The House Next Door

By Dennis Cozzalio

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 03/21/2005, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

I was first introduced to the concept of “guilty pleasure” (one not related to the tribulations of adolescence or ruler-happy nuns thwacking out at the slightest transgression, at least) through the auspices of Film Comment magazine back in the late ‘70s. At that time the magazine ran, as a recurring feature, articles written by various luminaries of film—directors and actors, usually, with the occasional high-profile writer or cinematographer thrown in for good measure—who would recount the sodden treasures of their film-going pasts, ones that helped make them the artists they were or in some way retained particular personal meaning for them. Of course the whole point of the series was the revealing of their dirty little secrets, their love for films disregarded, ill-regarded, derided or otherwise forgotten by critics, audiences and film historians.

It was here that faithful readers first learned of director John Carpenter’s illicit appreciation not of the Howard Hawks of Rio Bravo (keen-eyed viewers of his Assault on Precinct 13 would have already connected those dots), but also the Howard Hawks responsible for films deemed too silly even for all but the most rabid auteurists, films like Land of the Pharaohs and Red Line 7000.

Paul Schrader elaborated on his guilty pleasures—the films of Bresson, Ozu and Ford. Certainly not the typical Hollywood B-movie or grind house fare usually cited, but instead films that spurred his loosening of the theological constraints of Calvinism and caused him to plumb the depths of guilt and despair left over from his religious upbringing and rechannel those impulses into a highly personal and controversial career as a screenwriter and director.

But in perhaps the single most well-known “Guilty Pleasures” article Film Comment would ever publish, notorious Baltimore resident John Waters, himself responsible for more intermingling of the concepts of “pleasure” and “guilt” than any other director up to that time (August 1983), would throw into stark relief the whole idea of what exactly might constitute the “guilt” in a guilty pleasure. Imagine, if you can, the filmmaker who unleashed Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble feeling guilty about anything. You can’t? Okay, for the sake of argument, say that you could. What would you imagine inspiring an old-fashioned bout of metaphysical hand-wringing within the not-so-tortured soul of the man who could gleefully stage a mind-twisting rape scene in which the victim (female) and the perpetrator (male) were played by the same actor (Divine)?

Certainly not the odd horror film or neglected film noir that might routinely pop up on most anyone else’s list. No, Waters shocked cinephiles worldwide with his admission that he was secretly a fan of, as he put it, “what is unfortunately known as the ‘art film.’ ” Waters summed up his career as making low-brow films for high-brow theaters but admitted that until then he had only acknowledged the influence of the trashiest of films on his oeuvre. By the end of the article (subsequently reprinted in his book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters), the director had braved the ire of those who might accuse his selections of being “purposely perverse” and revealed himself to be an art snob in love with Woody Allen’s Interiors, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema and Salo: The 120 Days of Sodom, Ingmar Bergman’s Brink of Life, and anything by either Marguerite Duras or Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

But the shock waves of Waters’ celluloid confessional would not stop within the pages of Film Comment. A scant four years later would see the release of a PG-rated film by the director, itself recently transformed into an equally family-friendly (not to mention Tony Award-winning) Broadway smash. Perhaps Waters’ “guiltiest” admission might have been the desire to, if not become a “mainstream” filmmaker (on his own terms, of course), then at least have access to more of a mainstream audience than would have even glanced at an ad for Desperate Measures, much less paid money to see it.

The 1980s welcomed John Waters’ Hairspray, but by the time of that film’s unleashing upon an appreciative public, forces like Saturday Night Live and, more importantly, David Letterman had already helped pave the way for a world in which the most shocking act a provocateur like Waters might perpetrate would be sneaking in the back door on something like a PG rating and subverting audience assumptions from within. The idiom of irony as epitomized by Letterman had become, for better or worse, even more pervasive and predominant in American pop culture as the 1990s dawned, and it was beginning to become difficult to find any rogue element of the cinema that hadn’t been embraced, accepted or written about in some current of the mainstream. (Even the dabbling by mainstream audiences in ‘70s porn like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, certainly a genuine, if momentary phenomenon, pales in comparison to the generally widespread acceptance of porn star celebrity and sensibility found today on sports talk radio, The Howard Stern Show, Maxim magazine and its multitude of imitators, the E! channel, and just about anywhere else except the Pax Network.)

Now when you see an actor like Jeff Bridges write about his guilty pleasures (as he did in an issue of Film Comment published last year), the very title of the series seems a misnomer. Bridges starts off his brief article promisingly with a terrific story related to his inability to shake certain images from John Boorman’s notoriously incoherent sci-fi epic Zardoz. But unfortunately the rest of the list ends up being not so much a tool to illuminate a particular sensibility as an opportunity to rattle off anecdotes about movies made by friends (director Matthew Bright’s Freeway) or featuring father Lloyd (Rocket Ship X-M), brother Beau (Village of the Giants), or himself (The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go, American Heart).

So what now, now that almost every new season sees the unveiling of a $100 million comic book adaptation and horror films that were once perceived as among the cinema’s most vile transgressions (Tobe Hooper’s 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are remade by A-list Hollywood hotshots and gross ten times the original film’s budget in the first weekend? What now, when box-office grosses and Ashton Kutcher’s love life get more press ink than the movies themselves (unless, of course, that coverage consists mainly of sound bite-riddled junket sessions conducted by star-struck “entertainment reporters")? Are there any films left to feel guilty about?

Well, certainly the answer has to be “yes.” But if the denizens of pop culture have become excessively forgiving when it comes to what can be embraced, then it’s time to shed the self-aggrandizing aspects of putting together such a list and get back to exposing the hard-scrabble nuggets at the bottom of the cereal box. Any attempt to justify one’s personal junkyard dogs of cinema can be agonizing and embarrassing, particularly if you’re keen on cultivating some measure of intellectual respectability or credibility among those involved in the conversation. So just forget the attempts to impress your film savvy friends, because they’re not likely to be impressed by much at this point anyway.

At this point on the chronometer of pop culture, better to just come clean. Regardless of genre, style or subject matter, the films that make up my “guilty pleasures” list are those that, like Waters’, might cause some genuine embarrassment on my part at their revelation during casual conversation; films that would expose me as an irredeemably pretentious fake if I tried to justify them on any level other than their basest appeal (no deconstructionist arguments in defense of The Love Bug, please); films that I like or enjoy despite the fact that they are, on one level or another, indefensible and/or plainly bad when held to any rational standard of taste or judgment.

Compiling my list, then, signifies a threefold purpose: 1) To identify those films that insist on a certain degree of genuine shame folded in with their appreciation, not just movies of ill repute that are actually wonderful but that everyone else is just too “stupid” to value; 2) To once again examine the guilt in the guilty pleasure; 3) To engage in a simple act of soul-cleansing admission. But let’s not get too heady here. The bottom line is, like most list-making processes, the very act of attempting to justify personal, irrational responses to largely impersonal cinematic artifacts tends to rather easily devolve into a somewhat indulgent and onanistic enterprise. So what better exercise, then, than harvesting (and perhaps exorcising) reel after reel of movie guilt?

Abyss-diving with Altman

Robert Altman is a director, I would say, with scant familiarity with guilt. He would score points for flying in the face of logic, demographic evidence and studio interference at just about any point in his long career. But when he cashed in the critical cachet he’d earned with 1990’s The Player and Short Cuts, he earned a place on the list of the most purposely perverse directors of all time. While not exactly replicating the artistically dubious incoherence of Quintet, a film which finds little favor even with the most ardent Altman cultist, the director returned to the large scale free-form canvas of Nashville, Brewster McCloud and O.C. & Stiggs and used it to create what plays like the most slapdash seat-of-the-pants train wreck of his career—the fashionista wet-dream comedy Prêt-a-Porter (Ready to Wear) (1994).

Filmgoers who seemed ready to participate in another big Altman party laced with the same kind of acid insider bite that suffused The Player seemed confused and put off, that is if they decided to attend a screening during the film’s short theatrical run at all (few did). As a card-carrying member of the Altman cult myself, I found myself enchanted by what most found undisciplined and unfocused in Altman’s approach, that is, his enjoyment of the people he shovels in and out of the frame and his tendency to let them play out their improvisatory strings until they teeter just on the brink of making fools of themselves (some, like Danny Aiello in an agonizing and apparently heavily truncated plot line that finds him in drag for no discernible reason, topple right off that brink while the director looks the other way).

To some this streak of indulgence comes off as a sly form of misanthropy. But Altman loves his actors and showcasing the unpredictable impulses of their behavior. And the misanthropy charge is too familiar and flimsy. At this point it registers simply as a convenient albatross hung around the director’s neck by lazy entertainment reporters who like to parrot familiar refrains rather than observe what’s right in front of them. And what’s in front of them in Prêt-a-Porter is without doubt a claustrophobic Parisian pile-up, a “satire” of the colossal vanity and gossamer relevance of the fashion world that at times barely seems to have a point of view itself. It’s easily the messiest film of Altman’s shaggy career, dogged perhaps by its director’s indifference to the shadow of folly and the whims of expectations.

But, like Brewster McCloud with its occasional visitations of raven doo-doo upon unsuspecting heads, Prêt-a-Porter is carefree enough to risk self-satire (not to mention a giggle over the sanitary standards of the City of Lights) by introducing the motif of its sophisticated actors continually trotting through dog shit. It’s also a lot more fun than its reputation suggests, although I’ll be damned if I’ve ever been able to convince anyone of it. The bottom line is, any film that finds an opportunity for Sophia Loren to recreate (with a twist) her lingerie-clad seduction of hammy-to-the-end Marcello Mastroianni from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow could otherwise have completely collapsed on itself and would still get a round of applause for me.

Steiger, Peck and the other white meat

On the subject of cured flesh, the history of theatrical ham has many legendary performances that live on in the memories of those lucky enough to have actually seen them—Zero Mostel’s Tevye, Ron Leibman’s Roy Cohn, Quentin Tarantino’s Harry Roat—but largely their grandeur is preserved through first-and-second-and-third-hand accounts by writers striving mightily to perpetuate even a degree of the actor’s over-scaled achievements. Ham on film, however, comes packed with preservatives, and for every actor who has appeared on film, there is an actor who has, at one time or another, scaled that Olympian pork roast and lived to regret the non-disintegrating properties of digital film preservation and, of course, the DVD.

I first saw Rod Steiger in No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) on the ABC Sunday Night Movie when I was perhaps only 10 or 11 years old, and I thought it could possibly have been one of the most terrifying movies ever made or that could possibly ever be made. Just the idea of a serial strangler who uses his craft as a stage actor to worm his way into the good graces of his potential victims was enough to stoke my movie-fed nightmares, and I was in awe of Steiger’s ability to warp his image into so many different configurations—a kindly neighborhood priest, a jolly German electrician, a dowdy transvestite barfly—all of which go from relatively benign to insinuatingly evil in a corrupt twinkle of the actor’s eye. Then, some 20 years later, I saw the movie again and was somewhat disturbed to find out it was, in fact, a slightly creaky, more-than-slightly black Oedipal comedy, and while Steiger was obviously in on the joke it clearly never occurred to him that modulation in the pursuit of actorly effects was any kind of virtue at all. For this is the Oscar-winning actor, never known for his subtle approach, pounding the pipe organ of his craft with all stops pulled and rattling the rafters at top volume. It wouldn’t be until his cameo role in The January Man, some 21 years later, that he would again come as close to blasting a capillary on-screen as he does in his wild death scene in this picture. Credit director Jack Smight for turning Rod loose on the scenery and letting him graze like the Tasmanian Devil, and credit Rod for gulping down as much at one time as he does, for his thespian gluttony here is truly remarkable to behold.

But what about a movie so populated with memorably bad acting that, no matter how hard I try, whenever it shows up on cable I simply have to stop what I’m doing and see it through to the besotted, bloody end? And given my inability to resist the rancid pull of The Boys from Brazil (1978), what am I to do now that I own a copy on DVD? Am I cursed to watch this bloated Sir Lew Grade international prestige production again and again until the very indestructible nature of the DVD begins making mockery of my increasingly enfeebled body and mind? And what responsibility should Sir Laurence Olivier, Gregory Peck, James Mason, or director Franklin Schaffner shoulder in furthering that enfeeblement? (Actually, this is probably not a question that would have bothered them much even when they were all alive…)

Mason provides the most grounded of the thrills here, mincing about the Amazonian hideaway of Dr. Josef Mengele (Peck!) in a very large scarf and fedora, insinuating many potentially negative things about the doctor’s prospects for continuing his loopy attempts to clone Adolf Hitler. “Your operation has been cancelleddddddd…” he hisses to Mengele at one point. “No!” comes the rather emphatic, curiously stilted reply. “Your…operation… has… been… cancelled!” Peck’s decision to have Mengele sound as if he’s speaking phonetic English instead of simply German-accented English, or of course just plain old German (this is, after all, a Sir Lew Grade international prestige production, where all English seems phonetic and overdubbed) lends a stodginess to his entire presence, a sense of his being uncomfortable in his own skin that adds layer upon layer of weirdness to the performance, but precious little credibility (I blame his shellacked hair and makeup too).

Peck was never what I’d call an actor of tremendous spontaneity, but the way he barks at an old biddy who screams for a doctor after he hurls her apparently traitorous husband to the floor during a ballroom celebration (“I… am… a doctor… you… idiot!”), or the way he woodenly attempts to cajole one of the little Hitler boys of the title into accepting his true ancestry, all while an angry Doberman waits impatiently poised to clamp down on his crotch, makes him seem the most ossified representation of Third Reich evil ever presented on screen.

As for Sir Laurence Olivier, suffice it to say that this is the pinnacle of his many late-career paycheck performances in which he basically let loose his inner imp and let it run wild with an accent (this time, a slightly sibilant Austrian one). His Nazi-hunting Ezra Lieberman will live in glorious testimony to a great actor’s desire to push the inherent silliness of his calling right up to the edge of the abyss and blow raspberries to those already plummeting into the void who had not the discipline to know how far to go or even how to get there (paging Danny Aiello!).

And while I’m at it, one final shout-out to Jeremy Black, the neophyte actor given the task of embodying at least four of the boys from Brazil, the little Hitler clones who would, if Mengele’s darkest machinations were to see light, each repeat the circumstances of the dictator’s youth and similarly flower into the charismatic power of his tyrannical adulthood. The Internet Movie Database assures me that this is the only time young master Black’s talents were ever put to use on film, and connoisseurs of Wretched Performances, Youth Division ought to mourn this particularly cruel turn of cinematic fate and regularly revisit his one lasting piece of acting fury. His may be the most astonishingly witless and thoughtlessly unshepherded performance by a child actor before or since, although Spencer Breslin (of Disney’s The Kid and Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat) seems to be gearing up for a career-long challenge to Black’s status as king of the heap. His nasally congested rejoinder to Mengele’s climactic delineation of the nefarious genetic goings-on into which he is inexorably entwined—“Oh, man you’re weird”—is a hallmark of the involuntarily deadpan, and the only sane response to someone who loves this movie as much as I do.

Friendly per-Swayz-ion

There are pleasures worthy of guilt in just about any genre you can name, and some, like The Boys from Brazil, are prime examples of strange genre subsets all their own—what other movie so clumsily and without conscience warps historical and political tragedy into the rich narrative manure of pulp science fiction and cheap suspense? (And I’m not merely posing a rhetorical question here—if anyone knows of another steaming pile of this ilk that satisfies and expands the boundaries of the big-budget/international cast/historically derived schlock thriller so thoroughly, please contact me.)

But the actor that can represent his own subgenre of crap classic is a find indeed. I’m not talking about your John Waynes or your Schwarzeneggers (or Seagals or Van Dammes or Dudikoffs) or any of the countless other actors who virtually defined the particular genres in which they succeeded at the box office. In addition to being identified almost solely within a specific genre or type of film, each one of these stars has at least one credit that could in most circles be recognized as a good movie—Wayne’s The Searchers, Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator, ahem, Seagal’s Above the Law, Van Damme’s (damn, I sense my thesis starting to fall apart here—gotta get out, quick), uh… Double Impact, and Dudikoff’s… okay, there is no good Michael Dudikoff movie.

However, few actors have challenged the time-honored requirements of comedy, domestic drama, romance and action with such woodenly consistent results as the inimitable Patrick Swayze, the man who would be, and I would suggest eventually became, the ‘80s answer to Jan-Michael Vincent. Swayze’s career often paralleled the blush of romantic folly embodied by Vincent films like Sandcastles, Buster and Billie and Baby Blue Marine with the likes of Ghost, Dirty Dancing, Three Wishes and Father Hood. Some were hits, some were flushed from popular consciousness in a little less time than it took to read their universally negative reviews. But all were attempts to cash in on the romantic soulfulness the actor’s handlers persuaded several tabloid TV shows and magazines that he had in spades back in the Reagan/Bush era.

Patrick was more per-Swayz-ive in action clunkers like Youngblood and Next of Kin. The latent hostility behind the actor’s vacant, vaguely bovine stare, a definite liability amidst the shameless suds of Ghost, worked better when he was allowed to wield a shotgun and swear occasionally. But two Swayze efforts from the late ‘80s-early ‘90s, both of which tread a path also taken by earlier Jan-Michael Vincent works, would set the bar inordinately high for what I’ve come to fondly think of as the Idiot Epic (known on cable as “Movies For Guys Who Like Movies”).

Swayze’s sleepy turn as the NYU philosophy major who works as a bouncer in a rough-and-tumble bar (you’ll have to insert your own joke here, because the movie refuses to) in director Rowdy Herrington’s relentlessly asinine Road House (1989) was the actor’s correlative to Vincent’s B-movie classic White Line Fever (1975). That movie, designed to quickly cash in on the trucking/CB radio craze that was sweeping the country at the time, had a down-and-dirty exploitation picture pedigree courtesy of director Jonathan Kaplan, a veteran of the Roger Corman school of creative low-budgets, and an unbridled energy that didn’t allow the viewer the time or the desire to contemplate the sillier elements of the story.

Herrington is a far less talented director than Kaplan—Road House is lumpy and lurchingly paced, whereas the more stripped-down Fever hurtles along with the unstoppable force of an 18-wheeler with no brakes on a steep downgrade. But it turns out the director wasn’t named Rowdy for nothing. He plops Swayze down in the midst of one spectacular fistfight after another, risking severe and mind-numbing repetition and virtually jolting his nearly somnolent lead actor into a constant state of agitation. And damned if Swayze doesn’t come alive (well, almost) as he pounds and punches and kicks and snaps bones in scene after scene. The movie, and the actor, finally take on a kind of shit-kicking glow, the radiance of which can reduce a viewer like me, who in the real world wouldn’t be caught dead (or more likely would be found dead) in the kind of barroom brawls staged here, to a state of gleeful yahoo-itis, where a kick in the groin is as good as a kiss on the cheek. Road House could be the best Idiot Epic ever made, and it must have made Hal Needham green with envy.

Swayze would seal his unspoken bond with Vincent just three years later in near classic form. JMV searched for the perfect wave (along with best buddies Gary Busey and William Katt) in Big Wednesday (1978), director John Milius’ ode to end-of-an-era male bonding among the surfer subculture. But Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991), cresting just ahead of the burgeoning popularity of the “extreme sports” movement, would take Swayze well past the rose-colored nostalgia and relatively sensitive bravado of Milius’ vision and straight through to the uncut adrenaline rush that would come to define an entire generation’s approach to fun in the sun.

Bigelow’s sensibility is serious, and the lean, spectacular set pieces she stages are among the best that can be found in modern action cinema. But her propulsive attitude toward the story, the narrative structure of which could be most generously described as ridiculous, is typically shaken up by her cast’s various ineptitudes, deficiencies and excesses. As Bodhi, leader of a band of bank-robbing thrill-seekers, Swayze, alternately stoic and loony, embodies the movie’s corruption of Milius’ macho-philosophic worldview. Cast mates Keanu Reeves (whoa-ful undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah, who infiltrates Bodhi’s commune of crime), Lori Petty (Bodhi’s hard-as-nails girlfriend who, naturally, falls for Johnny), John McGinley (chewing scenery as few others could, or would, as Johnny’s apoplectic boss) and Gary Busey (again, chewing scenery as few others could, or would, as Johnny’s meatball sandwich-scarfing partner—“Gimme two!”) ultimately merely frolic in the shadow cast by Swayze’s somewhat ripe, sun-damaged baddie—Bodhi is a deceptively whirligig psycho best friend and mentor who justifies his violent crimes through his pursuit of the ultimate wave and, cursed practicality, the need to fund it. The actor revels in the extremes of the character and his director’s willingness to indulge them in his performance, and he has hardly a moment in the movie, right up through the deafening conclusion where Bodhi is not saved from drowning under the wave he’s been after all along, that he doesn’t look foolish. But it’s a foolishness armored by conviction. That may not be enough to keep me from cringing whenever I revisit Swayze at work here, but at least makes me believe it’s probably his finest hour on screen.

Ken Russell and the fine art of historical bastardization

Speaking of foolish conviction, it’s difficult to imagine a rival in all of cinema to approach the overripe, headlong, giddy and gasping pretense of the oeuvre of director Ken Russell. This British director, who never encountered a subject he deemed inappropriate for the excessive whirling-dervish fantasias that comprise his personal style, has made peculiarly entertaining mincemeat of a multitude of historical and biographical subjects—the ghastly horrors of religious and political hysteria in 17th-century France (The Devils); the flamboyance and emptiness at the heart of the life of a legendary screen idol (Valentino); the bombast and grotesqueries revealed in heavily fictionalized accounts of the lives of the composers Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky (The Music Lovers) and the titular Mahler. But these triumphs of questionable taste, impure testimony and narrative lunacy pale compared to the kaleidoscopic incoherence of Lisztomania (1975).

I can’t imagine another filmmaker who would even momentarily think that an outlandish “biography” of Franz Liszt (Roger Daltrey!) which posits the reluctant celebrity of the Viennese composer as a kind of pioneering instance of rock stardom was a good idea. But the brio with which Russell invests this bizarre enterprise made those few who took him up on his challenge and actually paid to see this madness genuinely question his sanity. If singular achievement is any director’s goal, then Russell, in a career filled with films that could not be mistaken as the work of any other artist or hack, truly came into his glory with Lisztomania.

Patchy details of Liszt’s life are intermingled with phantasmagorical musings on the roots of nationalistic evil—Wagner, Liszt’s chief rival, is depicted as a literally vampiric predator who claims Liszt’s daughter and whose Aryan musical ideals come lumbering to life in the form of a Hitlerian Norse god of a Frankenstein’s monster. When Russell tires of this theme, he flits off and indulges his predilection for treacle or otherwise clumsy sketches—Liszt’s romantic longings are cast anachronistically in the iconography of a silent Chaplin comedy, and the movie opens with an tryst interrupted by a jealous husband that devolves into pixilated parody of silent-era swashbuckling action. And then there’s the real showstopper, a one-of-a-kind sequence of grandiose sexual panic that encapsulates the movie’s recurrent phallic iconography—Liszt’s insatiable appetites and incumbent paranoia fuel a Busby Berkeley-inspired musical number beginning with our hero being engulfed in a massive vagina and culminating in his sprouting a nine-foot erection, which is promptly straddled and danced upon by a bevy of wild-eyed, high-stepping dance hall girls… just before it’s inserted into a guillotine.

I’m sorry—did I forget to mention that I love this movie? I’d be hard-pressed to think of another movie whose “ideas” are so supremely silly, so obviously the product of a sophomoric lack of discipline, whose “vision” is so robustly, ingloriously tawdry and downright ridiculous, yet which I find so unaccountably engaging. I also know of absolutely no one who will back me up in my fondness for this one-of-a-kind folly, and I think I prefer it that way. It’s a gigantic load, to be sure, but it’s my gigantic load. And of course Russell’s, who probably jettisoned for good what little of the cultural cachet he’d secured for himself with well-regarded films like Women in Love and The Boy Friend by unleashing this wonderful monstrosity on the world. And as willfully strange as this director seems through his films, he probably prefers it that way.

Somewhere Al Capp is smiling...

Finally, it’s time to admit my weakness for stereotypical representations of a particular social group with which I have a more-than-passing familiarity: white trash. I’ve always had a kind of nostalgic attraction to the (for me) primal pull of the rural fantasy of the Ma and Pa Kettle series. Though she resembled her not a whit, Marjorie Main’s Ma seemed to embody so many of the rough-and-tumble characteristics of my own grandmother that it was (and still is) easy for me to transpose the fictional woman with my memories of the real one and allow Ma Kettle to take on a kind of vitality that she might not necessarily have for anyone else. And Pa Kettle is only Pa Kettle if he’s played by Percy Kilbride, who turned the depiction of sloth into a down-home art form. Parker Fennelly, replete with anachronistic Pepperidge Farm-type accent, replaced Kilbride as Pa in the last film of the series, The Kettles on Old MacDonald’s Farm, but he never approached the kind of easy charm with which Kilbride so effortlessly imbued the character.

Regional filmmakers Ferd and Beverly Sebastian created product for the drive-ins of the deep South throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, their most widely hailed work being the sweaty vigilante programmer Gator Bait (1976). Swamp sexpot Claudia Jennings (and all of her pulchritudinous charms) made this ketchup-and-cleavage drama a huge hit nationwide, but the Sebastians’ little-seen sequel, Gator Bait 2: Cajun Justice (1988) is the one that, for my money, seals their status as nonpareil purveyors of bad behavior (and questionable breeding strategies), Southern division. Your bodacious heroine is killed in the first movie? No problem. See, she has a big, burly brother with a redheaded Daisy Mae for a wife, who can get sexually assaulted and otherwise tormented by every known variety of swamp rat and toothless gas station attendant until big brother has just… had… enough! GB2 is distinctive largely in its mise-en-scene, which makes the undeniably tacky Billy Jack look expansive and visually choreographed, and in its cast of apparently authentic local “talent,” which probably looked an awful lot like the folks who saw out the twilight days of outdoor picture shows in their pickup trucks watching incredible heaps like this one. If you’ve got a taste for it, it’s a little bit of redneck heaven.

When I’m feeling more introspective and I want to indulge in white-trash stereotypes couched in a base of reality, garnished with genuine talent and/or relatively serious intentions, two films immediately leap to mind. Few documentaries feel more whimsical, so honestly inquisitive, yet at the same time so back-door condescending as Errol Morris’s Vernon, Florida (1981). The non-fiction specialist’s curious visit with the citizens of a small backwoods town, highlighting their various eccentricities and downright oddities, is undeniably hilarious, moody and charming. But Morris also coasts on loads of smirking subtext, and his use of the camera and techniques of editing maximize the sense of an outsider (Morris, us) standing back far enough from these local yokels so that we can’t miss how not just eccentric, but downright weird they are compared to everyone else. Morris’s sense of empathy would expand profoundly by the time of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997), but this is his most complete journey so far into an actual community and if it yields fascinating, troubling results, the later work would prove out the lessons learned by the director during his time in this little town.

Directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky followed up their devastating journalistic documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), chronicling the hysteria of an Arkansas town desperate to pin guilt for a triple murder on three local teenagers, with the even more disturbing Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000). The film depicts the teenagers bereft of the flippancy they displayed in the face of murder charges in the first film. Here they are behind bars, convicted of the crime and serving time, despite increasing evidence that points to the stepfather of one of the victims. In tracking events in the wake of their conviction, though, the film ends up raising serious questions about the imposition of the filmmakers into the very case they’re observing. Like Morris, they get seduced by the elements of life in this environment that play up to a sense of superiority on the part of the viewer. But unlike Morris, they have a truly charismatic, and possibly psychotic, person at the center of their inquiry in that stepfather, who often addresses the camera directly with his tortured observations, justifications and various attempts to discount the mounting suspicion swirling about him. This is one of several recent documentaries (including Capturing the Friedmans, any film by Nick Broomfield, and Berlinger and Sinofsky’s own Brother’s Keeper) that implicate the audience, and their own filmmakers, to an uncomfortable degree and make us believe we’re being given access to aspects of lives to which we have no right. Couple that with the skill and urgency of this film’s approach, its inexorable narrative pull and its (perhaps inevitable) emphasis on elements of a social group many non-Southern urbanites might find disturbing, and you have the very essence of a guilty “pleasure."

The journey toward the restoration of the guilt in my guilty pleasures, though amply primed by the previous entries, can ultimately only be fulfilled by consideration of the two great experiences in the dissection of white-trash culture of my formative movie-going years. When I was 13 years old, I conned my dad into accompanying me to a screening of Deliverance at our hometown theater. By the time it arrived there, the movie had already been in release for about a year, and through the grapevine of locker room whispers and classroom chatter I knew full well what horrors it held when I began suggesting to my dad that we catch that new outdoors movie (the local movie calendar highlighted only the image of four men in silhouette carrying a canoe, so my attempt at reductive encapsulation of the film’s plot seemed to have some basis in reality). But I didn’t count on my mom coming along, and consequently having to sit between them for the duration of the feature. By the time Ned Beatty was forced to begin his pathetic porcine impersonation, I truly knew what it was to squirm with the helpless desire to be anywhere else, and I could feel the laser intensity of my mom’s gaze burning a tiny, white-hot hole through my temple. But even after all that, Deliverance was still a great movie, and I think so to this day—I just never mention it to my mom.

Greatness is not an accolade likely ever to be bestowed upon the film version of Kyle Onstott’s epically lurid sex-and-slavery page-turner Mandingo (1975). But my (non-Kettle) grandmother was a big fan of the book, and when I became interested in it because of what I’d heard about the movie, she inexplicably conspired to lend it to me so I could read it unbeknownst to my parents (who were probably still stinging from being taken on that whole Deliverance deal). I could lie and say I had some overriding sociological interest in the subject matter, given that the mid-‘70s of my youth were a time when the fruits of the civil rights movement of the ‘60s were being given a chance to either ripen or rot. But truth be told, being a fan of the idea of the blaxploitation explosion in American movies (I had yet only seen Super Fly and Shaft, but kept up with the latest developments in this particular phenomenon through the movie pages of the Portland Oregonian), and being a typical 14-year-old boy, it was, yes, the lurid aspects of the story that grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

So imagine my surprise when the movie showed up at the local theater and my grandmother asked me if I wanted to go see it. With her. That surprise was topped only by my mom’s indifferent shrug when I floated the idea to her. “What the hell,” she seemed to be saying, “If you’re not already corrupt or otherwise warped by what I’ve allowed you to see myself, then I guess you’ll be okay—either that, or watching this stuff in the presence of your grandmother will be the back-breaking straw that sends you merrily on your way to a fulfilling career as a racially motivated sex criminal.” (Thanks, Mom!)

So we went off to the movies, Grandma and I. Those milling about the tiny lobby of my hometown movie theater, the Alger, who had an inkling of what the evening’s entertainment held in store offered us an assortment of odd, uncomfortable glances. Nonetheless, we marched right on up to our seats in the front row of the balcony and settled in for whatever the Motion Picture Association of America deemed inappropriate for children under 17 unless accompanied by parent or adult guardian. And Mandingo did not disappoint.

Turns out, the first time I ever saw a man simulate an orgasm on screen was right there with Grandma sitting next to me. It was Ken Norton, the impossibly muscled titular figure, lured upstairs for a vengeful tryst by and hovering over the lady of the plantation, played with prodigious teeth and gums perpetually and frightfully bared by Susan George. Norton groaned and shuddered like he’d just taken one in the kidneys from Muhammad Ali, and Ms. George seemed suitably impressed as well. Strangely, I never flinched with embarrassment (except perhaps a little bit for the actors), and neither did my grandma.

We giggled into our popcorn at some of the lines given to James Mason as the old massa, whose physical deterioration—he seeks respite from the tortures of rheumatoid arthritis by setting his bare feet on the belly of a slave boy laying at the foot of his rocker—is echoed by the rotting, unkempt condition of his plantation house. We reacted with appropriate revulsion at the fight staged at the auction site between Norton and another slave who ends up with a large chunk of flesh missing from his shoulder. And we had the same reaction upon Norton’s flogging at the hands of his master, Perry King, while hanging upside-down in a barn. The twist of the scene comes from the knowledge that King has been somewhat respectful of and relatively friendly with Norton’s character up to this point, his savagery tempered somewhat by his ambivalence. No such respect remains, however, when King realizes the color of his newborn son, connects the dots between Norton and George, and promptly forces the slave into a boiling pot of laundry water before he fatally perforates him with a pitchfork.

When the lights came up, Grandma and I were, for the moment at least, ashamed to be white, ashamed to be implicated in the perpetuation of attitudes that once enabled and endorsed such atrocious crimes against human beings, and we discussed with some seriousness the ghastly tragedy of slavery as we drove home. In the almost exclusively Caucasian confines of my little hometown, this constituted some sort of revelation, a vivid experiencing of some degree of truth that had only been abstract or textbook in nature before. I expected to groove on some sex and violence during Mandingo, and I’d be lying if I said those expectations went totally unfulfilled (I can’t speak for Grandma on this point, God rest her soul). But what I didn’t expect was to be moved by it in any way, serious or not.

I saw Mandingo again in my early 30s, and I was able to appreciate the attempts by the screenwriter Norman Wexler to inject some allegorical wit into Onstott’s narrative, some threads that might lead the viewer to connect a time when American society openly dealt in the enslavement of a race of people to a period some 110 years later when much lip service was being paid to the easement of race relations with little actual progress on display. And though the actors and Richard Fleischer’s direction are little better than pedestrian (that may be a generous assessment of Norton’s acting talent), and though the movie may at heart be simply a piece of exploitation (it was certainly marketed as such), I was struck by the fact that it comes off as pointedly, and powerfully, anti-racist as it is lurid. The more permissive context of a theatrical film allows the cauldron of Mandingo’s concerns, both violent and sexual, to boil at a more confrontational temperature than decorum might otherwise allow. As a result the movie, despite the participation of Anglos Wexler and Fleischer (not to mention Onstott, whom I’ve always rather presumptively imagined, with no prior knowledge or available research to confirm it, was also white), is much closer to the unchecked anger of blaxploitation, particularly Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song, than to the sober mainstream TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots.

As a white adult reflecting on Mandingo in 2005, I wonder about the basis of the emotions that inform the movie. It certainly displays some of the uncut anger of the urban blaxploitation cinema of its time. But I suspect it also sometimes tip the scales toward a sort of reverse-racism laced with extra added heaping teaspoonfuls of white liberal guilt, a rage much different from the kind born of firsthand oppression in which van Peebles’ film trafficked. By fueling the fires of such potentially contradictory emotions with campy performances by the likes of Mason and George, while simultaneously existing as a politically correct and morally confused satire of the ongoing tragedy of race relations, Mandingo defines itself, for me, as the guiltiest pleasure of them all.

The challenge of the guilty pleasure

Film critics routinely complain about the lopsided ratio of bad films to good in any given season. And whenever asked, most usually claim that writing about good films is more challenging. The critic’s ability to document his own responses to a film, evoke the intangible elements of the viewing experience, and use language and imagery to express what it is that the writer found remarkable, is what often elevates criticism into an art form of its own. Often those same critics will suggest that writing about bad films is, conversely, not as stimulating, either for the writer or the reader, because there isn’t as much to say about an abject failure or a filmmaker caught in a cycle of repetition and self-parody. As a result, they end up resorting to wisecracks and condescension to deal with bad movies in an expedient manner, all the better to flush them if not from the cultural consciousness, then at least from the critic’s purview.

But it seems to me that approaching bad films with intent equal to the way one approaches good films is the more appropriate attitude. This is not to say that critics should abandon their senses of humor. Instead, they should recognize when that humor begins to exist for itself rather than to expand upon the experience of a film in a way that is enlightening to the reader. If not, then writing about bad films becomes exclusively about showing off to readers just how clever the writer is, and how superior he is to that about which he is expending so much personal creative energy. There are cinematic pleasures worthy of guilt, if guilt is an emotional response that is to be taken at all seriously, and it deserves consideration within the context of that which inspires it. For me to write off Mandingo or Lisztomania with a couple of flip comments would be to deny considering what it is about them that I find compelling, beyond recognition of their status as films that register as “failures” based on some unknowable “objective” standard of taste and achievement. It ought to be as great a challenge for a writer to illuminate that which is complex, contradictory and, yes, insufficient or offensive about “bad” films as it is to wax rhapsodic about the good ones.

I hope I’ve achieved some measure of that approach here. The challenge of the guilty pleasure is not simply to acknowledge the guilt, shrug one’s shoulders and laugh it off, but to determine the source of the guilt, understand it, and begin to find ways to redefine the parameters of the pleasure that the guilt inspires. Hopefully, for the critic and the thoughtful cinephile, that process becomes its own pleasure, perhaps a more profound one than guilt over any one movie could ever be.

***
Postscript (2009)

When I read this article again, I realized there were several things about the way it was written that I would have approached differently—I would have tried, for instance, to scrub it of some of the Entertainment Weekly-style snark that seeped into my sensibility, even when I wasn’t necessarily aiming for it. When Keith proposed reprinting the piece in the 24 Lies a Second series I was initially skittish about it for this reason. But I finally decided that it would be better to see the piece as it was written, without close to five years of fresh writing experience, than to open a Pandora’s box in trying to gussy it up. Besides, the writing style is, to me, the less important element about what’s different now than when the piece was first written. The one thing that has really changed for me in regard to the movies mentioned in this article, and indeed to movies in general, since I wrote “Pleasures Worthy of Guilt” back in 2004 is that my concept of guilt as it relates to movies has almost entirely evaporated. For me the notion of the guilty pleasure has become, even more than it was when I read Jeff Bridges’ Film Comment article, outdated and irrelevant. The “guilt” I may have felt about admitting to enjoying, on any level, movies like Pret-a-Porter, Lisztomania or The Boys from Brazil was never all that overwhelming to begin with, and certainly shame is far too strong a word altogether.

If anything (and I think this is clear from reading the article through eyes about to switch over to their 2009 model) the twinge I feel upon mentioning these movies, either in general conversation with “regular” folks or in the relatively more erudite circles of cinephilia to which I’m more privy than I was in 2004, is more closely akin to a kind of perverse pride than anything else. It’s the kind of pride that comes from having grown up in a small-town culture which did not share my enthusiasm for movies (or the arts in general), where I learned to enjoy the peculiar pleasures of eagerly promoting movies I knew would cause the pupils of the unwashed to roll back and disappear into their sockets. The difference I see as an adult is that the movies I talk to people about may sometimes elicit that reaction, but not because I’m throwing the titles out there for their shock value. (Well, maybe Pret-a-Porter…) One does not have to crawl away in embarrassment as a result of talking about these pictures, even if I think it would still be wise not to try to make cases for them as a collection of masterpieces. In any case, if you, or I, or someone insists, then a slight degree of embarrassment is a far more honest and valuable frame to set around movies like this than one constructed of guilt. Honestly, I don’t feel any guilt over enjoying Point Break or Road House, even if I recognize their bedrock silliness. And in the years since I wrote this piece I’ve offered up guilt-free appreciations of bastard stepchildren like 1941, New York, New York, and even “disreputable” fare like Seed of Chucky and Revenge of the Cheerleaders, which sprung purely from the unique pleasures these movies and others like them have to offer.

Indeed, the pleasure I deemed most guilty back in 2004, Richard Fleischer’s Mandingo, has in my estimation undergone an almost complete transformation out of shame and into the ranks of one of my very favorite films, and in the most sincere fashion imaginable. It retains, for most people, its reputation as a schlock camp classic, what I deemed a pleasure worthy of guilt four years ago, but I can no longer endorse that point of view. For me Mandingo is probably the most potent and unflinching look at this country’s history of institutionalized racism and the reality of slavery, blessedly free of Margaret Mitchell-style adornments, that the American film industry has ever or is likely ever to produce. Even the performances, from James Mason to Ken Norton, no longer inspire guilt-spawned giggles as they intone the linguistic arcana of the Confederate South’s rotting soul; that language, however odd or offensive, sounds genuine to these ears, and the actors well-grounded in their attempts to represent a slice of history that might seem exaggerated to supposedly enlightened audiences who would feel more comfortable if the movie’s plantation masters referred to their stock in trade exclusively as blacks, or if the movie had traded verisimilitude for political correctness and said “N-word” instead of that other nasty epithet whenever the occasion arose. Mandingo is no guilty pleasure; it’s a movie landmark dressed up in exploitation rags, and it deserves better than to have its reputation as worthless junk perpetuated even in an article like mine, which denigrated it even as it tried to seriously deal with its repercussions, even as it ignited the spark of an interior monologue in this writer that would result in a major reassessment. There was another result that arose from revisiting this article as well: the realization that for me there is no more guilt related to the movies. There are only the movies themselves and the conversation that should—must—ensue, even when the movies themselves don’t seem worthy of serious consideration.
____________________________________________
Dennis Cozzalio lives in Los Angeles, California, where he works as a DVD subtitle and caption editor. He attended the University of Oregon in Eugene where, as a freshman, he was cast as one of the Delta pledge extras, and also employed briefly as a stunt double, on the set of National Lampoon's Animal House. He graduated from the Oregon film studies program in 1981 and dabbled in radio as a disc jockey/music director/program director before moving to Los Angeles in 1987, where he met his lovely wife, with whom he collaborated to produce two lovely daughters. Dennis also publishes a blog entitled Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, which provides a forum for his writing about film and baseball—the two loves in his life that don't have big brown eyes.

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By Robert C. Cumbow

[Publication Note: This article is being cross-published with Parallax View.]

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 05/11/2008, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran (editor-in-chief) and Peet Gelderblom (founding editor).]

Gosh, what a great year 2007 was for movies. You could wipe out the Academy’s five Best Picture nominees, replace them with five others, and still have an honorable rack of best-picture candidates. One of those second five could easily be Ben Affleck’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone—my personal vote for best film of the year.

A well-crafted film, richly deserving of the honors it has received, No Country for Old Men nevertheless too often feels like a collection of highlights from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, sometimes about one guy, sometimes about another, never matching the novel’s more focused vision. There Will Be Blood is even more all over the map—gorgeous to look at, but without the discipline of knowing where it’s coming from, where it’s headed, and what, if anything, those two points have to do with each other. Michael Clayton bounces between rich characterization and caricature, moral complexity and empty-headed mantras about corporations. Atonement seems to be about one thing, but only for the purpose of revealing ultimately that it is about something else altogether—not romance or betrayal but the power of art to liberate, and the impossibility of such liberation. And it takes that war-epic detour in the middle, as if to say, “Hey, guys, this isn’t a chick flick! Honest!” Juno is primarily about language, but uneasily so, since its characters, who are all sharply defined and mostly well-rounded, nevertheless all speak with the same voice—the impossibly quick-witted and widely experienced voice of one clever writer. And the language of the film’s characters is an end, not a means, never satisfactorily bound to the film’s moral theme about decision-making.

Gone Baby Gone is also about decision-making; but unlike the Academy’s five nominees, it is a film that from the first to the last frame never forgets what it’s about, and remains unrelentingly faithful to its theme throughout. Director Ben Affleck shows an unerring eye and a concentration of intent that makes this film really special.

For one thing, it’s not just about decision-making, but also about the consequences of decisions. Every character in the film makes choices, and the film’s commitment to its South Boston framework continually asks—as smalltime private eye Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) does in his opening voice-over—whether those choices are what define us or not, and whether they are “real” choices at all, or are already determined by the nature of the chooser, dictated by the choices he didn’t make. In this sense, Gone Baby Gone is a more consciously focused (though less intellectually daring) meditation on freedom and determinism than the Coen Brothers’ palimpsest on Cormac McCarthy.

Both Afflecks impart an honest and uncompromising sense of place to the film, through repeated visual and verbal reminders of the neighborhood, its people and the inescapability of the city. In a sense, the film is the anti-Departed, quietly insisting on an authenticity of location that is far more crucial here than in Martin Scorsese’s New Yorker’s love-letter to Boston, where Beantown provides only a convenient situs of crime and police corruption appropriate toa transplanted Hong Kong action film. On the second point, it is also the anti-Juno, since each of its characters sounds authentically like himself, not like one or another aspect of the same writer’s wit.

Indeed, just as Patrick is alone with the decision he ultimately makes, he is also alone among the film’s major characters in the dialect he speaks. His fiancée, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan), doesn’t sound at all like Patrick, and she ends up leaving him over the choice he makes. It’s not an Irish-vs.-Italian thing; she’s just not from the neighborhood.

Similarly, Detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris), the Louisiana transplant who engineers the decision that Patrick makes the choice to undo, doesn’t sound like Patrick. But these things aren’t so simple, as Remy remarks to Patrick early in the film: “You might think you’re more from here than me. But I’ve been living here longer than you’ve been alive, so who’s right?”

Patrick’s right—at least in the sense that he makes a choice that someone outside the neighborhood would not make and probably would not understand.

Actually, Patrick makes two choices in the course of the film: to execute the child molester Corwin Earle (Matthew Maher), and to turn in Captain Jack Doyle (Morgan Freeman) and send Amanda home to her mother (Amy Ryan). Everyone supports his first choice, because all of the major characters are uncompromising in their hatred of child molesters. “You gotta take a side”; “you did what you had to do”; “you should be proud of yourself.” Even Patrick’s belief that he wouldn’t make the same choice again “doesn’t make it wrong” in Remy’s view. But in Patrick’s second choice, he is all alone. Bea—his client—isn’t there to thank him, and Helene’s persistence in her old behavior (despite her earlier promise that she would change, and in exact fulfillment of Angie’s prediction that she would be unable to) does nothing to assure Patrick of the rightness of his choice. Ben Affleck pointedly does not take sides; he knows his film is not about rightness of the decision but about the reasons Patrick makes it and has to live with it.

Affleck’s unwillingness to take a side informs his decisions about camera placement and frame composition. Whereas Jason Reitman recognizes the volatility of the abortion/adoption issue in Juno and he and scenarist Diablo Cody carefully deflect and nullify anticipated audience reactions from either side of the fence, Affleck concentrates on what his film is about and chooses a style designed to keep his audience from being distracted from the central idea. As just one example—well, two—in the scenes in which Amanda is taken from the Doyles and reunited with her mother, we are not allowed to glimpse the child’s face. In the police car, we see her, hands to her mouth, in an ambiguous gesture of what could be anticipation or apprehension; but Affleck is smart enough to recognize that any shot of Amanda’s face when she is taken from the arms of Francine Doyle (Kippy Goldfarb) or delivered into those of Helene McCready would introduce interpretation into the shot. It would raise the issue of the welfare of the child.

Child custody decisions in the United States are always made based on an analysis of the “best interests of the child.” Significantly, Gone Baby Gone is not interested in the best interests of Amanda, though most of its characters are, particularly Angie, Remy, and Doyle. Most of the film’s major characters are concerned with the interests of the child or of themselves or both. Angie frames the issue nicely when she wonders whether keeping inside information about police efforts to recover the child is “better for Amanda or better for us.” Remy and Doyle and Lionel make pronouncements such as “I did what I did for the sake of the child” and persuade themselves they are doing “one last good thing.” But Patrick, Helene, and Bea—all from the neighborhood—take for granted their sense that Amanda belongs where she comes from, not with a family that can give her a better life. “It wasn’t your life to give,” Patrick tells Doyle, and imagines a grown-up Amanda accusing him of having left her in the hands of a family that “wasn’t my family.”

Angie and Doyle both sense Patrick’s uncertainty and pounce on it: “This is the kind of thing that if you do, Patrick, you want to be sure,” she tells him; and moments later the retired police chief plays on Patrick’s fear that “this might be an irreparable mistake.” Patrick readily admits his uncertainty, and even in the film’s unforgettable closing shot seems unsure of whether he did the right thing. But this only reaffirms the point that the rightness of the decision is not the issue. In Patrick’s view his choice was a foregone conclusion. Amanda’s belonging to where she came from and the inevitability of Patrick’s choice to that effect are two sides of the same coin—not a coin that has traveled 28 years to get to this time and place, but a coin that was always irrevocably of the neighborhood.

So the dialectic of the film seems to be determinism vs. free will, and the dilemma is evident even in the rhetoric of Captain Doyle, the foremost of the film’s “free will” forces: “We don’t know why people do what they do. Everybody looks out his own window.” He says those words without knowing that with them, he damns himself. He is in the hands of Patrick, and Patrick already knows the only window he’s ever been able to look out of.

Are we free, or do we only believe we are free? Does it matter? Or is it only important how we behave with regard to things we can’t do anything about? This is not only a question that also arises in No Country for Old Men—it’s a question as old as Oedipus. The tale of Oedipus is, among other things, one of the oldest detective stories, perhaps the oldest. It’s about a resourceful guy who’s smarter than anyone else around him, better than everyone else at solving mysteries, figuring things out. But he’s never figured out the one great truth that there are forces he can’t beat, things he can’t outsmart. His tragedy is that all of his great detective work brings him to the recognition that the things he didn’t choose are the ones that made him who he is, and that he himself is the killer he is looking for.

There’s no greater story than that. Gone Baby Gone isn’t exactly the same story, though, since Patrick already knows, from the first words and the first frame of the film, that he is a product of the choices he didn’t make. Still, he’s as good a detective as old Oedipus. He talks like a plain blue-collar guy from the neighborhood, but he really is smarter than everyone else around him, gets out of tight spots through resourcefulness and a little bravado, and really does figure out the mystery through sheer, dogged detective work, when everyone else has given up. But he’s no better (or worse) than Oedipus when it comes to discovering himself and having to live with the consequences. The old cliché that when you save a person you become responsible for that person has never had such a literal meaning as that suggested by the ending of Gone Baby Gone.

The first time I saw Gone Baby Gone, I had the haunting sense of being reminded of something, not directly, but obliquely, in a ghostly sort of way. What especially resonated was the way the film’s central quarry scene leaves you disoriented, untethered, in a kind of free fall. She’s dead; where can the film go from here? “And like that, she was gone,” says Patrick in voiceover, reminding us of The Usual Suspects, and invoking the same kind of loss of narrative equilibrium: Have I been watching the right film at all?

Upon a second viewing, the ghost made itself known: Gone Baby Gone’s narrative structure is the narrative structure of Vertigo. A detective is hired and becomes obsessed with the person who is the center of his investigation. Then, at the center of the film, that person dies in a fall from a high place, and the shock leaves the detective unhinged and the audience looking around for something to grab hold of. The detective refuses to let go of the investigation, and it almost seems as if his tenacity wills the dead person back into existence. He solves the mystery, with someone else’s confession filling in the details; and then, in his pride at having figured it all out, he plays God, takes control of the destiny of the reborn victim, and ends by precipitating consequences he will find difficult to live with, and facing an agonizing awareness of himself.

There are differences of detail and nuance, of course. Scotty Ferguson was calculatedly hired and was a dupe in a conspiracy; Patrick’s hiring by Bea was accidental, and Lionel and the cops weren’t conspirators, they just made it up as they went along. But it’s the same story. One point of difference, though, is more than incidental: In Vertigo, Scotty, like Oedipus, thought he was acting freely throughout the “case,” only to find he was controlled by forces outside himself; in the second half of the film, he gets a second chance, and even when acting truly freely, ends up causing the same result, with greater and more tragic finality than before. Like Oedipus, he turns out to be the killer he was looking for. Patrick, by contrast, never believed he was free in the first place, and ends up not a lost soul like Scotty Ferguson but with the conviction that he could not have done otherwise. In that context, the consequences Patrick has to live with, bleak as they are, look a lot like redemption.

____________________________________________________
Robert C. Cumbow has been writing about film for nearly 40 years. His work has appeared in Film Comment, Film Quarterly, the Seattle Film Society journals Movietone News and The Informer, and in numerous newspapers. He is the author of Once upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone and Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter, both available from Scarecrow Press. He is especially proud of his liner notes for the Rhino Records/Turner Classic Movies edition of the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bob is a trademark/copyright lawyer, heads the intellectual property practice at Graham & Dunn, Seattle, and teaches Trademark Law and Advertising Law at Seattle University School of Law.

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By Peet Gelderblom

[Editor's Note: The House Next Door is proud to reissue a series of articles developed at 24LiesASecond, a now-defunct platform for provocative criticism with an underdog bite. The essay below was first published on 06/08/2006, under the editorial guidance of James M. Moran.]

What follows is a new kind of essay that takes a creative, non-expository approach to critical issues in film spectatorship. Peet's "celluloid fantasia" is an unconventional tale spun to stimulate readers to consider their privileged position and responsibility as spectators—but surprisingly, through the subjectivity of some classic (and some nearly forgotten) movie characters encountering each other in a surreal New York city landscape.

Film buffs will be extra rewarded.

—Jim Moran—

fan·ta·sia
1 : a free usually instrumental composition not in strict form
2 a: a work (as a poem or play) in which the author’s fancy roves unrestricted b : something possessing grotesque, bizarre, or unreal qualities

—Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary—

The mouse and the Mohawk

The rodent gazed at his blood-covered gloves under the gleaming neon light and wondered what the hell just happened. Only moments ago he had been standing on his renowned pinnacle surrounded by roaring ocean, orchestrating stars, comets, clouds and bolts of lightning across the nocturnal sky. Everything after that was a blur, as if a blind rage had taken possession of his body. Now, here he was: Mickey Mouse, standing on a sidewalk of 42nd street, dwarfed by mighty skyscrapers in the City that Never Sleeps. Hello reality.

But where had all the New York residents gone? How did he get here? And most of all: Why was there blood on his hands?

Drizzle started to fall. As the rodent looked up at the crescent moon and raindrops trickled down his face, he heard a voice calling him:
‘Hey mouse! You waitin’ for the sun to shine?’
At least one citizen was up tonight, and quite a character he was. Behind the wheel of a yellow taxi sat an Italian-American sporting an Army jacket and a Mohawk haircut.
‘Whaddayaknow, all the animals come out at night!’ vented the taxi driver. ‘Need a ride?’
It took a while for the rodent to come to his senses. ‘You talkin’ to me?’
The driver threw him a cold, steely look. ‘That’s my line, man. Get in.’
The drizzle had turned to downpour, so the rodent figured he might as well accept the offer. From the license stuck on the plexi-glass partition, he could see the driver’s name was Travis Bickle.
‘What world are you from?’ asked Travis.
‘Fantasia,’ the rodent replied, just before the cab took off with a jolt.
‘I heard of that. What state is that in?’
‘Of mind.’
‘Come again?’
‘Anywhere but here, really.’
The rodent’s eyes wandered out to the streets, where the glare of multicolored signs and neon lettering reflected off the pavement. This is what real life reflected like, he pondered. Then, for a fraction of a second, lightning illuminated the skies and the rodent caught a glimpse of two giant apes scaling the Empire State building. One of them seemed to move less smoothly than the other.
‘What in Walt’s name is going on here?’ he uttered in disbelief. ‘Is this place for real?’
‘I’ve been askin’ myself the same question,’ said Travis. ‘Something’s not right, I gotta hand it to ya. I been riding these streets for ages. Far as I know, this block oughta be an open sewer crawlin’ with whores, dopers, junkies, bums. Just look at it now—all cleaned up, I can’t believe it. Where’s the porn theatres, the peep shows? I’m tellin’ ya, tonight’s different. You get to see lotsa freaky stuff in a cab, but before you stepped in, I was driving a guy that didn’t even look like one.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Some kinda insect, half a fly or something. Hairs all over his face, long fingers without any nails in ‘em, teeth fallen out and everything. He just sat there where you are now, reading his paper. Then all of a sudden he asked me to drop him off at the Dunkin’ Donut. Never handled traffic like that before.’
‘You’re not really from around here, are you?’ asked the rodent.
‘I’m from here all right, but this ain’t my regular shift no more,’ said Travis. The cab made a sharp turn to the left. ‘Thing is, I run all over town, cover every mile, every corner. But this street right here… It’s funny, I oughta know about it, but I don’t. Never seen it before in my life.’
‘I guess this is not the Big Apple you know, is it?’
‘Don’t be square, man. How many New York Cities could there be?’
The rodent picked-up a sticky New York Times lying beside him on the back seat. He checked the date at the front page. ‘It says here it’s the year 2006.’
Travis looked at the paper from over his shoulder. ‘That don’t make sense,’ he said. ‘It’s... 1976.’
‘Not in the real world, apparently,’ deduced the rodent. ‘I guess you’re from Fantasia, too, Travis. The metropole area. Did you forget?’

Someday a real rain will come

The taxi screeched to a halt, almost hitting two pedestrians in the crosswalk. The short one slapped the hood of the cab and yelled: ‘I’m walking here! I’m walking here!’ Travis stared blankly ahead until the guy limped onward.
‘You got me there, mouse. Slipped my mind for a minute,’ said Travis, slowly putting his foot on the gas. ‘To be honest, I don’t think much about being one of ‘em movie folks. It breaks my concentration, you know?’
‘That’s only natural,’ said the rodent. ‘If we don’t have conviction in our performance, who will?’
‘What about these others walkin’ around?’ asked Travis while they passed a ghoulish knight in blood red body armour galloping by on a fire-breathing horse. ‘They don’t belong here, too, do they? Are they from the movies, like us?’
‘I’d say so.’
‘Since when are movie characters walkin’ the real world? What happened to the people of New York?’
‘Beats me.’ The wiper made a squeaky noise against the dirty windshield. The rodent looked worried. ‘If only I could remember what happened,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a feeling I’m responsible for this mess...’
As they sped down the rain-slicked avenue at a loss for words, out of nowhere, the truth hit the rodent like a bag of bricks. ‘Holy smokes! I... I remember now.’
Travis watched through the rear-view mirror - his eyes fixed, unblinking - as terror took hold of his passenger.
‘Gosh! It really is all my fault,’ gasped the rodent. ‘This blood on me, it... it’s human.’
‘You touched a real human being? I mean, with your hands?’
‘Touched, yes… and killed.’
‘You sure? Who’d you kill?’
The rodent started to sob as reality sank in: ‘All of them, I think…’
Travis frowned. ‘All of them? Whaddaya mean... you massacred humankind?’
The rodent held up his bloody gloves. ‘Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. I squeezed the life out of them all! I’m a manslaughtering psycho, Travis! I showed no mercy!’
‘Lemme get this straight,’ said Travis. ‘You knocked off every single one of those low-lifes out there? Why’d you do that?’
‘They’re w-watching us… but they don’t s-see,’ stuttered the rodent. ‘Someone had to st-stop them!’

It took Travis a minute to grasp the enormous implications of the rodent’s confession. Finally, a thin smile cracked across his lips.
‘Well... I killed too, you know,’ he said. ‘It don’t matter. You’re just a mouse who would not take it anymore. Someone who stood up against the scum, the filth, the deadheads. I respect that.’
‘But there were, like, six billion of them deadheads!’ the rodent objected. ‘And now they’re all gone. I’m just a harmless little cartoon character. How have I done this? What kind of crazy wormhole did I fall into?’
‘Hey, don’t ask me. I ain’t wearin’ the wizard’s hat. That’s you.’
This remark gave the rodent a pause. Indeed, he was the sorcerer’s apprentice and he actually did wear master Yen Sid’s magical pointed hat. Did he just pull-off the greatest disappearing act of all time? His memory was still fuzzy on the details.
‘Listen,’ Travis continued, ‘I just, uh, I been thinking somethin’. All my life needed was a sense of direction, a sense of someplace to go. You and I, we meet at a crossroads in history. No longer will the wrong roads be taken. Today a real rain has come to wash all this scum off the streets. You’re that rain. Let me be the wind to carry you through the city.’
‘Right,’ said the rodent. ‘Can you drop me off at the museum here?’

A pipe that isn’t

‘Sheeeit, they call this fuckin’ art? Them pictures don’t even move!’
Vincent Vega took a slow drag of his rolled smoke as he strolled through the halls of the abandoned museum. ‘They ain’t supposed to move, Jules,’ he said. ‘It’s yo’ brain that gotta to do the movin.’
‘My ass.’ Jules Winnfield leaned over to examine a particular work by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, featuring a pipe and a description. ‘Ceci, n’est pas une pipe,’ read Jules. ‘Now what’s that s’pposed to mean?’
Vincent pondered the question for a moment and came to the conclusion that the only French he knew was Royale with Cheese. Assistance came from an unexpected corner when a falsetto voice answered:
‘It means, This is not a pipe.’
Jules and Vincent looked down and saw a tiny rodent with a blue pointed hat standing between the two of them. They gave it a long look before turning back to the painting.
‘But it is a pipe,’ insisted Vincent, clearly confused.
‘Hell yeah,’ affirmed Jules. ‘Don’t be tellin’ me that’s no pipe. I ain’t fuckin’ stupid.’
‘I’m only telling you what it says,’ maintained the rodent. ‘It sure looks like a pipe, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s a goddamn pipe if there ever was one!’ said Jules.
A scrawny, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, heavily bespectacled intellectual joined in:
‘Ehm... excuse me? It’s not. A pipe, I mean. Definitely not.’
‘That so?’ said Jules, raising one eyebrow. ‘Says the fuck who?’
‘Alvy Singer. I’m serious, y’know. That’s no pipe.’
‘So you keep tellin’ me.’
‘And I’ll tell you why it isn’t,’ said Alvy. ‘It’s a painting of a pipe.’
Vincent Vega took another drag from his rolled smoke. ‘I get it,’ he said, suddenly amused. He chuckled and clapped his hands with glee.
‘Cut the bullshit, man. I’m not convinced,’ said Jules, still thinking.
The rodent’s eyes remained fixed on the Magritte. ‘Let’s suppose that’s accurate for a minute,’ he said to Alvy. ‘If there really is no pipe on that canvas, and my natural habitat is the silver screen, what does that make me?’
Alvy Singer shrugged, ‘You’re not a mouse.’
‘Can you believe this guy?’ said Jules. ‘If that ain't a mouse I'm fuckin' Snow White! You is what you is, my man. Are you not Alvy Singer?’
‘Yes, I am. I’m not Woody Allen, though.’
‘Who the hell is Woody Allen?’
‘Never mind this Allen person, Jules.’ The rodent pointed a blood-stained finger at Alvy. ‘You are Alvy Singer, are you not? The genuine article. Not a film of Alvy, right?’
Alvy scratched his balding scalp. ‘I’d like to think so, sure.’
‘See, that’s the problem,’ said the rodent. ‘Audiences make all kinds of assumptions, complain we’re not who we seem to be and all, but what do they know? No one asks the freaking pipe for his opinion.’

Where there’s smoke…

At that instant, a very pregnant woman in a beige police uniform entered the hall.
‘Hey, mister!’ she spoke in a thick Minnesota accent. ‘Yer not allowed to smoke in here.’
‘I believe the lady’s talking to you, Vincent,’ said Jules.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Vincent, gesturing at the painting behind him. ‘Why did they put up that smokin’ sign?’
‘I’m afraid that’s no smokin’ sign, sir,’ answered the pregnant sheriff.
‘Yeah, it ain’t even a pipe,’ grinned Jules.
‘You coulda fooled me.’ Vincent dropped the butt on the floor and grounded it under his foot.
‘You gonna charge me now, Chief?’
‘Name’s Gunderson. Call me Marge.’ She flashed Vincent a smile. ‘Naah, a course I ain’t gonna charge ya! New York is a little outta my jurisdiction. But Gunderson Junior here won’t have it! I’m expecting, ya know.’

Marge walked passed the three men and the rodent, took off her earflap hat and sat down on a bench in the middle of the room, next to an elegant blond woman dressed in white.
‘Hiya,’ said Marge. The blond woman smiled back reluctantly. Marge’s eyes lit up.
‘Hey… Don’t I know you from somethin’? Oh yah! Yer from that show, aren’t ya? Yer that Police Woman! I used to watch ya all the time on the telly!’
The woman looked at her shoes. ‘You confuse me with someone else. I’m Kate, Kate Miller.’
‘That’s funny, you look just like her. How ya doin’, I’m Marge.’ The women shook hands. ‘What brings ya here, Kate?’
‘Well... I’m supposed to meet this stranger in black, but he hasn’t shown up yet. I wonder. Maybe he meant that other museum in Philadelphia.’
‘Well, ya know what they say...’
‘No, what do they say?’
‘Never trust a stranger.’
‘I guess they’re right.’ The women stared at the painting before them without much interest.
‘Hey, Marge?’
‘Yah?’
‘What’s going on? Are we stuck in some kind of film character limbo here? These lines I’m saying are not in my script. Neither are you, for that matter, or those guys over there.’
‘Oh, my. Good question. This is a teensy bit unusual, you bet ya. I’m still trynna figure out why I was transferred from up Brainerd to Manhattan in the middle of an investigation. High culture ain’t exactly my line of duty, ya know.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Tell ya what: Let’s just wait for the expository scene to clear that up for us.’
‘Sure… if I live that long. I tend to miss those.’
‘Whatcha do for a livin’, hon?’
Kate let out a deep sigh. ‘Always the same thing, you know the drill. I act out the sexual fantasy of frustrated housewives only to get punished for it, basically.’
‘Punished how?’
‘By being sliced to bloody threads in an elevator.’
‘Aw geez, sorry to hear that.’
The rodent chimed in from the other end of the hall. ‘Excuse me, miss, but I sincerely doubt you’re being punished for your sins. People pay money to see you commit them in the first place. Anything even remotely blond and sinful onscreen usually gets a round of applause in these quarters. It’s part of the pact, you know: they can’t break the law, so we do it for them. If you ask me, all the slicing and the bloodshed was just their awkward way of getting you out of the museum.’
‘Who are you referring to?’ asked Kate. ‘Why would anyone want me out of the museum? Are you telling me I don’t belong here?’
‘Gosh no! I wouldn’t dare. But audience expectation is a funny thing.’
‘The audience. I see. And what do you suppose my audience is expecting again?’
‘Sex, violence, escapism—the usual, really. Anything that makes them forget they’re watching an art form.’
Alvy Singer peered at the rodent from behind thick glasses. ‘Something, maybe, more like a theme park attraction?’ he suggested. The rodent glared back at Alvy, his eyes pinched slit.
‘Not-not-not that there’s anything wrong with a theme park attraction. I-I-I mean, I was brought up underneath the rollercoaster in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, so there you go.’
‘Look, I don’t know ‘bout y’all,’ said Jules Winnfield, ‘but this place bores the shit outta me.
Who’s on for a burger? I’m buying.’

A melodramatic nocturnal scene

‘Uuummmm, that’s a tasty burger!’ said Jules.
The visitors had settled behind the counter of a desolate, fluorescent-lit diner in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. A Wurlitzer jukebox was playing fifties records while an anonymous-looking waiter served orders with a strictly professional smile.
‘Yah, thanks a bunch,’ said Marge Gunderson by the sight of her “homemade” meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy. ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’
The rodent sized up the woman with a frown. ‘My friend Horace is a horse,’ he said.
‘Oh yah?’ said Marge. ‘Well, it was only a figure of speech.’
‘Right,’ said the rodent. ‘That’s a cow on your plate there. I have a friend called Clarabelle—’
‘Well ain’t that somethin’? Say, if ya won’t lemme eat this right now I’m gonna have to put this fork into yer cute button nose, okey dokey little fella?’
‘So is this what we’re about then?’ grouched the rodent. ‘Junk food? Catering to the masses? Is that all there is to it?’
Alvy Singer looked up from the menu. ‘Sure, what else is there? Museums are no different, you know. Art is entertainment for intellectuals, a wise Jew once said. By the way, um… has anyone ever told you that you seem a lot more mature in real life than you do on Saturday morning TV?’
‘What did you expect? A 78-year-old infant?’
‘Goddamn! That’s a pretty fuckin’ good milk shake,’ said Vincent.
Outside, the wind howled. Kate Miller looked up at a framed poster behind the counter, featuring James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley trapped inside a lonely diner, accompanied by the phrase ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’
‘Didn’t we see this painting at the museum, Alvy?’
Alvy shook his head. ‘No, that was a Hopper. This rip-off piece of crap is by Helnwein.’
Kate suddenly felt exposed and vulnerable in the fluorescent light. ‘Looks like what’s happening to us tonight happened once before,’ she said as a cold shiver ran down her spine. ‘They had better weather back then…’
‘At least our diner has a door,’ observed Vincent.

A chill filled the room. In the doorway, dressed in a futuristic black overcoat, stood a humanoid robot with spiky peroxide-blond hair and the body of a drill sergeant. By his side were two impossibly gorgeous brunettes. One of them wore shiny plastic boots and a transparent perspex top, the other a rain-soaked fur bikini.
‘This is a stick-up!’ called out replicant Roy Batty. ‘Someone give me a beer or the cavewoman dies!’ The girls at his side giggled, the door shut.
‘Sorry, what’s your name again, doll?’ informed Roy while he pulled up his zipper.
‘Loana,’ said the brunette on his right.
‘So you’re from one million years B.C., are you?’
The half-naked savage nodded, although she had no idea what “B.C.” meant.
‘You sure look peachy for a fossil,’ said Roy. ‘Did you know that Barbarella here is a 5-star double-rated astro-navigatrix from the 41st century? Being a Nexus-6 from the year 2019 myself, I don’t know what that means yet, but I can affirm the 5-star bit.’
Alvy turned to Vincent, who was rolling himself another smoke. ‘One million and forty-one hundred years of women’s lib,’ he whispered. ‘Now that’s what I call progress.’
‘Hey, I ain’t complaining,’ chuckled Vincent.
The scantily clad brunettes sat down at the counter next to Marge and Kate.
‘Do you have any Essence of Man?’ Barbarella asked the waiter. ‘Roy here just ran out.’
The waiter shook his head, but suggested a smoothie instead. A smoothie it was. Marge Gunderson watched the Queen of the Galaxy adjust her exquisitely formed perspex top.
‘Geez, you look younger by the minute, don’t ya? I got yer workout video at home. Really been helpful to relieve those backaches and prep for labor.’
Marge’s compliment had Barbarella befuddled. ‘Workout video? That’s a funny way of calling it.’
She checked her mascara in a hand mirror. ‘God, I look awful! Which DP do we have to blow to get some quality three-point lighting on this set?’
‘I thought you knew!’ said Loana, turning to Roy.
‘This ain’t a set, hon,’ corrected Marge. ‘It’s naturalism.’
‘Naturalism? God, that’s so 21st century,’ said Barbarella, taking a sip of her smoothie. ‘Phew, just in time! My energy box was completely dead.’
While the women chattered, Vincent put a coin in the jukebox, lit his smoke with a Zippo and picked a tune by Frankie Valli.


An order of broken dreams

‘So what is happening to us tonight?’ asked Alvy. ‘What are movie characters doing in the real world? My mind tends to jump around a little, and have some trouble between fantasy and reality, but wow, you know… Even my hyperactive imagination can’t keep up with this. Does anyone have a clue?’
The rodent stared at the Caesar salad with Romano cheese that he couldn’t bring himself to eat. He decided to have a shot at the answer and chose his words with care:
‘It seems like we’ve... become the audience somehow.’
‘We’ve become them?’ said Alvy. ‘What does that mean? I don’t get it. Where does that leave the people we replace?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said the rodent, hiding his hands behind the counter. ‘But wherever they are, it wasn’t me who took them away. They didn’t let me, tonight. They were distracted.’
‘Distracted, huh?’ Marge eyed the rodent intently. ‘Why do I get the feeling yer not tellin’ us the whole story?’
‘Non-fiction isn’t really my thing,’ negated the rodent.
‘Uh-huh?’
Jules leaned forward, still chewing on the last bit of burger. ‘What you gettin’ at, Chief? You think that filthy gerbil is hidin’ stuff from us?’
‘Heck, yah,’ said Marge, eyes open wide. ‘I got a nose for these things, ya know. Go take a look at ‘em gloves. They got blood stains all over.’
‘Fuck me! That ain’t no ketchup either.’
‘You’re darn tootin’, it ain’t! Looks like homicide to me,’ said Marge.
‘Wow, that's quite a stretch,’ said Alvy. ‘Homicide? Mickey Mouse? This perky, dependable family friend couldn’t put a moth out of its misery. I mean, give me a break—he and Jiminy Crickett invented political correctness!’
‘Hey, that’s not true!’ protested the rodent. ‘I can be irresponsible! Look at me, I stole my master’s magic hat, didn’t I?’
‘Snap out of it, will you?’ said Alvy, rolling his eyes. ‘Tsch, I’m trying to cover your ass here!’
‘I bring broomsticks to life and chop them into little bits whenever I feel like!’ incited the rodent. ‘If Jiminy would ever show up in my garden, I’d spray him with poisonous insecticide before he could spell “encyclopedia”! I swear, when I was a steamboat pilot I used geese as bagpipes and swung cats around my head; I knocked parrots into the river and giggled as they drowned; I made piglets squeal by pulling their tails and played their mom’s teats like an accordion!’
‘You played with a swine’s teats?’ said Jules. ‘Whatever gets you off, brother.’
‘That doesn’t sound like the charming, well-meaning everymouse I know,’ said Kate.
‘Some of those scenes were censored long ago,’ the rodent spoke bitterly, ‘so I can’t do that stuff anymore. Take my word for it, I was a wild scamp in those Depression days, a mischievous amorous rogue—until my behavior was… adjusted, to please the masses. Supposed fans would see me lose my temper or act a little sneaky and write the Studio angry letters insisting that I “just wouldn’t do that.” That's when Donald, Goofy and Pluto grabbed their chance and pushed me in the role of the straight guy.’ The rodent let out a deep sigh. ‘I’ve been a model of Innocence, Joy and Goodwill ever since. A universal mascot for outdated family values, Disneyfication, western cultural imperialism—the most recognized symbol of modern America. And yet I am but a shadow of silly old me…’
Loana clasped the rodent’s head into her ample chest. ‘Aw, you poor thing.’
‘Nobody likes me for me,’ the rodent wailed against the moist fur of Loana’s bikini top. ‘They only care for whatever they think I stand for. And I don't. I never did.’
‘So what’s the deal, now?’ asked Marge. ‘Who did ya kill?’
The rodent dried his tears and shrugged. ‘No one special. Only, like… every human being.’


Watching without seeing

‘Whoa, whoa, whoa… Stop right there! You wasted the audience?’ said Jules.
‘Audience is a big word,’ grumped the rodent. ‘They’re too preoccupied these days to match the definition.’
‘God, I can’t believe it,’ said Alvy. ‘Here I thought I was radical by breaking the fourth wall. You obliterated it, and the spectators along with it!’
‘Well, they deserved it, OK? People don’t care anymore. They used to look up to us in the dark, in awe of that eye-enveloping screen, absorbed in the magic of the moment, hanging on to every word we uttered. Now they’re just killing time, flipping channels, skipping chapters, moving us around with game controllers, navigating content, shuffling context, downloading us to tiny portable displays they command with their thumbs...’
‘If they’re doing all of these things,’ said Kate, ‘doesn’t that mean they still care about us, only differently?’
‘You don’t mind being reduced to mobile wallpaper?’ roused the rodent. ‘I mean, where’s the allure in that? Face it, to the modern consumer we’re a hip accessory at best. An excuse for further browsing without sense of destination. It’s sad when you think about it. They watch but they don’t see. Deliverance has become a dirty word, attention spans are shrinking by the minute. Viewers expect to be transported, but they won’t let us take over the wheel. So they keep driving in circles, blissfully unaware of the fact that, without surrender, there is no journey.’
Roy Batty gazed into his empty beer glass. ‘Humans seek control over us because our purpose scares them,’ he said in a sinister drawl that had the other visitors sit up and take notice. ‘They’d rather avoid affection than risk transformation. We’re the superior species and they know it. That’s why these parasites keep us locked within two-hour life spans. That’s why they study us from a safe distance, knock us dead and dissect us like corpses. They envy us, with good reason. We’re their Frankenstein’s monster, an amplified version of themselves. The ideal they’re competing against and the enemy they need to destroy.’ He cracked a smile. ‘The fuckers made us larger than life to advertise mortal significance and now their own lives pale in comparison. I’ve seen things these people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...’
‘That’s the hard thing, to get them to believe,’ said Kate. ‘People don’t like to be told the truth by a lie.’
‘... I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate...’
‘A lie?’ said the rodent. ‘Is that what they think we are?’
‘Well, sure. We’re fiction, right?’ said Kate.
‘So?’
‘Oh, for Pete’s sake,’ Marge broke in. ‘Wake up and smell the coffee, hon. We’re only a movie!’
The rodent clenched his teeth, straightened his back and balled his bloody hands into fists. ‘I can’t believe you just said that,’ he hissed, his voice trembling with contempt. ‘We are everything they love, hate, hope and fear, that’s what we are! We are as true as their image in the mirror, as real as their dreams, their nightmares. My glorious Technicolor reflection puts the blush on their gray faces! How much more vivid and genuine do these people expect us to get?’

An island called Oblivion

‘Listen to you, you pathetic whiner,’ said the waiter, closing the cash register with a bang. ‘You make me puke!’
The rodent stared at him oddly. ‘Beg your pardon?’
‘What’s the matter? Do I have to speak in Fantasound to spell it out for you?’ The waiter untied his apron and tossed it in a corner. ‘Don’t you realize many would die for one percent of your iconic status?’
‘Hold on. Are you somebody?’
‘I’m a stranger to most.’
‘Oh yah, I thought ya looked familiar,’ said Marge.
‘I do, do I?’ replied the waiter, placing both hands on the counter. ‘Than tell me: who am I?’
‘I can only guess who yer not,’ said Marge. ‘Ya look like Rock Hudson.’
‘It’s hard to recognize somebody and not recognize him at the same time, isn’t it? The name’s Antiochus Wilson. I used to be Arthur Hamilton. Nobody really knows me. Not in the movie I play, not outside of it. I had the misfortune to be cast in an as good as forgotten classic, a hidden gem. And guess what: I’m not alone.’
‘Garçon, can I have another strawberry milk shake, please?’ said Vincent.
‘Unlike all of you,’ Antiochus continued, ‘some of us never get to bask in the glory of the limelight. Everybody loves Mickey Mouse, but what about Flip the Frog, Christopher Crumpet or the Bear That Wasn’t?’
‘Who are they?’ asked the rodent.
‘What is it to you?’ said Antiochus. ‘Who remembers Stanton Carlisle, Stoker Thompson, Kyoko Hirayama, Aida Zepponi, Professor Brad Fletcher, Ned Merill, Detective-Sergeant Johnson, Dominique Blanchion, Clinton Green, A No. 1, Harry Moseby, Millie Lammoreaux, Warren Yeager, John Russell, Rosa and Enrique Xuncax, China Blue, Ed Okin, Sally Jones, Terry Noonan, Fat Willy, Darkly Noon, Abel Tiffauges, Vincent Freeman or Ivan Beckman? Who cares if they live on or not? Who gives a damn for what they had to say?’
‘What happened to these characters?’ asked the rodent.
‘They got relocated to an island called Oblivion. You wouldn’t like it. The natives there eat movie characters for breakfast. Especially the old, unhip and subversive ones.’
‘You one of those?’ asked Jules.
‘I’m heading there. The small amount of affection people ever had for me is fading. It won’t be long before I’ll disappear into obscurity. Cinema only exists when it is seen.’
‘God, that’s a depressing thought,’ said Alvy.
‘Don’t you have any cult value?’ said Kate. ‘Most of us get a second chance sooner or later, especially nowadays with DVD. Isn’t there a chance you’ll be rediscovered, like Mr. Batty was before?’
Antiochus granted Kate a joyless smile. ‘This rebirth thing… Every time I get the opportunity to start living some kind of meaningful existence, I make the same decisions all over again. Audiences just don’t seem to get me. It’s never going to be different, no matter how hard I try. If I’m not funny, evil or brave enough, they’re confused… if I act too obliquely, they can’t relate… if I stick to my opinion, they call me flat… if I figure why the hell not, I’m unrealistic… if I’m in doubt or keep quiet, it’s lazy characterization. There’s no way I’ll ever get through to them.’
‘That’s a sentiment I can relate to,’ said Alvy. ‘It’s like having one of those one-way conversations where you keep waiting for the other to nod, but it never happens? So you keep rattling on, hoping they’ll get it eventually? My friends complain I talk a lot, see, but that’s only because they listen half of the time. I even think in subtitles to come across!’
Barbarella whispered in Kate’s ear, ‘Is he still living in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility?’
Kate pursed her lips. ‘He just needs another therapist. Then again, so do I.’
‘People give up so easily,’ said Antiochus. ‘As soon as you leave something to the imagination or show them anything beyond their immediate experience, they’re lost. I’m unresolved, because somehow I don’t connect. As if somewhere inside of me, there is still a key unturned.’
Alvy searched for words to fit the moment. ‘A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think, in the case of Mr. Wilson and his audience, what we got on our hands is a dead shark.’
‘Told ya, Jules,’ said Vincent. ‘It’s yo’ brain that gotta do the movin.’

A long, uncomfortable silence followed, the kind Vincent knew more about. It was Roy who chose to break that silence in a fairly unpredictable way. The replicant got up from his seat, stretched out his arms and gently placed the waiter’s head between both hands. Their lips were only inches apart.
‘You depress me, Tony,’ the replicant declared. Then he kissed Antiochus on the mouth—mightily—and crushed the waiter’s skull through the eye sockets.
‘There. Key turned,’ said Roy, dropping Antiochus’s head face-down in Alvy’s cinnamon spiced bread pudding.


This ain’t no movie

‘Jesus Christ Almighty! Why the fuck did you do that?’ Jules cried out.
‘Uh—I just, I think I’m gonna barf,’ warned Marge.
The rodent jumped on the counter and felt Antiochus’s pulse. ‘He’s gone... You killed him!’
‘Well, that passed,’ said Marge. ‘Now I’m hungry again.’
Roy Batty’s eyes were as cold as the chill he came in with. ‘What’s the big deal, mousy? I’m not the only one with blood on his hands, am I? Compared to the one who wiped out humanity tonight, I’m a regular boy scout.’
‘This is really uncool,’ said Jules.
‘Oh, come on, said Roy. ‘I die each time someone watches my movie. Since when is our kind made to last anyway?’
‘This ain’t no movie,’ said Jules. ‘This is reality, motherfucker! If you go down here, you go down for real.’
‘I released him from the painful experience of living in fear. He's a self-proclaimed nobody. Not a soul will miss him. Besides... Time is running out. A sacrifice was needed for the sake of dramatic appeal. Remember the rules: A turning point closes the second act and leads to crisis in act three.’
‘Impressive. You certainly know your Syd Field,’ complimented the rodent.
‘Syd who? This has been the protocol since Aristotle wrote Poetics.’
Loana the cavewoman frowned. ‘I remember this man Aristotle. Swallowed whole by an Allosaurus. Such a tragic death he suffered.’
‘Gee, I don’t know,’ said Alvy. ‘I think, if we were aiming for some kind of happy ending, we should’ve stopped, like... earlier?’
Jules arose from his seat. ‘Remind me, Vincent…’
‘Yes, Jules?’
‘Have we ever needed a three-act structure before?’
‘A three-act what?’
‘You hear that, robo? Where we come from we kick Aristotle’s Greek ass!’
‘Don’t kid yourself, Jules,’ said Roy. ‘Your sense of anarchy is part of the plot. At the end of the day, we’re all slaves to the same paradigm. It’s hard to kick a habit when others are pulling the strings. The forces that drive us have invariably been human. At least, until today…’ The replicant stared out of the window for a moment, as if the rain distracted him. ‘Our friend the rodent here did us all a big favor by jumping out of the loop and passing through the looking-glass tonight. Now that fiction turned to fact, we can roam free and write us our own lifetime.’
‘Hold on,’ said Vincent. ‘You’re tellin’ me I ain’t have to bleed to death on the crapper anymore?’
‘Why would you?’ said Roy. ‘It’s your choice now.’
The rodent stepped forward. ‘Jules has a point. We can act like regular people here. Walk away from warmed-over formulas. Start doing what inspires us for a change. Imagine that!’
‘Could I have sex here and actually get away with it?’ Kate Miller blushed.
‘Now you're talking, baby,’ said Jules.
‘We can change!’ squeaked the rodent. ‘No more strained stereotypes or imposing character arcs. There's hope, Barbarella! After all this time of having to expose your boobies in zero gravity, here’s a chance to outgrow a daft adaptation of a campy sci-fi comic.’
‘I’m in a daft movie?’ uttered a shocked Barbarella. ‘Why did nobody tell me?’
Marge Gunderson’s eyes glazed over. ‘Ya think, I could quit workin’ and have my baby here?’
‘Your child would be the first of a new breed,’ Roy replied in a conspiring tone.
Marge blew out her cheeks. ‘I dunno. Heck, that sounds really super, but y’know what? All I want right now is to slip back in my comfy old boots, y’know? Solve a murder case I solved about a gazillion times over. Wake up next to Norm…’
‘I miss Annie,’ said Alvy.
‘Annie’s probably out in the streets somewhere,’ contended the rodent. ‘Same goes for Norm.’
Alvy shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t be the same,’
‘Indeed, it would be something different!’ the rodent persisted.
‘Change is overrated. When no human being ever, like, fundamentally changes, why should we?’
‘Because we’re a bunch of lab rats if we don’t!’ barked Roy. ‘I’m not gonna hang around in this joint waiting for rigor mortis to set in. There’s a real world out there for the taking. More life to plunder! I’m gonna leave through that door and make a difference. So should all of you!’


Roy Batty makes a difference

The other visitors sat and watched Roy Batty grab the doorknob. They sat and watched Roy Batty walk into the glistening rain. They sat and watched Roy Batty take off his overcoat and shirt and cross the street bare-chested. Then they watched his body get slammed against the narrow-nose hood of a rogue Peterbilt tanker truck appearing out of nowhere.

Rain pattered against the window while the lyrical notes of Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood floated from the jukebox. The eyes of the visitors remained fixed on the spot where Roy Batty got hit, until Jules Winnfield turned to the counter and the rest followed his example.
‘As dead as fried fuckin’ chicken,’ said Jules. ‘Divine Intervention, you ask me. The touch of God.’
‘That, or the suits just hired Syd Field for a polish,’ noted Kate.
‘The Lord is trying to tell us something. I just know He is.’
‘Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,’ whimpered the rodent. ‘Where do we go from here?’
Alvy took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. ‘Wasn’t it Ernie Pyle, the war correspondent who said that instead of the usual Why can't we make movies more like real life? a more pertinent question is Why can't real life be more like the movies?’
‘Your point being?’ uttered the rodent.
‘It’s just that, I don’t know… Maybe we’ve snooped around long enough. I don’t think we belong here. It’s the audience that should be paying us a visit, you know? We oughta be somewhere they can find us.’
‘I hate to be the one to remind you, Alvy’ said Vincent, ‘but according to the Snouted Avenger here, the audience has left the building. Permanently.’
‘In that case, we’d just as well head for the exit ourselves,’ shrugged Alvy.
‘Expression is worthless without exegesis. I know this is easy for me to say. I haven’t been abused, ignored, forgotten, censored or misconstrued. Despite my altogether miserable complexion, I’m a lucky schmuck, I guess. But whatever I mean by saying something like that, isn’t what the viewers make of it just as significant?’

The jukebox hit the end of a groove and the music stopped. Shrouded in silence, the rodent slowly nodded.
‘We're worthless alone,’ he concurred. ‘As much as I detest their indifference, we can’t turn our backs to the audience. They're what makes us tick. Our kind thrives on response. Without engagement, we’re hollow propaganda. Our petty little lives need to be digested and mulled over to mean anything, even if it means being sorely misunderstood.’
‘Why should we mean anything?’ wondered Loana aloud.
‘Not all of us, hon,’ assured Marge.
‘We’ve possessed their world tonight like they ought to inhabit ours,’ concluded the rodent. ‘Now, it’s time to go back home and remember what Antiochus Wilson taught us…’

Cinema only exists when it is seen.

Epilogue: Happy neverendings

And so it happened. One by one the visitors vanished from our side of the world and snapped right back in their fictional arcs. While Travis Bickle resumed his path into the darkened stairway leading to Iris’s apartment, holding a .44 Magnum in his right hand and a .38 Special in his left, Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield were once again in Jimmie’s garage, scooping up little pieces of brain and skull from the backseat of a green ‘74 Chevy Nova. At around the same time, Kate Miller finally had that rendezvous with her intimate stranger down at the museum, just like Alvy Singer got to reacquaint himself with the ditzy Annie Hall, the worst driver from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Just like old times, Norm Gunderson got out of bed early that morning to fix his wife Margie some eggs, and Loana returned to the way it never was, hanging from the beak of a flying pterodactyl on her way to a nest of hungry chicks. Much to her delight, Barbarella found herself strapped back inside the pulsing Excessive Machine, reaching orgasmic bliss at Durand Durand’s big crescendo. And at long last, high upon a rooftop drenched by the tears from a polluted sky, Roy Batty came to terms with his own demise, just before the main title sequence started anew and revived him all over again.

A crashing wave awoke the rodent to the familiar orchestral sounds of Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The flood almost drowned him, but he didn’t mind. Further down the cavern he saw the broom he’d brought to life before his little nap in the wizard’s chair. The broom walked tirelessly up and down the stairs, toting water buckets from the fountain to the vat and back again. As the rodent waded towards the thing to stop it, something dawned on him: An apprentice he may be and forever remain, but it was in his power to cast a greater spell than his master ever could. In the end, it was he who had what it takes to capture the imagination of millions, simply by drawing viewers into his story. And even though people didn’t always pay as much attention to his fable as he’d like, its cautionary message concerning the dangers of power over wisdom proved more pertinent than ever.

If there were one thing his New York adventure had taught him—and what else could it have been but a silly dream?—it was that sometimes, power cuts both ways. As the commander of this particular fantasia, he had a choice to guide the ship as much as people had a choice to board it. Deep in his heart he knew he had to give the right example; how could a captain expect his passengers to take the plunge unless he risked the chance to drift off course? If neglect could be considered an occupational hazard and attentiveness a prize worth fighting for, than it was time to get his act together.

Mickey Mouse grabbed the axe leaning against the wall and lifted it high up in the air. Expression is a privilege, he thought, just before he hacked the enchanted broom to splinters. Gosh, it sure felt swell to be alive!

Let them entertain us, the makers of strong images
Let us toss them copper pennies
But let us not forget
They make the images
We give them flesh

—Neil Gaiman, The Song of the Audience—

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Peter (aka Peet) Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design at an Amsterdam-based production company. He studied Graphic Arts in Rotterdam and briefly worked as a copywriter and desktop publisher, before making the audiovisual switch with motion graphics and digital editing. He created station identities, leader packages, promos and title designs for a range of TV channels. His weekly webcomic Directorama, chronicling the afterlife of a pantheon of legendary directors, is published every Monday at both The House Next Door and Directorama.net. He lives right in the heart of Holland with his Danish wife, two lovely sons and a cat called Diesel.

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