WARNING: If you've never seen Eraserhead, go watch it. It's excellent. It's a high point in the career of David Lynch. It's best to go into it totally blind, with no pre-conceived notions. Don't read what I think about it, don't read any other reviews before you see it-do that after, if at all. Eraserhead's worth the time spent with it.
...
An evil man in the moon manipulates a set of levers setting in motion a nightmarish existence for a printer named Henry.
Henry is full of monster sperm he doesn't want.
A woman with a face full of tumors-or maybe Jo Shishido-style silicone injections gone bad-sings of heaven inside a radiator, and stomps out the unwanted sperm monsters.
Henry is so ashamed of his desires,
he literally loses his head sometimes.
When he really gets down, the grotesque head of a monster baby replaces his own.
Henry's apartment transforms into a muggy jacuzzi when he finally has sex with the woman across the hall whom he has desired for so long . . . assuming this isn't a dream.
Henry lies in bed with his fiancee (not the woman across the hall, btw), post-coitus. Suddenly, he starts trying to remove the monster sperms he has filled her with by reaching inside of her and extracting them manually which causes extreme pain to the fiancee.
And then there's the dream of becoming an eraserhead . . .
Eraserhead is full of nightmarish imagery in glorious black and white meticulously planned, lit, designed, shot, scored, sound re-recorded, edited, and mixed over five laborious years in the 1970s. I had to remind myself that this was 1970s American cinema. It has that timeless look that Citizen Kane has, where I have to remind myself of the true age of what I just watched. Eraserhead feels even more contemporary than Citizen Kane, whose snappily paced dialogue and German Expressionist style clearly dates it to the 1940s. Eraserhead is still very much of this present moment with its long stretches of ambient sound scoring, and characters who alternate between anguished silences and awkward exchanges. The characters inhabit a world of deep loneliness and isolation, and so they turn inwards to keep their own counsel, nurture bizarre fantasies, or have outright hallucinations. Or are they transcendent visions? (Maybe these people need social media. I mean, if they could just situate themselves within solipsistic always online echo chambers I'm sure their angst and alienation would be geometrically amplified to lethal proportions-oh, wait . . .)
The question of whether this movie takes place in reality or a dream is seemingly settled by its well-know tagline: "A dream of dark and troubling things." Of course, you could say that every movie is a dream of one kind or another, especially if we define a dream as a discrete set of images, sounds, and moods that constitutes a hermetically sealed experience complete in and of itself.
Gojira is a nightmare of a giant radioactive monster laying waste to Tokyo; Double Indemnity is a fever dream of forbidden desire run riot overturning the placid surface of prosperous lives; Zero Dark Thirty is a slow-burn nightmare of vengeance hollowing out an intelligence analyst's soul; La La Land is a bittersweet dream of attractive young people making it in Hollywood; Mulholland Dr. is a nightmare of attractive young people making it in Hollywood hidden inside a bittersweet dream of attractive young people making it in Hollywood.
Eraserhead is, perhaps, a nightmare of a man who fears having to take care of another living being.
Henry has a child with his fiancee which is a monstrosity seemingly created before the camera from an actual cow fetus, expertly puppeteered like something out of a Clive Barker story. The newborn is piteous, magnificent, repulsive, and irritating in equal measure. He keeps it on top of his dresser in his tiny apartment. It mewls in pain at all hours of the night, and in this world it's almost always night. Henry tries to ignore the monster freak baby, but then he tries to tend to its fragile, bandaged body and everything only gets worse. Which is exactly what drives people from trying to love one another, right? A peculiar fear not just of failure, but of rejection, that no matter what you do you'll only become more vile, more alone, more unworthy of being loved. And because Eraserhead is a discrete set of images, sounds, moods, performances that constitutes a hermetically sealed experience complete in and of itself the only possible escape or transcendence flows from the logic of a dream or a nightmare . . . you just need to see it for yourself.
I really don't want to spoil the ending on this one, but I'll say this: a number of Lynch's movies play like nightmares with a transcendent climax in which some mercy or salvation is achieved even if that transcendence can't help but also encompass a high degree of perversity, of madness, annihilation of self and others.
Eraserhead. It's some weird shit.
1/22/18: The Elephant Man (1980)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Sunday, January 14, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -5
A man sitting on the edge of a bed gets up to walk through a door
a year and a half later
the man walks through the door
well,
that was the shooting schedule,
how it worked out.
Two years into the shoot, the original cinematographer died of some unspecified illness.
Leading man Jack Nance kept his hair all crazy teased-up like that during the entire shoot.
Money ran out, no one knew if it would ever be finished,
everyone involved gave whatever they had: time, money, labor,
with no real profit motive or hope of breaking in to the Hollywood scene,
Five years of filming
Eraserhead's the result.
It's some weird shit.
...
I saw Eraserhead for the first time sometime in 2002 on VHS with a couple of friends in a dingy, collegiate apartment. We watched it in mostly rapt silence, all Lynch fans, a perfect screening.
None of us knew anything about the making of the film. I assumed it was a movie made like any other movie. Maybe I thought of it being something like Night of the Living Dead, shot on weekends by a dedicated group of people over five or six months.
After Eraserhead, I recall us watching Tetsuo the Iron Man but I'm not sure. That would've been a terrific double feature.
David Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard for the cast and crew of Eraserhead to put them in the mood of a black and white reality. I guess we should've watched Sunset Boulevard with Eraserhead back in 2002. Well, we didn't know any better at that time.
Maybe I'll watch Sunset Boulevard first before watching Eraserhead this time around.
a year and a half later
the man walks through the door
well,
that was the shooting schedule,
how it worked out.
Two years into the shoot, the original cinematographer died of some unspecified illness.
Leading man Jack Nance kept his hair all crazy teased-up like that during the entire shoot.
Money ran out, no one knew if it would ever be finished,
everyone involved gave whatever they had: time, money, labor,
with no real profit motive or hope of breaking in to the Hollywood scene,
Five years of filming
Eraserhead's the result.
It's some weird shit.
...
I saw Eraserhead for the first time sometime in 2002 on VHS with a couple of friends in a dingy, collegiate apartment. We watched it in mostly rapt silence, all Lynch fans, a perfect screening.
None of us knew anything about the making of the film. I assumed it was a movie made like any other movie. Maybe I thought of it being something like Night of the Living Dead, shot on weekends by a dedicated group of people over five or six months.
After Eraserhead, I recall us watching Tetsuo the Iron Man but I'm not sure. That would've been a terrific double feature.
David Lynch screened Sunset Boulevard for the cast and crew of Eraserhead to put them in the mood of a black and white reality. I guess we should've watched Sunset Boulevard with Eraserhead back in 2002. Well, we didn't know any better at that time.
Maybe I'll watch Sunset Boulevard first before watching Eraserhead this time around.
Saturday, January 13, 2018
COMICS REVIEW: ORBITER (2003)
Writer: Warren Ellis
Artist: Colleen Doran
Colorist: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Clem Robins
Review by William D. Tucker
In the not-too-distant-future, a NASA space shuttle disappears not long after launch. No one knows exactly what happened, but this loss deals a deathblow to the program of manned spaceflight. The government is no longer willing to invest in any mission which could get people killed, and only robotic space exploration missions are funded. This shift in policy works alongside a drift towards militarism and growing economic inequality inside the United States, and within a decade of the space shuttle's vanishing, Kennedy Space Center has become a shantytown squat for growing populations of the permanently unemployed, climate change refugees from the flooding coastal regions, and masses of sick junkies, the untreated mentally ill, and those disenfranchised by jingoistic nationalism and white supremacy.
And then one day, the vanished space shuttle returns, crashing into the shantytown, and killing scores of innocent people. The military government of the United States moves quickly to investigate the returned shuttle, and try to crack the mystery of its disappearance. The military supervised scientists discover rather quickly that the shuttle is not what it once was: it is covered in a mysterious skin. Only one member of the original crew has survived. And they may no longer be human . . .
Orbiter is a science fiction allegory about the death and rebirth of manned space exploration in the United States of America. I describe it specifically as an allegory because the emphasis here is on themes, ideas, and an overall message about the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration among the "hard" and "soft" sciences of physics, biology, psychology, and engineering in order to overcome the vast challenges of intergalactic exploration, as opposed to a focus on characters and interpersonal drama. The characters are important, and well-sketched for the most part, but like many science fiction tales, the ideas are what matter most. This results in a cast of characters who mostly exist as spokespeople for different values and philosophical points of view, with a few devolving into stock stereotypes of geekdom and hardline military authoritarianism. I was able to forgive the weaknesses of some of the characterizations because the overall thematic development was so compelling.
The art is seamless and cinematic, foregoing sound effects text and thought bubbles, and emphasizing shadows, earth tones, faces, and the magnificent returned space shuttle which has undergone a startling biomechanical transformation. Scenes of crushing poverty and cataclysmic mass death set a very dark tone early on with an abundance of detail depicting piles of corpses and heaps of trash side by side. Human life has lost much of its meaning and value. But as the human investigators probe deeper into the mystery of the returned spacecraft, the people-with their questions and memories and theories-take center stage lifting the story into a higher plane both visually and textually.
At one hundred brisk pages, Orbiter cuts all the bullshit, and gives you everything you need between two covers.
This comic was originally published as a single volume hardback "graphic novel" way back in 2003, the year the US embarked on its disastrous Iraq adventure, and it seems even more relevant now as the United States struggles to keep its shit together under the shameful administration of Fake President trump and his government of white supremacists, hyper-nationalists, and climate change denying anti-intellectuals. Orbiter, for all its gruesome dystopian world-building, actually depicts a path forward by dramatizing interdisciplinary cooperation in the face of nihilistic inertia and despair. Sometimes dystopia clarifies one's thinking, and makes you realize you need not be bound to the failed institutions and ideologies of the past. This, too, is what I see as the primary lesson of the ordeal of the Fake President trump White House as it implodes in real time: what kind of country do we want marching forward into the future? One that is inclusive of all people regardless of skin color, sexuality, and gender identity? Or a corrupt shithole of jingoism and white supremacy?
Orbiter offered transcendent hope in the dark days of the lying, warmongering Bush/Cheney regime in 2003, and it holds up in this present moment as well.
Artist: Colleen Doran
Colorist: Dave Stewart
Letterer: Clem Robins
Review by William D. Tucker
In the not-too-distant-future, a NASA space shuttle disappears not long after launch. No one knows exactly what happened, but this loss deals a deathblow to the program of manned spaceflight. The government is no longer willing to invest in any mission which could get people killed, and only robotic space exploration missions are funded. This shift in policy works alongside a drift towards militarism and growing economic inequality inside the United States, and within a decade of the space shuttle's vanishing, Kennedy Space Center has become a shantytown squat for growing populations of the permanently unemployed, climate change refugees from the flooding coastal regions, and masses of sick junkies, the untreated mentally ill, and those disenfranchised by jingoistic nationalism and white supremacy.
And then one day, the vanished space shuttle returns, crashing into the shantytown, and killing scores of innocent people. The military government of the United States moves quickly to investigate the returned shuttle, and try to crack the mystery of its disappearance. The military supervised scientists discover rather quickly that the shuttle is not what it once was: it is covered in a mysterious skin. Only one member of the original crew has survived. And they may no longer be human . . .
Orbiter is a science fiction allegory about the death and rebirth of manned space exploration in the United States of America. I describe it specifically as an allegory because the emphasis here is on themes, ideas, and an overall message about the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration among the "hard" and "soft" sciences of physics, biology, psychology, and engineering in order to overcome the vast challenges of intergalactic exploration, as opposed to a focus on characters and interpersonal drama. The characters are important, and well-sketched for the most part, but like many science fiction tales, the ideas are what matter most. This results in a cast of characters who mostly exist as spokespeople for different values and philosophical points of view, with a few devolving into stock stereotypes of geekdom and hardline military authoritarianism. I was able to forgive the weaknesses of some of the characterizations because the overall thematic development was so compelling.
The art is seamless and cinematic, foregoing sound effects text and thought bubbles, and emphasizing shadows, earth tones, faces, and the magnificent returned space shuttle which has undergone a startling biomechanical transformation. Scenes of crushing poverty and cataclysmic mass death set a very dark tone early on with an abundance of detail depicting piles of corpses and heaps of trash side by side. Human life has lost much of its meaning and value. But as the human investigators probe deeper into the mystery of the returned spacecraft, the people-with their questions and memories and theories-take center stage lifting the story into a higher plane both visually and textually.
At one hundred brisk pages, Orbiter cuts all the bullshit, and gives you everything you need between two covers.
This comic was originally published as a single volume hardback "graphic novel" way back in 2003, the year the US embarked on its disastrous Iraq adventure, and it seems even more relevant now as the United States struggles to keep its shit together under the shameful administration of Fake President trump and his government of white supremacists, hyper-nationalists, and climate change denying anti-intellectuals. Orbiter, for all its gruesome dystopian world-building, actually depicts a path forward by dramatizing interdisciplinary cooperation in the face of nihilistic inertia and despair. Sometimes dystopia clarifies one's thinking, and makes you realize you need not be bound to the failed institutions and ideologies of the past. This, too, is what I see as the primary lesson of the ordeal of the Fake President trump White House as it implodes in real time: what kind of country do we want marching forward into the future? One that is inclusive of all people regardless of skin color, sexuality, and gender identity? Or a corrupt shithole of jingoism and white supremacy?
Orbiter offered transcendent hope in the dark days of the lying, warmongering Bush/Cheney regime in 2003, and it holds up in this present moment as well.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 4: The Amputee Version One and Version Two (1974)
A woman (Catherine Coulson) writes a letter or maybe a script for a daytime soap opera as a nurse (David Lynch) tends to the stump of her freshly amputated left leg. The right leg has also been amputated. The woman jots down a series of jealous accusations and insinuations exchanged between a group of close friends as the nurse tries to staunch the bleeding stump. The blood continues to flow. The letter or soap opera script or outline of a turgid novel of love and betrayal a la Peyton Place just goes on and on and on narrated in voice over by the woman who does not even seem aware of her amputated legs, the eternally bleeding stump, or the nurse who seems to be incapable of staunching the flow of blood.
Petty soap opera conflicts obscure the larger truth, the larger wound.
This short little flick-available in a five minute and in a four minute version-seems to encapsulate in miniature all three seasons of Twin Peaks + Fire Walk With Me.
The two versions were each shot on a different kind of videotape that the American Film Institute was looking to purchase presumably to cut costs. So this is early video work from Lynch, who would shoot web videos and the labyrinthine epic INLAND EMPIRE on digital video farther on down the line.
The video is a rough looking black and white that enhances the dreamy surrealism of the scene that plays out in one continuous take in both versions.
The scene has no real ending. I was left with the feeling that it just goes on and on, cyclically, a warped soap opera playing out inside the amputee's mind,
while the nurse tends the wound he cannot close,
the wound that will never stop squirting blood.
NEXT: 1/15/18 The Lynch Meditations 5: Eraserhead (1977)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Petty soap opera conflicts obscure the larger truth, the larger wound.
This short little flick-available in a five minute and in a four minute version-seems to encapsulate in miniature all three seasons of Twin Peaks + Fire Walk With Me.
The two versions were each shot on a different kind of videotape that the American Film Institute was looking to purchase presumably to cut costs. So this is early video work from Lynch, who would shoot web videos and the labyrinthine epic INLAND EMPIRE on digital video farther on down the line.
The video is a rough looking black and white that enhances the dreamy surrealism of the scene that plays out in one continuous take in both versions.
The scene has no real ending. I was left with the feeling that it just goes on and on, cyclically, a warped soap opera playing out inside the amputee's mind,
while the nurse tends the wound he cannot close,
the wound that will never stop squirting blood.
NEXT: 1/15/18 The Lynch Meditations 5: Eraserhead (1977)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -4
The Amputee exists because the years long production of Eraserhead-David Lynch's first feature length film-ran out of money and had to shut down. The American Film Institute-which was helping to produce Eraserhead-was looking to test two kinds of film stock. David Lynch and his collaborator Catherine Coulson (known in later years for playing The Log Lady on Twin Peaks) wrote a script overnight, and had Frederick Elmes-the director of photography on Eraserhead-shoot it as one scene, all in one take for each version, shot on the two different film stocks.
So, The Amputee was created to scratch an itch: the desire to create, even in circumstances where there's no money, no real crew, and a script conjured from thin air.
What's possible?
How much something can you get from nothing?
So, The Amputee was created to scratch an itch: the desire to create, even in circumstances where there's no money, no real crew, and a script conjured from thin air.
What's possible?
How much something can you get from nothing?
Monday, January 8, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 3: The Grandmother (1970)
Mixture of live action and animation. Some live action sequences are shot as stop motion using human performers giving that weird herky-jerky effect to their motions-people become monsters out of a Ray Harryhausen fantasy sequence.
A man and a woman are secreted and processed by the earth until they reach the surface where they make animal noises, and crawl and fight upon the forest floor. The man brutalizes the woman, forces himself upon her, and a son is born, also secreted and processed upwards by the earth. The son is brutalized by the father, neglected by the mother.
Soon, the son is pissing the bed. The father punishes the son for this, rubbing his face in the bright yellow piss stains, reminiscent of how some dog owners abuse their pets.
The son goes to another bedroom-which might exist only in his imagination-where he piles dirt on the bed, adds water, and a large, spiny plant grows. The plant births an old woman, whom the son loves, and she loves the son. It is not clear if this is actually happening, or if this is a dream of the boy. The old woman-the grandmother-might also be drawn from some memory the boy has of his grandmother from earlier in life, but this is not certain. Personally, I think this grandmother springs wholly from the boy's imagination. He knows there are kindly, loving grandmothers out there in the world, even though he himself has never met one, and so he has created one in his imagination, and has brought her to life through green-thumb magick.
One thing I find interesting here is how the earth is portrayed as a crazy machine manufacturing miserable humans. Is this what human cruelty has done to the earth? Are we on another planet? My take is that this is what we have done to the earth. We humans have brutalized mother earth into a factory specializing in the manufacture of broken, abusive souls.
Animation and surrealism are used to go beyond the mundane surface of miserable lives. If this had been staged in a wholly realistic way, we would have no distance, and we would be deeply depressed. The movie's weirdness gets us into an investigative frame of mind: why are these people so fucked up? Is there a way out? Is fantasy any kind of salvation? Why must so many fathers be abusive, predatory pieces of shit?
I no longer hate The Grandmother, but I think I know why I disliked it so much when I first experienced it. This film is a harrowing portrayal of child abuse, and how a boy suffering abuse uses fantasy to imagine someone who loves him unconditionally in a world without love. The movie, interestingly, isn't trying to get you to fall in love with it-The Grandmother is meant to be difficult, bizarre, unpleasant, and nightmarish. I now have respect for it as a work of cinema, and I hope it does not reflect personal experiences on the part of David Lynch; but if it does portray personal experiences, then I hope this movie was part of some healing process. Either way, it is a challenging experience, and I'm glad I ventured into its frightful world one more time.
NEXT: 1/11/18 The Lynch Meditations 4: The Amputee Version One and Version Two (1974)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
A man and a woman are secreted and processed by the earth until they reach the surface where they make animal noises, and crawl and fight upon the forest floor. The man brutalizes the woman, forces himself upon her, and a son is born, also secreted and processed upwards by the earth. The son is brutalized by the father, neglected by the mother.
Soon, the son is pissing the bed. The father punishes the son for this, rubbing his face in the bright yellow piss stains, reminiscent of how some dog owners abuse their pets.
The son goes to another bedroom-which might exist only in his imagination-where he piles dirt on the bed, adds water, and a large, spiny plant grows. The plant births an old woman, whom the son loves, and she loves the son. It is not clear if this is actually happening, or if this is a dream of the boy. The old woman-the grandmother-might also be drawn from some memory the boy has of his grandmother from earlier in life, but this is not certain. Personally, I think this grandmother springs wholly from the boy's imagination. He knows there are kindly, loving grandmothers out there in the world, even though he himself has never met one, and so he has created one in his imagination, and has brought her to life through green-thumb magick.
One thing I find interesting here is how the earth is portrayed as a crazy machine manufacturing miserable humans. Is this what human cruelty has done to the earth? Are we on another planet? My take is that this is what we have done to the earth. We humans have brutalized mother earth into a factory specializing in the manufacture of broken, abusive souls.
Animation and surrealism are used to go beyond the mundane surface of miserable lives. If this had been staged in a wholly realistic way, we would have no distance, and we would be deeply depressed. The movie's weirdness gets us into an investigative frame of mind: why are these people so fucked up? Is there a way out? Is fantasy any kind of salvation? Why must so many fathers be abusive, predatory pieces of shit?
I no longer hate The Grandmother, but I think I know why I disliked it so much when I first experienced it. This film is a harrowing portrayal of child abuse, and how a boy suffering abuse uses fantasy to imagine someone who loves him unconditionally in a world without love. The movie, interestingly, isn't trying to get you to fall in love with it-The Grandmother is meant to be difficult, bizarre, unpleasant, and nightmarish. I now have respect for it as a work of cinema, and I hope it does not reflect personal experiences on the part of David Lynch; but if it does portray personal experiences, then I hope this movie was part of some healing process. Either way, it is a challenging experience, and I'm glad I ventured into its frightful world one more time.
NEXT: 1/11/18 The Lynch Meditations 4: The Amputee Version One and Version Two (1974)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Sunday, January 7, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -3
The Grandmother is my least favorite David Lynch film. I've watched it all the way through only once, and I clenched my teeth and wanted to get up and leave for about twenty-five of its thirty or so minutes. I found it to be incomprehensible.
Which isn't the worst thing a film can be-I mean I don't really understand Lynch's Lost Highway, but I enjoy watching it. The same goes for films like Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and Clouds of Sils Maria; or Hideaki Anno's Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo.
Why did I hate The Grandmother so much? Will I hate it as much on my next viewing?
This feels like an impending long-overdue, awkward, and painful conversation with someone I've purposefully avoided for years.
Fuck me running . . .
Which isn't the worst thing a film can be-I mean I don't really understand Lynch's Lost Highway, but I enjoy watching it. The same goes for films like Olivier Assayas's Demonlover and Clouds of Sils Maria; or Hideaki Anno's Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo.
Why did I hate The Grandmother so much? Will I hate it as much on my next viewing?
This feels like an impending long-overdue, awkward, and painful conversation with someone I've purposefully avoided for years.
Fuck me running . . .
Saturday, January 6, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 2: The Alphabet (1968)
"Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken."
-Duke Leto Atreides (played by Jurgen Prochnow) in David Lynch's film Dune (1984)
Mixture of animation and live action derived from a real life incident in which the niece of David Lynch's then wife Peggy was having a nightmare of repeating the alphabet over and over again. Lynch has stated that he was attempting to imagine what the nightmare was like for the little girl.
Much like a nightmare, The Alphabet consists of jarring juxtapositions, refined and stylized into a cohesive visual and sonic four minute 16mm film short.
Chaos is created out of animation of schematic lines, letters, basic shapes, and messy organic clouds juxtaposed with live action footage of a girl in ghostly pale makeup (played by Peggy Lynch) writhing on a bed and vomiting blood from her mouth. There is a precise order to these images, but I find that they shuffle together in my mind and seem to take place more chaotically than they actually do in the film itself. The movie is short and exact-as animation and low budget films in general need to be in order to work-and yet my memory is one of nightmarish chaos.
It's also a film that goes from sounds of children chanting ABC and an adult male voice singing a corny educational song to a bizarre insect/human moaning noise to baby mewling noises to the relative quiet of wind whistling.
As in a dream, mundane proportions of human faces and bodies are scrambled, distorted, mutated as the mind processes the day's inputs . . . or whatever the hell goes on when we dream.
A distorted human figure has their head filled with letters and knowledge 'til their head melts down into flowing blood.
A live action mouth speaks from behind bars, begging, "Please remember you are dealing with the human form."
The climax, I suppose, is the girl vomiting blood all over the bed sheets.
Language, logic, the rigorous drills of a standard education cannot contain the irrationality of existence. Language, words are a kind of prison for the essence of being, forcing the Alphabet down a girl’s throat causes her to vomit blood . . . but this agony is unavoidable. Language is a necessity, and change-transformation-is often painful.
-Duke Leto Atreides (played by Jurgen Prochnow) in David Lynch's film Dune (1984)
Mixture of animation and live action derived from a real life incident in which the niece of David Lynch's then wife Peggy was having a nightmare of repeating the alphabet over and over again. Lynch has stated that he was attempting to imagine what the nightmare was like for the little girl.
Much like a nightmare, The Alphabet consists of jarring juxtapositions, refined and stylized into a cohesive visual and sonic four minute 16mm film short.
Chaos is created out of animation of schematic lines, letters, basic shapes, and messy organic clouds juxtaposed with live action footage of a girl in ghostly pale makeup (played by Peggy Lynch) writhing on a bed and vomiting blood from her mouth. There is a precise order to these images, but I find that they shuffle together in my mind and seem to take place more chaotically than they actually do in the film itself. The movie is short and exact-as animation and low budget films in general need to be in order to work-and yet my memory is one of nightmarish chaos.
It's also a film that goes from sounds of children chanting ABC and an adult male voice singing a corny educational song to a bizarre insect/human moaning noise to baby mewling noises to the relative quiet of wind whistling.
As in a dream, mundane proportions of human faces and bodies are scrambled, distorted, mutated as the mind processes the day's inputs . . . or whatever the hell goes on when we dream.
A distorted human figure has their head filled with letters and knowledge 'til their head melts down into flowing blood.
A live action mouth speaks from behind bars, begging, "Please remember you are dealing with the human form."
The climax, I suppose, is the girl vomiting blood all over the bed sheets.
Language, logic, the rigorous drills of a standard education cannot contain the irrationality of existence. Language, words are a kind of prison for the essence of being, forcing the Alphabet down a girl’s throat causes her to vomit blood . . . but this agony is unavoidable. Language is a necessity, and change-transformation-is often painful.
“Please remember you are dealing with the human form.”
This cryptic line comes across as a warning
or maybe a plea for compassion.
“Please remember you are dealing with the human form.”
because it is delicate, irrational, and resists all forms of imposed rationality
even if that resistance goes unnoticed or even outright suppressed.
Mouth/tongue/teeth-all behind bars. Language painfully sets them free,
but language can also entrap us when we can’t get it to work how we want it to,
but we must continually drill,
'til we have fluency,
the capacity for communication, listening, and understanding,
no matter how frightful the prospect of change,
potential failure,
our desire to remain asleep, safe, divorced from reality.
but we must continually drill,
'til we have fluency,
the capacity for communication, listening, and understanding,
no matter how frightful the prospect of change,
potential failure,
our desire to remain asleep, safe, divorced from reality.
NEXT: 1/8/18: The Lynch Meditations 3: The Grandmother (1970)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle e-book here.
Friday, January 5, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -2
Abraham Lincoln speaks us into greater union, invokes the better angels, no matter the cost
Susan B. Anthony speaks us beyond white male supremacy, towards greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the cost, even to herself
Adolf Hitler speaks white supremacy, genocide, the abyss
Churchill speaks us to the defense of what's left of democracy, no matter the cost
JFK speaks us to the stars, no matter the cost
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks us into greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the long history of slavery, no matter the hardwired injustice and inequality of white supremacist America, no matter the cost, even to himself.
Post World War II, evil was supposedly vanquished
of course
this was just a story we told ourselves
the evil went invisible, parallel compartmentalized soul chamber
verily, it became entwined with our free market American soul, if there can be said to be such a thing
some words get us to a higher place
some words advocate genocide and white supremacy, cutthroat capitalism, slavery
words mislead people who might've otherwise done the right thing
words, long abused, lose all meaning,
and our faith in communication
as opposed to force
dies.
Language
spoken, written, signed, tapped, felt, touched
is a massive part of the human experience
for all the wreckage
for all the lies
of a voice yoked to this or that rubblemind
we can also speak visions of compassion, liberty, equality, justice,
speak a vision that can take us beyond the boundaries
of family, tribe, village, town, country, city, nation, planet
speak us into a union with cosmos
unless that's just another lie
or a tantalizingly compelling fantasy construction
perfectly internally consistent, logical, full of dramatic reversals and payoffs
yet wholly divorced from reality
it's just a movie.
Which reality are we speaking ourselves into, and what voices are being suppressed?
which voices have we yet to hear?
which voices are we prepared to hear?
Susan B. Anthony speaks us beyond white male supremacy, towards greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the cost, even to herself
Adolf Hitler speaks white supremacy, genocide, the abyss
Churchill speaks us to the defense of what's left of democracy, no matter the cost
JFK speaks us to the stars, no matter the cost
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks us into greater union, universal enfranchisement, no matter the long history of slavery, no matter the hardwired injustice and inequality of white supremacist America, no matter the cost, even to himself.
Post World War II, evil was supposedly vanquished
of course
this was just a story we told ourselves
the evil went invisible, parallel compartmentalized soul chamber
verily, it became entwined with our free market American soul, if there can be said to be such a thing
some words get us to a higher place
some words advocate genocide and white supremacy, cutthroat capitalism, slavery
words mislead people who might've otherwise done the right thing
words, long abused, lose all meaning,
and our faith in communication
as opposed to force
dies.
Language
spoken, written, signed, tapped, felt, touched
is a massive part of the human experience
for all the wreckage
for all the lies
of a voice yoked to this or that rubblemind
we can also speak visions of compassion, liberty, equality, justice,
speak a vision that can take us beyond the boundaries
of family, tribe, village, town, country, city, nation, planet
speak us into a union with cosmos
unless that's just another lie
or a tantalizingly compelling fantasy construction
perfectly internally consistent, logical, full of dramatic reversals and payoffs
yet wholly divorced from reality
it's just a movie.
Which reality are we speaking ourselves into, and what voices are being suppressed?
which voices have we yet to hear?
which voices are we prepared to hear?
Thursday, January 4, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)
Sequence of strangely proportioned men exposing themselves-their very guts-to the sounds of the air raid siren. All kinds of crazy color, raw emotion spews forth. Little fires, little fires-I can’t help but think this is a commentary on the Cold War. Like in that moment when you realize the bombs are going to drop you can’t hold in your nausea, your fear, your very guts anymore. Extreme fear results in an internal spiritual explosion that sends everything inside-fear, anguish, despair, intestines, bones-flying all over the place. The sequence repeats as though these men are caught in some never-ending cycle of panic, nausea, and self-disembowelment.
Or maybe these six men don't need the Cold War behemoths grappling above them and the prospect of being stamped out in the scuffle to bring up overwhelming existential terror from the depths. Maybe the sickness is purely spiritual, irrational, with no definite cause or pathogen. After all, where do capitalism, communism, nationalism, and nuclear warfare come from? Human minds, human hearts.
Another possibility is that these men, if we presume them to be American, might just be giddy at the prospect of annihilation, the sickness and vomit welling up out of them expressions of performance anxiety before the realization of a cherished dream: Better Dead than Red. The bombs are falling, later for humanity, but at least the commies get to be ashes, too.
There's no overt political messaging here, as in most of Lynch's work. If you weren't told this movie was made in 1967, you might not even peg it as a Cold War film or having anything to do with nuclear weapons . Even later Lynch works that explicitly deal with matters of war and conscience-such as Dune and The Straight Story-do not emphasize the conflict with an external enemy so much as the struggle within the hearts of the protagonists to deal with the costs of conflict, brutality, the power of life and death over another individual or the entire human population of planets like Earth or Arrakis. The "Gotta Light?" episode of Season 3 of Twin Peaks explores the sheer terror loosed by the advent of the Nuclear Age, but the sides of that metaphysical conflict are more evenly portrayed, flirting with an explicit good vs. evil duality that was only suggested in earlier Lynch films.
Six Men Getting Sick was David Lynch's first film-an animated painting, really, according to Lynch's own remarks about its origins. Watching it today, it runs about five minutes, and on first viewing it might seem impenetrable, opaque, but the more one watches it, the more one perceives its detail and nuance. It's a densely packed primer of the cinema to come from David Lynch and his future collaborators.
NEXT: 1/6/18: The Lynch Meditations 2: The Alphabet (1968)
Wednesday, January 3, 2018
The Lynch Meditations -1
Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, born October 19, 1862
Louis Jean Lumiere, born October 5, 1864
Francis Bacon, born October 28, 1909
Trinity Nuclear Test, July 16, 1945, Trinity Test Site, New Mexico
David Lynch, born January 20, 1946
Truman Doctrine of containment of communist countries, advent March 12, 1947
Louis Jean Lumiere, died June 7, 1948
Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, died April 10, 1954
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), released 1967, directed by David Lynch . . .
Staid gentlemen
flying apart
under the weight of nuclear jitters
a tarantella communicable
from the bite of fate
furiously unleashing the suppressed terrors
of a world poisoned by the dream
of total annihilation
light obliterates
but it can also capture dreams
two schools of sublime rigor:
nuclear weapons
and cinema
aborning
or metastasizing
within the tormented heart of the twentieth century
Louis Jean Lumiere, born October 5, 1864
Francis Bacon, born October 28, 1909
Trinity Nuclear Test, July 16, 1945, Trinity Test Site, New Mexico
David Lynch, born January 20, 1946
Truman Doctrine of containment of communist countries, advent March 12, 1947
Louis Jean Lumiere, died June 7, 1948
Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumiere, died April 10, 1954
Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), released 1967, directed by David Lynch . . .
Staid gentlemen
flying apart
under the weight of nuclear jitters
a tarantella communicable
from the bite of fate
furiously unleashing the suppressed terrors
of a world poisoned by the dream
of total annihilation
light obliterates
but it can also capture dreams
two schools of sublime rigor:
nuclear weapons
and cinema
aborning
or metastasizing
within the tormented heart of the twentieth century
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
The Lynch Meditations 0
by William D. Tucker
Filmmaker David Lynch-director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Dune, Lost Highway-refuses to discuss what his films mean. He'll talk about how they're made. He might speak about the roots, the inspirations of a given work, but he doesn't want to tell critics or interviewers or audience members what deeper significance-if any-his work contains, suggests, or embodies. Lynch prefers not to state the theme of a given work directly. This may be because he doesn't consciously construct his films to deliver a singular meaning. It might be that his films are meant to be engaged with in a state of uncertainty, with no definite answers within reach. Lynch has a background as a visual artist, so maybe he approaches his films as visual works first and foremost, and everything else is meant to support the visuals.
Lynch is also a proponent of Transcendental Meditation. He has a foundation-the David Lynch Foundation-which promotes TM as a discipline for achieving personal happiness and world peace. TM involves-as do many meditative techniques-sitting quietly, eyes closed, staying in the moment, taking note of your thoughts and feelings as they occur, all while trying to exist in a wholly non-judgmental moment . . . something like that?
To be perfectly honest, I've never seriously practiced meditation. Maybe I tried to meditate once. I fell asleep. I think that's what happened. I don't claim to understand TM or any other mindfulness discipline. What puts me in a thoughtful, focused state of mind is cinema. Sitting, staring into a screen, ideally in the dark, but sometimes with the lights on, and giving myself over to a fantasy, a gritty neo-realist drama, a progressive documentary trying to throw a wrench into the works of the war machine, a hallucinogenic anime dystopia, a Hong Kong heroic bloodshed shoot-em-up-whatever kind of movie, cinema puts me in an altered state of mind. Maybe I'm just a compulsive fantasist, but cinema is my drug, my therapy, my meditation. It's to the point where I find it hard to articulate, to even want to put it down in words, yet I have this nagging feeling that I should. I don't know why. There's absolutely nothing special about me. I don't see more films per year than other people. I don't have any special expertise or metaphysical insight. But that's what I feel compelled to do every now and again when I have the time and the willpower to put down my thoughts about movies I find interesting.
Although I do not practice any form of mindfulness or meditation, I wanted to try to approach the cinema of David Lynch in a more personal, philosophical fashion, integrating my own feelings, thoughts, and musings from my own experience into the viewing experience. In a way, that's what every film reviewer or critic does, but I wanted to go a bit more loopy with this one.
I've come to view cinema as a kind of secular church, as a spiritual experience that affects me internally in important ways. I don't know who first came up with the term 'The Church of Cinema,'( I think I first came across it reading an interview with Quentin Tarantino who referred to him and fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese as worshiping at different churches as a metaphor for their different styles of filmmaking) but I like it. So these reviews of Lynch's films aren't exactly meant to be sermons-I have no desire to preach definitive visions-but meditations on possibility, interpretation, and feelings. Lynch's films strike me as unusually inviting of interpretation, rumination, and meditation because they can be very weird, abstract, surreal, and grotesque. Lynch's cinema can also be shocking in moments of violence and transformation; and disorienting in their transitions into different realms of existence, perception, and consciousness. Lynch's movies can also be frustratingly obscure, opaque even, and this by design, thus demanding multiple viewings to figure out what, precisely, the hell is going on in a given film. Or maybe this opacity is meant to short circuit rational thought and encourage a shift into more intuitive forms of feeling and knowing, as opposed to rationally dissecting a work into its various parts, and assigning meaning, form, and function to all those parts.
I don't know. But I'm going to take a close look at the cinema of David Lynch, and see what I find.
NEXT: 1/4/18:The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle E-book here.
Filmmaker David Lynch-director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive, Dune, Lost Highway-refuses to discuss what his films mean. He'll talk about how they're made. He might speak about the roots, the inspirations of a given work, but he doesn't want to tell critics or interviewers or audience members what deeper significance-if any-his work contains, suggests, or embodies. Lynch prefers not to state the theme of a given work directly. This may be because he doesn't consciously construct his films to deliver a singular meaning. It might be that his films are meant to be engaged with in a state of uncertainty, with no definite answers within reach. Lynch has a background as a visual artist, so maybe he approaches his films as visual works first and foremost, and everything else is meant to support the visuals.
Lynch is also a proponent of Transcendental Meditation. He has a foundation-the David Lynch Foundation-which promotes TM as a discipline for achieving personal happiness and world peace. TM involves-as do many meditative techniques-sitting quietly, eyes closed, staying in the moment, taking note of your thoughts and feelings as they occur, all while trying to exist in a wholly non-judgmental moment . . . something like that?
To be perfectly honest, I've never seriously practiced meditation. Maybe I tried to meditate once. I fell asleep. I think that's what happened. I don't claim to understand TM or any other mindfulness discipline. What puts me in a thoughtful, focused state of mind is cinema. Sitting, staring into a screen, ideally in the dark, but sometimes with the lights on, and giving myself over to a fantasy, a gritty neo-realist drama, a progressive documentary trying to throw a wrench into the works of the war machine, a hallucinogenic anime dystopia, a Hong Kong heroic bloodshed shoot-em-up-whatever kind of movie, cinema puts me in an altered state of mind. Maybe I'm just a compulsive fantasist, but cinema is my drug, my therapy, my meditation. It's to the point where I find it hard to articulate, to even want to put it down in words, yet I have this nagging feeling that I should. I don't know why. There's absolutely nothing special about me. I don't see more films per year than other people. I don't have any special expertise or metaphysical insight. But that's what I feel compelled to do every now and again when I have the time and the willpower to put down my thoughts about movies I find interesting.
Although I do not practice any form of mindfulness or meditation, I wanted to try to approach the cinema of David Lynch in a more personal, philosophical fashion, integrating my own feelings, thoughts, and musings from my own experience into the viewing experience. In a way, that's what every film reviewer or critic does, but I wanted to go a bit more loopy with this one.
I've come to view cinema as a kind of secular church, as a spiritual experience that affects me internally in important ways. I don't know who first came up with the term 'The Church of Cinema,'( I think I first came across it reading an interview with Quentin Tarantino who referred to him and fellow filmmaker Martin Scorsese as worshiping at different churches as a metaphor for their different styles of filmmaking) but I like it. So these reviews of Lynch's films aren't exactly meant to be sermons-I have no desire to preach definitive visions-but meditations on possibility, interpretation, and feelings. Lynch's films strike me as unusually inviting of interpretation, rumination, and meditation because they can be very weird, abstract, surreal, and grotesque. Lynch's cinema can also be shocking in moments of violence and transformation; and disorienting in their transitions into different realms of existence, perception, and consciousness. Lynch's movies can also be frustratingly obscure, opaque even, and this by design, thus demanding multiple viewings to figure out what, precisely, the hell is going on in a given film. Or maybe this opacity is meant to short circuit rational thought and encourage a shift into more intuitive forms of feeling and knowing, as opposed to rationally dissecting a work into its various parts, and assigning meaning, form, and function to all those parts.
I don't know. But I'm going to take a close look at the cinema of David Lynch, and see what I find.
NEXT: 1/4/18:The Lynch Meditations 1: Six Men Getting Sick (1967)
My Patreon's here.
SUITMATION FAMILY PACK can be purchased as an Amazon Kindle E-book here.
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Fragment of a 2017 Dream
I actually have-
-this is a valuable collector’s item-
I own
In a climate controlled vault
The very first edition
Of the issue of Nintendo Power where they had the Communist Manifesto as a pull-out special strategy guide-you know where you have to pry open the staples in the center of the page to get the booklet out of the center of the magazine?
Yeah.
Low print run on that one.
I was told Martin Shkreli bought up all the other original copies, presumably to destroy them,
but then I heard
that he saw himself in the Marxian writings
saw himself as a harbinger of capitalism's implosion,
something like that?
I mean
like
who the fuck knew anyone took Marx seriously anymore?
-October 2017
Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission
Friday, December 29, 2017
MOVIE REVIEW: THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Written by Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor
Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and J. Miles Dale
Cinematography by Dan Laustsen
Edited by Sidney Wolinsky
Music by Alexandre Desplat
Starring
Sally Hawkins
Octavia Spencer
Richard Jenkins
Doug Jones
Michael Shannon
Michael Stuhlbarg
Review by William D. Tucker
The Shape of Water is a Cold War era science-fiction fairy tale about monstrosity, romance, interior states of fantasy, and the break down of perfect systems of control whether they be American capitalistic militarism or Soviet totalitarian communism as agents or assets within those systems break under pressure, find love, decay in their given jobs, or some combination of these factors. The movie bounces back and forth between different levels of harsh external reality and interior fantasy.
We begin in the depths of some lagoon, and zoom into the submerged hallway of an apartment building. The water drains away, and we realize we are in a kind of dream, or some more elastic than normal reality all in tones of green. When the narrative voice over comes across the speakers, and the opening credits of actors, producers, and craftspeople appear on-screen it actually kind of brings us back down to reality because we get our bearings: we're watching a narrative movie with actors playing characters conceived in a screenplay written by humans, produced by humans, directed by a human. We, the audience, exit the zone of uncertain surrealism, and begin to navigate the Cold War, pre-Kennedy assassination world of The Shape of Water.
Our protagonist is a mute-but not deaf-woman named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), who works nights as a janitor inside a top secret government facility in Baltimore rather cleverly called Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa was abandoned as an infant, seemingly bearing the scars on her neck of some horrible mutilation which has left her mute. Elisa's partner on the night shift is fellow janitor Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who confides every last detail of her mundane marriage to Elisa, who is happy to listen since she lives alone and seems to live vicariously through Zelda, and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a middle-aged commercial artist who also lives alone. Giles and Elisa both live in neighboring apartments, and they constitute each other's primary form of social life. If Giles were heterosexual and thirty years younger, he would've proposed to Elisa by now, and maybe Eliza would've accepted-but this reality isn't so simple for these good-hearted, struggling people.
One night, Elisa and Zelda are cleaning a chamber of the gothic research center containing an open pool when a high tech cylinder is wheeled in containing a humanoid fish man creature (Doug Jones, who played the similar Abe Sapien in the two Del Toro directed Hellboy movies) overseen by Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) a super creep in a suit who's in charge of the fish-man at the research center. Elisa sees the creature through the plate glass of the cylinder and there's an immediate connection between the human and the seemingly non-human. Or less-than-human? Or more-than-human? Later, we find out that the the fish-man-referred to as "the asset'"-was kidnapped from his home in a river in South America, and that this creature is believed to offer new modes of existence to the human race which could make them more durable in outer space . . . but the only way to know is to dissect "the asset."
Complications arise. Colonel Strickland reveals himself to be a white supremacist and a sexual predator. Elisa establishes an unexpected rapport with the fish-man. Not to mention there's a Soviet agent in the house. The Soviets may try to steal the fish-man, or destroy him to prevent him from giving up cosmic secrets to the Americans. Everyone sees some precious dream within "the asset," who is characterized as having been once worshiped as a god in his native land, and may possess paranormal power.
Along the way, conflicts involving sexuality, class, race, white supremacy, and the oppression of women during 1960s America boil forth from the soul of this intricate dream of a film.
I don't want to give away too much, here, you really should just see how it plays out for yourself.
The Shape of Water is my personal favorite film I've seen in an actual movie theatre this past year. Only Get Out, Logan, Blade Runner 2049, and Detroit came anywhere near moving me the way this movie did. It's also a strong return to form for Guillermo Del Toro, who's previous films-Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim-were gorgeous visual spectacles, but came up short in the script department, falling back on the tropes of gothic romance novels and mecha anime. Entertaining, sure, but somewhat insubstantial for me. This is easily his best movie since Pan's Labyrinth. Nothing comes easy for any of the characters-good, evil, in-between-in this story. Even the repulsive Colonel Strickland is shown in context as an effect of a system of brutality more than a cause, though Strickland himself is absolutely complicit.
The Shape of Water even has my single favorite line of dialogue of this past year's cinema . . . which I wouldn't dream of spoiling!
Be good to yourself. Go see it.
Written by Guillermo Del Toro and Vanessa Taylor
Produced by Guillermo Del Toro and J. Miles Dale
Cinematography by Dan Laustsen
Edited by Sidney Wolinsky
Music by Alexandre Desplat
Starring
Sally Hawkins
Octavia Spencer
Richard Jenkins
Doug Jones
Michael Shannon
Michael Stuhlbarg
Review by William D. Tucker
The Shape of Water is a Cold War era science-fiction fairy tale about monstrosity, romance, interior states of fantasy, and the break down of perfect systems of control whether they be American capitalistic militarism or Soviet totalitarian communism as agents or assets within those systems break under pressure, find love, decay in their given jobs, or some combination of these factors. The movie bounces back and forth between different levels of harsh external reality and interior fantasy.
We begin in the depths of some lagoon, and zoom into the submerged hallway of an apartment building. The water drains away, and we realize we are in a kind of dream, or some more elastic than normal reality all in tones of green. When the narrative voice over comes across the speakers, and the opening credits of actors, producers, and craftspeople appear on-screen it actually kind of brings us back down to reality because we get our bearings: we're watching a narrative movie with actors playing characters conceived in a screenplay written by humans, produced by humans, directed by a human. We, the audience, exit the zone of uncertain surrealism, and begin to navigate the Cold War, pre-Kennedy assassination world of The Shape of Water.
Our protagonist is a mute-but not deaf-woman named Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), who works nights as a janitor inside a top secret government facility in Baltimore rather cleverly called Occam Aerospace Research Center. Elisa was abandoned as an infant, seemingly bearing the scars on her neck of some horrible mutilation which has left her mute. Elisa's partner on the night shift is fellow janitor Zelda Fuller (Octavia Spencer), who confides every last detail of her mundane marriage to Elisa, who is happy to listen since she lives alone and seems to live vicariously through Zelda, and her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a middle-aged commercial artist who also lives alone. Giles and Elisa both live in neighboring apartments, and they constitute each other's primary form of social life. If Giles were heterosexual and thirty years younger, he would've proposed to Elisa by now, and maybe Eliza would've accepted-but this reality isn't so simple for these good-hearted, struggling people.
One night, Elisa and Zelda are cleaning a chamber of the gothic research center containing an open pool when a high tech cylinder is wheeled in containing a humanoid fish man creature (Doug Jones, who played the similar Abe Sapien in the two Del Toro directed Hellboy movies) overseen by Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) a super creep in a suit who's in charge of the fish-man at the research center. Elisa sees the creature through the plate glass of the cylinder and there's an immediate connection between the human and the seemingly non-human. Or less-than-human? Or more-than-human? Later, we find out that the the fish-man-referred to as "the asset'"-was kidnapped from his home in a river in South America, and that this creature is believed to offer new modes of existence to the human race which could make them more durable in outer space . . . but the only way to know is to dissect "the asset."
Complications arise. Colonel Strickland reveals himself to be a white supremacist and a sexual predator. Elisa establishes an unexpected rapport with the fish-man. Not to mention there's a Soviet agent in the house. The Soviets may try to steal the fish-man, or destroy him to prevent him from giving up cosmic secrets to the Americans. Everyone sees some precious dream within "the asset," who is characterized as having been once worshiped as a god in his native land, and may possess paranormal power.
Along the way, conflicts involving sexuality, class, race, white supremacy, and the oppression of women during 1960s America boil forth from the soul of this intricate dream of a film.
I don't want to give away too much, here, you really should just see how it plays out for yourself.
The Shape of Water is my personal favorite film I've seen in an actual movie theatre this past year. Only Get Out, Logan, Blade Runner 2049, and Detroit came anywhere near moving me the way this movie did. It's also a strong return to form for Guillermo Del Toro, who's previous films-Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim-were gorgeous visual spectacles, but came up short in the script department, falling back on the tropes of gothic romance novels and mecha anime. Entertaining, sure, but somewhat insubstantial for me. This is easily his best movie since Pan's Labyrinth. Nothing comes easy for any of the characters-good, evil, in-between-in this story. Even the repulsive Colonel Strickland is shown in context as an effect of a system of brutality more than a cause, though Strickland himself is absolutely complicit.
The Shape of Water even has my single favorite line of dialogue of this past year's cinema . . . which I wouldn't dream of spoiling!
Be good to yourself. Go see it.
Monday, December 25, 2017
Every Day Is Halloween 5: Shadowing Up
Every Day Is Halloween 5: Shadowing Up
by William D. Tucker
Santa pulls the chains
attached to the steel arrows
buried deep in the heaving flanks
of His twelve cloud-tripping reindeer.
Claus reaches into His bottomless sack
(all done up with runes that keep twisting themselves up into ruins evocative of bygone empires, makes your brain hurt to stare at it too long, makes you want to go build an empire, just so it can eventually be all bygone and shit)
grasps the blazing industrial complex of intertwined mandalas of intertwined industrial complexes within
transmits dreams of world-girdling conspiracies through all the face-splitting hairs of all his beards
(which are, of course, mystically empowered antennae, learn something new every-)
to all the faithful of all ages
gives them ENEMY
gives them the Rubblemind to go deal with ENEMY
broadcasts to all the boys and girls
on both lists, actually,
who have all mostly organized themselves into competing militarized secret police agencies,
the militarized secret police model having displaced all the others-nuclear family, tribe, organized crime, cult/organized religion, legacy political party, terrorist cell, tabletop role-playing gathering, online gaming network-to become the primary mode of human professional and/or social activity.
Santa makes sure to shadow up
before appearing on radar as a paid propaganda asset of various military-industrial-infotainment complexes around the world
or for His select on-camera major media market appearances
wouldn't do to let the kids-of-all-ages behold the pierced reindeer
(reindoors, actually, that let Claus clip in and out of vanilla space-time, make the goddamn schedule)
definitely would not do
to let anyone
of any age
behold His true face
or any part of His true body
which is mostly a lot of teeth, claws, and agonized vestigial faces
glitching in and out of mundane reality
too many leftover, conflicting design assets,
too much malevolent design creep going in all directions,
over too many iterations
across too many corrupted, partial-build realities
trying to be too damn many places at once'll do that
gotta provide all the boys and girls
of all ages
on both lists, mind you
with ENEMY
on schedule
in all the asshole realities.
Which doesn't leave much He can reveal without properly shadowing up first.
Ho-ho-ho, motherfuckers.
-December 2017
Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
by William D. Tucker
Santa pulls the chains
attached to the steel arrows
buried deep in the heaving flanks
of His twelve cloud-tripping reindeer.
Claus reaches into His bottomless sack
(all done up with runes that keep twisting themselves up into ruins evocative of bygone empires, makes your brain hurt to stare at it too long, makes you want to go build an empire, just so it can eventually be all bygone and shit)
grasps the blazing industrial complex of intertwined mandalas of intertwined industrial complexes within
transmits dreams of world-girdling conspiracies through all the face-splitting hairs of all his beards
(which are, of course, mystically empowered antennae, learn something new every-)
to all the faithful of all ages
gives them ENEMY
gives them the Rubblemind to go deal with ENEMY
broadcasts to all the boys and girls
on both lists, actually,
who have all mostly organized themselves into competing militarized secret police agencies,
the militarized secret police model having displaced all the others-nuclear family, tribe, organized crime, cult/organized religion, legacy political party, terrorist cell, tabletop role-playing gathering, online gaming network-to become the primary mode of human professional and/or social activity.
Santa makes sure to shadow up
before appearing on radar as a paid propaganda asset of various military-industrial-infotainment complexes around the world
or for His select on-camera major media market appearances
wouldn't do to let the kids-of-all-ages behold the pierced reindeer
(reindoors, actually, that let Claus clip in and out of vanilla space-time, make the goddamn schedule)
definitely would not do
to let anyone
of any age
behold His true face
or any part of His true body
which is mostly a lot of teeth, claws, and agonized vestigial faces
glitching in and out of mundane reality
too many leftover, conflicting design assets,
too much malevolent design creep going in all directions,
over too many iterations
across too many corrupted, partial-build realities
trying to be too damn many places at once'll do that
gotta provide all the boys and girls
of all ages
on both lists, mind you
with ENEMY
on schedule
in all the asshole realities.
Which doesn't leave much He can reveal without properly shadowing up first.
Ho-ho-ho, motherfuckers.
-December 2017
Copyright 2017 by William D. Tucker. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)