Heimat is a Space in Time

Thomas Heise's Heimat is a Space in Time (2020) is the culminating work of aGerman documentary filmmaker, well-known in Europe but, until this picture, mostly unknown in the United States. Heimat is 220 minutes long, an epic of "materialist" filmmaking heavily influenced, I think, by the maddening purity of Straub and Huillet.  Heise himself aspires to the role of "archaeologist" -- he finds artifacts and marshals them into a narrative.  The film subscribes to certain conventions:  first, there is no narrative -- although Heise reads the letters and diaries that he molds into the film, he doesn't provide any narrative explanation nor does he interpret explicitly these materials.  Heise provides a date for the letter or diary entry and tells the identity of the correspondents but, beyond that information, he leaves the synthesis of these fragments to the viewer.  Second, Heise doesn't really attempt to "illustrate" the letters and diary entries selected as the film's content -- rather, he films landscapes, trains and winking wind turbines, ruinous corners of terrain, anonymous groups of people coming and going, and leaves it to the viewer to form connections between what we see and what we hear (or, in the case of those dependent upon subtitles, what we read).  On rare occasions, he will use photographs to establish what his protagonists look like -- but, in these instances, the picture always seem a little ill-focused, grainy, and hard to grasp.  An early Polaroid picture showing a little boy with a flag seems to be more stylistically related to Gerhard Richter's queasy paintings of family snap-shots that to any sort of objective photographic evidence.  Repeated shots of trains and train stations inevitably call to mind the similarly materialist film by Claude Lanzmann, Shoah -- although Heise doesn't use interviews or "talking heads".   Heise's subject is family history -- the film recounts the experiences of his family members beginning around 1912 and continuing to the present.  Heise is fortunate in his subject:  everyone in his family seems to be fantastically articulate, literate, and theatrically eloquent:  diaries and letters cited are, often, intensely poetic.  (Heise is no German "everyman" -- in fact, as the film will show us, members of his family were at the center of the literary scene in East Germany and comprise the elite of the East Berlin intelligentsia.)  Heise's tale is spectacular, involving scandals, family mysteries, and elaborate episodes of betrayal.  Relatives dies in concentration camps, are imprisoned by the Gestapo and East German authorities, and tour the burning rubble in Dresden, making diary entries about the corpses and dying people that they encounter.  In terms of his hyper-literate source materials, Heise's correspondents are like the letter-writers in Ken Burns' Civil War on steroids.

Part One of the film begins with color images of a post embedded in leaf-litter.  The camera pans up the post to where there is a sign that says that this was the place where "Grandma's house" was located according to legend.  Another wooden panel has been cut into an old woman's profile and is painted with grandmother's face. After titles, Heise reads an essay written by his grandfather when he was in 8th grade.  The essay is vehemently, if naively, pacifist, an attack on all war that is vitiated, it seems, by the young man making an exception -- if Germany were forced into war than, perhaps, the fighting would be justified.  While this essay, written in 1912 is read, the camera shows us pictures of the young man both as a civilian and dressed in a uniform marked with Red Cross insignia.  We see a huge black train rolling forward inexorably -- a symbol of both war and history.  There are some puzzling shots of people at what seems to be an outdoor festival dancing at their tables -- these are contemporary images, also filmed in black and white.  Heise reads letters written by his grandfather to Edith,a Jewish artist from Vienna, whom he apparently married in 1922.  The film shows us ceramic sculptures made by Edith, eerie-looking expressionistic objects some of them damaged and, even, headless.  In the letters, the young man notes that he has just been paid 8 billion marks but this is nothing since loaf of bread costs 2 billion marks.  A young man says goodbye to his girlfriend in a Berlin subway station -- after kissing her passionately, the young man glances over his shoulder twice as she climbs the impersonal flight of steps to the train platform.  A letter covered with frantic handwritten corrections is read -- Heise stutters and sometimes reads phrases in several different variants:  his grandfather is protesting his forced retirement:  the authorities don't like the fact that he is married to a Jewish woman and have compelled him to give up teaching.  There follows a staggering sequence that is a masterpiece of materialist cinema:  the camera remorselessly tracks down a huge list of names, most of them marked with a green check-- at the upper corner of the sheets of paper on which the names are listed is a date in November 1941.  Voice-over:  Heise reads letters from Edith's Jewish family members in Vienna:  the letters become increasingly fearful and desperate:  Jews are not allowed to sit in street cars until all other people have taken their seats, then, they are not allowed to travel in street cars or public buses at all; they are denied coal and have to heat their flats with gas ovens and there is a rumor that they will be deported to Poland.  The letters are dated and begin in the summer of 1941.  As the camera moves imperturbably and with complete assurance down the huge list of names, we grasp that this is an index of those to be deported in November 1941 -- Edith's family is named "Hirschhorn".  The list begins to identify people with names starting with an "H" -- then, we reach a Hirschhorn, the name and address underlined in red.  Surely, this is the end.  But, then, another list is shown to us, the camera still tracking down the list of names inexorably -- this is a second round of deportations scheduled for February 1942.  The letter-writer wonders why her parents aren't communicating with her from the camps  (She guesses her father is in a rest home somewhere and her mother "is busy with something.").  She is starving and freezing to death.  When the camera reaches her name, also underlined in red, the recitation from her letters stops.  But there is a third letter writer, and, again, the process continues until the camera passes over her name.  She notes that the Jews being deported have to pay for their train fares to the camps.  After a black-out, we see huge heaps of trees that have been bulldozed, massive piles of brush and wood and bricks.  Sometimes, an eerie black shadow sweeps over the woods still standing.  What can this be?  There's a cheerful little ditty on the soundtrack -- something like a German version of "Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side, always on the sunny side of life."  There follow readings from the war-time letters of Hans and Wolf, Edith and grandfather Heise's sons.  The boys are picked up in a Gestapo "sting" and put in a labor camp.  It's February, March, and April 1945 - they write poetic letters to their parents and are homesick.  The bombing comes closer.  The darkness sweeping the woodlands is revealed  to be the shadow cast by the rotors of a huge wind turbine.  The camera tracks across the facades of ruined buildings that seem to date back to the 19th century, broken doors and windows that are slated for destruction.

Part II ends with a narrative coup that will be spoiled by my description.  (It's curious to think that an austere, highly theoretical documentary of this sort could be "spoiled" by this review, but Heise's film is sufficiently gripping to create significant suspense and it is full of surprises.)  While the camera implacably tracks a pipeline running at the edge of a field, a girl named Rosi describes a ski trip in early 1945 and how she met a boy named Udo.  Udo tries to kiss Rosi but, although she's sexually attracted to him, she "closes her teeth" and doesn't return the endearment.  A few minutes later in the film, Rosi witnesses the bombing of Dresden and rides into the smashed and burning city on her bicycle, seeing all sorts of vividly described horrors.  It's now dark at the edge of the woods with the camera tracking in the opposite direction, the lights on big wind turbines blinking in the distance.  After the war, Udo studies law in Mainz.  Rosi remains in the East, presumably near Dresden.  She seems to be Communist, devoted to the regime.  Udo is opposed to all ideologies and writes bitterly pessimistic letters -- he uses the extravagantly cynical diction of a poet like Gottfried Benn, clipped and bitter, a bit like Hemingway a writer he admires (he reads For Whom the Bell Tolls).  Udo persistently begs Rosi to join him in the West -- from time to time, they meet, but, then, quarrel.  In his letters, Udo says that he will release her to see other men -- she doesn't need his permission; she's already had a number of affairs with other men.  At least, once Udo uses his letters to propose to her, but she temporizes.  Claiming an initiative that he doesn't really possess, Udo says that he will end the relationship -- she has waited too long to reciprocate his affection.  (But two years later, he is writing to her again and suggesting that they should have got married in 1951.)  Rosi is clearly an emancipated woman and takes her pleasure where she finds it -- Heise even has a nude photograph of her, presumably found in one of her letters.  The film's imagery shows train stations crowded with young people -- this accompanies accounts of Udo's studies at law school -- and train yards where cars couple and uncouple.  In her diary, Rosi describes an encounter with someone called Wolfgang.  They talk until late in the night and, then, walk through endless suburbs to Wolfgang's house.  Rosi is planning to have sex with the young man and, in fact, later, while engaged in some preliminary negotiations about birth control, both of them vow that they don't ever want to have children.  Rosi is concerned because Wolfgang lives with his mother and she expects it will be embarrassing to see her in the morning.  Wolf's mother is Edith and, suddenly, we grasp that he entire lengthy affair with Udo has been a misdirection -- Rosi, who vows never to have children, will, in fact, be the mother of Thomas Heise, the filmmaker, born in East Germany in 1955.   Rosi is a truly liberated woman in the Communist mold and she is more than a little scary.

III begins with an eulogy to Wolfgang Heise, spoken by Christa Wolf, the formidable doyenne of East German literature -- the speech is apparently after the collapse of the DDR because Christa Wolf notes that she and Heise suffered from physiological symptoms of their repression under the Communist regime and had to periodically convalesce at sanitariums.  Heise suffered from stomach trouble.  At the climax of the eulogy, Wolf says that Wolfgang Heise told her that all regimes were instruments of domination and all ideological -- that is, based on "false consciousness".  The answer, he says, is that the individual must attempt to remain "decent" (Anstaendig bleiben  -- "Anstaendig" meaning something like "upright", righteous, but, generally, translated as "decent").  Wolfgang Heise predictably gets in trouble with the Party, ends up denounced for his support of Wolf Biermann (one of his students who became a folksinger and famous dissident).  Tom Heise and his brother, Andreas, break into an abandoned movie theater when they are about 12; Tom kisses someone, thinking it's a girl, but it turns out to be Andreas.  (It's implied that Thomas Heise may be gay.)  Andreas later confesses that he just doesn't like Tom and writes that he has a red spot on his head due to his forceps delivery that flashes bright scarlet when he is angry.  Rosie tells Wolfgang to be "less German" about his troubles with the authorities:  "be Viennese," she says, "give them the finger."  But Wolfgang's health problems catch up with him and, harassed by the police, he resigns his position at the Humboldt University.  In this section, we see the university apparently being remodeled from within.  Walls are being torn down.  Wolfgang's removal from his position at the University is associated with pictures of a horribly ripped-up Autobahn, presumably destroyed in a flood or something on that order. 

Part IV is, more or less, about the experiences of Andreas and Thomas during their mandatory military service.  Andreas is assigned to the crumbling barracks at Oranienburg where he drinks heavily, gets dressed-down from time to time, and drives on pointless errands in a Trabant.  The film shows us more ruins, parking lots, half-demolished woods.  Thomas serves at Peenemunde on the Baltic Sea where he tours the ruins of Werner von Braun's villa and reads Borges.  Andreas writes to Rosie, his mother, and tells her about his service and how he feels estranged from his father, Wolfgang.  There are audio clips from a North Vietnamese propaganda film and a jaunty marching song about happy comrades and pretty girls.  This part of the film ends with a recitation of the Stasi (State Security file) on the Heise family.  We are told that they don't have a car and travel by cab, that Rosie dresses well and is attractive, that Wolfgang flies a red flag to show "solidarity" with the workers but is otherwise unreliable with respect to party-functions, and that their home is frequented by people with "southern complexion", possibly "Turks or Arabs".  This comically petty report, we learn is the product, of about ten different snitches all living as neighbors around the Heise family apartment.  The final shots in part IV seem to show a swan dining on debris within the rib cage of another, completely decomposed swan -- although I must confess I'm not exactly sure that was the tenor of the shot. 

Part V is very dense and philosophical.  Rosie is impressed by the East German playwright and man of the theater, Heiner Mueller.  (Heiner Mueller was East Germany's heir to Brecht, a man who staged audacious and obscene variants on classical plays -- his most famous work, at least as known in the West, is Hamletmaschine, a series of scatological monologues based on situations in Hamlet.  At one time, Mueller was enormously important in literary circles -- I tend to think of him as an arrogant, bombastic poseur, but may be wrong in my assessment.)  Rosie invites Mueller over and he becomes friends with Wolfgang.  (It appears to me that he also becomes Rosie's lover, although this is implied only and never made explicit -- it is clear from Rosie's notes and letters to Mueller that she was in love with him.)  Mueller and Wolfgang Heise record one of their colloquies, possibly for East German TV, and they discuss Brecht's observation that the masses can really endure just about anything -- this is why revolutions are so infrequent and, generally, doomed.  Mueller asserts, however, that you can beat someone down until they are subservient, but there is a "wisdom" that arises among the defeated -- this is the wisdom of the masses that are always defeated.  (These words take on resonance in light of the impending collapse of the Berlin Wall and the absorption of East Germany into the West German federation -- these historical developments were not universally celebrated; Christa Wolf, for instance, defied German reunification arguing that her country was the DDR -- it's very clear that Rosie, at least, would not have been enthused about the West Germans taking over East Germany; she seems to have remained an unapologetic Communist to the bitter end.)  Heise is not without touches of the comic -- after a long didactic (tape-recorded) conversation between Mueller and his father, you can hear the ice cubes clicking in their glasses of whiskey, he cuts to a shot of an elegant looking lizard and, then, a crocodile.  The sound track is a letter about how Thomas and Andreas in 1987 were asked to sign letters of intent signifying that they wished to join the East German officer corps.  Horrified by this demand, the young men consult with Mueller, who is like a second father to them.  Mueller pauses and says:  "Sign it and wait and see."  The young men do this but feel a deep sense of shame and go to the zoo to silently look at crocodiles "for an hour."  An elaborate sequence follows in which a train with a car maked "Chronos" backs up, while the camera glides to the side and somehow ends up ahead of the train which now pulls forward into the darkened the switching yard -- this balletic camera movement signifies going back in time to the Nazi-period, perhaps, and, then, forward:  Thomas describes in dream-like language a demonstration in which he is arrested, interrogated, and, then, released in time to see Mueller's new play, Germania.  The idea seems to be that Fascist mechanism of repression are now increasingly visible in the DDR government. Mueller sensing that the DDR is about to be kaputt buys some expensive suits (eschewing his blue collar working man's uniform) and begins to "talk about money" -- to the utter horror of Rosie who sees her lover deteriorating before her eyes.  Christa Wolf denounces the Pax Americana and notes that only a few months into reunification that US has forced Germany into war -- I think she is referring the police-actions in Bosnia.  Heise next reads a letter from Rosie to Christa Wolf, who has landed very much on her feet in Santa Monica -- in this 1993 letter, Rosie criticizes Wolf for being publicly apologetic about her serving as an informal Mitarbeiter (collaborator) with the Stasi in the early sixties.  Rosie says she also collaborated with the Stasi on the basis that she was compromised due to a "short, but ardent" love affair that she wanted to keep quiet.  But Rosie goes on to say that she thought helping the secret police was her duty and, even, a good thing.  Rosie says she informed and didn't use a pseudonym -- the snitching that she did, she didn't try to hide and did under her own name.  "We thought the Stasi necessary in those days," Rosie reminds Christa Wolf.  (Those not familiar with German literature and the career of Christa Wolf will likely not understand this part of the film-- Rosie doesn't directly say what has caused Christa Wolf's anguish and her public apology; this has to be inferred.)  Heiner Mueller publishes an article in a Frankfurt newspaper called "The Shores of Barbarism".  He cites a recent documentary about a young man denied the opportunity to be a pastry chef in the German economy who has become a Fascist skin-head.  This documentary, Mueller says, is by Thomas Heise -- he is referring to Heise's first film, Vaterland.  Democracy means oligarchy, Mueller says, and makes the dispiriting observation that "everybody is alone...the boat is full and there's no room for any one else and it can only land on the cannibal shore."  This article is published in September 1992, after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and during the reunification.  There's a brief coda:  in May of 2014, Rosie is living in a nursing home, partially demented, and continuously asking "What must be done?"  Thomas Heise's companion, probably his boyfriend, Mark is ill and dying.  Rosie's apartment in Berlin has to be cleaned-up and it is filthy.  Andreas calls and says he will have to be admitted to the hospital with some unnamed condition.  We see darkened suburban streets, trains creeping through switching yards, some anonymous-looking apartment buildings.

The film is epic in all respects and beautifully made.  Despite the foregone conclusions that history imposes on the movie, the film is actually very suspenseful, even gripping -- we want to know what will happen to these people.  There is a bit of self-justification in the final hour -- but I think Heise is not without malice in coupling, for instance, Christa Wolf's bitter denunciation of American consumer society (an image of a heap of dead trees and the sound of jets in the air) with the next citation, Rosie's letter to Wolf now comfortably residing in Santa Monica.  Heise calls the film an Entwurf in a short Q & A that accompanies the movie -- if the film is a mere improvised sketch, I would hate to see what the finished product would be like.  At the American premiere at Lincoln Center, someone asked Heise what they should take-away from the film.  He replies:  "If I knew the answer to that question, I wouldn't have made you sit in a dark theater for almost four hours."  The film, he says, is a family chronicle and has no "message".  An artist isn't obligated to provide a "message" and, in fact, the film's themes are mixed, intricate, and contradictory.  Heise's nostalgia for the old DDR -- symbolized I think by the dozens, if not hundreds of shots, of ruined, half cut-down forests (one of the final train shots shows a freight car heavily laden with tree trunks) -- is made problematic by his acknowledgment of the crimes committed by that regime.  In his remarks at Lincoln Center, Heise said that some families were not affected by history, but that his family was totally destroyed by historical events -- "until not a single stone was left standing on stone." 

The Big City

The big city in Satjayit Ray's 1963 film is Calcutta, the home of the Mazumdar family.  Many of the Indian director's films, at least for me, are a "hard sell" -- in synopsis, these pictures seem forbidding, dour, and socially conscious in a well-meaning, if obtuse, manner.  For instance, The Big City is primarily concerned with a woman's efforts to supplement her family's meager income by joining the work force.  The subject doesn't sound too promising, but Ray is a great film maker and he dramatizes his story's themes pictorially -- in fact, he's as great an inventor of compelling images as Fellini or Bergman.  From the outset, the way that things look in The Big City is compelling:  locations are so intensely imagined in space and texture that you can almost smell them.  An example of Ray's visual panache is the film's first image, an extended minimalist shot that underlies the film's titles:  we see a metallic arm gliding along a cable; at each point where the arm crosses a splice in the cable, there's a pop and a spark as electricity arcs -- we're seeing the electrical conductor that powers a street car.  Ray cuts to the inside of the street car and shows one of his protagonists, Bhobal, Mazumdar, the family's father, shot from an unflattering low-angle that emphasizes his jowls and weary expression.  (Ray's actors are very attractive, but he, often, conceals their handsomeness by filming them in unflattering, glamour-less close-ups or from camera angles that make his players seem heavier and older than, in fact, they are.)  Ray shows us the neighborhood where his character's live -- children are coming home from school and the streets are thronged with young boys.  Then, the director encloses us in a warren of small, hot-looking rooms, doorways hung with blankets to provide a semblance of privacy in the apartment that otherwise resounds with radios blaring and the noise of people in adjacent rooms.  This dwelling has a palpable presence and is as important as the characters in establishing the situation and milieu.

The Mazumdar family is lower middle-class.  Dad is employed as a clerk, a sort of customer relations liaison, in a bank.  He supports his elderly father and mother who live in their cramped apartment along with his wife, his little son, and teenage girl whom we learn to be Bhombol's little sister (this wasn't clear to me until late in the film).  Grandpa is a retired school teacher, a cross-word puzzle fanatic, and embittered (as well as pleased) by the fact that his pupils have succeeded in the world and have well-paying jobs while he lives in semi-poverty.  (The old man is nothing if not proud and, in one scene, we see him weeping when one of his students, a successful optometrist, offers to provide him with glasses free of charge).  Bhombol's little sister is a student who shows promise and she is studying for college admission exams; the cost of her tuition is a burden to the family.  Since the family is having trouble making ends meet, Arati, the family's mother, decides to seek employment outside of the home, a radical measure as far as her in-laws are concerned.  (The old schoolteacher and his wife are opposed but Mr. Mazumdar notes that their opposition will vanish as soon as the woman's first pay-check arrives.)  Arati gets a  job selling "knitting machines" (I assume these are what we would call "sewing machines") door to door in the upper class neighborhoods in town.  She's good at her work and earns not only a salary but commissions on sales.  Ray observes with tact and delicacy the young mother's nervousness at beginning her employment, her tenacity, and her sense of grief at leaving her family for the workplace (she obsesses over her small son's bath -- "even now," she says, "I would be giving him his bath"; she is with her husband riding to work on the street car.)  None of this may sound promising as cinematic material, but Ray's imagery is, often, astonishingly concrete and palpable -- a scene in which the characters dump sauce onto rice, roll it up with their fingers, and, then, eat it has a weird charge; this fundamental action, eating, dramatizes issues at play in the film.  Similarly, when Arati fills out her job application in English, she asks her husband (these people speak Bengali) if their last name is spelled in English with a "s or a z"; her husband says "z" as "in zoo", a comment that leads to the little boy misunderstanding (probably willfully) and demanding that his father take him to the zoo.  "Not now," Mr. Mazumdar says, "your papa's pockets are empty of money."  These are tiny details, but observed with a generous and probing intensity.

Arati's success selling "knitting machines" upsets just about everyone except Bhombol's mother who is predictably grateful for better food and gifts of "scented tobacco."  Arati's own father is upset that his daughter "has to work" and casts aspersions of Bhombol.  The simple fact is that Arati likes working, enjoys the camaraderie with other employees and likes interacting with her customers.  But Bhombol asks a friend to find him another job so that the family can pay its bills on his earnings alone.  And he demands that Arati resign her job.  She is about to submit her letter of resignation when Bhombol's fly-by-night bank collapses (the aggrieved customers beat him up in the street) and she becomes the sole bread-winner.  Arati's friend at work, Ellen, is an "Anglo-Indian --that is, her parents were an Indian and English couple.  Apparently, this group of people is pretty much universally despised in India as being neither fish nor fowl, a kind of contemptible half-breed. Discrimination against Ellen manifests itself in various ways -- for instance, she is paid in filthy, crumpled bills while Arati is given clean, sweet-smelling cash.  When Ellen falls sick, Arati has to work over-time to cover for her and, in fact, is given a significant raise.  Arati's boss wants her to become a supervisor of the female sales force and offers her a big raise.  Arati's increasing success at work seriously threatens Bhombol's already fragile ego -- he's now unemployed, just sitting in the apartment smoking cheap cigarettes.  Arati, by contrast, is strutting around the city wearing big sunglasses, with (horror of horrors!) lipstick on her lips.  The old schoolteacher has taken to making the rounds of his former students and aggressively cadging money from them -- he's become a first-rate nuisance and pain in the ass, particularly because he acts entitled to the money that he begs.  He collapses climbing a long flight of steps up to a doctor's office, another successful student has his consultation suite at the top of these purgatorial stairs.  (Some of the old doctor's offices in Austin were above retail establishments on Main Street and accessed by horrible steps that no sick person, nor any infirm elderly man or woman, could navigate -- apparently, the situation was the same in Calcutta in the early sixties.)  The old man doesn't die and will recover and he's become reconciled to Arati's employment outside of the home.  Bhombol goes to see Arati's boss to ask if he can find him a job -- the two men bond over cigarettes and exude casual, condescending sexism toward the female workers.  Mr. Mukkerjee tells Bhombol to come back at 5:00 pm so that they can jointly prospect among his business contacts for a  job -- both men are from the same area in Bengal it's the Bengali old boy network in action.  A big storm is (literally) brewing and we see dark clouds and hear thunder rumbling.  Mukkerjee fires Ellen, the Anglo-Indian girl, and, then, boasts about it to Arati:  "Our ex-rulers left behind quite a clan, didn't they?"  Arati is naive enough to expect justice in the work-place and demands that her boss apologize to Ellen for insulting her.  Mukkerjee is enraged, but before he can fire Arati, she quits.  Down on the street, Arati runs into Bhombol who is  coming to the office for his meeting with Mukkerjee.  Arati tells Bhombol that she has quit.  Oddly enough, both of them feel liberated and closer to one another than they were before.  Arati says:  "It's a big city and we can both find jobs."  The camera cranes back and we see them walking together down the crowded street and, then, lost among the people in the teeming metropolis.  In the foreground, a streetcar glides by on its rail, sparking at the connections between electrical cables, and the bulb of an electric lamp begins to glow.

In all respects, the film is a masterpiece, probably one of the most incisive movies ever made about the workplace.  If a Martian were to judge human beings by their movies, that creature would conclude that people spent most of their time murdering each other, plotting elaborate crimes, or engaging in sexual affairs.  In fact, most of human life is devoted to working, although movies almost never show this aspect of our existence.  (The only other example that immediately comes to mind is Ermanno Olmi's wonderful Il Posto ("The Job").0  Because of the picture's documentary elements, we learn a number of interesting things about life in a big city in India -- women take great pride in their culinary accomplishments, particularly in making curry; Bengali's speak to one another in confidence using English phrases and like to lard their speech with British cliches.  Upper class Bengalis are very polite to door-to-door sales women and Indian men are poor drivers.  The way things look is part of the film's appeal.  All the locations are completely convincing -- the Anglo-Indian girl lives in a musty Victorian space filled with knick-knacks and has a ghostly, defeated mother (there's a picture of Clark Gable on the wall).  Several key scenes take place in a small, spotlessly clean toilet (marked "toilet" on the door) in the building downtown where Mr. Mukkerjee has his firm.  Ray is completely unsentimental -- the old English teacher is a nasty, arrogant, bully.  (I am reminded of the sinister and ancient granny in Pather Panchali who eats more than her fair share of the peasant family's food.)  Ray's neo-realist mise-en-scene is continuously complicated by shots that have expressionistic implications:  when Arati''s disgraceful tube of lipstick is found, her little son, who is blowing bubbles, sprays her with a cloud of them, all bursting disconsolately.  Bhombol's profile cast on a mosquito screen seems grotesque and menacing.  Arati's confusion between whether she is a mother and home-maker or a working girl is reflected in mirrors that literally divide her into two figures.  The acting is all beyond reproach and Ray refuses to simplify his characters into types -- the blowhard Mr. Mukkerjee is also generous and very kind (to those he likes); Ellen, the hapless Anglo-Indian girl, is just a little too cavalier about her job and, in fact, there's a suggestion that she really isn't much of an employee.  When the old man begs for money from one of  his former students, the doctor's wife is anxious to go to a movie and keeps gesturing at her wristwatch while the old school  teacher rambles on bombastically about his poverty.  Later, the woman says something like:  "I can't believe he would come to beg like that."  The doctor replies  "He's Bengali and that's how Bengali's do things."  The film is about two hours and 15 minutes long and excellent throughout.  Cross-cutting builds suspense in the scene in which Arati is about to quit while her husband is being thrashed on the street for the failure of the bank where he works.  Oddly, enough Ray builds so much suspense by the ancient technique of cross-cut parallel action that the scene is as thrilling (and seems to have higher stakes) than most car chases or murders committed in Hollywood movies.  The film that that the picture most resembles is Griffith's picture about inflation in Germany after World War One, Isn't Life Wonderful!

Seven Days in May

John Frankenheimer directed Seven Days in May, a 1964 political thriller based on a bestseller by Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey III.  We had the book in the house and I must have read it when I was about ten.  I recall some sex scenes in the novel but nothing else. I have a more precise memory of the big budget prestige movie based on the book -- watching the film on Turner Classic Movies last night, some sequences seemed familiar to me, although I had forgotten the picture's plot and its "big themes" -- a lovingly detailed, although narratively insignificant sequence in which an ally of the beleagered President Lyman approaches a touring air-craft carrier on a skiff and, then, comes onto the huge boat has remained with me.  (Although now seeing the sequence more than 50 years later, I observe that it is spatially incoherent.  The vast bulk of the aircraft carrier dwarfs the little boat approaching it.  The director has no idea how the small boat somehow disgorges it's passengers on the deck seventy feet overhead.  This is characteristic of the confusion that afflicts this film at every level.)  I also remembered a bleak aircraft crash location where Spanish gendarmes wearing outlandish hats stood baffled in the smoking debris while men carrying litters, presumably laden with the dead, wandered here and there in the wreckage. 

The film's premise is that a steely right-wing Air Force general, James Matoon Scott (Burt Lancaster playing Douglas McArthur) has engineered a military coup to displace a highly unpopular president, Jordan Lyman (Frederick March).  Scott's factotum, an appealing, plain-spoken Marine named Jigs Casey (Kirk Douglas) senses that something is amiss -- there are peculiar clues scattered about and, slowly, Jigs uncovers the awful truth.  Seven days from the film's beginning (May 12), an ostensible military exercise will result in the detention of the president and TV broadcasts that Scott has seized power to save the republic.  Lyman has entered into a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Russians that the Pentagon opposes.  (Even the reasonable happy warrior, Jigs, thinks the deal is a disaster.)  Scott wants to avert the treaty and is willing to seize power to take control.  The film divides into three parts:  first Jigs figures out what the bad guys are planning, second, the President and his men try to gather sufficient proof to expose the coup before it takes place, and, third, the President and General Scott debate the merits of their respective positions.  The script is by Rod Serling and it has very snappy, elegant dialogue -- Serling's modus operandi is primarily theatrical:  he sets up dramatic confrontations between his protagonists who, then, tear up the scenery haranguing one another.  Serling is middle-brow literate and clever, but the film's action comes down to a series of conversations and debates.  The picture is shot in documentary-style black and white and it has some of the high-contrast imagery, glaringly lit, that features in Kubrick's much greater Dr. Strangelove produced a year later.  But none of the images are memorable and Serling tells the story through dialogue not pictures.  A good example of a purely pictorial sequence that goes badly awry is the opening scene:  totally silent files of protesters and counter-protesters in front of the White House march back and forth, past one another.  Finally, someone clubs another protester with his sign and fracas breaks out.  The street-fighting is chaotic and the scene goes on and on -- it's much longer than necessary and makes no point at all.  Somehow, Frankenheimer manages to make a riot uninteresting pictorially.  And the prelude to the riot, the two groups of demonstrators marching past one another is grim, stark silence makes no sense at all -- the groups would either be widely separated and shouting at each other, or, if allowed to mingle, also engaging in argument.  Other sequences don't make any logical sense.  One of the Senators dispatched to investigate a secret military base near El Paso is detained by MPs and, since he is a drunk, tempted with bottles of bourbon.  The old drunk heroically pours the bourbon into a toilet.  (We see the toilet in the background in an early shot in the sequence; toilets were not ordinarily shown in movies in 1963 and, so, it's pretty clear that the commode will have some narrative function in the movie.)  But later the old drunk is lying on a bed with two fresh bottles of bourbon on his night-stand.  Why doesn't he pour those down the drain too?  And are the MPs so stupid they just keep plying this guy with bottles of booze that he doesn't drink?  The climax of the film is completely incoherent.  If General Scott is so poised to depose the President -- and thinks he has good patriotic grounds to do this, why would he call off the plot just because it is exposed an hour or two early?  A big plot point has to do with some purloined letters:  Jigs has seduced General Scott's mistress (he has broken up with her) and taken love letters between her and Scott.  Why?  Do the letters contain evidence of the coup?  (This seems unlikely -- the megalomaniacal and paranoid Scott would not expose the plan to his girlfriend; this makes no sense).  So are the letters going to be used to humiliate Scott by exposing his love affair and sexual misconduct?  That's how the film plays the issue, although it's all ambiguous and never really explained.  Ultimately, the noble president determines the ends don't justify the means and that he will not use the letters against his adversary.  But if the risk is that a military junta seizes power and that the Soviets, then,  take advantage of our disarray to nuke us ("with, at least, 100 million dead") shouldn't the president use every means at his disposal to avert the coup.  (Today when a president's sexual exploits are front-page news, the rectitude of the characters in Seven Days in May about exposing the sexual pecadillos of public figures is both touching and naive.)  The film assumes that bringing crimes and misdemeanors into the light of public scrutiny disinfects the contagion afflicting the body-politic -- like the later Watergate pictures, the film is essentially a pro-journalism tract:  brave journalists will expose the truth and save the republic.  Jigs supports the Constitution and says that although he dislikes Lyman's politics, there is a way to register that disapproval -- it's the ballet-box in November.  Some of Serling's speechifying is effective and moving, but a lot of it is just bombast.  At one point, President Lyman tells his colleagues that the enemy isn't General Scott, but the malaise of the nuclear age.  That's completely idiotic --the whole film is devised to pivot on a climactic hand-to-hand debate between Lyman and Scott.  Of course, the enemy is the pernicious, conniving, and murderous Scott.  The final confrontation between Jigs and Scott is exemplary of Serling's style.  Scott snarls:  "Have you studied your Bible?  Do you know who Judas was?"  To which Jigs replied:  "He was a man I admired.  A four-star general who betrayed his nation."  Poor Judas is spinning in his grave somewhere.  The movie is badly dated -- after President Lyman's noble defense of the constitution at a Press Conference, the gentlemen and the ladies of the Press rise and give him a standing ovation. (There is a primitive science-fiction element to the film -- the characters confer by video tele-conference, undertaken on massive tube-operated TV sets; the automobiles belong to no known era or manufacturer). 

The film is well-acted and the secondary characters are more compelling than the cartoon-like Scott, President Lyman, and Jigs.  Martin Balsam is good as the President's political advisor -- he gets killed in the plane crash.  Edmund O'Brien is effective as the "dipsomaniac" Georgia senator, Ray Clark.  Ava Gardner is used in a cruel and unflattering way -- she plays Scott's spurned mistress who succumbs all too readily to Jigs' machinations.  Clearly, she thought the role was important and was willing to be portrayed as a faded, scheming salon courtesan, but she looks a little pathetic and her part is under-written.  A supposedly happy ending suggesting that she and Jigs will get together for a romantic interlude is just grotesque. 

The film was endorsed by President Kennedy who authorized filming the botched riot scene in front of the White House.  The Pentagon opposed the film and the curious spatial incongruities in the destroyer scene are due to the fact that the sequence was made "guerilla-style" without the assistance of the navy.  The demise of General Scott was supposed to be a car crash, probably suicidal.  For some reason, the film doesn't use that ending, although it was shot -- the picture sends Scott off-screen with the simple remark to his chauffeur:  "Take me home."  There is an enigmatic reference to a General Walker -- this is refers to events current to the movie, that are now, more or less, forgotten.  A right-wing general, Edwin Walker, made political remarks hostile to the President's Administration and was forced tor esign.  

Earth and Blood

Netflix produced this Western in 2019.  It's short (80 minutes) and stylishly made, although the plot is moronic.  The picture reminds me of an old Walter Hill flick, something on the order of  Southern Comfort or Trespass which Earth and Blood resembles in many respects. 

A half-breed with a deaf daughter lives in a  remote valley on the frontier.  In that place, the man operates a saw-mill.  Seven desperadoes besiege the isolated saw-mill.  The hero kills them all in ingenious ways, but, also, suffers fatal injuries himself.  The deaf girl survives unharmed. 

That's it:  there's no more to the film. Except that I should note that the half-breed seems to be anAlgerian Berber living on the frontier between Belgium and France.  The desperadoes are a gang of drug dealers of mostly African origin -- they are like the Indians besieging Fort Apache.  There's no acting to speak of -- just a lot of scowling and muttering threats.  The hero looks good with a shot-gun and most of his dialogue consists of ordering people to "hide" or "get down!"  As usual in films like this, your sympathy always is diverted to the indefatigable and doomed bad guys.  In this case, the object of their assault is a satchel full of cocaine -- surely a replaceable item and not worth the massive sacrifices that the villains make in terms of blood and guts.  After about the third bad guy is slaughtered in some picturesque way, any sane person would vamoose for the hills and get away from the implacable killing machine hero.  But these guys heroically keep up the attack until they are slaughtered to the very last man, of course, the big malevolent boss being spared for the end.  Since the action takes place at a saw-mill, lots of lethal industrial equipment is deployed to butcher the bad guys.  One villain gets his forearm spiked to a sliding table and his hand sawn off.  The hero hops in a huge front-end loader that looks like it weighs about ten tons.  One hapless bad guy gets involved in a SUV v. Front-end loader crash with predictable consequences.  In an early scene, a burly-looking drayhorse drags a huge log out of the forest.  As Chekhov advises:  If you show a dray horse in the first scene, that dray horse has "to go off" by the last scene.  (I'm borrowing from a Manchester Guardian review.)  In the midst of all the mayhem, the hero spends time rigging up the dray horse so that it can literally tug one villain in two .  (Generally, the special effects aren't very good and you have to, more or less, surmise that this guy gets bisected in this way.)  The head bad guy, the big chief, has a way of killing people by twisting their heads in his hands -- he's like a psycho-killer chiropractor.  At the climax, the villain decides to break the deaf girl's neck instead of just shooting her.  He approaches, lovingly caresses the terrified girl's neck and skull for a long moment, draws close and, then, of course, gets an ax smashed into the back of his head.  He falls over grunting, having no one to blame but himself and his propensity for extended murder-foreplay and bare-hands spine-snapping for his demise.  The hero, dying of lung cancer we're given to believe, takes the ax, raises it over his head, and slams it down on the bad guy's breast-bone.  This is distinctly anti-climactic:  in any self-respecting American film, even a TV show like West World, the ax would split the villain's face in two.  In fact, the film is weirdly restrained:  all of the opportunities for mayhem potentially provided by saws big enough to cut a semi-tractor in two, all of the wood chippers, bark-peelers, and aerial conveyor belts leading to fearsome blades don't get used at all. 

Blood and Earth is attractively mounted in wood tones -- everything looks like a tastefully paneled room even the exteriors.  The skies are muted and grey and rain falls.  There's mist in the mountains and the movie is a symphony of wood tones and pale gray colors -- even the blood looks monochromatic.  This sort of movie would be better if it were silent -- you don't need dialogue to tell this story and, in fact, the characters' speech is a just a distraction  Furthermore, I don't know why the French was dubbed -- I suppose because fans of this kind of movie don't know how to read.  Everyone speaks very clear (dubbed) American English.  Someone named Julien LeClerq directed this thing.

Leave her to Heaven

Leave her to Heaven is a 1945 movie of the genre, now discredited, of the "women's picture."  The director John Stahl specialized his melodramas targeted toward female viewers and his films from the early sound era are much esteemed, although almost impossible to see.  Since even modern women don't want to see a "women's picture", the new Criterion edition of the film is marketed as a rare example of technicolor film noir.  Film noir are currently fashionable with cinema-history academics (David Bordwell has just published an important book on the topic) and these movies, currently, have critical cachet.  Leave her to Heaven isn't a film noir under any definition of that genre that I know.  It's rather, a curiosity that fits within no known genre, a cruel and misogynistic character study on the theme that love is a battleground, the sort of nasty picture that Fassbinder would later specialize in.  The film is about the psychopathology of a jealousy so extreme that it ends up literally suicidal.

An author of potboiler novels, John Harland meets an extravagantly beautiful woman Ellen played by Gene Tierney) on a train traveling toward Santa Fe in New Mexico.  The train compartment is lavishly appointed -- it's like a cocktail lounge at the Algonquin Hotel.  The novelist, although he doesn't know it, is traveling to the same destination, Ellen's stepfather's summer cabin in the high red rock desert, a place like Georgia O'Keefe's Ghost Ranch north of Abiquiu.  At the lavish ranch, the novelist becomes infatuated with Ellen and she brashly proposes to him, kissing him so violently that he has no choice but to accept her offer.  Ellen's previous fiancee, a snarling if Byronically handsome prosecutor (played by Vincent Price) appears and there's an ugly scene -- he stalks out saying that he will always love her.  Ellen claims she is a niece raised like one of the children of the wealthy family who occupy the spectacular ranch.  She has returned to the West to "bury her father" -- by this she means scattering his ashes on the red-rock mountain ridge overlooking the oasis where the ranch house, a bit like a Frank Lloyd Wright structure, has been built.  The ritual on the mountain top, observed by Harland, is more than a little disquieting:  Ellen on horse-back gallops around the rim of a deep ravine, impassively shaking the urn back and forth -- she looks like a combination of an Apache warrior and a Valkyrie and her half-sister, the dead man's actual daughter, and his widow look on from the mounts a few dozen yards away.  This is an unsettling scene, shot on location and scored to barbaric-sounding tympani drums scored by Alfred Newman, and, when Ellen is done with the rite, she hurls the urn like a discus from horseback into the ravine.  Everyone comments on how close she was to her stepfather and, at least in this scene, she seems both feral and half-crazed.

Needless to say the marriage isn't a happy one.  Harland is very close to his little brother Danny who seems to have polio and is recuperating at Warm Springs, the same sanitarium where Franklin Roosevelt convalesced.  Danny is irritating both to the film's audience and Ellen.  Although Ellen seems voraciously sexual, Harland is pretty much celibate, preferring the company of the chirpy, perky Danny to his wife.  This distresses Ellen and so she encourages the kid to swim across an icy lake in Maine where the poor lad gets a cramp and drowns without the woman, who is nearby in a rowboat and has been shown to be strong swimmer, so much as lifting a finger.  (This is a famous sequence similar to the drowning of Shelley Winters in An American Tragedy, a signature set-piece for Leave her to Heaven.)  The mourning Harland adjourns to another family resort, a lavish home at Bar Harbor, Maine.  Ellen is pregnant at this time, but not happy.  She doesn't like the fetus' effect on her lithe figure and is afraid the child will come between her and her increasingly remote  husband.  So she hurls herself down a flight of steps to induce a miscarriage.  Harland, who is a dim bulb, begins to figure out that his wife is totally psycho.  He has finished a new novel and dedicated the book to his attractive and reasonably sane and normal sister-in-law Ruth (played by Jeanne Crain who looks like Gene Tierney but on a human-scale:  she's an ordinary human being compared to Tierney's bitch-goddess.)    Ellen, needless to say doesn't take well to the book's dedication and devises a bizarre plot to assure herself of (posthumous) revenge.  She commits suicide but makes the act look like a murder committed by her half-sister, Ruth.  Then, reaching from beyond the grave through a letter, she deputizes her former lover, the hapless DA played by Vincent Price, to prosecute the case.  There's a big, grossly implausible, trial scene, highly stylized and idiotic.  Both Ruth and Harland admit their love for one another; Ellen's crimes and misdemeanors are exposed and, remarkably, Ruth is acquitted but, somehow, Harland is convicted of being an accessory to Ruth's murder (by negligence) of Danny.  None of this makes any sense.  However, released from his two-year prison term, Harland canoes across the lake in Maine to his cabin, a place called Back of the Moon, where Ruth is waiting for him.  (The film is devised with a frame-story, also implausible, involving the family lawyer, a trusts and estate man, who somehow defends the hero against the charges lodged against him by Vincent Price's character.  The defense isn't too vigorous -- the lawyer doesn't ask a single question, probably in the interest of keeping the trial scene clipping along.  The lawyer claims to know, the full truth, although he can't possibly be privy to most of the details that the film shows us.  In the opening scene, Harland's return from prison, Cornel Wilde who plays the novelist, deftly hops into a canoe with breathtaking grace and confidence -- it's like seeing Joel McCrea in old westerns leap up onto a horse and ride away without a moment's hesitation.  The gesture is athletic and beautiful at the same time.)

Cornel Wilde is good as the dim-witted novelist with more libido for his brother than his stunning wife.  Wilde as a young man is bland and looks a little like Victor Mature without the drooping eyelids.  But the picture is about Gene Tierney and, in fact, her implacable, impassive Kabuki-like mask of a face.  She is all face -- you can't see her figure in much of the film -- and her beauty is exotic and, even, a bit repellent.  Her skull is a little too well-defined, although, of course, it's got beautiful bones and her eyes are too metallic for comfort.  (She's a typical heroine in a woman's picture -- I think most men would find her appalling.  Her perfect features are the kind that women admire but that I don't find attractive at all.)  She gives a great performance that seems, like Robert Mitchum's best work, to be doing nothing at all.

I can't warm to this movie.  It's ice-cold notwithstanding the spectacular scenery and lavishly appointed interiors.  The art decoration is stunning -- the ranch, the cabin in Maine, and the Bar Harbor house with its backdrop of pounding surf are all majestic sets.  There's a swimming lagoon location with bottle-green water cradled in the living rock in New Mexico that is a great vision in and of itself -- particularly when Tierney rises from the water in her bathing suit like Aphrodite in the desert.  The trial scene is ludicrous for any number of reasons -- for instance, the DA is wont to testify from his own personal experience about Ellen and clearly has an ax to grind against Harland who has taken his woman.  The happy ending is unconvincing.  But the film is as crazy as one of Fassbinder's concoctions and, if anything, even colder and more misanthropic.  (The Criterion disk has a commentary film essay featuring  Imogene Sara Smith that is very informative and helpful -- this is the woman whose commentary on Desert Fury was notable for the subway train interfering with the soundtrack every eight to ten minutes.  She's fantastically beautiful herself and looks a bit like Tierney.)

The Tiger King (with notes on the Show's concluding episodes)

Many years ago, a couple who operated an exotic animal zoo in a remote part of the county made an appointment to see me.  I was a young lawyer, then, and wished to represent high profile clients. At the appointment, the couple were dressed in flamboyant western attire and the woman's hands were dripping with turquoise set in heavy silver rings.  The ensemble of jewelry on her fingers looked less like adornment and more like some sort of weapon, brass knuckles with sharp protuberances.  The people were locked in a dispute with county officials about their wildlife park.  It was a dispute of longstanding duration and was described to me in terms relating the controversy to the personal characteristics of the county commissioners -- each of whom were provided with first names and a set of loathsome attributes.  The couple had sacks full of correspondence, much of it with lawyers that they had retained and, then, fired and, as far as I could see, they lied about everything.  I couldn't ascertain who owned what, whether there were corporate entities involved, or the history of the imbroglio -- although it could be reconstructed from some of the letters and court orders.  The exotic animal zoo-owners struck me as totally detestable, corrupt, and unprincipled -- later, I think the animals became too expensive to feed and the beasts were just allowed to escape into the winter night.  This provided much merriment for local law enforcement who were deputized for a brutal big game hunt. At the time that I encountered this man and woman, I was representing a child molester who had groped at four-year old girl at a trailer park.  I greatly preferred the company of the child molester to the exotic animal folks.

As everyone knows, The Tiger King (2020) is an eight episode Netflix documentary that chronicles the blood-feud between a wild cat zookeeper in Oklahoma named Joe Exotic and a wealthy woman, Carole Baskin, who operates an alleged "big cat rescue-sanctuary" in Florida.  As the film makes evident, both Joe and Carole are unscrupulous, lethal narcissists and, for all intents and purposes, there isn't an ounce of difference between their respective operations -- they both house huge felines in tiny pens, exploit the cats for profit, and aggressively promote their businesses on the internet.  Carole Baskin is slightly more vicious, at least with respect to her so-called "sanctuary" because of her hypocrisy -- she sanctimoniously claims that she is "rescuing" the tigers and lions from maltreatment and isn't actively breeding the beasts, but it doesn't seem that she is any more compassionate than Joe about the animals who are purely instrumental to her, merely a means to her self-aggrandizing ends.  Joe Exotic is a flamboyant homosexual who struts around in cowboy gear with six-guns holstered at his hips.  His big cat and exotic animal zoo is spectacularly squalid, staffed by hoodlums and petty criminals.  Joe's misfits include an butch Indian girl who has her arm pulled off by a big cat in the first episode and a hillbilly with no legs -- he ambles about on stumps in psychedelically colored prosthetics.  (Joe's hoodlum animal-keepers are refreshingly honest and direct -- they seem to be the only reasonable and trustworthy people in the large rogue's gallery that populates this show.)  Carole is trying to shut-down Joe's operation, enlisting the aid of naive animal rights activists at PETA.  Joe responds by libeling Carole and accusing her of having murdered and fed her first husband to her tigers -- something that seems probable.  Joe makes videos of a Carole look-alike (very convincing) happily feeding scraps of her dismembered husband (his head is on a platter) to her big cats.  When he discovers a photograph showing Carole's minions with dead rabbits (they are planning to feed the bunnies to the big cats), he accuses her of rabbit-abuse.  He even pickets her Florida sanctuary, dressed in a PETA bunny outfit stained with gore.  Ultimately, Joe goes too far even by the bat-shit crazy standards of exotic animal fanciers -- he steals Carole's trademark and advertises himself as the one and only Big Cat Rescue.  Amy and her husband, Howard, a saturnine fellow with the features of a small-town mortician, sue Joe and his enterprises.  Joe is too dumb to conceal his tracks and, also, too dumb to protect his assets by any measure other than the most obvious fraudulent conveyances -- he transfers his zoo to his mother and drives his aged parents into bankruptcy.  (In fact, it seems that the old woman, told to lie to the Federal judge about assets, comes very close to getting imprisoned herself.)  When it's obvious that Joe can't sustain the charade of fraudulent transfers to secrete asset against collection, he begins to film himself destroying his own property by shooting things with his revolver and blowing stuff up with dynamite.  Joe has hired a gaunt con-man to film his videos that he broadcasts on You-Tube and podcasts.  The con-man, named Kirkham, also has contracted with Joe to produce a Reality TV show that he is trying to peddle to NatGeo or the Discovery channel.  Kirkham has been subpoenaed in the Baskin v. Exotic litigation to produce to Carole's lawyers video and digital recordings and computer systems -- it's pretty clear that this evidence includes proof of the abuse of Joe's animals and other crimes as well and there's a whiff of blackmail in Kirkham's interviews on this subject.  So, on the advice of a crooked lawyer, Joe burns down his studio, boiling alive seven alligators, and melting the computers and digital/video footage into slag.  This ruins Kirkham.  Joe, then, seeks "an angel"to salvage his failing enterprise.  He's impressed by a fraudster named Jeff Lowe, a Vegas low-life who specializes in orchestrating orgies that involve tiger cubs.  Lowe has all the trappings of success, a show-girl consort, a Porsche and a penthouse suite above the glittering Vegas strip, but he's also a crook and, at the end of Episode 4, seems poised to seize control of Joe Exotic's collapsing empire.

The documentary has a large cast of bizarre and iniquitous supporting characters, but the main contours of the dramatic action are clear:  the conflict between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin drives the narrative.  And this conflict is presented in terms of social class that will resonate with most viewers:  the sanctimonious well-spoken Carole is attractive and has vast amounts of money; although she's profoundly evil and probably murderous, she represents an elite class of people with more money than sense -- she has all the advantages over the working-class Joe Exotic and his cadre of toothless hillbilly underdogs.  It's the American way to root for the underdog, Joe, the self-made man and entrepreneur versus the condescending and hypocritical Carole Baskin.  The show exploits this dynamic with merciless show-business flair. 

In Werner Herzog's great documentary Grizzly Man, the director comments on the growing insanity of his protagonist -- a man who identifies with grizzlies to the extent that he no longer fears them (with disastrous consequences) and who documents on video his interactions with the beasts:  "I had seen this sort of madness before," Herzog portentously tells us, "on film sets."  Herzog's point, pertinent to The Tiger King, is that the act of filming events controls how the events will play-out.  It's the media equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle:  the act of observing alters outcomes.  Here, the level of camera surveillance is mind-boggling.  Joe Exotic has hired Kirkham to produce a series of videos promoting his operation -- these videos become increasingly deranged as the program proceeds.  Kirkham has contracted with Joe Exotic to produce a Reality TV show about the embattled wild animal preserve that he runs.  So Kirkham has another set of cameras operating behind the first set -- he notes that he is filming himself filming Joe Exotic's antics for the internet postings.  Then, behind Kirkham there is the camera team filming under the direction of  Eric Goode for the Netflix Tiger King series.  Therefore, we are confronted with as dizzying mise-en-abyme -- that is, the French term for a recursive hall of mirrors:  cameramen filming other cameramen, movies within movies within movies.  There's no doubt in my mind that the continuous surveillance turns everyone in this film into a caricature -- the hillbillies are like cartoons of hillbillies; Carole Baskin is a nightmare figure:  the worst, most narcissistic and self-aggrandizing bitch ever portrayed on film; Joe Exotic cavorts for the camera -- pointing his six-gun at the cameraman, growling, and, then, discharging the weapon in the air.  It's obvious that participants are constructing their performances and their performing personae for the camera -- everything is a lie, fictional, a pantomime for the cameras ceaselessly recording the grotesque reality that the film presents.  Of course, an argument can be made that the ubiquitous presence of the cameras makes the folks on-screen nonchalant and that we are seeing their true selves. The debate about reality TV of this kind dates back to the infamous American Family series that aired on PBS fifty years ago -- the progenitor of this form of entertainment.  In American Family, the audience window-peeped on the Loud  family and watched the marriage between husband and wife dissolve while the oldest son, Lance, admitted his homosexuality and came out to a viewing audience of millions.  Debate raged then about whether the spectacle was staged for Tv or authentic.  We've now progressed (if that word can be used) to an understanding that there's no real distinction between real and fictional in documentaries of this kind.  Inevitably, the people involved perform for their audiences and, ultimately, their performances become so reflexive and in-grained that no distinction can be made between what is true and what is contrived for the camera.  The presence of cameras (here a mise en abyme involving, at least, three layers of documentation) inevitably alters what is recorded and makes people into parodies of themselves.

Of course, Carole wearing a diadem of flowers in her tiger-print blouses and cougar slacks  and Joe Exotic costumed, as if for Halloween, in cowboy clothes and six-guns, are already parodies, already cartoonish characters.  The notion of unwitting (or witting) self-parody is on display everywhere in the film.  Joe Exotic's cautious lawyer (he's not the off-screen thug who suggests arson) is prudently lawyerly.  The hillbillies who work for Joe are like figures from a Li'l Abner cartoon strip. Other less important participants in the debacle on-film are equally bizarre and grotesque.  There's a detective responsible for botching the murder investigation as to the death of Carole's first husband who seems to have darkened his eyes with kohl or some other kind of eye-shadow:  this guy poses in a room full of monkey paraphernalia, including a plaster chimp fashioned as a full-size butler bearing upright a platter.  A woman escaped from the cult-like group sex of one big cat petting zoo still is surrounded with feline knick-knacks although she's in Ames, Iowa where it seems to be perpetually snowing. Carole's third husband, the ultra-buttoned down, Howard (the small-town undertaker guy) poses on the beach with Carol during their honeymoon apparently on a leash, squatting on the ground like a monkey.  (Carole had to fight off her abusive first husband by throwing "a potato at him.") The big cat people are beyond parody:  they are uniformly grandiose, narcissistic, histrionic and anti-social.  Doc Antle (first name Bhagavan -- which means supposedly "the Lord") makes entrances at his petting zoo on an enormous elephant.  He has, at least, five wives and runs his enterprise like a harem -- it's his big cat sex-cult that the girl in Ames, Iowa has escaped.  A Cuban big-cat enthusiast models himself on Tony Montana in Scarface -- he's a felon convicted of smuggling cocaine into the country in the guts of huge pythons that he has slit open and stuffed full of the contraband.  Lowe, the vicious Vegas hoodlum, devises orgies involving Tiger cubs:  "If you've got an big pussy, you can get all the pussy you want," he boasts as he poses with several cubs and a half-dozen beautiful young women.  (The documentary doesn't have the guts to display the thousands of hours of sex-tapes involving orgies with big cats as participants that must undoubtedly exist.)  The Vegas sub- plot casts a malign light on the scenes in The Hangover involving another thug, Mike Tyson, and his big cat.  (And the relationship between carnivorous felines and sex has always been pretty obvious -- a porno-place in Owatonna near the freeway is called "The Lion's Den" and features in its advertisements the profiles of nobly maned big cats.)   The ordinary rules don't apply to Big Cat people:  we get a peek at Joe Exotic's marriage ceremony in which he weds, not one, but two dullard husbands.  One of them is said to have "the biggest feet" that Joe Exotic has ever seen.  A dog, of course, is a kind of slave, submissive and eager to please.  Dog owners are law-abiding -- they take their pooches for walks always at the same time and following the same path.  Anyone who has lived with a dog knows that canines are creatures of habit -- they like things to be exactly the same day-after-day.  It doesn't take any charisma to dominate a dog -- the critters are naturally submissive.  But a big cat is unpredictable, imperious, feral, and savage -- if a 1000 pound 12 foot long tiger is an emperor, then, what is the man or woman who controls the power and majesty of such an animal?  You would have to be some kind of God.  The world, the show demonstrates, is full of cruel beasts of prey -- and, then, there are the actual tigers and lions.

The Tiger King was made over five years and, as I have argued, presumably the creation of the film, the camera's relentless surveillance, plays an important role in what happens (and is made to happen.)  The show is structured around an opening shot in which Joe Exotic places a call from a  jail in Oklahoma, a weird-looking structure with the appearance of a modified grain elevator.  (Even the buildings in this show are strange.)  The question that the show answers is posed in a simple enough way:  how did Joe end up in this plight?  It's a fake conundrum -- given the massive illegality documented in just about every frame of the show, the question really should be how was Joe allowed to remain at large for as long he was?

Clearly, the filmmaker began this enterprise as an attempt to document the cruel conditions existing at privately operated big cat "experience" zoos -- essentially petting zoos where people with more money that intelligence get to maul and grope hapless lion and tiger cubs.  (It's a pricy form of entertainment:  Antle's cadillac big cat ranch charges $399 a patron for an hour abusing a tiger or lion cub.) However, the director quickly realized that the really awful and compelling narrative is only incidentally about the big cats.  The people, as is always the case, are far more interesting than brute beasts.  And, so, the film shifted focus into chronicling the blood feud with Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin.  On all levels, the enterprise is founded on lying.  Clearly, the director persuaded Carole and Joe that they would be portrayed in a sympathetic light in the film -- but Carole is shown strutting about in slow-motion while people accuse her of murder and Joe is pathetic on all levels.  The abuse of trust that film inadvertently documents is also stunning -- although, probably, the principals are too vain to imagine that they are portrayed as preening monsters.  The real tragedy, which the film shows only incidentally, is the way in which the animals are tormented.  The huge felines that Carole says require a range of 400 miles are kept in tiny wire cages. (She tells us this while standing incongruously in front of a wretchedly small chicken-wire cage confining a tiger at her "sanctuary."  In one scene, a tiger is giving birth while Joe keeps admonishing the camera-man to to "film her ass" -- the tiny cubs are unceremoniously yanked away from the mother using a sort of boat-hook.  And when the Vegas crook, Lowe, stuffs a beautiful Siberian tiger cub into a Louis Vuitton suitcase to haul the little animal to one of his orgies, the only proper response is tears -- surely, this kind of thing ought to be illegal and. if regarded from the perspective of the livestock, it's all profoundly tragic.  (Schopenhauer said that animals live in a kind of hell in which human beings are the tormenting demons.)  At one point, Joe runs out of food -- he collects expired meat from Walmart to feed his animals.  His chief zookeeper, a dimwitted yokel who seems like a decent man, is horrified by the fact that the animals are starving and he has nothing to feed them.  Joe has tried to breed his way out of trouble with catastrophic consequences.  Meanwhile, the avuncular Doc Antle, running the cult up in one of the Carolinas, is said to euthanize tigers and lions by the score to inflate market prices.  Someone observes that there are more big cats in captivity in squalid exotic animal zoos than in the wild. Throughout the film, the viewer is rooting for the cats -- if these animals could savage Roy of Siegfried and Roy fame than why don't they tear apart Joe and Carole.  (The one successful cat attack from the perspective of the feline, the assault on Joe's hapless Native American zookeeper resulting in the loss of her arm inflicts injury on the wrong target -- the tough girl is one of the few sympathetic characters in the show. And I should note that this figure, a transexual Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran identifies as male -- so read "he" for the pronouns used above.)  In one scene, a big cat attacks Lowe -- you really hope that the animal will inflict some serious injuries on this guy.  But he manages to fight off the cat with only a few scratches.

The show is justly celebrated.  It's very funny and horrifying.  My fear is that viewers are taking away the wrong message from The Tiger King.  Donald Trump Jr. appeared on TV recently remarking that he was surprised that you could buy a big cat for about $2000 dollars and that he was considering acquiring a few.

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I have now watched the entire seven-part series.  A few additional comments, perhaps, are in order.

 The fifth episode is the most bizarre and, therefore, the most compelling.  Episodes six and seven contain the obligatory prosecution and trial sequences and seem to me to be somewhat rushed, uneven, and confusing.  Sinister new characters become predominant and, because cameras are not allowed in Oklahoma courtrooms, the visual element of the show suffers -- the pathetic and majestic large cats are mostly offscreen and Goode has to illustrate the complexities of the government case with reprises of earlier footage, courtroom sketches, bland TV news clips, and cliche flow-charts featuring maps, arrows, and mug-shots of the usual suspects.  The trial outcome is never in doubt.  Although the lady-prosecutor is appropriately steely and scowls at the camera, the proverbial 'ham-sandwich' could have convicted Joe Exotic on all counts -- as we have seen, everyone was filming everything and there were mountains of evidence against him relative to all charges.  Furthermore, the prosecutors enlivened their case with 15 indictments relating to animal cruelty.  As we all know, most Americans don't care about crime when its victims are adult humans (you choose your associates and if you choose wrong there are consequences), but torture of animals is a "hot-button" and the feds accused Joe of shooting five tigers execution-style and burying them on his property.  He was also convicted of trafficking in exotic animals -- there was no doubt that he was guilty on this count.  The controversial allegations involved Joe's scheming to murder Carole Baskin.  But, if one ignores the broader context as required in a trial. Joe was obviously guilty of those charges as well.  If you want to swim in the sewer of this series (which I recommend), spoilers follow.

Joes' best defense would have been some variety of insanity plea.  Episode 5 establishes that Joe is probably bipolar with a grandiose manic phase interspersed with periods of despair, torpor, and impotent rage.  Not merely queer, Joe was crazy as a coot.  The fifth episode is replete with weird disclosures -- Joe's two husbands are revealed to be drug addicts and not homosexuals.  Their attraction to Joe was based on methamphetamine supplied to them in tooth-enamel dissolving quantities and the various toys that gave them as gifts, most notably ATVs, trucks, machine-guns, and high-explosives -- after all, what more could a boy want.  Joe admits that he has married two men who are "straight."  (One of these guys even gets the receptionist at the zoo pregnant.)  One of his husbands, the guy with the huge feet, kills himself.  Like everything at the zoo, this is filmed live although the poor fool has stepped off-camera momentarily when he pulls the trigger. We see the aghast response of Joe's campaign manager, a character who would be regarded as seriously deranged in most contexts but here seems relatively sane and sober.  Joe has a campaign manager because he runs for governor of the State of Oklahoma -- apparently, he got 19% of the vote. By this point, Joe has lost control of his zoo.  The sinister Jeff Lowe has taken control of the enterprise and recruited two other thugs to assist in the operation. These men are characters who seem to have wandered over to Oklahoma from the criminal enterprises featured in the Netflix show Ozark.  One of these guys is a fat strip club owner who is always identified in the titles flashed under his interviews as a "businessman."  The term needs to be inserted in quotes, because it's highly unclear what business this guy actually operates -- we see him sitting under a huge sign that reads "check-out" in a store-front on one of the dismal, abandoned main streets in small-town Oklahoma.  The store has metal shelves on which miscellaneous stuff is sitting -- it's unclear if the stuff for sale or rent or what.  Can you rent a can of previously opened paint or a blender?  (Maybe the place is a pawn-shop although it's certainly the spookiest and most depressing pawnshop that I've ever seen.)  This guy, Garrettson, is not only a felon, but a snitch.  The government recruits him to work with Jeff Lowe to engineer the entrapment of Joe Exotic on murder-for-hire charges.  Scarier than Garretson is Glover, a fellow with the hardened demeanor of a professional criminal (he's also a felon) and has a little tear-drop tattooed under one of his  eyes.  Glover is deemed to be an assassin, although, in fact, he's just a crack-head with a shaved skull and a tough-guy swagger.  There's no honor among these crooks and they quickly agree to become confidential informants against Joe.  The idea seems to be to oust Joe from the zoo as quickly and decisively as possible by having him imprisoned.  Glover is supposed to kill Carole Baskin, but he takes the $3000 fee from Joe and squanders it on drugs.  This complicates the government case since the murder-for-hire efforts are farcically incompetent.  Doc Antle, who seems to know about these things, scoffs that you can't hire a competent murderer for $3000 -- you would have to pay, at least, $30,000 he says with a wink and a nudge. Joe has embezzled funds from the zoo to finance his political campaigns.  When he senses that Jeff Lowe and his henchmen are about to drop the 10,000 pound shit-hammer (to use Hunter Thompson's phrase) on him, he flees.  We see him transporting hapless tigers in front loaders into nasty-looking trucks to hide the creatures at some undisclosed location in Oklahoma.  Joe plans to re-institute his zoo at that place. But the net has closed around him and he ends up in jail.  A lot of this is confusing:  we don't know if Joe is released on bail or not.  (If not, why not?  The show implies that he's trapped in the jail during the entire pre-trial  period -- undoubtedly a year or more.)  We don't know what happens to the animals or the zoo that Joe plans for some "undisclosed" place in Oklahoma.  He re-marries and his new husband is pathetically loyal to him -- the film represents him as genuinely loving Joe.  The remaining husband from his earlier polygamous marriage is shown in a tattoo shop getting the tat on his belly that reads "exclusive property of Joe Exotic" replaced with a snarling big cat.  There's a confusing coda in which we see a young Joe Exotic talking about animal conservation in seemingly sincere terms.  At one time, he, at least, persuaded himself that he was acting in the animal's best interests and his pitch is identical with Carole Baskin's publicity about her operation.  (Carole and her husband open a bottle of champagne and scarf down shrimp cocktails when Joe is convicted.)  Jeff Lowe and his buddies have a falling out over their zoo, intended for the backyard of a casino on the Texas border -- it's not clear whether that place is ever built or opened.  Jeff Lowe's girlfriend, Lauren, is pregnant and the loathsome Lowe colludes with the mother of his child to retain a pretty nanny that they can both fuck.  There's a heartbreaking scene in which Joe, imprisoned now in a cage himself, muses about his two chimpanzees -- he kept them in tiny separate cages for ten years.  When the chimps were rescued and taken to a large-ape sanctuary, we see the poor beasts embracing and kissing.  "They were just loving on each other," Joe says, "and I kept them from being what they were, chimpanzees."  This is very tragic, although Joe's sincerity is always in doubt, and the show lessens the impact of this revelation by surprising us with the fact that Joe even had chimpanzees.-- we've only glimpsed the primates a couple times in the preceding seven hours.

If a Martian came to earth, that being would conclude that tigers are creatures bred to be pets for human sociopaths in Florida and Oklahoma and other warm states.  The Martian would conclude that a few of these cats have escaped and gone feral.  There are as many as 10,000 tigers in captivity and about 4000 believed to live in the wild.

Drunken Angel

In a Tokyo slum during occupation, an alcoholic doctor treats patients suffering from tuberculosis.  At the slum's center, a enormous cess-pool breeds mosquitoes, black mud blistered with gas-bubbles.  Akira Kurosawa directed Drunken Angel in 1948 and the picture is influenced by American film noir of the period.  Of course, the filthy, rotting lagoon at the center of the squalid village-like slum is symbolic:  the cess-pool represents moral decay at the heart of Occupied Japan.  Prostitutes dressed to attract GIs line the mud alleys around the fetid swamp.  The signs are all in English:  No. 1 Dance Hall, Bolero, and The Social Center of Tokyo.  Kurosawa's point is clear:  The Americans are part of the moral rot and, perhaps, its guarantors.  Although American censors prohibited any criticism of the regime by the Japanese, Kurosawa was allowed to use the signs because they were already there and not part of a set manufactured for the film.  American influence is dramatized by its overt absence from the film.  In fact, the entire movie is fundamentally American in genre and form.  At this stage in his career, Kurosawa (never the most subtle director) was heavy-handed in his application of moralizing to his films.  As always, however, his imagery carries the day and manages to suggest, with its horrific close-ups of the rotting garbage in the bog, a metaphysics of decay.  The pustulent lesion in the slum is equated with the moral rot represented by the gangsters and this malaise, in turn, is symbolized by tuberculosis,  the "big hole" in the gangster's lung that the doctor detects when he first examines Matsunaga (the yakuza played by Toshiro Mifune in his first role with Kurosawa).

A wise-guy, Matsunaga goes to Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura) to have a bullet yanked out of his hand.  Sanada, who detests gangsters, performs the necessary surgery without anesthesia.  He tells the gangster that he suspects that the man has tuberculosis.  The gangster is outraged and strangles Sanada half to death.  Sanada gives as good as he gets -- he pitches crockery at the yakuza and rages at him.  Sanada is an alcoholic curmudgeon (we see him drinking the clinic's medicinal alcohol) -- "curmudgeon" is too mild a word.  The doc's bedside manner consist of growling at his patients and throwing things at them when they defy his orders.  Nonetheless, he is revered in the slum as the "drunken angel" who treats the poor without expecting that they pay him.   And Dr. Sanada states one of the film's morals -- that is, the application of scientific reason, as opposed to irrationality, to human problems is sufficient to defeat them.

Sanada's nurse is fearful because her old boyfriend (who beat her up and gave her a dose of syphilis for a good measure) has been released from jail.  The thug's name is Okada and he's a "made man" under the protection of the "big boss."  Matsunaga becomes Sanada's patient -- he is, in fact, suffering from tuberculosis.  The two men fight whenever Matsunaga comes for a consultation -- he can't admit to himself that he's sick and views his infection as a weakness.  He's also obviously terrified of the disease and conceals his fear behind a facade of toughness.  But the facade is cracking and for the last half of the film, Matsunaga is spitting up blood and staggering around with cadaverous, almost Kabuki-like make-up that gives him the appearance of a ghost or reanimated cadaver.  Okada, the yakuza just out of jail, makes a move to displace Matsunaga as the neighborhood's wise-guy. There's a gang-war in the offing and the big boss plans to sacrifice Matsunaga, who is doomed anyway, in the conflict.  It's Matsunaga's habit to pluck a flower from a vendor's display each time he passes the shop.  This is tribute that the businesses in the neighborhood offer to him.  But, near the end of the film, when he takes a flower, the shop-girl runs after him and asks him to pay -- the local businesses are now under the protection of Okada.  Matsunaga goes to Okada's lair and is killed in a knife-fight. (Kurosawa's films are full of violence but he resists glamorizing killing -- the film's big knife-fight involves a bucket of paint that is kicked over and makes the floor so slippery that neither of the combatants can do anything but writhe around in the muck.  This is an effect similar to Kurosawa staging the last big battle in The Seven Samurai in a rainstorm that has made the ground a sea of mud.)   Before his death, like many doomed thugs in American films, Matsunaga has dreamed of escaping the slums and living a clean life in the country -- Sanada's nurse is now his girlfriend and has been caring for him in her home, and she offers him this chance to become a new man.  But he's killed and in the final scene, the nurse plans to take his ashes with her to the country, an idyllic rural place that we never see and can scarcely imagine.  Dr. Sanada's favorite patient, a plucky school girl arrives with news that her x-rays show that her tuberculosis is cured.  (Throughout the film, Sanada has outraged Matsunaga by repeatedly telling him that the little girl has more courage than the gangster.)  No one drains the swamp.  In fact, draining this particular swamp is unimaginable.  (A few years later, in Ikiru, the dying bureaucrats drains a similar swamp, turns the waste-land into a playground, and, famously, dies in the snow seated in a children's swing.)

The film is closely modeled on American film noir -- there's even a sequence in which someone wields a weapon reflected by three mirrors, a trademark of American movies of this kind, mirrors featuring most notably in Orson Welles The Lady from Shanghai made the same year.  American influence is ubiquitous -- the signs tell us that the slum profits from American soldiers who support its vice and criminals.  The sleazy dance-halls play caricatures of American blues and jazz.  At the "Number One", the band seems always performing a properly funereal if decidedly plodding and square version of "St. James Infirmary."  In one scene, a Japanese singer, wearing extravagant feathers, performs a song called "Jungle Boogie" -- she growls and wails saying that the is a "she-panther."  The  number is startling and the censors must have been asleep to ignore it's obvious, and rather brutal, parody of American jazz.  The woman yowls like a demented Yma Sumac, and Sumac's mambos were already a parody of a  parody.  In the climactic confrontation, Sanada abuses Matsunaga has being an unwitting victim of "a feudal system" that demands absolute fealty -- "the Japanese," he says, "have already made too many pointless sacrifices", a statement that is clearly an indictment of the Japanese military and its Emperor.  I presume that these lines were injected into the script by the American censors, although this is just surmise on my part.  It would be like an American DA lecturing a mobster on the fact that the bad guy has brought "Sicilian feudalism" to the Bronx.