Cat Class: THE CAT CREATURE, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE

Julie Newmar in the old BATMAN TV show: her lithe playful grace, her tender malevolence with her dopey underlings, her black spangly bodysuit and ease in her own long, languorous dancer's body; the way she'd climb up and dismount the boxes and thrones in her secret lair, stretching out, slowing down dance moves and yoga stretches into cat-style longwise stretches, using her Stooge-like cat creeps as balancing beams. I know I'm not alone in feeling my own unconscious / anima rouse itself from fitful hibernation, whenever she appeared. She had me. All of us. We'd always play fight after a Batman rerun, in the front yard, shouting "Pow" and comically falling over, afterwards.

When Julie Newmar was on, we'd fight for real, to prove our alpha mating potential, though we were but seven or eight.

Bast, the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, was invoked around playground pentagrams. To boys like me in the 70s, she was what Jacob the wolf boy from Twilight is to girls the same age today. That's why I "get" Twilight, because of Julie Newmar. Animal-human hybrids are a pop culture's 'safe' pre-adolescent sexual surrogates, i.e. the anima / animus. Long before the shaky parent runs from the room confident their role has been passably completed by some five minute rote 'sex talk', the TV smiles, rolls its eye and returns to regular cat channel. Cat Woman has covered all this before, without the messy biology of reproductive science or messy things like 'real' girls. We may not know the mystery behind that impassive mask, but that's why it's there. It's pagan idolatry at its best. 

As long as it's on, we don't have to worry about not liking what's underneath. Lord knows, we'll have enough of those dates in the early years of AOL.

Alas, Newmar's Catwoman fell down a well (see Kitty Kali) and left us all bereft. Other ladies took the role. But what cat can compare to luminous Newmar? Genres change, boys become men; men become wolves; graven images are smashed by heretics' hacking hammers; the beat goes on; and cats come back / the very next day. As Boris says in THE BLACK CAT (1934), "Cats do not die." So can we deny that the crazy old lady with the ton of cats is within us all?

Lately two film ambled forth (though hardly knew I saw them with new eyes), cat-related. Timeless, strange, evocative, ephemeral, mysterious, kind of goofy, and short. What can we do but cherish them, and never try to put them in little cardboard boxes? You heard me, Ollie, in CAT PEOPLE (1942).

THE CAT CREATURE

(TVM - 1974) Dir. Curtis Harrington

***

A strange necklace is stolen off of a mummy and everyone who handles the piece gets mauled to death by Bast, a mummy cat god woman returned to life (the necklace held her prisoner in the sarcophagus!) Written by Robert Bloch, Curtis Harrington's TV movie THE CAT CREATURE is pretty damned solid as far as 70s TV horror movies go--and there were a lot of them but no one did them better than Curtis Harrington, the Joe Dante of his era. Despite, or because of, its typical-of-the-time shallow depth, slow-amble cop show vibe, their general avoidance of anything like sex or gore, its low budget and clear reliance on commercial breaks for pacing (which makes their video and digital versions seem strangely incomplete, as if 'the good parts' are missing), it's a prime example, a classic of comfort food opiate reassurance, with great use of the low rent streets of Los Angeles making a great melancholy contrast with the atmospheric indoor occult furnishings; B-list character actors from past cult favorites evoke the bygone classics while doling out just enough scares and suspense to keep dad from changing the channel at the next commercial break.

A true fan of the classic horror era, Harrington single-handedly rescued James Whale's OLD DARK HOUSE (1932) from the edge of the lost film void and here he salvages the gloriously sinister Gale Sondergaard from the blacklist, giving her a job as owner of 'The Sorcerer's Shop', with ample room to flash her evil smile, dish out tarot fortunes (guess what card is drawn for the nosy archaeologist?) and generally carry on in great scenes of Mephistophelean relish and coded lesbian vibery. Harrington also gives us Kent Smith, finally getting his comeuppance for trying to keep a kitten in a box all day at work as the dopey architect in the original CAT PEOPLE. getting murdered while archiving the collection of an already murdered Egyptologist collector. Each time... a cat silhouette!

Investigating detective Marco (Stuart Whitman) realizes the murders center around a missing cat amulet; the trail leads to 'The Sorcerer's Shop," since Sondergaard used to deal in hot jewelry.  Marco recruits a local archaeologist Roger Edmonds (David Heddison) to help him ID the stolen amulet and together they tool around LA, talking to each other with their great gravelly TV male 70s smoker voices, searching the flop houses and antique shops in search of the amulet and/or recently flush winos. What a unique experience for professor Edmonds! Turned on by the mystery (Agatha Christie is his favorite author, he tells Marco) vibes with the shy cute new clerk at Sondergaard's store, 'Rena' (Meredith Baxter), little guessing the occult connection.

Jammed with great skulls, Satanic tapestries and assorted items much darker than you'll find in any new age bookshop today (with a great palette of golden oranges, browns, and blacks) Sondergaard's shop seems like one weird great place to hang out, as does Reina's apartment and the wickery restaurant.  John Carradine, Keye Luke, John Carradine, Milton Pearson (he played the escaped lunatic in THE HIDDEN HAND) and John Abbott (THE VAMPIRE'S GHOST) saunter past as the suspects, coroners, or new victims, as Marco and Roger keep orbiting back to Sondergaard's and cute Rena, I know this is hard to believe, lieutenant, but the murders seem to have been done by a cat! And then Roger brings up the subject of Bast-- the cat goddess worshipped through human sacrifice by ancient Egyptians. And all the victims were drained of blood!

So much more than just a restaurant - dig the weird waiter and art direction

I love the little weird details here: the skulls and weird old Universal horror props in every corner of the frame; the meowing violins, pensive percussion, slow sustains and yowling gongs in Leonard Rosenman's score; the cool-creepy green font of the credits: the eerie chanting of the exit music. At a brisk 75 minutes it's over quite promptly, leaving me, at least, wanting more, rather than less, which is a rare good feeling to have with a 60s-70s TVM. From the plaster Egyptian 'artifacts' to the autumnal palette, Harrington ensures every frame is a-drip with classic horror fan / 70s childhood manna (it's streaming through Shudder). Adding a manly contrast, I like too the teaming of Heddison and Whitman, each with a voice deeper than the other, displaying a manly gravitas long vanished, sadly, from our post-MTV landscape.

Dig some of Harrington's 'uncanny' extras - the lesbians at the Sorcerer's shop,
waiter at the hippie-ish restaruant, "Maybelle" at the hotel, etc.

Best of all is the way the odd sense of isolation, the superb contrast of run-down LA studio backstreets and Addams Family / Christine McConnell-style posh interiors finds a doomed resolution in the sadness in Baxter's Rena. When she tells Roger of her centuries being alone in the dark, getting closer and closer to him in a romantic heat blast, you feel just how tempted he must be to take her up on her offer and just go racing out of town. Masterfully underplaying as she goes, she conjures a grown-up Amy from CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (perhaps intentionally), history all set to repeat itself (Rena being clearly taken from 'Irina'). Taking a page perhaps from Lewton, Harrington ably syncs the mellow rhythm of 70s TV to the languid sense of timeless affection that develops between Rena and Marco--evoking that SHE/MUMMY ages-echoing amor. The "did they or didn't they" question is sidestepped in such an ephemeral yet profound way (we feel how a casual coffee after work can evolve into a devotion beyond death without so much as a romantic kiss; the affection is there in their mellow loving unconsciously tactile manner with each other the morning after). It's the same sweetly aching connection we get in Harrington's NIGHT TIDE, that ephemeral mythopoetic love we find only in dreams, they dissolves into air and surf if you try and hold onto them past waking. Alas, the climax, with its surplus of cats and Rena... well, I can't spoil it but the ending tosses less-is-more ideals to the wind, replete with ceremonial Egyptian garb, skulls, dust, and massive cat attack. As so often happened with prime time TV movies, despite the cool font and chanting-Morocco-style desert wind fade out, it might end better if you go upstairs before the last five minutes and watch safely from the embryonic depths.  

CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE

(1944) Dir. Robert Wise

***1/2

Just as CAT CREATURE's low-key success hinges on hazy classic B-movie nostalgia, CURSE's success hinges on the Lewton's unique wartime quietude and visual poetry, his gift with extended dialogue-free scenes of young girls making their way through a strange landscapes at night, menaced by the quiet and sudden rush of trains, zombies, busses or snow tires, the whistle of the cane stalks in the dry wind the shadows in the pool room, and so on. Each is, in its way, a transient event, ephemeral; the supernatural is always ready to dissolve in the salty brine of rational overhead lighting.

CURSE goes Lewton's bucking of the RKO brass-mandate of the title one better, to eke out a weird but quietly beguiling fable that snakes through THE SECRET GARDEN and NIGHT OF THE HUNTER-style child's eye mythopoetica, building to a weird climax of faith and wind effects. It also has a cast of way more women than men (the war was in full stride) but unlike so many woman-dominated films of the era, there are no types, no floozies and caricatures, just low-key confident professionals, including a cool teacher whose authority on child psychology is delivered in the same calm-assertive manner of Nancy Davis in the Lewton-esque SHADOW ON THE WALL (and sadly almost nowhere else).

Though it's often avoided in principle by classic horror fans (there's no actual cat people, too many kids), there's much more to this sequel than the casual viewer of the first ten minutes will suspect. The story is unique among sequels in that is very faithful to its predecessor as far as cast and continuation, but rather than repeat the same formula, as RKO no doubt hoped (i.e. some young girl coming of age ignorant of her cat-like ways, headed to a bloodier honeymoon than the censors can imagine), Lewton could cite Irina's sexual hysteria in the previous film made a literal child impossible, so his weird 'imaginary friend' thing would have to work.

Irina dreams in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

Kent Smith (remember him from the above movie, CAT CREATURE?) is once again loping around as Ollie, the amiable but hopelessly square ship builder whose patience drove his late wife--the coded lesbian/feline Serbian Irina (Simone Simon)--to murder. Naturally he's remarried, to Alice (Jane Randolph), the girl who Irina tried to kill in the first film, and it's their kid who's haunted by the ghost of Irina, but it's a good haunting. Irina has found peace in death, and the family has moved to the bucolic paradise of Sleepy Hollow --only Kent is having trouble moving on, terrified that somehow Irina's toxic imagination will leak out and poison his daughter. Maybe he's right to be worried: a only child more like Irina than Alice, Amy (Ann Carter) doesn't mix well with the other kids, preferring to follow butterflies down ominous driveways. Both Alice and Ollie still work at the ship building company, so Amy is minded by Sir Lancelot (the calypso singer from the previous year's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE) as a combination maid, cook, chauffeur and nanny. Their normal happy upscale middle-class life includes: bridge games with the neighbors, drop-in visits from the teachers, and drinks and songs with the Xmas carolers. The compassion is clear in Lewton's and screenwriter Dewitt Bodeen's treatment of their romantic evolution and the innate goodness (and educated intelligence) of Sleepy Hollow life. That psychic and inward daughter Amy doesn't quite fit Ollie's uber-generic idea of what kids should be however, turns Ollie into the bad guy. Lashing out at any sign of shadowy imagination (he's still determined to believe Irina's condition was all in her head) he's all but inhaled his own ghost, that of some long gone witch-hunting Puritan.

One of the real issues I have with Lewton, especially his later work, is something Tourneur would have probably kept more ambiguous, the line between fantasy and reality. The first two films of Lewton keep the door to the unknown open: voodoo and this ancient Serbian curse could be real and not just vivid imagination. A big 'if' kept them from spilling over into straight-out fantasy or the tired 'it was all a trick' ending that makes horror fans groan (the sign the producer really doesn't like the genre he's assigned). When Irina's ghost shows up to help Amy in her loneliness, we may read it as a kind of psychic apology (since Ollie's irrational fury towards Amy's flights of imagination are due to Irina's 'madness') or just take her presence at face value - that Amy saw a picture of Irina in a book and thought she was pretty, and Ollie blowing up at her for showing it to him gives it a kind of holy cachet.

Either way, if she's just 'an imaginary friend' it kind of errs on the side of whimsy, a whimsy that' compels Ollie himself to become Irina's shadow. When he spanks Amy for saying she has an imaginary friend, we hate him so much it's hard not to cheer her for running off into the night, utterly abandoned as even her imaginary friend decides to leave her (since she broke the cardinal rule and mentioned her existence to dogmatic Ollie).

We relate to Amy's desolation the same way we related to Irina's frigidity in CAT PEOPLE. Whether or not she was coded closeted-even-to-herself lesbian (as per the 'sister' greeting of Elizabeth Russell at the cozy restaurant), Irina's dislike of being touched (pawed, mauled) made her cinematically self-aware - we related, since Kent Smith so ably played a kind of neutered version of the American male it was easy to see how she might presume marriage would be lavender in nature. Since the code is in effect, on a meta scale, it was also as If Irina knew that the only thing keeping herself human was the safety of the camera, our gaze. In director Jacques Tourneur's simple but elegant daytime (studio-bound) shots of her apartment, the restaurant, and the zoo, she was immortal - give her the black night and sooner or later, there'd be no escape from the pawing of the Ollie.

As per the code, it's inside the fade-out when sex happens-- the demons take possession; the animated cats dance in her head. We kids knew this as kids, from being brave all day in the sun with our parents around, and then huddling in bed at night, aware of every little scratching noise inside the walls. Imagination is--in the land of children and Lewton--not merely some Spielbergian whimsy, but also a source of unfathomable danger and dread. Irina's fear of sex was like our fear of the dark, a ruptured vein of mythic alchemy.

And since we didn't understand it, sex became an important mystery initiation, a ritual, notable for its subtextual absence (it's the thing we don't see - at least in older movies - it's what happens in the place no children or cameras can trespass. We only knew that people emerge from this place changed - bonds are somehow stronger in the morning or after a cut to the fireplace or a tower, or the train going through a tunnel). The darkened portion of human knowledge, all the things we kids were afraid to find out but were nonetheless drawn to like a magnet, lay behind the wedding veil, in the dark of the dissolve.

The Women: reflecting the wartime shortage of men by having a strong mostly female cast,
where everyone, even Amy, is more or less a mature adult.
As in SHADOW ON THE WALL, the world of disturbed children is one where
women carry absolute authority. Amy's teacher, Ms. Callahan (Eve March), even corrects
Ollie's intolerant behavior towards his daughter; Ollie sends Amy upstairs
but he's the brat; Ms. Callahan sends Ollie up after her, but far more maturely.

Either way, Amy herself is the product of piercing that veil; the evidence of Ollie finally getting laid. But he doesn't get to control the outcome any more than Irina could control her cat conversion. Amy is dreamy and otherworldly, not at all the rational bundle of joy Ollie was blithely expecting all those patient weeks with Irina. Ignoring her friends to chase butterflies, mailing her birthday invitations to magic trees, and calling Irina into being; she also goes chasing butterflies and walking past the gloomy old 'haunted house.' Here Amy show her connection to the mystic. She is not afraid; an old lady in the window throws her a magic ring wrapped in a kerchief and soon Amy finds herself swept into the drama inside the crumbling Gothic mansion, between super-creepy Elizabeth Russell (the 'sister' in the first film), whose elderly mom, who an old stage actress (Julia Dean) refuses to recognize as her own daughter (not unlike Ollie and Amy might devolve into if they're not careful).

These visits are fascinating, Amy offering completion of a kind of maternal love triangle that is almost exactly like the one Hitchcock would later depict in MARNIE and one is compelled to realize the rarity of it since these are the only two instances (though it shows up on a more sexual note in, say, Von Sternberg's Dietrich films) as the old woman pampers Amy almost intentionally to drive Russell into a jealous sulk.

On the other hand, why is this weird daughter hanging around, taking care of her mom and not, seemingly, having a life of her own?

Ann Carter is a very unique actress, with something of Veronica Lake's blonde otherworldliness (she even plays Lake's daughter in the last scene of I MARRIED A WITCH). She bring to Amy a heightened cinematic reality: any fantasy or paranoid hallucination is just as real and vivid as the reality itself - and for the film to work properly we must take them as literal. If we do, one of the scarier parts of the film is one level just an old lady telling the tale of the Headless Horseman. It's the way it's filmed that makes it so eerie: Dean's commitment to the role, the wide-eyed way she stares directly into the camera while delivering the oration (and we hear, through Amy's mind presumably, the thunder of approaching hoofbeats) creates a uniquely weird and original mood that won't be duplicated again until the big climax.

Though there's no immanent threat, and it's the afternoon, and Edward (Sir Lancelot) is right there to whisk her away, the mood--one imaginative woman's mind to another's--lingers. Sir Lancelot's discomfort can't compete with that kind of wild imaginative prowess, so he fears it. For Lewton fans it's an ironic counterpoint: the last time we saw Lancelot in a Lewton film he was slowly advancing towards Frances Dee in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (below, 2nd down), singing a creepy ballad about the 'trouble' at the plantation, staring into the camera in the same way. Now, a year later, he's shifting with the same unease he generated in Dee; and he's sort of playing the Dee role here, a caregiver to a blonde with far-away eyes - just a touched and wayward girl instead of a zombie.

Don't stare into the camera, lest the camera stare back

Directed with some of Tourneur's visual poetry by Robert Wise, once we leave the daytime shots for the surreal studio snowdrifts and spooky mansion with its rattling shudders and wind billowing through the curtained foyer, flickering the oil lamps, the film finally lets go of its central theme of childhood imagination to focus on something closer to spiritual transubstantiation. We come away wondering if Amy's found a new friend, a babysitter, or at least a friendlier (or at the very least, marginally less hostile) neighbor in Elizabeth Russell. And dad comes around too - at last at which point Irina can safely disappear into the idyll. THE END flashes in an ominous touch, just as it does in Curtis Harrington's CAT CREATURE, without a specific orchestral crescendo, implying the story is still going on, even after the house lights come up. It might be over for us, the 'End' and heavenly 'Exit' calling us forth from our air-conditioned tomb, but cats do not die, nor does darkness.

RELATED: 

America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton
At Long Last, Lost Lewtons: FALCON AND THE CO-EDS, ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY
CinemArchetype 2; The Anima
CinemArchetype 15: The Animal Familiar
A Moon, Cat Women, and Thou: CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON
“What It Takes to Make a Softie”: Breaking Noir Tradition in THE LEOPARD MAN

1.

Shhhh! At long last, lost Lewtons: ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY, THE FALCON AND THE COEDS

Shhhh! Let us speak of Val Lewton, but quietly. A man whose oeuvre of poetic B-movie horrors we knew of, even in the 80s of Central Jersey suburbia (where we taped them off local TV creature double features, like a fisherman dipping his claw into the soft stream), Lewton made subtle and shadowy noir-horrors that are still ephemeral, mere wisps of smoke through the threader. Yet how come even my Journey-crankin' gearhead brother also liked Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie after I taped them back-to-back when they came on WORs Creature Double Feature and we watched them nearly every night one long ago summer, the fan on next to the window drowning out the crickets,  and the harp and frond shadows whistling all around the dark verandas? We dug the growls in eerie WMCA basement pools, and the rustle of the cane fields. They didn't shout and telegraph their emotions --they talked in low, conspiratorial voices and operated on a level of subtlety that drew us in (we had to lean into them), leaving us transported, and... then... suddenly realizing, as does the lovelorn birthday girl in Leopard Man, that it's gotten dark and we're locked in with some strange deadly force we can never see clearly. Where most horror was like a crazy derelict shouting at us over shrill orchestration, Lewton's movies lured us close with seductive calming whispers.

Maybe that was part of their appeal --the low, quiet talking was part of the wartime experience. Loose lips sink ships! The guy on the park bench reading the paper might be a Nazi spy! We could watch these films all night and never wake the parents (and they were good for hangovers, too).

It being the war, the thinking at the big studios was that if one must make horror films, make some of them hilarious, so that America might laugh at its Euro-thrashing boogeyman fears. Boris Karloff was on Broadway with Arsenic and Old Lace, and 1942's underrated Boogeyman will Get You was at Columbia; Lugosi was chasing the Dead End Kids around moldy Monogram passageways. And at RKO--on the B-lot with Lewton and Tourneur--a new way to exorcise the horror of war was manifesting, a style the both looked forward to film noir and backwards to classic literature and ancient myth, and with a minimalist leave-it-to-your-imagination approach to monsters.

The latter was something that we young Famous Monsters of Filmland devotees were initially turned off by, but then later-- when confronted with too many bad monster suits--we finally realized how seeing is never the same as believing; a really dark black shadow is itself scarier than any illuminated monster hiding within it.

That shadowy minimalism, in combination with the quiet whispering and the mostly-indoors filming, and the supernatural--unconscious--power-of-suggestion-genuine supernatural transformation aspects, makes Lewtons seem very personal. Everyone in the world could be wearing I walked with a Zombie T-shirts and we'd still think we were the only one who resonated with its weird dream poetry. It was just some small precious thing that spoke only to us in a 'psssst' sort of conspiratorial whisper, like some girl you meet at four AM outside on a stoop and have an hour-long conversation with in low voice to not wake the neighbor while you share a cigarette (and then you realize she was never even there - just a dream, your anima projected onto the smoke). I'm always amazed when I hear other people say they love these films, for I presume they're my discovery alone, and so perhaps do they.

That's why we fans--especially those who love both film noir and art films as well as horror pics, feel protective of them. I don't like all Lewton's later movies as well as the first four; I think it was a mistake to separate him and Tourneur after the third film, a mistake to start casting children (as in Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher) and setting things in period costumes, and a mistake to lose narrative steam by getting hung up on polemics on 'authority in tight spaces evoking madness '(Ghost Ship, Isle of the Dead). All the tri-corner hats and clattering hooves and smiling coachmen (Bedlam, Body Snatcher), make me feel like I'm being dragged through Colonial Williamsburg as a bored, thirsty kid with aching feet (an experience which left me with a lifetime aversion to period pieces and the smell of horses).

The later Lewton would have no doubt done an actual Jane Eyre instead of I Walked with a Zombie, for example. If only the executives in their infinite wisdom didn't give him such easy literary titles as Body Snatcher and Bedlam! Better they got weirder and more prosaic like The Thorned Glove of the Time Traveler or I was a Voodoo Vampire. 

All of which is a tortuously long preface to the discovery of two 'sort of' Lewton films made by RKO's other B-units but using many of the same people, same actors, crew, writers, sets, props, ghostly mythopoetic flavors and signifiers from the first four films (all from 1942-1943) in the Lewton RKO series. When I've run the Lewton circuit and I got to have more, and am eyeing the Bedlam, Body Snatcher last gasp with grim countenance, maybe I'll turn to these instead. 

So here are two I have found and folded into my Lewton box, if you get my meaning. None of this will mean much to people not in love with the breezy interiority of I Walked with a Zombie. But then again, who wouldn't be, if they surrendered to it?

THE FALCON AND THE CO-EDS 

(1943) Dir William Clemens

***

From its crashing waves close-ups and swirling romantic piano music score, right down to the title font, the resemblance of Falcon and the Co-Eds to the opening of I Walked with a Zombie is uncanny; I only noticed it though as I recently saw them both--quite by accident-- back-to-back (1).
In addition to cast, font and mood, the figure of a gloomy fragile-doomed poet hangs over both this film and Lewton's fourth, The Seventh Victim. All three of them are from 1943, and two were written by Ardel Wray, a mysterious poetic figure who seems clearly to have modeled these fragile doomed poets on himself, possibly exorcising some inner doomed poet, forever at odds with the RKO B-movie system, looking for one muse to lift him from suicidal despair.

In both instances, a poet is hanging around and wafting in his (spacious) bungalow, clearly nursing a fabulous dreamy crush on some girl who's really a shimmering reflection of his own dream anima. A teacher at the all-girls school, the dead poet/English professor has fans who are sure it wasn't an accident or suicide and that the dean just wants to avoid scandal. Hence a saucy student heads down to the city to steal the Falcon's car so he'll need to go up there to get it. Once he's up there, reading the dead poet's manuscript as a crushing girl is swallowed in billowing curtains from an ocean view window, we think instantly of Seventh Victim's Jason (Erford Gage) and his original draft of poetry that Dr. Judd accepts from him on their way to the Satanic mass, or thereabouts. Reconstructing the personality from mute evidence, the Falcon declares this dead poet "a man who perhaps demanded too much from people and had to live in books to get it, who spent most of his time alone,.... who took refuge in his new imagination (...) how easily a man like that could be dominated by others." and "He lived such a narrow empty life that it finally suffocated him." Damn dude, been reading my seventh fLstep? Nimbly prowling around the grounds, Tom romances or confounds the endless string of suspects, manages to maintain the student body's collective crush without either dampening or indulging it, and employs three singing moppets to shadow suspects, the very cool 'Ug Sisters.'

Haunting Co-Eds with otherworldly presence is a dreamy psychic student named Margueritte (the alluring Rita Corday), with a dead composer father--supposedly similar in temperament to the dead poet (but more famous)--who keeps having premonitions of death ---voices whisper to her in the wind to kill herself. We hear what she hears in the sound mix, and it's pretty creepy as the whispers blend with the wind until we almost feel like we're going crazy. And for a supposedly grounded mystery, the film keeps a tactful and open-minded opinion on the supernatural, mirroring that of Lewton's films, wherein the real and the vividly imagined merge into a poetic realism (i.e. Irina is a cat and/or a frigid hysteric in Cat People; Jessica is a zombie and/or a casualty of tropical fever in I Walked with a Zombie - the supernatural as a dweller on the threshold of existence).

Tom Conway seems to have been quite busy amidst the RKO B-lots, for in 1943 alone he was in three Falcons and two Val Lewton pictures (Seventh Victim and I Walked with a Zombie). Like Lewton, Conway was born in Russia (St. Petersburg) to a wealthy family that fled the Bolsheviks, bringing with them with barely any of their vast fortune). Looking at Cat People now I realize that it is not really my favorite Lewton film anymore - it lost some esteem when I lost my own virginity (and stayed human). But whether the curse is real or not, I'm a huge fan of Conway's lascivious Dr. Judd. I'll grant you he doesn't really buy into her story and he should, because he's already losing his chance to get her on the rebound, but then it's too late; one certainly can't hold it against him if he turns up the following year after supposedly being torn up, to go around pimping Jean Parker and pissing off more poets in The Seventh Victim. 

Here are some more similarities -

WOMEN

The women angle too is interesting, as Lewton films are stocked with so many strong females. With women doing so many of the jobs usually taken by men during the years 1941-45, it's imperative to remember that, while women suffer at the hands of soldiers and blah blah, its a great time for feminist advances in the workplace and an even better time for attractive men still at the home front, that is if they want to experience a world where the women compete for the men, for a change. That's part of the noir fantasia we so love in The Big Sleep for example, all the hot available lady cab drivers, librarians, book store managers, etc. We think 'oh how novel!" now, but these films reflect a very real facet of life at home during the height of the war, and not only are there many women, but war widows, and in the morality of the time, a widow was basically allowed to sleep with anyone she wanted. She had given her maidenhood to the cause, and now the rest of her sex life was her own.

The girls' school, seen in both Co-Eds and 7th Victim is a prime example of this Edenic safe space in the time of war (ala the woman's dorm in A Matter of Life and Death). This is a kind paradise a man overseas can imagine without feeling either sexual desire or paternal affection but something in between and yet neither, beyond any one final thing, reflecting the feminine eternal flame that cores the death drive like an apple.

THE AMBERSON STEPS

Astute viewers will also notice the school's main stairwell (built for Welles' Ambersons and used regularly by the B-unit) used for the interior of the all-girls' schools in both Co-Eds and Seventh Victim - leaving us to wonder - is it the same school?

Alas, Jean Brooks

I am not a fan of Brooks, and though she wears a few nicely trimmed dresses here and is a decent actress am shocked by her callous behavior towards the "students" (many of whom seem no older than her) and that we're supposed to not think she's the dragon lady. Kind of the missing link between Joan Bennett and Shelly Winters, she has gravitas and a no BS sense of acting and purpose that creates a kind of hangover contagion rather than the allure we'd hope for. Not sure if it's me but I can't abide her character being mean to Marguerite or letting a panther loose, or turning down a poison drink for weeks only to pick a noose instead. Nothing makes sense when it comes to our Ms. Brooks. 

ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY

(1945) **

Deconstructing the horror / war mindset is tricky. We can understand the psychology behind the horror ban as a classic example of Hollywood misdiagnosing the contradictions that abound in viewer psychology. The feeling was that audiences didn't 'need' more horror (the war provided plenty). Lewton's B-unit and Universal's THE WOLF MAN and SON OF FRANKENSTEIN proved audiences needed the old horrors more than ever, but they also needed to be able to laugh at their fears. Thus, horror comedy became a huge parallel program, stretching from Bob Hope in CAT AND THE CANARY (1939) and GHOST BREAKERS (1940) through to BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU (1942 and the stunning success of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE on Broadway, which kept Karloff out of films for almost a year.

RKO finally loaded itself into the horror-comedy canon for ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY in 1945, a clunky if well-crafted little blend of scares, laughs and island intrigue. The comedy comes from a pair of shifty talent agents who try to appease gangster Sheldon Leonard's yen for nightclub entertainment by procuring a real 'live' zombie for his voodoo-themed lounge. What makes it, like Co-Eds, a long lost Lewton is that the boys go to San Sebastian, the same island setting as 1943's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, and there they meet several actor/characters from that film, including the tall scrawny bug-eyed zombie, Darby Jones (above- the skeletal tall black man who plays the scariest of the zombies in Lewton's film, Carrafour) and the strolling calypso singer, Sir Galahad.

Though not part of the Lewton crew (he'd only appeared in a small role in the same year's Body Snatcher), Bela Lugosi has a florid, full-tilt villain role as the zombie maker who ensnares our bumbling pair of Abbot-and-Costello-esque comics (2), tying them up and then letting them run amok through his trap doors and passages, chased by himself and Jones.


As with Lewton's Zombie, a real chilling highlight is a song from Galahad, this one played as the boys disembark on the San Sebastian dock. First Galahad sings happily about how San Sebastian is a tropical paradise but when the boys walk past him and he's behind them, and all the other passengers have gone from the dock, the song gradually darkens in melody and lyric, to become a tale of menace, paranoia and woe.

Sir Galahad's songs are always direct addresses to the people he's singing about, which is what makes him uncanny - as in his slow ghostly walk across the empty veranda towards Frances Dee after brother David has passed out in I Walked with a Zombie. But of course the boys are imbeciles, and don't think Galahad's eerie tourist trap warning could apply to them.

Though played for comedy, these little termite moments gives Broadway the Lewton vibe. Also, it's entirely (RKO) studio-bound, with atmospheric lighting especially in the night/dungeon scenes The front of the NYC club could be the same set as in Leopard Man, the NYC exteriors the same as in Seventh Victim.e

As for the boys, they're fairly forgettable. The stooge screams like a hysterical baby the moment anything goes wrong, even while sneaking up on a voodoo ceremony, making the panic of Mantan Moreland in KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941) seem like square-jawed heroism. I'm also not a huge fan of Darby Jones' doofus ping-pong ball eyes this go-round. It's not a good look. His eyes were plenty buggy in Lewton's film, so what's the rumpus? Luckily we wouldn't see ping pong ball eyes in style again for zombies until 1972's SUGAR HILL where they rawk. At any rate, Bela makes up the difference. He seems to be having a grand time here, stretching his muscles in real sets after loping around Monogram's waterlogged cutaways for so long, Best of all, there's no Jean Brooks!

So enjoy what ye can while ye can, for the war can't last forever and once Johnny comes marching home, all that dizzy poetry will have to be stopped. Played by Alan Ladd or Robert Mitchum, our returning vets will be brooking no umbrage from fey 4F poets who've had the pick of the dame pool for too damn long.

Until then... Shhhh!

NOTES:
1. I thought I was the first to make the Ardel Wray connection, only to find Time Out London's Film Guide had beaten me to it, them crafty Brits.
2. Strangely, aside from Hold that Ghost in 1941, Abbot and Costello stayed away from horror until well after the war (... meet Frankenstein came out 1948), preferring westerns, period pieces, and sports spoofs.
Special shout out to the indispensible DVDBeaver from whom I copped some of the above Co-Eds stills

America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton

The new Lana Del Rey album is out this week, like the Stygian tide, and with it "controversy" so perfectly-pitched that she and her salivate-on-cue detractors must be in on some cosmic PR joke. Take it from an old punk rocker-turned hippy-turned-hipster-turned post-Peaks-ian, who missed all his grabs at the big brass ring: it is good to die young, whatever Frances Bean may say. The only freedom an artist has from eventual irrelevance lies embedded in the obsidian wind that whistles through gratings of that other sewer's shore, or the cane in the fields at night on San Sebastian. In death, alone, can artists safely say they made it. Once past life you're way past worrying about the critics and audience indifference, hit counts and box office. The same way you used to forget your troubles at the movies--safely darkened to the point of anonymity in that eternal shrine to our shared past--you forget your irrelevance in the field of 'breaking new artists' via a before-your-prime death.

There's no difference between living through the movies and living through death. Either way you coast into immortality like second base on a field of feathers. If you're writing or painting or singing only for the edification of the future rather than the adulation of the pearl-twirling swine of today, then rest, in peace and assured, no matter how maligned or ignore you are today, some distant unborn generation will pretend to have read or heard or seen your work. First, though, they need to know you died, to prove you're serious - and so they aren't afraid of running into you at the part while they're reading your book and then you start trying to autograph them or worse. Immolation purifies art from compromise by cumbersome human mortality. Lana Del Rey knows. I'd say she knows it so well she doesn't have to prove it. I'd say she's free from the iffy benefits of validation, and has achieved this purely through facing her own mortality, via the bi-polar abyss.

As we learn only after much resistance in AA or therapy, in surrender lies the only true victory. The only true heaven is hell, accepted.

And, from Lana Del Rey's perfectly framed early 60s car crashes and second shooter denim paranoia, we stagger down an off-road shortcut through the slashed tire car wreck James Dean 50s, and all the way back to the 40s wartime graveyard of Val Lewton. It's no accident that all the Del Rey backlash ballyhoo started up again yesterday-ish while simultaneously TCM played Lewton's acclaimed low-key masterwork THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943). Like all Val Lewton's best work, Victim is suffused with his deep wartime homefront guilt and paranoia, conjured to scare and yet comfort the Rosie Riveters on their lonely dinner breaks. Their man was gone but death was right there. All Lewton had to do was dredge the cables up from the ocean bottom like collective unconscious tentacles. His best work is like a modern art exhibit after the public has long drifted home and the lights are off; the crumpled invites and plastic champagne flutes loll ominously in the breeze of an open window. And then there's Lewton, creeping in with his art, the art of the nervous insomniac who remembers as a child seeing Death watching over his cradle, making sure the orphanage of mortal light was taking good care of him, ready to yank him back at the first sign of carelessness on the part of the living staff.

Icons from top: "Summertime Sadness," I Walked with a Zombie, "Tropico"

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton both create a vibe where the ebb tide of childhood abandonment anxiety is stronger than any fear of death. When this abandonment tide washes through the psychic land, once the terror subsides, the crap is washed away and all that remains are the immovable immortal icons, the stone memorials built to last, in whom we first found a source of protection that wouldn't abandon us. Thus Elvis, John Wayne, Marilyn, and of course Jesus all loom on Lana's heavenly plane like death coaches. On Val Lewton's post-tidal surge shore are immortal archetype statues from Greek and Egyptian myth: Cerberus, Set, and later on San Sebastian (above). Waiting in crevices of the stone stairways and rustling cane fields and wine goblets and calypso songs, Letwon's idols are literally etched from rock. All-seeing blank eyed demons that are only vaguely visible in the shadows, animated black-on-black splotches that resist all but the final Rorschach meaning.

So while some are threatened or indignant (same thing) over this death drive fancy of Del Rey's, I say hey, man, be grateful: her death drive is visible, in our sights to share, because all she has to do is pout, turn slowly away, and take a backwards slow mo Peg Entwistle dive off the Hollywood sign and down through Diane Selwyn's pale blue skylight and it's YOU who die, not her. Keep her in view at all times. Once you can't see her you'll know she's behind you, with a gun or sharp sword. You can follow her around like Boris Karloff follows the hottie Greek wurdulak in Lewton's ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945); you can be a whole internet worth of Karloffs reigning down torrents of ancient superstitions and gossip on anyone who'll click your link; you can drip a whole nation of self-appointed sanity over her sun roof... it does not slow her rush home to your death one hourglass grain.

Lana Del Rey knows memories and movies are the same thing and that every home movie of happier times must speed up as you approach the black hole realizations that the people you're watching onscreen are long dead. She even casts herself as the bad guy most of the time, as in "Summertime Sadness" --driving her lesbian ex-lover to jump off a bridge ("kiss me once before you go") while she pouts in fog machine student films and home movies that repeat faster around certain points as the weeping lover falls, the drama finally so impressing Lana she jumps/falls too, the doubling inherent in an L.A. lesbian affair fully embraced- - drowning in each other's reflections in each other's eyes, downing cliffs and Hollywood sign letters, their eyes stare straight ahead, batting lashes until they morph into a thousand penitent film strips striping down Hollywood's naked back. They come already refracted like an ever-opening lotus mirror reflection of cinema: hence Rita/Betty=Diane in Lynch's quintessentially L.A. masterpiece MULHOLLAND DR. (below); hence the shifting dynamics of the nurse and her glamorous willowy zombie in Val Lewton's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1942); Klo-Klo/KiKi's continual mirroring/sacrifice deferral in LEOPARD MAN (1943) and Irina's attempted devouring of Alice in CAT PEOPLE (1942).

Sister, she called me her sister.

It's fate, baby. Watching CAT PEOPLE today on DVD it's possible to see just what's in the deep dark shadows around the swimming pool: there's a black hole cartoon animation in there, a shape that mutates from vertical to horizontal, ever so briefly. When Irina turns back human she moves from paw prints to high heels prints (not bare feet - Lewton never tries to literalize), she wears a fur coat that when she changes tightens in around her and, if you look close at her body lying on the ground outside the panther cage, she looks like a bearskin rug with a teddy bear's head sewn to one arm, but we only see it from far off, up on the street lamp. In ISLE OF THE DEAD we can see, if we look very close, the way the undead Mrs. Aubyn seems to materialize out of the moonlit reflections on a stone wall, like she's only semi-corporeal but never in that common special effects way that would make it obvious. DVD's clarity alone makes these things at last visible; they were never meant to even register consciously. There was no way to pause and rewind before video tape... No one ever knew for sure just what they saw, if anything, so they remembered all sorts of darkness.

Lewton's subtlety reveals a Russian's love of great literature that extends deeper down than the average bourgeois tenure track, deeper even than the blood (his real name is Vladimir Ivanovich Leventon), deeper than the cauldron from which are dredged all our hopes and fears, and our tomorrows are like a thousand yesterdays. And great literature is always about death, that's how you know. It's where we go to prepare, to remember that a vast elevator full of blood is only a thin, easily-punctured epidermal layer away, and the only freedom comes in whether to ignore this dread out of fear, or embrace it out of courage, love, and rock and roll who-gives-a-fuck-it. This is where Lana Del Rey's coming from with her comments about being a feminist and thinking it's cool to die young. Would you get mad at David Foster Wallace, or Hunter S. Thompson, or Hemingway for saying those things? No. And they're all dead, at the hands of the same assailant, the only one that truly makes it. Performance.

Now, if my dad killed himself because of Lana Del Rey I'd be pissed. But my dad was killed by doctors (he died, after all, in the hospital) and it's hard to be pissed at them, as a whole. At home with an ocean of bourbon and ginger ale he was immortal. He kept death close so it couldn't sneak up on him. But that hospice-strength IV cocktail's got no spirits. Without his whiskey and gin, the door opened right up and waved him in like a pit crew waving in a race car. Maybe when we try so hard to keep the body alive we kill the soul. Who wants to die sober? Only those for whom sleep is the cure-all; for some of us, the fucked up artists and writers who do what we do because we'd go even crazier if we didn't, the only cure-all is music, literature and films. We can die because we've already left our immortal imprint on the living world. Lana Del Rey is both the cure and the cause for the cancer of Hollywood because she embraces the theatrical aspects of emotional anguish, with herself as both the sufferer and the object of longing; her faux-period home movies, painstaking in their iconic recreations, are like the restaged car accidents in Cronenberg's CRASH, only transcending sex in the service of art, music, and obsession.

From top: CRASH, LEOPARD MAN

I love Lana Del Rey because of her pro-death chanteuse-rock fuckithood, not despite it, and I have no problem with it all being a persona put on by a failed pop star named Lizzy Grant. If her schtick didn't resonate we wouldn't be talking about her, wouldn't feel strongly one way or the other, and if her story is really a confession, then so is mine, though not, apparently, Rolling Stone's and Jezebel's -- though both were once edgy in their ways, I hear. Now they're both 'institutions' successful enough to feel they have something to lose, something they'd kill to protect (see CinemArchetype 5: The Human Sacrifice) but never endorse dying for. Lana Del Rey is a persona that has nothing whatsoever to protect, so can engage in a kind of high wire free-form self-immolation theater. Animas with respectable DSM-IV counts are plentiful but then they have kids one day and Whammo! The persona is replaced, even grown out of, but is it really a growing out of it or just doubling and diluting? How many great sexy young actresses have we lost to their children? Even when these starlets come back to us, babies delivered, they're not the same: their dangerous heart--that thrilling gleam in their eye--now exists off camera, transferred to vessels still mewling and puking in nurse's arms.

It should have been me, puking, like the princely changeling in Midsummer Night's Dream. I had to quit her, my whiskey... sweet whiskey, and ride off with AA Oberon. My sober life --that's my cross to bear, my LSD Albert Hoffman problem child, the thing that robbed me of the gleam, my lost Lenore. But I'm not a star. No one even notices. Not even the guys at Liquor Warehouse on Broadway, still the best prices in New York City.

But I still haven't forgiven Angelina Jolie, or Liz Phair. Ladies, you broke my heart!

Never stop smoking or drinking - even knowing both are poisons,
for you've already spilled more than secrets (bottom: SEVENTH VICTIM)

Now you love your children the way you used to love the fans.
Now your love is funneled to some off-camera cradle.
Those who love you from speakers and screens are left orphans.

We can't see through your kids' eyes,
for we are not John Cusak trapped in John Malkovich's child.
But either way you will soon age, past this singular moment.
And you will know the sting of this abandonment
once we both eventually move on.

There's no way to stop the ravaging.

You'd have to leap off the edge
like Lana Del Rey.
But she does it in advance of our gaze, and so
we will never move on
from her.
She's already
gone, and you - mom,
you've fucked it all up.
The apron string hydra, newly hatched,
whines you away.

-----
In a semi-deserted Bijou in 1943
a nervous young assembly line worker calls in her sick day,
watches SEVENTH VICTIM or THE LEOPARD MAN at the half-empty Bijou.
The dark shadows of the empty seats surround her,
where a boyfriend or husband would be.

Then, onscreen in the shadows she sees him, beckoning...
She knows in her heart he's just been shot down over Europe.
Doesn't even need to read the evening telegram.

Lana Del Rey is the eyes that discern changing shapes in that darkness, and Lana Del Rey's eyes are that darkness. On digital, nothing escapes notice... even the void hidden within the void.

This is the girl

That's why Val Letwon's morbid preoccupation with death is so relevant. Using deep black shadows he reveals that the thing wartime America most fears isn't death but loneliness, abandonment, being entombed --all of which is brilliantly realized by the cheap B-movie sets where even the sky seems indoors (and is)--of being left alone too long in a dark empty country with only the ghost radio signal one clings to for company, for news of the vast armadas of sweethearts and sons vanished into the bookending oceans.

And then... Frank Sinatra's voice like a phantom mellow echo; his mastery of mic technique giving his songs an almost unworldly amniotic sound markedly different from the rest, welcoming you to join him in the pulsing warm fog between two shores: "if our romance should break up / I hope I never wake up /if you are but a dream." You are. Hardly even born yet. There in the unrealized amniotic slumber of the Stygian crossing, as Sinatra's songs coast overhead in ceaseless tachyons towards the past, you can hear your father's conception becoming re-buried in the sunken space between the words. 

Lana keeps her expression blank --she does it for our haunted projector, so too Val Lewton's deep black shapes --they accept our projection just as American small towns became a ghost towns for the wartime duration: the younger healthier men all drained away by old Europe's vampires, even in Hollywood, until all that's left in Hollywood are German and Russian Jewish intellectual exiles (and gay Weimar actors whose only roles are as the very same Nazis that drove them out). The young male stars of the B's are now tenderfoots, the old men, the crippled, the meek, the short and reedy. And everywhere, in the air wafting from Europe, the smell of death --the inevitability of it--in ways we can't imagine with our current wars and their paltry kill levels (we might lose a few dozen thousand but nothing close to Europe and Asia's combined sixty million in World War Two). Only a full scale nuclear war would even put a dent in us now. We need hundred of million dead, and it would still be the same % as we lost in WW2--a spit in the bucket. Half of us could die and we'd only be where we were in the 1970s, when we first started to worry about overpopulation via films like Soylent Green (1973). It's not death that dooms our planet, but life. Our blind clinging to health like panicked survivors swamping the lifeboat. If we could all just die like gentlemen, like the great Solomon Guggenheim on the Titanic--if Lana Del Rey can lead us by power of bad example, and if we leave right now--we just might make it.

We won't.

Echo of my undead soldier (from top) Del Rey, DEATHDREAM

Lana Del Rey and Val Lewton know we're not going to make it, and they see and hear and reproduce the ghost of America's past in the deep shadows of the cinema. Their work is already self-aware, feeling its way backwards, seeing their audience for what they are, already dead, or soon dead, relative to the immortality of movies and recorded music. Del Rey makes music for America's ghost future/past to haunt the wasteland with, but for now she's all alone, like any still-living phantom. As Pitchfork notes she's "an utterly distinctive figure in popular music, not part of a scene, with no serious imitators—and befitting someone completely off on her own, she’s lonely." There are a few artists over the years who have explored similar ghost transmissions: Miles Davis' trumpet echoing through the primordial pre-ears-to-hear-it howling of an uncooled Earth in Agharta; Kubrick's use of "Midnight, the Stars and You"; Lynch's use of Roy Orbison and Julee Cruise... but none live and breathe within that ghost transmission - none play on the idea that--even if you weren't alive to hear them sing--the sound is encoded in the crystal receivers at the core of your DNA.  

Lana Del Rey--her "self" as persona, her videos, her willingness to invite nanny state feminist shock and outrage--returns Freud's 'death drive' to its preferred verb status, floored and drunk down Route 66. Her music is ideal for drug overdoses, lover's suicide pacts, long drives with tearful anorexic self-cutters, and self-immolation at the graveside of James Dean. Without Morissey-moping but rather with hair done up and radio playing Elvis with JFK convertible top down, smoking, hovering over Marilyn's lifeless body like a wraith, hiring an actor to dress like Elvis and sneer while rubbing up against the old time microphone stand in front of the John Wayne's rawhide coffin, to paraphrase the Donne-quoting devil-worshippers in Lewton's Seventh Victim, death falls to meets you as fast, halfway. And death x death = life.

"National Anthem" - note vivid attention to period detail and home movie posing 

while at the same time revising JFK into a contemporary-ish sexy, rich, cultured rapper, and 

gaggle of cute biracial children. Like so many of her best work, the music and imagery are linked and
build to a  final 'bells' montage i.e. the final moments of DON'T LOOK NOW, or the last seconds of 

THE BLACK SWAN.

Del Rey embraces the sacrificial phoenix icon of the damaged hottie in ways Lindsay Lohan never understood well enough to make part of her art, to use it rather than be used by it (painting a fictionalized self-portrait vs. being someone else's paint). When it comes right down to it, Lohan is sharp, talented, and ballsy but LA has robbed her of self-perspective. She's mystified why she always lands in jail and loses her film funding. Lana Del Rey skips all that and just films in the jail. She avoids the trap of co-dependence or prison or rehab by becoming the 'act' of the drunk, the Baby New Year of the Mulholland Death Drive. Where Lohan avoids the stake and the torch of the frightened villagers by promising to get help, Del Rey climbs right up and starts the fire and directs the camera angles, but it's an act, man - the villagers never gather for real because they're already there in effigy. Del Rey acts it so she doesn't have to be it, whereas Lindsay is it but tries to act "normal." If you get angry at Del Rey because she's fake (shouting "hey Lana, why a-you change your nice-a Jewish name?" from across the street) or are worried because she's real, well - all your rants and raves will do is boost her hit count --like the boost in album sales she got after her hostilely-received 2012 performance on SNL (see "Kiss Me Del Rey"). 

The Leopard Man

Val Lewton's poetic dread of death similarly produces films that hang inches from the darkened grave, performing/exorcising the collective demons of wartime, so he doesn't have to go fight and die for real. He has to prove himself somehow, feeling the terrible guilt reported by so many stay-at-home men during World War Two. The best you can do if you're an artist on the home front is try to capture death's lightning spirit in a statue of Hermes or San Sebastian watching over the scared endangered souls, understanding in this the entire primal purpose behind art as totemic sacrifice, a giant burning man made of straw, a sand mandala patiently perfected then dusted away. The true artist never hides the skull in the ice cubes because, when the death wish is externalized for posterity, one achieves immortality. Death is pleased that you've honored him and so spares you for another year, the living ghost retina burn outline of his long ago flown-free firebird cohering from the flames.

"Summertime Sadness" 

Del Rey trusts we're not going to kill ourselves just because she says it would a sweet gesture, would show her we really care. That's her whole secret, believing in our intelligence as much as we believe in hers. How many films other than Lewton's or music videos other than Lana's with this level of trust? I sympathize with Kurt's daughter but really, Rolling Stone, it's you should be ashamed for soliciting angry responses from a girl who never got to know her father any better than we did. That doesn't reflect badly on LDR's statement, or FBC's retort, only on your journalistic 'ethics,' RS. You who were a once mighty countercultural institution (even smart enough to be aware of the paradox in that phrase) are now reduced to passing gossip, angling to be ground zero of a viral thread, leaping down the throat of anyone speaking out against the principles of bland nanny state life-for-life's-sake-PG-tedium (rock out, safely!) and embedded advertising-ready rebellion. Maybe you should go run another cover piece about Bob Dylan and Tom Petty together again, or Neil Young and his guitar! Like all the other fallen giants, you've let 'trending' become the new version of stock market panics, all real guts and glory trampled underfoot in the stampeded to avoid being trampled by your own clod readers. 

"National Anthem," ISLE OF THE DEAD

Most filmmakers and artists and musicians only think of themselves, of their hunger for fortune and fame, or their ennui after achieving all their goals and realizing the hunger still remains. But some of us know well that every film, post, or album we make will survive our own death --and it haunts us. We know black magic's promise of eternal youth, of the ghost in the machine, the threading spools running emulsion past the projector beam light measuring images and spinning shutter rotary out in 1/24 second still images that give the actor on the wall the only immortality there is. The Bing Crosby songs from the 30s radio shows are still flying out into space, signals coasting farther and farther away, just waiting for the right crystal skull receiver. These signals will, in a century or so, be still traveling, more alive than our own cracked and disintegrating skulls. Compared to this eventual alien Akashic record-style idea of future reception, any reward of fame in this lifetime is paltry. Some of us know we're long dead already, but we have our living image, our words and voice, out there, up there, in the ether, the WiFi signals drifting out in waves recorded by time, or down in the teraflop stone tapes. Even if no one reads us or sees our art in our lifetime, we can die easy. 

Some, like Val Lewton and Lana Del Rey, take this weird solace one step further, enacting rituals of death and transfiguration for posterity and mimetic power in much the way the Gunfight at the OK Corral is recreated on the streets of Tombstone by scholars with big gun collections. Thus the JFK Zapruder footage will endure any memory of the actual presidency of JFK, and in doing a macabre, melancholy homage to this ritualized repetition-compulsion, Del Rey cracks the door handle to the beyond. You can feel it in her sad puppy eyes, the fusion of sex, sadness, lost, lust and American-style freedom, the sort of sad-eyed lady of the lowlands that always needs to be courting death to feel alive, that lives in the crevasses of national tragedies like a sexy afterthought. It's there in the films of Val Lewton too. Watch the first four of Lewton's RKO horrors interspersed with a few Lana Del Rey videos all in the same night (the older ones--"National Anthem," "Video Games," "Born to Die," and "Summertime Sadness") and before you die you shall see their America of ghosts.