Laureate of the Laid: Terry Southern, CANDY (1968)

Life is a latticework of coincidence, whether we see it or not. Usually we don't want to --we're worried we'd go crazy if we did  -- and we would, if the stayed down too long. With our blinders up, thankfully, the coincidence matrix scans less as a pineal gland-buzzing 9-dimensional grid of raw wave energy and more as an abstract field of meaningless white noise with the odd splotch of identifiable pattern-- a ghost outline of an unintelligible word that comes and goes long before any deciphering of the cosmic hidden message can ensue. But dig this, man: when you're alight with manic magic or 'awakened' or 'enlightened' or 'tripping balls' or schizophrenic or a genius, then every single goddamn moment of conscious existence holds a hundred thousand coincidence matrix four-dimensional linkages, stretching from your mind into the TV screen and out to America and into your own cellular biology, everything macro- and micro- fractal-ing out and in, through the past and future, and in higher dimensions than we can consciously perceive, except through the metatextual incorporation of media (i.e. virtually).

Whether or not we can handle it, this interconnectivity exists like vast and unknowable tendril lattice matrix betwixt our eyes, ears, TV, film, music (only what is currently playing in that moment) and the outermost limits of one's living room and mind. It's all connected to the point of Rubik's Cube inextricability; the retinal screen tattoos the mind and the DVD spins as if a windmill testament to our mind's ability to perceive shapes, faces, voices, targets. Every single element of perceived external and internal reality is an interconnected 'other' staring back at "us" as blankly as we stare at TV commercials, perking up only when we're going through emotional extremes. This 'other' groans in boredom if we don't keep it entertained, as much as vice versa. If we behold its gaze directly we're either dead or insane, but art, baby....art... Art gives us the Perseus Medusa mirror shield by which to cautiously glimpse that which we cannot behold head-on, that which the blinders are there to block. In other words, we can keep our blinders on but widen our perception at the same time.

Mandrake, isn't it true that on no account will a commie ever take a drink of water?

And not without good reason!

When these latticework lightbulbs are flashing atop each pylon neuron around the pineal car wreck (presuming fluoridation hasn't encrusted it), one turns naturally to Terry Southern, America's dirty Swift, the Texas Voltaire, the Watergate Lubitsch, the Lenny Bruce of lauded literary lustful libertinism, the acidhead Brecht, the Ayatollah of cock rock lit. Southern took the ball from randy sordid authors like Nabokov, Poe and Henry Miller and threw it straight through the Cuban Missile Crisis' fire hoop, shattering the speed of the three martini lunch's glass bottom end zone and through the Hindu deity receiver's fifth and sixth arms, scoring the free-love mind game psychedelic put-on touchdown. True anarchy of spirit finds full flower of expression in his R-rated Marx Brothers protozoic chest-thumping. His scripts and/or original novels for films like Barbarella, Candy, The Loved One, The End of the Road, and Dr. Strangelove mix jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy, trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants, un-PC skirt chasing, grim apocalypse flashing and vintage slapstick in ways that make the puerile inanity of today's sex comedy seem tragically flaccid.   
Maybe you don't, but I remember the year (circa 1995?) that that girls' dating guide book The Rules reaffixed a heavy price tag to free love. It killed it, in fact. It had just begun to fly (in the 70s) and already it was being called back to the nest for overhauls, when it returned it was all date-rapey, the masses never getting the correlation between the popularity of Game of Thrones and the news' latest sex abuse charge. On a side latticework spider strand: let yourself wonder much sex would be in books if not for the juicy free press provided by censorship, probably not as much. Dirty books once were banned in many countries (including ours), and were therefore exceedingly popular. Authors like Burroughs, Southern, and Nabokov could make fast money churning them out for Parisian small presses, which were then smuggled into America as 'imported' erotica (what they were really importing, was literature. (The only way to get America to read 'the articles' was by printing them in Playboy).

Lax censorship in our current age on the other hand has strangely led to a second Puritanism, reminding one of the clean-cut Nazis rising up from the ancient Rome-style decadence of Weimar Germany. Southern is from an era when 'adult' cinema was adult--by adults for adults--and not the sole purview of 'endearingly' foul-mouthed nerdy immature boys or rapey HBO writers. Literary lions have no place on our bookshelves now, except in the library , where erotica isn't always welcome. And more and more, old dead straight dirty white guys are being scissored from college reading lists to make room for minority and female voices. As a result, erotica now seems the result only of immaturity and a small vocabulary, a sad association from which it may never recover.

This putsch of maturity and learnedness from the realm of sex may seem a victory to the easily deluded PC snobs of the Ivory Tower, but they've never been good at spotting coincidence latticework anyway, their pineal glands being so fluoride-encrusted they're blind to even the idea of blindness. They've forgotten that when intellectual satire is volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror, it destroys only the dead cells within, leaving the rest vibrant and now hip enough to incorporate critique. Only the mundane and banal need fear (and even then, the teacher's union springs to protect their right to keep boring students). Meanwhile the potty-mouthed prattle of today's grown infants is never a threat to the higher-ed gestapo and can indeed be yoked to the PC mafia's repressive practices, encouraging said banal literati that not one dead cell shall slough off from the obese corpse of "literature."

Jane Fonda - Barbarella

Thus Southern, the Alvarado Swinburne, the heterosexual Wilde, was obscene only to illuminate the truer obscenities of religion, Washington, the pertro-chemical industrial complex, the funeral industry, the American military, Wall Street, academia, the American Medical Association, even the counterculture of which he was an active part. His was the the voice of the savage American expatriate id, run aground in Paris after the War like the Lost Generation before him. First he attended the Sorbonne on the GI Bill, then became a Paris Review co-founder, then a dirty book writer full of unbeatable Bugs Bunny trickster tactics, then a black comic screenwriter. Willing to look deep into the obscene eye of humanity without blinking, or even judging, his adults-only humor wasn't aimed at naughty boys of fifteen, but real live adults, with deep smoker's voices, at least one STD to their credit, maybe a few scars from the war. Theirs was a level of maturity we seldom see today (think Johnny Carson's smooth elan vs. Jimmy Fallon's beer-bloated fanboy gushing or even Animal House vs. Old School -- and weep for an America that will one day make Adam Sandler seem a stalwart fount of manly gravitas).

If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after this latest PC putsch, one yet able to be lusty without merely lapsing into unconscious misogyny, that author is well-hidden, and would never dare come forward until said putsch hath passed (I predict it will by 2020). One day he (or she --why the hell not?) may write a book that could bring us out of this maturity death spiral, or that could be made into a film like Candy, which seems to condone molestation, drugging women without their knowledge, borderline/date rape, etc., (seems is the key word in that sentence). In the meantime, men now feel so bad for saying no to a relationship after saying yes to sex that we'd just as soon pre-empt the whole thing.

(Sorry, another latticework side strand): I mean how else are you going to know, for sure, you don't want to go out with a girl, unless you sleep with her first? But that's 'wrong' now. Not back then, apparently! Back then no one was meant to feel bad at all; even a man chasing a girl young enough to be his daughter around the room, his tongue hanging out, honking like Harpo Marx, was under no unseen liberal arts lash of penitence. It may have been annoying for the girl, or not, who knows. But either way, there was no lashing going on, no souring of the air to lead to repression, which seems to me the main underwriter of misogyny and vileness.

If you neuter your satiric watchdog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, thus making his entire existence superfluous. And those burglars he lets in are actually squatters who-- once ensconced within your walls--will linger until they've worn your masculinity down to a mawkish enfeebled little nub. All you will have left are James Bond marathons and then only when your wife is away at spin class. When you hear her car pulling into the garage you quick change the channel to PBS, and bury your nose innocently in The New Yorker. And then, only then, will said squatters leave you to your misery.

You know what I'm trying to say: the institutional targets most deserving of take-down sit smugly behind walls of standards and practice policies, while once-proud writers are assigned stories of mundane consensual love affairs between rational adult celebrities who just happen to be married (albeit to other people). All bawdiness is now relegated to teenagers at band camp or softcore augmented SOV puerility on late night cable, and anyone who texts the wrong person at the wrong hour risks having their texts read aloud on CNN or sent around to all her friends by morning, by that afternoon they're out of a job, hounded from the human race. By dinner, forgotten.

And yet, do we think we can shame human nature? No matter how much PC lip service they pay, chicks still pick the brutish lothario over the sensitive poet, most of the time. What's the point of being a feminist if it doesn't get you laid? It took me 20 years to figure out (with the help of Camille Paglia), what Terry Southern knew all the time: intellectual writers could be just as wild, chest-thumping, and aggressively sexual as any jock, greaser, thug, or motorcyclist. We didn't need to associate the masculine literary intellect with pussywhipped PC enfeeblement, is my point. I despise what's passing for a 'men's movement' these days, and their vile misogynistic corners of the web, but that world has nothing to do with Southern's, any more than a rabid Chihuahua to do with an Alaskan wolf pack.

The vanishing of Southern's pack, then, is a reminder perhaps that writers are not allowed groupies anymore, or if they have them they must either hide that fact lest it compromise their nebbish image, or boast like douche bags, and lose our respect that way. Most comic talents lament their loserdom, their failure with women, their small dicks. Reduced to the status of a shiftless older sibling in the home by their ballbusting mom and her incestuous darling son, dads turn back to their buddies for support: bromance, and gay jokes, whistling in the hetero foxhole dark as women become more and more unapproachable (Jody Hill's Observe and Report a rare, glorious exception). When we do see a famous comic in a standard groupie hook-up, it's presented in the most mutually demeaning manner possible (ala Adam Sandler in Funny People).

In France and England (or Argentina) on the other hand, writers can be pot-bellied, balding, too drunk to even make it to the party plane but they're allowed sex, groupies, and lovely ladies on each arm. and they feel no reason to brag or feel bad or be made to look sleazy or pathetic. Smart is sexy over there. Or was last I checked. Or so I hear.

Southern centered

Southern's oeuvre now represents an era where it may have been a little sneaky getting some bird into bed but it was under the rubric that both of them would have a good time, no one would be 'slut-shamed', and that free love was just that - especially if you were a friend of the Beatles. So the high-functioning gropers of Candy may come from Southern perhaps witnessing blokes gone instantly from birdless to beflocked with a single hit record. Maybe he noted the accompanying changes in their sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof, and that's what shows up in Candy and Barbarella. This is because the safety of loserdom allows for Lacanian objet petit a self-construction, i.e. it's easy to be a stud when you're not actually getting any offers. Once the girl makes it plain she's up for a roll in the way, once the free room and bed are located, and once pants come off--then all sorts of embarrassing equipment failures can manifest... Cialis for daily use is still decades away, erection-deflating coke dust in the party plane air ducts, and groupies impatiently waiting, their plaster cast a-drying more with every flaccid minute.... It's no wonder men have to boast later to their bros --getting the entire deed right, from first eye contact to putting clothes back on and sneaking back downstairs, to satisfy her needs as well as your own without fumbling the condom, losing the erection, and making it all seem organic --it's no easy task. It's a triumph, and there should be more than one other person to bear witness!

All of which is an elaborate, rambling set-up for my discussion of Candy (1968) because even in contemporary America's chilly intolerant climb we wouldn't dream of calling Ringo Starr or Marlon Brando a dirty womanizer, or Richard Burton or James Coburn a pathetic joyless bathroom groupie humper -- which is one of the reasons their characters' over-the-top sexual harassment, abuse of patriarchal authority, even medical malpractice, flourishes into full subversive flower in this film, in ways that would be too unappetizing if ugly hairy-backed plebeians were doing it. That Brando, Coburn and Burton, particularly, lampoon themselves and their status' and profession's own most private (dirty) groupie-trawling here should brook no scolding. Indeed, should be celebrated!

Especially when juxtaposed with modern stuff like HBO's use of graphic rutting which stresses the more mutually demeaning and bestial aspects of sex, Southern's brand of erotica is positively life-affirming. He takes the Voltaire hint and presents the sex drive, and the naked body with all its hairs and gasses, as incorruptible and forgiven all trespass. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically unaffected postures before lunging at a passing hottie naif, and the way all their strutting oratory just make them all the more ridiculous once their trousers are halfway off, for no amount of bluster and male pride can smooth the awkward transition from civilized gentleman to a spastically humping mastiff. One look at today's conservative hysteria over birth control on one end, liberal PC lockstep on the other, and the Joy of Sex deflates to a pleasant moment before acres of guilt and anxiety. Dr. Ruth is still out there somewhere, but her voice has grown so faint...

And as far as movies are concerned, the kind of ravishment women like to read about in some of the more disreputable Harlequin offshoots is completely out. One false step and you wind up being demonized in a Lifetime movie.

Though only based on Southern's original novel (co-written with Southern's fellow Parisian ex-pat and Olympia Press dirty-lit writer Mason Hoffenberg), adapted for the film by American satirist Buck Henry (coming hot off The Graduate), directed by Christian Marquand (a French actor, as odd and illogical a choice for an American satire as Mike Sarne for Myra Breckinridge [1970]) and filmed by a French-Italian crew, Candy seems quintessentially Southern at first, standing alongside Dr. Strangelove as a savagely honest critique of America's noisemaker patriotism as well as its drug-fueled paranoia and the sexual puritanism that keeps each at odds.

Kicking things off, Burton is mind-blowingly grand, spectacularly pathetic, and thoroughly hilarious as McPhisto, a grandiose 'dirty-minded' poet making his first appearance, wind in the hair, electric rock blaring, at a student assembly attended by Candy (Ewa Aulin), setting the mechanisms in motion. Brilliantly modulating a cascade of punch lines in a cue card rhythm  - "I wrote that," he says after reading his first poem, long hair and scarf blowing, "laying near death... in a hospital bed...  in the Congo... after being...savagely beaten... by a horde of outraged Belgian tourists." His fluid Welsh wit makes great rolling use of pauses and accented words as he orates, speaking in Latin only to admit he's not quite sure if it means anything, mentioning his books have been "banned or burned in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius grandeur to hangdog contrition as he mentions his book is available... signed by the author... for three dollars... in cash or money order, even bringing Welsh florid anguish to the mailing address, culminating in "Lemmington, New Jersey."

Burton, orating with creepy alien hybrid

Candy: "Oh my gosh, (watching Burton fall out of the car, soaked in whiskey) he's a mess!
Zero: "Well man, that's the story of love."

Moments later MacPhisto has Candy in the back of his Benz (indeed there's the idea he came there expressly to pick out a nubile co-ed) while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) drives, though there seems to be a kind of understanding that they share the automobile and like to get into sexual adventures together, ala Don Juan and Leporello (switching roles nightly, perhaps). "Candy - beautiful name," McPhisto says as prelim to his attack. "It has the spirit and the sound of the old testament." A Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz gets turned on by accident, and McPhisto winds up crawling around at Candy's feet, booming on about his 'giant, throbbing need' and pathetically lapping spilled Scotch off the floor, getting it on his trousers, and ending up in Candy's basement with his pants off, heroically making love to a doll that looks eerily like abductee descriptions of alien-human hybrids, all while reciting random verses and sobbing heroically.

Then, alas, with a terrible Mexican accent, Ringo Starr joins the fray. Playing the 'innocent' virgin gardner, he hears the noise and comes down and starts molesting Candy on the pool table, all while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) helps himself to the basement bar while dispensing bon mots ("Quo Vadis, baby!"), beaming so approvingly at the crazy scene methinks I was in the kind of hetero-camp heaven I once believed the sole province of Russ Meyer!

Alas, the MacPhisto adventure is the best part of the entire film and even that is marred in the second part by Ringo's terrible performance.  Luckily John "Gomez" Astin kicks it back into some sort of gear as Candy's swinger uncle, who comes home later, setting up a nice contrast to his square twin brother (Candy's father, also Astin). Uncle's nymphomaniac swinger-in-furs quipster wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli) tells Candy she'll like New York, where kids "aren't afraid to scratch when it itches" but a drive to the airport finds them all accosted by Ringo's three sisters riding up on motorcycles, their long black veils fluttering behind them for a brilliant wicked witch of the west / harpy / Valkyrie / flying nun effect.

Alas, the film has already fallen into it's start/stop rhythm. Once the whips and brass knuckles come out, the film starts to just hang there. Director Marquand and screenwriter Buck Henry don't know what to do with the scene, how to resolve it or make it measure up to that awesome chase. The family winds up running onto the tarmac and hopping onto a B-29 taking off with a crack paratrooper cargo, always airborne in case of nuclear attack.

Then, determined to seem more miscast than Ringo, comes Walter Matthau as a deranged Albanian-hating airborne paratroop general (it should have been George C. Scott or Lee Marvin -- who ever heard of a New York pinko Jewish-intellectual US Army general?) And another thing -since when would a general waste his rank in control of only a single planeload of shock troops? A non-com could handle that duty easy- it's what they're there for.

Still, ever a pro, Matthau knows how to keep deadpan when mocking military patriotism, but his cadence as he rambles on about having a kid with Candy and sending it to military school lacks the kind of deranged jingoistic ring that Scott brought to both Patton and Buck Turgidson or Sterling Hayden to Ripper: it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid.

But Candy's next fornicating adventure is one of the greats, involving James Coburn's toreador Hackenbush-ish brain surgeon Dr. Krankheit ("This is a human life we're tinkering with here, man, not a course in remedial reading!").

Coburn's histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Dr. Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend of Southern's and Coburn has the spirit of the thing, modulating Shakespearian antithesis and masculine actorly power, seizing the chance to let his sacral chakras vibrate and hum. Aside from Burton, he's the only other star in the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in even the most seemingly mundane lines (which Matthau breezes right over, missing all the half-notes) and to let each word ring like freedom's infernal bell. Amping up his patented actorly mannerisms, Coburn conjures a physician as a liberated but insane as any before or since, accusing the operating theater audience of thinking what he was a moment ago just saying--throwing his scalpel to the floor and just sticking his finger right into the comatose Astin's brain (one slip and the patient "will be utterly incapable of digit dialing"), saluting the crowd with his bloody middle finger in triumph...

My friends, there is no other word for it: Coburn is MAGNIFICENT!

And just when it can't get any better, Anita Pallenberg (alas, dubbed, as she was in Barbarella) appears as Krankheit's number one nurse. Then, kind of worse: Buck Henry cameos as a mental patient in a straitjacket trying to attack Candy in the elevator. Then, better: John Huston shows up as a prurient administrator who seems to get off trying to shame Candy in front of the entire post-op party after she's caught being molested by her uncle. But hey! Krankheit dispenses B12-amphetamine cocktail shots at the party, and the pink-clad nurses wait around like beholden nuns in some religious spectacle. Coburn's medical innovations include a 'female' electrical socket affixed to the back of Candy's father's head, so he can drain off the excess wattage by powering a small radio. Again, the kind of thing that modern films would not approve of, i.e. how dare you satirize a litigious, lawyered and humorless institution like the AMA, sir!? Sir... Sir?

Candy - w/ James Coburn and Anita Pallenbeg 

From then on, alas, the film's mostly downhill: a scene with a trio of groping Mafioso and a crazy Italian stereotype-a filmmaker is just crude, pointless and skippable; ditto the shocked cops playing up their blue collar bewilderment and earthy hostility as they bash frugging drag queens, crack nightsticks down on hippies, and wind up crashing the squad car because they can't help leering down Candy's dress (alas, who can?). Southern's/Henry's dialogue stays interesting but the targets are too easily skewered and not every actor knows where the cherries are in their monologues. Why not have the cops be groovy, just to be weird, man? But it being 1968, I guess cop-bashing was still 'in'. Now, though, the blue collar drooling thug cop angle comes off almost more like class-based snobbery than cutting satire.

Another low point: Candy joins up with a criminal mastermind hunchback (Charles Aznavour), who can climb up walls and jump into watery windows ("an old stereoscopic trick" says the unimpressed cops), all well and good but Aznavour's aggressively twitchy rat-like Benigni x Feldman-style behavior eats up another soul-deadening stretch, centered around a gag you'll see coming a mile off (if you've seen Godfather 2 - which admittedly came after). And seeing this humpbacked little pisher rutting away atop the luscious Candy is like watching a cockroach dying of Raid atop a vanilla cupcake; with all his hippie minions showering them with down feathers from busted pillows from above, it's also very gang-rapey and uncool.

Escaping once again, Candy winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl --played by Marlon Brando. Half-baked and not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn--his voice stuck in a congested limbo between Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson and Abie the Fish Peddler from Animal Crackers, Brando's Indian accent ends up just sounding congestedly Borscht Belt, mining the rhythm of Lenny Bruce as Groucho or Alan Arkin as played by Sky Masterson. Brando's way too internalized and self-righteous for this Grindl to reach the compromised grandeur of Burton's McPhisto or confident carnivorous genius of Coburn's Krankheit (better Brando himself be satirized by some other actor). When he says you 'must travel beyond thirst, beyond hunger" while eating a sausage he sounds just like Hugh Herbert, which is great, but it's such a dick move not to share the food that it's hard to feel anything but a sympathy headache with the by then-starving and much-abused naked girl, and since by then the movie's cresting the two hour mark, with plenty more vignettes to go, you almost certainly will be ready to just smack someone, hit stop and go have dinner or a nap.

Shocking and racist as it might be for an actor of Brando's caliber and political leanings to appear in brownface while noshing on a sausage (which no guru would ever eat) and floating phony guru raps to some blonde in the trailer equivalent of a shag carpeted party van, just remember he (and Burton) liked working in European adult films at the time (when adult meant adult, remember) making things like Last Tango in Paris, and Bluebeard (both 1972, both X-rated), respectively. Abroad they could be free to drink, eat, smoke and screw to excess without having to hide it all lest America's post-Puritan pressure cooker explode all over them. The wine was better, the vibe looser. Who wouldn't rather be there than unbearable gossipy Hollywood?

Which brings me to my final lattice strand--the idea central to Candy's Christian values--which begins with what MacPhisto says in the beginning about being willing to giving oneself freely as the height of human grace. Sure it's a line men use to try and get women into bed at the time, but if they didn't try, where would humanity be?  And as Lenny Bruce would say, that's the true difference between obscenity and humanity. The truth of our 'huge, throbbing need' is unendurable any other way except as a joke that paradoxically lets us save face and free ourselves of it at the same time. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body's societal failings, the hairy gorilla remnant that can't be hidden underneath the seersucker suit. We need society's forgiving tolerance of this gorilla, because if we denude the beast of his business suit only to sneer at him or deliver some drab lecture on morals or objectification, all we do is bum everyone out. We become just another nag, part of the problem. It's just sex, after all. In Europe it's just part of life. Only here does the Puritan shaming venom still drizzle.

In insisting on the okayness of these obscene trespasses, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, that there's nothing bad about the human biological system with all its warty needs. Let it be satirized but never condemned. Let only hypocrisy be attacked without mercy.

"We are not old men. We are not worried about your petty morals." - KR, in deposition

To sum up: Candy comes from a time when intellectual men were still allowed to be men, and hipsters were not pale smirking skinny jeans wallies crossing the street to avoid secondhand smoke or arguing in a mawkish voice against plastic bags at the food co-op. They were men, my liege! Southern's era had more repression and obscenity laws to reckon with, but they had the artistic clout to bash into them with dicks swinging, brain hanging, and fists helicoptering. If Southern and friends had been at that food-co-op meeting they would be hurling the organic produce at that anemic hipster, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented. Back in their own time all they could do instead was rage against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then die for real, as nature intended, either in WW2 or Vietnam or that Norman Maine surf from which no faded reprobate returns. Rather than clinging to bare life like today's greedy octogenarians, bankrupting Medicare so they can eke out one more month (the impatient specter waiting in the reception area, rereading that old Us Weekly for the eleven hundredth time while doctors stall out the clock since they're getting richer by the hour), rather than that, sir, they died... like men!

Real hipsters of the older era--having faced death abroad or within, heroically dodged the draft or fought the war, leapt into the waiting arms of the angry fuzz, or served jail time for a single joint--earned their aliveness and their secret stash of war-issued amphetamine tablets (and any spare Pervatin liberated from dead German's survival kits); they were able to dig on and understand modern jazz, and to smoke anywhere, including the doctor's office. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, Moroccan hashish, burgundy and deep connections to literature when the canon was smaller and more homogenous; if they pilgrimaged south, to the Amazon, they partook of the holy yage or the magic mushroom. Today we're lucky if we can afford a single Sex on the Beach and there's no smoking, sir... sir.... no smoking (and in NYC no dancing either).

I'm not arguing against women's rights, or equality, or clean air, or any of the huge strides we've taken, just wondering if perhaps in revisiting Candy, we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls and rediscover how well-read (SWM) intellectual weight might once again benefit from rabid id-driven boosters in trying to make it through the zipper of hypocrisy and into the erect stratosphere. Southern was the first to climb up on the A-bomb of sexual freedom in lettres and ride the New Journalism (which he co-invented) all the way down to the primary target, which is your face, and he had the chops to turn on your electric lattice of coincidence-detectors, because America still knew that facing its own monstrous extinction with a joke rather than duck-and-cover rhetoric was noble, that working through the terror that strikes when a hot blonde girl with no discernible income lands in your lap and--rather than running home to your wife or war in terror--plunging headlong into the moment, is heroic. It was a time when being able to accept and engage in casual sex with a random girl on your commuter train was brave and manly, and not callow, vile, and somehow predatory, while brandishing your wedding ring like a cross in a vampy graveyard, and racing out at the next stop to wait for the next train, was to be a pussy. Gentlemen, times have changed, mostly for the best, but we should still always be ready. Whatever may come, we cannot allow... a NYMPHOMANIAC gap!

From Left: Burroughs, Southern, Ginsberg, Genet

NOTES:
1. Not good: Southern's mincing gay stereotypes (espec. in The Magic Christian and The Loved One)

Tennessee Williams at the Mill of Rubes: THE FUGITIVE KIND

If a bunch of method-trained NYC actors crashed their bus in the middle of nowhere Louisiana and tried to pass as locals so as to not get lynched, the result might look a lot like The Fugitive Kind (1959). Marlon Brando--radiant, and way too good for it all--plays a Christlike (coded queer) guitar-slinging drifter who winds up in a romance with older Italian shop owner Anna Magnani. Together they face a hardened mob of drunken good-old-boy characters whose raging fires are fueled by Anna's bitter, sweaty invalid husband (Victor Jory, practically stealing the movie) spewing vitriol from his upper berth. It's the kind of vehicle the gay drunk genius Tennessee Williams cranked out by the dozen for his muse/avatar, Anna Magnani, plopping her down in the midst of his usual rentboy deep south fantasias, there to emote and assume postures and be as out of place as a weeping marble Madonna statue in the middle of a rowdy redneck saloon.

Running a general store in this Nowheresville town, scarred by memories of racist mob violence against her late father (for daring serve drinks to colored people at his wine bar), Magnani stays married to racist invalid Jory, who's all dying and sweaty, and strung out on morphine upstairs, for vague reasons (some long term plan of Elektra-style vengeance gone dormant?). Into all this strained soap and free-floating malice walks wandering troubadour Brando, his snakeskin jacket a symbol of his individuality and his handling of his mama guitar as awkward as a lavender honeymoon. He could have hot mess Joanne Woodward (top), who's never seemed sexier, or more alive, or wilder, more intoxicating, rampaging around town in a cute raincoat with wild platinum blonde hair (we're so used to seeing it pulled back with unflattering bangs, that her sudden sex appeal makes her seem like some whole other being), but Brando prefers glum middle-aged Magnani, thus hinting that his character is not entirely straight. He wants a mother, not a lover. And while he claims to be free, he's so closeted/closed-off that his snakeskin may as well be a straight-jacket. Get it?

It's that kind of poetic/layered stiltedness that keeps Kind from being an A-shelf Williams, something perhaps partially explained by its having spent two decades buried deep in his desk drawer (where it was called Battle of Angels), before he finally exhumed and reconfigured it into something called Orpheus Descending. What a title! What else is Orpheus gonna do? Now, Orpheus Just Standing There - that's more like it. The Fugitive Kind isn't much better, but at least there's a poetic semi-poetic second way to read it. And audiences were looking for second ways to read things back in the late-50s.

It's easy to forget, now it's all fallen into disreputability with many snotty academic circles, but Kind's era saw a kind of post-war suburban renaissance: White middle class America was almost legit intellectual while still being sexual, thanks to Freud and the Kinsey Report. The success of Williams' plays, his bridge game buzzword popularity, was bound up in that 'knowingness', the secret insider cool that came from that. A whole generation, home from the war, had picked up all sorts of European liberalism (that 'continental mind') leaving their parents' small town moral hypocrisy, moving wholesale into the post-war 'suburban dream of martini lunches and modernist art wherein there was just enough dirty business to make deciphering all the psychological underpinnings worth the effort.  Years of sanitized white Christian picket fence heteronormative blandness had made even a veiled mention of homosexuality, rape, or abortion in some otherwise pedestrian romance would send the cocktail class flocking, darling, if for no other reason than being able to say they saw it at the next Jaycees bridge game. Condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency was like a Pulitzer stamp. 

That said, Willians clearly run out of things to say by the time he dug his old Battle of Angels-cum-Orpheus out of that desk drawer. Man, I know the feeling. Who among us hasn't gone thumbing through old work for inspiration when we've fallen into weary writer's blockage? Still, he should have left the Battle be. He'd already cherrypicked the best ideas out of it for other plays, anyway.

Furthermore, director Sydney Lumet's shadowy noir style seems way too sober and judgmental for the Dirty South. Lumet could be great with small casts where--no matter how messed-up the characters were (as with his masterful Long Day's Journey into Night, Klute, or Dog Day Afternoon)-judgement didn't enter into it. But it's too easy to cast stones in the backwards county where Fugitive unfolds, to make characters grotesque without any real cause other than to  Brando's Christ-y glow even more godlike by contrast. Elia Kazan had a rootsy respect for the uneducated thug but Lumet's lynch mob is just raw undiluted evil, set up for us to throw rocks at, with no awareness of the vicious self-perpetuating irony such throwing engenders.

Most glaring of all the problems though, to my mind, is Brando. He's the prettiest, but he's also the most uncomfortable-looking miscast drifter/troubadour since Sterling Hayden in Johnny Guitar (1954), with which Fugitive would make an apt, if excruciating, lavender double bill. Both concern guitar slinging trouble magnets who shack up with middle-aged super-butch saloon/store owners and wind up in the crosshairs of  rabble-roused townsfolk who burn said saloon/store to the ground. Oh my god, it's the same damned movie!

Both films prove that stock outlaw guitar heroes need to be played by less awesome actors than Brando or Hayden to not seem forced. That's what Elvis was for. Real musicians are always a little spacey because they're so attuned to the melodic spectrum; their personalities are incomplete without their instruments. For big A-list personas, a guitar is just ab awkward accessory, hanging limply on them like a rotting albatross two sizes too small.

But Hayden knows one thing Brando doesn't: if you can't hide your complexity, just try to fade into the landscape as much as possible and let the women do all the raving. Try to not try to act at all. An even "bigger" actor than Hayden, Brando makes a bad casting choice worse by trying too hard to seem easygoing and Christlike. Each monologue is practically hung on the wall of the Whitney like an American folk masterwork and I don't mean that as a compliment.

The dialogue wouldn't be bad for a normal writer, but we've already seen this collection of archetypes and deep south incidents before, in better Williams adaptations and better Williams dialogue: Woodward's bleached nymph straining at her shackles was already brilliantly essayed by Carroll Baker in Kazan's Baby Doll and Sue Lyon in Night of Iguana; Anna Magnani had already done the depressed middle-aged Italian widow in The Rose Tattoo; Ava Gardner stole (and likely improved on) the role written for her in Iguana; the dying redneck patriarch shivering in the junky morphine prescription heat was done to a turn with breadth and sympathy by Burl Ives in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Jory and Woodward add their own spin, making them the reasons to watch this, but they still have to contend with Williams' muddled motivations. Jory and his cronies have suspicions about our guitar-wearing Brando's orientation but if they think he's gay, then their jealousy makes no sense. The idea of the virile straight male outsider downstairs at the general store, while the impotent fumer is straight-up Malden in Baby Doll or Anthony Franciosa in The Long Hot Summer (by Faulkner but similar) but the homophobic persecution angle is straight up Suddenly's Sebastian, Cat's Skipper, and Blanche's Streetcar husband prior to their suicides and/or devouring. But you can't have it both ways, unless you're just ticking off the checklist of Tennessee tropes. Even in the dirty south they probably knew enough to realize a gay bestie was a great way to keep the flies off, so to speak.

Another main problem in Fugitive, aside from its similarity to these Williams' classics, is that we can't quite believe an Adonis like Brando would be bothering to hang around these stifling swampy Louisiana backwaters in the first place. The beginning indicates he was busted hustling and is trying to go 'straight,' in some other podunk town, but an actor of Brando's caliber has no business being a mere hustler. His teeth are too perfect, his demeanor too polished. He's out of jail, why not split for NYC or SF and hustle there? New York City is the place where / they say hey babe! Yes sir, a gorgeous boy like him could make a fortune or at least find a nice sugar daddy with a comfy duplex, rather than putting up with a vicious mob just so he can get with this frumpy broad Magnani when he could be sailing the drunken Main with vivacious Woodward. 

Either way, the gay subtext is the only way any of it makes sense. The vicious hatred the town rubes have for anyone wild or serpentinely jacketed seems a beard for homophobia. Brando's 'crimes' here aren't otherwise great enough to stir the wrath of the town in quite such a vicious, heated way. Meanwhile, a handful of saints are strewn about for contrast, like Maureen Stapleton as a local painter, who Brando monologues in hushed cobra monotones until she sways before him like a hypnotized chicken. Surely such a talker could hypnotize hateful rubes into liking him if he wanted to. It's clear Brando's outlaw prefers a firehose crucifixion to any kind of real warts-and-all acceptance. Hell, all he had to do was buy them a round at the bar and the rednecks would likely accept him. Jesus would have, if he had the bread. 

What Brando's 'fugitive kind' doesn't grasp is that the beautiful people only trudge through the Dirty South for a reason. Otherwise they move, like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, from small town to big city - that's their natural drift, that's where all roads lead. Paul Newman understood that in Sweet Bird of Youth --his cocky rentboy is shanghaiing a drunken Hollywood patroness and her Cadillac to the outer bayou rings so he can rescue his hometown sweetheart from her cliche'd Kingfish-y mayor father --and it works because-- though Newman is in some ways even prettier than Brando--Newman the actor knows the way to seem a realistic local boy is to taint his beauty with cocky, needy cluelessness. When an already-perfect demigod puffs out his chest and struts to impress, he suddenly seems faintly ridiculous, and that's why Newman's performance works where Brando's fails. In refusing to betray the insecure little boy behind his character's bravado, Marlon never quite 'gives' us anything. He's so wise to his own bullshit he barely says an untrue word, which means he barely says anything, just orates a series of trite poetic monologues of the sort Williams realized early on were best kept in a file drawer.  
  
Streetcar, for another example, Brando's big Tennessee victory, was subtler by actually being more histrionic --that's the paradox Fugitive director Sydney Lumet doesn't seem to understand, and maybe wouldn't until Klute eight years later: No one should ever be all the way 'beautiful' and making a Williams play hum involves letting an actor become so much themselves that the seams of their persona break and the hideous lonely hunger of their hidden core comes busting out like taxidermy sawdust. 

Another master of getting sawdust out of his actor's taxidermy persona masks? John Huston, as in his Williams adaptation, Night of the Iguana. 

A director able to understand the Williams sawdust mill principle but not how to successfully harness it? Joseph Loesy in Boom! (1968, left). Here Taylor and Burton merely dump sawdust tonnage upon the stage as if it's a suitable shortcut to brilliance. But of course that doesn't work either. The pain has to be real, the sawdust awkward, faux-accidental, the stitches in the mask newly ripped, to grab us. We can sense the difference between drunkenly inspired and just sloppy. But the drunk cannot. That is the tragedy of humankind. 

And while sometimes his plays need a villain-- ala Karl Malden in Baby Doll, who, like the racists of Fugitive, digs on torching Italian-owned business; or Jack Carson's shrill grating harpy wife in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; or seething Ms. Fellowes in Iguana--when Williams is at his best there's no one-note villains or hicks or closets at all. In Streetcar everyone is sympathetic, even the brute Stanley. A pagan god crossed with "a ape", its he who is the put-upon party after all. He pays the bills and we can understand how he'd be sick to death of Blanche and her joneser high-hattin' and liquor-mooching after a few hours, let almone several months. I'd be fed up after a week. That he puts up with it when he's clearly no milquetoast is to his credit; not that it excuses any rapey climax, but on some level it at least rationalizes it.

When Williams is done right, his monologues are ranted or recited the way we natter on to people we subconsciously know aren't really listening to us. When Williams is done wrong, as he is in Fugitive Kind, monologues go on and on, slow and measured, while the onscreen listener stands at rapt (i.e. vaguely bored but respectful) attention, like at a poetry reading when they're trying to impress the bourgeois date. 

All that said, it's still fascinating as a film, just for its T-Williams laundry list affect. Brando is gorgeous and at least when he does sing and play it's actually his voice and guitar doing it (hearing Brando cautiously sticking to a few lightly brushed chords and singing in a half-whispered croon works only because you wonder if he really doesn't know how to play and it's just no one's told him because he's so gorgeous). And Woodward lights up the screen as the wild drunk nymphomaniac... when she's around, but for whole stretches of the film she's MIA and we're left with this half-baked, zombie-like mama-fixation romance between Magnani and Brando.  

Oh well, even if the tepid chemistry-free 'torridity' is just not convincing and whole stretches are formulaic, if you're a Williams, Brando, or Lumet fan (and you should be all three), you need to see this movie, even if for no other reason than to unlock the joys and motivations of Williams' other, better adaptations. Somehow seeing a genius faltering backwards into amateurish pretension makes his great work all the more noble. There's a great fountain of truth and enthusiastic idealism one can drink from when indulging amateurishness: the amateur's inability to dilute his poetry's potency in the minutiae of realism is like watching a clumsy magician give his tricks away, i.e. fun on a whole other level than intended.  The poetry is still fresh and raw, so you can feel the rush the author felt while writing it, his swooning in drunken euphoria over a late night typewriter. Such a euphoria can help us all find the courage to become alcoholic titans, to write into existence the scalpels that will tear open future actor's masks so they might sprinkle the sawdust of the soul upon silver screens yet to be... even if for no good reason.

The Incredible Melting Marlon (REFLECTION IN A GOLDEN EYE)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eye offends thee, no?

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

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

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

Acid Cinema Special Edition: The VIETNAM Experience

The topic of critical backlash against INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is still hot two weeks after the film opened, and seems aimed primarily at the "light" portrayal of the plight of the Jewish people under Nazism, and the Jewish-American commando squad's glorified brutality-- the "fire with double-fire" approach. These issues point me to a dilemma that afflicts many Americans, the refusal to see beyond the bogus facade of "civilized morals"--even when their own lives hang in the balance.

When Wes Craven or Charles Bronson turn the other cheek back around and start blasting and hacking, we're supposed to go "oh how quickly civilized behavior falls away to reveal the savage!" and supposedly go home and feel bad about how quickly civilized behavior falls away to reveal the savage and worse, how much we enjoyed seeing it happen. But to me, I just feel bad that it's not quick enough, that the sucker vacationers in American horror and revenge movies don't start reverting to savagery until needless damage has been done to the RV, and when they do, there's little celebration of their return to the true wilderness of the chthonic. Once you realize you're in a horror or war film and no rescuer is going to hear your screaming and whining, you can begin to fight back, to find self-reliance, the true warrior spirit. It's like when a kid sent to his room until he learns to behave, he kicks and cries and gets it out of his system, he never stops crying or kicking but then after awhile realizes he's stopped, is calmer, and goes downstairs all at peace, realizing instinctively he's able to rejoin his parents, and they're going to not even bring up his tantrums but just accept the newfound man.

Hollywood's forgotten or doesn't want to remember this parenting strategy because it still thinks mom will come if it just cries and screams long enough. Maybe I was lucky to have parents who let me figure it out for myself, who were trained by whatever 70s child psychology Jaycees speaker wandered their way to resist their instinctive urge to soothe my fits of tears and rage. So maybe its this parental weakness across the board that has led to the change of a nation of adults to a nation of infants expecting, as Camille Paglia says, the law to behave like nurturant mother. Now when the final girl finally kills the slasher, she no longer bellows her victory cry but instead reverts back to being a frazzled whiner...

And it all leads me to ask why and realize that my Acid Movie thread must now address Vietnam. Before I begin, please keep in mind this DISCLAIMER, that I'm always only really talking about movies, not "reality." I have no idea what being a soldier is actually like, and I thank god I missed the draft, but I'm a big WW2 history enthusiast, played war nonstop up until the age I started smoking weed instead, but I am fascinated by the whole process, again, as seen in films and documentaries. And taking acid is a little like losing yourself to a primal savagery that can move beyond civilized empathy as needed. As a man you are far less likely to let a girlfriend manipulate her with tears and sniffling.

The story of acid in the America of the 1960s is a story of a nation in conflict between a renewed lust for life and an enhanced drive towards death, between the Rebels and the Republic, the old guard Don Draper types clinging by their fingernails to the 1950s American dream as it dissolved around them and the crazy peaceniks mocking and deriding everything that dream stood for. While dad swilled a cold beer and cheered the bombers on the news, his kids were out in Central Park, dropping tabs and flashing peace signs. Seldom before or since in American history has the line between old and young, life and death, love and hate, conformity and free-thinking, been so sharply and clearly drawn. And, in the field of combat, the same line existed between delusional top brass notions of "heart and minds" and the real blood-and-ambiguity-drenched quagmire of the killing field.

LSD erased all those lines...as well as all other artificial social constructs. It could make you very peaceful with yourself as you committed horrific violence against yourself or others, merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream of disconnect... On acid, you realize that even killing can be an expression of love... just ask the Manson family! Or the babysitter nuking the kid in the microwave and putting the TV dinner to bed (as the old wives' take went), or Native Americans apologizing to the buffalo as they kill it, understanding that they're killing themselves for all is connected. All murder is just projected suicide. The Native American's knew we always only ever eat ourselves. On acid, we knew it too. We tasted it. And it tasted like majestic purple mountains.


Taking acid certainly could prove a boost to your perception, heightening and sharpening your senses enabling the user to transcend their usual social more-laced strait-jacket. Whether over in the war or at home, what seemed like unshakable bedrocks only hours before--marriage, church, state, government, patriarchy, tradition--became suddenly clownish, yesterday's papers, tools of hypnosis to keep the cattle placid. Acid made killing 'real' to non-combatants because it shuckered them loose from the grip of the patriarchy, helped them think like the enemy, or how they imagined the enemy thought; slinking through the jungle, hard-wired and alive to every flapping beetle wing and blowing leaf, and best of all, free of all the moral inhibitions about killing that would mean almost certain death if left unchecked back in boot camp. Mashing open an innocent Vietnamese farmer's face with the butt of your rifle (as in PLATOON) would be intolerable sober, but is just another freaky thing to trip out once you surrender to the fact that you're living in a world... of... shit, as Private Pyle puts it in FULL METAL JACKET (1987). They didn't give acid out in the boot camp though, but beatings. Same result.

An integral -- though demonized by the liberal press-- part of boot camp is hazing, the beating of lagging cadets with soaps wrapped in towels, to toughen them up, give them a face-to-face taste with unendurable pain, the kind that transforms and darkens you, makes you less afraid since you know it can't get any worse. Anything less than that level of prolonged and traumatic beating up is just business as usual from then on; the volume is turned way down. This tradition is nothing new, and corresponds to Native American rituals that involve hanging by pierced shoulder muscles until you see your white buffalo vision and know you are a man. Women have the agony of childbirth; men have to find their own.

Or, you could just try taking too much acid, a sort of self-induced hazing. Either way, you have to do something to free yourself from living life in a state of fear-based wussiness... it takes a jolt to your whole body-mind-spirit in order to shake the civilized cowardice out of a man, to obliterate all breadcrumb trails back to mommy. You can't wait to turn savage after you're savagely killed, by then it's too late. You have to be already on fire to fight fire with fire. A shrink might call it trauma-induced sociopathy but then again, that in itself would hardly disqualify you from the draft.

In Private Pyle's case, the hazing works all too well, but he doesn't even wait to get to the jungle before he has to start blasting. There's always that one dopey kid in your circle who makes the mistake of letting the newly freed inner demon take over completely. Rather than just harnessing its energy. This dopey Pyle-type always has to do something stupid like mess with the cops or pull out his stash in public, or try and rape an elderly lady in the middle of the park, or play one last round of Russian roulette.


But if you do it right and stay open to change, just allow the demon to have a share in the company and not full ownership, then you're in business. You can let the demon out when you need to be cold and merciless, such as when breaking up with a long-time lover; breaking a dog's neck to put it out of its misery after you accidentally run it over; pulling the plug on comatose grandma's breathing apparatus, and so on. With the demon at the reins, hearing someone plead for their life doesn't break your heart anymore. Don't they see that death is no different than life? That they're just scared of the unknown, of change? That they're behaving like a kid trying to talk his mom out of making him leave for the first day of school? Death is just the kindergarten of the next level education system. Really it's their ego that's scared, for it knows it will be truly dead, for the ego does not endure, and once the ego is dissolved, all fear goes with it. When your brain is exploding with the eternity of existence, you no longer whine to yourself about whether your friends are giving you enough credit for its luminosity. And so, what is war but an amusement park, a roller coaster on which you give your war shout and wave your hands (because if you don't you'll probably scream like a buried-alive Poe character?


In Oliver Stone's PLATOON (1986) the life/death line is drawn between the "cool" soldiers who smoke pot and dance and sing like a bunch of ANIMAL HOUSE-meets-MASH regulars, headed by Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) vs. the bourbon-swilling homicidal conservatives, represented by Sergeant Barnes (Tom Berenger). You may be too young to remember, but PLATOON really hit a national nerve when it came out in 1986. Vietnam vets would see it and cry afterward, right in the theater, I know because I saw one, finally recognizing and then releasing some of the horror they had been holding in for so long. I was a sophomore in college and our homework in America in the 1960s class was to get out to the off-campus theater and see it, and so my gang of hippies and we figured, why not eat mushrooms beforehand? We called a cab, piled in, and the cool driver takes one look at our tie-dyes and said "go ahead and smoke a joint if you want."

We knew this homework assignment had become something akin to a living myth.


For me, the film and shrooms kicked in at once to result in a quick descent into a palpable madness of paranoia and nihilism. In the surround-sound theater, I could sense every bug buzz, every snap of a twig, in the jungles all around me, knowing the buzzing gnats slowly moving around might turn any moment into VC twig snaps, that every possible rustle of leaves might mean death. The experience was so vivid, my friend Jason had to leave during the Mai Lai massacre segment, but I was really into it... It was that feeling of "why not just kill 'em all?" that comes from being pushed past your limits, the realization that insanity has a purpose, a grisly kind of freedom. I was 19, the perfect draft age. The mushrooms in conjunction with the movie had shown me the ambivalent killer I could have been with just the flick of a switch.


This "death-embracing" aspect of LSD is something America never has been able to reconcile with its more peaceful half, just throwing baby and bathwater alike into prison and barring the door on any further conversation, at least in the US. In England the late-inning demonizing was taken with a grain of salt, and the Nietzschean rebirth from civilized wanker into super-warrior via psychedelics thing appears in British films to this day. Leo DiCaprio taps into it for his psychedelic interlude during a stretch of THE BEACH (2000) and Cillian Murphy finds his inner psycho for the climax of 28 DAYS LATER (2002). Shauna Macdonald (above) experiences a similar death/rebirth when falling into a pit of menstrual blood signifier slime in THE DESCENT (2005). It's the last straw of horror that snaps her free into CARRIE-style warrior woman.


The Japanese have always been fans of this conversion and the slew of samurai films such as SWORD OF DOOM (1966) illustrate a cosmic understanding of the difference between sympathy and true compassion. The antihero main character played by Tatsuya Nakadai, for example, kills a weary old man he meets on a hill, just because he seems to be a burden to his granddaughter. In sword battle contests he only cares about perfection of technique, barely noticing the corpses he leaves in his wake. Perhaps the Japanese, British, and Germans for that matter, are just a little better at "going there." May I venture to guess it comes from being bombed (more than once)?

We Americans can't abide freedom from resolve-weakening liberal head games without a little help from our lysergic friends. We need far more of a push to shed our civilized moral paralysis, as we see in our terror of issues like euthanasia, castration and abortion. Comatose, paralyzed, dying patients are kept alive for years, and convicted sex offenders begging to be castrated are turned down flat due to minor health risks. Every hospital should have a man like Willard/Kurz in APOCALYPSE NOW or SWORD OF DOOM's Tatsuya Nakadai (above) to walk through the wards and dispassionately off the incurably sick or comatose, castrating and severing and doing whatever needs to be done. But it's shocking just to think of it. We are too scared to face death square in the eye! Won't someone think of the children!!?!?!

But we do have Vietnam, a shorthand signifier of the 'state of mind' where American hypocrisy collapses on itself and leaves you standing there in the bush with a gun in your hand, clinically insane from lack of sleep, and with a head full of contradictory orders.



APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) is the ultimate trip for Vietnam, the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY of war films, updating the original acid story, Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS to accommodate a broad spectrum of black comic situations. Brando's ambiguity as Kurz in the last section is always a bit of a let-down to what came before (maybe Brando wasn't 'experienced' anymore by then?). But before he bogs it up, the peaks happen often, most notably in the big bridge scene that's preceded by Lance mentioning to Chef (Frederic Forrest) as they're cruising up to the final checkpoint, beyond which is Cambodia: "You know that last tab of acid I had? I dropped it." Forrest replies, as if barely listening, "Far out."

Willard (Martin Sheen) gets off the boat at the bridge, bringing Lance with him like a magic protection symbol, like the white cloth pinned to the nurse's jacket in I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. Everyone fighting at this bridge seems lost and abandoned ("Who's in charge here?" / "Ain't you?") until they find a taciturn spectral presence named Roach (the Duane Jones zombie figure equivalent from IWAZ) who they bring out of his pot-smoke-and-Hendrix-filled cubby hole so he can take out a crazed VC sniper in the black night distance. "He's close man... real... close", says the Roach, his eyes glazed over with the 1000 yard stare. He loads his grenade launcher and just fires it straight up into the air without even looking, BAM, all is quiet, no more sniper. Roach's face barely changes except to snarl a bit as he whispers, "motherfucker" and pops out his grenade shell


"Soldier," an impressed, spooked Willard asks him. "Do you know who's in charge here?"

"Yeah" says Roach before disappearing back into the blackness. Who does the Roach mean? the devil? Or something even more bizarre, past duality, the Kali energy loosed upon the world? Roach is the end point of the Lance and Bunny mystical surrender/conversion... the ultimate acid soldier. His very name is synonymous with adaptation and survival: Roach will inherit the earth and in his stoned, gone expression is the true spirit of the Vietnam War -- at least as understood by the hippie layman.

Willard's question is, to Roach, Jimi Hendrix's same question in that song, "Are you experienced?" i.e. have you taken acid and 'passed' the test it dropped on your desk? The answer to both is the same: "yeah." (Roach looks a lot like Hendrix might in the war). No doubt that Roach is "experienced."

Earlier in the film we see the crew panic and machine gun a boat full of Vietnamese, but it's they who then label Willard the cold blooded killer when he shoots the sole wounded survivor. Willard notes that the American approach to Vietnam was "to shoot you full of holes and then give you a band-aid." and that the brass wanting to take down Kurz for killing a few suspected spies is "like passing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." We can't really blame the crew, just kids who know--as we do--any false move on the part of a seemingly innocent boat family might result in a suicide bomb or pulling a machine gun from a bag of rice.

According to the documentary, HEART OF DARKNESS, Coppola, cast and crew did lots of acid on set in the Philippines and you can feel it in the film's pulsing dissolves and apocalyptic imagery. Similarly, for PLATOON, Oliver Stone was actually there as a foot soldier in Vietnam and is admittedly very much "experienced." In each case you can feel the understanding of the killer instinct and the refusal to condemn it in the hypocritical "give 'em a band-aid" way of the American social structures.

THE DEER HUNTER focuses on the moment of facing this fear of death, but it never gets past it. Walken's addiction to Russian roulette indicates a kind of suicidal ideation autopilot. But the moods of APOCALYPSE NOW and PLATOON move beyond fear of death and into deep archetypal breakdown like true acid poetry. Cimino can't get beyond his own limited leftist jaundice.

In the end, you need to overcome your fear of death in order to become a true warrior. For some reason the bulk of cowardly Middle America thinks of tripping as somehow treason against humanity, and yet it would make for better soldiers, less afraid of dying. Almost all the people who want psychedelics to stay illegal have never tried them, just as people who want guns illegal don't own them. People are against the death penalty because their loved ones were never murdered. It's all part of the same hypocrisy.

Who's in charge here? Anyone with the balls to let go of fear and stick out their tongue for the real eucharist. As Brando advises in APOCALYPSE NOW, "you must make a friend... of horror." It's the only true thing he says, even if he already said it in LAST TANGO IN PARIS.