Into the Velvet Darkness: THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

When it comes to seasonal horror movies, there are two kinds of creepy - the Jason Voorhees/zombie creepy and the Boris Karloff-Vincent Price creepy. The latter is what I prefer, for it comes with a sly wink that lets you know when the bodies are counted yours won't be one of them. Price and Karloff make the viewer an insider, a friend in the RICHARD III tradition of horror. The horror of Karloff and Price in other words, is inclusive. Part of this comes with possessing the theatrical "voice" of villainy. As I live near the the Lee Strasberg School of Acting (just north of Union Sq.) I'm daily reminded of its slogan: "We entered the theater on the wings of a dream." Price, by contrast, enters our dreams on the wings of the theater. He dispels nightmares by the force of mellifluent theatrical ham diction; an inherent giddiness in his velvet voice makes him seem always as if it's somebody's special birthday and a surprise party is imminent. 

By contrast Jason or Michael would lose a lot of their menace if they spoke. Their silent treatment is scary, but it's a depressing all-too-real kind of scary. With his fiendish laugh Price really just pretends to be scary. He lets you in on the joke and in doing so eliminates the real scariness of the slashers, which is why his films are above all, delightful, not traumatizing (WITCHFINDER GENERAL and a few others being the grim exceptions). The zombies of Romero and his imitators just eat you; unlike le gourmand Price, they don't give a shit how you taste. Nothing slows them down as they stagger and chomp. If you want to get Price off your scent, just toss him a piece of scenery; he'll gladly chew it in your stead.

In MASQUE especially, Price is the picture of perfection as the devil-worshipping Prince Prospero. He's having a ball, albeit one with a guest list of gluttons, slavering toadies and ennui-ridden perverts. Being the only one with anything close to a genuine wit in the whole place (aside from Hop Toad), Prospero relies on his higher purpose--the serving of his dark master Satan--to keep him from getting depressed. Prospero might indulge himself with vice occasionally, but it's always for a point, a spiritual debasing as suits his dark lord's whims; his macabre jests indicate an aesthete beyond petty concerns of greed and lust. Like many a Corman antihero, he's driven to find what lies beyond pain and pleasure, to get to some terrible, usually fatal, level of truth. It's not just lip service. In a way he's like a super-famous rock star, the type for whom all doors are open, all women willing, and everyone catering to his whims, leaving him arrogant but isolated. With all wants catered to the mind is free first to succumb to despair and then to focus in on one's craft, or.... one's god.

Of course, there's a hardened production code burden this Prospero must bear with. For all his freedom, he can't show us any nudity or severed limbs. And all Patrick McGee's evil Alfredo has to do is suggest there's "other things" to be done in the name of evil besides silky talk and he's basically marked for death. Underneath the evil veneer, Prospero is a gentleman; he's genuinely disgusted by the lip-smacking Alfredo's leering. And he likes his little person entertainer, Hop Toad. When Hop Toad dresses Alfredo in an ape suit, ties him to a chandelier and raises it above the laughing throng and then sets him on fire, Prospero is delighted. When you find Hop Toad give him ten gold pieces as reward for his magnificent jest! He gives Alfredo quite a reward just for smacking a tiny dancer, Esmerelda. Not that it's not worth some retribution, but the man in red seems to think he's good enough to survive. All things are relative. 

In short this is the movie that THE PARTY and THE WILD PARTY and THE WILD ANGELS (Corman, 1966) try to be, but don't have enough of the devil on their side to quite fathom. MASQUE's Prospero and ANGEL's Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda) actually have a lot in common: each is a charismatic natural leader forced to endure the uncouthness of their brutish minions, bound to lead packs of dimwitted trogs who've mistaken unrestrained gluttony and lust for true freedom. Compare the hilariously disturbing scene wherein Prospero orders his guests to roll around on the floor (like the filthy animals they are) to the climax of ANGELS where the gang trashes a church in a drunken orgy of destruction. Heavenly's admonition to the priest, "We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man... and we wanna get loaded... and we wanna have a good time." is not dissimilar to Prospero's decrees, such as: "If a God of love and light ever did exist, He is long since dead. Someone... some...thing rules in his place."

We like Prospero the same way we like Heavenly Blues: we relish their graceful wielding of power and admire their lack of insecurity, their ability to be beyond good and evil, genuinely searching for something rather than just spouting hipster credos, their self honesty and complexity. Caught between the dull conformity of good (Zzzz) and the banal destructiveness of evil (zzzz), they find themselves alone and aching for amusement. Too jaded to be satisfied with the gauche pleasure indulged in by his pack, Prosper's budding relationship with Francesca (Jane Asher) the innocent peasant redhead, prefigures the special bond between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in LOST IN TRANSLATION. It's beyond some kind of older man lechery or young woman father complex. It's a connection of mentor and mentee fused to a kind of twin star orbit that illuminates the bond between the two actors as well as their characters.

For me and some of us in the rock group I was in, the lifestyle around sex, drugs and rock and roll were a way to expand the mind and get loaded. For a lot of our hairy fans it was just a chance to get heheheh fucked up! Wooo! Mexican Mud! Yeah! In that sense, Prospero prefigures Timothy Leary, the acid generation, and the later 'e' generation. And thus MASQUE is one of the most legit psychedelic horror movies until Corman's X-THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES, and THE TRIP! Do you doubt it? Can you look at Corman's MASQUE and not think of some far away rave or acid test of your dreams?

Consider the Satanic initiation of Hazel Court in the film: desperate to regain Prospero's favor after the arrival of lovely Jane Asher, Court undergoes a private ceremony where she is "stabbed" by a series of shamanic figures from throughout the ages: there's an Egyptian, Japanese, African, and Russian shaman/ghost, all waving their scythes and knives over her prostrate immobile heaving buxom figure, distorted through sheet metal reflection and green tinting. With it's thumping Rite of Spring-y David Lee score, this scene should be familiar to anyone whose ever dropped hardcore psychedelics (or had a really bad fever) and had to undergo similar panic-soaked hazing rituals at the hands of mortality's "threshold dwellers" before they could be totally free. "I have survived my own death," she later announces. She has known terror and moved past it. As experienced meditation practitioners and trippers knpw: once you face those grinning demon dervishes and the impure and selfish/fearful parts of you ripped to shreds symbolically, you are free...

Until the hawks of monkey mind ego chatter comes swooping back in.

Similarly, anyone whose ever tried to have a cultivated evening of psychedelically enhanced dancing, talking and group sex only to have the vibe ruined by the late-inning arrival of pinks, townies, burnouts, jonesers and/or wallies will cheer (at first) when Patrick McGee's (left) beady-eyed little ballerina molester receives grisly retribution at the hands of Hop Toad (Skip Martin). And who can fail to notice how Charles Beaumont's clever screenplay casts the humble Christians of the village as dull whiners (and hypocrites) while Prospero remains ever-complex and witty? Like Richard III, Prospero may be "evil" but he's the one taking the trouble to invite you along and to keep the film you're watching full of interesting bits of business. That is, until Death comes for him and he has to face the ultimate threshold dwellers all by himself, all while covered in red paint and forced to participate in modern expressionist dance!

If you still doubt the lysergic glory of this movie, remember five things: 1. It's got one of the best Corman scores ever (Corman had to use a Brit, so Les Baxter was out, though I thought it was Les for years - as a comment below points out, it's David Lee) / 2. It's genuine Poe - which means you can smell the absinthe from across the sea of time / 3) Nicholas Roeg does the cinematography (lots of great camera movement); and 4) Jane Asher was once engaged to Paul McCartney. 5) It ends with a trippy modern dance. The whole rainbow spectrum  of various robed Deaths is a little pretentious but The Seventh Seal had been very influential a few years earlier and this was--after all--happening after death. Tripping, you can always imagine when things get super weird, like everyone turning red and freeze-framing, that you may have died and not known it out there on the dance floor. The part where all the crowd's red hands are reaching out at him as Prospero tries to escape in a kind of Batman villain sideways dance move captures just what it's like when you're trying to get out of a packed Dead Show on too much acid, or Liz Taylor at the beach in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER.

Asher is pretty good as the girl who feels her morality gradually crumble in the thrall of Prospero's seduction strategies. Though on opposite sides of the divide, the pair share an "only two real people in the room" connection that evokes, in a weird way, that between Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. The only other person really to stand out as a cool character is Skip Martin, who brings a great deep voice and a crafty blend of manly complexity to Hop Toad. His utterly macabre vengeance, his sly way of admitting to Alfredo that his costume will probably "get a little warm," or the mad grin when he snaps the whip commands "get back!" show why Prospero is so considerate of him (even bowing back when he and Esmerelda--the tiny dancer--are introduced as the evening's first entertainment.

In real life, Asher knew something of this weird relationship. She broke off her engagement with Paul' McCartney when she realized he was way too much of a libertine. She wanted something more old-fashioned and monogamous. Somehow it's very apropos to the film, don't you think? Are the Beatles not in their way as thoroughly famous and kowtowed to as Prospero, and Asher like an innocent inspiration / the one person neither inclined to kowtow nor act the groupie, hence made desirable? As she says early on, "I have no learning!" Here, at least, is a girl who refused to get hitched to the cute millionaire first, then get a juicy alimony arrangement after catching him in the act of libertinism. It's that kind of integrity that Asher radiates. She is innocence at its most seductive to a decadent. What devil could refuse such a challenge, even knowing in advance he was likely to lose? What else are challenges for?

Oedipal Acid leaving on TRACK 29

Nicholas Roeg is a far-out dude, and TRACK 29 was so far out that few, apparently, were hearty enough to be able to get on board before the train left the station. For my hippie house, it was enough that it showed up at the end of a 6-hour tape that saw heavy trip come-down late-night rotation (after Fleischer cartoons, PERSONA) and we ended up watching it dozens more times than we normally would have, just because we were unable to change the channel or press "stop." Too high. Sheer coincidence? Not where TRACK 29 is concerned. Coincidence may be an illusion, but it's all we got, right?

The story follows an alcoholic pill head housewife played by the ever-sultry Theresa Russell (rocking a flat-Texas twang). Her husband (Christopher Lloyd) is a doctor having an affair with his nurse (Sandra Bernhard). He ignores her 'needs' and spends his few home hours obsessing over his sprawling electric train track.  It winds through the whole upstairs, screaming "metaphor!" Russell finds her own obsession when she meets 'craaazy' Gary Oldman (keeping his Brit accent) at a roadside dinner; he's her long lost son given up for adoption and for years he's been tracking her down.  Maybe. Only she never had, lost or gave up a son. Maybe she had an abortion, but she's damned bored, so what else she got to nurse, aside from delicious screwdrivers? Maybe he's a figure of her imagination... who really knows? Sigh, it's that kind of movie, 'artsy.' The train surely means Lloyd is "The industrialist" and Russell is the lonesome land, craving the more understanding hand of the Europeans who smartly stayed where they were instead of exploiting slaves and betraying Indian treaties. He's impotent, maybe! She's barren, maybe! Symbolism!

In lesser hands, it would be a mess of irritating Sundance quirks. Here it's a foggy indictment of the middle class, a meditation on the thin line between motherhood and cougardom, a tragic tale of incest and redemption, and/or just a big mess, or something else altogether, depending on the viewer and their frame of mind. The trick may be to get that frame seriously altered beforehand, and to pay only moderate attention, for Roeg's films demand you only half-watch them while falling asleep, fooling around with a cute but vapid hippie girl you met at the show, and/or throwing up on the wooden floor and praying for death.

But I endorse TRACK 29 as there's been so few post-1970s films with the guts to really, really take it on a limb -- not the quirky Diablo Cody kind of "faux-limb"-- I mean the fifth martini of the morning and the milkman disappeared into your carpet and you need to find your keys because you left something... burning... somewhere limb. The TV is giving you secret messages limb, the limb way high on the tree, too flexible to merely break off and fall. It's a limber limb forced to endure a life of constant waving in the breeze, with all the drugs you can get your hands on and a spouse having an affair with Sandra Bernhardt kind of limp, I mean limb, and Theresa Russell rides it like a hurricane. The TV really does talk to her, in that background subconscious kind of way only Roeg and Alex Cox have ever got just right.

To "get" this movie, qualified doctors recommend you take a bunch of acid the night before, when really freaked out, start drinking yourself back to normal. Keep drinking til Monday morning, then call in sick from work, then put this film on while you putter about the house with your tumbler of gin and juice and three cigarettes going in different rooms, robe splayed open, burns and bruises all over your body that you don't remember getting.

Then and only then... maybe.

The dosed goodness here really hinges Gary Oldman's ability to be both real and imaginary at the same time. His 'momma, you had me howl of primal John Lennon scream on the soundtrack therapy, David Cronenberg's THE BROOD psychoplasmic-alcoholic miasma of sexual frustration and resentment against her closed-off train fanatic doctor husband manifesting in a Satanic visitation kind of vibery performance embodies lots of contradicting stuff at once and still is sexually potent (capturing the same woozy sense of intimacy-enhanced altered reality he and Ryder pulled off in the otherwise mega-crappy Coppola's DRACULA). What a man! What an actor!



DISCLAIMER: Neither the author nor most qualified doctors actually recommend you take a bunch of acid then when really freaked out, start drinking yourself back to normal, keep drinking through to Monday and calling in sick from work, etc. Sic transit gloria, bitchez! You HAWD your CHAWNCE

Great Acid Movies #2: PERFORMANCE (1968)

In Marianne Faithfull's highly recommended autobiography, she discusses the germination (in 1968) of the film PERFORMANCE (directed by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell), recounting a particularly LSD-drenched evening with Mick, James Fox and Fox's androgynous girlfriend, Andee:

The carpets undulated in little ripples of apricot and ivory. Andee and I were slave girls of the great pharaoh languidly reclining on the royal barge [Mick's huge bed]. The pharaoh was fondling James. (It was going to be a very tactile trip...)

Later she describes vibrating beyond sex and duality in what might be described in lesser hands as 'tripping your face off' -- for what are faces if not masks?

I was in love with everybody. Actually, I was everybody... it was such a blissful state that you could easily fall in love with a chair, with your own shoes. What an absurd thought, someone belonging to someone else! God, and to think they started the Trojan War over stupidity such as that!

Sooner or later something was going to take place on this bed and tonight was evidently going to be the night. It was raison d'etre for the bed --- if Mick couldn't get Keith into bed, this (James) was the next best thing... No one knew about our little evening, of course, not a soul. But somewhere out in the drab, damp London night, the chief Dracula of this scene, director Donald Cammell, opened up his window and snatched it out of the air....

By which she means, PERFORMANCE --  a movie that was then shelved for two years (released in 1970) and is still way, way ahead of its time. If the Redlands bust in mid-60s London was like overturning a normal rock and finding the madness of affluent and beautiful youth experiencing a level of freedom the average voluntary slave to the system found intimidating, thus inspiring jealous rage, curious prurience and hypocritical pooh-poohing, PERFORMANCE made it impossible to be or do those things anymore - we were suddenly inside the dragon's den, the average viewer, like Chaz, the uncool (or cool, if you weren't class conscious) sadist gangster dosed with shrooms, found himself wrapped up in the new freedom. All it takes is the right set and setting and the right dosage, the bonds of rational sense and order vanished in a Lewis Carroll wordplay identity-dissolving labyrinth of play, sound, light, and movement. Could anyone imagine a better set and setting than that trippy house with those gorgeous, talented, free-spirited, vaguely Satanic, utterly open yet endlessly masked characters? The cast of the film mirrored that menage that Faithfull and Mick had been in before, albeit confusing the matters (as befit the subject): Faithfull's bosom chum (And Keith's girlfriend) Anita Pallenberg was the girl; Michele Breton played the androgyne that Mick could morph into (and James Fox's androgynous real-life girlfriend); Fox and Jagger played more or less themselves -- Camell-ionically warped into endless permutations, mirror dissolves, sex and gender warping, Francis Bacon-ating equations.

Some of the opening half of PERFORMANCE gets a little tedious, with all the thick gangster slang, crosscuts, and seething leatherboy power plays, that is, unless you give up expecting narrative thrust and surrender to Roeg's keen interest in generating meaning from apparently random images and sounds thrust up against each other. Cammell territory kicks in when we get to Mick and Anita's house, but before then the beauty is in short supply, and what there is gets uglied up pretty fast, such as a long scene of Chaz (Fox) pouring acid (wrong kind!) on a Rolls Royce (how wasteful!) or being roughed up by his old schoolboy crush, a small town bookie Chaz's boss has newly muscled into the orginzation.  Roeg cutting back and forth to Parliament in session with various scenes of bullying office drones. Whoa! But cross cutting like that is annoying (was it ever not cliche? If anyplace wasn't, this is it) and overly jarring (as in: sir are you inferring corporate takeovers voted through in Parliament is no different than gangsters muscling in for cuts of criminal enterprises? How dare you sir-zzzz)



The film hits its high "now its kicking in!" moment about 1/3 of the way through, when Turner (Mick) calls Chaz (Fox) up from his basement room, planning to kick the bugger out. Chaz is desperate to stay, and Turner is artistically blocked enough to feel him out like a character study, or just too f*cked up to figure out how to get rid of him, perhaps sensing the danger or sympathizing with what he gleans is a life or incarceration situtation. (If you've ever had to kick a broke meth-rattled scuz out of your hippie house while tripping on acid, you'll relate.) As Turner tries different weird passive-aggressive intimidation tactics, Chaz defends himself with feigned stupidity and music hall clownery. Chaz is initially so clueless about the current entertainment world that he bills himself as a juggler--which is a very easy lie to get caught in (if you can't juggle, which he certainly can't). Turner doesn't buy it, but he seems to be taking notes, filing it all into his own bag of tricks. Finally, Turner decides to keep him around in a kind of jaded rock star "slumming" way, as when Joe Buck and Ratzo get invited to the psychedelic party in MIDNIGHT COWBOY.

From there Anita decides to feed Chaz psychedelic mushrooms and soon he's hallucinating into a table ("How much you want fr'it?") and Turner and Anita start teasing the lad, breaking down his psyche, stripping off the learned layers of rude boyishness, dolling him up in a hippy wig and various flashy Carnaby Street outfits after he tells them he needs a fast in disguise passport photo to leave the country with. And in the end he shacks up with Breton, finally opening up and resembling a real person. And the peak keeps climbing and overflowing all the way to the tragic and confusing ending. (I recently read a piece where Cammell talked about the shot of the limo driving away suddenly turning and being in New York City! - But dude, that shot ain't there!)

Flaws don't matter with a film as subversively noble and--for a fairly substantial chunk--as druggy as this one. I quoted Faithfull at length above because I value her openness and clarity on drugs, and the shifting locus of perception and subjectivity that is required to be truly that free. It isn't just "LSD talk" or "perversion" or "oooh ooooh Mick wanted to sleep with Keith but settled for his girlfriend" (or a dismissive "man we were so wasted" which 80%, alas, of my American tripper friends let it rest at - as if any feeling or insight while tripping is automatically void - a feeling not shared by most Europeans, thankfully), but rather a scissor slash at the very fabric of our society, a challenge not just to the whole idea of "ownership" in sexuality and set gender identity but to the notion of identity in and of itself. In the trysts at play on both sides of the mirror--Faithfull's encounter with Fox and Jagger mentioned above, and the film version of same, wherein Faithfull swaps places with Pallenberg, there's no jealousy or clinging - friends and doubles abound, and that's a common feature in the film - the way Mick and Breton eventually become interchangeable, allowing the film to explore a gay subtext without having to get censored for it (the cutting back and forth between them must have really unnerved the suits at Warners and perhaps led to the shelving)

Anita herself is already a mirror twin of a Rolling Stone - the dearly departed Brian Jones (see their matching mouths above left) - all their friends noted well the way they soaked up each other's tics and styles, ravenous sponges for style and experience (and Pallenberg and Faithfull in turn helped style Mick and Keith). It can all be read as a call for everyone to be openly bisexual and loose-masked, to swap roles and bodies and personas, but it's even more than that... it blows the lid off all notions of persona, racing clear past mere granolification, any hippie Grateful Dead flute dancing, and into the dark recesses of the void beyond identity and duality, the realm of madness, "the only performance that really makes it".

Bergman had tread into this realm with PERSONA (1966) and HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968), but no one before or since took it as deep and clear-eyed druggy as PERFORMANCE. And with his masterfully intuitive editing strategy Roeg created all sorts of audio-visual allusion strategies he'd incorporate into the rest of his body of work, including the mixture of miniatures with full size people, disguises, cameras, light sources, mirrors, and the use of recurring authors via books left lying around and author photos (like the famous Borges head shot). As for the persona meltdown, Bergman approached it from a more Nordically removed, intellectual angle while Cammell and Co. plunged headfirst into the madness, and never fully returned from the void they found: Fox, they say, took years to recover; Breton never made another film; Cammell's career was never to be the same - throwing him a kind of early curve ball thanks to the studio shelving the film for so long it lost its buzz; Mick was traumatized by the experience and it warped his relationship with the most important person in his life, his true 'spouse,' Keith, etc. Only Roeg's career would take off, as if winning the big hand at poker. For now he had a director credit and could get into the union. The rest is history - Roeg would show time and again the ability to circumnavigate the void without plunging so far in he couldn't get out by the roll of the credits (sometimes he just barely made it out before the final bell, as in DON'T LOOK NOW).

Life goes on, and death goes often. From 1986-89, I lived a very Cammell-Jagger style life, tripping with my college hippie bandmates. We knew of this film and loved Jack Nitzsche's score (a roommate had the LP) long before it appeared, finally, on VHS. The soundtrack is worth getting on CD even if you also get the DVD, which--even if you're not an ex-rock star-turned robe-wearing drug-taking recluse like some of us-- you must own. For PERFORMANCE is a kind of endlessly fascinating artifact from a looser time, when what would count as certifiable insanity today was just wordplay and mind-melding. Ahead of its time in every way as well as behind it, PERFORMANCE even contains what may be the first MTV-ready video (non-Scopitone): "Memo from Turner." In that photo below you can see how Jagger taps the vein of homoerotic sadism that runs under the "chip chip cheerio" surface of British Imperialism and then trickles down to the Harry Flowers underclasses. It would make a damned good triple bill with DELIVERANCE and GUNGA DIN! Cheers!


Lastly, there's Mick himself as Turner. Always an interesting screen presence, more so than in any film before or sense, Mick relishes the chance to play a darker, more genuinely Satanic version of himself, pale and 'stuck' but way farther out than most of us ever get, with black eye liner and a full mane of black hair making him seem always as if he's vanishing inside a giant wig coccoon... leaving only lips and eyes. The devil seems to have half-devoured him and what we see is the stuff left in the fridge for later. While, according to Faithfull, Jagger really wasn't into Satanism and black magic per se (he just liked to pose in the clothes and do shamanic gyrations - which he was very good at), under the warlock-ish spell of Cammell, Jagger lets loose into some terrifying and funny places. At one point just shaking a luminescent light rod through (via Roeg's editing trucks) Chazz's ear drums, to one of Jack ("The Lonely Surfer") Nitzsche's instrumental tracks, you get a sense of how truly sublime and mind-altering Mick's snake charmer dancing is. Later he even plays guitar and sings Robert Johnson's "Come on in my Kitchen," and you can practically feel the dark forces stir from their Lovecraftian slumber at his power, the devil recognizing the tune he taught Johnson at the crossroads, finally played just right enough to wake him. Mick may not be the devil, or the devil's sympathy-courting minstrel, but there's got to be some sinister reason he and his band are still alive (knock on wood), karate kicking, and-- even in their withered shells--super sexy.

Thank "god," then, PERFORMANCE is finally out on DVD. It too is still alive, kicking, unedited, wild and still pulsing with something almost unknown in modern films, genuine subversion. Come on in its kitchen, at your own invitation - after all, you're the only one left at the party by the end. You've been talking to shadows. But isn't that how it's always been, Chaz? Time to go.