker, now either unconscious or tied up in the subterranean vault.  (Their conspiracy is an odd one -- they both agree that the best plan is no plan at all.  But their intent seems pretty clear.)  In the meantime, the sun has come out and it is a lovely day and Mrs. Park decides to hold a birthday party for her son who is obsessed with American Indians.  (He has been camping in the backyard in the downpour in a teepee.)  The thug in the cellar has been beating his head against a light switch that is connected to an upstairs fixture -- he is flashing out Morse Code:  H-E-L-P  M-E.  In the process, he's ripped open his forehead and is bleeding. copiously.  His wife, the previous maid, has died as a result of a subdural hematoma and is sprawled across the threshold to the underground compound. The Park family and their wealthy friends are now enjoying a garden party.  Mr. Park and Mr. Kim are hiding in the bush, dressed as Red Indians and carrying hatchets -- in fact, Mr. Kim looks a lot like Geronimo.  Their plan is to leap out of the bushes and pretend to attack Mrs. Park and the little boy.  The wounded thug in the basement gets loose, his face a mask of blood, he seizes a big knife, and all hell breaks loose at the garden party.  In the ensuing melee, Mr. Kim pushed to the limits of his endurance stabs Mr. Park to death and, then, flees.  (He is insulted because Park has wrinkled his nose at Kim's smell -- after all, Kim has spent the night in a gymnasium sleeping among hundreds of people drenched in sewer water.)  The film has a brief haunting coda, a kind of fantasy or flash-forward that suggests indelibly the basis for the poor accepting the power that the rich exert over them.  In Capitalist societies, even the very poor admire the rich because they believe that they, too, have the opportunity to prosper and become wealthy themselves -- although, of course, this idea is mostly just a pious fraud. 

The plot is even more complex than I have suggested, although everything is clear enough as it is happening on-screen.  Since I had to wink shut my eyes a couple time during the bloody massacre at the film's end, I'm not entirely sure who killed whom and in what order -- but I got the gist of things.  Clearly, there are some cultural references that elude an American audience.  I have the suspicion that the enterprising but poverty-stricken Kim family are refugees from North Korea or rural environs near the DMZ -- but this isn't clear to me.  At one point, one of the Kim's references a North Korean broadcaster threatening that "missiles will rain down on the south."  In general, there is a sense of social stratification that is not wholly clear to me and that may be founded, as well, in accents and ways of speaking that can't be conveyed in subtitles.  One plot point involves a so-called "Scholar's Stone" -- that is a unique and strangely shaped rock that has been collected by a grandfather in the Kim family and that has been kept in a beautiful wooden case.  This artifact suggests that previous generations of the Kim family were not only highly literate but, also, cultured -- again, I'm not sure what this means, although the rock is important in the massacre at the end of the film:  it's used as a lethal bludgeon.  In general terms, the film suggests that Korean society is comprised of those who are subject to hideous flooding, the deluge in the center of the film, and those who are immune to such perils because of their ill-deserved wealth.  The Kim's live literally in the "lower depths" --this is demonstrated in a breathtaking sequence of shots that show the flood.  The movie is designed as largely horizontal, with the camera tracking and dollying through the huge Park home.  But when the Kim family leaves the Park compound, we see them running alongside the flooding river and, then, descending through tenement canyons down to the lowest level of the city where everything is submerged under flooding sewage.  These sequences "read" like a descent into Hell and they are the equivalent of the final scenes in Us in which the heroine descends into the subterranean world from which their half-crazed doubles have emerged.  The Park and Kim families are, in effect, doubles of one another:  Husband and wife, with two children -- a boy and a girl.  The film suggests several propositions:  society consists of people playing socially assigned roles of parasite or host, although it's not wholly clear here who is the parasite and who the host:  on an obvious level, the Kim family lives as a parasite on the Parks -- but, perhaps, the Parks are really parasites on the work required to support them expended by the Kim's.  Second, income inequality consigns some to flooded slums while others live in mountaintop refuges -- the poor "smell" of the "subways" someone says:  "Not that I go down there any more."  Third, the storm is coming and there will be a high price to be paid on the day of reckoning:  when the poor go Apache on us, then, the streets will be full of blood. 

La Pointe Courte

Agnes Varda, the great French film maker, made La Pointe Courte  in 1954 on location at Sete, a French city on the Riviera,  "La Pointe Courte" names the sector of the town where its fishermen live, a neighborhood of shacks, alleys where women hang laundry to dry, and labyrinths of rotting docks wrapped in nets and seaweed.  Varda was only 25 when the movie was completed.  Although not completely successful, the film is astonishing from start to finish.  Varda grew up without watching movies and she has a uniquely poetic film vocabulary that owes nothing to Hollywood -- the principal governing the film is an aggressive use of montage, cutting together disparate images, but her practice is warm, lush, and not at all theoretical:  not only was she ignorant of Hollywood film practice, she also is singularly uninfluenced by Eisenstein's theories of editing.  Everything about the movie is fresh and startling. 

At the end of her life, Varda describes her first movie as based on  Faulkner's Wild Palms, a book that tells two stories that don't really intersect in anyway.  Varda's description of her first film appears in her last movie Varda on Varda, a picture premiered in Berlin only a few months before the director's death.  In fact, the film seems to tell three stories, although one is only slightly developed.  In the first story, a man from the village who has been living in Paris meets his lover and shows her around the tiny, derelict-looking fishing village -- the couple is estranged and both have sought other relationships.  The woman is distressed by the village's poverty -- for instance, there is no running water in the shack where the man grew up.  After a series of long, philosophically dense dialogues, the man and woman decide to stay together and, after spending a day and night in the village, depart together in the morning on the train to Paris.  In the second story, members of the village conspire against the authorities who have accused the fishermen of selling shellfish polluted by some kind of noxious bacteria.  This story involves threats by inspectors to close down the fishing operations and belligerent counter-threats made by the fisherman and their formidable wives.  In the third story, a father disapproves of a young man who wishes to court his 16-year-old daughter -- in the end, he seems to relent and allows her to dance with the boy at a celebration that takes place after a "jousting tournament" on the grand canal at Sete.  There are other smaller and more enigmatic narratives, micro-stories entangled with these three plot strands and the film is visually highly complex, built from passages that have completely different styles and pictorial textures. 

The movie begins with exploration of the squalid-looking fishing village -- the camera explores the shacks, the docks and decaying piers, the work sites where people repair boats or sort cockles, the ubiquitous nets hanging from fences and poles, the nearby railroad tracks and seaweed-encrusted beaches, and the harsh-looking industrial sites near the lagoon and channel where the villagers live.  The whole place is overrun with a tribe of black cats -- they prowl  through about two-thirds of the images in the film and provide a sort of spectral commentary on the action:  the cats have a little of the mysterious quality of the felines in a Bonnard canvas.  The woman from Paris has a flat, Slavic face -- she's not conventionally pretty but her features have a fine cubist aspect to them.  And, in fact, she and her sulking lover are often posed in cubist profile -- a face turned sideways against the other visage filmed from a full frontal perspective. (Bergman uses this type of shot in Persona, but that's about ten years after this movie was made.)  The sequences with the lovers have a dreamy highly stylized, almost surreal quality -- it looks like the sort of alienated mise-en-scene that characterizes an Antonioni picture like L'Eclisse  or The Red Desert.  In fact, some of the shots seem to be templates for sequences in Antonioni films in which disenchanted lovers bicker while wandering through picturesque industrial wastelands.  This aspect of the movie is stilted and cold (intentionally so) and the characters speak in elaborate poetry, a bit like actors in a play by Corneille or Racine.  I don't think this part of the movie works very well -- it seems pretentious and over-composed, but, when one considers that Varda is pioneering this sort of material (the movie was made ten years before the Antonioni films that it resembles), the technical aspects of the narrative and the boldness with which Varda cuts away to "objective correlatives" to her character's distress in the wasteland through which they wander is truly extraordinary.  The scenes involving the fishermen are filmed without condescension and have a raw documentary presence -- Varda doesn't sentimentalize the fishermen and their broods of ragged children.  In one shocking scene, we see a fisherman drowning kittens in a bucket of what looks like dirty oil.  This is intercut with images of a sick toddler dying -- he lies alone in a room apart from his six dirty-looking siblings, resting in what seems to be an open suitcase.  When he dies, an old woman enters the dismal room -- it's like a cave -- and begins to keen.  The mother sits stricken next to the dead child.  Then, the film cuts percussively to the father slapping a little boy -- the kid has annoyed him in some way, made some rude or inappropriate comment about the death of his brother.  Father, then, takes the child to get some licorice.  There is a similar "shock cut" after a long dialogue between the lovers.  Their speeches reach levels of flowery, poetic rhetoric -- it seems wholly improbable that anyone would speak this way.  Then, the film cuts to another adult slapping a little kid hard in face (these shots don't seem to be staged.)  It's very confrontational, a harsh comment on the poetry that the lovers are spewing at one another.  In the film's last twenty minutes, the tone of the picture again changes radically:  we seem to be in Venice, at the Grand Canal where there is aquatic jousting underway.  Big galleys full of rowing men sideswipe one another while champions with long lances try to knock one another off the boats.  (The defeated men fall in an aerial ballet into the channel.)  A big crowd is gathered, thousands of people, it seems.  After the jousting tournament, the teams gather in their boat-houses for a celebratory meal -- the women wait outside.  Then, there is a dance filmed from overhead.  The Parisian lovers push through the dancing crowds on their way to the train station.  The girls quarrel with their boyfriends over drowning kittens -- they want, at least, a few of the kittens to be spared.  A quartet of old men perform on their musical instruments and the film ends, the action encompassing one day and half of one night.  Varda makes no attempt to align her narratives.  In fact, she seems to urge a different camera style on each story.  The separate narratives create force-fields that radically alter the landscapes in which the plot takes place -- the love story is set in a waste-land, the narrative about the polluted shellfish is filmed against the fishing village portrayed as in a documentary; the young lovers are shot in the midst of warm spaces crowded with carousing people.  The only real cross-over between the stories are a few comments made by the fishermen -- one of the fisherman's wives says abruptly of the Parisian lovers:  "They talk too much to be happy." 

The most extraordinary aspect of La Pointe Courte is Varda's delight in the tactile aspects of the things that she films.  The movie is full of textures depicted with fantastic verve and enthusiasm.  When the lovers talk about sexual betrayal, the camera seeks out pots and buckets full of nameless filth.  When the woman announces she is leaving her boyfriend, a strange locomotive, terribly battered appears in a vacant lot full of weeds and gravel -- the locomotive squeaks and squeals on its wheels as it advances.  The camera picks out the slimy texture of eels, the white underbellies of mullets, the appearance of a sandy field all cut and incised with wheel marks from carts and dragged boats, the precise grain of driftwood, the flopping shadows cast by underwear dancing in the mistral wind on a clothes line, the soft fur of cats, a basket casting a filigree shadow on a dusty alleyway, wind blowing through the drying clothes, the slop a mother is feeding to her hungry family, the texture of old sails, rotting wood, rope and canvas.  The best scenes in the movie are comparable to Jean Vigo's L'Atalante and this is high praise. 

Detour

Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945) is revered as the secret source for much of  today's independent cinema.  A Poverty Row production, Ulmer manages to make the film's deficiencies seem illustrative of the movie's theme: hopes for happiness are futile, the open road leads nowhere, and we are all the playthings of a malign Fate.  The tiny cast are trapped together in a film that becomes increasingly claustrophobic -- there's no false beauty, no showy camera-movements, scarcely even any sets.  The movie is film noir as imagined by Samuel Beckett -- it could be staged with a single open mouth speaking in the darkness. In fact, it's almost that minimal as it stands.  Critics have observed that the film's embattled minimalism is an emblem for Ulmer's career.  After making The Black Cat in 1934, Ulmer was blacklisted by Uncle Carl Laemmle, the production head at Universal Studios who served as a patriarchal figure for German-speaking Jews fleeing Berlin's UFA for Los Angeles.  Apparently, Laemmle perceived the poetic and extravagant vehicle for Lugosi and Karloff (crammed with embalmed sleeping beauties, Black Masses and torture all taking place on the Golgotha of a nameless Mitteleuropaische WWI battlefield) as too extreme, too expensive, and too stylized.  There was some suspicion that the handsome Ulmer was messing around with the wife of Laemmle's favorite nephew.  In any event, Onkel Carl put the hex on Ulmer and he spent the rest of his life making zero--budget pictures for bottom-of-the-line studios.  (Detour was financed by P. R.C. -- Producers Releasing Corporation).  The sinister Destiny that corrupts and damns Ulmer's protagonists, the detour that diverts them from happiness, may be an allegory for the director's own thwarted career.

Detour is a savage system of disappointed expectations.  Al, the anti-hero, sets off cross-country to rejoin his girlfriend who has left New York for Hollywood -- he never makes it to the goal of his journey.  Al's girlfriend, a cabaret singer, goes out to LA to find her fortune in show business -- she ends up a "hash-slinger".  The film's terrifying femme fatale, Vera, hatches an elaborate scheme to defraud a wealthy dying man -- but the scheme is never implemented.  The characters are so doomed that they can't even accomplish a simple transaction such as selling a car to a rapacious used car dealer.  People set off on trips only to die inexplicably.  The hero arguably is responsible for two deaths and expects to be arrested at any moment -- but he gets to the end of the film and, only in the last shot, do we see him staggering down a dark road on which he gets into a police car as if accepting a lift from a taxi:  there's no drama at all and the final scene on the dark road might not even be real, just another disconsolate fantasy of the doomed hero.  The movie is narrated as a flashback -- in the first shots after the peculiar title sequence, we see the protagonist stumbling through the desert like a man walking to his execution.  Al ends up in a miserable diner where he fights with everyone, knocked into a reverie by a big band tune someone plays on the jukebox.  From the very outset, we know that Al is trapped and doomed, that there's no way out, that we are, in effect, hearing a dying declaration.  (Oddly enough, the actor who plays the perpetually morose Al, Tom Neal, was doomed himself -- after making the movie, the ex-boxer almost beat Franchot Tone to death in a brawl over a woman; later, he was convicted of manslaughter for killing his girlfriend and served six years in prison.)

Detour's plot is less a story than a kind of bitter anecdote of the sort that we might read in de Maupassant or Ambrose Bierce.  A gifted pianist is trapped playing jazz is New York City dives.  He's in love with the girl who sings with the band.  The girl is ambitious and, also, perhaps, perceives her relationship with Al to be going nowhere.  After hours, they walk along Riverside Boulevard in New York in a dense, all-enveloping fog -- Ulmer can't afford sets showing the city, but the chilly fog effects are wholly consistent with the movie's theme:  people are moving around in a sort of delirious haze.  The girl departs for Los Angeles to pursue her career as a singer leaving Al behind.  And, then, as is said laconically in Icelandic sagas she is, with the exception three inserted shots, "out of the story."  (One of the inserts is the film's showiest image, a picture of the girl singing while colossal shadows of jazz musicians are cast on the white wall behind her -- the image is obviously Al's fantasy, something he has imagined, since its a complete non sequitur:  she never makes it in Hollywood and ends up a waitress "slinging hash.")  Playing at some sort of upper crust soiree, Al gets paid ten dollars as a tip.  (We see him performing a spectacular set of variations, improvising wildly, with his hands entirely detached, it seems, from his brooding, upturned face -- as in David Lynch films, Ulmer portrays music as a kind of ecstatic trance.).  With his ten bucks. Al calls long-distance to his girlfriend and promises that he will come to her even if he has to "crawl."  Then, he sets off cross-country hitchhiking.  On a lonely and desolate stretch of highway in Arizona, Al rides with a sleazy grifter named Haskell.  Something is wrong with Haskell -- he keeps popping pills.  Haskell has bad scratches on his hand.  He boasts about picking up a female hitchhiker with the expectation that he would rape her -- but she fought back.  No paragon of virtue, Al seems mildly amused by the story and seems to accept that Haskell was well within his rights in assaulting the woman and, then, apparently, dropping her off in the middle of nowhere.  Haskell buys Al a dinner and, then, falls asleep in his convertible while the hero is driving.  Rain falls, flooding the inside of the convertible, and Al stops -- he can't revive Haskell who may, in fact, be dead.  When he opens the car door, the man sprawls out, banging his head on a rock -- now, he's dead for sure.  Al immediately concludes that he will be accused of murder and, so, he assumes the dead man's identity, loots his wallet, and, then, sets out for Los Angeles in Haskell's convertible.  At a god-forsaken desert crossroads, he encounters a woman hitchhiking and picks her up.  The woman is a harpy with greasy hair and a tight-fitting sweater and huge glaring eyes.  She falls asleep as Al drives and, then, in one of the most frightening moments that I can recall in a film, she suddenly wakes up while the car is plowing through the rear-projected desert, transfixes Al with her huge, accusing eyes and tells him that she knows that he has murdered Haskell and stolen his car.  Of course, she was the woman that Haskell attempted to rape.  Vera, blackmails Al into taking her to LA where they rent a cheap apartment as a man and wife -- at this point, the film has slid into delirium:  there's no objective reason why Al would take up housekeeping with Vera in a shabby furnished apartment, but he does.  It's as he's found his true soul-mate and that their fates are now locked together forever.  They try to sell the convertible to raise some cash but before the deal is completed, Vera finds out that Haskell's father is dying and that the tycoon is searching for his long-lost son, someone that he has not seen for 20 years.  So, Vera hatches an insane plot to have Al present himself as the elder Haskell's son and heir -- the plan is so palpably insane that the weak-willed Al refuses.   The leads to a fight with Vera in which she ends up dead, also accidentally killed by Al.  The protagonist now has two deaths on his conscience and, so, he flees, hitchhiking east across the same desert that he crossed a week earlier.  This brings us full-circle to the opening scenes in the wasteland and at the cafe.  The film doesn't so much end as just stop -- Al hallucinates his arrest by a cop on a dark road while he is hitchhiking.  Without resisting he gets in to the cop car, seemingly relieved to be captured and out of his misery. 

The film's execution is brilliant, a marvel of economy -- the movie is only 69 minutes long and was reportedly shot in six days.  Ann Savage as Vera is not conventionally attractive, indeed, she's very odd-looking for a movie star in 1945.  She alternately belittles Al and attempts to seduce him.  This is one of the few Hollywood films in which the suggestion of sex is treated with horror and disgust -- the viewer does not want to find out what is beneath Vera's sweater and skirt.  She and Al live together as man and wife in a kind of nightmare parody of a marriage -- they guzzle whiskey, play cards, and quarrel incessantly.  Periodically Vera tries to get Al in bed with her, but he rejects her, leading to her outraged indignation -- Al is not only ineffectual but possibly impotent. (These aspects of Ann Savage's performance resonated with the great Canadian film maker, Guy Madden -- he cast the actress in her old age in his own nightmare film My Winnipeg).  Al tries to call his girlfriend, but, when she answers, doesn't speak -- he's already so deep down in Hell that he can't reach her.  After Al accidentally kills Vera, the camera simply tracks around the blurry apartment, now and then, focusing on some of Vera's effects -- Al's chief concern seems to be that she has left so many traces of her existence in their rented rooms that he can never elude responsibility for her death.  All the while, the soundtrack persists in playing variations on the Judy Garland song "I'm always chasing rainbows."  In the title sequence, the camera surveys a barren desert landscape that is receding from us -- it's a shot out the rear window of a moving vehicle.  The sequence is disorienting --- we are moving away from something, not progressing toward a goal.  What  is ahead of us?  It's a fancy allusion but one recalls Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" wings outstretched and looking fixedly into the ruinous past as a great gale blows his appalled angel into the future.  Ulmer is working so quick and dirty here that he doesn't bother making the some of the shots match -- some of the hitchhiking scenes show Al getting into the wrong side of cars, as if he were hitchhiking in England's green and pleasant country.  This is what Manny Farber called "termite art", a nasty little hellscape without pretense that destroys itself from within.