I prefer it raw

I had a mini Julia Ducournau fest; I watched her two features, Raw (2016) and Titane (2021). The latter won this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, with Ducournau becoming only the second woman to win the award (Campion won it for The Piano) and the first to win it solo (Campion shared it with Chen Kaige). About which, good for Julia, thumbs up, but Jesus H. Christ, Cannes Film Festival. Way to get your act together, I guess?

But anyway, I hope everything’s all right, Julia? None of my business, but I just want you to be well. Okay.

But seriously, this is an incredible filmmaker (I mistyped incredible for a second and spellcheck offered me ‘incurable’ which is a better descriptor) and I’m excited to see what she does next. I took a look at a list of Cannes winners. Titane appears to be the first horror film—its genre is usually described as body horror—to win at Cannes. Unless you call Parasite or Uncle Boonmee or 4 Months 3 Weeks or something else horror films. I imagine there are some arguments going on about Titane vis-a-vis horror, such as, is it horror? It is body horror, so, yes. There are plenty of the kind of stomach-churning sudden lurches into violence that also make Raw a visceral horror experience. But this movie has other modes, as well. I would say it has a generic fluidity that I associate more with East Asian films than French—Takashi Miike, for example, could plausibly make a body horror film that is also a weirdly tender-hearted fable about family without the audience objecting (too strenuously) to the genre mash-up. As in Miike’s best work, in Titane far too much happens, and in varying tones—masterfully blended in our experience of them—to limit our understanding of the film to a single, or even a couple, generic forms.

I suppose I mention it because I both love that Cannes awarded a horror film and also worry about what that label says to the audience. I guess it rightfully warns squeamish people away, people who can’t watch violence, including sexual violence, and gross stuff, like various bodily fluids, well beyond blood. Fair enough. But it also categorizes the movie in a way that limits how a general American audience might respond to it. If you’re not squeamish, but generally don’t like horror, you should still check this one out.

For me, it was an experience similar to that of watching Parasite for the first time—though they are very different movies. Movie people argue endlessly about the future of cinema, then someone drops a movie like Titane—a breath-taking, audacious, timely work of art—and it makes the worry seems silly.

The Past Dictates the Future

Last week I completed my Twin Peaks: The Return rewatch. I can report that the series hasn’t lost any of its strange power; the power only grows, actually, as it becomes more comprehensible. In my last post about this, I wrote about Ed Hurley—what I had forgotten was that, in the next episode, Nadine finally frees Ed to follow his heart and he makes a beeline for Norma. It looks like they’re going to be together, which makes it one of he happiest moments in the entire series. Nadine’s change of heart—Ed’s sense of duty long prevented him from leaving her—is brought about by her listening to Dr. Jacoby’s online video rants, which is a way of talking about how “the stars turn and a time presents itself.” It doesn’t matter where her inspiration comes from, what matters is Ed’s sense of freedom and the unexpected resolution of the star-crossed love of his life. The way this comes about is as mysterious as anything Cooper has gone through; Ed’s faith is also a lesson for the viewer.

Of course, our faith rarely plays out in a way we could have foreseen. As the series continued, we move from the shock of recognition and the messy procession of time, to a new acceptance of the characters as they are. The resolution can’t happen without this acceptance. We have even gotten used to Dougie and almost accepted that we might never get Cooper back, until we do.

The season converges in a wild scene in the Twin Peak’s sheriff station, with many characters present, rounded up to play their life’s roles in the strange saga of Dale Cooper’s sojourn in Another Place. Freddie, James’s work friend with the green-gloved hand turns out to have a destiny straight out of a comic book; he uses his super-strong magic hand to punch out the evil released from Evil Cooper. The Japanese woman turns out to have been a magically disguised Diane, after we learn that the Diane we’ve seen this whole time was another tulpa. In fact, everything that has happened seems to be part of a Cooper and Diane long game, now finally won.

It all culminates in Cooper finding a way to return to 1990 and save the life of Laura Palmer—but something goes wrong in the process. So, though our faith was rewarded by the return of our hero, more is risked and more is shaken loose; the ending of the season raises more questions than even the ending of season two all those years ago. (Will get a season four? The rumors keep swirling.)

The scene in the sheriff’s station is incredible. It’s a kind of stock scene and played as a satire on it—the scene in which all the right people are in the right place, finally, and they have all the stuff they need, and they finally do the thing that saves the day. There is fire and danger and destruction, but they all come through it, changed and with new challenges. The execution is hilarious and low-tech but spoofs all of the literal action of such a scene, and manages to be silly, frightening, beyond strange, a satire of twenty years of popular entertainment playing out in a conference room.

Movie Mashup

I watched In the Line of Fire (1993) the other day, a cheesy nineties thriller starring Clint Eastwood as a Secret Service agent. It’s pretty campy, especially the Eastwood character’s “old-school” misogyny, which comes into play when he works with junior agent Rene Russo—a WOMAN—who turns out to be pretty good at her job (at least, no worse than Eastwood, who is unintentionally comically bad at it). It’s a fun movie, albeit a stupid one, and has a number of meme-worthy moments. Meme-worthiness might already be the standard for evaluating older media, since this movie has few other uses at this point.

In addition to a fun John Malkovich bad guy, the movie does one other fun thing, which is using Clint’s movie star history to give his character a visual backstory. His grumpy old man agent—Clint’s in his early sixties here—was at the Kennedy assassination, shown in doctored images from 1963 using images of Clint Eastwood from his Rawhide era. This was probably the first time I saw this trick used in a movie, though I’d love to know if there were earlier examples. Woody Allen inserted his character Zelig (1983) into historical images some ten years earlier, but didn’t use the younger version of himself from another work to do so. Steven Soderbergh would use the technique brilliantly in The Limey (1999), but that was six years later.

Got me thinking that it would be fun to make a mashup movie. I’ve always wanted to try editing together a movie that combines multiple movies with the same actors to create some kind of cracked continuity. In the Line of Fire offers a lot of stupid, cringey dialogue and Eastwood vamping—it also offers John Malkovich, so I could bring in Being John Malkovich (1999). What other movies of the era would offer useful clips?

Con Air (1997) seems immediately important—it has both Malkovich and John Cusack (from Being John Malkovich) and it brings in Nicholas Cage, which seems very worth doing; he’s also in Adaptation, which has a little Being John Malkovich crossover. Con Air has a bunch of other people in it, too. The Dead Pool and The Rookie might give Eastwood some good additional scenes. But then, there’s a whole history for him to explore.

It all sounds like an excellent way to waste time.

Nineties man

I don’t know if I’ve ever been this excited. No one man should have all this power. How do you think he’ll use it?

"I'm working on a novella."

The other day I created a spreadsheet of the fiction I’ve written in the last year. There are various names for types of fiction depending on word count. I discovered I have a first draft of

2 works of flash fiction

4 short stories

2 novellas

although one of the short stories might technically be a “novelette.” I love the idea of telling people I’m working on two flash fictions and a novelette. Actually, two goals for next year: I’m going to write a novel and I’m going to publish a story.

Let's Rock

My rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return continues. I’ve seen Parts 9 through 14 again, now. This block of episodes includes the resolution of some of Dougie’s problems and other threads and paves the way for Cooper’s return in Part 16. Most significantly, the second best character from the original series finally reappears, Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey Horne. Of all of the changes, or lack thereof, experienced by the original characters since the first run of the show, the cruelest fate seems to have befallen Audrey.

We last saw her entering a bank in Twin Peaks just before it was destroyed in an explosion in the final, cliffhanger episode of the second season. What has happened to her since is not explained; when we first see her in season three, she is arguing bitterly with a disabled man named Charlie (he appears to be a little person; apparently the actor suffered from severe juvenile arthritis which curtailed his physical development to some degree). Sherilyn Fenn, once called one of the most beautiful women in the world, in her early fifties when The Return was filmed, rather harshly contrasts now with Audrey’s youthful form. She is still recognizable and pretty, but has aged less well than some of the other former ingenues of the series.

Although we didn’t know her fate after the second season, it’s even more mysterious how she wound up in her current predicament. She’s married to a man who seems intent on controlling her, arguing with her, even gaslighting her. We can’t trust him, but it’s also devastating to see Audrey, once a stunningly beautiful, courageous and extremely resourceful girl, who seemed likely to inherit her father, Ben’s, business empire, as a puffy, washed-up shrew, screaming pathetically at a strange husband the young Audrey would not have seen herself with in a million years. Their bickering, in a long scene carried over to subsequent episodes, is both deeply unsettling and deeply off-putting; it’s one of the major moments in season three in which Lynch smashes audience expectations and underlines his themes of loss and age and stasis. Lynch’s work is full of Brechtian distancing; here it’s open hostility.

As we will glimpse before the season wraps up, there is something very different going on with Audrey than what we see. In her early scenes, she wants her husband to take her to the Roadhouse to search for her missing lover (an unknown character named Billy). Why she can’t simply take herself to the Roadhouse is not explained. However, at one point in Part 13, Charlie says that they may “have to stop this story” if Audrey doesn’t change her attitude; she asks, tauntingly, “What story is that, Charlie?” which is also the name of the episode. Although nothing is made clear, it suddenly seems that we might not be seeing reality—that, possibly, Audrey might be in a mental health facility, role-playing with a doctor, and we see what she’s imagining. Her final appearance, in Part 16, supports this theory, as, after visiting and dancing at the Roadhouse, she suddenly wakes up in another place. We can’t see where she is, but it’s not where she thinks she is.

Audrey’s story is one of the most frustrating threads of The Return since, after the original show, we care tremendously about her. There are intimations that Cooper’s doppelgänger might have assaulted her while she was in the hospital after the bank explosion, which would have been a particularly horrific, given her love for the special agent. Then, there’s her son (presumably), Richard Horne, the violently deranged black sheep of the Horne clan who killed a child in a hit-and-run and attempted to murder the witness who could identify him. Who is Richard’s father? Is it Evil Cooper? This question will be addressed in a later episode—but the horror of this and its effect on Audrey will be left unresolved. If there is a fourth season, it seems likely that this storyline will be one of the major threads. (But who knows—Lynch is nothing if not unpredictable.)

Ed Hurley has only a minor role to play in The Return, but gives us one of the most poignant moments. We knew from the first season that Ed and Norma were high school sweethearts, but a series of unfortunate events led to Norma marrying Hank Jennings when Ed was in Vietnam and Ed later marrying the insane Nadine. Ed never got over the loss, such that in the first two seasons he and Norma were eternally pining for each other. It’s not clear whether Ed and Nadine are still together now, but Hank Jennings died years ago. Yet Ed apparently never made a play to get Norma back once and for all. He visits the Double R in season three; later, the credits roll as we watch him slowly and sadly eating dinner alone at the desk of his gas station. In all the years, he didn’t step up to right the wrongs done to him and Norma and it seems she moved on long ago.

Must be the season of the witch?

Added a rather un-brief review to my “brief reviews” section of the new Halloween movie. Eyeroll…

Gotta Light?

Another four parts along, parts five through eight, in my rewatch of Twin Peaks: The Return. In some ways, Lynch and Frost are systematically examining the signifiers of Twin Peaks from the 90s and placing them in a new context; usually, a mocking or ironic context. For example, cigarettes. Lynch, a long-time smoker, fetishized cigarettes (as do many smokers) and made them very sexy in Twin Peaks. (Less so in Fire Walk With Me, when Donna, observing endless overflowing ashtrays, says to Laura, "If I had a nickel for every cigarette your mom smoked, I'd be dead.")

This time around, there is much less smoking, if any. Even Lynch's character, "old school" FBI deputy director Gordon Cole, has quit smoking. (I wonder if Lynch has?) But it lingers, appropriately—Cole refers to having quit, a few people (such as Sarah Palmer) still smoke. Richard Horne, the sharp-angle-faced bad seed grandson of Ben, smokes at the Roadhouse and gets reprimanded. Beautiful, 90 year old legend, Harry Dean Stanton, returning as Carl Rodd, laughs when he hears a young man say he quit smoking, says, "I've been smoking for 75 years, every fucking day." The way Stanton smiles and laughs after saying this it's clear that it's the truth; Lynch (and HDS) has the proud ambivalence about his habit only a longtime smoker can fully comprehend (as I was once myself). Cole's teeth (Lynch's teeth) are a yellowed wreck.

The youth barely smoke now. They chase after harder drugs and many other things. But not cigarettes so much.

Along with other Twin Peaks fifties-era signifiers like the Double R Diner and hot rod car culture, we also reexamine the signifiers of Dale Cooper, as he slowly picks up the pieces of his self. Coffee is a big one—when Cooper-Dougie first tastes hot coffee a lot of bells and whistles go off for him. He learns to give his patented thumbs-up again. He shows a fascination with shiny police badges. In one strangely moving sequence, he spends hours gently exalting in the statue of a lawman in the plaza of his office building. He eventually has to be hauled off home again by a thankfully observant and kind cop because he won't stop loitering by the statue acting like a crazy person.

Lynch seems to be asking about identity—what is it, really, how do we construct one? And what is "Twin Peaks," too? If I told you there were new episodes of Twin Peaks, what would you expect to see? How will we know when Cooper is back for real?

Dougie's wife, Janey-E Jones, is shown to be a fighter, pushing her family's life forward by sheer force of will. Whether negotiating with gangsters or making pancakes for Dougie and Sonny Jim, or hauling her childlike husband to his job so he won't get fired, Janey-E is tenacious. But who is Janey-E Jones and why does she dress so much like Betty Elms from Mulholland Drive? Is this Betty, sixteen years later, hard as nails thanks to a series of tough choices, having grown in to her suburban mom's clothing? Or is this another performance of Betty's?

I don't mean that I literally think Janey-E is supposed to be Betty. But questions of identity suffuse Twin Peaks, most often represented by doubling—doubles, doppelgängers, mirror-images, pairs, twins, multiple personalities; it's in the title of the show. And Janey-E and Betty are remarkable doppelgängers, not only because Naomi Watts plays both roles, brilliantly, of course, but also very much in line with how returning Peaks characters are portrayed here. Take Shelly—one of the ingenues of the original show, a beautiful, resilient young woman, horribly abused by her terrorizing husband, but strong enough to ultimately stand up for herself and be with the man she really loves. All these years later, she has barely moved an inch. She still slings cherry pie at the Double R, working for Norma. She and Bobby had a daughter, many years ago; they're many years divorced now. She still chases romance of the bad-for-her kind. Life hasn't been bad for her; but it's a far cry from what we might have dreamed of for the character in the 90s. There is an element of eternal doubling, repeating, an endless cycle, to so many of these characters. They are stuck in a loop, in a way that is deeply unnerving and also in the same way that nearly all of our lives go.

I gave this post the title of Part 8, Gotta Light? because I have to address this episode on its own for a moment. It's something of an outlier in the series, in terms of structure. Throughout The Return, we get more and stranger diversions into the mythology—or cosmology—behind the supernatural events of the series than at any other point in Twin Peaks. Some of it ties in with pieces of Fire Walk With Me or with the original series. Some of it—such as The Arm—take us to Eraserhead-levels of Lynchian strangeness.

Part 8 is the most sustained avant-garde segment in all of Twin Peaks, if that's the right term. David Lynch has been a visual and sound artist for fifty years, known primarily for his films; he is also a fine artist, a painter, sculptor and non-narrative filmmaker as well as a musician and sound designer. Parts of Part 8 bring his narrative film work closer to his painting, sculptural and non-narrative work than at any other time I can think of in his film career. It's a stunningly beautiful, terrible vision, shocking, embarrassing, profound; as unforgettable as it can be difficult to parse. Lynch pushes us, hard, to let go of our prejudices, our demands, our expectations. His miraculously handmade cinema can whipsaw the viewer between beauty and bathos, between joy and contempt, to break us down into our parts, to reassemble us anew. A clue for watching this: don't ask what it means, ask what is it doing to you? This is not to say that it doesn't mean anything—in terms of the larger mystery of Twin Peaks, this episode holds the key—but that there's something even more important here than missing pieces.

The Stars Turn and a Time Presents Itself

I have rewatched the first four, of eighteen, episodes of Twin Peaks: The Return, AKA season three. (The title, above, is the name of the second episode).

At the end of the original series, the lead character, FBI Agent Dale Cooper, had been replaced with an evil doppelgänger, possessed by the demon BOB. It was this demon that killed Theresa Banks, Laura Palmer and her cousin, Maddie, while possessing the body of Laura's father, Leland. The actual Cooper is stuck in the Black Lodge, the famous red-curtained dwarf-having extra-dimensional parlor Cooper dreamed about earlier in the show. This is how the show ended, with a crushing (and delectable) cliffhanger. The prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), did very little to even address the cliffhanger, so fans had to wait more than 25 years for a resolution.

So it's appropriate that the first thing we see in The Return is Cooper, still stuck in the Black Lodge. Though he's told the time is nearing for him to leave the Lodge, because the evil doppelgänger will have to return soon, it takes rather longer than that for Agent Cooper to fully return. Evil Cooper/BOB contrives to not return to the Lodge—and it appears he has prepared for this by installing another Cooper doppelgänger nearby, in the person of Dougie Jones, to send to the Black Lodge in his stead. Cooper exits the Lodge the wrong way and encounters a couple of helpful spirit women who facilitate his passage back to earth, even as Dougie, in the Black Lodge is killed (we assume) and turned into a small metal ball. (I love how ridiculous Twin Peaks sounds when you write it out.)

One of the women in the liminal space between dimensions appears to be Ronette Pulaski, another victim of BOB's who survived in the original series—she is played by the same actress, Phoebe Augustine—but her character name is simply American Girl.

The Dougie switcheroo allows Cooper to return to earth, but since it's a a hack to thwart BOB's plan, the trip leaves Cooper with some kind of amnesia. He doesn't remember how to speak or what anything is or what it's for, let alone remember who he is. The Dougie storyline is both hilarious and crazy-making, since Cooper doesn't come back to his senses until episode 16, making for an agonizing wait.

And we're waiting for what? For the real Dale Cooper to return.

It is this return that the season's subtitle references. The season is "about" the return of Agent Cooper from the Black Lodge. Initially, it seemed obvious that the return simply meant the audience going back to Twin Peaks, the show. As the season unfolds, however, the return begins to carry a lot more meaning than that literal read. There's the return of Cooper, of course. But, as Twin Peaks was originally, in part, a parody of the Primetime Soap genre, The Return is a parody of the Reboot Series. It doesn't lean into this directly; instead, Lynch subverts our expectations about what such a series should be from the very beginning and never lets up. It is a return in this way, a comforting return to nostalgic places and characters, except Lynch and Frost make it clear that there is never any going back. You cannot return to your original experience with Twin Peaks any more than you can return to your youth, to your old life, to your old loves.

As the season continues, it's at times a huge shock to see how the characters have aged. Many of them have moved forward, but haven't changed at all. Some who have changed have only changed superficially; others seem stuck in the exact same rut they were in 25 years earlier. Some of them are gone altogether because the actors have died, or the characters have died, or they have gone far away, perhaps unrecoverably so. The adults from the old show are elderly now; some are gone and several of the actors lived to appear in the season, but died before it was released. The kids from the old show are middle aged versions of themselves; their kids' generation is running around making messes every bit as bad as the messes their parents made. Some of the cast have aged gracefully, some less so. One of the major themes of season three is simply about time and about change, or the lack thereof, and about death. Lynch and Frost seem to be telling us, most emphatically, that you can't go home again, and there is a sense of sublime melancholy. The glory days are gone, but we're still here.

Sorkin and Rudin

I feel like “sorking” and “ruding” should maybe be words? We know what “rudin” would be. In a nutshell, “rudin” is behaving like an evil cartoon film producer of the most cliched kind; it’s related to “weinsteining” but doesn’t necessarily involve rape, just non-stop verbal and sometimes physical abuse. Some might suggest that “sorkin” might mean “to disavow any knowledge of a former colleague’s abusive behavior” while cutting all ties with them. Lot of that going around.

We like to say about abusers like Weinstein and Rudin that “everybody knew” and enabled the behavior. There were many enablers and, yes, no doubt some of them had direct knowledge or at least heard direct allegations from victims. To behave as if this set of people was the same as “everyone,” though, is a convenient fiction. It’s convenient, not only because it gives us secondary and tertiary villains to roast in our righteous anger, but also because it helps paper over our own complicity with evil.

How do we know that “everybody knew?” Because every one of us has, at one time or another, become aware, or at least suspicious, that someone we knew was behaving badly. Not always to the level of abuse, but just behaving in a less than ideal way all the way up to actual crimes. When we hear from famous people, like Aaron Sorkin, who have worked a lot with the abuser, in this case, Scott Rudin, and they say, I had no idea he was doing this stuff, but I’m glad they caught him, we immediately connect with it. We say Of course you knew, how could you not know, because we knew, too, or we feel we should have known, or should have spoken up, or should have left that job or that friendship. But we didn’t because, much like Aaron Sorkin, we are people and people are incredibly good at pretending they didn’t see something they didn’t want to see. Famous people who “must have known” but didn’t act must also be punished because they are us. They are bystanders who put blinders on.

In the excellent, chilling film The Assistant (2019), written and directed by Kitty Green, a young assistant in the office of a powerful Hollywood mogul (based on Weinstein) begins to understand that the boss is an abuser of women and that she, and all of the other workers, are meant to keep silent about what they observe. The thing is, most of them don’t “know” anything. They don’t actually see the abuse and they don’t hear about it directly. All of the signs are there, but that’s not “proof,” so they manage to ignore it. This is the exact position most people who work with abusers are in—if they are not direct victims and do not see the abuse themselves, they don’t “know” and so they can deny what’s happening, even to themselves. There is always an amount of bad behavior that people are willing to take, whether directed at them or colleagues. It’s easy to imagine decades of Rudin’s colleagues who were never directly confronted with evidence of his worst behavior that they were aware of his reputation as a “tough” producer, or even as an asshole human, but nothing they saw or experienced rose to the level where they felt like they had to destroy their relationship with him. Yes, this is self-serving and unethical, but welcome to fucking the entire human race. We all have done it in one way or another, every last one of us, and we feel guilty about it sometimes. Thus, the ire at Sorkin’s sorkining.

I have bad news for those who would like to “cancel” the people who have worked with abusers without whistle-blowing. If your sense of outrage (which is actually about you and your own past failings) requires you to dismiss or even erase the works of these supporting characters, the movie vault, for one, empties out very quickly. Do you know what movies Rudin produced? Here’s a very partial list—think of all the artists involved:

The Addams Family (1991), The Firm (1993), Clueless (1995), The First Wives Club (1996), The Truman Show (1998), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Zoolander (2001), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), The Hours (2002), School of Rock (2003), No Country for Old Men (2007), The Social Network (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Frances Ha (2012), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Captain Phillips (2013), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Steve Jobs (2015), Lady Bird (2017) and Uncut Gems (2019).

This is only a fraction of the movies he directly produced. If we added in films he executive produced (e.g., Sister Act, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and There Will Be Blood, among many) the list of beloved and popular films made by the some of biggest directors and stars in the world gets even longer. If all of the people who contributed to these films were somehow complicit in Rudin’s abuse and ought to be held accountable for it by the dismissal of their work, well, you might as well not watch movies anymore. It’s not safe. In fact, considering that Rudin’s behavior was legendary enough to possibly inspire a movie as far back as 1994 (he’s widely believed to be among the inspirations for Swimming with Sharks), maybe everyone who has watched and enjoyed the above movies is also complicit?

Which is the real point: WE ARE ALL COMPLICIT. The condemnation and preening on social media and in the entertainment press is pure vanity. Even the victims, in some cases, sorry not sorry, display a staggering spinelessness in their failure to respond ethically to the abuse. Their silence—which, sorry not sorry, has much too frequently been a craven attempt to place their personal careers ahead of their own, and many other people’s, well-being—allowed some of these abusers to continue for years without consequence. I know, it’s verboten to ever blame the victims—and I am not blaming them for the abuse they suffered, nor do I fail to understand how trauma affects people, and in the case of extreme abuse (such as rape and similar sexual violation), obviously the trauma can be overwhelming and coming forward has too often yielded no punishment—but some of them were just cowards.

Being a coward is not a crime. But when your boss smashes a computer monitor on your hand, necessitating a trip to the hospital, and neither you nor anyone else in the room smashes his face to a bloody, unrecognizable pulp, or at least calls the police or sues the motherfucker, what is the calculation there? No one is allowed to even yell at you at work. You never have to be treated like that. If you just quietly accept horrible abuse, take money and go away—or continue working for the guy—what kind of fucking person are you?

So where is your personal line? How many times have you looked the other way? Who have you allowed to treat you badly? Why have you allowed it? You have reasons for allowing it. Are they good reasons?

People don’t change abusive behavior, if they ever do, unless they are forced to do it. That is everyone’s responsibility; if you choose your career over that, whether anyone blames you for that or not, you are helping the shark and all the future sharks.

My favorite show of all time and a note on wisteria

My favorite TV show is Twin Peaks. I watched the pilot live on ABC in 1990 and was hooked immediately. The show came along at the right time for me, just as I was beginning to develop a passion for the moving image. It introduced me to David Lynch, who would become one of my favorite filmmakers. It opened my eyes to what could be done with a wild imagination. Its mix of mystery, humor and horror seemed like the perfect genre hybrid to me; it wasn't just one thing. I came to believe, and still do, that the famous "weirdness" of the show combined with other elements to create a kind of realism missing from pretty much everything else I had seen to that point. I didn't understand how that worked; I don't know if I understand it now, how Lynch gets away with the insane tonal shifts in his work, how they seem to make the work stronger and more meaningful. Plenty of people disagree, of course—but for me, it was a life changer, probably the most influential work of my youth.

The show is wildly uneven. The best episodes, by far, are those directed by Lynch himself. Of the 30 episodes across seasons one and two, Lynch directs just six. He was not always involved and it shows as lesser directors and writers attempt to keep the show moving forward. But the Lynch-directed episodes and the overall arc are so extraordinary, with some of those episodes among the best television ever aired, that the show became a cult object.

For the most part, the two original seasons stand as a bizarre parody of the primetime soap opera and, despite occasionally being the scariest show ever, with an unmatched intensity of violence and dread, most of the time it's a gentle, even silly, mystery show. It's a quirky show with quirky characters and quirky obsessions (coffee and cherry pie, for example) that, briefly, became a cultural phenomenon.

Lynch followed up the cancelled series the following year with Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, a feature film prequel that bombed with audiences and critics. The tone of FWWM is considerably darker and scarier than the show, apart from a few key moments of the series. It did nothing to resolve the cliffhanger ending of the show, which probably pissed off some viewers, who were also largely unprepared for what an actual David Lynch film could be like. The film features graphic violence, nudity and sex and spends a large chunk of time not in Twin Peaks at all, nor does Agent Cooper play a major role. It revels in the crazy mythology Mark Frost and Lynch created for the show, digging deeper, but explaining very little. And it's a horror film. It's not without humor and fun surprises, but in its telling of the last days of Laura Palmer it's about as dark as you can get.

FWWM is a tour-de-force, a cult film that was eventually reassessed beyond the context of the original series and placed alongside Lynch's other films. Particularly after Lost Highway, and especially after Mulholland Drive (when Highway was reassessed), FWWM could be seen as an important piece in the development of many of Lynch's eternal themes. It's full of characteristic stylistic flourishes; it also features a Sheryl Lee performance for the ages, as the doomed homecoming queen, Laura Palmer. More importantly—and a big part of its eventual critical reassessment—is its framing of the killing. The show is about the aftermath of Laura's death and the ultimate identify of the killer is terrifying, but FWWM clarifies the intent and makes the subtext text. Twin Peaks is a story about the horror of child sexual abuse, the pure evil of it; the film makes this powerfully clear. It shows us the generational tragedy—that abused children become abusing adults—the psychological dissociation and destruction, and the unwillingness of other people to accept the truth. It's utterly devastating, the ultimate horror, and it's fascinating to see how the film enriches the show, making it darker and stranger, too.

As a superfan, one of the happiest days of my life was when I could finally turn on Showtime on May 21, 2017, and begin watching Season Three, officially called Twin Peaks: The Return. Unlike the original series, the entire eighteen hour season was directed by David Lynch and written with original co-creator, Mark Frost. As soon as it was established that Lynch would direct the whole thing I was ecstatic. On pay cable, with Lynch in control of everything, I knew we were going to get something much more like Fire Walk With Me than the original series. I wondered if the executives even had any idea what they were doing. They were handing one of the greatest filmmakers and artists, a master surrealist indifferent to audience expectations—who, in fact, often has seemed to delight in trolling his audience in a way not seen since the heyday of Jean-Luc Godard—eighteen HOURS of network time and the freedom to do whatever the fuck he wanted (within budget constraints, of course). Eighteen hours is NINE MOVIES, give or take. Previous to The Return, Lynch had directed ten feature films. So over the summer of 2017 David Lynch essentially doubled his career output. Lynch fans might not be the biggest cult, but we rejoiced. This was what they call a magnum opus.

Having watched The Return, I consider it to be the greatest television work ever. I am not alone in this, though it was absolutely true that it turned out to be some of the most hysterical audience trolling of Lynch's career and plenty of people did not watch, or watched a bit then stopped. Forget FWWM: on the David Lynch Strangeness Scale, The Return is sometimes at Eraserhead levels. For Lynch fans, this is nirvana. Now I find myself watching it again and I thought I'd keep a bit of a running journal of my rewatch on this blog. Stay tuned.

And speaking of staying tuned, in doing a little web research tonight as I wrote this, I discovered that it appears Lynch is actually filming Season Four for Netflix right now. This is a totally secret, unannounced thing. There have been strong rumors of a Netflix series in the works from Lynch, but nothing to suggest it's related to Peaks. However, as of this past summer, many, many Twin Peaks actors and some key production personnel have made oblique social media references to "wisteria," which is the known working title for the Lynch/Netflix project. Mark Frost has denied involvement in Lynch's new show, but he did the same thing with reference to Season Three after he had already started writing it with Lynch. This possibility is so very exciting!

The Cancellation of Fredric March, or How to Spectacularly Fail Your Students

I read this piece by John McWhorter in the New York Times over the weekend. The gist is that the University of Wisconsin removed the name of famous alumnus, Fredric March, from buildings on two campuses after students pressured the administration. March, the Oscar-winning Hollywood actor and lifetime civil rights activist, had attended Wisconsin in the late 19-teens. While he was there, he briefly belonged to an honorary fraternity named the Ku Klux Klan.

Have you heard this one? Well, it might sound hard to believe, but this Klan was unrelated to the the KKK, the infamous American terrorist organization. That group, its first iteration active during the Reconstruction until 1871, was newly reformed around 1915 (evidently inspired by D.W. Griffith’s racist cinematic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation) but did not become nationally recognized until the early twenties. There’s no evidence that the fraternity Klan was anything more than a way to recognize college students’ scholastic achievements. A few years later, when the racist KKK became well known, the fraternity changed its name to avoid any association with the group.

But let’s just say, for a moment, even though it’s almost certainly not true, that Fredric March, later a star in the golden age of Hollywood, had joined a racist organization as a college student in 1919. But then he must have regretted it? Because he devoted his star power, for the rest of his life, to the cause of civil rights, first as an anti-fascist, then during the Red Scare, then working with Martin Luther King prior to Birmingham and as a lifelong supporter of the NAACP and many artists of color. He publicly supported black artists during Jim Crow, when most white artists were sitting by silently. He’s considered a civil rights icon.

So, even in the worst case scenario, he more than erased any youthful fuckups with decades of tireless activism. Even in the worst case made up story, his sins could perhaps be forgiven?

Nevertheless, an American public university, instead of seeing a teachable moment in aid of its more ignorant students, co-signed for a know-nothing mob. Why? In what scenario, in what worldview, is this an acceptable response? The school is failing its students.

And there’s no “woke” argument to be made in favor of this erasure, is there? Surely, an ally like Fredric March should be celebrated? Unless there’s a good reason? This wasn’t just a “bad reason,” it was an outright mistake.

So, I know, “cancel culture” is not really a thing, it’s just a right wing talking point, it’s just a way for old white men to avoid responsibility for raping everything, no one has a right to a book deal, nothing ever really happens to any of them, it’s about time they got got—I know, I get it. That means this March business isn’t an example of cancel culture, it’s something else.

It certainly doesn’t “matter” that the guy’s name isn’t on those buildings anymore. He’s dead. He doesn’t care. And I suppose we could argue that there’s no need to remember people in this way, by naming structures after them. Fredric March made movies, anyway. He’ll be remembered for as long as the movies are remembered.

What’s the principle? For me it comes down to the lessons they’re teaching.

1. If you suspect someone of badness, that’s enough to convict them in the public eye.

2. If someone has been convicted in this way, the solution is to, at least symbolically, erase them from the public sphere. In March’s case, it was enough to remove his name from the daily reality of this cohort of students.

3. There is no distinction between guilt and guilt-by-association. So, despite the fact that there’s no connection between the fraternity Klan and the terrorist Klan, apart from a name, which has its own linguistic history, the connotation alone is enough. Listen to the words of the Osh Kosh campus chancellor, Andrew Leavitt, as quoted in the article, “I no longer possess — and this institution should reject — the privilege of nuancing explanations as to how a person even tangentially affiliated with an organization founded on hate has his name honorifically posted on a public building.”

The privilege of nuancing explanations is an interesting phrase, isn’t it? How can we translate that? 

How about I refuse to allow the complex nature of reality to cause my students discomfort, does that work?

As a teacher, I just find this kind of thing appalling. It’s illiberal. It’s infantilizing. It’s insulting.

Grab Minecraft by the Long Tail

Earlier today my kids wanted me to watch a live event in the game Fortnite, which ended “Season 7” in spectacular fashion. So, a live event in a massively multiplayer game which morphs on a half-year or so schedule quaintly called a “season.” They found the event, involving a mass abduction by an alien spaceship, to be “awesome,” which might not have been what they said about it but that’s my equivalent for what they said about it.

I thought it was a cool happening, although I privately felt the action was not a meaningful part of the game, since it was very on-rails (by necessity), and reminded me more of a dark ride from an amusement park. Nevertheless, it brings me back to a passing thread these days: thinking about the future of entertainment and the long tail. We don’t talk about the long tail as much as we did in the aughts. This is likely because so much of that notion of the 21st century marketplace has been borne out that it’s no longer interesting. It’s simply the market.

A recent example. Podcasts, which came about more or less downstream of the release of the Apple iPod in 2001, have become a huge part of the attention economy today. They are great examples of the long tail at work because there are an incomprehensible number of podcasts on every imaginable topic; and the top examples within a given subject area can be incredibly popular, lucrative and influential; but the depth and breadth are beyond the capability of a traditional top-down media giant.

My friend, Andy, wanted to take some action on the climate crisis that also brought something new and beautiful into the world. He’s just one person, so he decided to commission some incredible poster artists to make designs promoting drawdown; he’d sell them and give the profits to a world-class environmental charity. Great thought; and I helped with some of the early ideation (alongside a team of smarter people) about what these designs might represent, ideation being pretty much the only thing I’m good at. The designs were made, the posters printed, to glorious effect. But how to get the word out?

Luck would have it that a dear old friend of his hosts one of the top science podcasts. (She was also one of those smarter ideators.) But still, the results hang the jaw—a few days after appearing on the podcast, sales of the posters skyrocketed; tens of thousands of dollars flowed to the charity. The influencer impact was so palpable and obvious, yet totally grassroots and independent. Long tail.

I mention this really just as prelude for some other observations. Going back to video games, my older son has long been obsessed with Minecraft (which is one of the greatest—possibly the greatest—video game ever). Of course, he’s not the only person who loves it—there are something like 130 million “monthly active users” around the world (MAU is always controversial, but that’s still a big fucking number). As with many popular games, there are professional Minecraft gamers who earn money creating gameplay videos on YouTube. Due to the nature of Minecraft, though, the YouTuber/Minecraft community is possibly bigger than for most other games. Minecraft is not really just a “game,” it is a wildly extensible multiverse that rewards and celebrates creativity. Players create whole worlds for others to inhabit, design complex structures and machines and create countless games for themselves and their friends to play within Minecraft.

One popular multiplayer server is called Hermitcraft. The “hermits,” as they’re called, are a changing collective of veteran players who build a new world for each “season” of Hermitcraft. There are currently 26 hermits involved in season 8. Many of these players have YouTube channels with, collectively, millions of subscribers. They tend to post personal “episodes” of Hermitcraft weekly. My kids watch a particular hermit, named Grian, an hilarious British man who loves to play silly pranks on his fellow players and create complex games and scavenger hunts for them. They have turned me into a fan—the episodes, once you understand what the hell you’re watching—are wildly entertaining. You can find Grian here.

Each week we watch his episodes, watching him build spectacular structures and explore what his fellow hermits have done. Various interactions with other hermits happen in Grian’s episodes and the incredible thing is that many of those hermits also put out weekly videos which feature those and other interactions but from their point of view. As a group, the hermits put out hours of content each week, for their own audiences. It’s far too much content for anyone to catch it all—and the point is that all of it is just a small corner of the Minecraft world on YouTube.

My kids also like movies and TV shows, books and comics—even podcasts. But I really wonder what the future holds for traditional moving image media when such a big part of their consumption is way down near the tippy tip of the long tail like this. The hermits are just individuals with a set of specific passions who have built a niche audience (numbering in the millions) from the ground up on platforms that didn’t even exist two decades ago. What they do can barely even be comprehended by people just a bit older than myself, let alone traditional media company executives who are actually still trying to parse box office returns during a pandemic.

Adventures in Horror Franchises, Halloween Edition

Halloween 12, a sequel to the fourth reboot of the Halloween franchise, actually called Halloween Kills, since most of the numbers have been used several times, releases (probably) on October 15, 2021. I’m fully prepared, having just wrapped up a review—out of order and over a stretch of time—of the franchise by rewatching Halloween (2018), that is to say, Halloween 11, yesterday. This last movie—rebooting the franchise again, after Rob Zombie’s two-film series in the aughts, was directed by indie-darling turned horror-remake journeyman, David Gordon Green, and co-written with his old friend, comic actor Danny McBride (and Jeff Fradley). It’s hard to know who did what in a multi-person writing collab like that, but much of the dialogue is vintage McBride-style aggressively awkward dork comedy, which is as hilarious as it is incongruous with the tone.

The movie is well-directed, though a strange fit for Green, who has always been at his best focussed on the clumsy interactions of his soulfully awkward characters. He certainly “gets” Halloween, though, and his Halloween is arguably the best one since John Carpenter’s original, from a certain point of view. That is, if you are interested in the Halloween sequels because you want to see Michael Myers kill people, it’s a fun installment.

From another point of view—that of the badfilm enthusiast panning for camp gold—Green’s reboot is deliberately, rather than accidentally, funny, somewhat miscast, and doesn’t quite follow through on its best/worst ideas. (For example, the tone of a scene in which two cops bicker hilariously about banh mi sandwiches could have been much more pronounced throughout the film. One senses the desire to do this as well as a conflicting desire to turn away from a comic posture back to slasher basics.) The campiest aspect is one of the bolder retcons in the series, which sweeps the entire franchise into the trash, declaring itself a direct sequel to the original, and the return of Jamie Lee Curtis as a Sarah-Connor-in-T2 survivalist upgrade of her chaste, conscientious babysitter from 1978.

Here is a helpful diagram from Wikipedia, by Will Locatelli, charting the Halloween franchise continuity:

By Will Locatelli - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79920884

As you can see, two reboots sprung directly from Halloween II (1981)’s storyline, the essential element of which is the revelation that Laurie Strode (Curtis) was actually Michael’s sister. (Interestingly, Zombie retained that plotline for his otherwise clean-slate reboot/remake series.) Both of these reboots on the Halloween II (1981) spur ignore Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the only Halloween movie without Michael Myers. III is also badfilm heaven, a soaringly ridiculous storyline about killer mask technology derived from supernatural Irish pseudo-mythology involving, maybe, witches? and Wall-Street-business-suit-wearing killer robots. Easily my second favorite Halloween movie; it’s a technophobic 1980s schlock classic.

At first the franchise seemed to have righted itself, with the well-regarded Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, featuring strong performances from Donald Pleasence (in his third of five outings as Dr. Loomis) and child actor Danielle Harris (who returns to the franchise as an adult, playing a different character, in Zombie’s series), in a generic, but occasionally tense, straight sequel. The next two outings, Revenge and Curse of Michael Myers, respectively, naturally go down hill, particularly Curse, which dives into the frankly stupid retcon (about a cult who wants to capture the essence of Mike’s evil or something) that gives this three-film arc its unofficial “Thorn Trilogy” nickname. Even so, the series remains canon—the child is supposed to be the child of Laurie Strode who is supposed to be dead (in a car accident) by this point. Probably not a coincidence, Jamie Lee Curtis’s career was arguably peaking around the same time, with A Fish Called Wanda, Blue Steel and, a few years later, True Lies coming down the pike.

She was coming off that ride in time to probably get paid a truckload of money for Halloween 7, called Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later, which, as you can see from the chart, ignores the third through sixth movies. Yes, Laurie is still Mike’s sister, but she never had a baby girl and certainly was never killed in a car wreck. She faked her death and took on a new identity, at some point having a boy baby and becoming the headmaster at an elaborately gated private high school in Northern California. It’s clear during the opening credits that the budget had swelled—by more than 10 million over the previous installment, according to Wikipedia. That baby boy is played by Josh Hartnett, hot off The Faculty and about to costar in The Virgin Suicides; hot child actor Joseph-Gordon Levitt started his transition to adult roles in a funny cameo; Little Man Tate and Ice Storm star, Adam Hann-Byrd is one of the doomed teens with Nash Bridges star, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe; Adam Arkin is on hand as a love interest for Jamie Lee (she could do better, obviously); and Dawson’s Creek standout and future ubiquitous indie-to-mainstream superstar, Michelle Williams, is the final-but-one girl. As if that weren’t a crazy-enough cast for the seventh Halloween movie, LL Cool J plays an heroic security guard; and ur-slasher-victim and Jamie Lee’s real mom, Janet Leigh, plays a pesky secretary. (Don’t worry, she doesn’t get killed by Michael; instead, she graciously exists the film driving a 1957 Ford Sedan to a musical snippet of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score. Her character is named Norma.)

The money spent on this installment paid off at the box office and Jamie Lee gets to have a lot of fun with her character. She ultimately decapitates Michael, which ends his reign of terror once and for all (no, it doesn’t). The reason that seemingly definitive finale isn’t? Halloween 8, Halloween: Resurrection, tells us that Mike had actually swapped clothes with an EMT and Laurie had de-headed the wrong man. The similarly-budgeted 8 follows 7 by wrapping up Laurie Strode’s story forever (no, of course not) by having Michael toss her from a roof. I’ve written elsewhere what a messy missed opportunity this film is. The less said the better—but it spelled the end of the Halloween II (1981) spur (for now).

Rob Zombie made a couple of interesting remake movies, completely disregarding all previous films. I don’t want to suggest that they’re good, but they’re interesting. He delves into a picture of Michael’s childhood (which no one really wanted) in the first one; in the second, he gets gonzo and has more fun making less sense. I hate Zombie’s filthy aesthetic but I admire his old-school slasher horror instincts.

After Zombie’s versions, Dimension lost the rights by not coming out with more crap sequels soon enough, wrestling the series out of the Weinstein’s dirty hands. Then, the final reboot (definitely this time). We’re getting two films more, following up from Green’s 2018 reset. That one was a mega-hit, making the most of any Halloween movie to date, in raw numbers; in adjusted dollars, John Carpenter’s original 1978 film is still the champ. Of course it is. It cost $600 grand and grossed $70M worldwide. It spawned not only a number of mediocre sequels and reboots (10 to date) but was immediately copied by thousands of filmmakers looking for a break. Official sequels to Halloween are irrelevant; all post-1978 slasher films are sequels to Halloween.

But franchises can take on a life of their own—much like a serial killer who can’t be killed. The whole monstrosity becomes an object in its own right. In this sense, Friday the 13th is a much better franchise than Halloween. It’s not that any individual F13 movie is even remotely as good as the best film of the Halloween franchise (the first one, obviously). They most definitely are not. But the F13 gestalt is crazier, funnier, more outrageous and even scarier than the whole Halloween experience.

At least until the next reboot.

Once Upon Some More Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino has figured prominently in my adult cinephilia; his first film, Reservoir Dogs, was released the year I graduated from high school. It’s the only film of his I didn’t see in the theater on or around opening day. Tarantino has accrued multiple reputations, multiple controversies, multiple accolades and multiple backlashes ever since, as befits an extremely talkative auteur at the center of the American film zeitgeist for thirty years. Like De Palma and Scorsese before him, a lot of Tarantino’s work has been misunderstood in a variety of ways and he has been accused, somewhat incoherently, of a number of sensitivity crimes—he glorifies violence, he’s a misogynist, he’s racist. He’s also been celebrated like only a few other directors of his generation—Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh come to mind—but perhaps none have maintained such pop culture supremacy as Tarantino.

Tarantino’s work has always resonated in at least two ways. For largely cinema illiterate fan boys, his extraordinary pastiche of the exploitation genres he loves works as a hip, ultra-violent ratification of regressive masculine prerogatives. To the cinema literate fan, with a bonus for lovers of pulpy B-movies, he offers a heady, hilarious critique of masculinity that both celebrates the over-the-top joys of “trashy” movies and utterly transcends them, with rich characterization, irony, suspense, comedy and a virtuosic command of cinema language. We see these divergent camps in the response to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the film he released two years ago. Many saw the film, but many younger film fans found it boring—not violent enough, too talky—compared to other films of his they prefer; whereas, another audience more responsive to art film but also appreciative of film history and the myriad influences Tarantino riffed on, found it to be a masterpiece.

Firmly in that second group, I loved the film. I was excited to read Tarantino’s novelization of the film, which was released last month. I was also wary, wondering if the book would change my perception of the movie. I needn’t have worried. If anything, the book enriched the understanding I already had formed. The book has been marketed—by Tarantino, too—as a “complete rethinking of the entire story,” which seems almost comically wrong as a description. The impression that I’ve gotten from the marketing is that QT sat down to write this book after the movie came out, but that’s almost certainly not true in the larger sense of expanding the story he told. It seems clear to me that the book is a slight reshuffling of everything he already knew about the characters and the backstory when he wrote the movie. He had way too much material—and, indeed, seems to have shot a LOT more than we saw onscreen (according to multiple cast accounts)—and decided to release it in book form simply because he loves everything about it.

What I’m saying is, sure, he might have written the book after the movie came out, but the material was not new—this is my suspicion. I consider the movie to be a comic drama exploring cultural modes and experiences of masculinity in perhaps the most direct and rigorous way of any film in his career. Then I read the book, and saw, over page after page, that this was precisely his intention and, if anything, he realized he didn’t need it all for the movie version, in order to make his point. Or, at least, he felt he didn’t need it when he released the film—but I wonder if some of the reactions to the movie influenced his decisions in the book?

I am particularly curious about the Bruce Lee scene—some found Lee’s portrayal in the film to be racist, particularly that handsome white man, Cliff Booth, bests him in a fight, and that the Lee character is presented as something of a poseur. He’s shown showing off for a crowd of stunt men and other film workers and boasting of his fighting prowess. In reality, Lee was a transformational figure, a milestone in Asian representation in Hollywood—which nothing in the film or book undermines. According to detail we get in the book, though, Lee was also, apparently, not at all popular with stunt men. He was known to repeatedly “tag” stunt performers on set—actually hit and kick them, instead of faking it—a practice which would, indeed, have potentially led to his being beat up by a “ringer,” a freelancer like Cliff brought in to teach a tagger a lesson. Cliff was not brought in to act as a ringer in the story; instead, it gets him in big trouble and ends his stunt career for a while.

But Cliff’s motivations for fighting Bruce Lee are complicated. Some of his views—Cliff’s views—could be construed as racist; as a World War 2 hero in 1960s Los Angeles, they’re not surprising. Nor are they Tarantino’s views. But racism has little to do with the fight that takes place. Instead, in both the movie and the book, we are asked to think about the difference between the fake violence that onscreen men have dished out for decades, as opposed to real violence. This is one of many times we’re asked to contemplate the masculine image our culture creates and sells, versus the reality even of some of those who collaborate in that image-making.

Hiatus

My summer hiatus, comprising six weeks of travel—three weeks in Texas and three weeks in Montana and elsewhere, separated by a week at home in the middle—has come to an end. It was not necessarily my intention to stop writing and posting, but I did, for the most part. A good thing, I think. We all need a vacation, sometimes, even if it’s not really a vacation with young children, it’s just parenting elsewhere. But the elsewhere is the important bit.

When we flew to Texas in mid June it seemed like the pandemic might be winding down, for the US, that is; driving back from Montana a few days ago it seemed like it’s back with a vengeance. The kids go back to school full time next week, masked, of course. Until they send them home again, perhaps. It feels like they won’t do that this time, but it’s not possible to know the future, is it? So much of our lives are prefaced by a relentless focus on the future—planning, scheming, squirreling away, positioning, banking—that there’s a certain comfort in simply no longer being able to predict, and therefore “know,” what’s coming. It shows our supposed foresight for the laughable ruse it is.

I’ve done a fair amount of reading and far less watching, than usual, in these weeks. Since finishing Stephen King’s Danse Macabre at the beginning of June, I’ve read several classic horror stories he recommended: Ghost Story by Peter Straub, The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. All fun and, especially the latter two, stunningly written. Jackson’s famous ghost story is an angry, hallucinogenic wail against life in the closet, with a brilliantly unreliable narrator. Bradbury’s evil circus is a dangerous, wildly poetic elegy for childhood dreams and nightmares (and clearly a major influence on King’s It). The Straub and Siddons are also affecting, but the other two are masterpieces.

I added one of my own, Marisha Pessl’s Night Film, which was a deeply creepy mystery about the death of a cult horror filmmaker’s daughter. And I read, alongside Something Wicked, Quentin Tarantino’s novelization of his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I will write about that fascinating experiment in another post. I have more of King’s recommendations to get to in the coming weeks, which I hope will be mostly filled with reading, writing and watching. When will I get back to teaching, I wonder? or some other kind of labor outside of the house?

I’ve watched plenty of movies this summer, but most were things watched with my kids and their cousins and other family. I showed Rear Window to my niece and nephew, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I actually saw a movie in a theater, Fast & Furious 9 at an Alamo Drafthouse with my dad. We watched the latest Marvel movie, Black Widow, which I enjoyed with my low, low expectations. Steven Soderbergh snuck back into his neo-noir wheelhouse via HBO Max, with No Sudden Move, which was an excellent showcase for Cheadle, del Toro and Fraser. And that week I was home I watched some delightful schlock horror. First, 1984’s C.H.U.D., a nutty D-movie with an accidentally great cast; then the Karyn Kusama/Diablo Cody effort Jennifer’s Body, a clever movie that feels watered down in execution. Next, I watched Larry Cohen’s insane anti-consumerist mixtape, The Stuff, which is a work of underappreciated genius; followed by Joe Dante’s The Howling, a mediocre werewolf movie with intermittent jolts of inspiration (and glorious makeup effects).

Since we were often camping when we went back on the road, there wasn’t much opportunity to watch anything. However, when we stopped over at Grandma’s place in Montana, and the kids were wondering about Westerns, we all watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I remembered much of it, but not the greatness, which shown through on this viewing—of the screenplay, the direction, the Newman/Redford bromance, the distancing music and narrative ellipses. I had remembered it as being more sentimental—this time, I found the sentiment purposefully curdled and a more Bonnie and Clyde-like sarcasm along with a searing violence that evoked the Vietnam War.

Back home now, slowly reassembling our lives from the boxes and suitcases of travel; cleaning the house; making new stacks and facing the coming season.

Always Coming Back

I had a hankering the other day to watch a feel-good fun-time movie during my stationary bike ride, so I put on Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991). It’s a great ride—at least, the first half is—that’s also dripping with cheese. I always think it’s kind of a shame what happened with this franchise. I started watching T3 (2003) the next day, just because I hadn’t seen it in a while; it’s just a shame that Cameron didn’t want to be involved. The action scenes are garbage compared to T2—unfair, I know, to compare a ho-hum B-movie to an action classic, but even so, what were they thinking? If the action was good, that movie would have been fine and might even have led to better things.

As it is, Terminator always feels like a franchise that was really let down. It’s a time travel story, for Christ, they can do anything they want, they have killer robots, why are the movies so bad after the first two? Actually, I don’t care about why they’re bad; I just find that whenever I watch a Terminator movie I automatically start thinking of fun shit they could do; like, is it really so hard?

For instance, what if the future sent back a team to steal secrets from the Cyberdyne lab while it was under attack in T2? They use the break in and chaos to sneak in, then jack into the network and steal designs from the computers, then run away before the place is blown up. This is just one example of a way to use the time travel—this heist could be done by a competitor that then uses the tech to build a different Skynet. You can spin out all kinds of stories about people trying to manage the weird time travel screwups and alternate universes—why not have fun with it?

Danse Macabre by Stephen King

I just finished reading Stephen King’s non-fiction “overview of the horror genre,” as it says on the book’s cover, originally published in 1981. It’s a very entertaining read, particularly for King fans, and it’s full of great insights about horror and recommendations for good books, shows and movies (from about the 1950s - 1980). It’s quite idiosyncratic, rather than attempting to be definitive, but his ideas are right on the money and sync well with contemporary academic thinkers on horror. And it should be obvious that it’s considerably more fun hearing them from Stephen King.

I only really got in to King in the past decade, having been too afraid to read him when I was younger. By now, I credit him largely with inspiring me to write over the past year. When the pandemic hit, thanks to all of the SK I’ve read in the last decade, I began to feel as if I, too, could put pen to paper. Saying that, it seems like I am insulting him, as if I think his stuff is dreck and if it can get published, I could get published; but this is not it at all. I love his work; the thing that it taught me was that it’s okay to be—in fact, you can only be—yourself when you write. It’s okay, it’s totally okay—in fact, it’s not even for you to judge—for the work not to be literary to some vague standard; just write. Let it out.

I’m not sure why King inspired me in this way—I have always read and loved “great literature,” say, Faulkner or Dostoevsky, and I don’t put King quite at that level. King is more like Dickens, to me; but in any case, King, more than anyone has taught me that these value systems, these labels, are not worth much to writers and that you should, you know, just write. There is a deep love of human beings and a deep humility even in his craziest, most Coke-fueled work (from decades ago), and it has given me the courage to try to tell stories, too.

There’s much similar, continuing inspiration in Danse Macabre. Depending on your interests, too, some parts might get a little dry. I loved the movie section, naturally, enjoyed the TV section a bit, and sometimes had to work through the fiction section. But I also bought a bunch of ebook versions of his fiction recommendations for a summer Read-A-Thon.

A Camp Sandwich on Wry

Since I’ve been thinking about camp so much since I started this blog, I would be remiss not to mark the occasion—I rewatched Showgirls (1995). I also read the 2003 critical roundtable on the film from Film Quarterly, which is a pretty great set of brief critical essays, centering on the epic failure of the mainstream critical establishment to see Paul Verhoeven’s infamous “bomb” as being anything more than a disaster. From the point of view of many film fans, both in academia and among the unwashed masses, Showgirls is so much more than a mere disaster.

Showgirls can’t easily be summed up; it requires experience and, almost certainly, multiple viewings. Even now, though I’ve seen it many times since it came out, if it’s been a while I tend to doubt my recollection. It can’t be as amazing as I remember it, I think. This is easy, too, because Showgirls is, first, very bad. It’s infamous for bad acting, bad writing, bad dancing—bad everything. That it’s shot and directed beautifully will sometimes be grudgingly admitted; other times the whole thing is described as trash, from conception to execution.

And trash it is, but (as put best in this quote that opens the Film Quarterly piece):

Showgirls is funny, stupid, dirty, and filled with cinematic clichés; in other words, perfect. Even better, the writer and director, no matter what they say today, don’t appear to be in on the joke…. Showgirls will hold up; it will be great trash forever. —John Waters

Actually, Paul Verhoeven might have been more in on the joke than Waters suspects, or perhaps not. It doesn’t matter much; the auteur’s intention is mostly beside the point. We have the movie we have, which is an exploitation movie with big-budget production values and impeccable craft, a delirious, blood-dripping satire that is not merely “campy” but camp wrapped in camp wrapped in camp that is fundamentally about camp. After all, one way of looking at camp is via its focus on performance—of gender, of social roles, of political ideology—and performance is central to Showgirls.

About Elizabeth Berkley’s ill-starred performance as Nomi Malone, Chon Noriega writes in the Film Quarterly roundtable,

What makes Showgirls unique as a satire is the way in which Verhoeven collapses the Lumière and Méliès traditions. The film has the strange sense of being an actualitié for Elizabeth Berkley’s performance.

This begins to get at the strange way Berkley’s performance works. It sticks out, like a stripped wire, and constantly surprises the viewer out of their badfilm shock-daze with its wildness and ungroundedness. The cautionary meta-narrative of a former child actress stretching her wings in a daring role is always close at hand (Berkley was—and is—one of the stars of Saved by the Bell), as is a frequent confusion about what is motivating her behavior or, for that matter, the people who try to help her. It’s interesting to think about how this connects to the satire—the “bad” performance is a constant reminder of the artifice depicted, the many artifices, throughout the film, and the theme of performance of the self.

Zombie Motives

Rob Zombie, in his two Halloween outings (in 2007 and 2009) approaches the question of Michael Myers’s motives by developing a richer backstory for the character than elsewhere in the franchise (of which these two films are reboots); we can certainly sympathize with him when we learn more about his family life. In the John Carpenter original, we glimpse Michael’s home life; it’s as comfortably middle-class and “normal” as any other Haddonfielder’s. Nevertheless, Michael commits heinous crimes as a boy, therefore he’s Implacably Evil, both as a character and as a metaphor—and all you can do is lock him up or kill him, both of which are difficult. In Zombie’s vision, Michael comes from a broken home (broken and filthy, because this is a Rob Zombie movie), where his stripper mom has rotated through abusive stepfathers and Michael has begun torturing and killing animals. He’s bullied by most people in his life and his sister would still rather fuck her boyfriend than take Michael trick-or-treating. (Said boyfriend conveniently leaves a Michael Myers mask lying around.)

The audience is made to feel sympathy for the boy, who seems just on the line of maybe turning it around if only someone would give him a little love and attention. This does not transpire; Mike kills a bunch of people then gets institutionalized (he’s ten or eleven years old), then grows up and kills WAY more people. And by this point, the conclusion is exactly the same: he’s Implacably Evil and all you can do is lock him up or kill him. So what was the point of all the getting to know you stuff? I’ll admit, it made him a more interesting character. But isn’t that a distraction when thinking about Michael Myers? Are we really meant to invest in him as a character? Can we sympathize with him enough to change the equation on “lock him up or kill him?” 

People regularly try to dehumanize anyone considered monstrous. We would say of Hitler that he’s “not really human,” or the like. Because no human can really do unthinkably evil things. By definition—if it’s unthinkable, it’s undoable. Here, of course, we make a bad error—not the think/do thing—the point of view thing. So you find murder “unthinkable” as an action, i.e, you would never do that. Well, someone else doesn’t. Your perspective—it’s unthinkable!—is irrelevant. The thing about Hitler is not that he’s somehow not human, it’s that he is human. A human can be human and be evil, even if we can’t really accept that word, either. While we argue about whether “evil” is actually a thing, it’s killed another thousand people somewhere.

So why do we say the murderer was “not even human?” We insist on it, even. We can’t abide that another one of us would even be able to do what this sicko did. People get into vicious fights on social media about “humanizing” bad people—which I take to mean making them seem more human. Look, nothing the New York Times writes about him is going to make the white supremacist more or less of a person. That’s the shit of it. Why is this controversial? We all have to pretend that we can exclude bad people that we hate from the human race for the sake of a metaphor?  But to get back to, uh, Rob Zombie’s Halloween…

In humanizing Michael Myers, is Zombie intending to motivate his later serial killing? Audiences tend to make that assumption—otherwise, they reason quite rightly, why the fuck would you be showing us all that shit about his childhood, anyways? Trying to entertain me? Because I came here to watch Michael Myers bringing in the sheaves, so to speak. Harvesting the flowering teens, if you will. I don’t really care why he’s doing it, man. But maybe that’s not Zombie’s game. Dr. Loomis (canonically Donald Pleasance; here Malcolm McDowell, a former teenage thrill killer himself) comes to the same conclusion—that Michael is incurably, unstoppably Evil. In other words—evil does exist. Even a human being can be Evil, in ways unthinkable to other human beings.

So the meaning of Zombie’s contribution to the Halloween franchise might be this lesson—that motive is not a helpful concept. The killer is a human who has lived a life before killing and will live a life after killing. He might have reasons, a rationale, a purpose of some kind. It doesn’t matter—it won’t make any of it easier to understand in the end.