Baby Reindeer

 Baby Reindeer (2024) is a Netflix series, apparently originating in the U.K., starring, written, and directed by a Scottish comedian, Richard Gadd.  Ostensibly based on real events, the show depicts a woman relentlessly stalking its protagonist, Gadd, more or less playing himself as an unsuccessful stand-up comedian and bartender.  The show is weirdly self-serving and disastrously deviates from its central plot to justify the hero's self-destructive behavior.  When the series focuses on the protagonist's misadventures with his dumpy, overweight stalker, it is compelling and effective -- the protagonist is trapped in a web of conflicting emotions and feels helpless with no place to turn for assistance.  When the show seizes its hero's agency and portrays him as a hapless victim, it becomes irritating and obtuse and, in fact, even loses its narrative urgency -- the dictum, in film, of course is to show things and not tell them; in the victimization episodes, beginning with the fourth installment in the seven-part series, things go badly wrong and the hero's voice-over does all the heavy lifting:  the viewer is, in effect, told again and again that the comedian/bartender protagonist is a victim of sexual assault (wholly unrelated to the stalker plot) and, therefore, all of his bad decisions can be excused.  This sort of thing may be plausible in terms of actual psychology, but the decision to cast the hero as a somnambulant drug-addicted victim leaches the urgency and interest out of the story.  Baby Reindeer is nothing if not "meta" -- it's a dramatization of a play or monologue that was a dramatization of the rather operatic oppression of the hero by his female stalker and that stalking was itself performative in character, a play within a play within a play.  Baby Reindeer, in other words, is keenly aware of the sort of criticisms that I am here lodging and the show takes pains to disarm that critique by acknowledging it and, even, exposing the hero's musings to considerable amounts of corrosive self-doubt. 

The narrative begins in media res with the gaunt, bearded hero, his big eyes all inflamed, reporting to a police officer that he has been stalked by a woman for the last six months.  The cop ask why the victim delayed so long in making his report.  This triggers an extended flashback that comprises the first half of the seven episodes.  The fourth episode is a pivot to a more introspective perspective on the events shown in the first three shows.  This pivot is either a brilliant digression that establishes the hero's ambivalent motivations or a serious mistake, the point where, as the Fonz would have it, the "show jumps the shark."  (I subscribe to the latter view but, clearly, there can be legitimate debate on this point.)  In the first three episodes, we learn that Donny Dunn (Gadd's fictionalized surrogate) is tending bar when a plump, plain woman comes into the joint and orders a diet Coke.  Donny feels sorry for the woman and chats with her.  She imagines that he is trying to seduce her and responds with thousands of emails and text messages encouraging him. (She has nicknamed Donny "Baby Reindeer" because of his winsome appearance, hence the name of the show.)  Donny finds that the woman, Martha, is a compulsive liar -- she claims to be a lawyer in an office representing well-known political figures in the UK -- and has a pattern of engaging in criminal stalking; in fact, she has been disbarred and served prison time for committing crimes associated with stalking.  Donny is a feckless, if gentle, soul:  he's living in the home owned by his ex-girlfriend's mother (we learn the reason for Donny's break-up in the pivotal fourth show).  Donny fancies himself a comedian, but, in fact, his stand-up is execrable.  Nonetheless, he participates in various comedy competitions -- his only fan seems to be Martha whose infectious laugh at one of his gigs energizes the crowd.  Donny is carrying on a desultory relationship, mostly consisting of platonic dates, with a trans woman, Teri, a clinical psychological therapist.  (Donny's sexuality is ambiguous -- he has disdain for his "heteronormative" mates at the bar.)  Donny tries to end his encounters with Martha who spends every night in the bar where he works.  When he ends contact with Martha, she sits at a bus stop outside the house where Donny lives, half comatose and shivering in the cold.  Donny has pity and tries to establish a limited relationship with her -- but, of course, this goes awry.  Martha discovers that Donny is dating Teri and confronts her, hurling insults and shouting that she "looks like a man".  Martha then beats Teri viciously and leaves her bleeding and with a hank of hair ripped out of her skull on the barroom floor.  This prompts Donny to report Martha's stalking, something that he does, however, only belatedly -- and, then, fails to report the assault committed by Martha on Teri.  

The fourth episode attempts to account for Donny's ineffectual response to Martha's threats and violence.  In a flashback, we see that Donny participated in the famous "Fringe" festival in Edinburgh five years earlier.  (Donny says that if they laugh his show is "stand-up"; if the audience doesn't laugh, it's "performance art.")  Simply put, Donny isn't funny -- his stand-up is cringeworthily bad.  An older man with a red beard praises Donny's work.  This guy, who works in the TV industry, is a sexual predator who gets Donny high on various arcane drugs and, then, apparently shoves his fingers up our hero's rectum.  Donny doesn't like this action at first, but is too high to resist.  Later, he comes to believe that these encounters, seemingly involving some form of digital penetration and fellatio, have turned him into a homosexual.  (The show's sexual themes are ostensibly liberated and fashionably tolerant, but, in fact, there are weird undertones of self-loathing and homophobia.)  The sexual predator, who has "groomed" Donny and ravaged his confidence, turns the protagonist into a drug-addict.  It's this addiction that has caused Donny's girlfriend to end their relationship.  The show posits that Donny's experience of sexual assault has made him passive and unable to act responsibly with respect to Martha's stalking.  (We're told this but the evidence on the screen is scant; the show traffics in retrograde notions of homosexual passivity.) Donny begins having promiscuous sex with partners of all genders.  At first, he's impotent with his beautiful transsexual girlfriend.  But, when he begins imagining sex with Martha, he's aroused and successfully has intercourse with her.  After reports to the authorities, the police intervene and warn Martha away -- she seems to meekly accept their admonitions and promises to leave Donny alone.  Donny, in fact, feels some chagrin about Martha's compliance with the police warnings.  But, of course, Martha then returns to her old tricks with a vengeance, harassing the hero's parents.  

The rest of the series is a retread of the opening episodes.  Martha persecutes Donny who sets traps for her that backfire on him.  The final two episodes are badly disfigured by two lengthy and self-indulgent monologues in which Donny explains the situation -- first at a comedy venue and, then, to his parents who listen stoically as he sobs, whimpers, and comes out to them as "bisexual."  These sequences are almost unwatchably bad and totally implausible.  The scene in the comedy venue where Donny whines about being sexually abused and tries to relate that experience to Martha's stalking, in anything approaching real life, would have triggered a deafening chorus of catcalls from the audience and mass walk-outs.  Here the audience submits to this nonsense and attends to every word as if it were Dostoevsky.  (In fact, Donny becomes famous for his brave candor.)  Further, it seems incomprehensible that Donny's parents don't know that he is gay -- when he admits to be being raped by the red-haired TV producer, his dad acknowledges that he too was a victim:  "I was raised Catholic," he says.  This is all simply detestable.  Obviously, Richard Gadd thinks he is some kind of great writer and actor and that it is reasonable to bring the show to a dead stop so that he can pontificate histionically about his sexual confusion.  This reminds me of early films featuring Sylvester Stallone (particularly First Blood the initial Rambo picture released in 1982) -- in those movies, Stallone felt that he had to treat the audience to a monologue inflected by tears and rage.  Accordingly, the action stops so that the actor can strut his stuff.  This sort of narcissism is on display throughout Baby Reindeer but most disastrously in these two monologues.  Ultimately, Martha is imprisoned.  Donny goes to confront his rapist.  The man offers him a job and amazingly Donny's outrage dissolves as he agrees to work for the TV producer.  (This is a curious development that is either very profound or a totally inept plot development depending upon your point of view -- since I doubt Gadd's competency, I tend toward the latter interpretation.)  Even Martha gets a kind of monologue in which she sobs and cries -- this is a recording played at the end of the last episode that explains why Martha used the strange moniker "Baby Reindeer" for our hero.  (Gadd's narcissism is so extreme that Martha is denied her image while the tape-recording plays -- she's not allowed to compete with Gadd in the emoting sweepstakes.)  This last scene is somewhat affecting, but the show is so badly botched by this point that the damage has been irretrievably done.

There's something illiberal and ugly about the entire exercise.  In one of his tearful monologues (I can't recall which because they are in substance identical), Donny describes Teri as his "Trans girlfriend."  Teri identifies as a woman and objects to being characterized in any terms that would suggest masculinity.  So why does Donny, as it were, "out" her by using the adjective "trans."  This is part of the show's nastiness -- Gadd wants credit for being modern and nonchalant about sexual identity but, nonetheless, he has to emphasize Teri role as a transexual in this scene.  It's all about scoring points.  Similarly, there's something profoundly misogynistic about the show's portrayal of Martha.  Indeed, one suspects that some fugitive distaste for ordinary, biologically cis-women underlies the show.  Martha is nothing if not feminine.  She has big breasts and a rounded figure that looks like the form of a Paleolithic Venus.  She's chatty, voluble, and has a nightmarishly sharp tongue, one of the conventional weapons that women wield against their oppressors.  And, most notably, she is frequently characterized by her menstrual periods.  In the last encounter with Donny, she claims to be having her period and, therefore, demands "hydration" -- asserting that it would be "illegal" for the bar to refuse her water.  (In an earlier scene, she boasted about her reproductive potential, her large number of "eggs" harbored in her ovaries.)  In substance, Martha represents a caricature of the female, lush with reproductive potential.  Is this sort of thing something that Gadd, with his homosexual leanings, despises?  I don't know, but there is something misogynistic about the show and the idea must be entertained.    

   

La Chimera

 A few years ago, I watched Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro.  I admired the film in all respects, but I also can't recall what it was about.  I remember there were some peculiar vertical landscapes in the movie, flowery quarries if memory serves.  But I don't recollect a thing about the movie's plot or characters.  I suspect that I may have the same future response to La Chimera -- the film is beautiful, packed with odd  incidents, and wonderfully eccentric characters.  But it's also diffuse, sprawling in its own understated way (the film is two hours and eleven minutes long) and more a matter of tone and atmosphere than plot.  La Chimera is a fine film, but, also, curiously aimless.

Rohrwacher's narrative paradigm is to supply an image that is difficult to interpret and, then, a few minutes later, casually show something that explains what we have previously seen.  We are continuously interpreting retroactively, that is, using information provided later in the movie to understand something earlier shown.  This means that La Chimera has to be watched carefully.  In one scene, the protagonist encounters a group of people; a woman is applying make-up to a chubby, plain-looking man.  This seems odd, but, a few minuteslater we see that the man is riding on float in a parade, some sort of small-town agricultural festival, and he has been made-up for that appearance.  The structure of the film also invokes this principle of deferring explanation until later in the movie -- for instance, the hero's interactions with some people on a train in the first scene only comes into clear focus at the end of the movie when the identities of these fellow-travelers is explained.  This structural feature (mystification resolving into understanding) is consistent with the film's plot which involves archaeology and how the past inflects the present.  

La Chimera is set in Tuscany, but this is, most assuredly, not the picturesque Italian terrain beloved by tourists.  Rohrwacher's Tuscany is impoverished, full of marginalized people of the sort we would call "white trash" in American parlance.  No one is honestly employed and the skies are mostly grey and dreary.  A retired, and partially paralyzed, opera singer (Flora played by Isabel Rosselini) lives in a villa that is crumbling around her.  The protagonist squats in a lean-to shoved up against one of the towering, faceless walls of the village -- it looks like a hard wind could blow the shack down.  The neighborhood is dominated by a huge, industrial power-plant that looms over a greenish-grey bay.  The hillsides are pocked with shadowy wet-looking niches carved into the rock, an Etruscan necropolis, and there are tumulus hills, also with tunnels bored into them.  The characters in the movie are mostly Tombaroli -- that is,,grave robbers who eke out a living by breaking into the Etruscan tombs and stealing the grave goods interred with the skeletons buried under the muddy earth.  Arthur, the film's main character, for some reason an Englishman, has served time for theft of antiquities and seems to have been just released from prison when the film begins.  After being taunted by some odd-looking people on the train, he returns to the hill-town surrounded by Etruscan tombs, a place where there are two rival gangs of Tombaroli.  Arthur is seeking his girlfriend, Beniamina, who has gone missing.  (He dreams of her wearing a knit skirt with a red thread that has unraveled and appears to be embedded in the soil under her feet; the film's first shot, Arthur's vision of Beniamina peering around a black threshold is explained only in the picture's last half hour.)  Beniamina's mother is Flora, a retired opera singer who lives in a decaying palace.  Flora has a servant, Italia, a young woman who attends upon the imperious older woman, working for her in exchange for singing lessons.  (The lessons are in vain, Italia is tone-deaf.)  Italia has a baby and, in fact. a ten-year old daughter.  These children live somewhere in the crumbling palace, hidden from Flora -- we see them literally concealed under beds.  Flora has innumerable squabbling daughters, at least five or six, and this profusion of children suggests something mythological about the character -- it seems odd and, even, supernatural for one woman to have so many adult daughters, but this is a  premise in the film that is established, but not really developed -- it's an aspect of the movie, like many other features that is simply shown but not dramatized or given any real significance.  Arthur goes to see Flora who seems unable to tell him where the missing Beniamina has gone.  Gradually, he's sucked back into the underworld of antiquities' thieves.  Arthur has a peculiar gift, called "la Chimera"  here meaning something like "second sight" or "visions".  He uses a dowsing rod to find buried tombs and goes into a sort of visionary frenzy in the presence of these graves.  His unique talent is highly regarded by the other Tombaroli.  The grave-robbers are working for a shadowy figure named Spartaco who has a network for the retail of stolen archaeological artifacts.  Finds unearthed at the tombs are brought in dog-carrying kennels to a corrupt veterinarian who, in turn, sells the objects to Spartaco.  The tombs are not located in exotic places but seem to be everywhere underfoot, in vacant lots and construction sites and among the dunes by the seashore.  Ultimately, the grave robbers find a buried temple, some sort of hypogeum, in which there is an astounding marble sculpture of a naked goddess surrounded by votive offerings.  It's million dollar find.  But Arthur is ambivalent about disturbing the temple.  (One of his colleagues brusquely knocks off the head of the goddess in a scene that is as shocking as anything you might watch in a horror movie; Arthur protests in vain.)  The rival gang contrives to seize the temple and loots it.  Arthur with his gang members go to a yacht moored somewhere off the shore of Croatia, it seems, where Spartaco is auctioning the body of the goddess to museum buyers.  Arthur shows Spartaco, who turns out to be a beautiful woman, the head of the goddess.  But, then, he hurls it into the sea, providing the occasion for a spectacular underwater shot in which the goddess' lifesize marble head is sucked into the silt on the bottom of the sea.  Arthur goes back to the hill-town where Italia has freed herself from Flora's palace -- Flora seems to have been put in a nursing home, probably suffering from dementia.  Italia, with several other women, is squatting in an abandoned train station where she is running a kind of day-care center and women's shelter.  Italia obviously likes Arthur and the affection is mutual but he is still searching for his lost love,  Beniamina.  After spending the night with Italia at the day-care, he leaves at dawn and wanders to the necropolis, parts of which seem to be under a new parking ramp under construction.  There he finds yet another tomb, enters the grave, and encounters Beniamina.  

La Chimera is full of surprising images and the film is designed so that the supernatural casually and naturally interacts with realistic depictions of Tuscan life.  The sky is full of starlings and it seems cold and rainy.  At the Day-Care, the children have lice and so we see them being deloused with pink plastic bonnets over their heads.  There's a remarkable shot of the frescos in the buried hypogeum instantly losing their color due to oxidation when air from the outside is introduced into the underground sanctuary.  Italia seems to be some kind of witch although her powers are not clearly defined.  There are odd dance scenes on the dunes next to the sinister-looking power-plant.  As with Happy as Lazarro, the landscapes are defined as primarily vertical -- the little car operated by one of the grave-robbers can barely get up the steep grade leading into the hill-town which seems to be comprised of ladder-like chutes and alleys.  Arthur's squat leanto against the city walls is shown from overhead, the camera perched atop the ramparts.  There are Brechtian interludes in which a singer performs a ballad about the exploits of the Tombaroli.  Italia who seems humiliated and subservient in the first part of the movie becomes a powerful and domineering figure by the end of the film.  

The world, La Chimera shows, is made up of innumerable intersections between the living and dead.  The goddess, Arthur proclaims, is "not made to be seen by human eyes."  The story resists meaning and obstructs any sort of abstract interpretation.  Things are what they are shown to be but also exist on a supernatural plane.  The film uses an interesting device to show Arthur's chimeras or visions; the camera tracks down from his face to the ground and, then, somehow rotates so that we are seeing Arthur upside down, poised over the vault of empty sky and hanging by his feet.  This idiosyncratic suggests interpenetration of the realms of the dead and living.  In the final scenes, Arthur sees himself reflected (and upside down) in a puddle and this is where he tells the looters to use their backhoe to dig.  No one, it is said, is interested in the "tombs of the poor folk like us..."  

Art is for Everyone: Keith Haring at the Walker Art Center

 The Keith Haring retrospective at the Walker Art Center is an unalloyed delight.  The show is vivid, thought-provoking and the art has a gorgeous, timeless quality.  You should see this show.  

Haring, born in 1958, is, more or less, my contemporary.  Tragically, he died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31 and so, of course, we don't know what he would have accomplished had he lived to be an old man.  His gifts were remarkable.  I never paid much attention to his work when he was alive.  In the eighties, Haring seemed to me to be an obnoxious and superficial excrescence on the Manhattan night club circuit, a kind of Pop Art mavin like Andy Warhol but more callow, more purely optical, making work without philosophical significance -- in my ignorance, I didn't understand that Haring, unlike Warhol, could possibly be anything except an epiphenomenon of a homosexual and hedonist big city party-scene.  The Walker show proves that I was wrong in this assessment.  Warhol is more important than Haring from an art-historical perspective -- but Haring (no doubt in my mind) is more fun, vibrant, and memorable.  Warhol is like Picasso to Haring's Matisse.  And, indeed, Haring even cites Matisse in one of his ambitious later paintings.  There is something to be said for sheer pleasure, for hedonism; Andy Warhol makes partying in New York discos and jet-setting with celebs look like tedious hard-work -- there's something borderline Teutonic, or, at least, Mitteleuropaische about Warhol's vast output; Haring's equally huge ouevre expresses a joie de vivre that is infectious (no pun intended) and life-affirming.

Keith Haring started out as a puckish graffiti artist working the Manhattan subway tunnels.  He was about 20 when his signature imagery began to appear on hoardings under New York (Haring wasn't a vandal; he seems to have made his murals on unused advertising spaces near subterranean train stops).  His early work is massively documented -- there's a video that shows him being arrested for making unlawful graffiti deploying the same imagery that, later, made him famous:   eloquent outlines of radiant crawling babies, dancing figures, barking dogs with big jaws open and exclamation-point dashes showing the noise that they are making, pyramids, cheerful dolphins with their yaps open to speak, flying sauces irradiating people having sex or orgiastic dancers.  These images have a primordial power and they can be deployed in almost endless combinations -- Haring's work is instantly recognizable and distinctive and, despite, what may seem a limited repertoire of signs, in fact, highly complex.  His pictographs have an intuitively expressive quality.  They lunge at your eyes. (Segregated from the main pathway through the show is a narrow corridor lined with erotic canvases -- mostly blow-jobs and figures buggering one another; these are cheerful, completely antiseptic diagrams.)

Of course, talent of this kind could not go unrecognized and Haring became very famous.  However, notwithstanding his fame, and pressures to simply repeat himself, the show at the Walker, arranged in chronological order, demonstrates a marked progression from his early works to later, darker imagery culminating in  heroically sized paintings that he made in the last half of the eighties.  In fact, Haring was groping his way toward something akin to 19th century "history painting" in the  images that he made near the end of his life documenting his response to AIDS plague that killed him.  And, even, in his first museum-style paintings, Haring shows an interesting development from the graffiti work on which his celebrity was initially based.  There are three museum compositions after the galleries documenting Haring's subway work -- viewed from twenty feet, the pictures don't seem to have any figurative subject; they are merely tangles of maze-like ribbons of paint, punctuated at intervals with dashes of dark color.  But this is an exhibition that you have to see coming and going -- I recommend that you walk through the show in the direction established by the chronological "hang" and, then, go back the opposite way.  Retracing my path back through the paintings, I noticed that the three big official Haring canvases, seen from a distance, resolve into very clear figures -- for instance, someone tied to a chair -- that I didn't see on my ascent up the galleries to the end of the show.  The effect is magical; somehow, Haring has embedded figures in what seem to be very broadly painted abstractions.  This shows that Haring has a rigor and cunning that is not immediately apparent in his jovial and radiant pictures that, on first glance, seem to be merely primitive pictographs.  

By his mid-twenties, Haring was working on ambitious compositions.  One big painting shows a Boho girl lounging in a room decorated by a Jasper Johns canvas and a Frank Stella picture; at the lower left hand corner of the twenty foot long image, there's a citation of Matisse's gold fish bowl in the famous 1912 painting..  Another big canvas shows Moses with the burning bush.  In these pictures, Haring puts a camouflage surface of winding labyrinthine ribbons over the image ,concealed in the picture and complicating it with a maze of dashed marks  on yellow or red ticker tape on the surface of the canvas.  Haring's invention never flags -- at least in this show (I assume that his vast body of work is, in fact, probably rife with repetitive variations on his pictorial themes.)  In a homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haring adjusts his pyramid-form to make a pile of crowns (Basquiat's personal pictogram was the crown).  Some politically motivated late paintings have some of the ferocity of Philip Guston -- we see a huge pig vomiting out a green sludge of computer screens, keyboards, TVs and other noxious consumer goods.  The pig has a vertical phallic appendage that is equipped with teats to which little sucking homunculi are attached.  The painting depicts something that is hideous and disturbing.  But Haring makes the image strangely comical and, even, endearing -- he can't produce an ugly painting notwithstanding his best intentions.  (Another picture in this room shows the earth pierced by a blade and bleeding.  Apparently, a bare foot has stepped on the knife impaling the earth and a green glacier-like bile filled again with consumer goods is spilling out of the wounded foot.  To describe the picture is to identify horrific subject matter.  But the canvas itself has a blithe, graceful insouciance.  In the last gallery, several monumental works are on show, a sculpture densely engraved with an intaglio of Haring's dogs, dolphins, and dancers and a huge phallus about 20 feet high also entirely covered with enigmatic marks, at once primitive and enormously expressive -- this is called "The Great White Way."  A huge canvas with foot-wide swaths of black paint delineating its forms shows a hunched, piteous figure laboring up a flight of stairs with a great egg (the world-egg) on his shoulders.  The egg is cracked and semen is flowing out of it in the form of a vast spectral spermatazoa bearing pointed horns.  This seems to be a response to the AIDS epidemic.  A smaller canvas, only partly painted in purplish bruise-colored marks was Haring's last -- he died before he could complete the image.

There's a lot of stuff in the show about Haring's celebrity status.  We see him posed with Warhol, Dolly Parton, and Madonna.  He made a painted leather suede outfit for a Madonna tour -- we see the singer rolling around on stage in the sheath of this painted garment.  Haring was the artist in residence at the Walker in 1984 and made a large mural for the museum.  He also made voluminous posters, stickers, and all sorts of other ephemeral things -- all of these things bearing the imprint of his unique sensibility.  

Haring's style was forged in response to the conditions of making subway graffiti in the late seventies.  He uses a very broad, assured line -- he paints with bold gestures so that the lines can be readily applied; that is, the image has to be completed before the cops arrive.  The broad lines outlining his images are not leaden however, but have a vibrant energy -- they are coiled, tense forms full of kinetic energy.  Furthermore, the clarity of his imagery is a response to creating pictures made to be seen through the window of a speeding subway train.  Later, Haring has to complicate his original pictorial impulse which is to communicate at a great distance and with viewers expected to behold the image for only a second or so.  This complication results in Haring nesting his icons very close to one another, creating jigsaws full of disparate pictograms, and, then, marking the surface with ribbon mazes.  God only knows what Haring would have accomplished had he survived the AIDS epidemic.  

Haring said in an interview a couple years before his untimely death:  "Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough.  I mean I've barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years.  I would love to live to be 50 years old. Imagine, hardly seems possible...."  Haring proclaimed;  "The public has a right to Art.  Art is for everybody."  

Death in the Garden

 A French-Mexican co-production, Luis Bunuel's Death in the Garden (1956) is an unusual picture with a big budget, an uncharacteristic transitional film that marks the director's emergence from the B-movie milieu of Mexican cinema, the sombrero ghetto as it were. Bunuel's many films made in Mexico -- there are reportedly more than 20 of them -- are not well-known.  He seems to have worked in all genres including musical comedy and was, apparently, a reliable yeoman director, so reliable, ultimately, as to be entrusted with relatively expensive films with expensive casts.  At the same time, Bunuel was essentially working "under the radar" and, so, was able to invigorate his genre films with perverse touches.  Death in the Garden is not a masterpiece -- it's only "pretty good" but the film is compelling and made with exceptional, if unobtrusive, craft.  Most notably, the picture juggles a large cast of characters and manages to establish all of its principal players as vibrant, memorable, and fully rounded figures -- this is a remarkable technical achievement for a movie that is only about 100 minutes long.  

In the proverbial "unnamed South American country", a rapacious military dictatorship (possibly a bit like Franco's regime in Spain) holds sway over a wilderness of jungle penetrated by a huge green river.  A diamond mine occupies a picturesque gorge, complete with waterfall, where a ragtag group of miners (said to be about 200) are digging in the boulders and falling water for precious gems.  One of the more prominent miners is Castin, a Frenchman, who has discovered enough diamonds (he has them in a leather pouch) to buy a restaurant back in Paris; this is  his dream.  The military junta sends troops to expropriate the mine, apparently, close to a decrepit-looking village with a ruinous chapel and some garrison buildings.  Led by Castin and others, the miners pitch stones at a phalanx of soldiers who disperse them by firing a volley into the sky.  Into the middle of this confrontation, a lanky, hard-bitten stranger appears, leading his horse right between the opposing forces -- he jauntily gives the middle-finger to the soldiers.  This is Chark (pronounced "Shark") who is a solitary fortune-hunter.  Looking for a bed to occupy in the impoverished village, Chark ends up sleeping in a  prostitute's room.  When the whore named Djin (Simone Signoret) comes home from one of her nocturnal forays, she finds Chark between her sheets.  This is no problem; she sleeps with him and discovers that he has a leather wallet full of cash strapped to his chest.  She sneaks away, alerts the greedy commander of the local regiment, who arrests Chark and steals his money.  Meanwhile, the miners have attacked the soldiers and killed one of them.  This triggers an all-out battle, complete with a machine gun and impressive pyrotechnics.  The miners are beaten back and one of their leaders, who is badly injured, is sentenced to death by firing squad.  Chark, also sentenced to death, asks to write a last letter, but uses the pen to gouge out a soldier's eye so as to escape.  (The poor wounded miner, accused of insurrection, who has lost a vast amount of blood, is dragged outdoors, tied to a chair, and executed -- this outrage causes more fighting.  But the miners are completely disorganized, impulsive, and poorly led -- they are again immediately defeated.)  The commander of the troops cracks down on the miners, perceiving that Castin is one of their leaders.  Castin, who is in love with the avaricious whore, Djin, flees to her room where she hides him.  Meanwhile two more strangers have wandered into this bloody mess.  One of them is Cherco, a pimp, who has come to the village with a boat loaded with three more whores.  The other is Father Lizardi (Michel Piccoli), a missionary to the wild Indians, who is caught between the opposing armed camps.  When the soldiers search for Castin, they encounter Lizardi in the prostitute's bedroom --  he's there by accident but allows the troops to think that he's been visiting the whore to protect Castin who is hiding in a backroom or closet. The soldiers have taken hostages and threaten to start executing them if the miners don't turn over Castin -- something they would gladly do if they could find him.  (He's been wounded in the head and is on the lam).  Ultimately, Castin escapes from the town on Cherco's whore-ferry.  Also on the boat are Father Lizardi, now in disgrace, Chark who sneaks on board, Castin's deaf-mute daughter, Maria, and Djin.  The tough-guy, Chark, bullies Cherco into setting off down the river with this unlikely group of refugee castaways.  Chark savagely beats Djin to punish her for betraying him to the soldiers.  (This is a characteristic example of Bunuel's sadism -- Cherk hits Djin over the head with some kind of bludgeon, pauses, and batters her a second time; surely, he's made his point and he ponders the situation for a long moment before smashing the weapon down on her a third time; the violence is disturbing and totally gratuitous.)

With the soldiers in pursuit, Death in the Garden launches into its tour-de-force second half with a passage that is  like something from Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God.  The castaways flee down the river, disembark, and plunge into the nightmarish "green hell" of the jungle.  There, they are drenched by torrential rains, wander through knee-deep mud, and, gradually, starve.  Castin goes mad and the other refugees, completely lost in the forest, bicker.  Cherco escapes from the group, (Chark has tied him up) although he is likely killed by the jungle.  Chark kills one of the pursuing soldiers, firing his long gun at the man, and the troops decide that the better part of valor is to let the forest devour the fugitives.  Just when it appears that the fugitives are on the brink of death, Chark discovers an airplane crashed in the jungle on the edge of a huge lake.  The airplane is full of provisions (and corpses).  There are jewels and expensive clothing in suitcases strewn around the jungle.  (Djin and Maria get dressed-up in elaborate and elegant evening gowns, traipse about the bug-infested wilderness as if they are in a Parisian ballroom, and, even, put on make-up.)  Castin's madness turns homicidal.  In the end, only two of the castaways survive.  The film shows them setting off in a dug-out that has magically appeared, paddling across the vast greenish blue lake toward the distant mountains of Brazil.  

Bunuel shows civilization (if that's what you can call the miners and provincial garrison) as being completely corrupt, criminal, and violent.  For the first half of the movie, everyone is trying to kill everyone else, although most of the violence is inept, sudden, and ineffective.  (Bunuel is wholly uninterested in staging this sort of violence and his "action scenes" are embarrassingly perfunctory.)  The vicious commander executes a dying man who is comatose and Djin the prostitute schemes to steal Castin's nest-egg.  When the soldiers demand that the miners surrender Castin, they are only too happy to oblige.  No one shows any vestige of loyalty and everyone acts wholly for his or her selfish benefit.  Castin, who seems like an engaging guy, proclaims his innocence of the offenses charged against him -- as if guilt or innocence means anything here -- and refuses to sacrifice himself to save the hostages; as far as he's concerned, the soldiers can execute these people, who are, of course, more or less innocent as well.  The scenes in the jungle illustrate in a primal manner, the proposition that nature is red in tooth and claw and that the corruption intrinsic to human beings is enacted on a cosmic scale in the tangled, verminous forest.  There's no refuge anywhere.  Society is corrupt and nature savage and indifferent.  The priest, who seems to want to be martyred by "wild Indians", has to tear pages out of his Bible to use as tinder in the campfires that the refugees try to build -- often with soaking wet twigs.  The tone of the film's second half is best exemplified by a remarkable sequence during the exodus through the jungle.  Chark finds an anaconda tangled around the limb of one of the huge buttress-rooted trees growing in the swamp.  He chops off the snake's head with his machete.  (Animals were definitely injured in the making of this movie and the snake is killed on-screen.)  The castaways plan to eat the snake, but are too slow in their preparations.  Father Lizardi's face is incandescent with horror.  Swarms of ants are eating the snake which writhes still on the forest floor.  After this hellish vision, the movie cuts to a night-shot of Paris, looking down the Champs Elysses toward the triumphal arch.  Cars are approaching.  But, then, the frame freezes, the traffic sounds slow to a dull rumble, and we see that Castin is gazing at a picture of night-time Paris (the image we have just seen) by the light of the guttering campfire.  He throws the picture of Paris into the flames.  Then, he tears in two a photograph of the Arc de Triomph.  The next day, the refugees trek through the towering green walls of foliage -- the film was shot on-location in the Yucatan jungles.  Chark comes across a burnt-out fire and excitedly announces that there is someone else nearby in the forest.  But, of course, then, we see the torn-in-two picture of the Arc de Triomph and understand that the day's hiking has merely brought the castaways in a full circle to the place where they started.  The film's eerie hopelessness is perfectly encapsulated in a shot in which we see that the deaf-mute Maria is shown with her long hair completely entangled in some kind of thornbush; she stands pinioned against the swarming, trembling green wall of the jungle.  

Death in the Garden is well-acted and very beautifully made.  The landscapes are palpable with verdant menace and the green rivers throb between walls of mangrove.  The scenes in the ruinous provincial town are gorgeous, bathed in a perpetual amber sunset.  The film's fantastically complex first half, a series of sequences that seem all compressed together in a diamond-like crystal of narrative, contrasts with the second part of the movie which is more slowly paced and philosophical -- Lizardi's belief in a benevolent God is challenged by the horrifying malevolence of the jungle and Castin concludes that no one is innocent and that all must be punished by death.  Half of the movie is a wild tangle of plots and subplots; the other half of the movie is the leisurely and philosophical proof of a savage theorem -- nature is hostile and, even in extremis, human beings are unable to cooperate for the common good.  It's an interesting movie, compelling and suspenseful, but seriously flawed. 

Look for a short shot right after Chark appears in town.  The camera tracks with him to a well in the town square where about a half-dozen women clad in filmy white garments are languishing in the heat.  It's a strange scene, surrealist in force -- but Bunuel doesn't linger over the weird image; it's completely matter-of-fact.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art since 1989 (Minneapolis Institute of Art)

 The Shape of Time:  Korean Art since 1989 is fairly small, but interesting, exhibition on display at Minneapolis Institute of Art through July 2024.  On the evidence of the show -- and I have no idea how representative it is -- Korean art has largely eschewed works on canvas and painting.  Almost everything in the show was either sculpture (glazed, highly finished ceramic objects), photography, or other media.  The show's name is a misnomer of sorts -- the art on display is either from South Korea or the Korean diaspora in the United States.  

The first gallery and its anteroom are representative.  A large colorful ceramic tower, something like a totem pole, greets museum-goers.  The brightly glazed ceramic spire is a mass of interlocked animals and human figures surmounted by a ghostly-looking figure representing an ancestor -- the object is about 15 feet high and has a shamanistic aura, although I don't whether it imitates Korean precursors or is based on Haida  (or other Pacific Northwest) totem poles.  The bright surface of sculpture is very different from the current weathered surfaces of Pacific Northwest totem poles (although I think these objects may also once have been brightly painted) --  it's an interesting invitation to the show (which will cost you $20 to enter).  In the first gallery, there are a number of eight-foot high canes, also surmounted with ceramic finials and representing certain natural forces, make a sparse forest in one corner of the room:  lights cast shadows of these stalk-like objects against a nearby wall, an interesting effect.  The gallery's main focus is a huge back-lit photograph stretched like a mural across one of the walls -- it's probably about 40 feet long showing tourists gathered in an observatory station overlooking the DMZ.  In this part of Korea, the DMZ runs through a dramatic mountainous landscape.  The figures in the observatory (it's the Euiji overlook) are reproduced life-size, a frieze of casually dressed men and women in seats facing a long, floor-to-ceiling picture window that simulates the shape of the vast photograph.  We are seeing people seeing -- apparently, the tourists are listening to a kind of lecture on the topography in front of them, with a voice pointing out landmarks in the enormous, sprawling range of green mountains. (A model of the landscape is also in front of the audience labeled with the names of the various peaks and military fortifications.)  A man with a sort of zither stands in the middle of the long, mural-sized photograph.  Facing this huge picture is a large TV screen on which there is projected a spooky virtual reality tour of the DMZ with captions explaining different routes across the heavily militarized frontier (paradoxically called a demilitarized zone.)  This array of art works is, more or less, representative of the rest of the show.  

There are some startling objects in the show:  a room full of meditating monks, painted Pompeii red, have lost their heads.  Dangling over each plaster-cast decapitated torso, are the heads of dolls, things like Waldo from the Where's Waldo books.  A corridor contains five photographs, larger than life-size, of urinating women -- they are standing up like men and disgorging great gushes of fluid in streams that could be emerging from a garden hose. (The work is supposed to have something to do with feminism, although the clinical images, also cropped to be as headless/faceless as the monks, are really more fetishistic in effect).  "Comfort Hair" is similarly feminist -- a sinister bale of braided black hair, the size of compact car, lies in a corner; on the wall, there's an image of three generations of women lying prostrate next to the vast excremental spool of hair.  (This is about Korean women impressed into service as sex slaves, "comfort women", during World War Two).  One room features images of urban renewal, three huge photographs showing a hillside slum in Seoul after dark -- it's punctum is a red neon cross on a little adobe-brick church.  With each successive image, the neighborhood loses more and more of its lights as buildings are demolished; in the end, it's, more or less, just the neon cross that remains in the darkness Across from these pictures, an elaborate landscape full of bone-white ceramic ruins depicts what is either the aftermath of aerial bombardment or urban renewal.  The sole canvas painting in the exhibition are a series of five pictures of Michael Jackson.  In three of the pictures, the pop star sits on a throne on which a leopard skin is draped.  The last two pictures depict the King of Pop regal on a red enamel throne.  A note explains that the pictures of Jackson, each showing a phase of his career (and plastic surgery), reference the iconography of nobility and kingship in a fourteenth century Korean dynasty.  There are elaborately detailed and specific clay simulacra of commercial items -- a ketchup bottle, pop cans, a Wilson basketball.  These objects are unimpressive, following in the wake of Jasper Johns' sculpture of a Ballentine Ale can from the late fifties -- nothing's really new in art after Duchamp and the Abstract Expressionists; that's true here and, also, in Korea.  A huge laser-sharp video provides documentary-style information about an idiosyncratic form of theater, also feminist -- plays and lip-synch performances in which women cross-dress and imitate men as "drag kings" (as the interlocutors on screen explain.)  This is a  phenomenon that bears more study and the performances briefly shown on the video seem charismatic.  But the artifact, itself, is just a documentary video that could be broadcast on PBS.  (Theater works of this kind are called yeosung gukgeuk) In a darkened gallery a triptych of screens shows iron being poured, ships unloaded, whales and huge fish, women weeping at some kind of mediumistic ritual -- it's beautiful but banal.)  A final gallery is full of huge photographs of anxious-looking young people.

In broad terms, much of the show is incomprehensible without a detailed knowledge of Korean culture and history.  I was able to ascertain that two divisions are significant.  First, there is the divide between the repressive authoritarian regimes that ruled South Korea prior to 1989 -- the thaw in the country was largely attributable to the 1988 Seoul Olympics which attracted international scrutiny.  (In the very first room, there is a nod to the pre-democratic era in a wall covered with defaced and partially erased portrait panels, pictures of people killed by the police or otherwise "disappeared" prior to 1989.  It looks a bit like a somber Gerhart Richter array of images.)  The second divide, of course, is marked by the DMZ between North and South Korea, also the subject of several large and imposing works.  Nothing in this show made much of an impression on me -- but this is my ignorance speaking through this review.  

(Upstairs there's a show of about 25 prints made in the Low Countries around the time of Rembrandt.  The Dutch, like Constable, like to show buildings and barns in semi-ruinous state, as if the victims of vast and destructive floods  The wood on display is always sodden and half-rotted away.  The structures are gimcrack, huddled in collapsing heaps, or standing on weird stilts with frail-looking ladders stacked against walls that are sprouting tufts of grass and moss.  There are bridges that I wouldn't try to cross, goats and sheep and cows, and drunken peasants stumbling around in front of half-demolished taverns.  Very interesting, if you like this kind of stuff.)

A Master Builder

 A Master Builder

I saw A Master Builder at its North American premiere at the Provincetown Film Festival on Cape Cod in 2014.  I think this was in June, a little before the Cape’s summer invasion by hordes of East Coast tourists.  One of the film’s producers was on the dais to present the movie as were the picture’s director Jonathan Demme with Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.  

Provincetown is a strange place, an elongated dune broad enough for about four parallel streets running between 19th century boarding houses and cottages.  There’s an aggressive-looking fortified tower at on one side of the town, a hulking landmark commemorating the Revolutionary War – exactly the sort of structure from which Master Builder Solness might catapult to his doom.  In the commercial district, every other building seems to be a little theater or a Drag Queen revue.  I was there at dawn one day and the light was murky and submarine, clouds of mosquitos rising out of the salt water marshes, and some homeless people camped on the dirty beach.  

A Master Builder was screened in the hall of some mariner’s association.  The structure felt like a vast barn built from enormous wooden joists and pillars, an interior like Noah’s Ark.  Alternatively, it was like seeing a movie on a remote screen in the cavernous belly of a whale.  The place was mostly full with casually dressed people, apparently primarily local residents.  Everyone seemed to know Andre Gregory who has a place in Truro just beyond the brine lagoons on the approach to Provincetown.  People referred to Wallace Shawn as “Wally” and there was a vibe that he was regarded as an eccentric character but much beloved by his neighbors.  Wally came late to the screening and seemed to be very drunk.  He had flown in from Los Angeles where he was working as a voice-actor, playing some animated critter in a Disney movie.  

I don’t recall much about the screening or the Q & A that followed it.  From a distance, Andre Gregory looked elegant wearing cream colored clothes and a scarf.  Wally also had a scarf draped around his throat.  It gets cold at night on the tip of Cape Cod. 

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A Master Builder is regarded as the third in a trilogy of films featuring Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory.  Two of these movies were directed by Louis Malle, a famous French film director: My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Vanya on 42nd Street (1994).  A Master Builder is dedicated to Malle who died in 1995.   Jonathan Demme is best remembered for his Oscar-winning adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) followed by the AIDS-related courtroom drama with Tom Hanks, Philadelphia (1993).  Demme also made a noteworthy documentary about the Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, a movie adaptation of Spalding Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, and the incandescent thriller, Something Wild, one of the best pictures of the ‘80's.  He died in New York City in 2017. 

The three pictures in the trilogy document Andre Gregory’s idiosyncratic approach to theater.  My Dinner with Andre is the result of a long collaboration between Gregory and Shawn.  The work evolved over several years as a result of dinner-time conversations between the two men.  At the time of its release, both Shawn and Gregory were well-known as figures in the avant-garde New York theater scene.  Shawn in particular had written and produced several plays, some of them notorious for their sexually graphic subject matter.  (In fact, Gregory’s Manhattan Project theater group was the first enterprise to produce one of Shawn’s controversial play, Our Late Night in 1975; Gregory directed.)  Gregory had studied theater with Jerzy Grotowski in Poland in the sixties, one of Europe’s most famous avant-garde directors, lived at the Findhorn commune, periodically, renouncing the theater for other more spiritual pursuits.  (His adventures are described in detail in his monologue in My Dinner with Andre.)  

During one of Gregory’s sabbaticals from commercial theater, he led a workshop devoted to a single play, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.  Gregory met with a small group of actors weekly for more than four years to work through David Mamet’s adaptation of Chekhov’s theater work.  Gregory had no intent to produce the play commercially.  But these extended rehearsals for a play that was never to be performed were filmed by Louis Malle, resulting in Vanya on 42nd Street – many of the personnel in A Master Builder worked with Gregory in Vanya including Larry Pine, Wallace Shawn (as Vanya) and Gregory himself. (The cameraman on The Ibsen Project, the name for the enterprise involving the 14 to 17 year rehearsals of the text, Declan Quinn, also shot Vanya on 42nd Street.) 

In 1997, Shawn “translated” Masterbuilder Solness – Shawn admits to knowing “some German”, was a Latin teacher after college, but doesn’t known Norwegian.  He commissioned a professor in Scandinavian languages to prepare a literal translation, word for word, of Ibsen’s text, a writing that listed synonyms for many of the expressions in the original.  Using this resource, Shawn made his own version of the play.  Gregory, then, began to workshop the text, convening periodic rehearsals beginning in 1997 through 2012.  Larry Pine (Herdal), Julie Hagery (Aline Solness), Shawn (Solness), and Gregory (old Brovik) were regulars in this 15 year endeavor.  Gregory saw these workshop rehearsals as an end in themselves, a sort of spiritual exercise, and there was no plan to ever present the theater-work to a paying audience.  In 2012, Jonathan Demme attended one of the workshop rehearsals and suggested that a film be made of the play.  Shot over several years, A Master Builder, was the result of this work.  The exteriors in the film were shot in Nyack, New York.  Interiors were filmed in Manhattan at manor house converted into a private women’s club in Greenwich Village, the Pen and Brush Club.  

^^^^^

Ibsen’s original play is reputedly very difficult to persuasively stage.  This is because of the work’s peculiar mixture of dream-like symbolism and apparently naturalistic realism.  Like Ibsen’s Masterbuilder Solness, the Norwegian playwright was fearful of being displaced by younger rivals, most notably August Strindberg, the Swedish writer, and Knut Hamsun.  In some respects, Ibsen’s Master Builder attempts to best Strindberg at his own game, incorporating aspects of the Swede’s overtly dream-like imagery obvious in plays such as The Father.  (Strindberg’s Dream Play of 1902 seems to reflect back some of Ibsen’s visionary symbolism and, in fact, seems a reaction to the Norwegian’s later works.)

Shawn’s adaptation attempts to solve the problem of clashing styles in The Master Builder by imagining most of the action as the dream fantasy of the dying Solness.  The opening scenes, naturalistic in character, although teeming with oddities, give way to fantasy when Solness repeats the speech about his fear of youth knocking at the door, the second version more vibrant in tone with the literal knock on the door following.  At that point, Solness rises like Lazarus from his “mattress grave” to confront Hilda Wangel haloed by rim-lit radiance, a figure that advances in her “mountain-climbing’ garb (it looks like a skimpy white tennis outfit), some kind of goddess who seems to be literally twice the size of the Masterbuilder.  (Up to Hilda’s entrance, the cadaverous old men, Solness and Brovik, have dominated the film and Shawn’s character, shown as an invalid, tyrannizes everyone from his death bed.)  After Hilda’s appearance, the tone of the film changes radically, with the mise-en-scene increasingly agitated, culminating in hand-held camera shots of Aline running through the house with the blue bottle that has been repeatedly mentioned by Dr. Herdal, and the acting is pitched at an ecstatic tone of histrionic melodrama that seems reminiscent of silent movies.   

^^^^^

The strange psycho-dynamics of The Master Builder present a riddle that can’t be solved, indeed, a mystery that is designed to implacably resist interpretation.  Hilda seems to represent the embodiment of Solness’ terrifying and indomitable will.  Thus, she seems to be an aspect of Solness’ character somehow freed to act independently of the sensibility to which she belongs and that has given birth to her.  In this respect, mythological correlates are, perhaps, suggestive.  Athena, who Hilda represents, was born from the brow of Zeus and seems to represent some of the God’s qualities although acting independently of her father.  Similarly, in Wagner’s The Valkyrie, Bruennhilde (“Hilda”) is referred to as Wotan’s “will” – her father sends her on a mission to destroy a man who has committed incest in defiance of the God.  But, like Hilda in The Master Builder, the Valkyrie is more than simply the embodiment of her father’s will – she acts in defiance of her divine father, falling in love with the man she is supposed to destroy and, thereby, triggering in a long passage in the Wagner opera in which Wotan berates her as an unnatural child for acting on her own desires and not merely as his embodied intentions.  Somehow, Solness has both spawned Hilda and, then, become her victim.  Solness dream-child, who replaces his actual children who were poisoned to death, is the master builder’s desires in alienated form.  The play reminds us of Emerson’s great characterization of genius in his “Self Reliance” – “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts, they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”  Hilda is Solness’ intentions and desires materializing before him “with a certain alienated majesty.”  

Ibsen’s theory of life, the “life-lie” to cite The Wild Duck, in The Master Builder is that the man of genius is one who wills that his fantasies take on a life of their own and become embodied in the real world – the Master builder’s designs become structures; Ibsen’s fantasies become plays.  Ibsen argues that the genius’ thought is omnipotent – to desire is to achieve that desire.  In short, the genius can control everything except his own will.  He molds the world to his ends and treats those around him as mere instruments of his desire.  But the one thing outside his Will is his Will itself and this paradox is fatal.

^^^^^

Shawn scraps the God-defying aspect in his Master Builder.  In the Ibsen play, the death of his twin baby boys has caused Solness to hate God to the extent that atop the steeple of his last church, the Master Builder proclaim to the heavens that he will no longer build churches to a deity who is nothing more than a despised rival.  Thus, the imagery of Solness tempting fate on the high tower with the sound of “harps in the air” – that is, he has invaded heaven and thrown down God himself.  

No one believes in God any more.  And Shawn doesn’t want to run the risk that Solness’ doom be viewed as God’s righteous judgement on the Master Builder’s blasphemous defiance.  So the religious elements of the text are excised; this makes sense but it deprives the theatergoers of a significant motif in the Ibsen original – the repeated phrase that Solness will ascend into the heavens with “the harps in the air” (it’s like Hedda Gabler’s assertion that Lovborg will triumph with “vines in his hair”) is excluded from the text.  

^^^^^

Ibsen is cumulative.  He insisted that his plays be read in chronological succession, asserting that each work was a foundation on which his later plays were erected.  In The Master Builder, we encounter the motif of poison inherited from the parents – Aline’s poisoned milk infects her baby boys and kills them.  (This is similar to themes in Ghosts and Dr. Rank’s death from inherited venereal disease in A Doll’s House).  The human capacity for self-deception evident in The Wild Duck with its artificial woodland in the garret is mirrored by Solness industriously engineering a phallic tower that will kill him.  Nora’s rebellion in A Doll’s House has engendered the possibility of certain type of liberated modern woman, the femme fatale embodied in Hedda Gabler and Hilda Wangel. (Hedda Gabler and Hilda Wangel are aspects of Ibsen’s “demonic” or troll-like energy, destructively converting thwarted desire into revenging furies, projections from the self that disastrously threaten the self.)  The dolls in A Doll House re-occur as the “nine dolls” – the number of the Muses – that Aline Solness played with until fire destroyed them and her ancestral home.  Examples can be multiplied but the point is clear – The Master Builder summarizes and compresses Ibsen’s concerns expressed in previous plays into a dense, crystalline structure.  

Similarly, The Master Builder encapsulates a Hegelian history of the Spirit (or Geist) in the 19th century.  At first, the Master Builder devised sanctuaries to the glory of God – rural churches that he elevated into high art.  Then, Solness rejects worship for domesticity.  Just as the bourgeois tragedy develops out of  dramas involving kings and princes and generals, so the erection of churches evolves into the design of homes for the middle class, houses for fathers, mothers and their children.  (Consider that Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest creations throughout his career were houses ostensibly designed for the upper middle class – although in practice too elaborate for any but the very wealthy.  Like Solness, Frank Lloyd Wright largely directed his genius toward constructing homes for his bourgeois clients – in particular, his Usonian homes were aimed at being affordable middle-class dwellings available for the masses.  It’s interesting to observe that like Solness, Frank Lloyd Wright’s career involved the death of his children and the destruction by fire of Taliesin, the “shining brow”, his Wisconsin studio.)  As Hegel predicts, ultimately Spirit or Geist prevails, evolving into its final mode: pure concept.  Solness reaches the conclusion that the only structures worth designing are those that are purely conceptual, fantasy towers erected in the air.  Spirit wrestles with itself; Solness the Master Builder proclaims that he will no longer build except in imagination or theory.  Hilda’s fatal emergence as the female embodiment of Solness’ desire illustrates the final aspect of this evolutionary progression.  Solness is hurled down from on high by the contradictions within his own spirit.  There’s a curious passage in which Aline claims that the fearsome and domineering Solness is really a person with a “very gentle and kind disposition” – this seems incongruous with what we have seen.  But there’s no reason to disbelieve Aline’s assertion that Solness’ secret self may be something very different from the tyrannical guise in which he interacts with those whom he believes inferior to him.  Aline has been, after all, the embodiment of Solness’ desires herself before the death of her children turned her into the skeletal apparition that we see in the film.  A couple days after my father died, I characterized him to my mother as being someone who was selfish, destructively perfectionist, and a tyrant.  My mother responded to me that my father was not the person he pretended to be and that only she really knew him.)  

^^^^^

Iceland is a post-modern society.  Everyone speaks English – indeed, Icelanders speak English among themselves code-shifting back and forth between their ancient ancestral language (old Norse) and the diction of modernity, English, as the discourse requires.  They vacation in Barcelona and Santa Fe.  No one seems to have any vestige of religion and relations between the sexes are construed, at least, officially, as embodying complete equality. Banking and tourism, with an ecological slant, are the country’s primary industries.   

But all this modernity has, perhaps, a lunar side.  Icelanders are said to be very superstitious.  They believe, supposedly at least, in elves and fairies and other supernatural creatures.  Icelanders will chuckle tolerantly when outsiders bring up anecdotes of litigation to route roads around places where elves are supposed to reside and other paranormal eccentricities.  But, if you bring up the notion of a person’s “fetch”, the conversation will chill notably and interlocutors will evade questions about that subject.  In northern countries, a “fetch” is a part of a person’s innermost being, embodying his or her secret desires and fantasies.  The “fetch” can become separated or dis-integrated from the personality that harbors it.  It is said that if you encounter this embodied aspect of your desires as a Doppelgaenger, death will soon follow.  (The old Norse word for “fetch” is fylgia – this means “one who follows or accompanies”; the fylgia is sometimes described as a “dream woman” – for instance, a “fetch” of this sort appears in Gisli’s Saga as a harbinger of the hero’s death.  Fylgia as “something that accompanies” is also the word used for “afterbirth” or “placenta.”)

It seems plausible to regard Hilda Wangel as Halvard Solness’ “fetch.”  

  

^^^^^

One strategy often used by filmmakers adapting a play is to “open” out the action – that is, dramatize event only described in the theatrical version of the work.  In this way, exterior shots, landscapes, and, even, action sequences can be staged that would not be feasible within the confines of the proscenium.  Ibsen’s play offers an obvious opportunity for “opening” the work: the director and scenarist could depict Solness’ ascent of the tower, the adulation of the townspeople, and, of course, his fatal fall.  A Master Builder, however, pursues the opposite narrative strategy.  Demme and Shawn don’t show the tower at all, even thought it is said to be visible by Ibsen in stage scenery described in the play.  The creative team producing A Master Builder suspect rightly that there is no real tower, no wreath of victory, no actual fall – all of these things are the furnishings of a dream play and to show these elements would be to make tangible what should be construed as the visionary apparatus of Solness destruction.  

Far from “opening out” the play, Shawn and Demme almost eliminate space and distance entirely.  The film’s paradigmatic shot is a very tight close-up.  Dialogue is staged as two persons with their faces, perhaps, four inches apart breathing their words into one another.  (I assume the film’s budget contained a significant line-item for breath-fresheners, Tic-Tacs, and mints.)  The eccentric staging reverses the ordinary formula for the use of close-ups in film: typically, close-ups are sparingly used and only deployed to emphasize moments of high emotion.  But Ibsen’s text is all high-emotion; once the situation is established, every line and exchange of dialogue has a life-or-death aspect and so the mise-en-scene is one of continuous and suffocating tight close-ups.  The ultimate impression that the viewer carries away from the film is one that is profoundly unnatural – in real life, no one speaks to another at a range of four inches or less.  A Master Builder creates the impression of flesh conjoined, figures literally melting into one another – the effect is not unlike “body horror” directed by someone like David Cronenberg: the characters run the risk of fusing into one flesh.   

 

^^^^^

A Master Builder suppresses some of Solness’ speeches about his “helpers”.  Solness asserts that his good fortune arises from the assistance of uncanny “helpers”, supernatural beings that implement the Master Builder’s secret desires.  Solness believes that the force of his will is such that he can project his thoughts into others, control them, and make things happen by purely mental energy.  The agents of his “omnipotent thought” as described as the “helpers.”  They work on his behalf to implement the zero-sum game that Solness believes rules human relationships – what makes me strong, makes you weak; my power subtracts from your power.  

Ibsen slips into some peculiar byways in late Victorian thought in The Master Builder.  Evidently, Solness is an adherent of something called Spiritism.  This is the idea that the universe is congested with invisible beings, some of them beneficent and others malevolent.  One can call on benevolent spirits and ask that they “help” with good luck and arrange events in one’s favor.  This notion was elucidated by a French writer named Allen Kardec in a number of influential books between 1857 and 1868.  Solness seems to be referring to these beliefs in some of his speeches in the play.  Spiritist beliefs remain vibrant in some parts of the world – aspects of Latin American Catholicism are “spiritist” in character and many Native American groups in the Southwest (notably the Yaqui Apache and Tohono O’odham in Arizona) practice a folk Catholicism heavily inflected with Spiritist beliefs.

Spiritism should be distinguished by Spiritualism, also a very popular doctrine at the time that Ibsen composed The Master Builder.  Spiritualism holds that the spirits of the dead can be summoned by mediums and that these revenants can prophecy the future and provide useful advice to the living.  The “helpers” in Spiritism are not dead souls, but independent celestial entities. (Needless to say, Spiritism and Spiritualism overlap to some extent and the distinctions between the two doctrines are not always clear.)

As with the religious references in The Master Builder, Solness’ references to his “helpers” will probably fall on deaf ears today.  So, it seems, the Shawn downplays this aspect of the play.  

^^^^^

Solness’ bleak view of the zero-sum nature of human transactions is effectively phrased in a song by Ry Cooder from his Bop’til you Drop album.  Cooder sings:

My father told me lyin’ on his bed of death / He says “Boy, a woman’s gonna make you a fool of your”/ I sez: “Oh Dad what do you mean?” / He sez: “She’s got somethin’ that makes a man / Lay his money in her hand / Cuz the very thing that makes her rich will make you poor.”   You can put her “behind a deuce and a quarter / Treat her like a rich man’s daughter” but the very thing that makes her rich makes you poor.  (“Don’t make that bad mistake / I’d rather climb into a bed with a rattlesnake” because “the very thing that makes her rich, makes you poor.”)

^^^^^

Wallace Shawn’s Solness on his death bed is wearing a sort of track suit with red piping or stripes that seems to anatomize his failing circulatory system.  When Hilda Wangel makes him rise from his bed, he continues to wear this odd outfit throughout the film.  In one of the rooms in the house, there is a table on which a small model of the Taj Mahal, the epitome of the architect’s art, is displayed.  A print on a wall also shows the Taj Mahal.  In the corner of the sickroom where Solness is attended by ghostly nurses – they are wearing red like the stripes on his pajamas in the final scene – there is a model of a tower.  Aline Solness wears a double strand of pearls as a choker around her throat.  The pearls seem to be a sort of desperate body armor.  Aline cuts up cantaloup for breakfast.  We see her wield the knife.  In the sun-room, she puts her legs on a bright red Ottoman that is like a puddle of freshly spilt blood.  A figure of a Kore or dead Greek maiden stands in one corner of the sun-room.  A white ladder appears against a wall just before Solness departs to climb the tower.  A moving shot of the sun flickering between the roadside trees marks Solness final delirium – we see this shot as punctuation in earlier scenes.  (The image of the light flickering through the skein of trees alludes to the famous Twilight Zone episode, broadcast in 1964, dramatizing Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” as directed by Robert Enrico – the award-winning French short subject was made in 1964; Bierce’s doomed hero invents an entire narrative of his escape from execution by hanging and his flight through the wilderness to his plantation home during the drop from the railroad trestle in the instant before the noose breaks his neck.)

^^^^^

Just before Solness’ death, Ragnar Brovik tells the Master Builder that the foreman Tesman will assist in hanging the wreath on the tower.  (Brovik is holding the rather sinister-looking wreath – it seems to be comprised of the pads of some sort of succulent, like a wreath made from prickly pear.)  Brovik praises Tesman as a good and loyal man.  Tesman doesn’t appear in Ibsen’s The Master Builder; rather, he’s a character in Hedda Gabler, Hedda’s scholarly “specialist”, an ineffectual man with expertise in the “domestic handicrafts of the Brabant.”  In A Master Builder, Kaya or Aline says that she saw Solness “burning the book”.  This is also an irruption into The Master Builder play from Hedda Gabler.  In the earlier theater piece, the malevolent Hedda Tesman nee Gabler burns the only manuscript of Lovborg’s treatise on the future and fate of civilization.  She does this as part of her scheme to compel the doomed alcoholic Lovborg to commit suicide.  These allusions suggest that Solness is the same as Hedda Gabler, a figure who desires to have the power of life or death over others.  And many modern critics have seen Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler as a self-portrait of the playwright himself.  (Harold Bloom notably claimed that Hedda Gabler represents Ibsen’s secret self as refracted through the lens of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.)  Shawn takes up this theme in the last instants of A Master Builder.  The film is not “the” Master Builder by Ibsen but rather “a” Master Builder, that is one iteration of themes in that work among many other possible versions

La Boheme (Minnesota Opera -- May 11, 2024)

 I've seen La Boheme many times.  It's a crowd-pleasing opera by Giacomo Puccini with glorious music and florid, ultra-expressive tenor arias.  There's a big chorus scene in Act Two that provides a nice work-out for the supernumeraries.  The plot is an example of verismo -- you don't need elephants or rainbow bridges to stage the work.  La Boheme's narrative is simple to the point of inanity:  a starving poet meets a poor seamstress with a racking cough.  They fall in love and the girl dies.  There are some minor complications:  the starving artist is jealous and quarrels with the girl and she leaves him for a callous viscount who ultimately discards the woman when she is in extremis.  The seamstress, turned briefly courtesan, returns to her starving poet lover and dies in his arms.  The opera ends on a note of stark horror -- suddenly, the fun has all evaporated and, when the curtain goes down, the audience is stunned.  They don't know if they should applaud the poor girl's death or leave the performance in shocked silence.  (Inevitably someone cries "Bravo!" and rises for a standing ovation and the opera-goers elect for applause over mournful stillness.)   Unlike Wagner or, even, Verdi, the show is relatively short -- in fact, the action has to be padded with the choral numbers in Act 2 to get the running time longer than two hours.  This is also a "sweet spot" for modern opera fans.

The older I get, the more sentimental I am and, so, I am moved by La Boheme notwithstanding its rather simple-minded libretto based on Henri Murger's Scenes de la Vie de Boheme,  Puccini is reliably inspired by death and the change of seasons (this is an important motif in Madame Butterfly and Turandot).  Here his love theme is a Liebestod complete with swooning late Romantic harmonies and trills of bird song.  For Puccini, love equals death and death is signified by the changing of the seasons.  La Boheme is set in a wintry Paris where it seems to be always cold and snowing.  Mimi, the poor seamstress, and Rodolfo, the starving poet, vow to stay together until the Spring -- but the hope of Spring is also the arrival of death.  Puccini signifies the demise of his heroine with four majestic chords, hammer-blows of fate no less impressive than the Beethoven's motif of the same sort in his Fifth Symphony.  "To be alone in Winter is like dying," one of the lovers says despite Mimi's apparent dalliance a callous Viscount -- this element of the plot, triggering some jealous outbursts from Marcello, is mostly suppressed in the Minnesota Opera version.  The fact that Mimi's seduction by Marcello (if that's what it is) converts her briefly (and off-stage) into some sort of courtesan like the flamboyant Musetta isn't really developed in this show.  Musetta, who is full-blown party-girl, alternately quarrels and makes love with Marcello (an artist) and one of Rodolfo's buddies in the demi-monde of the Parisian bohemians.  As in Shakespearian comedies. the bawdy and flamboyant Musetta contrasts with the "simple and happy" seamstress and the prostitute's erotic battles with the hedonistic Marcello are intended as counterpoint with the more dignified and ennobling love between the consumptive seamstress and the poet.  

The 2024 version of the opera that I saw at the Ordway Theater is set in the Belle Epoch -- that is, more or less, when the piece was composed (it was premiered in 1896).  Rodolfo's garret is a bare square space with rounded curved corners -- it looks like the entry to an Art Nouveau subway station on the Paris Metropol.  Cafe Momus where the big chorus scene occurs in the second act involves Dickensian street tableaux and art nouveau styling defining the sinuous contours of the restaurant.  A contemporary note is injected into the opera when a procession of protesters, the so-called gilles jaunes (yellow vests) marches onto the crowded stage -- replacing I think a battalion of singing soldier who appear in the original libretto.  The third scene is ordinarily baffling to modern audiences -- it's one of Puccini's luminous dawn scenes with a chorus of singers in the shadows greeting the rising sun.  The scene is set at a control point or tariff station locked against the farmers who are bringing produce into the city.  Because of unrest in Paris, the city was apparently divided into sectors walled-off from one another so that the town could be more readily defended and controlled. This setting makes no sense to an audience without knowledge of the spasms of civil unrest and violence periodically afflicting Paris and it's hard to understand why there is a sort of Berlin Wall running through the middle of the City.  The 2024 Minnesota Opera production solves this problem by imagining the checkpoint as a discoteque with reddish opaque windows, a surly doorman keeping out the hoi polloi and the shadows of people cavorting inside in this erstwhile Studio 54 showing through the windows.  Marcello, who is waiting for Musetta plying her trade, in the place installs a sign on the blood red facade where the dancers inside are shown to writhe in scarlet light like the damned in Hell; the name of the place spelled in cursive neon is Couer Fou ("the Mad Heart").  I thought this was a brilliant innovation and very effective.   Puccini's heart is always in the right place.  In the last Act, one of the Bohemians has to pawn his coat to buy money for the dying Mimi.  The man sings an aria to his old brown coat, noting that "he never bent his back to the rich or powerful" and that "poets and philosophers lived in his pockets."  Puccini probably penned the piece for a low voice, a bass, to create some diversity in the scoring of the opera -- it's most for high voices.  But the bass aria is wonderfully written and pitched, almost Shakespearian in the way it efficiently evokes the man's character. 

Of course, we all know that the popular Broadway musical Rent is based on La Boheme, updating the story of starving poets and painters to NYC's Soho or Chelsea in the midst of the AIDS crisis.  (AIDS substitutes for consumption.)  People used to pride themselves on pointing out the parallels between Puccini's source material and Rent.  The equation is now reversed and I have the sense that this version of La Boheme is, in fact, influenced by Rent and, in some ways, alludes to that show.  There's a wonderful scene in which a bearded transvestite comes out of club to smoke a cigarette -- Mimi approaches the transvestite and asks "Kind Madam, have you seen Rodolfo?"  The staging of the Third Act with the disco backdrop also seems to invoke Rent.  

You harden your heart against this stuff and defend yourself against being moved, but, in vain: I'm old now and the follies of this opera have come to appeal to me.  I see my mortality in Puccini's rhapsodic music -- will I live to see another iteration of this opera?  When Death arrives will it come like Spring complete with the songs of birds in their nests trilling in the dawn?

Coup de Chance (Stroke of Luck)

 Woody Allen's Coup de Chance (2023) is an old man's movie.  The picture exemplifies what is sometimes called a "late style" in art -- the film is radically simplified, economical, and lucidly constructed.  Four characters interact to dramatize a parable that seems alternatively trite and obvious but also profound:  the film's thesis is that chance and accident control the world and that, for this reason, life is meaningless.  Notwithstanding the movie's bleak thesis, the picture is beautifully shot and replete with images of people enjoying the pleasures of food, art, and love.  Allen's mise-en-scene reverts to the earliest film grammar:  the picture is composed in short, decisive scenes each devised to make a plot point; at the film's two climaxes, that is nodes of greatest emotional intensity, Allen crosscuts between his characters -- it's a technique that Griffith and Murnau perfected.  Consider, for instance, the scenes in Nosferatu in which Murnau cuts between a young woman's growing sense of discomfort and anxiety and shots of the vampire, a thousand miles away, menacing her fiancee.  Coup de Chance is autumnal in appearance, content, and texture -- there's no preliminaries, no scene-setting, no throat-clearing; the jazz music on the soundtrack, Nat Adderly and Herbie Hancock among others, proceeds in a manner that is independent from the action on-screen; dire episodes are scored to jaunty jazz riffs.  There is no excess to the film and the movie seems impersonal, almost post-dramatic (if that is a thing); Coup de Chance is decidedly non-novelistic -- it's cast is stripped to a bare minimum, plot points are sometimes made by a sort of antiphonal chorus of upper-crust gossips, and there are no detours and digressions; Woody Allen's film form was always based on the short story -- Coup de Chance is not even a short story, but rather a lean, minimalist anecdote.  (It appears that Allen, the great poet of Manhattan, now lives in Paris.  Coup de Chance is shot entirely in French, although all of the characters, it seems, have lived in New York City in the past.)

Allen's magisterial simplicity is demonstrated in the film's opening scene:  a woman is walking along a busy Parisian street.  The camera in a Steadi-Cam shot follows her at a discrete distance.  As is the case with big cities, the pedestrians keep to themselves and scarcely glance at one another.  The viewer immediately notices an exception:  a handsome young man approaching the camera (so we can see his eyes and face) looks closely at the woman who we are trailing -- her face is not visible to us.  He seems uncertain for a moment, passes the woman who doesn't pay any attention to him at all, but, then, calls out her name.  It is a chance meeting on the street between old high school acquaintance, the accident from which the film derives.  The woman, Fanny Fournier, is beautiful and waifish -- she looks a little like Mia Farrow.  She works at an art auction enterprise and is married to a handsome, doting husband named Jean.  Jean seems a little domineering; he seems to have purchased his wife and gives her expensive gifts -- although she doesn't want to be regarded as a "trophy wife", in fact, this is what Jean's upper-crust friends call her.  Jean is said to be like the Great Gatsby -- he is very wealthy but there is a surmise that his money was acquired through criminal means.  (Jean's partner vanished in mysterious circumstances ten or fifteen years before the action in the film and there a group of three or four acquaintances in his circle who suspect him of having murdered the man -- these friends provide a counterpoint to the action and comment like a Greek chorus on the action; they are petty, malicious, and backbiting.)  The young man who chances upon Fanny on the street is Alain Aubert, a novelist who had a crush on the woman when they were in High School together.  Alain is writing a novel about the role of contingency and chance in human life.  In High School, Fanny carried around Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; she is now reading Appointment at Samarra. (Allen isn't subtle and makes his points with literary references.)  Of course, Fanny and Alain embark on a love affair.  Jean suspects that something is wrong with his marriage.  He hires a private eye to surveil Fanny and, within an hour or so, the truth is known.  (The gumshoe is a haggard, sinister older woman who melts into the background and effortlessly documents the affair -- she is a convincing minor figure in the film, carefully and indelibly characterized but without a single line spoken.)  Jean, who seems to have a screw loose, has a room in his lavishly appointed townhouse in Paris, devoted to his model trains -- it's an effect a little like the artificial forest in the loft in Ibsen's The Wild Duck, a symbolic terrain that establishes Jean as obsessive, a control-freak, and, even, a little pathetic.  Jean has a home in the country, a rather lavish chalet in the woods, and, most weekends, he and his wife retire to that place, something that she dislikes as dull -- she says she's not an "outdoorsy girl."  There are hunting rifles on the premises and deer in the woods, both aspects of the chalet that will figure in the film's later development.  Jean is savagely jealous of Fanny's lover and hires a thug to dispose of him. A crime is committed.  A fourth character enters into this situation -- Fanny's mother.  This middle-aged woman reads novels by Georges Simenon and she begins nosing about.  

Coup de Chance is exquisitely made and suspenseful -- it's a kind of crime-thriller and not a comedy except to the extent that it satirizes the affectations of the Parisian upper-class.  Allen is highly reticent; like Clint Eastwood in his late films, he implies violence but doesn't show it.  Similarly, the film's sex scenes are also restrained and, as in the case of Hollywood's classic era, Allen cuts away when things grow too intense. The cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro (he's now in his eighties) and the picture is astonishingly beautiful -- Paris glows in an amber, honeyed light; in one scene with rain outdoors and glowing rooms inside a Paris apartment, the picture channels Storaro's incredible work in Last Tango in Paris, a movie that I recall not so much for the explicit sex scenes with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider but for the contrast between warm interiors and cold, dispassionate rainy weather outside.  Storaro makes everything elegant --he's a film cameraman par excellence; there's nothing showy about his compositions but the style isn't "invisible' as in the classic Hollywood films; rather, there's a distinct texture to the light and you can feel the air intervening between lens and flesh.  Coup de Chance is a minor film but it doesn't aspire to anything pretentious and, in its own unostentatious way, it's pretty much perfect.  

You Tube tour: mostly animation

 In the early '30's, Fleischer Studios produced three Betty Boop cartoons featuring songs by the "Hi-de-ho" man, Cab Calloway::  Minnie the Moocher. Snow White, and The Old Man of the Mountain.  Minnie the Moocher and the The Old Man of the Mountain are essentially the same movie:  both pictures feature Betty Boop accompanied by sidekicks Koko the Clown and Bimbo, a sort of black puppy-like creature.  In both movies, there is film footage of Cab Calloway, swaying eerily and dancing as if he has no bones in his body at all. Calloway shuffles about, performing a sort of moonwalk in which he moves without seeming to lift his feet and writhes his hips and shoulders like a snake.  All three pictures show ghastly and monstrous apparitions -- eyeless cats, heaps of bones from which globular, mucousy ghosts spurt, strange skeletal duck-billed creatures and the like.  Of course, everything transforms into everything else, figures morphing and shifting shape.  Betty Boop runs away from her home where she is bullied at the supper table by her fat German emigrant parents -- he father's head turns into a mindlessly ranting gramophone.  The real world outside turns out to be worse than her home with its bickering, haranguing parents -- there's a ghostly walrus who sways like an undersea plant (mimicking Calloway's weird swaying in the opening shot -- his image has been rotoscoped) who leads Betty and her friends into a cave filled with monsters.  At the end of the cave, there's a horrible banshee who appears in the darkness and flies toward the camera:  the banshee's mouth opens to swallow the camera and we see her tonsils animated as small ghostly figures at the back of her throat that also grow mouths and howl at us (and the heroine).  Betty flees, diving into her bed at home -- she has left a message about running away from home, now ingeniously torn into a scrap of paper that reads "Home, sweet, home" on the fragment resting on her pillow.  The lyrics of the song are bizarre, something about a prostitute or "hootchie cootch" dancer who takes cocaine and "bangs the gong" (apparently, meaning uses heroine), thus motivating the grotesque visions in the banshee's cave.  The Old man of the Mountain reiterates this plot -- Betty goes up a winding mountain road with her sidekicks and encounters an old man with a long white beard and long white hair.  The old man is lecherous and seems to chase Betty Boop in order to rape her.  (Betty is a weird figure in her own right, all curves packed into a tight, short black dress with a kewpie face, big eyes with big eyelashes and shapely gams that come to a heeled needle point.  She is sexualized from her spit-curls to the pointed stiletto tips of her shoes.  She talks a strange lingo, some kind of "White jazz" punctuated with nonsense syllables:  Boop-boop-de-boop.  This gibberish aligns with Calloway's spectacularly fast and intricate scat singing in the songs.) Snow White involves the fairy tale story with an ugly stepsister preening herself in a sentient mirror.  Koko and Bimbo are told to take Betty out and kill her -- she cries and, while they are sharpening their swords and axes on a whetstone, they are moved by her tears, ignore the task ay hand, and grind their weapons to a dark pulpy substance..  Betty escapes into the grave dug for her which seems to be about a mile deep.  She falls through the shaft and ends up fleeing into a cavern labeled "Mystery Cave."  Koko and Bimbo follow with the witch also in hot pursuit.  In the cave, the characters encounter stalactites and petrified monsters of various sorts, the same creatures recycled from the other two cartoons:  in this cartoon, Calloway doesn't appear on film but sings "St. James Infirmary".  As far as I can ascertain, the tune of "St. James Infirmary" is the same melody played in Minnie the Moocher and  The Old Man of the Mountain:  the wailing lyrics with the skat interludes reminds us that White people originally perceived the Blues as a sort of unearthly, eerie howling -- this is very much the premise of these three short animated films.  The concept seems to be that there is a brutish world of European (German) emigrants -- their domestic arrangements rest, however, on the backs of an underclass of ghostly spooks symbolizing I suppose some sort of repressed sexual instincts. Sex here equal death -- monster ghost walruses and the amorous apparition of the Old Man of the Mountain with his prehensile orangutan arms. The middle class bourgeois, it seems, are perched atop a teeming and comically grotesque underworld that is black -- the color of night, spooks, and African-American musicians who provide the bourgeois with access to that world.  Ascribing meaning to these specimens of what Bob Dylan called "The Old Weird America" is a pointless task -- on their face, the cartoons are meaningless, a jazzy improvised melange of figures fluidly changing into other figures but the themes of these animated films:  a white woman, drawn as a baby-whore, slipping off the straight and narrow path and, then, being pursued by various ghouls and monsters, I suppose, means something -- although it's hard to articulate what this is.  

In World War Two, a series of cartoons featuring the Sergeant Snafu character (Snafu --  service jargon for "situation normal all fucked-up") were used to train recruits.  Snafu is a wretched soldier and makes mistakes that often turn out to be fatal for him.  (The character is voiced by Mel Blanc and sounds like Porky Pig).  In Booby Traps, Snafu is warned not to fall for the enemies tricks.  He narrowly evades various explosive devices, but makes the mistake of wandering into some kind of brothel.  Here motionless, naked women beckon.  A bomb has been wired to a piano, set to explode if a certain ivory key is tickled.  Snafu sits down to play "All those Endearing Young Charms" on the piano but keeps hitting the wrong note and, therefore, avoiding depressing the key that will blow him to pieces.  He fondles a curvacous mannequin whose buttocks are black globular bombs.  (The figure is literally a bombshell.)  The spherical bombs shift over to become her breasts.  As he gropes her, Snafu discovers that he is about to be blown sky-high.  He escapes and celebrates by playing "All those Endearing Young Charms," this time correctly, resulting in an explosion.  The cartoon ends with Snafu sitting on a cloud with a harp on which he plucks out the same melody.  In another cartoon, Snafu has failed to properly maintain his carbine and machine gun  -- the muzzles of the weapons are filled with black goo.  A brutish-looking Kraut crawls up to attack him with a hand grenade (the Hun looks like a Fred Flintstone with a pronounced beard-line).  Snafu's weapons misfire.  A machine gun on a tripod literally melts like wax when fired because the water-cooled mechanism fails.  Snafu is captured and, as the villainous Kraut gloats, we see him cowering and naked in a cage.  

Sally Cruikshank was an animator in the seventies and eighties.  She made three psychedelic cartoons that are famous among animators:  Quasi at the Quackadero, Be a Psychic, and Face like a Frog.  As with the trilogy of Cab Calloway cartoons made by Fleischer studios, these short animes are all alike.  In each, a trio of figures (like Betty Boop, Koko and Bimbo) venture from their dwelling to some sort of hallucinogenic fairground -- there they are menaced by monsters who seem to be inspired by Brueghel.  Quasi is a sort of tuxedoed duck with a flattened head and "face like a frog" -- he has an enormous mouth and little bulging eyes.  Anita, the dominant figure in the trio, is tall lanky figure, ostensibly female who speaks with a southern accent, muttering mostly nonsense -- she wears a kind of night gown qua evening dress.  The third protagonist is Rollo, a deformed face on a bean-like body who moves  around in a wheeled contraption.  These cartoons are bright with day-glo Peter Max-style colors; the fairgrounds consists of crowds of worm-like figures and creatures that look like the old Mr. Potato-Head figures, globular heads with monocles and button noses embedded in them.  The fair grounds feature strange tents that are shaped like tiaras -- some of the imagery looks like its derived from Saul Steinberg cartoons, calligraphic scrolls that broaden into figures, and caricatured men and women reduced to one or two salient features.  In the tents, you can see yourself in "100 years" -- you look into a mirror in which there is an endless line of prancing skeletons; machines spool back and forth in time.  Quasi ends up among dinosaurs pursued by ravening, if toy-like, predators.  These cartoons also feature jaunty hipster tunes, a little like the music produced by the enigmatic Leon Redbone, a gent with a white panama hat ,sunglasses, thin as a rail, who sand diddy-wah-diddy tunes from the twenties.  (His stage persona was that of a Jazz Era pimp.) Face like a Frog has a good song by Oingo Boingo (Danny Elfman's band here called "The Mystic Knights") -- it's "Don't Go Into the Basement", a mock-ghoulish ditty that, of course, accomplishes exactly what it purports to prohibit --Quasi and Anita go into the basement where all sorts of dire things befall them. 

You can also see John Fahey playing "In Christ there is no East and West", the screen split to show his fingering on his guitar -- he produces a symphonic sound from the instrument.  Sister Rosetta Tharp, drenched in sweat sings "Clean Train" -- it's the train to Salvation on which no gamblers, nor boozers, nor even tobacco chewing, cigar-smoking sinners are allowed.  There's a video showing documentary style shots of General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, illustrating Charles Ives' spooky and majestic "General William Booth Enters into Heaven", another artifact of the Old Weird America.  Shot in extreme close-up, Lightning Hopkins performs a keening Blues song.

And that makes a night of it.