Intentional Lunacy: Duck Amuck

Post-modern commentary or above-average cartoon?

Circus of Life: Lola Montes

An interesting life does not always a great film make. Eliza Rosanna Gilbert was born in Limerick, Ireland, some time between 1818 and 1823, depending on your source. Married at age 16 to an English army officer, she disgraced herself by performing Spanish dance numbers under the name Lola Montez. Scandal would become second nature to Lola (a name she assumed for the remainder of her life), as she became courtesan to many of Europe's political and intellectual elite, including Franz Liszt, Alexander Dumas and, finally, King Ludwig I of Bavaria. This last affair led to a minor insurrection against the king, and Lola's eventual exile to the United States. There she re-married (her third or fourth, again, depending on who you believe) and lived out her days performing her renowned "Spider Dance".

Montez was a woman for whom "life was a movement", whose truth and beauty were power and lust, an object of desire whose romantic games eventually collapsed inwards, leaving her lonely and penniless. Who better to dramatize Lola's life (and the requisite social commentary therein) than Max Ophuls, at cinema's greatest critic of all things elegant and refined. His final film, Lola Montes, takes the sort of artistic license only possible with the most minor of historical figures. He places his Lola in a traveling circus, doomed to live out her loves and losses each night before a paying crowd of boorish Americans. Models of European opera houses symbolize her faded glory; a trapeze act represents her risky yet thrilling rise to power. As she struts and preens for her lowbrow audience, and carnival barker Peter Ustinov waxes on her equal desires towards love and money, Lola remembers her life in (slightly) more realistic flashbacks.

Ophuls was known for his opulent style, achieved through endless tracking shots and slow-pans. Montes is his only film that adds to his bag of tricks with Cinemascope and Technicolor. If the audience were only presented with the flashbacks, Lola Montes might live on with the great romantic epics like Dr. Zhivago. However, Ophuls emphasizes the subjectivity of Lola's memory with the harsh, over-saturated scenes in the circus tent, which play like a cheap, nightmarish version of The Red Shoes. There are no exteriors in the circus framing device, the unbearable present - the tent is Lola's coffin, Ustinov her eulogist.  

The film even makes the best of its shortcomings - most notable the wooden Carol Martine in the title role. Ophuls was forced to accept the French soap star by his financiers, rather than a more expressive actress like Danielle Darrieux or Jeanne Moreau. However, an object playing an object suits the film well, and rather than making a realist work, scenes with an identical Martine playing Lola at 16 and then 34 transform Montes into an idyllic memory. We are separated from her entirely, forced to look upon her as all those suitors did. We forget that she is a courtesan, the awful places she's been and things she's done, if only to enjoy that form for an instant. Lola, too, had to shut out what was before her eyes, and remember her happier past.

And what of those bygone days? Are the Circus Master's boasts all fiction? Ophuls certainly has his share of fun, as one character notes "five minutes alone with that woman is enough to start a rumor". These five minutes may have been enough for Liszt to be immortalized in cinema (the actual historical record is inconclusive on the possible affair). I committed the same sin in the opening paragaph, leading with the myth that might draw the viewer in, rather than responsible journalism. Lola Montes seeks to remind us of degrees of truth; the fact is that she was married, and while Ustinov claims it a fleeting bit of heaven, Ophuls depicts an abusive and destructive passage that formed Montez' approach to men for the rest of her life. Three distinct takes, with only a drop of truth to each.

The film does believe in one relationship; that with Ludwig, played with wit and panache by Anton Walbrook. Decades older than his Lola, he seems pleased just in her presence, carnal desires aside. In the stage show, the audience is beset on all sides by crowns and images of Lola as queen (she was in fact made a Countess in Bavaria). This is the most romantic, the most royal, of Montez' escapades, and it is in no one's interest, from the circus to the silver screen, to undermine it. It is Ludwig, and his obsession with Lola, that led to several paintings (more fabrications) and the near overthrow of his rule, that gets this average dancer and abhorrent singer her place in books and stories. The king and his desire, both long dead, create the line of spectators Ophuls settles on in his final shot. The camera tracks farther and father back, and soon we are just another chump in the line, waiting for our chance to kiss Lola's hand. As beautiful and short-lived as she may have been, her story is certainly not.

The Naked City

In Metropolis, society has been streamlined into one vertically-integrated corporation. Everything is more efficient, and everyone is a little less human. The result is an ongoing war: between the present and the past, the rich and the poor, science and religion, man and his Maker. It is not a subtle film. Over 80 years since its original release, Fritz Lang's masterpiece has returned to the screen, this time with over 25 minutes of footage discovered in 2008, and once presumed lost forever. At once Marxist fable, religious allegory, and thrilling adventure, audiences can finally experience Metropolis as it was intended: one of the greatest epics of all time.

The film is as much time capsule as it is narrative; from the opening credits we see the remnants of 20s Europe: garish art deco design and oppressively complex machinery. Though it depicts a world distant from our own, Metropolis was not pure fantasy; it was grounded in the principles of futurism. Lang did not have to look far to find his nightmarishly modern architecture or standardized timepieces - the wheels of change were already turning in a recovering Europe. He merely accelerated them. The conflict between workers and masters depicted in the climax would have been all to familiar to continental audiences of the time; Stalin was changing Russia and National Socialism was just around the corner (something Lang would touch on in later films). Referring to the lower classes as "the hands" and the upper classes as "the brains", Metropolis returns to one mantra over and over: "Between the head and hands the mediator must be the heart!" This message struck a chord with Joseph Goebbels, who later paraphrased it in speeches.

That mediator is Freder, prince of the city (his father Joh Frederson, is the autocrat who founded Metropolis), an urban bourgeoisie who wanders underground one day to find workers being treated like animals. He pleads for his father's mercy on their behalf, but is sent away. In order to learn more, he switches places with the unnamed worker #11811, and soon falls in love with a beautiful girl names Maria who preaches to the downtrodden masses. Rather than encouraging violence against Frederson and the other profiteers in their skyscrapers, Maria preaches patience. To bolster her message, she retells the story of Babel as a worker's uprising, one which ultimately left both hands and brains ruined.

This Marxist twist on the Bible always seemed a little out of place in Lang's ouvre; that is, in the 124-minute version most of us have seen (it was shown as short as 90 minutes in the U.S.). The circumscribed anecdote about Babel was a spiritual oasis in a film about the future and the imminent rise of machine-men. However, the found footage helps put the Babel sequence, and Maria's religious fervor in larger context.  Previously the hands were Grot, operator of the Heart Machine, and the brains were Frederson, cold tactician, linked by the heart in Freder. In Lang's full version, which features the seven deadly sins, readings from Revelations, and even a modern whore of Baylon, these anatomical features symbolize much more than specific characters. The hands are man's animal instinct and strength; the brain his reasoning and ingenuity; and now the heart comes to symbolize that zeal or religiosity thought necessary by thinkers from Socrates to Tocqueville as the essential motive force of a productive civilization. It's an awfully compassionate message for a German film about a mechanized future.

Of course there is mechanization to be found in Metropolis, though it may emanate from an anachronistic little farmhouse squeezed into the center of the city. There lives Rotwang, the power behind Frederson's throne, a half-mad scientist on the verge of an earth-shattering breakthrough: the Machine-man (or woman). If you haven't seen Metropolis in a while, this  is probably what you most remember: a Christopher Lloyd-haired Rudolph Klein-Rogge giving life to a replicant that resembles C-3PO more than a little bit. Frederson orders Rotwang to lend Maria's likeness to the Machine-man, and soon it is seducing high society with her gyrations. Though she has a sexual appeal to those with the time for earthly delights, the Machine-Maria is not a woman but a messiah to those in the lower depths, soon leading a riot that destroys the machine district, and nearly the entire city. While Freder lies bedridden with apocalyptic visions, Rotwang makes them manifest, and the film comes to a head when the mediator and the man of science run amok face off on the roof of a church.

It is curious that in a film that prefigures works like 1984 and Brazil, it is Rotwang, and not Frederson, who is ultimately the villain. While the opening sequences depicting the skyline and the modernity of the city must have mesmerized audiences, Lang meant to terrify them; Metropolis is about the inevitability of the future, and the danger is poses to our very humanity. Frederson is not to blame; no matter how far technology advances or recedes, there will always be bosses. Rather, it is the men like Rotwang, who hold the true key to the direction of civilization; even when benevolent, like Einstein, they are capable of immense destruction. Metropolis, a prescient work when it was made, is still and informative and enthralling experience.

De Palma's Better Days

As long as I've watched movies, the allure of Brian De Palma has escaped me. Forever to be mentioned in the same breath as Coppola and Scorsese, De Palma is, to some critics, a groundbreaking visual artist, a master of montage, a national treasure. I remember lining up for Mission Impossible as an impressionable 9-year-old, getting my Tom Cruise on. I vaguely remember seeing Snake Eyes on Showtime and Femme Fatale on Cinemax, but it would be hard to call any of the recent De Palma memorable. Nudity, sure. Thrills? You bet your ass. His admirers always compared him to Hitchcock - in his declining years the comparison was hard to see. Take a step back to the 80s, when De Palma scored mainstream dramas like Scarface and The Untouchables, he seemed like a hack who couldn't work with actors, obsessed with violence and little more.

There's one forum where those attributes pay dividends: B-movies, specifically thriller and horror. Before he had budgets, acclaim or box-office golden boys like Kevin Costner, Brian De Palma had little more than a bucket of fake blood and a 16mm camera. The films he produced were short, gritty, and voyeuristic. Without too much alteration, De Palma brought the trump l'oeil of sexuality and fear perfected by Hitchcock into the godless, paranoid Nixon-era; the classic noir turned disgusting, making us jump from our seat while never quite leaving reality. He might have done quite well with the Saw series.  

Of course, Saw and like-minded gross-out schlock might not exist without De Palma. His 1973 film Sisters sits perfectly between old school Val Lewton's Cat People and new school David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. Margot Kidder plays identical, separated Siamese twins, one (or possibly both) of which are prone to homicidal outbursts. When a nosy neighbor sees her hacking apart a gentleman caller, the police are called and an investigation into her checkered past initiated. Replete with an evil doctor, brainwashing and donut-munching detectives, Sisters is a psychological slasher film that doesn't play by the rules.

What sets the film apart from similarly low-brow midnight movies is its framing device. Sisters opens with a 4 minute long clip of a game show where contestants' morality is tested by seeing if they will watch a blind woman undress in a gym locker room. The show might as well be called Voyeur and be hosted by Hitchcock himself. It turns out the man watching and the woman undressing will come from behind the television screen and be our main characters - but this is certainly a strange introduction. From the gloss of 70s broadcast television to the histrionics of a beautiful murderess - Sisters whets the audience's appetite for sex, then flushes it with violence.

Flash forward to 1984, Body Double, wherein Nick Skully peers at a gyrating woman through a telescope, night after night, developing an obsession, only to see her murdered. De Palma loved Hitchcock, but he hated the illusion of elegancce or polish present in so many of the master's films. In terms of plot, Body Double is a very minor variation on Vertigo, but in terms of tone and style, the two films couldn't be further apart. Shifting the action from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and the protagonist from a retired police officer to an out of work actor makes the movie insignificant and hilarious.

So this was De Palma's allure all along. He knows the grammar and tropes of suspense - but he uses them to lighten the mood rather than intensify it. Skully wanders around Los Angeles following this woman he barely knows; he chases her through a mall for no reaosn, then smells a pair of her underwear as a punchline. When the finally do meet face to face, he embraces her in a minute long makeout session, the camera flying around them like the end of Gone with the Wind - then, she disappears without a trace. He never lets us forget for a second our experience in the theater is mitigated by the camera eye; in other words, taking anything seriously would be fooling ourselves.

So if he was so good at the splash of blood, the casual nudity, the comical portrayal of the entertainment industry, why did the studios enlist De Palma to do anything else? Why the clanking mess that is Scarface? Or The Untouchables, which only finds its feet in the masterful action sequences? Dramas are too weighty, too substantial, and ultimately too slow for an artist with De Palma's aesthetic concerns - sex and violence, period. Giving him Al Pacino would be like giving Martin Scorsese Jack Black. And awful mess. You know, now that I think about all of this, Snake Eyes might be a great movie.

The Vault #55: Gone Baby Gone

Dennis Lehane has enjoyed quite a decade. His novels Mystic River and Shutter Island were optioned and adapted by two living legend directors, and he chipped in on The Wire, widely acknowledged as television's crowning achievement. These works, however, have given us a bland, assimilated version of the Boston writer's take on criminality, corruption and the nightmarish past. It takes a Southie to know a Southie, so perhaps it should not come as a surprise that Gone Baby Gone is the best (and fittingly, most under-appreciated) Lehane project to date.

On the other hand, the last ten years have seen Ben Affleck has suffer a precipitous fall from Hollywood golden boy to the snickering stoner in last year's Extract. Who am I kidding - Ben Affleck has never been in a good movie where he was of any importance (this excludes his small but memorable role in Dazed and Confused). When you win an Oscar at 27, starting dating J.Lo and root for the Red Sox, you're on the fastest possible track to everyone in America wanting to throttle you. After sleepwalking through instant classics like Paycheck and Clerks II, Affleck finally got the chance to go back to his native Boston, and with a phenomenal script to boot. Hoping to capitalize off of the obvious Good Will Hunting connection, the studio picked Affleck to direct the latest in the recent stream of "gritty Boston dramas" , with this his only previous directing credit.

There's no question Affleck's Boston feels more real than the histrionics of Mystic River. The film opens and closes with "real people" - essentially footage stolen from the stoops of Dorchester. It helps that Ben has a fellow Beantown native in the starring role: his brother, Casey, plays Patrick Kenzie, a small-time private eye. He's brought into a child abduction case to deal with the "neighborhood aspect" of the case. He's is the sort of borderline individual needed to get information out of those hoods and addicts unwilling to speak to the police. A classic film noir setup, but with one crucial difference; our hero isn't a compromised or damned character - in fact, he's the only one willing to do any good.

Police chief Morgan Freeman is in it for absolution; career detective Ed Harris just wants to crack a skull; and the little girl's mother, played by Wire vet Amy Ryan, is a drug addict who sobers up in time for the news cameras. As the film's only moral agent, Patrick's motivations are as Catholic as the dirt-poor Irish neighborhood the film calls home; his guilt drives him to bring the family back together, no matter what that may mean for little Amanda. Casey Affleck is perfect for this part; he's not an alpha-male movie star like Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon. We feel his uncertainty and misgivings though his uneasy smile, soft voice and weak physical appearance.

As important as Kenzie and his mixed emotions are to the story, facing the dilemma of returning an innocent child to an abusive and drug-addled parent, Ryan, as that parent, crystallizes the themes even further. She embodies grimy Beantown itself - what all these other films have skirted around without attacking head-on. Boston might have Paul Revere, Tom Brady and Harvard, but it's also home to some of the worst urban poverty in America; drug trafficking and racial tension are just as much a part of its history as the Revolution. The reason why Gone Baby Gone succeeds where others have failed is it shows the place as it is, warts and all; it takes native Ben Affleck to cut through the glorified image. He brings the feel of the place to us through Patrick, who sees how awful his surroundings are, yet has no intention of leaving. Home is where the heart is; like Freeman in another movie about urban decay eating away at morality, he'll be around.

And Scene - Fellini's Hypnotist

Few directors' careers have as clear a through-line as that of Federico Fellini.  Starting off as a writer for neorealist master Roberto Rosselini, his first films dealt with topical subjects in everyday Italian life (parent-child relationships in I, Vitelloni; the church's influence in La Strada). Once Fellini was an internationally-acclaimed sensation, he ruminated on his new life in La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2. In decadent middle age, having lost touch with his roots, the master dallied in surrealism and excess with Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon. To put it simply, Fellini's films are a direct window into his pysche - we can see what was on his mind at any given point in his career.

Life as a circus, the transcendence of dreams, the naivete and beauty of the fairer sex - Fellini's pet themes are all touched upon in Nights of Cabiria (1957), at one particular moment. The scene in which Cabiria (Giulietta Masina) is hypnotized and fooled into thinking she has found a rich suitor summarizes everything Fellini had to say about life and filmmaking in a single metaphor. A prostitute shunned by one pimp and looking for another, or ideally a man who will treat her right, Cabiria's only genuine moment of happiness and release occurs in a waking dream:

Filmgoers are used to dream sequences being presented as real, and then the illusion destroyed. Instead of having Cabiria have a proper fantasy and then awake (as in a more conventional movie), Fellini uses the magician and his rude crowd to mock her. Cabiria is on display in the theater, doubling her appearance for us on the screen - here Fellini is giving us the option to agree with the crowd or pity his poor heroine.

It's a choice between the character's fantasy and the crushing reality - essentially what Fellini presents us in each of his films. We can slip into his slanted, cartoonish world, or accept the hard truths around us. Cabiria ends this film smiling at us (laugh and world laughs with you), making the director's choice clear. However, it is earlier, on the stage, that she faces the real test. She leaves the theater crying - but it doesn't last long. As misdirected and unrealistic as our dreams might be, and as absurd as the world might view them, Nights of Cabiria stresses the importance of a goal, an apex to strive towards. Whether we make it or not, or whether it may just be a conjurer's trick, to each of us the heights are very real.

Two Girls One Centipede

Tension and drama in the horror genre tends to originate from irrational sources. In The Shining and Halloween, a crazy person is set loose; Nightmare on Elm Street posits death lurks in our own subconscious; George Romero relied on armies of powerful, undead cannibals. The scariest of all villains, however, is the one that can scheme and reason, unleashing a new, original flavor of evil. Most recently, Saw has given us a killer trying to teach us a lesson, and using human flesh as his chalkboard. This idea is not particularly new - the mad scientist often thinks he is helping humanity as a whole. In Tom Six's The Human Centipede, however, Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser) has no such wishes for society; his insane plan serves him and him alone.

Jenny and Lindsey (played, if you can believe this, by actresses named Ashley and Ashlynn) play American 20-something traveling in Europe. One night on the way to a club, they get a flat tire, and after spurning the sexual advances of an overweight passerby, make their way through the woods to the home of Dr. Heiter. The coeds jump from soft-core porn setup straight into waking nightmare as they are drugged, strapped to hospital beds, and informed they will soon be part of a revolutionary experiment, along with fellow hostage Katsuro (a fiery, subtitled performance by Akihiro Kitamura). Dr. Heiter explains all with considerable charm and excitement, while providing concise visual aids:

One might expect a movie about an insane surgeon to portray Heiter as a Nazi lunatic, or otherwise one-dimensional sketch. However, as much as we are meant to connect with the victims of this diabolical torture, Laser steals the movie. With Katsuro the only one with an intact mouth ranting in Japanese, and the two girls reduced to muffled screams, Heiter gives us the majority of the emotion, from initial glee to clinical disappointment as the experiment reaches its logical conclusion. We actually feel for the guy; he did, after all, only start in on humans because his "three-hound" met its untimely demise. He makes the centipede not to teach a lesson or prove his prowess as a surgeon; he just wants a pet.

Earlier this year, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island violated B-movie rule #1: get to the point. Not so with The Human Centipede. Forty minutes in, the characters are sewn together; twenty minutes after that, the cops show up at Heiter's door to ask about missing persons. One unique and funny aspect of Centipede is how little precaution the doctor takes in his plan - he has no way to conceal what he's been up to - the jig is up before he even gets to have any fun. Soon, Six plunges us into a breathless action sequence of the centipede attempting to escape, as painful as rapid movement may be. This sequence, helmed by the overzealous Kitamura, recalls the uberweird torture-porn of Takashi Miike (and no doubt on purpose). Hunted by the lithe movements of the cat-like Laser, the humans on both sides are reduced to animals, brandishing improvised weapons and screaming their battle-cries.

In the marketing campaign, posters for The Human Centipede assured that the film was "100% medically accurate". Like famed movie sociopath Raymond Lemorne in The Vanishing, Heiter demonstrates what is within the realms of human possibility. He was famous for separating identical twins; to top himself, he tries to put them back together. The reverse of a good deed - that's all evil is.

Seeing those ads, people may have gotten the wrong impression about The Human Centipede - that it was disgusting, shocking and over-the-top. It's really none of those things, simply a concise exploration of a "Siamese triplet", confined to a few days and one psychotic doctor's suburban home. The minimalism of the setting parallel the minimal nature of the surgery - it's not too many steps to turn a mansion into a house of horrors, or three souls into one pulsing freak. It's a good laugh, and it leaves you satisfied. Pulp works on six legs.