The Incredible Melting Marlon (REFLECTION IN A GOLDEN EYE)

"It just occurred to me, you don't believe I want to repent, is that it? Did it ever occur to you that some people might be all repentance and no sin? I may start a mission to help your kind. Come all ye repentants and let us bring a little sin into your lives." -- Sky Masterson (Guys and Dolls)

It's hard to believe the same actor who played Sky Masterson so nimbly in the film version of GUY AND DOLLS would want to suffer through something so repressed as the role of Major Pendleton in REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE (1967). Psychosexually Freudian in the extremis, it's from a time (McCullers wrote it in the 1940s) when there was no 'out' of the closet without beatings and jail time. Repression cooked our great American literature in its egg. The sorrows of life are the joys of art, as Oscar Jaffe would say, and now that we're a lot more socially evolved as a nation, are there really any authors who can crack it wide open like Carson and Tennessee? 

I'd love to love the GOLDEN EYE, as I love most of John Huston's work and it has so many things going for it, but not all Southern Gothic Freudian hothouse pulp has aged as well as as others. The difference between Carson McCullers and her roster of closeted social misfits vs. those of her friend, the great Tennessee Williams, is as sweaty summer when it's too hot to move vs. a cool evening with mint julep and minimal mosquitoes. I'd rather watch Richard Burton swill his way through the scenery in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA for the 37th time than watch Brando soak up the masochistic vapors while his wild stallion wife Liz Taylor (her best line, whispered into Marlon's ear: "Son, were you ever taken out in the street and thrashed by a naked woman?") cavorts with (an equally-unhappily) married (to a bonkers Julie Harris) Lt. Colonel (Brian Keith). Meanwhile a doe-eyed private (Robert Forster) rides naked on her horse and breaks into her room to smell to paw through her underwear while she sleeps. Brando is (of course) in a separate bedroom but he's noticed Forster, and--in his repressed, isolated, sexually frustrated funk, Brando's Major Pendleton mistakes the stalker private's attentions as queer signals towards his own sweaty, obsessive self. Tragedy, of course, ensues. 

There's lots of flustered, coded triangles with old McCullers and her tales of sweaty misbegotten love-starved obsessives, yet for all its litany of perversions and Baby's First Freud symbolism, GOLDEN EYE all rawther airless. The title refers to an idol, unmoving, dead, but all-seeing. Such is the major, or maybe the sun, or, well, you know how dirty double entendres are the very core and existence of the South. Maybe I just don't like it because I was forced to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in high school and it skeeved, depressed, and annoyed me throughout. I felt a great thirst, as if all my senses had dulled so everything tasted like sulfur-vinegar and there was no air conditioning, and maybe I was depressed and skeeved by my English teacher's weird teeth as she made us all read. But maybe aside from that Pavlovian association, I dislike McCullers because there's never an ecstatic, crazy release-- no urinating on Ms. Fellowe's luggage or iguanas, or cathartic moments where all the masks come off, ala Williams' work.

I guess that's probably my bias because I lurve lurve lurve Tennessee Williams, He would have flushed out the mythic connections for Huston, made the thing a wee clearer, so that the mythic dimension vibrant, relevant, alive with cognizance of mortality and archetypal forces kick down a door and let in in a kind of truth beyond reality. For GOLDEN, the mythic 'eye' component seems like an afterthought, something already dead and only briefly unburied before paraded listlessly around the pasture. The story seems to be content with a through-line of horsey-riding sex symbolism that's almost as overwrought and existentially nauseating as EQUUS. 

Any similarity to the hindquarters of a horse is strictly intentional.

It behooves us to remember how the whole Freud analysis thing had swelled to super hugeness in the 50s,  thanks to the the dawn of suburbia, the space race, and the Kinsey Report. Thanks to freedom from their old world parents, the soldiers and wives in the burbs experienced a robust sexual unbridling, as if a field of horses were un-broken and kicked out the fence to run free and trample any cowboy in the way (or so it seems, I wasn't there). Huston embodied that unbridling in real life before but he loved literature and as a director, depended on the kind of writers (like Williams) who had, as he himself had done, faced oblivion via a war, or bullfighting, or whaling, hunting tigers, or guzzling booze, with a careless shrug. Huston needed a soul able to write the kind of gutsy harpoon-in-the-eye-of-god prose for his own wings to come out. McCullers may have suffered terrible illnesses and a lavender marriage but--if you're all closeted and repressed and horny and sober and sweaty in your little Filipino houseboy-molesting, nipple-mutilating, cocktails-and-hysteria fashion--why even bother setting your mess in a military school at all? And if it's not going to heat to a boil and runneth over into lurid murders and mob violence, why stage it in the deep South? Even Lillian Hellman knew to include those touchstones. For EYE, there's not much to suggest more than a low simmer of surface kinkiness, and-- immediately upon boiling--the film concludes with a weird camera movement and the last lines of the novel (I guess?) plastered over everything. 

And why put Marlon Brando in a role that wastes his talents? Where be his thunderous Marc Antony monologue moment? If you go to the Preakness, do you want to see the best horse just stand still and stare longingly at a carrot? Not that Brando's sad little bits of business at the big 'finally, some gay sex' climax aren't brilliantly underplayed, deeply sad, and bitterly hilarious, but they come too late. And then it ends abruptly with a ghastly bit of repetitive panning camera and onscreen text from the book that tries to be horrific and ironic but is just clumsy.

The eye offends thee, no?

The side cast tries their best to humanize these lurid stock types: Julie Harris, a constant scenery-nibbler, plays the wife who cut off her nipples with garden shears (awhile before the film begins), and who engages in god knows what with her weird Filipino houseboy; together they have turned against her cuckolding military husband (but which came first, the infidelity or the reason?). Brian Keith does okay as the indulgent witness and victim of the conspiratorial bond between this female Prospero and her gay Filipino Ariel (he's fine with it as it allows him to scamper off to rendezvous in the hay with Liz). Forster is appropriately inscrutable and smokin' hot as the underwear-sniffing (straight) bareback rider. 

Brando does have one great termite moment: when he's about to give a lecture on Patton to his gathered cavalry cadets. Suddenly the romance and resonance attached to a great cavalryman like Patton sinks into him and he almost cries, right there in class. For a minute it looks like his whole head is melting down like golden psychedelic spiral sludge. His eyes and lips spread out in a horizontal puddle of darkness and his lips pour over the sides like Donald Duck through a very gradual...  steam....   roller.

Oh Sky, if only you opened that mission....

You Desert Rats: PLAY DIRTY, RAID ON ROMMEL

Late May, summer vacation, Memorial Day. a time to embrace the inner WW2 past life veteran. Where were you when you fell? If you had a past life in North Africa, running raids against Rommel's fuel dumps, and maybe died under the treads of Rommel's esteemed Afrika Corps, you will love Netflix streaming, whereon WW2 desert warfare is amply represented.

The tussel with Monty and Rommel has long captivated the cinematic imagination.  On such a flat, harsh, unforgiving playing field, strategy is everything and both sides can get lost just trying to find the front. There are ample opportunities for stealth and skullduggery as front lines are hundreds of miles across. It's where scrappy outlaws and cunning commandos undertake missions where they wear any country's uniform but their own. 

 First: RAID ON ROMMEL (1971) with Richard Burton as a British commando taking out the shore guns of Tobruk. There's some icky misogyny with Danielle De Metz as an anachronistic jet-set Saint Tropez Italian courtesan (see how she's sandwiched in the poster atop), as if the whole movie resents some producer's edict his gold-digging hot model girlfriend be included, and no one bothered to ask her to change into something from the period. There's even a nasty crack about white slavery when she's shot up with heroin, and hip early-70s rage at high gasoline prices, making a great show of exploding fuel dumps and unlucky Germans lit ablaze in the Tobruk night thanks to Burton's ruthlessness with a flame thrower. It's such a mounting orgy of explosions by the end that it starts to resemble some surreal demolitions-porn video. Turns out it's all lifted from an earlier film, one called TOBRUK, in fact. 

PLAY DIRTY (1969) goes for the existential vibe where that's concerned: tire repair, driving stolen trucks up a mountain, weathering a sandstorm, and other SORCERER-waiting-for-Godot-style existential tomfoolery. Michael Caine is the by-the-book officer, Nigel Davenport the hardened cynic, Nigel Green the dissolute, cynical and well-worn Colonel who plans the mission (another fuel dump, by Jove!) Together they shoot unarmed Red Cross workers, (nearly) rape a German nurse, kill innocent bystanders and otherwise commit egregious and unclean deeds in the name of 'the mission.' Also anachronistically, they blare tons of music on the jeep radio like it's goddamned Top 40. The acting is all good but the existential vibe a bit souring. Part of my yen for WW2 movies is that they provide a rare chance for noble Hawksian male camaraderie but PLAY DIRTY denies that fantasy, trying to shoehorn post-1969 Vietnam bitterness into pre-1945 history.

When I see a war movie I want more than the begrudging respect of a few salts and an innocent German nurse nearly raped and then stabbed for no discernible reason. I want more than WAGES OF FEAR-style men in trucks minutiae. Hitler and Japan were the be-all and end all of ruthless evil. We can try to fathom the depths of soullessness we are all capable of, but even the cynical air of the late 1960's-early 70's Vietnam era which infuses both these films can't argue with that level of horror. Why bother souring us on the last chance we ever had to be truly the good guys? There's a time and place where we actually won the war, and no amount of Vietnam disillusion should cloud that up. Sometimes in showing how gritty and vile war is you only show how bitter and jaundiced you are, and PLAY DIRTY alas seems to think rubbing our noses in rotten behavior is a kind of Robert Aldrich shortcut to hip anachronistic CATCH 22-MASH-DIRTY DOZEN relevance. But cynicism should never cut so deep you start biting the hands that hold your tickets. Only on the Military Channel.

The Bleating of the Wallies

A leading scientific journal in Pakistan, The Journal of Management & Social Science,* recently published a paper titled "A New Role for the Military: Preventing Enemies from Arising-Reviving an Ancient Approach to Peace," indicating that the military application of the Transcendental Meditation technique has merit. The paper discusses how militaries worldwide could use the Transcendental Meditation® and TM-Sidhi® program, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, as a non-religious and scientifically verified way to prevent war and terrorism. When used in a military context, these meditation practices are known as Invincible Defense Technology (IDT). (Medical News Today, 3/23/10)

I saw The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) last night, then read the above article this morning. Coincidence? No such thing, my man, but then why do I have the urge to read Catcher in the Rye and go into a black-op black-out with a mission to excise all traces of Ewan McGregor's annoying narrator from the film? Seriously, was TRAINSPOTTING a total fluke? Either way, I'm glad the above article shows that meditation/druggie/hippie mind tactics in the military is not necessarily just the whimsical semi-truth of a trembling yellow (as in cowardly) journalist afraid of a little LSD-spiked water. Ewan's character in the film is the kind of guy I wrote about a few years ago [Kill All Jonesers 11/10/08] in regards to needy biographers and journalists who try to absorb by proxy the glory of their subjects after said subjects are dead or disappeared, even though said subjects have or would have scoffed at them while they were alive. In my day we had many names for them: Jonesers, Wallies, nerds, and Murphs.

Sad that his wife leaves him at the film's start (and who could blame her?), our smug self-pitying freelance journalist Bob Wilton (McGregor) heads off to Iraq to prove himself a man and teach her a lesson like a sulky boy holding his breath 'til his face turns blue to get out of eating his broccoli. Not on any assignment or associated with any publication, and terribly out of place, he locks himself to the ankle of mysterious maybe-spy Lyn (George Clooney) and spends the rest of the movie being a cranky nag as Lyn tries to complete a strange shadowy mission. Bob is a real drag to ride with, whining about every little thing, refusing to believe or go along with anything Lyn says and then presuming--after the adventures are done--that he's now some kind of super op himself. Realizing at least some of what Lyn said might be true after all, Bob finally switches from neurotic to sanctimonious, determined to make sure the story is told even it shakes the government to its foundations. And um, what? Bob ranks right up there with Leo Di Caprio's little shithead in THE BEACH and MacGregor's 'poet' in MOULIN ROUGE as one of the most entitled little pishers we were ever expected to root for at the movies.

I know, I know, you wanted to love this film. So did I. Well, if you think that Ewan McGregor stating he knows nothing about Star Wars or what a "Jedi" is makes for in-joke hilarity, then yes, you'll love it. (If you don't know that McGregor played a Jedi in the last three Star Wars films that makes you extra cool in my book) In fact, that tired in-joke goes by about five times; the director wants to make sure everyone gets it, right down to grandma in the last row.

For another painful example of this movie's level of wit, when Clooney confesses he feels bad about the time he killed a goat with his mind, McGregor blurts out: "The silence of the goats!?" as if he just decided on his entry for a New Yorker cartoon caption contest. And this guy is supposed to be a journalist? Who does he write for, Highlights? Ranger Rick? Dynamite? (left)


The goats themselves are awesome, but once again the movie shows no grasp on reality. The goats are kept in a big, dark, empty shed on the military base, labeled "top secret." Now, if you know anything about animals, anything at all, you know a few dozen goats aren't going to just stand around in a dark shed for years at a time in a stifling hot desert, waiting to be discovered by a snoopy journalist. Though they've been 'de-bleated' (yikes) so don't make noise, you would still smell them a mile away, and hear them trying to kick their way out, and then they'd all die of heatstroke or the fumes of their own piled up feces, or starve to death, within days. Goats need care, yo. Meanwhile goats wander in shepherded all over the desert. Why not just buy one from a passing herdsman as needed?

It's details like this which make MEN WHO STARE similar to one of those "earthy" romantic comedies about 'ordinary' people that were clearly made by rich Hollywood kids who've never flown coach or taken a bus and had to sit back by the toilet, or gazed into the pores of the homeless while waiting in line at a bank machine.

Thank god for Jeff Bridges, then, as the film lights up whenever he's there, onscreen, abiding. Maybe he's never had a 'real' job either, but he's The Dude, and that makes all the difference. In one of his military pep talks (he's head of this experimental psi-ops division), he says that his recruits will learn to "see and hear everything" and to "stop talking in cliches" and live in the moment. Did you hear that last part about cliches, Ewan? You remembered it enough for a flashback but --via one of the most tired cliches of all -you remembered it scored 60s protest rock-scored montage. Better stop, children, what's that sound? It's 60s rock cliche! Barefoot servants too! Something was happening here, and what it was, Ewan is sure we'll agree, aint exactly clear. Such a brave, piercing journalistic acumen!

So, if you come to this film hoping, as I did, for a psychedelic ride into the mind of the military, man will you be disappointed. GOATS seems to side more with the annoying journalist than the psi-ops kooks, making the end result a bit like APOCALYPSE NOW if Cathy (from the comic strip) played the Captain Willard role ("Day four - the river has too many bugs, and how come the army doesn't serve cake? Wauggh!")

Most journalists are way too cool to whine every step of the way as they tag along for a story. They keep quiet or ask questions and if they do ask they don't sneer at the answers if they get them. But the times have a-changed and young men these days are, apparently, well, if not all mice, perhaps unaware of their non-mice options due to a dearth of assertive father figures. Compare the bleating of McGregor's hideous wally, for example, with James Stewart in REAR WINDOW, trying to explain life in a combat zone to Grace Kelly. She might be all fashionista but she's ten times the man McGregor is... cuter too.

One plus about the film is the way it cleverly oscillates between believing in the stories of these psychedelic warriors and realizing most of it is perhaps bullshit. Any good shaman knows that all  rituals are 50% smoke and mirrors. That's not to hide the fact it's all "just" bullshit--it's not just, Clarice--but to make room in the imaginations of those present for true weirdness to manifest. 

But in the end it's okay if it's bullshit, because it's all bullshit, which is to say, there is no no exit from any of the bullshit, and no is, and no no, and therefore all is yes, which mean all is love, so love is nothing and nothing is everything.

All of this helps rope off a cordon of disbelief that allows visualization to occur. i.e. the way a child can use a dude with a sheet over his head going "Boo" as a screen on which to project real ghosts from his or her imagination, as opposed to the smartass brat who says "that's just a man with a sheet on his head." Who is more the fool, the one who thinks he's a sucker to imagine the ghost, and so has no fun, or the one who can see what may not be there, can project his ideal ghost on the sheet, and get willingly scared accordingly?

What's the point of doubting and dismissal as a lifestyle choice? And where does our projection of fantasy end and 'reality' begin? Who gets to decide where that border lies?

The flimflam aspect of psychic power creates a split which allows real supernatural events to exist--and if they exist for the subject then they exist in the universe --that's what quantum mechanics proves, o dour devotee of wallie normality, clinging terrified to the sterilized feet of dogmatic science! Rise now and embrace the pseudo-shaman... Within you and without you are the same you!

What I meant, man, is that you should see this movie, but just once, for Clooney and Bridges. They are two acting tricksters who "get" the cosmic truths behind the quackery and who each bump the film up a star.

But to reiterate, McGregor's 'Bob' is what we back in the semi-psychedelic 1980s used to call a "Wally," the sort of schmuck who clings onto your crew as you run with dilated pupils naked to the cosmic sea (or graveyard behind the dorms) like immortal lemmings, laughing and skipping. He shows up late, whining about being left behind, with normal-size pupils. And he goes "hey guys, wait up! Where are you going? Shouldn't you wait for Dan [another wally] to come back from class? Hey, wait up!" and then once there, in the cosmic sea graveyard with you, he refuses to join in the oceanic dissolving of egoic consciousness, and yet thinks he should still be able to hang all night and drag everybody down. Every time he frowns, crosses his arms and announces he doesn't need drugs to have a good time you can hear the whole universe groan and roll its eyes.

And eventually we all hide with the lights out and don't answer the door when he comes around. Then, one day, someone slips him a dose without his knowing it and, as J. Hoberman writes, "he loses a smidge of his smirk." (Village Voice, 11.3/09) and then thinks he's Gandhi times ten. He's King of humble without getting the irony. He becomes a mad prophet and then winds up insane, violent, arrested and --next time you see him, years later--he's become a drug counsellor, lecturing to you about how bad it is, what you're doing to yourself.

That's a wally my friend. Sound familiar? The oceanic realm has a beach crowded with them, all fretting along the lip of the void, pointing at watches, flipping out, and ranting about chromosome damage

Sigh, let's get some ice cream.