Lola

 What does it mean to be "good"?  Is being "good" something other than being "virtuous"?  These questions are posed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's late (1981) film Lola.  Fassbinder's picture is devised as an allegorical fable, but the film's execution raises it to another level entirely.  Fassbinder was a great iconoclast and he smashes through allegory to arrive at something that feels like the truth.  There is nothing complacent about his late cinema -- he is thoughtful, restless, intuitive, and, above all, not content with the glittering surfaces that he presents.  Part of the so-called BRD trilogy (BRD = Bundesrepublik Deutschland -- that is the former West Germany), Lola is set around 1958 -- that is, after the events depicted in the first film of the group, The Marriage of Maria Braun and also after the action in the final installment in the series, The Yearning of Veronika Voss; the films were made out of order, however, and Lola was produced between Maria Braun and Veronika Voss, Fassbinder's penultimate film and the last that he fully completed..  The films are all startlingly different and represent a master-class in how a great director sculpts his style to the subject matter portrayed.  Lola is shot in extremely expressionist color -- the screen is awash in blue tints and hot pink; a bordello-cabaret is red as a wound and the picture is full of swaths of unnatural color that do violence to your eyes.  The movie looks like Douglas Sirk at his most garish (for instance, Written on the Wind) dipped in some kind of lysergic acid.  Characters are color-coded, indeed, colors serve as Wagnerian leit motifs for the characters.  The film is also full of delirious musical numbers and, in some ways, plays like an American movie musical gone berserk.  Everything is unreal about the movie, but, ultimately, the audience senses that they are perceiving something like the inner truth about the characters and their milieu.  In Fassbinder's repertoire, the film's form and plot most resemble Ali, Fear devours the Soul, the story of a woman in late middle-age, dowdy and without any glamor, who falls in love with a Black Moroccan immigrant -- that film, much more realistically mounted, seems to be following the formula of a Sirk melodrama of mismatched lovers until it morphs into something much more profound, unstable, and unpredictable.  Lola has the same structure -- at first, we think we're watching an update of von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, a film about the destruction of a German bourgeois professor at the hands of a slutty cabaret singer. (This was the impression Fassbinder cultivated in the German news media and, in  fact, paid royalties to the estate of Heinrich Mann, the author of the novel adapted as The Blue Angel.)  But, in fact, the movie takes a much weirder and more profound turn.  

In a small city in West Germany, a vulgar, industrious building contractor controls the economy.  This man, named Schuckert, is working on revitalizing the war-traumatized city by erecting a huge housing project called Lindenhof.  Everyone in town is beholding to the cheerfully corrupt Schuckert who runs everything, including a spectacular brothel - cabaret frequented by all of the town's worthies.  Schuckert's prize possession is his whore, Lola, a blonde beauty who sings in the brothel.  Lola boasts that she has "the sweetest ass in NATO" and Schucket, who is married to shrewish and bigoted wife, agrees with her. (Barbara Sukowa plays the heroine and she's fantastic.)  Everything in town is progressing well; the city is slowly being rejuvenated and, even, the small group of anti-war and anti-armament protesters seem to be contented.

The oldest plot in the world, some say, is the story of a stranger coming to town.  In this case, the stranger is the new building commissioner, von Bohm, a Prussian from the lost East of Germany who is depicted as incorruptible and a man of singular goodness.  (Armin Mueller-Stahl plays von Bohm in a great, indelible performance -- it is hard to play a man of simple goodness but Mueller-Stahl succeeds in this task, helped by the film's stunning camerawork:  von Bohm is always shot bathed in cool blue light and a kind of Aryan mist of dewy blue seems extromitted from his eyes.)  Von Bohm is a realist, good  but not overly virtuous -- he sees that the town is flourishing under the corrupt regime of Schuckert and, although he's a hard-working Prussian bureaucrat, he's willing to look the other way and tolerates the contractor's crooked dealings.  Working with people like Schuckert is part of being good -- it serves the common well-being in the town.  Lola hears about von Bohm's elegant courtly manners and his kindness and, when Schuckert contemptuously tells her that such a fine gentleman would never be interested in a whore like her, she makes a bet with her boss.  If Schuckert will buy her thirty bottles of the best champagne upon her triumph, she will seduce von Bohm.  

Of course, von Bohm isn't interested in the boozing and whoring that takes place at Schuckert's cabaret.  So Lola contrives to meet the bureaucrat, charms him, and even writes poems that she reads to him over the telephone.  Von Bohm goes for chaste strolls with her and, even, sings a religious round (or canon) with her while kneeling in the local Church.  Of course, he falls in love with her and even attempts to impress Lola by buying a garish, checked suit -- she doesn't like it and remarks that it is inconsistent with von Bohm's personality.  For reasons that are unclear, perhaps her own scruples, Lola breaks off the relationship with von Bohm -- probably, she admires him herself and wants to protect him. Von Bohm gets drunk and is lured into Schuckert's cabaret where he sees Lola perform.  (This is a bravura sequence -- Lola is always shot in a flare of shocking hot pink; however, when she sees von Bohm staggering toward the stage, her face flares with the blue light in which he is always bathed.)  Bohm flees the cabaret and spends the night drinking at his office.  In the morning, his slavishly admiring secretary and assistant, finds him lying on the floor disheveled and unshaven.  This is shocking to her and us because von Bohm has always been the embodiment of the faithful and incorruptible German bureaucrat -- it's important to understand that Bohm tolerates Schuckert's chicanery but will not allow himself to be bribed or to earn anything from the contractor's crooked practices.  Von Bohm, then, engages in a reign of terror and virtue -- here is where the distinction between common goodness and virtue becomes manifest.  He decides to destroy Schuckert and so sabotage the Lindenhof project on which the town depends.  He gathers evidence of Schuckert's corruption and tries to present it to the Press.  The journalist is unimpressed -- he's looking for a juicy sex scandal and not  just a bunch of corruptly bid public contracts.  Von Bohm denies building permits for the Lindenhof project and stalls construction work.  He even begins consorting with local anarchists and anti-war (anti-armaments) protesters.  (One of them is Esslin, a minor factotum in the government offices, who is an anarchists follower of Bakunin and the drummer in Lola's stage band and her admirer.)  No one wants von Bohm's brand of terrorist virtue and even Esslin tries to dissuade him from stalling the Lindenhof construction -- Schuckert ultimately coopts Esslin by hiring him to work for his contracting firm.  Von Bohm gets drunk again and invades the cabaret -- there Schuckert decides to mollify von Bohm by giving him Lola.  He says he will "sell" Lola to von Bohm.  Von Bohm takes her upstairs and degrades her, but, then, collapses in tears in her lap.  In the film's short coda, we see von Bohm's marriage to Lola -- he makes a decent woman out of her.  But not too decent:  when he goes for a stroll with Esslin and Lola's illegitimate daughter, Marie (who may be Schuckert's child), Schuckert and Lola meet and have sex -- she still has the "sweetest ass in NATO" Schuckert proclaims.

The film is a parable about goodness, which means something like simple kindness, and virtue which is another thing entirely.  The picture, also, of course chronicles the many compromises that Germans made in order to achieve the so-called Wirtschaftswunder -- that is, the economic miracle of the nation's rebirth from the rubble of Year Zero after the World War.  The film harkens back to The Marriage of Maria Braun in that a key scene takes place at a family gathering in which we hear a soccer game playing on the radio.  (An important landmark in the film is von Bohm's purchase of a TV set to watch the single station available in Germany-- everyone peers intently and with wonder at the test pattern.)  In The Marriage a gas leak explodes destroying the bourgeois home and the heroine; in Lola, nothing bad happens -- everyone gets along fine and there is no annihilating blast.  Any schematic depiction of the film ignores numerous memorable minor characters -- there is a whore who dreams about getting married but only after a menses (that is, a period of a month of purification after working as a prostitute); her fiancee gets in a motorcycle crash, suffering brain damage, and she abandons the project.  There is a Black GI, the man who played Maria Braun's lover in The Marriage, who von Bohm instinctively despises but seems to come to like.  Complicating the situation is the fact that von Bohm is lodging with Lola's mother, a handsome fifty year old woman who seems sad and has abandoned hope.  Lola's daughter, who is about four, has some important scenes in the film -- at the end of the movie, we see her climb into a hayloft in barn where Lola and von Bohm once strolled during their brief courtship.  The little girl reclines in the loft just as her did her mother during her walk with von Bohm.   This time von Bohm and Esslin are discussing their happiness.  Innumerable small touches of this sort enliven the picture and give it depth.  

Fassbinder was an impossible man, vicious and unmanageable -- but he is also one of cinema's greatest moralists on par with Jean Renoir.  Repeatedly, in the film people say that they must play by "the rules in the game" invoking one of Renoir's greatest pictures.  The quality of the films in the BRD trilogy is very, very high.  And Lola, which is a lesser known picture (I hadn't seen it) is on par with the two other pictures in the trilogy, both of them, I think, masterpieces.    

Martin Eden

 Martin Eden is a sumptuously mounted free adaptation of Jack London's 1908 autobiographical novel of that name.  Shot in Naples and directed by Pietro Marcello, the film looks like Bertolucci, high praise for the picture's mise-en-scene and gorgeous photography.  It's an impressive movie although it traffics in every possible cliche about writing, politics, and fame.  Apparently aware that we have seen every second of this plot before, Marcello defamiliarizes the material with a number of ingenious techniques -- there is archival footage woven into the film, sequences in which characters speak directly to the camera, bizarre breaches in continuity, and eccentric art direction and set design -- the characters dress and act like people from the turn of the century, but they drive VW buses and Volvos, watch TV, and live at a sea-front full of African and Syrian refugees.  When an old man (cousin to the guy in Bertolucci's 1900 who announces that Verdi has died), a sort of town crier proclaims that the "war" has begun, we don't know to what war the grizzled, little fellow is referring..  This approach to the past as being a sort of present-day but without cell-phones and computers works okay, but it seems a bit contrived to allow television into the movie but not the internet.  This is particularly problematic in Martin Eden because the book involves the travails of the hero in getting his writing published -- the viewer wants to tell the guy to just become an internet "influencer".  

Martin Eden is a sailor knocking around Naples.  In an early scene, we see him having sex with a girl who appears to have met him on a cruise ship.  (Some of the film is so elliptical as to be incompetent).  This woman shows up later as Eden's companion in the scenes that document his crack-up.  A flash-forward, impossible to construe until late in the film, shows a haggard guy with red-rimmed eyes and bad teeth using a reel-to-reel tape recorder to announce that the individual genius fights the world with words as his weapons -- this turns out to be the credo of the hero as announced toward the end of the movie.  The first two-thirds of the picture are the best, possibly because they are the most cliched and, therefore, most readily accessible parts of the film.  Eden rescues a young man from a beating inflicted by wharf-side thug (we don't know why the kid is being thrashed).  The young man turns out to be a wealthy man's son and, when the bourgeois family reward the handsome sailor for his kindness, he explores the family's elegant fin-de-siecle library, choosing to read Baudelaire of all writers.  Elena, the rich man's daughter, becomes a sort of mentor to Eden and helps him with his speech and grammar.  (Commentators on the film note that the movie was shot in a Neapolitan dialect difficult for Romans or northern Italians to even understand.)  Eden decides to become a writer and, after acquiring a little portable typewriter,faithfully pounds away at the device.  He writes pathetic stories about the poor, including a tale of a little crippled boy that is effective but banal.  No one wants his stories.  In fact, no one even opens the envelopes -- they are simply "returned to sender", something that seems odd, but we get the point.  Eden retreats into the country to become a farm laborer, living with a kindly middle-aged woman, Maria, and her children.  His love affair with Elena founders when she demands that he get a normal job and "make something of himself" -- an odd request since her family is wealthy and, it would seem, that Eden could indulge his avocation.  Eden meets a Socialist named Russ Brissenden who is dying of tuberculosis (what else?).  Brissenden urges Eden to write for the proletariat.  Physical labor in the boondocks weakens Eden (usually it's the opposite) and he collapses.  He seems to be on his death bed when a check comes in -- a magazine has purchased one of his stories and, suddenly, publishers are clamoring for his work.  Brissenden dies and, apparently, Eden has his friend's magnum opus, something called "Ephemera" published. (Critics claim that Eden wrote the poem under his dead friend's name.)  We see an impressive archival image of a mighty sailing ship with immense masts sinking; the next archival image will be the becalmed boat from Limite, the Brazilian avant-garde film.  Suddenly, Eden is famous and wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of lucre.  But he is much deteriorated -- he looks like a terminally ill junkie with rotten teeth and bleary eyes.  Eden is living with the woman with whom he had sex at the beginning of the movie.  His agent wants him to make a promotional trip to the United States.  At a press conference, staged like a nineteenth century lecture, Eden espouses individualist theories that are so extreme they would make Ayn Rand blush.  He denounces Socialism as an ideology for slaves and spouts pseudo-Nietzschean blather about evolution.  (He has become a follower of the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer -- a reference that will undoubtedly be baffling to most people who see this movie, although there is, in fact, lots of talk about Spencer and his theories -- apparently, an aspect of the source novel that is here faithfully reproduced.)  Elena makes an appearance.  Now that Eden is rich and famous, she's interested in him again.  But Eden angrily rejects her -- one of the few things he does in the last third of the picture that seems fair and reasonable.  Eden has a hallucination and sees his younger self striding along the boulevard.  He follows the apparition to the sea shore and, apparently to avoid traveling to the USA, he swims out toward the sunset -- presumably committing suicide.  

It's hard to take much of this seriously.  But the picture is extremely entertaining.  It's the kind of movie in which perky upbeat Europop is mixed with Debussy and somber music by Bach.  The hero played by Luca Marinelli looks like a young version of Burt Lancaster and has smoldering eyes, although he lacks Lancaster's physical panther-like grace and lumbers around with a curiously gawky, staggering gait that is faintly endearing.  The opening shots suggest the director's own ideology -- we see the Italian anarchist Erricco Malatesta kissing a baby while all the time smoking a big stogie (that seems to menace the child).  The film, indeed, is an anarchic mix of styles -- there are luminous, still landscapes, close-ups of glistening fruit in the manner of Dovhenko, montages of smiling sailors that look like they belong with Eisenstein outtakes, sepia shots staging the bathos in Eden's short stories (a little crippled kid with a crutch like Tiny Tim limping through a picturesque slum).  The first two-thirds of the film although extremely predictable and, even, banal is staged with real verve.  The abrupt shift into Eden's mostly inexplicable decline comes so quickly and without warning that it is jarring.  The part of the film is insulting to those of us (most of the audience) who never had the opportunity to be destroyed by too much money, too much fame, too many beautiful women.  In other words, Eden expires from problems that we would all like to have and so this part of the movie rings more than a little hollow.  The theme of the movie seems to be that Herbert Spencer will always lead you astray and that the ideology of rugged individualism is a fraud.  I don't know anyone who reads Herbert Spencer anymore; Ayn Rand's form of rugged individualism remains a spectral force in American politics, although I don't know anyone who really espouses her ideas either.  The film is pretty, exciting, ingeniously made, and a little  empty.

Pale Flower

Shochiku execs hoped for a "Sun Tribe" ("Japanese youth culture) hit when the studio, famous for its films with Ozu, bankrolled a lurid yakuza story set in Tokyo's gambling dens.  Pale Flower, a 1964 film, directed by Masahiro Shinoda, however, turned out to be so ineffably weird that the businessmen didn't know what to do with it.  The picture was shelved for a few months while the executives tried to figure out how to market what was, in effect, an elliptical and bizarrely expressionistic work of experimental film-making.  (The score by Toru Takemitsu channels Stockhausen by way of Duke Ellington and was, probably, the most astringently avant-garde music in existence at the time.)  Once the movie was released, Pale Flower was an unexpected box-office success, one of the landmarks of the Japanese nouvelle vague.  It's not the sort of picture that a viewer can understand in one viewing and I wonder what the audiences that flocked to see the movie made of it.  The picture is challenging, a vessel for odd geo-political cross-currents depicted allegorically in the film -- it's interesting in an abstract way but too cold, calculating, and nihilistic to be emotionally compelling.  The film fascinates, but I thought it was also somewhat tedious -- immersion in what can't be understood is gripping at first, but too much swimming in  these glacially cold waters becomes tedious:  you get sucked under.

A yakuza at the end of  his tether is released from prison and returns to Tokyo.  In a voice-over, he describes the megalopolis as a chaos filled with human swine.  The gangster, Muraki, has spent three years behind bars for killing a member of an adversary gang.  This crime turns out to have been spectacularly pointless.  Muraki's gang has now formed an alliance with their former enemies in order to combat a third mob that is encroaching on their Tokyo territory.  Therefore, Muraki's return, which everyone regards as surprising, is an embarrassment -- the boss for whom he killed the enemy gangster is now best friends with Muraki's former enemies.  (We see the two men slurping Miso soup in a noodle joint and planning a fishing vacation together).  Muraki meets an enigmatic woman, Saeko ("Psycho"?) gambling with a bunch of shirtless tattooed yakuza.  The gangsters are playing some kind of game with completely inscrutable rules -- it involves tiny stiff cards with flowering trees printed on them.  The cards make a weird clicking sound as they are shuffled and Takemitsu scores the gambling scenes with bizarre rattles and clicking sounds (he recorded two famous Japanese tap-dancers performing on concrete for the sequence); sometimes, brass blaring in dissonant chords sound while the croupier bellows out various enigmatic phrases over and over again like some kind of demented auctioneer.  (According to the commentary on the film, ordinary Japanese would have no idea how the game is played -- it's called "matched draw" and is intrinsic to a certain form of yakuza culture.).  This gambling is set up as a ritual invoking pure chance -- there doesn't seem to be any skill involved or even much sport.  Cards are tirelessly shuffled and cut with a rickety-tick sound and, then, after much repetitive hectoring, a cloth covering a card is lifted and someone wins while the others lose.  Muraki becomes obsessed with the mysterious woman.  She is either some sort of embodiment of a Shinto goddess or an angel of death or both.  Saeko has no back-story; she appears out of nowhere in a late model sports car and she seems to have limitless money.  Saeko has unblinking big eyes dark as midnight and she glares at her cards like a reptile of some sort and she's an odd-looking, seductive, but deadly apparition.  Saeko asks Muraki to find her a higher stakes game and he obliges. Meanwhile, the gang bosses scheme about the third crime family invading their turf.  After a gambling bout with high-rollers -- the gambling den seems to be enclosed by a series of cages -- Saeko and Muraki go for a ride in her sports car.  She gets into a nearly lethal racing competition with a bearded dude with his own fast car -- the vehicles tool all over Tokyo, passing on curves and swerving to avoid crashes.  It's pretty clear that Saeko is a thrillseeker with a potentially lethal appetite for risk.  The high-roller games are guarded by a Chinese mafia-type named Yoh.  Yoh is a heroin addict and he squats at the side of the mats unrolled for gambling balefully eyeing the proceedings.  Saeko seems interested in Yoh who is, if anything, even more of a dead-ender than Muraki.  During a gambling binge, enemy gangsters raid the gaming den.  Saeko and Muraki have to crawl into bed together and pretend to be having sex to avoid arrest by the corrupt cops shaking down the enterprise.  Even though they are in bed together, it's pretty clear that neither Saeko nor Muraki are interested in sex and, maybe, even incapable of attempting it.  Muraki feels that he is losing Saeko to Yoh -- he has a showy psychedelic nightmare to this effect. (This dream sequence is the film's biggest misstep-- it's solarized with obvious imagery.)  Yoh tries to kill Muraki in a funhouse maze of deserted alleyways and gloomy empty taverns.  Muraki escapes.  In a last ditch effort to impress Saeko. Muraki agrees to kill the mobster who leads the third gang -- he tells Saeko that committing a murder is the ultimate thrill and invites her to observe the homicide.  In an elaborate sequence scored to the final aria from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Muraki kills the head of the invading mob -- this takes place in some sort of elaborate restaurant atop a mountain of steep stairways and decorated with stained glass windows of Jesus and the Virgin Mar (and bizarrely "Nelson at Trafalgar").  Muraki goes back to prison for the killing which Saeko has watched with the fascination of dark-eyed cobra hypnotizing her prey.  In jail, Muraki learns that Saeko has been killed in a "crime of passion" by Yoh.  Two years have passed.  Muraki's informant says:  "We finally learned who she was --" But before he can explain, Muraki's exercise time in the yard is over and he has to return to his cell in a prison that is shot as a pitch-black series of corridors.  In voice-over, Muraki tells us he still "hungers" for Saeko.  

In summary the film seems more clear than it is while watching.  There are some haphazard subplots.;  Muraki has a girlfriend who lives, for some obscure symbolic reason,. in a clock shop.  The ticking clocks rattling on the soundtrack are a particularly invasive and percussive element of Takemitsu's score.  After having sex with woman (who comes equipped with complicated if hard to understand back story of abuse -- the opposite of Saeko who has no backstory at all), Muraki abandons her -- he has no time for any kind of  conventional relationship..  In fact, later, another girlfriend pursues him, but Muraki urges her to marry a bourgeoise salary man -- characteristically, this part of the story is shown in a way that makes it very difficult to integrate with the rest of the movie.  Shinoda has a habit of introducing new characters without warning -- here we see the salaryman importuning Muraki's girl in a way that is smarmy and, possibly, bullying.  The woman doesn't respond to the bespectacled salaryman and, then, we see her with Shinoda who summarily tells her to marry the suitor that she has just rejected.  All of this comes at us from nowhere.  An apprentice yakuza tries to stab Muraki (since Muraki killed his crime-boss buddy resulting in his three-year bid), fails, and then has to cut off  his pinky finger and deliver it to the hero is a matchbox.  Later, the kid becomes fast friends with Muraki.  When Muraki buys him a suit, he's careful to put the severed finger in its little box in the garment's breast-pocket.  It's this kid who delivers the news to Muraki that Saeko has died in a "crime of passion" with Yoh.  Yoh has no lines in the film -- he just squats in a corner glaring at everyone.  The film is full of elaborately explored mini-labyrinths -- the gambling dens have barred cages around their entries and are shown as long narrow rooms surrounded by other dark narrow rooms where various sentries and body guards lurk.  Yoh's attack on Muraki takes place in Yokohama's red light district, ,in real life closed by order of the State -- it's another labyrinth of tiny shops and taverns all of them shut down, a circus of sinister shadows.  The jail where Muraki is immured at the end of the film features a forty foot tall wall of polished ashlar and enormous doors that  incongrously rise fifteen or so feet above the pavement -- the prison is a German expressionist vision of what an Asian fortress-jail might look like.  Most of the film takes place in darkness, empty streets, bars with flashing neon, dark mazes everywhere.  Shinoda has said that the film represent Japan allegorically as Muraki, a figure who is radically unfree suspended between the thuggish Chinese Communists (represented by Yoh) and the savagely Capitalist (Americanized) Tokyo infested by vicious gangsters.  This explanation is interesting but unconvincing.  To my eyes, the film demonstrates a particular form of "No Exit" -- gambling signifies a world organized according to wholly absurd and destructive rules, a paradigm for the absurd.  Saeko proclaims that she is desperately bored and her life is organized around increasingly desperate forms of thrill-seeking.  The camerawork is ultra-noir revealing a world of blind alleys and encroaching dark shadows.  The tattooed gambling gangsters leer at the lens.  It's all claustrophobic, a world in which the brightest scenes take place in the exercise yard of a vast symbolic prison.    

WAC during Covid (Michaela Eichwald) and a Warning

 I've been to Minneapolis and St. Paul only twice in the last year.  Since new infections have been decreasing during the past few days, I availed myself of this lull in the tempest to visit the Walker Art Center.  (Apparently, Covid infections are predicted to spike again in about three or four weeks, during mid-March 2021 -- this is apparently due to the onslaught of a much more infectious and lethal strain of the disease, the mutation known as B.1.1.7. from the United Kingdom.)  I also was celebrating my prospective injection of vaccine at Albert Lea's Walmart on Friday, February 19, 2021.  This celebration turned out to be premature -- winter weather delays in supply caused cancellation of my vaccination.  I learned this by email as I was driving to Minneapolis.  

The Walker Art Center, like many contemporary art museums, straddles the fine line between gimmicky hoax and genuine art with respect to many of the objects that it displays.  (I suppose some theorists of contemporary art would deny that there is a distinction -- a lot of what passes for leading edge art is firmly rooted in the old avant-garde of Dadaism, now over a hundred years in the past:  that is, art works that appalled or amused our great-great-grandparents ceaselessly recycled in increasingly arid variants in our modern art museums.)  There's always been a lot of fraud on show at the WAC.  And, as art migrates into progressively more limited and Balkanized ethnic, racial, and sexual identity politics, the razor-thin line between art that has merit and mere propaganda also blurs.  Therefore, any visit to the WAC is likely to involve some degree of outrage.  Whether it is good to be outraged by art is an open question -- on balance, I think the answer to this question should be "no", since outrage distracts from the other qualities intrinsic to an artwork.  

By WAC standards. the small show of paintings and prose-poems by Berlin-based Michaela Eichwald is tame.  Eichwald is a neo-expressionist, pretty clearly in the lineage of Joerg Immendorf and, even, more directly, George Baselitz.  She paints with intentional crudity, smearing surfaces with slimy-looking orangish browns and yellows.  Although Eichwald's titles obscure this fact, she is fundamentally a figurative artist -- of the 15 or so paintings on display in the show, almost all of them can be interpreted as images of something, most with anthropomorphic forms visible in the slither of acrylic.  On first viewing, Eichwalds's pictures (here made between 2013 and 2019), seem chaotic and she appears to design her large frieze shaped panels to refute efforts at interpretation.  For instance, one painting that looks like an intestinal tract uncoiled for display shows a brownish-yellow tube winding around within the picture. (Die unsrigen sind fortgezogen -- "The Ours have moved away")  However, Eichwald makes the tube-like smear worming in loops in the picture, discontinuous -- this confounds the eye's ability to make sense of the image as a kind of ropy maze.  Many of her paintings are about three-feet wide and six or eight feet long (or wide).  This images have a mural aspect.  In the West, we read pictures of this sort from left to right -- the direction that we read words on a page.  Eichwald often sets up her pictures to suggest a process that progresses in the opposite direction -- that is, someone is doing something at the right side of the picture with the apparent effects of that action shown to the left.  This is the reverse of what we expect and also confounds any easy reading of the painting's surface.  

Eichwald's intentionally ugly colors and her haphazard way of structuring the pictures make the images somewhat rebarbative.   As it was said of Wagner's music, the picture, however, are considerably better than they look.  (This isn't true of Eichwald's prose poems, nine of which are displayed between pictures -- these printed panels are mostly pretentious gibberish and essentially unreadable.  Here is a sample:  in this way you can believe me.  I'm imagining the sentence "what german foresters can do only german foresters can" once wrapped in worn loden, once flocculated onto a dark green crumpled sack... "loden"is a dark green woolen cloth; "floccculated" is a term mostly used in chemistry that means "to form into a loosely aggregated mass of clumps or particles." )   I ambled around the museum for awhile after spending some time closely looking at Eichwald's work, returning to the gallery after surveying some other things exhibited in the Museum.  On a second viewing, the paintings seemed more coherent to me.  Each looks best when viewed from across the room.  Up close, the images are obscure and the pictures just seem chaotic.  But when viewed at a distance, and making the assumption that pictures are mostly figurative in inspiration, they look better, more interesting, and less abstract.  Eichwald doesn't use canvas -- the pictures in this show were either acrylic on fabric or daubed on "pleather" (this is polyurethane designed to resemble leather -- the sort of thing that many car seats are made from.)  The largest work in the group, Beziehungswahn ("Connection-mania") a thirty-foot long collage is by far the worst -- it's hideous and unimaginatively made with no apparent structure at all; Eichwald has just glued pictures on the polyurethane and smeared whorls and orbs of paint around them.  Much better is Gebet, so wird Euch genommen ("Ask and it shall be taken from you") -- the word "Gebet" in German primarily means "prayer" and the picture appears to show a human-shaped cloud at the left gesturing toward several irregularly-shaped badges or shields of yellow against the kind of institutional green that you might find on the tiles at a bakery; the "praying" or gesturing figure with one hand in the air is a crusty impasto of deep blue.  Steinzeit ("Stone Age") may even be witty -- near the center of the narrow painting, a troglodyte with a big nose broods in  profile over some smears of shit-colored paint.  Amidst these daubs, there is a crisply painted form, a bit like the outline of a flat-headed screw, suggesting that the cave-man has, perhaps, invented (or, at least, imagined) some kind of fastener.  In Die Auer Dult, die leidende Mangle ("The Auer Dult, the washing machine wringer suffers"), Eichwald has painted some vaguely anthropomorphic forms on a long runner of linen; the Auer Dult is a Munich folk festival and the picture suggests some Dervish-like figures dancing amidst flares of yellow and orange.  As all reasonable people know, there is really nothing that is truly abstract.  The mind and eye always conspire to imagine a form even in seemingly random spots of color -- I suppose other people might see other things in these pictures, but I have no doubt that in these paintings Eichwald is representing something.  In fact, several of the pictures have humanoid forms that would not be out of place in one of Paul Klee's paintings -- this is particularly true of Die Neue Bestimmungen sind da ("The New Regulations are there") another painting that seems to scan from left to right, a whimsical yellow profile peering out across a space where what seem to be red dancers are whirling like tops.    

Design for Different Futures occupies several large galleries -- it's not really an art show but rather an exhibit of architectural and industrial designs for future worlds.  The objects have the cool and lucid appearance of scientific instruments -- some of the enigmatic objects reminded me of the awful gynecological instruments in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, speculum made for "mutant women."  There are items of apparel, one of the Handmaiden's gowns from the TV show based on the Margaret Atwood novel, and various sorts of boots and helmets.  Some designs for a lunar colony are offered and a very peculiar arch-shaped armature of hard white plastic with gallon-sized modules arranged along its spine is labeled as a "Cricket Shelter:  modular edible insect farm" -- the idea being that crickets in the tens of thousands could be raised in the jugs, aerated and provided nectar though pipe-like tubes and, then, harvested to be roasted or ground into meal for flour.  The design is sleek and appealing and the object has tall wispy antennae at its top that are for air exchange and that also allow the cricket-farmer to enjoy the sound of his insect crop singing in the big white arch.  The highlight of the Designs show is a large darkened gallery in which a house-sized plastic orb encloses several other huge, translucent globular spheres -- the thing is called "Another Generosity" and it is attached to a mass of conduits and sensors.  The object apparently detects the carbon dioxide generated by visitors to the gallery (it has a number of vents on its exterior) and changes color and shape on the basis of data collected in that way.  This object sat alone in a room with a single guard.  I approached it closely and breathed into one of the ports, dropping my mask for that purpose -- nothing happened so far as I could observe.  

Parts of the permanent collection have been re-hung.  This show is identified as Five Ways In -- Themes from the Collection.  This exhibition is heavy on identity-politics and conceptual art.  The Walker's signature canvas, Franz Marc's "Blue Horses" is nowhere on display and Edward Hopper's enigmatic "Night Office," another picture that is a viewer favorite is crammed into a nondescript corner near the beginning of the exhibit.  Two highlights from the show at David Hammer's Phat Free, a large video screen showing a man kicking a bucket down a desolate street in New York City -- the installation is very loud and grating, but the imagery is surprisingly beautiful, slightly blurred and mostly monochrome video of the man kicking the bucket against a ravishing nocturnal background of vacant storefronts lit by brilliant flaring yellow lights.  It's gorgeous to behold in a strangely Old Masters (Rembrandt) sort of way.  At the end of the galleries, in the "Abstraction" part of the show, there's a ravishing painting by Agnes Martin -- an abstract painting that is as close to true abstraction as can be imagined.  The picture shows a sort of blue-grey mist over which Martin has used a pencil to trace parallel lines.  The lines make a grid that is comprised of alternating patterns of closely spaced vertical lines and more broadly spaced lines, crossed by horizontals that are evenly spaced.  As I've earlier argued, everything looks like something and, so, I suppose this abstraction (it's called "Untitled #7") might approximate a very faintly lavender mist somehow seen through a grid like an ultra-precise and delicate wire fence.  The curious thing about this painting is that viewed from certain angles, the top of the picture seems markedly darker than its bottom -- and it's a big painting, probably about eight feet tall.  I can't tell if this effect is a result of darker gesso at the top of the painting or some kind of optical illusion.  I spend quite a bit of time looking at the Martin picture and admiring the canvas for its strange, disembodied beauty.  

Here's a warning:  In the design show, there's a vitrine in which three internal organs designed for upgraded human beings (they seem to be improvements on bile ducts) are displayed.  The organs are patterns of rubies and quite pretty in their own way.  The base of the display case, there's a  video screen showing an operation that involves a retractor device parting ribs and, then, much grubbing around in the gory interior of a human body.  When the retractor parts the ribs, the interior of the body gushes blood that overflows the basin of flesh and pours over the edge of the body.  I found this image upsetting and wished I hadn't attended so closely to it.  Reeling from my reaction to this footage, I felt faint and looked around for some place to sit.  With the darkness closing it, I raced through several galleries but found no benches anywhere.  I didn't faint but vomited a little in a corner.  When the guards approached, I told them to put a label on the wall and they could display the emesis as art.  

The Trial of the Chicago 7

Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed The Trial of the Chicago Seven (2020) for Netflix.  It's an estimable, well-made movie and retains the viewer's interest for two hours and ten minutes.  For some reason, the picture left me cold -- I didn't feel any real enthusiasm for the movie and its emotional climaxes were a bit tepid and tendentiously contrived, I thought.  The picture doesn't really evoke for me the era in which it is set.  Rather, it seems a bit like an exercise in debate, scoring valid and interesting points, but a rather abstract exercise.

The Trial of the Chicago Seven has an all-star cast.  Mark Rylance, the great British actor, impersonates William Kunstler, the lead lawyer for the defendants, and imparts to the role a gravitas that the actual Kunstler lacked.  Sacha Baron Cohen (who is also a producer) plays the part of Abbie Hoffman who is conceptually paired with Jerry Rubin, as the most radical (and obstreperous) of the Defendants.  Frank Langella is memorable as the hapless Federal Judge Julius Hoffman who is viciously excoriated in the film, deservedly as far as I can tell.  David Dellinger is played by the character actor who had the role of the pregnant cop's husband in Fargo -- he's very good as the "adult in the room."  Tom Hayden is acted by    .  The other performers all seemed familiar to me, many of them worthy co-starring actors familiar from TV and the movies.  Michael Keaton plays the part of Ramsey Clark, the previous Attorney General of the United States who was called as a surprise witness (although his testimony was suppressed) in the lengthy proceedings in Chicago.

There is nothing remarkable about the film's mise-en-scene.  Although the film's subject matter cries out for a flashy Brechtian approach to the trial, Sorkin plays it safe -- the movie adopts a cautious "you are there" fly-on-the-wall style of presentation.  The movie is resolutely focused on its debating points and demonstrates a kind of left-liberal prudence and sweet reason that I found somewhat irritating.  At no point, does Sorkin ever allow the film to develop into anything ecstatic or radical.  Rather, the movie espouses the sort of limousine-liberalism of the Hollywood elites, not a bad thing, but not inspiring either.  Sorkin wants to make points about authoritarianism and the limits of reasonable debate; he also wants to show that even people committed to non-violence and justice can slip into unpalatable extremes under the pressure of circumstances.  The movie is ingeniously constructed with flashbacks seamlessly illustrating points that Sorkin or his characters want to make -- everything radiates out (or back) from trial scenes that comprise the majority of the film. (Abbie Hoffman was apparently, like Sacha Baron Cohen, something of a stand-up comedian and some of the narrative is provided by him reciting his story to a crowd of people in what seems to be an open-air comedy venue.)  Everything is presented in a way that is tasteful and serious -- the violence when the cops riot is well-staged but it doesn't go over the top.  Even the scene when the police force Rubin and Hoffman (with their fellow protesters) through the plate-glass window at the Haymarket bar and lounge isn't so dramatically shown as to cause the viewer to feel any outrage or, even, real discomfort.  Sorkin wants his viewers to attend to the forensic points that his characters make in the dialogue and not be distracted over-much by flashy pictorials.  I respect this approach and believe it valid but it seems just a tiny bit dull and too cautious for my taste.

The Trial proceeds chronologically.  We see the prosecuting attorney bullied into taking the case by Nixon's Attorney General. (John Mitchell is angry that his predecessor, Ramsey Clark, didn't implement the transition of power in a cordial way -- many aspects of the film are obviously pertinent to the dilemmas of today including the trial charges of inciting a riot.) The defendants seem to be holed-up in a mansion in Hyde Park where they work with Kunstler and his associate to develop their approach to the case.  There are familiar debates played out between Dellinger, an old Leftist committed to non-violence, and the more radical Hoffman and Rubin.  Tom Hayden is poised in between the extremes, an institutionalist.  In the trial scenes, the Judge behaves with savage injustice.  A subplot involves the presence of Black Panther, Bobbie Seale, as a co-defendant.  Seale really didn't belong in the trial.  He was imported into the indictment to provide a "scary Black radical" to influence the jury -- at least, this is what the movie supposes.  For some incomprehensible reason, Seale has no lawyer.  His lawyer is in Oakland recovering from gall bladder surgery -- although this seems to be some sort of pretext for Seale representing himself pro se.  (Counsel never recovers from the alleged surgery and makes no appearance, although the trial goes on for something like 80 days before finally Seale is dismissed out on a "mistrial."  This is after the infamous episode in which Seale was brought into the courtroom bound, fettered, and gagged for disrupting the proceedings -- this is one of the few things that I recall from news accounts of the original trial -- I was about 16 when the case was tried.)   Judge Hoffman keeps trying to coerce Kunstler into representing the Black Panther -- Kunstler refuses on grounds that Seale doesn't really want a lawyer.  Seale is advised by the local leader of the Black Panther's Fred Hampton who is murdered during the course of the trial.  The film shows all sorts of chicanery practiced by the prosecution and its corrupt witnesses.  The movie climaxes in a physical altercation between Hoffman and Tom Hayden back at the Hyde Park refuge..  Hayden sees Hoffman and Rubin's antics as delegitimizing his opposition to the Vietnam war and, further, damaging the Left; Hoffman and Rubin view Hayden's institutional inclinations as a betrayal of the "cultural" revolution that the two men are trying to foment.  Although Hayden eschews violence, he has made an incendiary speech in Grant Park after seeing  a friend brutalized by the cops -- this speech prevents him from taking the stand.  Ordinarily, trial films climax in a confrontation in open court that dramatizes the larger issues at stake.  But, apparently, no such confrontation (on the order of Darrow versus William Jennings O'Brien) occurred in the Chicago 7 trial.  And, so, the film stages the confrontation in the hypothetical -- Hayden pretends to testify and Kunstler pretends to cross-examine him:  in this way, the film's thematic concerns can be aired even though there was no climactic showdown in the Courtroom.  (Hayden's institutional conservatism is shown when he rises for the Judge after Seale has been treated barbarically -- so badly that the prosecuting attorney demands a mistrial; Hayden's reflex to rise for the Judge is the subject of much hostile criticism later back at the Hyde Park digs where the defendants seem to be living in a sort of frat house environment.).  At the end of movie, Hayden rises to recite a list 5000 names long of soldiers killed in Vietnam -- this creates tumult in the Court.  The Judge has said that Hayden, alone among the defendants, seems to be a person "who can make a contribution to the Nation" -- and, of course, we know he was later elected for six terms as a legislator in California and married to Jane Fonda.  Hayden takes the opportunity to disrupt the proceedings with the lengthy recitation of the dead.  The Judge slams down his gavel violently and repeatedly.  Everyone stands up to honor the dead, including the prosecuting attorney who has finally, the show implies, come around to see the error of his ways.  I doubt that things actually turned out this way, but the show's ending is satisfying in its own demure fashion -- something like justice is served.    

  

The True History of the Kelly Gang

Many years ago, I read a novel called The English Patient.  The novel was interesting and, on just about every page, there was some specimen of lyrical writing that was breathtaking.  But, for some reason, the entire enterprise, including its punctuation marks and conjunctions, rang false to me.  The book displayed all sorts of extreme situations but none of it made any real sense.  (Later, the novel by Michael Ondaatje was made into a movie that won many awards and was similarly beautiful, but wholly unconvincing.)  The English Patient was a brilliant conceived "artifact", but it wasn't "art."  I have a similar reaction to a recent (2019) film about the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly, The True History of the Kelly Gang.  As directed by Justin Kurzel, the film is full of startling imagery, hallucinations, and lurid violence.  The picture looks great and the acting is splendid, but, somehow, the grotesque events depicted don't really cohere.  A lot of what we see on screen is, apparently, true but the movie's weird emphasis on the sexual perplexity of the title character undercuts the enterprise and, ultimately, turns the film into a sort of gratuitous freak-show.  This is an ambitious picture and worth seeing, but I don't think it succeeds.

The movie depicts Ned Kelly's career as an outlaw ("bushranger") and would-be rebel in three extended acts:  these are signaled by graffiti etched into scraps of wood or metal -- Boy, Man, Monitor.  The last word refers to the iron-clad warship, the Monitor, that was deployed in the American Civil War and, that, according to the film was the inspiration for Kelly's exploits wearing plate armor late in his career.  (Images of Kelly striding around in a towering metal helmet with iron strapped around his body are iconic in Australia -- one of the first films ever produced on that continent was an account of Kelly's banditry shot in 1906, 26 years after the outlaw's execution.  Mick Jagger played Kelly in  1970 movie and, it seems, that about every decade the story is retold.  Peter Carey won the Man Booker prize in 2001 for the True History of the Kelly Gang, the novel on which the 2019 movie is based.  Sydney Nolan, one of Australia's greatest painters, was famous for pictures of Kelly in his famous ploughshare armor stalking about the landscape.)  The "Boy" section of the movie shows Kelly as an angelic, blonde little boy.  The film starts with a dimly perceived episode of Kelly's mother giving a blow job to a local constable -- she runs a shebeen in a desolate, burned-out forest in Victoria Province.  (Her little shack in the midst of a vast tract of charred trees make as much sense as the log cabins of John Ford's pioneers crouched in the sand and rock under the buttes of Monument Valley).  Kelly saves a local lad from drowning and the boy's mother wants to pay for his education, but Kelly's monstrous mother refuses -- they are shanty Irish and proud and she doesn't want her boy educated by the English. Kelly discovers that his father, also apparently a bushranger and horse rustler, has the habit of wearing women's evening gowns during his nocturnal exploits.  Kelly's father is feckless and, when the family runs out of food, the little boy kills a beef cow and drags a quarter of the animal back to the home.  (This sequence is surreal and reminds me a bit of the dream in Bunuel's Los Olvidados in which a young boy dreams of his mother and meat).  Kelly's father is accused of the cattle theft, hauled off to the gaol by the constable who has been enjoying his mother's favors, and, later, dies in custody.  Kelly's loving mother than sells the boy for 15 pounds to a vicious bushranger, Harry Powers (played by a fat and very dissolute-looking Russell Crowe).  Powers exploits the boy but, also, teaches him how to rob stagecoaches and commit murders.  Powers corners the constable in a local brothel and orders Kelly to shoot off the man's penis.  Kelly refuses, deserts Powers (who ends up in custody), and returns home to his mother's tavern/whorehouse, the shack in the charred forest -- he's been gone for ten years.  

In the "Man" section of the film, we see Kelly's encounters with another local constable  (The cops are all British; the people living in shacks are Irish --the aboriginal population is nowhere to be seen.)  Kelly's mother has taken up with a cowboy from California.  At a brothel, Kelly falls in love with a local whore who has a baby. Kelly's mother interferes with the relationship -- she seems to want her oldest son for herself.  There's a fight and Kelly shoots the constable in the wrist.  Kelly flees into the bush with his brothers and forms a gang.  After a massacre of cops, Kelly's mother is arrested and taken to Melbourne where she is put behind bars for three years.  The constable menaces Kelly's "son" with his gun to get the mother to admit to the outlaw's whereabouts -- she refuses.  The final section, "Monitor" details Kelly's gathering of an army with the intent of staging a raid on a police train, killing large numbers of constables, and, then, leading his rebels into Melbourne to rescue his mother.  Kelly forges armor and his men train wearing the metal gear.  A number of hostages are taken and, cloaked in white sack-like hoods, kept in a room in a schoolhouse.  Kelly talks to the schoolmaster and shows the man his diary in which he is writing for his son (Mary's bastard child) the "true history of the Kelly gang."  The schoolmaster praises the diary and says that he would like to be released, for just five minutes, to get some books to lend to Kelly.  Kelly, an avid reader, lets the man loose and he immediately betrays the gang.  A big group of cops clad in weird white ski-outfits attacks the shed and shoots it to pieces,  Kelly emerges in his armor, takes a couple hundred rounds, but ends up fallen to the ground and, apparently, as helpless as a turtle in his heavy metal gear.  He' s taken to Melbourne where he spends a tender hour or so with his mother (the scene has quasi-incestuous overtones) and, then, is hanged.  In a final scene, the schoolmaster, I think, addresses parliament and says that the Australians are unfortunate in choosing bushrangers like Kelly for their heroes.  A final title tells us that Kelly, as an Irish Catholic, wanted his body buried in consecrated ground -- but this wish was denied.  This ending is a nod to contemporary events -- Kelly's bones were moved about here and there, displayed as curiosities, and not finally buried in church soil until 2012 (after DNA testing established the identity of his remains.).

The film is utterly bizarre in its grotesque psycho-sexual imagery.  The opening scene showing fellatio is rhymed with a later sequence involving someone's corpse hanging from a tree with his genitals rammed into his mouth.  Kelly's rebels all wear evening gowns to their battles.  The bushrangers all cross-dress.  There are strange scenes of men embracing and sleeping together.  The physical habitus of the male characters is exaggeratedly stiff and "armored" -- men pose with their chests bulging outward, muscles flexed, legs spread with knees stoutly upraised.  It's as if the film were designed as some kind of elaboration on the ideas of Wilhelm Reich -- these soldier warriors are armored against orgasm, implicitly homosexual, and, always, sashaying around in filmy low-cut evening gowns.  Kelly's relationship with his feral mother is quasi-incestuous.  The reason men have to be armored is because the bush is deadly, full of thorns and charred trees, and the men are soft bags of blood prone to bursting and spraying gore everywhere.  Kelly's agonized sexuality recalls Paul Newman's performance as Billy the Kid in Arthur Penn's The Left-handed Gun (adapted from a play outing the Kid written by no less than Gore Vidal.  For some reason, many sequences are staged in the snow -- I have to admit that I had no idea that it snowed anywhere in Australia.  The shanties look like steel containers but ,when attacked by rifle fire, their walls simply disintegrate -- what looks like steel can't protect the people inside.  The final fifteen minutes of the film is hallucinatory.  The hostages look like Klansmen from a Philip Guston painting -- they have big ornate hoods over their heads.  And the attacking police form an abstract string like Christmas tree lights ; they are also dressed like Klansmen  in white get-ups, as they blast away at the hapless bushrangers. Camerawork features jerky handheld sequences, footages, in some instance, apparently shot with something like a wobbly selfy-stick, and elaborate drone shots.  The dialogue is difficult to decipher due to the odd lingo and heavy Australian accents -- on several occasions, the cross-dressing rabble of bushrangers led by Kelly is referred with words that I heard as "The Sons of Steve".  Undoubtedly, I heard wrong. 

 

30 Coins

 HBO's 30 Coins is an example of the Spanish Baroque that makes pictures by Pedro Almodovar and Guillermo del Toro seem tame by comparison, sedate, genteel, and placidly neo-classical.  The supernatural thriller begins with a flourish:  three crosses loom over a sun-blasted escarpment while a storm boils in the sky; a centurion flogs Jesus viciously and, then, we see nails pounded through the Messiah's hands.  The cross thuds into a hole, upright, while gangs of grotesque figures grimace and howl with laughter (the people have zombie-white eyes and hooked noses and chins and they look extras from Brueghel or Bosch painting of the Passion).  Jesus glares down at Judas and, then, laughs at him.  The spear that pierces Christ's side releases a hydraulic spurt of gore that fountains up out of the frame.  Judas flees through the wilderness.  The mob raises barbaric-looking effigies agamst the turbulent sky.  Ants overrun a skull with its jaw propped open.  Judas hangs himself while a phalanx of centurions blow trumpets that shatter into pieces a huge marble angel.  Thirty coins lie in the trampled dirt.  These images comprise merely the show's grandiose and brutal opening titles -- more blood in the credit sequence than in the entirety of many full-blown horror films.  Things get even more operatically melodramatic as the show gets underway.  In remote Spanish village, perched like Toledo above a stony gorge, a cow has just given birth to a human baby.  The town's Mayor, Paco, a ridiculously handsome, specimen of male pulchritude runs the boutique hotel in the ancient village.  His shrewish wife, Mercedes, ("Merche") also runs an abattoir -- more gallons of blood in the slaughterhouse and gurneys pull of gloating pig faces hacked from the skulls of slaughtered swine.  Paco is in love with a comely lady veterinarian who is, in turn, intrigued by a wealthy cosmopolitan playboy.  The lady vet's husband has vanished (we find out that he's been murdered and, also, somehow turned into a gaunt scarecrow standing in a arid field outside of town.)  The local priest, Father Vergara, is a heavy-set former boxing champion, fled to the town in the wake of a failed exorcism in which the victim of this demonic possession has ended up dead.  The cow's baby boy turns into a forty-foot spider that dashes around town tearing people to pieces.  Meanwhile in the Vatican, a cabal of evil cardinals is hunting for the 30 coins that Judas was paid for betraying Christ.  Once these coins have all been gathered, demonic forces will be unleashed on the earth and the some sort of apocalypse will devastate creation.  The cardinals wear gorgeous red robes and they meet in sinister conclaves to plot the massacre of innocents that will occur when the 30 coins have been gathered and deposited into some sinister Vatican reliquary.  In one alarming scene, a group of spelunkers garbed in HazMat suits descends into a shaft from a subway tunnel.  A thousand feet below the earth in a vast dripping cavern an enormous crucifix dangles upside down like a colossal  perverse stalactite.  The HazMat spelunker ascend to Christ's inverted face, drag open his eyes, and yank one of the 30 coins out of his eye-socket.  In other scenes, zombies seeking the coins hack people to death and are riddled with bullets but, nonetheless, stagger away in fountains of blood to hand the purloined coins to their demonic handlers.  During the botched exorcism, the possessed lad is afflicted with one of the accursed coins that slithers around in his flesh like a flesh-eating beetle and, then, erupts through his skin.  The victim of this possession dies but his waxen corpse makes cameo appearances from time to time in later episodes to either excoriate Father Vergara or comfort him.  The series' frantic action involves scenes at the Vatican, including within its library where all "the books in the world" are shelved; Hasidic Jews in the diamond business are slaughtered in New York City (their jewelry shop has one of the coins); a demon-priest shoots up a posh restaurant in Paris's Place Vendome, and Father Vergara, for inexplicable reasons, sojourns in war-torn Syria where he is tortured by various factions of the regime (or resistence- -- who knows?)  The hysteria achieves a delirious intensity when another priest from Hell (this guy looks like Jack Palance) pours maggots into the city sewers, enlisting the services of a local witch, causing the whole town to foam up with clouds of impenetrable fog -- it's like someone has used the Drano from Hell (literally) in the town's plumbing.  Then, the demon drizzles some sort of black goo (apparently edible if you're a fiend since he gulps big fistfuls of the molasses-colored syrup) all around the edges of town.  The goo magically installs clear plexiglass barriers enclosing the village and preventing the inhabitants from escaping.  The witch goes around town nailing pig faces to doors.  From below the stark cliff where the town is built, the whole village in encased in frothy pillars of fog much to the dismay of local gendarmes.  Somehow, Father Vergera has returned and, opening a secret chamber in the church's sacristy, he exposes an armory of automatic weapons.  Before the end of the penultimate episode, we see him liberally dowsing the bullets in holy water.

Thirty Coins is ridiculous but it has the courage of its crazy convictions.  Spanish shows are exquisitely cast.  (I recognized several of my favorite actors from Money Heist another excellent Tv show from the country.)  The villagers are variously ridiculous and some of them so ugly as to be actually cute.  Spanish TV also  features astonishingly gorgeous women, often nude or semi-nude, and so the show is replete with Majas (clothed and unclothed).  This commitment to what is sometimes called "eye candy" isn't an appeal merely to male viewers:  the men in the show are also lavishly handsome and athletic (and, also, generally traipsing about shirtless).  Some of the imagery is Goyasque -- particularly friezes of terrified villagers pressing their grotesque snouts up against the magical plexi-glass in their vain attempts to flee the demonically possessed town.  It's all idiotic but convincingly presented with high production values.  So, despite the better angels of my judgement,(so to speak) I am cautiously a fan of the series. 

 

The White Tiger

The novelist Milan Kundera once described the art of the novel as an explication of the cages in which human beings spend their lives.  Some of these cages are made by society or destiny or, even, embraced by their occupants -- but they are all cages of one sort or another.  Ramen Bahrani's film The White Tiger (2020 Netflix) explores this subject with unblinking intensity.  And, in fact, the film's theme is announced by a striking image:  in Indian markets, roosters are kept in cages where they can survey the site where they will be butchered.  The film's picaresque hero, Balram, describes these rooster cages and the film shows the animals stacked up in iron barred boxes awaiting slaughter, noting that the birds don't seem to mind their imprisonment and that they probably wouldn't try to escape if they could.  This dispiriting concept is at the film's heart, an ambitious epic-proportioned movie that portrays for us the chaotic corruption endemic to India, ironically called (several times) "the world's largest democracy."  The film is excellent and should be seen.  At the end of the movie, Balram, the Dickensian hero (a sort of brown David Copperfield) has become an entrepreneur and a successful man.  The film's narrative purports to be Balram's account of his life written for the benefit of the Chinese prime minister who has planned a trip to India to promote trade.  Balram proclaims that "White people are on their way out.  It's the century of the brown and yellow people. God help the others."  Upon briefly encountering the film's hero, the Chinese leader is a little nonplussed by Balram's assertion, but he doesn't dispute it.  

In elementary school, Balram distinguishes himself, praising the so-called "Great Socialist", a woman (probably Indira Gandhi) who leads the nation.  The teacher, recognizing Balram's potential, procures a scholarship for him to an excellent private school, declaring that he is the prodigy of the "white tiger."  But Balram's education is thwarted -- his family requires his labor in the tea shop that they operate in their tiny impoverished village and, after only two years of school, the lad is forced to work breaking up coal for fuel in the shop.  His large family is tyrannized by an elderly grandmother who forces everyone to work for her benefit and for the good of the kin, compelling all to pay their wages into a common fund (of which she is the chief beneficiary).The despotism in the family is mirrored in the larger society.  The people in the village tithe to a vicious landlord nicknamed the Stork and his eldest son, the Mongoose, beats people up who don't pay their share to the feudal master.  Balram's father, a rickshaw puller, is thrashed by the mongoose for not paying enough to the Landlord's family and, later, dies miserably of tuberculosis -- the town has no doctors.  When Balram sees his father's corpse burned, he observes the poor man's toes and feet writhing in the flame, a sign that even in death his father's misery continues.  

Balram is ambitious and he finagles a job as a driver for the Stork.  (First, he has to learn how to drive, a sort of bloodsport apparently in India in which each driver bullies every other driver on the crowded roads).  Balram figures out that the other servant and driver is a Muslim.  He informs on the man to the Stork and the poor fellow loses his job.  (It's hard to be sympathetic to the Muslim, however -- in Bahrani's film everyone oppresses everyone else mercilessly; the Muslim bullies Balram viciously until the youth sees the man surreptitiously observing Ramadan and can get him fired.)  Balram is obsequious and gains the trust of his employers.  Their world is feudal and Balram is just a serf -- people beat him up and claim that peasants like to be thrashed.  But Balram insinuates himself into the family's business, a squalid enterprise that involves bribery of officials in Delhi.  (It is assumed that no one pays taxes in India -- everything is an enormous protection racket.)  In fact, the Mongoose delivers red valises full of cash to government employees up to, and including, the nasty "Great Socialist" herself, who is thoroughly and viciously corrupt.  Ashok, the youngest son in the Stork's family, has returned to India from New York City with his wife, Pinky Madam (as she is called), the daughter of an Indian family emigrated to Jackson Heights.  Pinky Madam fancies herself liberal and progressive and she has a degree as a chiropractor.  Ashok and Pinky Madam pretend to be Balram's friend and benefactor but their declarations of brotherhood ring hollow.  One night, Pinky Madam is driving the family SUV in Delhi when she runs over a little kid crossing the street in a slum.  Pinky is drunk and Balam, recognizing the peril, counsels them to flee the scene.  The next morning, Balram is gladhanded by the family and handed a confession written by the Stork's lawyer -- Balram agrees that he was responsible for the hit and run collision and that it was solely his fault.  Balram signs the confession without asking anything in return.  (In fact, there is always implicit a threat that Balram's extended  family, including the nasty old granny, will be massacred by the Stork's henchmen if he isn't compliant with their wishes.)   This plot development mirrors a similar situation in Nuri Bilge Ceylans' Three Monkeys (2008).  Pinky Madam understands that she is now complicit with the horrible Indian caste system and leaves her husband, returning to New York.  (She gives Balram an envelope full of cash -- a rich reward until we learn later that the amount of cash provided, a King's ransom to Balram, would not suffice to pay for a single night at the luxury hotel in Delhi where the family lives when they are not extorting cash from their serfs back at their posh estate in the country.)  Balram understands that he is nothing more than a tool in the hands of the Stork and his erstwhile friend, Ashok.  So Balram begins stealing money from the family and plots a way to escape from their clutches.  Ultimately, he murders Ashok, gouging out his throat with a broken whiskey bottle, and flees town with a red suitcase full of bribe money.  (It is seldom in film that the audience feels that a savage murder is so well-merited by its victim -- Balam's only regret is that he couldn't kill the brutal Mongoose as well.)  By this time, Balam has the care of a small boy from his family, apparently a nephew sent to live with him in Delhi.  Balram travels to Bangalore where the economy is booming -- everyone is outsourcing work to India.  There he founds a cab company called "The White Tiger Drivers", after bribing officials to put out of business his competitors (whose licenses to drive have expired).  When he was in school, his teacher proclaimed Balram to be gifted, a so-called "white tiger", a marvel that arises in the jungle once every generation.  Before killing Ashok, Balram has taken his nephew to the zoo and sees a white tiger pacing its cage, emboldening him to the act.  Balram writes a letter to the Chinese leader -- this is the roguish voice-over narrative in the film -- and briefly meets the man, his hero.  At that time, he declares that the era of the white people is over.  And, in fact, there is not a single European or White person in the movie.

Bahrani is a superb film-maker. (he's an American, second-generation Iranian, raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and has made a number of fine films, including A Most Violent Year, also produced for Netflix and about a feud between heating oil purveyors in New Jersey; he is one of the few American movie-makers seriously concerned with economic issues.)  The White Tiger is very funny for its first hour before it turns feverish and savage in its last half.  The images are startling:  we see mansions with mobs of monkeys on their roofs, horrifying poverty, and tremendous wealth.  The feet of a corpse burned on a pyre seem to turn inward.  The drivers at the luxury hotel live in an underground garage, sleeping like unburied bodies under mosquito nets, bathed in an eerie green light.  The film shows the structure of poverty as being an endless cycle of exploitation -- the landlords exploit the peasants who, in turn, prey on one another.  Balram's granny is every bit as oppressive as the Stork's henchmen.  In one scene, Balram abuses a beggar -- it's a pecking order where everyone above kicks everyone below.  The liberal Ashok and his New York wife profess solidarity with the poor but when the "chips are down" they show their true colors and participate just as vigorously in the oppression of others as the more villainous characters -- in fact, they may be worse because they are hypocrites.  Of course, India is fantastically picturesque and colorful -- a land of only two castes, those with big fat bellies and those without.  Some live in the light and others the darkness -- the film seems to paraphrase Brecht's Three Penny Opera.  Astonishing poverty lives cheek to jowl with incredible opulence -- no one has taught Balam how to brush  his teeth and he curses his father for not teaching him this; but, of course, the poor man had no money to buy toothpaste or a toothbrush.  We are shown an extended montage of Balram stealing money from his employer's by falsifying invoices for repairs and peddling gas from the boss' tank.  But Balram tells us that all this thievery practiced over many months would not amount to enough money to even buy a double shot of Johnny Walker Red at the Hilton bar.  The film is in dialogue with another similar picture Slum Dog Millionaire -- in that movie, the hero wins a game show to become rich and famous.  "I wasn't going to go on some bull-shit game show and make my fortune," Balram tells us derisively.  The movie suggests that the only way for the wretched of the earth to better themselves is by violence.  This violence is probably not equal to the savagery of the oppressors.  At one point, Balram learns that his entire family of seventeen has been massacred by the Mongoose and his assassins. (It doesn't seem to bother him.)  In fact, we see a sequence showing everyone gunned down, with some old men being killed by having their skulls bashed open by thugs wielding bricks.  The Indian system of caste is maintained by brutal violence and can only be overcome by similar cruelty.  A statue of Gandhi is Delhi leading the people into the future is a vicious lie.  The Great Socialist is the queen of the thieves.  But as the poet Iqbal says (as quoted by Balram):  "The moment you notice what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave."  Bahrani's India is an edifice built upon the consent and compliance of its slaves -- they offer their faces to be slapped.  But once they see the horrible truth, namely that their brutish oppressors are not tyrannizing them from benevolent motives, the cage is open and fresh horrors must, then, occur.  This is an entertaining film that is, also, singularly uncompromising.

 

Under Fire

In the mid-80's in the last century, I lived in a home with HBO and one of the movies that was shown in frequent rotation was Under Fire (1983).  The picture had been denigrated by most critics for reasons that I no longer recall and was a box-office disappointment.  But it was obviously an impressive picture and found a following on cable TV.  Indeed, I esteemed the picture myself and, even, showed it to some friends.  But I haven't revisted the movie in thirty years and, so, I was interested to watch it again recently.  My recollection was that the movie began without much promise but improved radically as it progressed and, at the end, achieved something of lasting importance.  Today, I am unable to detect much difference between the way the film begins and its development over the next two hours -- it certainly seems more of a piece to me than when I watched it thirty, even 35 years ago.  The movie remains impressively produced, an example of seamless, efficient filmmaking with brilliant realized scenes of mayhem and chaos.  But the message of the picture, its essential themes, haven't aged well.  

Under Fire was timely when it was made, a picture set during the Sandinista revolt in Nicaragua.  The movie indicts American foreign policy in Central America and overtly supports the Sandinista cause.  In those days, I was a supporter of Ronald Reagan and so, I wonder, if the film's pro-Sandinista politics initially deterred me from admiring the movie and resulted in my sense that the picture grew in stature as it progressed -- possibly, the effect of me relaxing from initial disapproval of the movie's political stance toward an appreciation of its merits.  The movie is directed by Roger Spottiswoode from a script heavily doctored by Ron Shelton, a very skilled writer who graduated from this movie to pictures like Bull Durham and White Men Can't Jump.  Shelton also directed the second-unit work, the combat footage shot in Oaxaca and Chiapas that is the aspect of the movie that is most memorable.  In fact, I suspect that most of what is noteworthy in the movie is work done by Shelton.  

Under Fire is a romantic triangle set against the background of the civil war in Nicaragua. Nick Nolte looking very young and, even, a bit frail plays the part of Russell Price, an intrepid, even recklessly fearless, combat photographer.  He falls in love with Claire (Joanna Cassidy), a print journalist who is also a bit of an adrenaline junkie.  At the start of the film, Claire is in a failing relationship with Alex (Gene Hackman) a TV reporter later promoted to anchor on the network news.  Alex has covered his share of violence in the world and wants to get away from all the killing.  The movie begins with a civil war in Chad where helicopters battle elephants.  (Price gets a good picture of the fighting which is sold as a cover for Newsweek.)  After the fight between the helicopter gunships and the elephants, Price hitches a ride back to the town on a truck where another American, Oates (a very handsome youthful Ed Harris) is also riding with the African troops.  Oates thinks that he's riding with the government forces but it turns out that the truck, in fact, is loaded with rebel fighters -- to him, the combatants in third-world countries where he works as a mercenary are all fungible.  Oates suggests that Price go to Nicaragua where there's a "nice little war under way."  The film, then, shifts focus to Managua where Price, Alex, and Claire are all covering the war between the CIA-backed Somoza regime and the Sandinistas (led by a charismatic rebel named Rafael).  Alex is sick of covering combat and takes a job with the networks back in New York.  Price and Claire embark on a love affair.  During the fighting, Price and Claire join some rebels involved in a skirmish at a church.  One of the rebels who admires American baseball players pitches a hand grenade a hundred yards into a church steeple where there are a number of snipers firing machine guns at the Sandinistas.  Taking pictures of the corpses in the bell tower, Price discovers Oates now working as a gun-for-hire for Somoza hiding among the corpses.  Price doesn't reveal Oates presence among the dead bodies.  As Price and Claire are strolling away from the church, Oates guns down the merry kid who threw the hand grenade.  By this time Price and Claire are supporting the Sandinista cause -- "it's a nifty war with good guys and bad guys," Claire says.  Price and Claire go in search of the heroic Rafael and find that he's been killed (as earlier claimed by Somoza).  Price abandons journalistic ethics to take a picture of the dead man staged in such a way as to suggest that he's still very much alive.  The Sandinistas take courage and mount an assault on Managua.  Alex has flown down from New York to interview Rafael who is still reputed to be alive and directing the rebel troops.  In the chaos in the capitol, Alex is stopped by a Somoza patrol and executed.  Price shoots the killing with his Nikon and, then, flees through the shanty-town with half the army after him.  With his CIA handler, Somoza announces that Alex, now a world-known celebrity, was killed by the "terrorist" Sandinistas.  Price gets his film to the hotel where it is sent to the networks revealing that the anchor-man was killed by Somoza's troops.  Jimmy Carter, then President, cancels aide to Somoza's regime because of the anchor-man's murder and the rebels win the war.  Somoza flees the country with the bodies of  his father and brother in their lead caskets. In the cheering crowds of Sandinistas, Oates meets up with Price and suggests that they meet next in Mozambique or some other third-world country embroiled in warfare.  We have seen Oates directing mass killings for the regime.  When Price berates  him for these war crimes, Oates says:  "What do you mean?  They're kicking our butts."   

At the center of the story a French double-agent (Jean-Louis Trintignant) works for both sides.  He's sleeping with Somoza's girlfriend and symbolizes old-word Realpolitik as compared with American naivety.  The Frenchman, named Jazy, has been circulating copies of Price's photographs to death squads so that the rebels shown in the pictures can be murdered.  (Jazy's conduct is supposed to echo Price's breach of his own journalistic ethics when he joins with the rebels to make it seem as if Rafael is still alive -- Price's picture of the corpse still seeming to direct troops is dropped by airplanes all over Managua during the fighting to embolden the rebels.)  A bunch of feral rebel kids invade Jazy's luxurious home and murder him.  As he dies, Jazy says that we will see in 20 years what has become of the idealism of the rebels.  This is a prophetic remark:  we all know that Daniel Ortega, who led the Sandinista revolt, became a vicious tyrant and dictator himself, as bad or worse than Somoza.  (Of course, this couldn't have been known when the movie was made.)  

The movie is brilliantly staged.  There are immensely spooky sequences involving panicked soldiers in the empty streets of Managua randomly killing people at check points.  The combat scenes have a raw intensity that seems completely authentic.  Set pieces like the attack on mission tower are effectively filmed with a real sense for terrain, space and distance.  Joanna Cassidy, who sounds a little like Judy Garland (she has a breathy deep voice) is very sexy and compelling as the focus for the rivalry between Alex and Price.  But the romance scenes are intentionally underplayed and shrink into insignificance in the setting of the compelling combat footage.  The movie is politically naive and would be viewed as possibly racist today -- the film shows heroic Americans instrumental in leading the Sandinistas to victory.  It's Price's picture of the dead man seeming to still lead the rebellion that saves the cause.  (It's as if the Sandinistas never heard of cameras themselves and don't know how to take pictures.)  Then, Alex'  shooting saves the day by causing the Americans to divert 25 million dollars promised to Somoza to some other cause -- this precipitates his flight (with his family dead) to Miami.  Implicitly, the film suggests that the Sandinistas are unable to succeed on their own without the help of the Americans in the film -- they lack agency and are viewed by the movie as a picturesque ragtag group of brown men and women who can't succeed except with the assistance of an American savior (in this case the Byronic Nick Nolte).  The film has a good line that underlines the theme:  "50,000 Nicaraguans have died without anyone caring.  But one American journalist is killed and this makes all the difference.  We should have executed an American journalist fifty years ago."  But, of course, the film has the same intrinsic problem -- the war in Nicaragua is used primarily as a background for a love affair between Claire and Price with poor Alex the odd man out.  But the combat scenes are so decisively filmed, much after the documentary manner of Guzman's Battle of Chili or Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers that, in fact, the violence becomes the film's primary emphasis with the effect that the romantic triangle is really never developed in any substantial way.  The movie is well worth watching and extremely well-made but the clash between its intentions (to amuse audiences by showing a romantic triangle featuring attractive Hollywood stars) and its means, a bloody combat film, creates an obvious discontinuity:  there are really two pictures here -- a traditional Hollywood romance and documentary style war movie and, although the contrasts between these genres is fascinating the whole thing doesn't exactly work.

The plot has some glaring holes.  In one scene, Joanna Cassidy as Claire drives through Managua looking for Price and, in fact, finds him.  Managua has a population of about a million people and it seems unlikely she would be able to find this particular needle in this particular haystack.  The film implies that Somoza fled to Miami -- in fact, he is buried in Miami with his ancestral corpses; in fact, he fled to Asuncion, Paraguay where he was welcomed by Alfredo Stroessner but blown to pieces when assassinated the year after the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua.