William Powell's Retrograde Psychedelic Amnesia: CROSSROADS, I LOVE YOU AGAIN

Amnesia is always a great topic for the movies, furnishing a built-in self-reflexivity vis-à-vis the movie watching experience itself. We all start any movie an amnesiac (unless it's a sequel or based on a book we've read), instinctively sizing up clues as to what's what and who's where and why when. As far as narrative identity, we start the film lacking the whole backstory of each character, and we could wind up identifying with, rooting for, or against, nearly anyone until finally the good and bad pieces sort themselves out.  But we root for William Powell no matter what. He's one of the few actors able to be witty, wry, composed and elegant without seeming British, and he plays an amnesiac in two very different and worthwhile films from the early 40s. In the comedy I LOVE YOU AGAIN (1940) and the noir mystery CROSSROADS (1942) he plays a guy who we only gradually learn has been suffering from amnesia, and undergoing a radical personality change because of it, ever since he was hit on the head, ten or so years before the films begins. Now he's a staid stalwart and sober citizen. But then - BAM! he takes another hit. The past self, the complete opposite of his then-established paragon of dull virtue, now fades in favor of his previous incarnation as a louche con artist. As in LOVE, William Powell's characters' initial conk-on-the-head-amnesia ten years earlier has ushered in sobriety, loyal decency and, this time, success as a diplomat, but he's far from a bore or windbag. When Basil Rathbone shows up alleging he's an old con artist crony, we never know for sure if he's telling the truth. To give away more would spoil them both, spoil the post-modern amnesiac cinema frisson provided by seeing them as a double feature, ideally at the same time, opposite each other, reflected onto mirrors.

I'll tell you something about LOVE, my friend: Powell starts out as Larry Wilson, a small town tea-totaling bore on a cruise who gets a conk that knocks him back to Nick after rescuing drunken McHugh (still staggering around the liner where Powell left him back in 1932's ONE-WAY PASSAGE). When Powell wakes from his conk in his stateroom the next morning it's not as old staid Larry but his original self, George Carey, a charming, quick-thinking grifter much more like the William Powell we love but a stranger to his current load of friends, co-workers, and soon-to-be-ex-wife (Loy). Realizing his interim self, Larry--about whom this new Powell, George remembers nothing--might be rich, George's eyes light up, his body careens around the stateroom--recruiting McHugh--who turns out to be a fellow grifter and immediately has the good sense to latch on for the ride--to help him loot his own bank account. It doesn't make sense, but it feels familiar.

pre-conk - '85

Post-"conk" - '86

I love this early stateroom scene because it captures exactly my first psychedelic awakening, in sophomore year of college, wherein all my old worries and dull habits were wiped away (see my Larry self, at senior prom, left). Pacing my dorm room while the sun came up, much as Larry paces his cabin in the film, my old comic book-reading depressive warmonger self like a cocoon husk kicked under the bed, a paisley butterfly from my cracked-open third eye, I felt towards my possessions and moneys as if I had found them all in a treasure chest that didn't really belong to the new me, but I could loot and give away. I once walked out of my dorm and left the building, with my door unlocked and wide open, music still playing on my turntable, all lights on, so free was I of all concern and attachment to possessions. Naturally, I wasn't robbed. I was so aligned with the tao I was invulnerable to harm.

That didn't last of course. My old Larry self came creeping back, no conk needed, and eventually the two--psychedelic 'shabby-chic-sham-shaman' and the surly awkward nerd--kind of blended together.

I had forgotten all about those times, that total instant post-conk transformation, until I saw Powell exhibit that same aliveness in his turn from Larry the dull sober moralist to George, the fun drunk con artist.

Returning to Larry's home town in order to get at that bank book, McHugh poses as Larry's doctor to explain why "Larry" must have lots of rest and be excused if he acts peculiarly, as in not recognizing Myrna Loy waving at him when he gets off the train, explaining that for his treatment to work, Larry "must have lots of alcohol!" Larry's ten years of sobriety as Carey was surely good for his liver. Now he can get back to processing THIN MAN-level toxins! But will George's attraction to Loy get in the way of this noble plundering and deep elbow-bending?

It's pretty funny when he meets her on the dock and can't tell who she is, the wife, girlfriend, random stranger, fan, or does she just thinks he's hot, the way Kay Francis did in ONE WAY PASSAGE? It turns out Loy's in the process of divorcing him because his old self was so sexually inhibited and boring. She's unaware he's changed so drastically, to the point he's this other character from before they even met who hasn't met her either. George is everything Larry wasn't, but he can't tell her he changed lest she wise up and deny him Larry's riches (a detail I love because if he thought it through he'd realize she can't deny him the riches - they are his, irregardless. But it feels like he's stealing, like he's moving into some easy mark's action, which--if he can play it cool--holds no barriers between him and the plunder. I know that feeling too, to a tee- the post-conk/trip butterfly you are now bears so little relation to your old straight-edge caterpillar cautious fearful comic book-collecting nerdy self that you wonder if your mom will even recognize you when you come home for Christmas, won't let you into the house or even pick you up from the train station once she sees how long your hair is. It's absurd of course, but that's how it feels. And then, once home, you have to play the game without letting on that you've been 'activated' through mushrooms or whatever, that you're now more than human. Can you display your enhanced self without coming off like a pompous tool? Or will you lose your new perspective and fall back into old behavior like prison stripes? 

Every alcoholic, once he's been sober longer than he drank for, can't help but wonder the same thing, albeit in reverse.

It would be very easy to start again... it's stopping again that might not work.

In the end, if the new George is a much closer approximation to his savvy souse of the THIN MAN movies than a noble bore, he should be the very man for Loy's weary near-divorcee. But let's face it, having such a drunken rogue as a husband requires indulgence, tolerance, and her own level of booziness not to get mighty fed up. One can only imagine what the nights are like when there's no murder to solve. If Nick's hollow leg is anything like mine, he can drink anyone under the table and still pass for sober when needed, but for just so many years and then - Booom! Done. Once that hollow leg is finally filled, it can never be emptied. One drink becomes an impossibility. A single shot can launch you right into withdrawal sickness if another one doesn't follow immediately.

It's interesting too because both Loy and Powell are getting older; her no-longer-patient wife is less able to embody the tolerance for Nicky's antics she showed in the first film. Her elfin sparkle has dimmed. And you can tell their rapport is strained because they have such affection for each other as actors it hurts them to hurt each other as characters. It hurts her to be mean to him, to force him to re-examine his notion of himself as an adorable souse. Drinkers his age have tough choices: slide into sobriety, moderation, a coffin, or an alcoholic ward. They seldom get a second chance to detox their liver for ten years before they, as we say in AA, turn from cucumber to pickle. In a sense, his new con man self has lost a decade of youth but gained a decade more of drinking. He looks older but can drink like an 18 year-old. For Loy, an actress who's been granted-- or perhaps burdened--with excessive MGM-brand dignity, it's enough to make her romance with either version of Powell believable. Loy's had to mellow and compromise, the hard way, being one person in one body. Together in AGAIN they seem like Nick and Nora if Nick joined AA and got super boring and preachy for ten years and Nora was so sick of how unfun he'd become she filed for divorce and started dating the local Bellamy. But then Nick relapsed, so she loves him again and hence the title! Alas, his co-dependent stammering and soft-shoeing and trying to get her drunk makes for a sad, weak wooing. But, then it it all starts to work, as the magic of booze always does, until it finally doesn't. Sure, once it finally has you in its iron grip, booze takes off its loving mask to reveal the cold sadistic demon laughing at your pain, but who can't forgive hours of torture if it first provides even a moment of true bliss?

I Love You Again (1941)

Love Crazy (same year; same dress?)

This movie is awesome so it begs the question, why haven't I seen it sooner? I've drunk more bourbon watching THIN MAN on my duped VHS in the 90s alone than most people drink in their entire lifetime. But I got I LOVE YOU AGAIN confused with the far lamer LOVE CRAZY, another Myrna Loy-William Powell comedy of remarriage, which I watched back before I had read Stanley Cavell and knew what to look for and so disliked it. I still haven't been able to get into DOUBLE WEDDING because I was so bummed out by LOVE CRAZY. I thought all non-THIN MAN Loy-Powells were as wartime watered-down as Garbo's TWO-FACED WOMAN (also 1941). I shouldn't have been so brittle. I could have been drinking to this all along! Shrooming, too. For LOVE YOU AGAIN's giddy stateroom awakening from stale Larry to foxy George is as about as succinct an encapsulation of my old dorm-at-dawn sophomore year peaking as I've seen in some time. Oh my god, did I write about that already? Did I mention already Frank McHugh staggering around the ship bar in the opening scene shortly before falling overboard, Powell noting McHugh appears inebriated to the bartender. "Wha'd he say?" asks Frank McHugh -- "ee-nee-brated," the bartender says. "Oh he did, did he?" McHugh asks appalled--- and you realize "ee knee-brated" seems like some byzantine bird-flip or bodily insult, as in "he neebrated all over your stool"? Fuckin' brilliant, man. That's Lederer gold.

Also: some snazzy rousting of Herbert (Donald Douglas) Loy's dimwit new boyfriend while she and Larry are in the midst of divorcing, and man, what good, dirty writers could do with the old trope about 'coming upstairs to look at my snapshots' or in this case, taxidermy ("I'll never stuff another squirrel as long as I live!") In some ways it's like the screwball en verso of BIGGER THAN LIFE!!

Getting back to Myrna and Bill's legendary screen chemistry, now faded and strained, with every sparkle coming only with moderate effort. Each glimmer of the old charm adds a vibe of sadness. We come to see them as if we are their adult children perhaps. We've come to rely on Nick and Nora's sophisticated co-dependent chemistry to invigorate our ever-threatened conceptions of marriage, so now what do we aspire to? We loved how Nora would pretend to be sore at Nick for his constant drinking and how relieved we were in she smiled that wry pixie nose wrinkle half-smile to indicate she was just ribbing him. We all knew the drab buzzkill wife sermons so common to lesser romantic mysteries (such as in RKO's attempt at the THIN MAN formula, the buzzkill code-strangled STAR OF MIDNIGHT --see "Without a Slur"). Alcohol had long beeen the spinach for this marriage's Popeye; its absence has left their love near dead from iron deficiency. It becomes intrinsic to George's future happiness to inflate the old give-and-take back to life, to avoid being bumped on the head again, certainly, and most of all to strike it rich with a phony oil deal and to convince Myrna he's changed permanently before enough Larry creeps back he starts gets all small town noble.

But first many areas of small town life are milked for comedic goofiness, including a Boy Scouts award ceremony and a department store razzing (for Larry's Jack Benny-level cheapness). It's a firm reminder we did the right thing by moving out of the suburbs; how glad we are now that we live in a place where no one ever knows our name and an American is judged not on the color of his Elk's Club tie or his ability to sublimate sexual desire into tiresome Norman Rockwell Americana, but on his wit, virility, and in-the-moment alacrity.  That said, finding our own Nora on match.com is like looking for a diamond on the floor of an OTB.

In LOVE, Powell the grifter wakes up from a nine year coma of being Powell the staid bore; in CROSSROADS (1942) that same (but more sophisticated) bore's a diplomat in Paris who woke up with amnesia after a bad boat accident ten years earlier, and so can't account for anything of his past (he was never claimed, so to speak), but he's been his new self long enough he's married a gorgeous European gal (Hedy Lamar, never prettier), and become a trusted success. When a letter arrives requesting money owed by his old shady self, a self he has no memory of, the intrigue begins. Just as each personality didn't know anything about the life of the other in I LOVE YOU AGAIN, here we have the grifter emerge only in the court depositions of the old molls and jakes who come out of the woodwork to be cross-examined in what may be the most intelligently written court scene ever (Parisian, naturellement). By jove, there's none of the excess legal jargon that clouds the pens of lesser hacks. Claire Trevor is the savvy showgirl grifter shadow to Lamar's playful Grace Kelly-esque younger wife; then there's Basil Rathbone nosing into the proceedings, leaving us to wonder if blackmail's just another word for 'you owe me money but you don't remember.' How convenient.

Right off the bat, CROSSROADS lets us know we're in strange country: a lecture hall where Powell is dissertating; a brazen student at Powell's witty lecture seduces David (Powell) into a car. It later turns out she's his wife, a fun jest he picks right up on that casts a weird glow over the rest of the film (a dark mirror to the scene where Powell doesn't know who Loy is on the dock when he gets off the boat, and tries to fake it), letting us know in very well written language that film is an amnesiac experience -- until the dust settles after the first reel, they could well be meeting for the first time. He could be playing the same game on the audience and his friends from the get-go, just faking being noble to get access to some safe in a long long con. A lawyer here is even smart enough to ask how long an actor might stay in character before he officially becomes that character, as in common law marriage or naturalization! At an hour or less (ala Lamar's taxi ruse), it's just sparkling play amongst sophisticated people; at over an hour its theatrical acting; at over a month it's dissociative identity disorder (DID); at over five years it's retrograde amnesia. Longer than that, it's who the person really is! Now the old, original self is the act. One might thus legally go to jail for robbing oneself.

Helping matters is the out-of-time feel of the figures from David's past (when he was Jean Pelletier). Lamar seems modern like a Velvet Underground-moderne version of Grace Kelly in REAR WINDOW but the mysterious woman claiming to be Jean's old flame (Claire Trevor -left), wears her hair piled high like she just drifted in from the 19th century; and in her shadows lurks the aquiline silhouette of mighty Rathbone, stalwart heavy of Victorian mellers. The wet soundstage impression of a noir Paris muddies and blurs (maybe its TCM's print) like ink gouache across a....oh, man, but Heidi's pretty.

Sig Ruman shows up at the trail playing a bad doctor. Frank Bressart plays a good one, and the language and class barriers are--a rarity for Hollywood--vividly rendered. The script is maturely engaging and thought provoking without needing to rely on cheap thrills  or sudsy sentiment. David regularly makes smart decisions we normally don't see his brand of noir protagonist make, and we sympathize.

The mature noir chain to LOVE YOU's bouncy Runyon pendant, CROSSROADS might not be as lively but it's got its own weird midnight beauty and might have my favorite Lamar performance. And to think I avoided both films for years because I got them mixed up with DOUBLE WEDDING and LOVE CRAZY! It's understandable, though.

Without the THIN MAN structure, the chemistry of Loy and Powell often overflowed and swamped lesser vehicles, dragging them under by frilly post-code censorship and daftly interchangeable, meaningless titles. They never quite caught on, like Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda or Barbara Stanwyck did, to the correct vibe for screwball comedy. LOVE CRAZY was made after I LOVE YOU AGAIN, with a similar comedic plot (acting insane to prevent a divorce). But with Lamar as his more demure opposite, CROSSROADS followed, more serious amnesia formula, further adding to my split self confusion upon reading the blurb (i.e. mixing up LOVE YOU AGAIN with LOVE CRAZY, then LOVE with CROSSROADS, even now I'm confused. Have I even seen DOUBLE WEDDING, except in passing? Maybe I saw it only long enough to note its 40s MGM streamlined short hair sentiment and slyly ant-feminist parabolism (her success in business requires Loy to be a bitch). So many MGM films of the period were so similarly bludgeoned by Louis B. Mayer's bourgeois sentiment and censorial hatred of feminism it's hard to keep them separate, or want to see them more than once.

But when they shine, brother, they shine.

So there you go the whole story of two films about assumed identities and fading marriages rekindled by lively alter-egos, and me, a viewer so confused by their bland titles that I waited to see them until this latter period in my film watching life, now that I too have no memory and keep repeating myself. Don't make the same mistakes I did!! Don't let fuzzy blows to the head or drugs to the pineal fuzz your roll into the split screen duplicate machine. Powell makes the jump with mere conks to the noggin. Can you do less? The screen shall split you whole if you don't mind first surrendering your individuality in the service of a grand war. Does that mean relapse, or just a feigned slur? Sometimes drunkenness isn't the same thing as not being sober -- it's called the movies.

Death to Realism!! eXistenZ + Oculus Rift Vs. Marcel Duchamp + Al Texas Jazeera Chainsaw America Massacre

Cronenberg's 1999 mindbender eXistenZ grows in its many-tentacled relevance with every passing year, but this one's the cake-melter. Its initial release date, lest we forget, was the height of internet growth, right before the dot.com bubble burst; it was to us what 1928 was to capitalism. Virtual reality was just beginning to figure itself out and William Gibson cyberpunk adaptations or offshoot homages were popping off right and left: Donnie Mnemonic, Strange Days, New Rose Hotel. The big fear on the horizon was the turning of the century clock to year 2000. We worried the internet was going to explode and cripple the world. We stocked up on bottled water and duct tape; we were excited! We loved The Matrix but other virtual reality films were a bore --since nothing was ventured - it was just fiddling around in empty dream sequences unless the threat of actual physical death could be incorporated. We bought Morphius' sketchy "the body can't live without the mind" adage so that the hero's journey could have some consequence but that adage didn't hold true by the dull sequels. I remember seeing the first one, Reloaded, and walking out during the 'big' fight with a thousand cloning agents vs. Neo, as neither side was ever going to win or lose - so why were they bothering? I went out for a cigarette, came back, they were still at it... and the franchise died in its CGI black leather bootstraps.

Now, 16 years after it came and went in theaters, eXistenZ  seems the real sequel to The Matrix, or rather, the version of the virtual reality future that came true. The dot.com bubble burst long ago; nothing happened when the clocks ticked 1/1/00, or 12/21/12. The dew erased its data from the lily drive. What a bummer! But with disillusionment always comes enlightenment and an enhanced sense of seen-it-all savvy. So now the first The Matrix seems dated and naive. Its conception of the 'Real' as grungy and depressing (lots of grotty grey dreadlocks, cream of gruel ("everything the body needs"), leaky pipes, cold grates, robot threats (ala the Terminator) is as fake as the artificial reality (corporate skyscrapers, busted down telephone booths) its body needs to be believable as artifice (i.e. the fake real needs to seem more real than the 'real'). What worked before the crash now seems the most naive of tricks. This is because, in the past two months or so, the symbolic and imaginary are trumping the real to the point reality is at best a third class passenger to the symbolic and imaginary realms.

For examples of the way popular art (imaginary) usurps reality via the news (symbolic) consider: the storm of bad press over the all-white 2014 Oscar noms; the storm of pro-and-anti-American Sniper sentiment; the sheer weirdness of North Korea's cyber-attack on Sony over The Interview; the "Je suis Charlie" bloodbath. There is very little real left for us in the first world, saturated in screens as we are, but at the same time as we're losing our virtual reality because the third world is declaring war on it. Our symbolic and imaginary dimensions are being assaulted, leaving only the horrible misery of the unmediated real, one left too long untended. Imagine, for example, if Hitler declared war on a photo of Churchill, or tried and sentenced a newspaper to prison (not the editor or publisher, the actual paper). We are dealing with a whole new kind of radical Islamist reactionary --so anti-graven image that any kind of representational (non-decorative) art is destroyed once it falls within their purview. We're being forced to look at the mess we've left:

ALL REAL AND NO IMAGINARY/SYMBOLIC MAKES JACK A HOMICIDAL BOY

To most westerners, 'thou shalt not kill or steal' are the only commandments worth fussing over. Adultery, lying to your parents, bowing down to graven images, these are negligible sins at best, their potential for evil dispelled by a simple apology or late night prayer. But not everybody is as 'evolved' as we (think we) are. We, here in the USA, we, who seem never more than a swing state away from The Handmaid's Tale, we think we know best. But the bottom line is, if say you believe in your religion, how zealously do you cling to its tenets? Aren't freedom of thought, education, and expressions of independence merely rationalizing masks worn by the seven deadly sins?

Al Jazeera America welcomes you...

eXistenZ asks these kind of big questions, obliquely, of course, and in the process reverses the Matrix's covert pro-luddite terrorist endorsement.  Told as an immersive interactive virtual reality game that's interrupted by a terrorist threat on the life of the designer, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Cronenberg's film is a fine illustration of how western culture's ever-widening hall of virtual mirrors keeps edging out the 'Real' to the point images provoke real life threats just as much as vice versa. The terrorists even call themselves 'realists.' They seek to destroy the game and specifically Geller, in order to save our collective sanity. The game's artificial reality is so vivid that the realists worry our breadcrumb trail back to sanity will disappear altogether, resulting in a collective psychotic break.

And they're right. Man should never go so far out of consensual reality he snaps the cord and can't find his way back. It's dangerous work, even going out that far, and not for amateurs: creative thinkers are scouts and foragers, ambush-blockers, spies, counter-intelligence entrappers, stray rounder-uppers. Vacation from the real is the purpose of recreational drugs in a social sense, but they shouldn't fall into the hands of kids or lightweights or amateurs, dopes who can't take a wave of paranoia without cracking up or who are unable resist the momentary urge to jump out a window. If the drug taker just wants to escape and never return at all, they don't become a help to society's progress into the unknown, but an eventual threat, a burden on the mental health care industry. They wind up floating helplessly through space like Syd Barrett, or Brian Jones, or Don Birnim, or Dr. X, the Man with X-Ray Eyes.

Or you.

Ostracized by the social order, locked up in a psych ward and shot up with tranquilizers, you'll never make Madeline Stowe believe you're from the future when you're drooling, Bruce! So if Allegra's game gets too real, if it tries the Matrix trick of transcending the real through the performance of realness, then the entire world becomes a Brian Jones or Syd, lost in the windmills of their mind, maybe forever. "Is this still the game?" asks one bystander after all the presumed layers get peeled back. And of course, the worry is that no answer at this point can be ever be correct again. Indeed, perhaps it never could (outside of Canada).

Savvy Post-modernists could have saved these luddite terrorists the worry from the get-go, however, for they know reality's been slipping away since 1917, and already long gone, and what's more, letting it go has resulted in no great loss. If the realist terrorists wanted to smash something they should have started with 'R. Mutt's' "Fountain" (below) which won sufficient Parisian surprise to mark the date. Taking a pompously pronounced sip of their absinthe, the post-modern critics soon noted Duchamp's original point was drowned out in the bidding war over that urinal, and that eventually Duchamp had to hide his readymades in inconspicuous places around the gallery, so no collector could find them and thus their true artistic flowering occur.

This he did with "Trap (Trébuchet)" 1917 (intentionally unpictured), an unobtrusive coatrack that went unnoticed through the entirety of his show.  Success! Later, Andy Warhol turned lazy silkscreens (made by his assistants, signed by his double) into the height of overpriced post-Duchamp balderdash. And now, so many illusory moments later, it's not ask 'what post-modernism can do for reality', it's 'what can reality do for post-modernism?' The answer: it can only bow before the Marcel's urinal and drink deep from the milk of the prodigal golden calf returned from the mountaintop with a dozen teraflops of commandments, each one animated with a how-to instructional video that's right now writing its way right into your subconscious, deleting your once vibrant imagination to make room.

"Fountain" - Marcel Duchamp / eXistenZ gaming console

"(as we know from Lacan) the Real Thing is ultimately another name for the Void. The pursuit of the Real thus equals total annihilation, a (self)destructive fury within which the only way to trace the distinction between the semblance and the Real is, precisely, to STAGE it in a fake spectacle." - Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

The Void/Real Thing, as Zizek extrapolates from Lacan above, is approachable only via the fake spectacle, the Perseus Medusa shield, i.e. TV is the only way reality can be. To confront the thing in itself means total annihilation - the terrorist bomb being the be-all end all critique.

But the mistake of the 'realist' terrorists is to think that by killing the fake spectacle they have aligned themselves with the power of the Real Thing/Void, that its tragic raw horror dimension will become their ally - that the bomb is 'theirs' (their group claiming credit for it to the papers as if worried some other movement will steal their work). It's a big mistake to identify with fire demons - they still won't like you - and they will bite your fingers off when you fail to connect their wires properly.

On the other hand, identifying purely with the spectacle, as most of America does, myself included, isn't good either, because the spectacle doesn't mirror the Void/Real at all, but its fictional potential, its imaginary 'rush'. We only notice the eruption of the actual real when we walk past armed soldiers in the train station or when we raise our arms for a scan at the airport. Aside from that, unless we happen to be caught in their blast radius, terrorists are just images on CNN, delivering anti-image violence to America through images. Like it or not (and really, it's the main reason they do it), the terrorist's actions are used by the news channels to sell air time for pharmaceuticals, cars, and investment brokers (the three keys to a long future).

This same formula mirrors the below chart illustrating the future and past of immersive video game tech, only with ISIS struggling to deliver the void of the real onto more than just CNN, to blow our walls and electricity clear away and force us to watch the slaughter of our kin in first person, up close, to essentially provide a feedback loop that erupts from news channel sound byte coherence and explodes our eyes and ear drums, paradoxically opening our senses to the real ' Real' before they're overloaded and extinguished.

Source: WIKI

the end product

 As the terrorists endeavor to widen the last remaining sliver of real' in our lives by breaking the input-output loop, we strive to narrow it still further by living totally within a comfortable cocoon of cables, letting our reality go all to seed from inattention and only considering the terrorists as any kind of actual threat to that cocoon, and with good reason. Perhaps it is because of their rejection of the imaginary and symbolic realms that fundamentalists mistake satire / humor for genuine attack, and why I become so disinclined to hear about either of them. I'm worse than anyone as far as not caring to see the suffering. I turn the channel at the first wide-eyed orphan or emaciated dog commercial, no matter how riveting the show surrounding it. CNN understands that need to escape, to not look into the sad suffering eyes of the puppy dog anti-Medusa. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, shows images like the ones above, of life in Syrian refugee camps, the carnage of bombings of Palestine, all the violence and despair which CNN doesn't show (and vice versa). Watch Al Jazeera and CNN in alternating segments and maybe you can get a proper idea of our whole fucked world, the Middle East as a petri dish microcosm but who wants that? That's too much real! We need smaller doses of horror, otherwise we're like Scarlett at the makeshift hospital before the intermission in Gone with the Wind: we just keep walking, the sheer magnitude of the 'real' overwhelming our empathy response past the point of ambivalence.

But the converse is true, too: not enough 'real' is just as corrosive, creating a 'real' image dysmorphia. If you ban harsh images, you give them power. Just ask any Brit who was denied Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) for 25 years due to Britain's ban on 'video nasties.' Those nasties became any Brit horror fan's obsession. Nothing gives an image power like enforcing its absence. No actual 'nasty' measured up to the dread associated with not seeing it.

Of all the nasties, though, Texas comes closest to capturing the pure horror of its absence. This is partly because it provides the extra 'real.' The "smash to the head" power it still holds today might have to do with the hell the cast and crew underwent to make it and that's a hard thing to intentionally duplicate. In a way, it rips the screen open to become a whole new thing, a once-in-a-million-tries 'true' horror. Even so, it can't measure up to the potentiality conjured by the image-starved imagination. It comes mighty close though. We see in that house sights beyond what we thought could exist in this country or any country - and all the attempts to recreate it by adding 'more' to its sequels and imitators have failed - more blood and grime only abstracts it, reveals the hand of someone trying too hard to be scary. The decor of the house in Hooper's original is far scarier for its comical attempts to be homey, artistic, genteel even.

Still, want and curiosity are powerful things; images have obscene amounts of power for those denied them, and as the Brit kid squinting to see some bootleg seventh generation dupe of Texas Chainsaw can tell you, the imagination never yet met a blank it couldn't fill in.

SUPERBESTFRIENDS: 

By contrast to the mostly unseen Mohammed, Jesus and the Buddha are omnipresent in figurative representations, providing both a comfort at odd moments and an excuse to keep us out of the real (as in we don't have to imagine anymore --every last bank is filled). Mohammed isn't supposed to be depicted for reasons not unlike what motivates the 'Realist' terrorists in Cronenberg's eXistenZ. I forget which of the Ten Commandments says not to bow down to graven images, but we've been bowing to that shizz for so long we can't stop without someone pulling the plug on the TV, or blowing up the station. I doubt Moses would be on the terrorist's side but, to his rheumy eyes, every animated billboard on Times Square might as well be for Golden Calf margarine. Moses knew you have to be quick and ruthless to maintain a holy order. Cut the advertisements down at the knee, sayeth the lord, Tivo and fast forward through all commercials. Because if you don't, even the Commandment tablets themselves will inevitably be worshipped as graven images, or at the very least bid on as collector's items, spiked with ads ("Citibank presents "Thou Shalt Not Kill") or removed from out in front of a Southern courthouse, not that it's the same thing as violating free speech (the atheists didn't try to kill the sculptor) but it shows us that the same confusion that motivates jihads on cartoonists and hacks on stoner comics also motivates alleged atheists.

Feedin' the masses... with the masses

'Now' back in 1999, newly sober and full of angst--uneducated in the tenets of Lacan--I loved The Matrix and thought eXistenZ was meandering and too much like a rehash of ideas Cronenberg worked over already in Videodrome and Naked Lunch. There's the same harvesting monsters for their organs or glandular secretions (for making drugs in Naked Lunch, biomorphic gaming consoles in Existenz); guns made of organic material (Videodrome); a bewildered protagonist shuffling along after a savvy, sexy woman who knows her way around the new paradigm (Judy Davis in Lunch, Deborah Harry in Videodrome, Jennifer O'Neill in Scanners), a maze of spies and counterspies where, as the talking fly's ass says in Lunch, the best agent is one who is unaware he is an agent at all (hence our hero is caught in the middle and never knows the score); the eXistenZ scene in the garage with Dafoe installing the portal in Jude Law's spine is a mirror to the Naked Lunch scene where the Moroccan man sticks the broken Martinelli in the forge and pulls it out as a giant Mugwump head. And on and on. And at least neither 'drome nor Lunch involved actual gross eating of weird monster things (the sight of which makes Leigh gag - and leaves a bad feeling in the digestive tract of sensitive viewers like myself).

But it's all come true since then. Hasn't it? eXistenZ, I mean? Once we get over the 'using living organic matter for data transmission' stigma and learn how to tap the inner recesses of the pineal gland and bypass the clumsy ear and eye, we'll be exactly there --using third eye visualization energy to craft something our brain can't distinguish from the reality it's used to--and we'll be able to restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, even if what they see and hear is just virtual reality.

 It's got to be coming! It's just too controversial to be public until it's ready. Either way, we've come a long way since The Matrix (1999) or Ralph Fiennes selling other people's bootleg sensory impressions in Strange Days (1995). Virtual reality isn't just for Michael Douglas breaking into a virtual safe in Disclosure (1994) or falling off a roof in The Game (1991), not no more it's not. Cuz this here's real. Unlike Matrix, though, you can't die in reality just because your avatar is killed by a World of Warcraft marauder. It's just a damned game after all and maybe that's part of the problem... there's very little at stake. But is it really so little? Really? Reealleeeee??

 We can't really tell. We just keep waking up out of one reality into another; is that death, or just finishing one more level on a video game with an infinite number of levels, all waiting for us to unlock them. Even if we never figure out how to access them they're all nonetheless on the same disc.

Some have argued that showing bloodshed and trauma repeatedly and sensationally can dull emotional understanding. But never showing these images in the first place guarantees that such an understanding will never develop. “Try to imagine, if only for a moment, what your intellectual, political, and ethical world would be like if you had never seen a photograph,” author Susie Linfield asks in The Cruel Radiance, her book on photography and political violence. Photos like Jarecke’s (above) not only show that bombs drop on real people; they also make the public feel accountable. As David Carr wrote in The New York Times in 2003, war photography has “an ability not just to offend the viewer, but to implicate him or her as well.” (The Atlantic "The War Photo No One Would Publish")

STAGING DEATH AS SPECTACLE 

(PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT)

I haven't ever been shot or been in a war, or shot someone or been shot, but I was way into cap gun artillery and pre-paintball war games as a kid in the 70s-early 80s, which I now take to be a child's attempt to experience the moment of life and death even in effigy (the staging of the Real as spectacle). And I've had some profoundly spiritual Lovecraftian transdimensional horror/void plunges since I put guns away and picked up guitars and hookahs. And even after quitting booze I've had some roller coaster reptilian demon devouring soul cleanings that make my worst college acid experiences seem like mild disturbances in the force. And they have stripped my soul clean 'til all that was left was a glowing sunlit circle. And to dismiss these experiences as just manic episodes or a hallucinations is the same as presuming there's no subjective-imaginary component to the experience of death, to dismiss the most profound human experience (NDEs) as nothing more than 'mere hallucinations' of an oxygen-deprived malfunctioning brain. To me that's like saying getting shot in a war is nothing but a physical 3-D space-time event, a metallic sphere entering the organic body and disrupting some biological systems, rather than a terrifying crisis of mind-soul-body, your life flashing before you, things going dark, all in the middle of a confusing smoke-and-shrapnel firefight, i.e. a nightmare beyond the scope of the imagination. There's no atheist in a foxhole, or on a meditation cushion, or the 'Psych Ward' section of a Dead show - because in all three the distractions from the void/real are stripped away.

I don't mean to compare a meditation or a powerful psychedelic drug experience to being in combat but either experience can be pretty damned terrifying and traumatic, so to dismiss any of the three as 'mere hallucination' or 'mere reality' is to convey, clearly, you've never had that experience yourself. If you did then you'd know that what's going on is a deep drinking in of the pure intersubjective real. The horror of constant growth and decay that is our organic, physical world is suddenly grasped on a level that our unconscious barrier mechanism (or symbolic mediation) usually screens or filters out. Without these screens/filters we wind up either penniless spiritual wanderers, trapped in a cult, dead (from jumping off a building, setting ourselves on fire, etc.) or institutionally-committed. But by the same token, if those imaginary-symbolic filters aren't ever compromised or transcended, then we turn into pompous a-holes, didactic pragmatists without, as they say, a clue.

For example: A real sunflower beheld by someone with their imaginary-symbolic blinders on is merely a sunflower - identified against one's inner rolodex of flower names and then dismissed, its full elaborate mystery screened out since it's neither a source of fear (unless you're allergic) or desire (unless some sexy new lover gave it to you). But for someone without those blinders, like a yogi, Buddha, starving artist, tripper, child, or schizophrenic --that sunflower breathes and radiates light and is alive with the little yellow petals around the big stamen center like yellow flames from an eclipsed sun. This radiant crown image is not a 'mere hallucination' though a less enlightened friend might dismiss your enthusiasm, saying "dude, it's just a sunflower, chill out." In fact it is that idea --that the real is completely contained within its symbolic component, that it is 'just' its label--that is the hallucination!

You might tell your dismissive friend that he's trapped in a morass of the purely symbolic-imaginary; that he's traded in his rose-tinted shades so he can fit in with the social order, but as a consequence he'll never be in 'the moment.' You can tell him that what you feel for this flower he can only feel when he buys a very expensive item or paints the bedroom a new color, or gets a new girlfriend, and even then, the feeling is fleeting. Yours is, too, alas. As the signifier chains trap down all sensory impressions sooner or later.

You can tell your dismissive friend that he probably also paradoxically dismisses NDEs (Near Death Experiences) as just dying brain hallucinations, when the reverse is true. This same friend might look at a beautiful mountain vista and say aloud, "it's like a painting." Or, if they witness some eruption of strangeness, perhaps a Native American ceremony in progress as they walk back from the trail, they note that "it's like something out of a movie" i.e. the more 'real' things get, i.e. outside their language's dismissive pincers, the more things get "like a movie" or if some natural vista strikes their eye it must quickly be labeled "like a painting" - its beauty therefore contained and defined, and therefore 'safe.'

And for those on the outside of the purely symbolic-imaginary--the Islamic fundamentalists or eXistenZ's realists--the symbolic-imaginary prison of labels is taken as a real threat, hence the Parisian cartoonist massacre. These people might seem crazy to us but at least they recognize the hypnotic power of the image and do everything in their power to fight its narcotic effect. And yet, if a fundamentalist Islam terrorist considers the hallucinations of the atheist consumer to be a physical threat, then the purity of his conception of the real becomes its own hallucination! He goes to war 'in the real' over a purely symbolic representation (i.e. a cartoon of Mohammed) and through this enters the symbolic (via CNN). For us this would be, in a sense, like arresting Spielberg for depicting war crimes in Schindler's List or demand actors killed in a cannibal movie prove they're not dead.  Or stepping inside the screen of Sherlock Jr.. The Ring, or Purple Rose of Cairo, to blow up the cameraman so no one could follow you.
------

JUDE LAW = TOTAL WALLY

So NOW for my post-1999 eyes and ears, the idea that a newbie to the virtual reality game like Jude Law in eXistenZ would act all amateur hour "oh my god I'm tripping too hard" is not surprising or even that upsetting (it really annoyed me back in 1999). These are the types who have some serious resistance to the 'weird' - they hang out with us (the psychedelic surfers) latching onto some girl or guy they like, but fall prey to the first anxiety that comes along. We called them 'wallies' in the day (see: The Bleating of the Wallies) A voice in their head tells them they're drowning, so next thing you know they're clutching at your lapel, begging you to take them to the emergency room when a moment ago you were both fine and chilling out listening to Hendrix, man, and exploring the vast universe between your thumb and cigarette. They're the types who blab to the cops at the ER, disappear into a rehab or something for six months, and then suddenly show up as anti-drug sermonizers, or worse, narcs.

And who among us in that same situation hasn't heard that same voice in our head, the 'ohmigodi'mDYING' voice? We just know to ignore it, along with all the other panic triggers being pressed, to let them come and go along with the joy and rapture and spirits whispering in our ears. But if you're not prepared for the rush of contradictory signals--every new impression flooring the gas pedal and both fear and desire at once, to the point you want to make love to a candle flame or end table one second and then destroy them the next--then you're like the surfer hypnotized by the size of an approaching groundswell, who gets near-drowned when all he had to do was duck his head under the water for a few seconds.

As Ted (Jude Law) notes after spending a little time in the game:

"I'm feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I'm kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here."

It's silly to think that of course, even if it's true. No one forced him to play the game. He should stop being a little bitch, be more like Bill Burroughs and realize "the Zone takes care of its own."

There was a stretch of time in 2003 when every day after work I was leaving my physical body and hovering around on the ceiling over my bed, and what sometimes stopped me from merging fully into the next world was the dreaded feeling of suffocation: 'what if I stop breathing while I'm not in my body?' which is kind of dumb, since we don't worry much about that when we go to sleep at night - and in dreams we're just as outside ourselves as I was at the time, and that shit goes on for hours and hours. These excursions of mine only took a ten minutes or so of linear time, though they seemed to go on for hours. It's not like I couldn't snap out of it in a microsecond if my buzzer buzzed. I knew then that the body and mind are built for these excursions. Not all of us are meant to have them, the shamanic near-Brian Jones/Syd Barrett pack separations, but those of us who are, are. And we're meant to come back, and write about them nonstop. so viola! This blog is woven by machine spiders into exiStenCe.

Real (pre-symbolic)

So I came to realize Cronenberg's Naked Lunch's InterZone has always been true. When the majority of people have taken or are currently on powerful hallucinogens, a kind of group mind outside linear time and space becomes the new paradigm. Even if you haven't taken any substances, you too start seeing things 'as they really are' (i.e. really aren't) when in their company and the result is a profound existential nausea (Sartre was a big mescaline fan).

In this sense, trying to differentiate truth and illusion is like separating an orange from its peel and asking "which one is the true orange, the peel or the inside?" You might say the 'inside' is the orange and the skin and seeds are just compost, but the outer peel or skin is just as much 'the orange' and is what we see when see an orange not being eaten; and as such it will exist far longer than the rest of it, which you will eat and then it will cease to exist in that form. But it's only when the skin is ruptured that it finally becomes real. When it's ground up and cycled through your system before being expelled, then the real is occurring. Cronenberg has always known that biotech is the wave of the future as much as virtual reality. It's already beginning to happen, designers are learning to 'write' DNA. And new steps in virtual reality are always imminent. Imagine vast teraflops of data in a simple eye drop. "Right now we're at the pong stage" notes Reasonblast39, "but within ten years we'll be full circle." What the hell do you mean, Reasonblast? I axed. But he didn't exist anymore - just a glitch in the matrix of our lives. (See also Post-Sensory Pong).

Similarly, David Cronenberg's allegory for the collapse of the symbolic is now revealed as savvy enough to understand that only by denuding the lunch can the imaginary transcend the symbolic and become 'more real than reality'. It's also the realization that our human nervous system has long been an elaborate immersive experience for higher beings. These demons and angels plug into our delicate nervous system as video-audio immersive booths with which to experience all sorts of Hellraiser-esque masochistic pleasures. Jesus wept, but he wept our tears. We'll all soon be marching through the traumatic real of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre bone rooms and wind up impaled on Leatherface's meathooks, all just so some fourth dimensional burnout can feel a Batailles-esque sadomasochistic ecstasy via our shredded nerve endings.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as close to Traumatic Real as horror can get.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (remake) - the Re-Staging of the Re-Staging of the real becomes
unreal through excessive realness i.e. the art direction is so 'real'--
 thanks to the high contrast photography, elaborately stressed wood, and other 
art direction-- it becomes commercial jeans ad banal

But since in eXistenZ we're dealing with agents and counter-agents, spies, saboteurs called 'realists' who are worried--understandably as it turns out--that once games get too 'real' we'll lose our grip on reality (and yet are working within the game itself) it's clear that re-staging the staged real collapses any exit strategy back to our old symbolic-imaginary repressive mechanisms. So determined are they to be free of the Platonic cave of illusion that they create their own even smaller cave through a performance of non-caveness. Where do you draw the line between killing someone for drawing a a guy in a big hat with word 'Mohammed' on his chest and firing an NBC comedian for letting an 'F-bomb' slip during a live broadcast, or crucifying a sports team owner because his mistress leaks a private phone conversation where he uses the word 'nappy' or am I thinking of Don Imus, who was also fired 'in real life' for word use deemed unsavory?

I'm not justifying or denigrating any of it, you understand, just noting that everyone on both sides of the divide feels that their strong emotions demand action --the stronger their outrage the more punishment must be inflicted! Only those of us who've seen the limitations of our own judgement, been in therapy for years, or learned in AA that "feelings aren't facts," can step back and not send that angry e-mail. But I am just pointing out that if we as free speech defenders think we're beyond confusing our umbrage over symbolic representation --either in printed word, speech, or image--with legitimate real life retaliation, then we're blind to our own blindness. Destroying a man's standing in the real world because of what he said in a private conversation to his mistress is just a nonviolent first world cousin to the Charlie massacre, i.e. killing people because of marks on paper and remarks on the phone. Names hurt worse than sticks and stones, apparently, so the response is in proportion to the sense of hurt, rather than in proportion to the actual offense. In both cases, if we never heard the phone conversation, played obsessively on CNN, or if the terrorists never saw the offending Charlie cover, would they or we be any the worse for it? No. In these cases we can blame the messenger, but it's a messenger we can't live without. We created it, a giant amorphous amoeba blob of all our hopes and fears jammed within the 24-hour news cycle, the journalists like a bunch of snappy piranha orbiting the latest popular kid on the playground and heaping scorn on the unpopular, instigating each's rise and fall all during a single recess.

The minute / you let it under your skin....  

Ted: We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistent, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand.
Allegra: That sounds like my game, all right.
Ted: That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market.
Allegra: But it's a game everybody's already playing.

It's a game everybody's already playing, it's just no one uses the same rules, and admitting that it's a game means they lose half their pieces. So shhhh, pretend you didn't read this. It's too long anyway, I been rambling. My mom died yesterday... very sudden, and far away.... and words are just fingers pointing to illusions and skittering away to the next schizoid dot connection... and this is a time for me when illusions don't work at all, and I'm forced, alas, to exit the Boar's Head Inn, Falstaff's woolen eye coverlets trailing behind me like the last few strands of my latest televisual cocoon. Adieu my mommy. You never fell for a single trick even if, heaven help us, you loved The Big Bang Theory. 

Cinq à sept vs. the Censors: LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, CHLOE, LOLITA, BABY DOLL, ON THE TOWN, RED DESERT, THE BIG SLEEP

Censorship has been a constant bane of our great country, but the need to outwit dogmatic Christian 'morality' has inspired great writers and directors to new heights of sneaky double entendre. One of my favorite tricks of theirs is a common enough thing in Paris but unknown to the Christian right: the afternoon tryst. The censors of the 50s-60s never could grasp the idea of love in afternoons; sex to them was limited to one position (missionary), one place (bedroom), one time frame (night after everyone had gone to sleep). Having boys and girls even in the same room at night was presumed to leave someone pregnant by morning, but in the middle of the day these girls were safe as Fort Knox.

If anything this proves censors are both unimaginative and vile. The more tightly they try to control sex the more paranoid they get, hence the tighter the grip, and the more limited in thinking. Thus their sexual repression leads to the notion that most men change into date-raping monsters as soon as bedtime looms and the censor/camera isn't there to chaperone/spy.  They know something is going on in that fade out from night to morning --that's a long time- but not knowing what drives them insane. All men become the raging id of repressed desire, all women easily willingly overpowered. This low opinion of human behavior serves to justify the chaperone-like censor's sense of self worth, that their job mattered, they were the bulwark against the tide of baser instincts.

That doesn't mean sex wasn't all over censored films, just that there had to be a 'code' for every thing: if someone unmarried of the opposite sex did sleep over in a post-code film, for example it goes like this: If there's a fade to black after a kiss between two lovers at night, the editor can never fade out to the next day or morning. The scene must always end with him going home alone, or being interrupted by the terrified maid announcing some sinister distraction, OR the director could cut away to something, like a clock tower (in CASABLANCA) and come back to the scene with the lovers still fully dressed, but now smoking -and then you might presume (if you were over 18) that they were both just very fast dressers. But you had to show her leaving (or him) before actually she goes to sleep, nonetheless. If she or he does stay over, the butler might be shocked to see a girl lounging in his master's bed in the morning, but then find his employer not in bed beside her but in a knot of sheets on the living room couch. Whew!

In the days of the small town idyll of the soap opera 50s there was plenty of post-war modern sex colliding with pre-war small town moral hypocrisy, and movies and novels lolled in the horrific toll taken when a young free spirited girl and boy tried to stifle their romantic impulses to please the shrewish old gossips next door. A kid hangs themselves to be free of all the slander in PEYTON PLACE (1957), and in A SUMMER PLACE (1959), Sandra Dee comes home from spending the night on the beach with her boyfriend to find her mother (Constance Ford) waiting with a doctor to examine her hymen. What the fuck is this, you think, Sharia law?  No, just a reminder, perhaps, that the censorship boards are terrorist-affiliated, very very misogynist and backwards, prizing virginity, which is something only a very sexually insecure, small-dick punk would want, with no idea of what's involved in getting a girl to loosen up. There, I said it.

That's what that moron Sam Neill in Jane Campion's THE PIANO (1993) also doesn't understand. He'd be much happier if he just rolled with the sensual blowback from his new wife's affair with Harvey Keitel. But Neill is so sweaty and repressed and easily led along by colonialism's backwards ideas of propriety that he thinks it's much saner to mutilate her hand instead. In short, he is a natural-born censor.

Censors even insisted husbands and wives had to sleep in separate beds, which makes no sense if you're trying to endorse marriage as desirable. No doubt sex was present, but censors suspected even husbands of turning into rapists once the lights were out, though of course the night table between the beds was considered be enough to repel them. Laymen will also bring up the rule of lovers having one foot on the floor on each side of the bed but I've never seen that. Still it's pretty damning evidence of the sexophobic Catholic censor board.

Thus it's natural that one of the most interesting ways the filmmakers sought to baffle the censors is through elapsed time (the way lovers in the 20s would fool the dozing chaperone by moving the clock back).

It took most of the later 30s (from when the code was implemented in the back half of 1934 through to the late 60s) for screenwriters to bamboozle the censors while providing what the code was all about -- enough doubt over what happened in the fade out to let innocents think nothing happened and laid adults to know something did. Two examples most film fans should be familiar with are CASABLANCA (1942) and THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). The former cuts from an embrace to an airport watchtower and back to the lovers, still dressed, smoking and looking out the window. Since it's only later that night, and the lovers are still formally dressed, they can smoke and look contented.

In FALCON, there's a fade-out with Bogart leaning down to kiss Mary Astor that moves away from them (we never see them kiss, just Bogart bending down past the window towards where she's sitting) and out the window, where a figure in a trench coat watches up at the window like a ghost wondering if a womb might be going up for rent. We move from this to the next morning but the censors couldn't stop it because a) we never see them even kissing before the fade out, and b) the assosication with danger (the gunsel) and sex is subtextually implied anyway, and c) they are very far from the bed at the fade out, and not even shown in any representational manner.

But the easiest way to baffle and flummox the censors was love in the afternoon, which is a common French practice, as I never get tired of mentioning, and which decadent continental-minded directors and screenwriters use to their advantage, making fun of the censors' lack of earthly carnal experience as they do so. Here are some worthy examples:

BABY DOLL (1956)

Elia Kazan's masterpiece takes the “did they or didn’t they” aspect of production code censorship and makes it the focus of the story, something they could never forgive him for. Here the censor / prurient viewer stand-in for whom all things must be clear and literal (hick cotton gin owner Karl Malden) goes insane trying to figure out whether the hazy dissolve in the nursery where Vacaro takes a nap in baby doll’s bed late in the afternoon signifies they had sex. 

And this was the way Hollywood dealt with the issue of “did they or didn’t they" --the narrative split. If you expect a yes or no answer and really try to find one, you will go insane. In the tree of sex, the cardinals can rest easy in one corner, and the horny bald-spotted Maldens can go nuts in the other... it must be so, or society cannot function. BABY DOLL calls attention to this split however, and ridicules those who would prefer one side over the other... if you feel the need to insist "they did it," you are a pervert, and if you insist they did not, you are a prude. As such, BABY DOLL poses an affront to the pious and phony moralizing of so-called "decent" citizens, which may account for the huge Catholic protest the film created.

After Vacaro and Baby Doll wake up from their nap, neither Archie Lee nor we in the audience know if they did or didn't have sex. Rather than confront them directly, Archie Lee hems and haws around the issue, and Baby Doll and Vacaro play up their flirtations... but is solely for Archie's benefit? At least partly, yes. What makes this scene so “dirty” is not the seductive play between Vacaro and Baby Doll, but its performative aspect. They exaggerate their seductive fire for each other in order to enflame the jealousy of Malden. Their kisses are passionate in direct relation to Malden’s proximity; the harder Malden tries to get a clear yes or no, the steamier their interaction gets.

The lesson to be learned is how to let go of control: Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression and playful retreat, an ebb and flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Thus play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role, without any forward move on her part leading immediately to a man slobbering all over her. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex, Vacaro forces her to sign the statement against her husband for burning down his gin. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "underdeveloped" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly -- one dissolve between a kiss / fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out, stretching that black bar until it forces Malden into a corner.

LOLITA (1962)

A whisper, a fade, no mention of anything ever. But what did happen in that hotel room the next morning? We're still wondering... in removing anything remotely even double entendre, the film makes Debbie Reynolds movies look raunchy by comparison, yet the whole film fairly sizzles over because of our fascination, or censorial-prurient desire to look deeply into the did they/didn't they crevasse... (more here)

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)

It's kind of weird to think that Billy Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON came out a year after BABY DOLL. It's classy enough for the 30s but naughty enough for the early 60s. (Wilder was an unrepentant fucker-with of censors). Audrey Hepburn visits millionaire Yank wooer Cooper at his killing floor hotel suite (which he keeps stocked with a band of serenading gypsy troubadours) only in the afternoons, while her detective father Maurice Chevalier is at work (Chevalier gets a lot of cases trailing errant wives to Cooper's apartment), then splits in time to deal with her dull musician geek boyfriend, cello homework, etc.). She acts all worldly and experienced, almost a burlesque of the women she reads about in her father's lengthy file on Cooper, and slowly uses his own playboy image to slowly infuriate him with jealousy ("if it's any comfort to you, Mr. Flanagan, you are the first American in my life"), gradually shifting the power seat from his worldly wiles to her playful manufactured put-on. Her elaborate imagination with conjuring alpine guides, Spanish bullfighters, and Dutch alcoholics recalls the Lady Eve train scene. Meanwhile the censor gets easily sidestepped through ingenious pans away from the lovemaking to the swoon-worthy gypsy musicians, each song keyed to a stage in the seduction. The censor can't say shit about an orchestra, but when we pan back it's clear something has happened. As long as they're still on the couch, and more or less dressed (even if the clothes are mussed and they can't find a shoe or two), and it's not yet night, all is well, as far as 1957 is concerned.

I really resonate with this film for a few reasons, and one of them perhaps hinges on my whole enamored feeling towards the French cinq a sept (5-7), a tradition whereby one visited one's mistress between work and going home for 7:30 dinner. I still long for mine, now some seven years gone. Notes Chevalier in Wilder's film, "In Paris people make love . . . well, perhaps not better . . . but certainly more often. They do it any place, any time," but the film didn't do well, and as Film Projector notes, a lot of that was maybe the age difference:

Hollywood has a long tradition of teaming older men with younger women (and also that there is psychobiological evidence to explain such mutual attraction: men tend to equate youth in women with fertility, while women tend to equate age in men with the stability and material resources necessary to maintain a family), and such a romantic pairing as Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn—although certainly not fashionable in today's more age-conscious world—doesn't seem entirely implausible. (more)

Damn straight, age-consciousness --one is a dreamer wooer quite getting along in years, the other Hepburn in prime gamin beauty and jubilance, innocent but visibly intrigued. May-December relationships are as stigmatized today as gay relationships used to be. But it goes deeper than how an older man is in a much better position to benefit a younger woman, sharing wisdom and gallantry galore, while all a younger man can really share is surly petulance and vitality. I also think that goes both ways, and older women should take younger men lovers as often as they please. Why not? It's good all around, and might even save this fucked up country from its current quagmire of gender and age relations. And it's very French, n'cest pas?

But rest assured, these relationships exist, behind closed doors, denied in public, deep in the closet, and safe from the censors by making love mainly in the afternoons (by evening, the old man is usually too tired anyway, at least pre-Viagra).

ON THE TOWN (1949)

The war was over but girls were still being nice to guys in the service, and a certain sexual leeway was perhaps implied, especially between the working girls of New York (or San Francisco as with Dorothy Malone and that cute cabbie in THE BIG SLEEP - 1946). Once she gets rid of her roommate, taxi driver Betty Garrett all but devours Sinatra during the afternoon while Gene Kelly chases Miss Turnstiles and fellow sailor Jules Munshin hooks up with sassy sketch artist Ann Miller. We don't see much of that hook-up but it sure is great watching Garrett devour Sinatra: "I like your face," she tells him. "It's empty, know what I mean?" At least she keeps her goals reasonable -- going for Frank. "I knew you'd come back. They all come back." And since they all meet later, 8 PM I think, up in the Empire States Building, the unchaperoned nooner between Frank and Brunhilde (as Garrett is named) goes off without a hitch. The censor dozes right on through it. It was the war after all, or had been. Girls could hook up with sailors before marriage as long as they didn't stay the night and made it to their wartime riveting job on time the next morning. (see also High Society Matrons of Frank).

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

"...On the other hand -- we never know what happens in between being 'closed for the evening' and going out - he doesn't kiss her goodbye or anything - yet perhaps less gallant or experienced viewers will instantly assume it was a full on tryst, a 5-7 shag (vs. snog). Well, the censor is a great one for compelling lovers to not kiss and tell; the time between the glasses coming off and the paper cup toast and the "so long pal" exit are strictly their own business. At any rate, it would be pretty hard to believe even in the 60s-70s that something so cavalier as a sexual hook-up between strangers could go on during regular working hours and not leave any repercussions. You could say it's all just a male fantasy--all those young., available women in all those working wartime women (taxi driver, etc.) leading old Doghouse Rileys like Marlowe to gambol wild and free amongst them while the boys labored overseas. Further wartime references are scattered through the dialogue ("How are you fixed for red points?" Marlowe asks Bernie, meaning to corpses and culprits he has along with their guns, red points being weekly ration booklet meat allowances.)" - full review

 CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972)

Eric Rohmer is a quiet genius when dealing with sexual tension of first kisses and hook-ups, and that genius is on big display in this tale of a Parisian man who runs into an old friend-of-an-old-girlfriend and starts hanging out with her in his lunch hour, gradually leading closer and closer to cinq a sept territory while his pregnant wife waits at home. Sure it might be a mid-life crisis and sure I can't give away the ending, but it's a great example of that love in the afternoon...

In closing, sex in the afternoon is such a great loophole to the conventional mores of the life-choking censors that it's naturally Parisian in origin. Paris, where people have sex rather than obsessing about it (to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich). What a delight censors can be confounded so easily!  Here sex is displayed all over the place as the ultimate status symbol: the stakes are high, and every one is holding out for a perfection they'd only run away from (or would run away from them) if they ever actually found it. We put all this pressure on the third date sleepover to deliver a wonderful mythic poetry that we can spend the next week analyzing and/or bragging about in long phone conversations with our friends; is it any wonder we're so single and so eager to settle? Ladies and gentlemen, let our great country discover the cinq a sept, and stop expecting sex to deliver all the answers... only film can do that.

RED DESERT (1964)

It's Antonioni's big art joke --the modernist response -- writ fast to the frisson disconnect of censorship - Vitti, her husband, her maybe lover, and a few assorted wives, secretaries, managers and swinging bosses all rendezvous for lunch at a brokedown shack by the docks. A conversation about the aphrodisiac properties of fertilized bird eggs leads to one of Vitti's few outbursts of ease-in-the-skin, "I want to make love," and this big bedroom space in the shack, painted red, is gradually full of bodies all being drawn to each other, dancing and slowly acting on their lusty interlocked blase cool. Have they gathered for an orgy? Or is just one almost happening? Is it a matter of Italian censorship that Antonioni can't be specific or is this the modern art genius? Yes, of course it's both, as in all these 5-7 movies. If we demand to know what did happen in the fade-out then we are like Karl Malden in Baby Doll, and we will lose our mind! Ah... Modernité!

Anyway we have the dissolve to darkness and when we fade in it's clear some great energy has been expended, or they ran out of wine or there's just one of those momentary lulls that occur sometimes among people having a really good time and almost having an orgy, but then backing off and feeling their good mood turn on them, pissed they chickened out. We're not meant to know, and by accepting never knowing we realize that's the point and that's why Vitti is crazy because even she doesn't know yet there is no knowing. She's the 'awake' character beginning to realize that all these other people know stuff she doesn't, that they have lives between frames, scenes, before and after, which she lacks. But is there really anything to lack? Again, that's the genius - no questions - we must embrace ambiguity as a pre-requisite to waking from the dream of consensual linear time. The result of our collective slumber to our true reality is what is poisoning the world. We miss the beauty of the trees so lose them. We 'don't know what it's got til it's gone,' but even when it's gone we don't know - unless we first get enough perspective, enough distance from our beds. So wake up, sleeper! The nap is over, the mistress is sated and watching the clock. The censor will be getting home soon; time to feign dignity and dishwater dull decency, until tomorrow, same time, same brief candle. The best part of it all is, you can wait.