International ScarJo: GHOST IN THE SHELL, LUCY, GHOST WORLD, Black Widow

Turn the cable on at any given time and there she is, as: as KGB-enhanced warrior "The Black Widow" in THE AVENGERS; a neurochemically-enhanced girl who achieves 100% brain usage in LUCY;  (voice only) a sexy Siri Mach 2050 who achieves the technological singularity in HER; an alien who lures Scots to the slime in UNDER THE SKIN; an alienated Tokyo tourist in LOST IN TRANSLATION; an alienated high-school graduate in GHOST WORLD.... on an on, aliens, augmented humans, ghosts (in worlds or shells), and AI. Her wry half-smile and husky voice transform any enhanced, artificial, alien or weird character into something warm, tangible, iron tough yet all-forgiving. She's Captain Scarlett Johansson, and she was born in the Bronx (and an inheritor of all the tough chick rasp that implies).

Ever ready to use seduction or a mixture of the kind of martial arts (Muay Thai, Kali, etc) that involves swinging around people's necks like an ice ballet starlet, in Ghost in the Shell she also has a great 'across the thug-filled room' saunter, shoulders low and hunched, as if primed for a sneak attack, and a unique way with sussing potential trouble out of the corner of her eye without breaking stride or cool. She seems always a notch above her material, yet she doesn't step on its toes as she climbs. Gingerly she even brings it along behind her. No easy feat, to redeem and solidify shaky CGI realities. It's OK, too, if she can't quite pull off some of the more encompassing moments of grandeur, for she has the brains to underplay rather than ham it up. Hers is the same cool savvy of 80s (male) action stars like Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger --if she lacks their self-deprecating doofus undercarriage, she at least doesn't wink at the audience or start doing funky dances like Cameron Diaz. That shit doesn't age well (just watch those two Charlie's Angels movies, or Knight and Day), but Scarlett is built to last.

Though adept at smaller scale comedies (where she'll occasionally dust off her Jersey-Bronx-LI accent), since becoming an A-lister, ScarJo hasn't labored for respectability in prestige pics too often, content instead with her lot as the poster girl for a Tyrell Corporation-sponsored Time-Image sci-fi future. The first girl to hang glide all the way across the Uncanny Valley, she's part Hawksian 'one of the guys,' part 'your older sister's one cool friend who's nice to you.' When we see strange new sci-fi worlds through her eyes, they seem livable; their furrowed scalps are gently but robustly tousled by her maternal (but not bossy) fingers. Be they Seoul's skyways, the post-riot despair of 3 AM Glasgow, jet-lagged Tokyo, futuristic Tokyo, some other Tokyo, Paris, mall culture America, the empty rose-colored void, she can bring humanist warmth. 

Turn on any channel and there she is, making the future seem not only real, but inviting, even survivable. 

Her gaijin hair is Asiatic hipster grrl cool. (Ghost in the Shell)

GHOST IN THE SHELL

I'd heard the 'white-washing' accusations (1) before going to (open the Netflix envelope of) Ghost in the Shell, but that only helped lower my expectations, which were low to begin with, for it seemed like Aeon Flux meets Ultraviolet x Resident Evil all over again. But after seeing it I was a fan. Ghost in the Shell is actually a goddamn great film. It's so rich in ambient futuristic detail --from the ingeniously animatronic reptilian geisha girl assassins to the visualized 3-D streams of bit data (they make the green columns in The Matrix seem like the dos prompts in War Games --insert snorty nerd laugh)--its generic cop vs. corporate corruption clunkiness is forgivable (and certainly no more perfunctory than that in Ghost's most obvious template, Blade Runner) and maybe even necessary, since the mise-en-scene itself is so densely layered we need the story to be familiar enough we're not totally alienated.

In a role originally played an anime pixie (and ink has no race, people!), Johansson stars as "The Major," an advanced cybernetic cop chick chassis (the shell) housing a Japanese girl's ghost. Fronting an elite group of cops, she investigates AI-related crimes, and is a bit of a hothead. She regularly gets told not to rush into danger by her concerned chief (Takeshi "Beat" Kitano), which is almost as tired a cliche as M. Emmett Walsh tossing back whiskey and cigars while talking about "beauty and the beast - she's both." As in Blade Runner, some advanced robotics engineers are the target of a splinter group of amok replicants, or something (shades of Shelley!). Their next target seems to be Major's own creator, Juliette Binoche (which is funny if you've just seen Clouds of Sils Maria).

(Spoiler Alert!) The killer /bad guy, 'Kuze', a cyberterrorist robot-human, played by another gaijin, Michael Pitt, is a marvelously intricate character in both acting and CGI senses of the word. he seems to be constantly reconstituting himself from surrounding bit rates, only half alive and half virtual at any given time, his tortured voice wracked with auto-tune and static, his awareness of his past at odds with the Major's computer generated amnesia. Once they start talking, Major starts 'going rogue' while the evil robotics CEO turns the bullets their way. Luckily, the cool thing about being a robot: she can get shot to shit and still be ready to dive slow-mo backwards off the parapet and come crashing upside down through a skyscraper window with both automatics Woo-style blazing in just a few dissolves. The future is nothing to fear as long as hangdog toughies like Beat Kitano carry teflon briefcases and can shoot from the hip. It's an unusually upbeat, even tidy, Robocop style resolution, but it hardly matters - the greatness is in the details, the startling HD clarity that makes the film seem ready for a VR headset 2020 remastering. Compared to the new Blade Runner movie, it's a goddamned masterpiece - maybe even better than the original Blade Runner or, gasp, even Akira! Time will tell.

But getting back to the race cards: the casting of Johansson and Pitt as formerly Japanese eco-terrorist twenty-something lovers (arrested and mind-wiped) presumes if any Japanese person could create their own ideal robot shell, they wouldn't look Japanese, or at any rate even if the ghost/soul was Japanese, the white (French) engineer would give her shell a white face, and she'd automatically speak English (the universal corporate language) rather than Japanese. This strange but sadly (if conveniently) conceivable decision reaches a peak subtextual moment when Kuze and the Major, remembering their Japanese teenager past, take off each other's facial covers, revealing the circuitry beneath; in the process they seem to be showing the maze of sociopolitical awareness vs. box office second-guessing at work in their mask's lack of epicanthic folds. Is it racist, sure? But is it the cause of - or a statement on - ?

In her hirers defense, ScarJo has ample experience for the job, including that of being alienated in Tokyo (as 2003's Lost in Translation); having her face dissolve into bits of digital programming, also in Tokyo (in Luc Besson's Lucy); disappearing altogether and becoming just a SIRI-style AI voic (in Spike Jonze's Her); growing up as a rich person's clone, for future organ harvesting in a Logan's Run style enclosed citadel in The Island - etc. I'd also say that, though white-washing is a long and shameful cinematic practice, Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee didn't just play Fu Manchu because they were white, but because they'd played evil megalomaniacs successfully in the past. Fu is more than just Asian - he's also evil and a genius. Those three things are not always interconnected and in dicerning Fu's chief trait as his Chinese decent one does China a disservice as much as the other way around. In the same way, ScarJo the actor has a resume of successfully conveyed artificial intelligences, test tube babies, amnesiacs, assassins, and substantial fight training that keeps the obligatory hair in the face stunt doubling to a minimum. She's a global star. She's sanded her psyche down for mass appeal, ready to be on the cover of everything from Italian Vogue to Japanese iPhone keypad ads for fragrances based on the novelization of the German film based on a Chinese fable.

There is one way to avoid all the conflicts when watching Ghost, a way to amp up the subtextual resonance until it rings like freedom's bell: watch it on Blu-ray with a Japanese dub language track. Hearing a Japanese actress speaking from inside ScarJo, as a Japanese ghost trapped in an artificial gaijin shell, will likely make all the difference.

I don't know why I'm sticking up for the casting decision- except that I, like everyone else of the SWM variety, needs to prove he's not racist, even if it's only to himself, and the filmmakers clearly went for distance in re-imagining both their holy bible Blade Runner and the original 1995 anime classic. There are multiple viewings worth of layered space and evocatively wrought Black Mirror future shockiness, and I'd hate for all that to be lost like tears in rain just because the producers were scared Maggie Q. wasn't enough of a household name. The level of artistry and detail on display is jaw-dropping, and for once it actually serves a narrative purpose: cluing us in on--not only the world of a very conceivable, maybe even inevitable, future--but the foreign/alien way that future will be perceived, i.e. when VR and 'R' merge inextricably.

I can hardly wait until it too is on FX or FXX and comes punctuated with commercials for 4D, the 'next word' in high-definition television. Ghost in the Shell seems clearly meant for it.

As an anime from 1995, all its cyberpunk detail often seemed to get lost in the overwhelming rush of negative and positive space (ink can't be layered the way blacks shadows in HD can) and--let's face it--the internet was just getting rolling in '95 --AOL still connected via whirring phone modem. A lot of all that internet stuff was still just on the (printed pulp paper) page of Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson novels. Shell's anime style (left) used a lot of rotoscoping and 'real' lights and--unless you were an anime devotee familiar with the narrative tics and traits, ahead of the curve on the dawn of cyberspace--it seemed a kind of over-the-top cartoonish reliance on animation shortcuts rather than segue/linking micro-movement (i.e breathing). That over-the-top literalness in this live action version lives on only in the 'tactical' eye adjustments of Batou (Major's right hand man, he loses his human eyes in a bomb blast, and opts for two telephoto / infrared lenses that make him look like Little Orphan Annie's jacked uncle). Aside from that, nearly every image is sublime and best of all, at least semi-subtle and subdued. Since the actual actors and lighting provides some measure of corporeal relativity, the VR super-impositions stand out yet are so fully meshed, at times reminded me of last February when I had the DTs. While the slow-mo glass shattering and frozen water diving splashes have long been cliche (thanks to The Matrix), here they actually fit the post-modern future on display, as she comes through a window that's also a giant video screen - as if turning the pixels of the image into glass shards.

The ultimate takeaway is that, when the virtual world is as valid and 'real' as this one, (and the Uncanny Valley bridged), one of the side effect developments will be time travel along personal axises and the ability to replay our sensory recording of a single event, which can then be slowed down until the whole world stops on a fraction of a nanosecond for all eternity, and those watching/reviewing can wander into the middle of your 3D retinal projection display and see around corners and read the names of files left on the dresser. Weirder still, these memories could be hacked, so that around the corner too might be a VR assassin ready to--if not actually stop your heart and kill you--at least steal your mental capacity, leave you a stunned amnesiac while he makes off with your internal hard drive. We see bits and pieces of this future in various Black Mirror episodes, but here it all fits together in a blast that's like an atomic bomb trapped inside an orchid.


If social-racial progress gets knocked back a peg by ScarJo's presence in this film, beauty parameters takes one step forward due to her lack of fear at presenting to the world a genuine womanly shape in bodysuit --not zaftig or shapeless mind you, but filled out like a mix of Marilyn Monroe and a UFC fighter -- her lower center of gravity and sinuous synchronized shoulders and pelvis betray evidence of long-term fight training ala Cynthia Rothrock in her earlier films and of Gina Carano in her current ones. She keeps her head perfectly balanced, like a Steadicam, when she weaves around a room, shoulders slinking cannily back and like a combination alley cat and see-saw.

It makes a huge difference. Watching Rothrock throw down next to Michelle Yeoh for example in Yes Madam! is to see the difference between a dancer, lithe and fast (Yeoh) and a genuine kickass fighter (Rothrock); Johansson has grown into the latter. You just can't imagine yourself getting back up from a fight with ScarJo as easily as you can one with Maggie Q.

At the same time, Johansson's modulated low-key acting (as demonstrated first in Lucy) fits both this fighter stance parameter and the role of a soul who's basically had her identity stripped away; her brain has been washed white and enhanced with micro-processors that record and play back memories that can be, as in the Tyrell corporations' most gifted Nexus edition, Rachel (Sean Young), artificially implanted or removed. Her whiteness and blank performance reflect cultural meaning in an era where the digital and analog are no longer separate, where humans can be hacked and turned into weapons just by touching the wrong door knob during a live action interior chip role playing game. But it's her daringly 'real woman' body, unhidden and unashamed, that becomes the unassimilable remainder, an assertion of humanity against the machine, and her micro-gestures of awakening vulnerability accomplish a gravitas Sean Young never could.

What makes Ghost in the Shell work for me, too is that, like Blade Runner, it keeps its ambitions and goals for narrative resolution low-- cliche'd, linear, resolved--to better focus on the visuals, mood, ambience and subtext. Compare with, say, the disastrous Matrix sequels where vast reels trudge across with abstract thesis dissertations on the collapse of space-time vs. the simple Wizard of Oz meets the Pusherman mythos of the first. Macking out between the cop show beats in Ghost are fascinating throwaways, such as a go-nowhere but still interesting scene where she touches the actual flesh(?) of an androgynous, only partially-human, 'mixed race' freckled prostitute (above). In a very touching--but not quite sexy--scene their faces touch close enough the heat is there, but there's no need to go all the way into some gratuitous cyber-lesbianism. Instead we have that curiosity with which a human might gaze into an animal's eyes (as in the cliche'd scenes with Batou's stray mutts) or vice versa, each fascinated by the mystery of a separate, never quite-knowable intelligence on the other side -- as beautiful, as de Lautréamont's saying goes, as the chance encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on the dissecting table. For Major it's the unknowability of what makes us human, metered out with the fascination of the machine for the human and vice versa; each enraptured, envious, even, of the other: a human with artificial augmentation seen through the eyes of the reverse.

And then there's the weirdest, most strangely vivid and human--portion of Ghost in the Shell: Kaori Momoi a Major's mom. It's clear English is not Momoi's first language but she attacks it with a stunning, raw innocence- as if in forming these strange words she's creating some new kind of polyurethane fiber: even across the divides of language and digital artificial shell recombination, and even race, she quickly recognizes her long lost daughter without ever having a big reveal. Maybe we can all learn a lesson from that. Probably not.

IRON MAN 2 / AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON / CAPT. AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER: BLACK WIDOW needs her own damn movie, Marvel. 

A nurturing friend to the Comic-Con geek, ScarJo likes to get right up close to the Hulk and rub his fingers or invade his puny Banner's personal space, or fall on top of him in a sexy silk dress behind the bar, telling him "don't turn green, ok?" She ends up trying to help Capt. America find a girlfriend even while they unfurl a dastardly Fourth Reich Paperclip conspiracy deep within the CIA (I mean HYDRA within SHIELD) and finally does the direct approach with Banner when he won't take please for an answer, and he ends up running away instead. The smart move, that, because Black Widow is single for a reason: Marvel 'gets it' -she belongs to us all. She's who we, the lovelorn teenage male demographic, imagines coming home to. We know she wouldn't be turned off by our living in mom's basement and spending our disposable income on mint condition action figures. Were Marvel to saddle her up with some dude like Luke Wilson, bringing her flowers and making hangdog eyes, that, sir, would be a major miscalculation in how fantasy works to allay and soothe the hormone-tortured adolescent mind. 

 Marvel's too smart for that. Marvel gets it, and clearly posits Black Widow (it's in the name) as the girl we can imagine ourselves with (lord knows I did, back in the days of her character's large-size black and white comics when I was at a nerdy high school freshman). Or at the very least she stays single and we stay best buddies.

That said, I wonder just how many young boys and lesbians actually do imagine themselves with Scarlett Johansson. I don't think it's that many - she's more like our badass fantasy friend. Maybe it's her Bronx upbringing, but Scarlett's one weakness is that she can't do 'weakness.' She can never quite tap the accessible vulnerability (emblematic in, say Heather Graham or Patricia Arquette) that brings out the lusty aggressor in a man, so essential to his sex drive. Instead, we love her at a respectful distance, and like her style; as a pal, she boosts our ego without having to get awkward about it.

There's a scene early in the first Avengers where she's tied up and  getting slapped around by a cadre of Russian mobsters in an abandoned warehouse and her cell phone rings, it's Fury who wants her to come in, and she says something like Hold on, I'm almost done interrogating these guys. In the calm collected way she says it, the men realize she's never not been in control of the situation like they thought. She easily escapes her bonds and beats the shit out of them all with pieces of the broken chair, then sashays away. That scene to me illustrates the breadth of Scarlett's range, for she is not the most giving and exhibitionist of actresses. This scene plays her dramatic weaknesses into strengths the way Neil Young overcomes his limitations on guitar, through a kind of advanced depth primitivism. We can buy her as vulnerable only if it comes packaged with the idea it might be a ruse.

On the other extreme of the acting intensity range, for example, we might consider Noomi Rapace, who acts her pain and anger so vividly in films like Prometheus and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that she leaves any concept of 'fun' far behind her. In her hands, that scene in the Russian warehouse would be a grueling drag. She'd make the pain and trauma of her slapping brutally real - she'd make it our problem, the post-Fury call thrashing would be cathartic but we'd still be left irritable and clammy. Rapace forgets we come to movies to be entertained, especially movies about space monsters and girl avengers. We don't need to feel traumatized, or to hate ourselves worse than we already do. The only thing tempering our pain at Rapace's automated C-section in Prometheus is that her character has been such a self-righteous drag we're happy to see her suffer. She makes her own pregnancy issues everyone else's problem, then gets pissy when the ship's crew don't drop everything they're doing to ram an alien space craft on her command even if it will kill them all. ScarJo by contrast implicitly understands the parameters of a scene in ways beyond mere chops and intensity; she's her generation's Angie Dickinson, she's Lauren Bacall x Alice Faye. 

Dig the way her shoulders hunch and move with her eyesight like a canny
low-center boxer snaking through the crowded disco as the ecstasy kicks in.

In Lucy (2014) there's a great bit where, after she's been spending the first 1/4 of the movie crying and pleading, one of her captors kicks her in the stomach, breaking open a kilo of high-end brain boosting Limitless-style super drugs she's been muling. Peaking on these blue crystals, she ably escapes, kills an array of bad guys, gets shot, goes to the hospital and--while a doctor removes the bullet as she holds him at gunpoint--she calls her mom to explain that she remembers being in her womb and the taste of her milk and how much she loves her.

Good lord! Delivered by Johansson in a flat whispery monotone, Lucy's call to mom will bring uncomfortable recognition from anyone who's ever had a mind-opening drug trip / manic high and decided to call their mom out of the blue to re-'connect', and explain they've cracked it wide open, broken the code, that they 'get it now' and can see past the limitations of time and space and realize all the interconnected love etc. etc. This will either move their mom to tears of gratitude or have her ready to call the psychiatric clinic. I know I've had a few of those back in the 80s-90s, and was always grateful for my mom's sense of denial, for I'd never hear about it later and forgot most of what I said/promised. Since then, I've been on the other end, watching younger generations do the same thing and I've been privy to how crazy these sorts of phone calls and explanations sound, both pretentious and deluded, egotistical and full of fragility masked in bravado, as if in convincing me of their discovery their discovery becomes permanent, rather than just the flash of illumination - eternal only in the memory. It's like they try to etch these fleeting feelings into the consciousness of those around them, rather than where they should go- onto paper, magnetic tape, and hard drives- but, what might be trippy in art, brilliant in theory, sounds nuts in verbal rants to your sleepy friends and parents. Profound insight doesn't translate out of the blue, just like hearing about someone else's dream never has the same dizzy power as telling our own.

It's perhaps the sadder truth of enlightenment, especially via the poison path, that the more brilliantly the ideas cascade inside your mind, the more the tongue can barely keep pace. Ideas, insight and inspiration may all flow out into brush strokes on canvas, words on the screen, words from the mouth - but try to talk normal to a friend or parent and you don't sound like someone who's cracked it wide open and broke on through to the other side. You sound like an amok egotistical maniac, a frothing lack-of-sleep meth-addled grandiose version of James Mason in Bigger than Life and maybe, a little bit, like Scarlett Johansson in Lucy would if she didn't wisely underplay to such a dry extent. It may seem at the time like bad, flat acting, but any other way would be far worse. And besides, soon her Lucy can back up her words by remote controlling all media and gravity via telekinesis and shit in ways that make her more than a match for Neo in The Matrix, but she does it all without leather and dark glasses.

For Lost in Translation (see A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula)

Ghost World

It was in 2001's Ghost World, Scarlett J. first showed the world a most endearing smirk that set her in a class somewhere off from/above the zero sum hipster anarchy of her self-destructive friend Enid (Thora Birch). They start out as equals in sardonic incredulity but by the end Scarlett looks upon Enid with the same kind of bemused indulgence Enid looks upon Steve Buscemi. When, with that not-yet patented ScarJo kind of halfway grin that can--if tried by amateurs--smack of snide dismissal, she finally turns against Enid in favor of a job and some semblance of normality, we feel a chill in our guts. We don't want Scarlett to do that to us - we'll be normal if that helps, for we realized too that Enid's rebellion is a dead end. Sure her options were all soul-sucking drone work, but she needed to knuckle down and do it, to let her soul die just a bit, to reign in her wild mare, and then let it loose at night, in basement art, like some John Cheever character, instead of sticking with her snider-than-thou posturing straight into the 'isolated drifter -one dollar' bin. Poor Enid.

Scarlett J. was right to do dump her because Enid's world view and attitude is, in the end, not self-sustaining. There's nowhere to go, and that--I think--was the film's big flaw, it didn't know how to end itself. It should have zapped the title up to a blast of punk anarchy when the old man gets on the bus that wasn't supposed to come and leaves Enid alone on the bench. Bam! She looks out at camera, Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. Kafka-esque, man: the bus out of here never comes - oh wait it came after all these years - and now it's gone again! Forever! A Winner. They probably tried that ending, but test audience asked what happened to Seymour, so the film checks in with Seymour again, letting us know--not that we cared--he's doing just fine, getting professional help, as if we needed to know that rather than to experience his and Enid's fall both in that one bus stop moment. The utter pointlessness of rebelling against life outside the beef jerky and nunchucks of prefab American reality while still living within in it, Scarlett mutes it all down and gets excited about a fold-down ironing board in the apartment she's renting with Enid (if Enid gets the money), and that's really the film's one emotional payoff. The terror that flits across Enid's face as she suddenly realizes she truly is alone in the universe. Bam! Ghost World title card and punk rock credits music. Another key winner final shot.

Scarlett's never really given us that ironing board moment since, thank goodness, and has become instead a global scale avatar of a kind of mirror reverse nerd gaze - reflecting the geeky adoration of the Comic-Con Cos-play Kid back upon itself, with a wry half-smile that says "I know you would run in terror if I came onto you in real life, and so I'm not going to, because if I did, and you ran, you'd hate yourself and then when you saw me onscreen again you'd jut get the sting of shame at the memory of when you ran away, so I'll spare you the shame and me the lack of your movie ticket royalty. But otherwise, I would totally hit on you as you're cute in a geeky way. We both know that, so let's never say another word about it." 

This is the gaze that boys want to see mirrored back, for it acknowledges their gaze as something other than a toad-like imposition; even as it gently rejects, it flatters; the male gaze is returned without the Medusa stone surcharge so usually associated with 'real' women. The fanboy's gaze is not judged sexist, misogynist, evil, gross or all the other judgments breathing mammalian women make on men who leer way out of their league, nor is it returned with a come-on directness like a prostitute meeting their gaze across an Uncanny Valley casino bar, the type where you look away in fear instantly, before you consciously even realize what just happened. Even if you've never seen a high end prostitute in the wild, you still instinctively don't kick yourself for being chicken, because you suddenly realize a beautiful girl's sudden reciprocal stare is terrifying, your gaze can't help but flinch if it's not used to being gazed back at the same way that it gazes. It's like Delilah springing forth with a garden shears to cut your balls or hair off the minute you spot her in the Waldo crowd.

ScarJo doesn't bring the shears. Her stare says, hey man, relax, the parts of us that are human are so far apart I can look back at you as insolently as you look at me in the hidden darkness of your roost. The shell you gaze into may be owned by Sony, but my ghost is my own, and I promise you this: no matter what else the future may shear away, you can keep your hair on.

Further Reading:

Skeeved by an Asian: THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN, MASK OF FU MANCHU, ETC. 
It's only real if it wrecks your life: HER, THE WAY WE WERE, LOVE AFFAIR
Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT
CinemArchetype 16: Automaton / Ariel 
A Jet-Lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE

NOTES:
1. Blair, Gavin J. (April 19, 2016). "Scarlett Johansson in 'Ghost in the Shell': Japanese Industry, Fans Surprised by 'Whitewashing' Outrage". 

A Jet-lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE

"As for fidelity, should one not be faithful to all those whom one loves?" - Robin Wood  

Watching the weird nocturne noir chemistry cohere like a ghost from the black and white celluloid mist of This Gun for Hire (1942) for the zillionth time, I'm still trying to nail down the lovesick ache I get from Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake's mystical lost ghost frequency. Blonde, small (ten feet between them) and only flickeringly emotional, they're like a separated-from-birth version of Sharon Tate and David Hemmings in Eye of the Devil, or two alien-human hybrids who recognize each other from a past off-world life.

Neither fraternal nor sexual (as critic David Shipman notes, Ladd "never flirted nor even seemed interested, which is one of the reasons he and Lake were so effective together." [2]), their muted chemistry is so elusive, so void of frills and posturing, it resonates today as strongly as it resonated with wartime audiences. It's the "speak-softly-because-you-don't-know-who's-listening" wartime caution ("loose [or loud] lips sink ships"), the same shadowy skull reflection death drive cool low-key whispery savvy we find in Val Lewton's horror films and Sinatra's ghostly radio crooning from the same period (1941-45). There's a stealthy 'shhhhh don't wake the parents or the baby or the sleeping regiment' emotional intimacy that reaches out to include the listener/viewer like a warm blanket.

This was the era when every healthy able-bodied man was overseas facing death, and the women were expected to go into a kind of sexual deep freeze, working in munitions plants or driving cabs, and waiting for letters from the front, terrified of the arrival of an officer with an ominous telegram in the middle of the night. In the B movies from Monogram, Bela Lugosi abducted and froze the virgin brides and while men died powerless in their foxholes and idiot heroes missed obvious clues. John Carradine brushed their baby's zombie hair while they moaned powerless from their seats in the canteen.

But for all that, their woman's chastity was intact, somehow. We knew it would be all right as long as we kept our voices low. Sinatra's crooning soft from the radio protected them all like the giant wing of a feathery evening. Ladd and Lake's chemistry was perfect for this deep freeze moment. They pulled themselves from the gravity of their respective slumbering arcs and fully noticed each other, falling, with us, into a new kind of subtle dream.

That kind of subtlety is never popular for long however. Sleazy studio heads--perhaps used to a steady supply of eager would-be starlets ("Mr. Smearcase!" as per Lake's ingenue in Sturges' Sullivan's Travels) parading their wares-- were like John Travolta's snickering entourage in Grease, they want to know 'did they or didn't they?' Sympathetic wavelength entrainment and platonic pair bonding were to these slavering troglodytes just synonyms for cowardice in the face of zong zong zip zowie awooga!

Such men are a blight on Hollywood and human genomes. They're stuck there. But you! Oy, you can-a-dance-in-a-Manhattan, Vinny. All fornication will get you is VD or a kid, Vinnie. One broken condom at the drive-in ("feelin' like a fool / wonderin' what the kids will say / next day at school") and your career is over: child support, and diapers. Diapers, Vinnie! Or just whispers, shadows, cigarettes, and insouciant gazes. 4-ever.

Note: subliminal similarity to a multi-armed Hindu deity

That's the trick to staying cool in wartime: honoring the homefront sexual deep-freeze, the core of platonic alien jet-lagged love. To relish the anguish of sexual longing and sublimate it into art and friendship rather than materialize its carnal shadow and therefore obliterate it, this is the highest form of fraternal love. As I've written before on this site, in Visconti's The Leopard, Burt says "marriage is six months of fire, forty years of ashes," but with platonic love / friendship it's ten-to-twenty of slow-burning coal. Isn't that better, and way harder to find? Whether he's dead Fred from Night of the Iguana, an old wise film critic whose Cialis prescription ran out, a savvy Lacanian, or a sixty foot tall gorilla, the adroit, awakened lover is transported by beauty past the breakwaters of horniness and into accidental chivalry, into honor, the Hawksian code.

After all, she's got a boyfriend... over there... somewhere... it would be a kind of like Nazi sabotage to take advantage of his absence.

The first scene of This Gun For Hire tells it all: Raven (Ladd) rips the sultry boarding house maid's dress, not to ravish her but because she was mean to his kitten. Raven makes only two 'moves' on Ellen (Lake), the first to steal five dollars from her purse and next to march her into an abandoned building, not for vile molesting, but to shoot her dead as a witness, as someone he thinks is in cahoots with Laird Cregar. She gets away only by the timely return of two construction workers back from their lunch break. Her friend later tells her she looks like she's been on a "hayride with Dracula," an analogy which works well, as Drac's motives aren't carnally impure either. He's just in it for the blood.

The few times Ladd and Lake did hook up in a movie, their kiss happened only at the end, or after fade-out. We seldom saw the actual kiss. The Blue Dahlia (1946) for example, fades out on William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont looking over at Ladd and Lake, offscreen, who are by then presumably kissing. We've been longing for them to get together all through the film but now that there's nothing standing between them... well, who likes seeing their parents kiss, even if they're little blonde aliens? 

Aliens... I don't only mean extraterrestrial but also alienated. Foreigners in a strange land, unable to shake their dreamy disconnected jet lag ennui. When they finally meet a fellow traveler as alienated as themselves, like Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation (2003) after so many lonely alienated hours, well, it's a special magic. Both unable to sleep in their ritzy Tokyo hotel, not speaking Japanese at all, or any other language, their initial reason for being there not taking up much of their time, their gaijin height and features contrasting them from the rest of the city as distinctly as giant Nephilim Nordic Vikings, they can either hang out together or with no one. They connect, but it's more about their sharing loneliness, as opposed to merging into couplehood --with all the associative baggage that implies.

I remember when I saw Translation at a Chelsea theater during its initial run on Thanksgiving in 2003 at with a cadre of AA people. I was in the throes of something so similar to the doomed bonding of Bob and Charlotte, I felt like the film was a continuation of my own life, with Manhattan doubling for Tokyo and Brooklyn for the States. I recognized too the dangers of this intense bond leading anywhere other than disaster, largely from the cautionary example of Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch in Ghost World (left), in which Johansson also co-starred just two years earlier.  We all in that AA posse recognized the same lost soul magnetism between Murray and Johansson in our own love for each other, the gorgeous ephemeral lost soul union known only to we who have heard the chimes at midnight fade into sirens and muffled EMT voices muffled across hurricanes of silence far over our heads as we leaned back against the flat bumpy pillow of the numb sidewalk and felt with our eyes half-open like we were standing, sitting up and lying down all at the same time: "Sir? Sir? Can you hear my voice? Have you had anything to drink or taken anything tonight?"

"Taken anything".. what a dumb expression, you think. No ossifer, everything's right where I found it.


Isolated in our space, cut off and adrift, our precious alcohol on the other side of a dangerous highway, when someone else comes along who gets that, someone also on that level--a sympathetic cute chick EMT rather than a suspicious cop eyeing your bulging gym bag--well, she's too precious to throw away by busting even some advanced playa move. You might rear back and think that's being scaredy-cat, but I know the follow-through too well. If it works, you have to make out for hours and blah blah, and if it doesn't and she leave, you die on the street, the average folks stepping over you like you're just another vagrant, and aren't you?

People say men and women don't know how to be friends but what they mean is they don't know how. Love can flourish more profoundly in a platonic friendship, irregardless of genders, or numbers. You needn't be monogamous or cockblock or judge or restrict or allow those things to be done to you. But first you need to have achieved a few of your life's most cherished desires, like crawling through the parched sand for days, finally making it to the far off mirage of a water fountain and seeing at last it's just a rock. Or in love's case, a goddamned diaper. Is anything more revolting than when love leads to a family? What's the use of being a hit man at all if they're just going to keep coming?

There needs to be some peace, a population evening-out, otherwise no one even has a chance to experience the grand crushing emptiness of making it to the water fountain and finding out it's just a fountain-shaped rock. To paraphrase Jim Morrison--no earth-shattering orgasm or greaser high-five will forgive you for the dawn you just wasted.


Breeder San Francisco homicide detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston - above) for example, wants to waste the dawn that is Lake's shimmering hair in This Gun for Hire by turning her into "a cop's wife," "I don't understand it," notes one of her fellow showgirls to him, "that girl is nuts about you," We don't understand it either.

Robert Preston? Whaaaat? Whyy? We can feel all the disembodied souls swarming around Lake like masked figures at a sold-out Sleep No More consider, at this news, breaking off to haunt some other gorgeous blonde. No point jostling with those other souls in the dark if you have to grow up with half the gene pool of this dunderheaded straight-edge who expects your gorgeous mom to cease chanteuse-ing, to perform instead for an audience of one, "darning his socks and cooking his (and eventually your) corned beef and cabbage." I love This Gun for Hire but when I hear that line I wince and want to shout, "all that horrid smelling steam will ruin her heavenly hair!"

No offense meant to Preston, he's great as the uber-gay promoter in Victor/Victoria, his winning performance did wonders for easing America's collective homophobia, but his detective is a safety-first putz fit to warm the Catholic Legion of Decency's heart, but annoy everyone else. When he sees lovely Lake slink onto the stage and do her number, this future fey Music Man can only imagine getting her out of that shimmery gown and into an apron; he sees her gorgeous hair and imagines how much better it will look wilted from the steam, leaning over a pot of fucking boiled cabbage all day. As Bugs Bunny would say, what a maroon. And is she any better?

I can only presume we're supposed to feel that way. In the shadowy option of the other side, Lacan's primal (or anal) father, is Laird Cregar, nimbly seeming both gayer and straighter than Preston, referring to his main vice as "backing leg shows" and by acknowledging the job's essential tawdriness, he brings it some counterintuitive class and legitimacy. He might be a lech, but at least he wants Ellen looking glamorous for everyone rather than Crane's super-menial "cabbage-cooker for one" alternative.

Oh well, even if she didn't wind up as a blue collar cop's wife role in her subsequent films and even if Gun would be the last time we have to have a square boyfriend for her (just noble dimwits or blustery gangsters from now on), we know her real love is always that lost cause with a broken wrist who claws at everyone but her. She looks at sweaty little crumb bums like Ladd's Raven or amateur mendicant-disguised Sullivan with compassion of the same sort Raven has for the stray boarding house kitten, not with disgust or judgment the way the rest of the world does, just one right guy to another, take it or leave it. The compassion in her eyes when she looks at Raven, especially on the train and when they're hiding out at the train yard, provides one of the great transcendental healing gifts of the movies. Hers is a look beyond sentiment, sympathy or some covertly judgmental altruism. It's a real feeling of empathy--it's lifted me out of many a post-bender shame spiral and made me, like Raven, her loyal champion. She's the dream girl for all us broken mugs who need a friend--her beauty acts like a healing opiated salve on our souls, and she's glad to radiate as long as we don't get Smearcase touchy-feely, which we're too shaky to try, anyway. 

"You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!' - Veronica Lake's character, a struggling actress who spends her last dime on who she thinks is a bum but is a slumming director who knows Lubitsch - Sullivan's Travels 1941

The same beauty Ladd and Lake capture in Gun is here in this diner between Lake and McCrea, the Hawksian self-awareness that keeps one so aloof from the shallow world finally being rewarded in a union of equals, and she's free from Mr. Smearcase and his grabby hands (in 1951's The Thing, Margaret tells Pat how much she likes him only when his hands are safely tied - Hawks knew, too, the two are connected).

And then there's that hair. Gun for Hire is considered her big hair breakout, but if she owes her career to anyone it's not her hairdresser or Ladd or Raymond Chandler but Preston Sturges, for throwing her into a pool in Sullivan's Travels (1941), leading to the scene where she brushes her long hair out by the pool in her sexy white robe. A complex post-modern masterpiece on the bourgeois need to tell the story of 'the little guy' to the little guy who'd rather not hear about it. (3)  

There's only one problem: there are only a few Lake-Ladd noirs, and only a few other films that know how to situate Lake's rare gifts --and once you watch 'em all, where are you? A shivering alcoholic in the cold again, sifting through your stacks of DVDs like they're a bunch of empty bottles, wondering if there's anything left, anywhere, for that sense of Hawksian bonding or Lake-Ladd alien frequency, that golden healing opiated salve. Can Ramrod fit the bill? No. Her hair never leaves those western coiffs.

"It's really the repression of sex (think of old stories like Brief Encounter and Love Affair) and the acceptance of a carnal boundary that can't be crossed that becomes, in their eloquent silence-filled rapport, a form of love more life-altering than the sexual contortions now monotonously de rigu eur." - Molly Haskell (4) 

The tragedy with the couple in platonic love orbit in Lost in Translation, is that each party has already 'settled' for an approximation of what they considered 'normal' - the cop boyfriend or the star-chasing photographer, some banal 'normie.' Luckily, it's not a tragedy, as that obligation to be faithful to an undeserving other frees them from needing to drag the carnal along into their love affair. Courtly love was never about breaking up the marriage, which was usually arranged at the time. Sex was what triggered your disillusionment, not the other way around. It's the hesitant but undeniable attraction of doomed lovers in the lost moment, sharing the pain of remembering that loving bond, that matters. Anyone who's fallen in love from a distance--something all too common in the internet age where the lack of earthly parameters frees one to write acres of poetry and longing prose letters--vast forests of stanzas--that never need to be printed or even saved, anymore than their yearning urgency needs to be concretized in the carnal sack. The lover in your mind isn't usually even close to the actual person anyway. When you finally meet up, there's that awkward first few hours as you adjust your expectations.

In AA we say 'think the drink through.' Instead of just thinking of the drink and the sweet sudden feeling of completeness, of joy and fearless brio, the surge of coherence, confidence, inspiration, and jubilant love it brings, think it through to the need for the next one, twice as strong as the need for the first, but with only half the joy and completeness, and then the sodden depression when we're too drunk to do anything but drink more, and gradually we're too fucked up to do anything else but pour. And then... it's all gone, and we're too fucked up to get any more. We can't even find our goddamned pants, or even the phone to order delivery, let alone drive or stagger to the liquor store.

But it's the same for Bob as he's being drawn to Charlotte in Translation, that rapturous connection too delicate to risk with clumsy fumbling. In AA we also say "drink all you want, just don't drink the first one," i.e. if you don't have the first drink, you're free, and that's not a lot to ask, considering all the other drinks waiting. It's a trick, but it works. Same thing in the Bob-Charlotte or Lake-Ladd connections: if you don't make a first move you'll never lose her. Maybe she'll sleep with every single one of your friends while making eyes at you, but in 20 years you will be the only guy she remembers without anger and remorse when she's making her qualification in Sex Addicts Anonymous. And if you doubt your love is stronger without it, just check how peevish Scarlett is at Bill for hooking up with that lounge singer. Here they're both married, but the real devotion is to each other, and sex with other people is an affront, almost too close to the real thing.

It's a Catch-22. It's like death, in fact, and like death you are officially permitted to laugh it off, to stand pat, sound in your Lacanian ideal and self knowledge, using her loveliness to fuel your art. Forever. There's no greater bond. If Death chooses you, if Death makes the first move, then okay. But you don't have to make it easy for her. Death loves a good challenge! Pedro, did you put the girl on the stage or not??

No! she did not go!

It's that death drive as a platonic ideal that is why Johansson was so well cast in Lost and later in Her and the underrated Lucy and why it was so important she wanted to fool around with Captain America in Winter Soldier and later Bruce Banner/Hulk in Age of Ultron, but they were the ones who held back. Natasha Romanov, sexy seductress super spy: it's great that she wants to fool around with you, it's bad if you allow it, because this is a girl so used to having men she wants, of using sex as a weapon, of being constantly ogled, seducing and destroying, that the only way to win her respect is to not be one of her countless conquests. You can't risk the Hulk coming out when she dumps you, or sleeps with some KGB shithead as part of her job. In this way art thou noble, chivalrous, and tortured enough that your soul is forge-hot, ready to be hammered by God or the Devil into brave new shapes.

And if you love her, you want her respect more than the crushing pain of thwarted desire; if she doesn't call you back some rainy Sunday night, it won't be for anything you did wrong. Brits have this shit down with the relationship between Dr. Who and his companions, for them--with tons of platonic pair bonds--it's no big deal. Only America, where sex is such an obsession it's stifled in its cradle, does such steamy self-sabotage keep everyone lonely in that susceptible-to-advertising way so intrinsic to first world domination.

Take it from me, the pain's the same, either way. Things are only valuable once they're lost. So lose yourself and watch your price shoot up until you're smack center of the comic store window. So what if you're not in Near Mint condition? You're still Very Fine.

On the other hand, if she moves in, goes for that first kiss, you may as well go along because it's even better if you help. And it's rude to refuse a beautiful woman. And then that's probably going to be it, onscreen, so make it count. Censors, man. What you do after the fade out, or whether or not we pan to your buddies walking down the street, passing below the window, wondering if they'll ever get to be sheriff or mind their own business, or pull away from your conversation on the Tokyo street so we can't hear it ---that has to be your affair, private, for this all to work. There's only one solution to the bind Charlotte and Bob find themselves in at the end of Lost in Translation, for their final words together --Bob's whispering in the Tokyo throng while his car service sits in traffic--to be unheard by our corrupting microphone ears.

Anyway, we'll always have Facebook.

Here's looking at you/r kid/s.

NOTES
1. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics in Narrative Cinema, (p. 82)

2. Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years. New York: Hill & Wang, 1979.
3. I wish had a making-of documentary extra, so we could see all these rich characters with expensive filmmaking machinery filming a bunch of extras as hobos hopping a freight train in a movie about how dumb it is for rich guys to film hobos running onto a train instead of Ants in Your Plants.
4. Molly Haskell "Melancholy Males or Movies about Men Turning 50" (The Guardian, Oct. 10 2003)

Antichrist in Translation: UNDER THE SKIN, HABIT

Showing off scars, from top: Under the Skin, Habit

Under the Skin (2014), the new slick dark green opus from Brian (Birth) Glazer, is a film that links up one's panic attacks before and after itself (as seen by you, the viewer) and signals the future of cinematic horror-science fiction as less about acting and thrills and more about the viewer's brain dissolving itself in a pool of black oil in the middle of a dark forlorn forest, wondering as it fades how it hears the rain and sizzle without ears. 2014's first official trans-humanist off-world 'chance to begin again' at that Crystal Peak moment of post-modern social decay, the screen on which it's showing as permeable as a jet black oil-filled swimming pool, Skin is not just mercury mirror from ye auld Cocteau Orphee, not just the menstrual matrix of Shauna Macdonald's Descent. It's the next step deeper. Just don't expect to climb out in the same skin you wore when you dove--or were sucked--in. You emerge as different from your old tar pit-stuck self as a tetrapod is from a placoderm.

I collaged this image/s together/m and are real prowed

I know how it is, bro. I began the weekend with a terrible panic attack. Friday crashed down around me in hailstorms of at-work red tape, hot potato bureaucratic quagmires, April allergies, allergy med-fed depression, and free-form anxiety--based on the need-- to take my girlfriend anywhere other than our couch in front of the TV for the weekend. She can take just so much of my trepidatious sloth and then the pressure is on to amuse her. She said she wanted to go out to the movies this time. My blood ran cold and I shook like the gallows pole was sliding up me arse at the thought. I came home, we looked at the times, and soon I trembling on the floor in a ball of anxiety.

Luckily, she had a stash for emergencies - and so took pity on me - and tossed a half-a Xanax down in front of me and like a good dog I went scrambling after it, ate it down like a good boy, and 20 minutes later was feeling sane enough that we caught the late show of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin down at the BAM with minimal hand tremors.

Wandering back home afterwards, up Flatbush towards Park Slope, it was around midnight. Usually busy as hell, the half-deserted and strangely-lit Good Friday-empty Brooklyn was a trash-strewn neon, rain-shined ghost town. Cutting through the uphill haze of alienated Flatbush Ave liquid street lamp and traffic light reflection on the droplets in the mist, stale popcorn nausea and lingering-half Xanax glow wobbliness pulsing through our hamstrings, we knew something weird had happened. I couldn't quite get past the feeling Glazer's film was more of a video art installation swerving towards a last minute And then the Darkness homage than an actual movie, but it was certainly art. Instead of a narrative flow there is--buried in mossy 'membrances of Basil Twist-y underwater shirt twirlings--the sense of drowning-in-place, the theater slowly being flooded with tar--like it would be, for example, at a Marble Index-era Nico concert--and that's all art can ever hope to convey. The darkness of the murky theater swallowed my soul right up, each block behind us falling into Blitz-era blackout, and even as we floated up to the smoky safe squalor of our flat, it was still there: the cord between the Twisty twirling and my body stretched G-sharp and Carpenter-ominous.

The paranoid terror red hot potato Poe-level paranoia was waiting, at home, arms crossed, for that X-half to wear off.

I felt half digested, like that Xanax-was. As it faded, so too my essence.

Then, I realized where my paranoid terror was coming from: it was coming from Mad Men.

It was related to re-watching all six seasons of in prep for the new and final season and realizing I'd mixed up Don Draper's forced hiatus from Sterling Cooper with my own at-work woes. So it's true, then. I'm already half-sunk into the black oil image. I can't always remember where I end and TV begins; since I live in NYC I get confused too and think people I know from TV or movies are people I know from work, and so I wave if I see them on the street (not helping matters, so many of the supporting actors live in my neighborhood - it's far weirder to recognize them and not remember from where).

But when things get too intense at home, by which I mean onscreen, I can move to the kitchen to fix a drink or go to the bathroom and repeat to myself, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie." To our cat we at home must look often like statues, frozen in seated positions on the couch, before the glowing square, awaiting our orders.... hours and weeks at a time pass in addled bemusement, while the cat waits for us to see her.

But does the cat know what we do? That away from the safety zone of our apartment, the world is cold, dark, harsh? The world Glazer lures us into is that zone, a dark and alien theater, built up on the power of Birth (Nicole Kidman enraptured at the concert) and the sexual allure of Scarlett Johansson- we see these ladies movie-size--and suddenly they see us-! Suddenly we're not even safe in our own simulacrum.

Set mostly in and around the dark shroud of Glasgow, Skin is rich with bleakly beautiful panoramas of: bowling alleys; cobblestone streets with sad pubs lined; panic attack-inflicting red-glazed strobe dance clubs; drenching rain over misty mountain moors and lashing surf rolling and crashing down in fast accelerations on a family, first at play and them sucking them all into their presumed deaths in a chain of failed rescues from a relentless riptide. Sans suspenseful music or any indication they've drowned, leaving only a screaming infant behind, it's such a harrowingly existential moment it kind of crawled inside my stomach like a nightmare I had as a child and had forgotten all these years. Suddenly the layers of assurance and support that nothing bad can happen to an infant onscreen are swept away with nary a sympathetic orchestral string to let us know that the filmmakers, too, are horrified rather than as mountain-level indifferent as the alien who only deigns to steal the clothes.

We're not given any indication Glazer cares about the fate of anyone in the film, even himself, his own reputation as a human being, and that kind of ambiguity is chilling, and even somewhat original. And there's also working class yobbos Scarlett hooks: their slang--as indecipherable as an alien tongue--contrasting with her (surprisingly good) posh Londoner accent--setting up a class divide, and... damn -- I can't let it go. How do you get back to talking about this film's familiar Devil Girl From Mars plot after seeing that poor bereft toddler screaming, abandoned to the incoming tide on a deserted stretch of beach as the sun sets down around him like an evil shroud? This poor kid's screams hang like a torture-tricked sucker punch cheap shot over the remainder of the film, until the sheer weirdness of the deformed lion boy pick-up throws us yet another Mickey.

Whole reels of Skin seem to have been carved out, though--based on our familiarity with films like La Femme Nikita and The Man Who Fell to Earth--we can deduce those missing pieces easy enough and patch in the cracks, but why should we have to if it's only so Scarlett can suddenly turn compassionate Ann Bancroft at the Lynchian epidermal symbolism carnival moment? I'm not an animal! See me! Touch me! I'm dreaming. Take the shot, Miss Moneypenny.  Glasgow is for drunks and junkie loo divers but too dangerous even for a black oil seductresses to engulf. Run forest-ward for safety! Wrong way! Take the shot, poured to double size for growing ladies shedding skins, melt into the forest couch so Robert Carlyle can't find ya. and carve his pound of flesh. AYe...

I'm no great lover of children, but to let that child get sucked off to its death purely to illustrate your hard ambivalence makes me not care that you suddenly care later on -- even if you are the divine Miss ScarJo.

That's the problem with this film, though I respect others who love it. Lourde knows I would have followed Miss Scarlett anywhere, even over to the commercial multiplex wherein she's seducing Captain America instead of playing Venus Flytrap to some juicy soccer hooligans. It's strange and scary but her alien here seems to have very little real power and decays in ways that make us hope Lars Von Trier is waiting in the wings to snatch her from the Kubrick coldness and douse her in the Charlotte Gainsbourg womb of old testament Griffith vengeance. Instead all we're left with is the unsettling and dispiriting idea that Scotland's working class might be collectively more dangerous than any carnivorous alien sexually hypnotic prowler.

Still, I saw some things I don't usually get to see at the movies - things so weird they're like the dark rural cousin to Matthew Barney's Cremaster. But I guess I'm on the fence (after one viewing) as to whether this is a real movie, a video artwork of staggering foresight and genius that will one day be regarded as the 2001 of our era, or just a long experimental hot mess like 2001 when you're not in the right mood for a pitch-shifted "Maisie."

The string of previews BAM showed before the film included something for Locke, which is set entirely inside Tom Hardy's car in real time as he talks on the Bluetooth. A whole hour and a half (no doubt) of artsy glistening street lamp reflections on rainy dark streets looking like luminous watercolors dripped on a black canvas whilst techno throbs hypnotically and family members and work acquaintances shout their panicked exposition at him via Siri's surreptitious signals and strings. Is this preview meant to prepare us for the endless driving shots and slow loop to nowhere repetitions of Under the Skin? It seemed an ill omen. If you want a real movie that does real things these days, you need to stay home and just imagine it. Movies are now about big screen compositions set within cars and the minds of predators --they don't expand your horizons but shrink them until they tighten around your neck like a dominatrix dog collar. If they don't tighten your aperture 'til you're gallows engorged, they're worried you won't feel anything at all - like we're a collective of grand theft autoerotic asphyxiation addicts.

The next stage will be where you spend your ten dollars just to sit in your car and think about what the movie you paid to see might look and sound like if it was ever made; while you drive around in parking lot circles, you grow furious that this hypothetical almost-movie would subject you to such violence, that are such awful people in the world. Dig, the movie is you, mate! Deep, man Ten dollars anyway!

Locke 

Another problem with UNDER THE SKIN: what's with the mean male "handler" (Jeremy McWilliams) with the motorcycle humpsuit? There's a kind of icky chauvinist undercurrent--like male filmmakers aren't comfortable with castrating Venusian bitches unless there's a man in charge of them (see my expose of cinema's pimps both before and behind the lens). Scarlett's voluptuous body, stripped to black bra and skintight black jeans, becomes the whole show--just her and the black box rooms with the wet floors --so we really don't give a shit about this handler with his smug countenance. Ain't right he should have such power over her. The first film of this ilk that transcends the pimp factor head on and smashes it? Daughters of Darkness -- the most recent -- Neil  Jordan's Byzantium!

Under the Skin tries hard to puncture some hidden and vital vein in our decaying culture, and it does get down to the way any sense of a dislocated universal all-seeing eye (locus of identification/camera) dissolves when one is alone in the dead of night in the middle of nowhere. When no one can hear you scream, you're not screaming. So Scarlett's web-mobile rolls slowly through Scotland, trying to snare the dusty bodies of hunched-over men, pummeling their way on foot through the darkness towards home from shopping or the bus or working long after normal people go to sleep. This Scotland seems as abandoned as some lifeless corner of the galaxy. She's all alone, and between the darkness of an experimental intro that's just drones and a pinpoint of light, and the rainy woodsy finish, it's hard to get a straight bead on anything. We're used to that pinpoint of light becoming a tunnel, but it's not going to be so easy this time. Aside from 'in Scotland' we never know where we are, except that we're treading the line between modernist ambiguity and hedging indecisiveness... Glazer indeed.

In his second feature, the Kubrickian Birth, Glazer gave us a real soul in Nicole Kidman, whose gamin innocence ruptured all his shady attempts to modernize her. Beautiful with her Rosemary buzz cut and with Anne Heche as a brassy Lady Macbeth that colored the painting of our fear that nothing was true, Birth was more Kubrick than Eyes Wide Shut, but still it lacked the feeling of being aware of Earth's planetary orbit. In The Shining and 2001 you can actually feel the world turning below the feet of the Steadicam operator, the orbit of the Earth spinning around the sun and the longer orbit of the sun around the lip of it's galaxy as the universe expands outwards, and how orbits meet and eclipse each other until both disappear, and with them, the sense that any kind of stasis or stillness is anything but illusion.

Under the Skin has only one decaying orbit, and lots of flashy editing tracks and scars are displayed out from under its sleeve, including an extended melange of overlapping images through which Johansson's strange and lovely face gradually appears, but when the spell's broken there's nowhere to go but towards macroscope finality. It's the kind of film that depends on Wikipedia and summations of the original source novel for its post-mortem autopsy translation. My GF read them to me afterwards but I was sick off too much stale popcorn, and was coming down off that half doggie Xanax, and the terrors of bureaucratic power mixed with Mad Men bleed-over finally besting me and my office fuckup DTs. My weekend was ruined... forever minus two hours. 

At any rate, I appreciate a film that needs a drive or walk to and from itself to cohere. But if even then there's no real coherence, except that which we give, out of our longing to not disappoint sweet Scarlett, then it's not even itself.

Before that, there was Larry Fessenden's 1995 low rent horror opus, Habit (Netflixed after admiring his friend Wingard's You're Next). As befits its post-Blank Generation style and Liquid Sky content, Fessenden wears all the hats and stars as Sam, a bartender and witty drunk from the era of the 90s. Hey I drank the same way, at the same time, in his same neighborhood (he bartends at the Hat, the great Mexican restaurant in the LES with the super strong take-out margaritas, though in parts it looks like Ludlow Bar, and Max Fish rolled together.) I think I've even used his great line about booze and cigarettes being a form committing suicide on the installment plan. Great minds, man. And, with his wild hair and missing front teeth, Fessenden is a great shaggy antihero, of the rare type where intellect and the ability to succinctly share one's inner feelings are not the marks of a square, nor missing teeth the mark of a townie scrub. He must have been really drinking 'cuz I think he's amazing here, and not as paunchy as he is now (drinking will do that), in things like The Innkeepers. And there's some really great drinking scenes, wherein chats with his friends, about his new girlfriend Anna (Meredith Snaider)'s habit of sucking his blood during sex, come out as organic and low-key as any normal conversation, neither forced, melodramatic or otherwise.... and she doesn't need a pimp to wave his wand and 'allow' her to feast like in The Vampire Lovers. Fuck that.

Fessenden also has a great gift for framing shots within the tight confines of small realistically dilapidated apartments. The Halloween party sequence wherein he first meets Anna is a masterpiece of tight economical framing. We've been to that same party before--20-40 people in the 20s all crammed happily into a long but thin railroad apartment set up with streamers and kegs--and the sustained conversational tone Fressenden captures is nothing short of a post-no-wave marvel. Sounding like an early Jack Nicholson but not trying to, Fessenden navigates his way through the start of a sexy relationship with Anna and into a rapidly downward spiraling series of options, as boozers often will. The hand job in Battery Park was one of the hotter punk rock sex scenes I've witnessed in some time, too, for being so sudden, realistic, intense, and out of left field, i.e. real. It left me bleeding psychic energy from out my limp imprisoned genital matrix in a way I've not been bled since Lydia Lunch in Kern's Submit to Me Now!

All that said, there's still the issue of the horror, the weakest element of this otherwise strong and moving film. The vamp fangs are clearly the two dollar plastic variety and while that could have worked --like if he was too drunk to tell if she's just joking or really trying to bite him -- plastic or real - etc., they play it straight and by then the film's run on kind of long. Still, there's still no denying this is a significant and impressive low budget work; if the climax is a let-down it's only because the rest of it is so much better than it has any right to be.

The main issue with both these films' femme fatales of course is the weird dichotomy they represent in a male auteur-verse: Scarlett rocks the posh accent but dresses like a waterfront Lars Von Trier prostitute, and why is her spaceship an SUV? And as vamp Anna, Meredith Snaider is too short to be scary; I would have liked to see her taller, or more mature, played by a real gravitas-bearing actress who somehow seemed separate from the murky twentysomething slacker low-key characters in the film, none of whom emerge to become any archetypal vampire types (the one kid tries to be a Van Helsing rescuer of sorts but it never pans out though he does get in a great stream-of-babblelogue about the real vampire being all around us in the choking overreach of popular culture). So if in the end it may not be effective as a scary horror film, it does work as an authentically booze-engulfed LES twentysomething denizen depiction, wherein the sense of world-weary isolation is so acute that the vampire metaphor is almost redundant.

The reverse is perhaps true for Under the Skin, which has a few striking visuals involving black goo (are the aliens merely tar babies drawn from this murk, as in they're all one giant amoeba that occasionally splits off and dons a pelt like a wolf in sheep clothing?) and in one climactic shot we're able to realize the way even the most horrifying sight can blend in perfectly with twisting sunless old growth forest. Critics have noted the way Earth becomes so easily alien and terrifying through Scarlett's eyes, and how inherently alien she looks to begin with, and the weird similarities between these alien seduction / immersions and the reality of reported alien abductions, and the similarity between these aliens and the weird eye thing in Liquid Sky. While I get all that I'm still not convinced. Were my expectations too high? I wasn't high at all... just poisoned by panic... was that it?

Days later I'm still thinking about it, and the film did help strangeify that long walk uphill from BAM to our Park Slope digs on a late night Good Friday, half the locals seemingly gone upstate to visit relatives for Easter, leaving the neighborhood feeling very abandoned and surreal. Maybe that's the best movies can do if they want to be both artsy and get us to not wait for video: to get us to trek out there into the dark foreboding night and pay over ten bucks to spend a couple hours parked next to strangers, our purse and coat pockets easily accessible to bed bugs and junkie fingers, the film has to seamlessly link up to all those things, to forge a doorway between our lives, where we are inside our own skins and their outer furs, wherein our seeing the film and the film itself merge. If a film can't make the walk home resonate through a different pair of eyes than the ones we came in with, then why did we ever leave the safety of our homes to begin with? Underground nuggets from the 90s like Habit, on the other hand, go the other way, to link up to our memories of being in our 20s in Manhattan in the 90s, a time when trekking to the neighborhood video store in the wearying sunshine of a hungover Sunday afternoon used to help create some kind of anticipatory context, some ceremony, even for old favorites. Both those trips -forward to theater and back to the rental place, are forgotten now in favor of Netflix, the delivery system that sluggens down to a slow-mo swim our escape path through the tar pit black quicksand stasis of reality. One day maybe soon we won't even need our own memories, our own darkness, our own seat, speakers, ears, ossicles, neurons. We'll be the viewer and the viewed in one looping orbital motion, the entirety of our senses transferred onto a stack of DVDs on a dusty shelf, and hopefully none of them, not ever, will be Transcendence.