BOOK REVIEW: SECRET RENDEZVOUS (1977, 1979)

by Kobo Abe

English translation by Juliet W. Carpenter, and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979.

Originally published in Japanese in 1977 by Shinchosha.

. . .

“This is one peculiar job I have taken on. No matter how I follow myself around, I will never see anything but my own backside, when what I want to know lies beyond: the empty space, for example, that I never knew or dreamed existed until it was invaded by that doctor’s footsteps . . . the space that ever since has grown endlessly wider, separating my wife and me . . . the ground that anyone can walk around on freely, that belongs to nobody . . . the jealousy like a bed of hard, frozen lava, leaving only the imprint of anger . . .”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

A nameless man tries to write his story according to the extensive surveillance logs collected by a secret police agency that he himself may or may not be the boss of, but he seemingly depends upon these logs more than his own memories. Hey, nowadays we all know how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be, and who is the primary eyewitness to your life? Yourself, an unreliable narrator of your own existence. So it would seem that the secret police are just trying to help us out, just some friends indeed to a friend in need of memory enhancement.

The nameless man is looking for his wife, who disappeared after taking a sinister ambulance ride. The nameless man is assisted by a man who is also a horse, or is working hard towards becoming a horse. The nameless man is not as weirded out by the horse as you might think, but it is something he gets caught on now and again. 

The nameless man investigates a suspicious hospital. He finds a labyrinth of secret passages, hidden rooms, and quirky characters ready to make his acquaintance. It’s not a million miles from a Hideo Kojima video game. There’s even a power-up item in the form of “jump shoes” which the nameless man also retails. The nameless man also has to evade goon squads, and even has a martial arts dustup to protect a woman with liquid bones. This investigation uncovers a festival of sexual perversion, human trafficking, and human experimentation. The secret police turn out to be a private enterprise outfit who get quite a lot of their business from the suspect hospital. The people running this hospital stalk and capture people to be used for parts-a chop shop of a most gruesome kind.

The nameless man’s narrative is suffused with jealousy, paranoia, misogynist entitlement, and bewilderment. He is not the most sympathetic character, and yet he himself also seems to be caught up in the chaos gears of a machine he cannot control or understand despite his desires for power via surveillance networks and unethical biotechnologies. By the end, he is abandoned by the system which he once prized. Perhaps his manufactured narrative that pitted him as a rebel against a corrupt system was his fantasy of escaping a world he knew would turn on him in the fullness of time since its hunger for human vivisection fodder could not be effectively regulated. Secret Rendezvous may have been intended to remind audiences of Imperial Japan’s germ warfare atrocities which included testing of weapons upon live human beings. The empire is gone, but big business endures, so why wouldn’t corporate capitalism, ever restless for new frontiers to consume, section and suture and dissect human beings to derive new products and services?

Secret Rendezvous may also be the chronicle of an elaborate delusion and/or masturbatory fantasia reflecting cranky, reactionary attitudes towards advances in medical science. Maybe it’s just a middle aged author’s remix of nurse porn and sensationalist headlines about artificial tissues and organ transplants and sperm donations and egg banks and the like. This is Kobo Abe, so it’s hard to tell what’s a put-on and what’s in earnest. I imagine many contemporary readers raised on formulaic lawyer thrillers, Stephen King-a-likes, Harry Potter-esques, Tolkien clones, and various YA soap operas will be displeased by such a twisty, ambiguous, button pushing narrative such as this, but that’s how it goes. Abe carved out a place for himself as a literary weirdo who wrote whatever the fuck he wanted, and I think that has value, even if Secret Rendezvous witholds narrative closure. Hell, even I sometimes find myself frustrated by Abe’s novels. I assume the frustration is part of the point.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #3: APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

I wept like some grandmother, and so will you!

MOVIE REVIEW: QUINTET (1979)

Produced/Directed by Robert Altman

Screenplay by Frank Barhydt, Robert Altman, and Patricia Resnick

Story by Robert Altman, Lionel Chetwynd, and Patricia Resnick

Music by Tom Pierson

Starring

Paul Newman

Fernando Rey

Bibbi Andersson

Vittorio Gassman

. . .

"All things of value fit the game. The game is the only thing of value."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

In a frozen hell of a world-maybe it's a new Ice Age brought on by nuclear winter-the final remnants of humanity while away their days in and around a ruined subterranean city playing a board game called Quintet. The rules of this game are utterly impenetrable to We the Audience, but the characters in the movie seem to understand them. The stakes are life and death, but the emotional affect of the people of these end times is severely reduced. These humans know the end is coming for the species. They hunted the seals to extinction. The supply of fish is uncertain. Cannibalism will only hasten the end; and anyways, there are dutiful packs of dogs trained to eat human corpses where they fall. And there's no discernible appetite for dogflesh. There's still electricity, but that could fizzle out any day. No one's getting pregnant since no person of conscience would seek the agonies of childbirth for a woman in these dire circumstances nor subject a newborn to such a harsh environment. No more art. No more technology. Plenty of religion, mostly centered around the murderous board game of Quintet, which affords the final humans a neat trick: the ability to die purposefully-to die for the sake of the game. 

Quintet is the next level bummer of apocalyptic science fiction cinema. Humanity is so demoralized that it has literally gamified death as a means to (literally) play out its final days. And that's only for the privileged few who are good at the game. If you're no good at Quintet, then you receive no economic chits, you therefore must seek your own food outside of the game economy, and, inevitably, you slowly wither from the nutrition-deficient gruel spooned out by the church until you finally keel over where you stand and the carrion doggos swarm you and eat you. Please note that these dogs are not aggressive and do not attack the living. These vulture mutts are, in fact, the loyal friends of humanity by virtue of saving us from the final degeneration of cannibalism. It's surely something for which to be grateful in these final days. Good dogs, indeed!

The rules of Quintet are enforced by roaming referees who are empowered to use daggers and cutthroat razors to stab and slash and bleed out the losers. One overzealous ref uses a bomb that ends up wiping out an entire family. This bombing precipitates the plot of Quintet. A surviving member of this family unit assumes the identity of a dead man and goes questing for answers: why play such a lethal game? How were the explosives manufactured? Is there any reason to keep on living in a ruined city that participates in such a bizarre death sport? 

Our Designated Protagonist Man is played by Paul Newman with an intriguing mix of doggedness and resignation. He's been away from the subterranean city for years, hunting seals, and has just returned due to the extinction of his prey, his livelihood. He remembers the game of Quintet from his younger days, and has little interest in it. The bombing drags him back in, and, in a sense, his quest is to get his head around the absurdity of Quintet even as he seeks justice. In his head, he's still a man seeking an honest living, a job, even though the human species is trudging towards an icy doom. He is hostile to the idleness and fickle childish sadism of Quintet even as he begins to come to terms with his own inner illusions about the prospects of meaningful work during humanity's final era.

One of the referees is memorably played with diabolical relish by Fernando Rey as a true believer in the game of Quintet. Rey and Newman have a series of conversations that also function as collisions between Believer and Skeptic. This leads to a somewhat on-the-nose climax, where I think things are spelled out that had already been revealed, but it's forgiveable. Quintet spends much of its running time with such a reticent protagonist that any extended dialogue risks seeming extravagantly loquacious. Since the film ends up being a sort of philosophical murder mystery, an Agatha Christie-esque scene of summing up becomes a formal necessity, I suppose, whatever its flaws. 

The final scene could be edited into a supercut with the endings of films like The Shining, The Human Condition, John Carpenter's The Thing, Goyokin, McCabe and Mrs. Miller . . . it isn't just a murder mystery about the extermination of a single family unit, that's for sure . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: ALIEN (1979)

 Directed by Ridley Scott

Jones trained by Animals Unlimited

Alien design by H.R. Giger

Alien head effects by Carlo Rambaldi

Special Effects Supervisors Brian Johnson and Nick Allder

Concept Artist Ron Cobb

Production Designer Michael Seymour

Art Directors Les Dilley and Roger Christian

Screenplay by Dan O’Bannon

Story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett

Director of Photography Derek Vanlint

Edited by Terry Rawlings

Executive Producer Ronald Shusett

Produced by Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Starring

Sigourney Weaver as Ripley

Yaphet Kotto as Parker

Tom Skerritt as Dallas

Ian Holm as Ash

Veronica Cartwright as Lambert

Harry Dean Stanton as Brett

John Hurt as Kane

Bolaji Badejo as the alien

Helen Horton as the voice of Mother

Jones is Jones

...

“Pathetic earthlings, hurling your bodies out into the void without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you’d known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would have hidden from it in terror.”

-Emperor Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe in Flash Gordon (1980)

…

Review by William D. Tucker.

In the future, being an intergalactic space traveller is just another shit-ass fuckin’ job. You’re basically an extension of an artificially intelligent space ship-the whole goddamn operation could run without any all-too-human bags of meat, couldn’t it? The only reason why you’re there is politics and economics: labor negotiations to ensure jobs for highly evolved primates inside the hyper-rationalized, mostly autonomous ultra-tech resource extraction industries of whatever distant century within which Alien takes place. 

The space ship is the Nostromo, a vast and ugly, yet star-worthy, mobile ore extractor, refinery, and transport vessel, which visually evokes a dystopian devolution of Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back. When we first see the Nostromo it’s in visual contrast to a huge, Saturn-like planet with impressive rings of space rocks, and all this measured against the pitiless void of space. We eventually go inside the Nostromo, and it is so dense with Millenium Falcon-esque run-down retro-future details that, if you’re watching this at home-as opposed to a COVID-19 superspreader theater-you’ll want to pause and play back a lot of the scenes after you watch it through once without stopping, just to try to suss out what all the gadgets and junk are supposed to be:

-robot heads that seem to pilot the craft whilst the human crew are locked in cryogenic hypersleep-those fuckin’ robo-heads always creep me out, as they seem to be sending and receiving some kind of machine language, which you know is bad, right? When the machines are talking to each other when no humans are around . . .

-what is that-is that an elephant key chain hanging on someone’s astro-navigation monitor? Is that Dumbo? Someone adding a little kitschy human flair to their work station?

-smooth glide, stalkery camera maneuvers combined with Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie score give us the sense that the Nostromo is haunted by some unseen, pervasive evil presence-which would be capitalism, of course-BUT, if you mute the sound and watch it again, it’s almost like a virtual tour of some second hand space craft. Try before you buy.

-and then we get to the hypersleep bed-pods. The lids open. John Hurt slowly sits up, awakening from a no doubt years-long slumber. He’s so pale and withered looking. Yet he has a kind of anguished Zen about him, as though he is resigned to his dehumanizing fate as a disposable cog in the overall corporate machine. A quintessentially John Hurt moment-see also 1984. 

-and soon the rest of the crew is awake, and gathered around the mess table, eating a variety of vaccuum-packed self-heating meals. You’ve got the alert and by-the-book science officer Ian Holm, who’ll surely dole out plenty of technobabble and vital exposition as the movie chugs along. You have chief engineer Yaphet Kotto who brings up the “bonus situation” on behalf of himself and his fellow below-the-line engineer Harry Dean Stanton. Tom Skerritt as the laconic hard-on of a captain tells him everybody gets paid what’s in their contract-so, a very reasonable, “Fuck you.”

Warrant Officer Sigourney Weaver and astro-navigator Veronica Cartwright soon realize that their star charts are all wrong for an automated return trip to Earth. Something has diverted their homeward voyage: a signal, of either distress or warning, from an unknown source on an unexplored planet. The laws of space travel require that any capable crew has to assist another vessel in distress, and so the homeward voyage becomes a rescue operation. 

Look, you’ve seen Alien, right? This is one of those movies everybody’s seen. Or it used to be. It still is, right? Is it possible to spoil Alien, in this miserable fucking pandemic year of 2020? 

I’ll err on the side of caution. I’ll try not to totally spoil this one, ‘cause it is one of the best. Not so much in terms of absolute originality of ideas or themes-Alien is highly derivative of earlier sci-fi B-movie thrillers. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon may have lifted a crucially disgusting aspect of the titular alien creature’s life cycle from David Cronenberg’s Shivers, tho’ I don’t know that for sure. I wasn’t there myself, you know. 

What sells Alien is the obsessively wrought production designs of the Nostromo and the structures awaiting the human crew upon the surface of the planet where the mysterious signal originates; the off-the-cuff Robert Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes shot and edited in what William Friedkin would call “induced documentary” style; the nasty twists and turns of plot as the wealth of inductive details give way to terrifying deductions about the horrors that are possible in a universe that is both mind-numbingly vast and utterly indifferent to human moral conceptions-

-okay, okay, I’ll do a major spoiler . . .

. . . WARNING! WARNING!

YOU ARE ENTERING A SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE . . .

. . . the Company sends mostly extraneous humans on their mostly automated ship because machines can’t be infected with parasites. Thinky meat-bags chasing paychecks and financial stability and bonuses and class mobility are the bait, my friend . . .

YOU ARE NOW EXITING THE SPOILER CONTAINMENT ZONE.

Just one more thing, Human.

There’s a scene that really got to me this last time I watched Alien. 

Okay, the Nostromo is run by an intelligent computer called Mother. Mother-or some sub-system of her-is engaged with an ongoing translation process of the signal from the alien planet. This process is entirely automated. When it’s done, there’ll no doubt be a ping or a beep and an indicator light. But Sigourney Weaver insists on watching the raw feed, the translation-in-process-not because she or anyone else on the crew can do anything to make Mother’s work go faster . . . I guess she just wants to be there as the results come in, even if all she can do is take it in, and see if the new information clarifies the larger situation. 

We are hypnotized by a flow of inductive detail, so compelling, so novel, leaving so many possibilities wide open, until we are crushed by the grand deduction that it all adds up to being cosmically fucked to death by both alien indifference to the value of our lives and human malice towards the same. 

Enemy without. Enemy within. 

Right. 

MOVIE REVIEW: LAST HURRAH FOR CHIVALRY (1979)

Directed by John Woo

Review by William D. Tucker. 

A young martial artist's master is humiliated by a ferocious kung fu gangster! 

The young martial artist must seek revenge, but he knows he's no match for the gangster. So he looks up the toughest swordsman in town, a fanatically principled young man named Chang. Chang isn't for sale. But another swordsman, the drunken womanizer Green, may be willing to take on the job. Chang, Green and others become embroiled in a kung fu street fight for ultimate vengeance! 

This is a swordplay and kung fu epic from a filmmaker mostly known for his gun fu classics A BETTER TOMORROW 1 and 2, THE KILLER, BULLET IN THE HEAD, and HARD-BOILED. After HARD-BOILED, he had an intriguing but disappointing dalliance with Hollywood making a couple of okay movies, FACE-OFF and BROKEN ARROW, and some really mediocre films with occasional moments of fun, like MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 2 and PAYCHECK. He also directed a WWII epic with Nic Cage, WINDTALKERS. Windtalkers isn't a bad movie, but it is an underwhelming one. It tries to blend Woo's stylized action with a nominally realistic combat story and it's like oil and water. It does have some tremendously badass action scenes in it, so I would recommend it to hardcore fans. 

Recently, Woo went to China to make his five hour epic RED CLIFF, a film of jaw-dropping grandeur and intensity. A lot of people made a big deal out of the over-the-top mayhem of 300, but Red Cliff is the real deal: actual stunt people with a minimum of CG chicanery. When I watched Red Cliff, I was surprised at how much it was of a piece with Woo's heroic bloodshed masterpieces of the 1980s and 1990s. No guns, the characters aren't criminals, but they have the same values, the same codes of honor and loyalty. In Woo movies, sworn enemies find themselves drawn to each other, almost magnetically, and it sometimes comes across as sexual. Since this attraction is often times between male protagonists this adds a provocative twist to the usual macho heroics of action cinema. As I watched Red Cliff, I recalled reading about how Woo had made another kung fu and swordplay film that was well-regarded, and so I tracked it down. 

LAST HURRAH contains the usual elements, male bonding, honor, sacrifice, but something else I wasn't quite prepared for: insane, punishing, sometimes humorous fight choreography with exquisite timing. It was a near perfect synthesis of martial arts and musicality without quite being a musical. Woo takes the usual martial arts flick staples, vengeance, betrayal, conflict between the older and younger generations, and spins them into a complex web of schemes within schemes. Red Cliff was also an impressive fight film, but it had a different energy. Red Cliff was a war film. It emphasized the sweep and chaos and mass destruction of large-scale battles with thousands of soldiers. 

Last Hurrah is more personal, more one-on-one conflict, although there are some impressive brawls involving dozens of fighting men. At first, this might seem to be the usual case of a kung fu movie with a plot that serves the action, but I found it hypnotic and expertly woven together. In a regular drama, characters speak, and yell and cry and accuse one another with words. In this movie, the fight scenes are themselves intricately worked out dialectics between men who have given themselves over completely to the martial code: to fight to the death, to never back away from a challenge. Yes, it is insanely melodramatic, and has little to do with how violence works in real life. In real life, violence is awkward, ugly, and leaves people dead or crippled or bewildered and heartbroken. But Woo works in some rather stinging consequences for his characters in all of his movies and LAST HURRAH is no exception. 

I have said nothing specific about the plot of this film, which is a good thing. It's best to watch this with the only prior knowledge being that this is an all out action packed kung fu film. The rest you should discover for yourself.