The whores in hors d'oeuvres: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY

Bring on the multitudes with a multitude of fishes:
feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist!
Stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas.
Crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them.
Let them die, and by
their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands,
that he might form an ashtray...
or an ark.

  -- Maxwell J. Brock (A Bucket of Blood)

INTRO:
Italian art house cinema of the late 60s, she could be-a both dangerous and-a dull. European critics and American intellectual art critics alone could--their Herculean pens dripping with post-structuralist antivenin--confront its many hydra heads without passing out from the wounds of monotonous languor. Mainstream American audiences scattered to the four winds like frightened goatherds at the first sign of subtitles... unless they heard there was nudity. Just as Ingmar Bergman broke into America on the body of of Harriet Andersson in SUMMER WITH MONIKA; Italian neorealist sentimentalism of the late 50s/early-60s needed Sophia Loren; The French New Wave was launched on the backside of Brigitte Bardot and needed the loveliness of Jeanne Moreau keep it afloat towards American screens. But it worked! 'Subtitles' became a kind of in-the-know shorthand connotative code, like French postcards. And slowly, bathing scene by bathing scene, American 'adult' cinemas--those rundown houses in the disreputable parts of town in showing nudie cuties (under the arbiter of 'documentary importance') while self-appointed champions of morality snarled from the overgrowth--became art houses, birthed into co-ed respectability in the fertile wombs of Ekberg, Persson, Loren, Andersson, and Bardot.

But then--in 1966--came Antonioni's BLOW-UP. There was no putting European cinema back together again after that. As EASY RIDER would soon do to Hollywood, BLOW-UP handed European cinema's head to it on a Matisse bowler-bedecked Salome special platter. All the dime store Marxists now masqueraded as disaffected wunderkind beats to win the tourist distributor's fickle coin. All the best corpses, models, and stoop-shouldered socialist toothed birds a casting call could couch were then shipped wholesale to Rome and thrown into all sorts of art gallery-set situations. Producers started grinding up their red telephones into pigment to redden the canvas of the artist. Warhol, Lichtenstein, LSD, Vietnam, radicalism, labor strikes, women's lib --all were hanging around and kicking the bomb-blasted corpses of neorealist prostitute madonnas and pinball-and-cigarette pimps to capture the pen of the now fully-awakened critics.

But... paralyzed with the realization any step taken outside BLOW-UP's immediate blast radius would harden them into mock-ups of their plastic avenue parents--the dilated Now generation and the lecherous old Commie intellectuals in disguise (or, for the first time, out of one), now hired by bonanza-minded distributors to make wild art films that reached the signifier-trashing post-modern epiphanies of Antonioni (with a little sex in it)-- stood frozen on the spot, paralyzed through fear of paralysis. Trapped inside the mess of neorealism-splattered tiles and smoldering post-war blackened labor pamphlets, they waited, wondering, trying to decide how they were going to rewrite the history they'd just collectively admitted had been erased.

Finally, they began to rummage through the blast-darkened detritus, for old world survivors, images from the Weimar era, from gay 20s jazz Paris, and ancient, ancient Rome. What they found was a wounded Fellini, hiding under the ruins of a mawkish life-is-a-carnival-metaphor merry-go-round. They strung him up by his heels to finish the job, But when it came to slitting his throat, they were suddenly afraid of committing too far in that dark direction, of stumbling on their dad's mothballed attic-stashed Fascist Party parade sash in search of a sacrificial dagger. Finally, Dario Argento grabbed s jagged piece of glass and made the cut, for real, right across the screen. And from that gaudy rococo throat gushed a dishwasher ocean of red, followed by the rush of razor wire phoenix feathers. BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1968) soared aloft, like an own from the forehead of Athena.. and immediately everyone who had been so reticent to do more than pretend to strangle their mistress or their husbands for a party game fake-out (ala Death Laid an Egg) changed their minds and went scrambling through the ruins for their own giallo shard.

Suddenly breasts and fab clothes and kinky psycho art shows weren't enough. While Ennio mocked you from the playground with deft slide whistle and tra-la-las, you had to kill 'em, fabulously, ironically, brutally--but not tastelessly. The Money urged you on and you had to be an idiot if you let your feeling of virginal castration angst hang you up instead of the other way around. The Money commands a sacrifice, and then another, as thirsty as an Aztec god on a hot summer day.

Anyway it wasn't blood that flowed so free, but red -- pigment for the artist. BIRD was a horror film the way 1966's BLOW-UP was a conspiracy thriller, or PERFORMANCE a British mobster film, or PSYCHO film noir. The father along the imitations trail, the less the post-modern art meta/artist trimmings framed the violence. That was the compromise: the finger points to the moon; Argento cuts off the finger as a tribute to Dali and Bunuel's LA CHIEN ANDALOU; the next generation just film bloody stumps pulsing red; the moon long forgotten. Have you forgotten Balzac too?

When you film a girl in her underwear looking at tawdry X-rated photo books, thou has committed post-modernism AND made the distributor happy,

And that's where 
A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968) comes in, for it is one of the weirder, more vaguely satirical contemporaries of Argento's definitive Italian post-BLOW-UP giallo; it's the brother, not the son, the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when they can get away to visit him at the 'funny' farm. The kids would never know from his address how cool he is, I mean what is up with that title? A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY sounds like a Squaresville Merchant Ivory bucolic reverie about "love, laughter, and a little bit of heart," the kind of film only a half-asleep grandmother with her old lady book club would love. It doesn't even have a poster, for gods' sake (PS - this has been solved, and now there's a nice Blu-ray - 5/18). Is it deliberately trying to be lost to time?  That's why I made one (above) poster, changing the name to u3prufj]gi]42go[ggr=gr.

Whatever it's called, the line between artistic genius and psychotic mania has seldom before been so succinctly erased, and that deserves at the very least a more evocative title!

Not only is psychotic mania succinctly erased but there's also the by-far best performance of a young Franco Nero (dubbing his own voice in the English track), as an unhinged modern art painter named Leonardo. The way he tears around the crumbling estate, happy as a lark, reminds me of that old children's song by Napoleon XIV they used to play us in elementary school. Apparently he was shacking up with Vanessa Redgrave at the time, and they both really loved making this movie together, and it really shows, especially with him; he's alight with joy. If you're used to his terse inexpressive deadpan cool from DJANGO or THE FIFTH CORD, it might be a pleasant shock to see how opened and giddy and light on his feet he is. Whether he's chasing the ghost of a nymphomaniac countess, skipping barefoot around his crumbling country mansion, or being chased by his needy art gallery owner girlfriend (Redgrave), he's gorgeous, magnetic, manic, and free.

Redgrave, on the other hand, is his agent / gallery owner girlfriend, whose visits to the mansion often expose her to brutal pranks perpetrated by the previous inhabitant's maybe-ghost.  Redgrave is painfully convincing as the bewildered needy clueless type, familiar to any 'experienced' traveler, the one you kind of leave in the dust after your first big acid or shroom trip opens you all the way up, the one who won't or can't follow you over the edge, so hangs on the void's lip looking down, trying to lure you up by babbling about vacations and other prizes that until a few moments or hours ago you would have salivated over but now seem inane. When that doesn't work, she tries sex, then crying and stamping her foot but that suddenly seems so childish and manipulative to your open senses that you sneer instead of getting all paternal and supportive like you used to. 'Awake' to the world of the villa, like his own private wonderland, he has no time for such triviality. Consider the episode where he takes flowers from the place where Wanda was killed and then throws them to Vanessa but she's too busy moving 'civilized' stuff in for him, like a dishwasher, to care. With his unkempt haircut and  "alive to the wildflowers that the plastic fantastic types cannot see" vibe, he resembles Assisi's "Brother Sun", leaving comfortable bourgeois textiles family to go chant and dally in a half-restored stone church in the middle of nowhere, if his mom showed up after a week to move in a washer and dryer to keep his burlap rags clean. Francis of Assisi's legacy might not even exist if he hadn't picked a church way far away from his mom's apron tentacles, and kept the surrounding fields kee-deep in mud and offal so no cart carrying a major appliances might e'er trespass. (Consider too Violet Venable following Sebastian to the Buddhist monastery in Suddenly Last Summer).

For a male artist struggling with the usual individuation issues, the worst thing a woman can do is try curtail or control his madness. The second worst is to try and cajole their way into being part of it unless it's a totally natural fit, in which you're able to represent the the anima (the way say Pallenberg and Faithfull were animas for Richards and Jagger) rather than the devouring mother (like Redgrave here). It's the difference between a parent actually able to enter their kids' imagined world, seeing things through their eyes (very rare and precious), the parent who just shrugs and says "oh you kids" and goes back to reading the paper, but with one eye on them to keep their madness from spinning out of orbit (the average 'good' parent response) and the worst option: the parent who tries to enter the imaginary world but ruins the mood (the average 'anal' parent response), and the one who makes the kid stop imagining things altogether out of a kind of buzzkill jealousy or misplaced piousness (the worst response).

What's interesting is that in art the genders are often reversed, with the father able to enter the imaginary world easier than the woman who gets roped into playing authority figure the way the father is outside of the imaginary realm. Even the photographer Vanessa's PR agent brings on a studio visit to the crumbling mansion has more of a grasp of the method to Leonardo's madness than Vanessa. He alone notices the flowers, Nero has thrown on the ground for Vanessa to notice, or at least snaps a photo of them - recognizing that a photo of this tossed-off natural bouquet might constitute his own art--in a future photography exhibition (outside his PR job).

This photographer's snapping the flowers enrages Franco, as if the photographer is stealing his wildflowers' soul! This young turk, setting himself up like an Eve Kendall, building his own art off the madness of Leonardo, who-- rather than lighting a cigarette and talking about Marxist aesthetics through opaque Armani shades during this PR visit--reaches out to grab the photographer from inside his canvas hideout like an old dark house gorilla reaching through a secret panel in the wall above Paulette Goddard.

As for other, non-Vanessa girls, there is only one who understands him, who doesn't try to nail Leonardo down to sensible hours, clean dishes, and regular meals, and that's the ghost of the nymphomaniac countess, an obscene combination of obscene nymphette and ghost anima (ala Rebecca. In order to find a similar ghost we have to hop genders to examine the ever-corrupting Quint in The Innocents. In covering both roles, she both sucks the film deeper into Poe's mournful quagmire while simultaneously dragging to dangerously close to the purely obscene/pornographic (his obsession with dirty magazines is defiantly not MOMA-ready). As consumes the photographer in Blow-Up, Leonardo winds up on a kind of scavenger hunt/detective thriller hole climb, solving her possible murder (initially written off as WW2 collateral damage) as he collects old photos and memories of her - but he's not a cop, just an insane voyeur, thrilled to hear all the old men reminisce about losing their virginity to her during the war. Is this just his distraction from doing any work or is this somehow mirroring his work? Or leading his work astray? Is the genius of art hinged at the edge of smut? Is the madness caused by obsessive voyeurism really in the same league with conventional investigative journalism?

Antonioni's madmen tended to be women, driven insane through lack of an artistic outlet while men turn their bodies into temples to be worshipped or defiled; by contrast, Redgrave is a warm sane human who structures and profits by her male artist's madness. Her love is based on his resistance and absence (expressed even to the point of his anima/the nympho ghost attacking her at odd moments). He's the cracked one, and he's full of outlets but resists making any actual conventional art. When Redgrave shows up, the whole house conspires to kill her via roof cave-ins and falling shelves and exploding pipes while Nero stalks her like a combination Italian spy and house cat stalking a mouse-shaped felt toy - that becomes his art. Stifled by her suffocating sanity, her pedestrian conceptions of art, showing him her collection of electric knife sharpeners as if begging him to cut her apart  (it's never been this easy, especially with our patented three speed process!) pleading with him to touch her and make her relevant, to shave off her consumerist edges, Nero can only channel his misogynistic kinkiness through mock strangling or Poe-like fits of Morella-Ligeia possession. That's how the film gets to be both horror and not, because it fits both quite well without committing to one side or the other.

To avoid a feeling of being cheated or that the film is copping out on a satisfying ending, murders within a mise-en-scene can only turn out to be just dreams and hallucinations instead of 'reality' if it's unclear enough whether or not the 'all a dream' ending is itself the dream, that either way, reality is severely jarred (as in, say, De Palma or Bergman) and will never quite be distinguishable from fantasy ever again. It takes a true surrealist (like Lynch, Cocteau, Argento or Bunuel) to recognize there doesn't ever need to be an 'it was all a dream' denouement in movies-at all-no matter how illogical things get. We can tell when things get 'dream-like' that we're in a special in-between place.

The feeling of cheating and disappointment comes when there's a lack of trust in the audience, the producer or writer doesn't think we're mature enough to handle surrealism, that without a solid reality to go home with society itself may crumble. Even the most masterful of visionaries feel often feel obligated to bring things back to Squaresville at the end, remembering logic and linearity like the dutiful spouses waiting at home to chide them for not wanting to be patiently chided. But if they let go and trust in their audience, then the film can be all dream, all the time, and logic, truth, and reality can go to the devil. We'll be fine, mom!  You and your Fellini carnival megaphone can go end some other film. We already know life is a carnival, it's been drummed into us like a prenatal hearbeat. Now sashay... away.

So why is Quiet Place not more widely seen and praised? Critics pee their pants praising other surrealist portraits of Italian male artist egocentric sex addict dysfunction like 8 1/2, but Quiet Place makes Fellini look like that insecure childhood friend who tries to keep you reading comic books and playing D&D past the date it's 'normal'. Part of TCM's Creepy Art and Artists series, the film was preceded by Mystery at the Wax Museum (the original) and Corman's Bucket of Blood. They're two favorites of mine, so the TV was still on afterwards, me, folding laundry in the other room, half-listening, when I heard Ennio Morricone's unmistakable cacophonic counterpoint cut through my deep focus like a knife. I never in a million years would have found this film otherwise. What kind of giallo is called A Quiet Place in the Country!? I had already forwarded past it on the TV menu scroll a dozen times, kind of a priori dismissing it from my attention's channel surfing filter, where I note and dismiss things I deduce to be turgid British costume dramas or saccharine musicals.

TCM's entry on the film mentions it kind of disappeared off the radar and never came to the States at all, and the "only reason it probably received distribution in an English-dubbed version in the U.S. in 1970 was due to the tabloid notoriety of Redgrave and Nero, who were living together openly and had a child." Which is interesting since Performance was also filmed in 1968 and only released here in 1970. Were they both considered too dangerous for the time? Too likely to spark a revolution, a riot, or a surge in mental hospital self check-ins? Even for a town that saw the receipts for Easy Rider?

Regardless even in 1970, nothing you could say on the poster could would lure anyone under 40 to a movie called A Quiet Place in the Country. Good god... I know, because I never in a million years would have seen it nor be writing this even at 50, if not for that Morricone muted trumpet recognition while in the other room. After all, what kind of film has that bland name and then this is the first image you see:

You might look at this kind of self-reflexive student film self-indulgence and groan, thinking about incoherent image stringers like Baba Yaga or even annoying 'visualization of mental states' one man show quirkiness like Caro Diario but hey, fellow, relax. Director Elio Petri is no whimsy-merchant, ego tripper,sooty  or softcore hack anymore than he is giallo / gangster journeyman, a white elephant 'alienation' technician, nor some Marxist snot filming pinball and polemics through cafe windows. He's a bonafide pop art post-Marxist artist whose Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion is on Criterion with all the hearty handclasps that implieth. So-- even if Quiet is such a down and dirty mindfuck it would make David Hemmings cry like little Chester in The Fatal Glass of Beer--and even if the fantasy visualization bits are done so that we can't tell which is which--well, it's still Art, baby, Capital A small R, small T.

In other words, we can wonder in this weird overly-symbolic opener if: Nero is tied up as part of some contemporary art gallery show she's curating; is himself a performance art installation; or if this is just an abstracted sex scene, and not worry anything so crass as clarification on this point will deign to be offered. We can wonder if Leonardo is being haunted by a real ghost at the villa; whether he is just a paranoid schizophrenic sex addict; whether he's genuinely dangerous or just 'playful;' whether this is little window of tied-up hairiness is meant to be: a dream or an art gallery show; a critique of modern living, the pair-bond social system, or a couple hanging out in their apartment, with him feeling trapped in a tied-up situationist strait-jacket and she faux-enthralled by all the wonders of the electric age (demonstrating them with pleading eyes as he stares emptily, she's the height of bourgeois neediness. He must go insane if only to escape her).

Again - we don't need to worry we got the wrong answer--the only answer is the only answer isn't.

To repay this favor of no wrong/right answer duality, let's talk about this film and why it's not getting more love from the fringe contingent. I think it's first the title then the way it is defiantly not any one genre. It defies expectations for a giallo while riffing on them in a deadpan absurdist abstraction that puts it more aligned with Spasmo and nothing else.

I've only read one review in English that gets it, on Electric Sheep (from the UK, naturally):

Petri’s foray into experimental horror. It’s a film that demands repeated viewing as it is all too easy to get engrossed in the intricacies of the delirious plot. Once you know how this flamboyantly elusive tale of a troubled abstract painter obsessed with the ghost of a nymphomaniac young countess pans out, you appreciate all the more how brilliantly it is all set up. Blending sex, love, madness, identity crisis, alienation, death, art, consumerism and social commentary in a hypnotic, dazzling visual swirl of bold colours, powerful emotions and artistic expression, it is a feast of experimental visual imagery, but not without Petri’s typically dry, caustic touch. - Pamela Jahn

One of the legendary Situationist ad campaigns hushed up by A.O Range

All the Candide clowns you crayon can't compete with a single electrically-sharpened switchblade slash from the sandman's blood-blackened brush!
In dreams I'll find
who's there?
'Ennio Morricone carving bologna from the fattened calves of the schmaltz-fattened phonies"
Ennio Morricone carving bologna from the fattened calves of the schmaltz-fattened phonies who?
One electric guitar sting instead of a whole tedious orchestra equals Da Vinci.

Insanity pays dividends (done ideally without real violence), regardless of the severity of the strait-jacket's initial application. Art thrives on censorship the way muscles thrive on free weights. The trick is to be successful enough in the market that they wheel you to the nicer home, the funnier of farms, the satin strait-jacket, with pretty views and indulgent staff, and access to paint and brush. An attendant who brings you whatever obscene magazines you want in exchange for obscene art works he can immediately sell. If Pollock had been medicated and under house arrest, with an alcohol-detecting bracelet, he might still be alive. If you care. Would his work even be so fawned over? I've looked at those drios of his on all sorts of different drugs, after reading all sorts of how-to theorists, and I still think it's shiite. I do love his pre-drip work though (below) where there are enough perceptible forms that my pareidolia is engaged, just barely, to allow the abstraction to have something to work with. Without the visible forms to start the eye rolling, his drips seem to me like a wood chipper without any wood, or even the chipper, it's just the roar of the engine and grinding of the blades, divorced of all else.

I mention Pollock too because his Ed Harris biopic is a classic example of trying to white elephant a termite (see here), again and again, visionary (i.e. mentally ill), as excited corny orchestras pump artist's in-progress painting with pomp and import - only slightly less misguided as showing someone's fingers at a typewriter while they pound out a future classic. Minnelli got around it in Lust for Life by turning the whole film into a Van Gogh, with glowing light. And here, Petri gets around it by bouncing it all up against the tropes of a ghost story (just as Antonioni sprang off Hitchcock with Blow-Up).  The problem in this case is that his aesthetically rip-roaring child's eye view of the world, where size is a matter of dilating and contracting perspective, like Alice eating mushroom stems in order to match the height of each new character she encounters, he runs into people who stay the same dull size, always.

Maybe you've been there (brother, you know I have), the place where spittle-flecked speedy mania, spiritual enlightenment, and madness intersect and liberate consciousness from the old self's locked parameters. But your old lady, man, up for the weekend, a little concerned to find you in such a state, stays locked up in her old self's parameters. She wants to keep you the same size, like a dwarf star albatross anchor of bore-o-drome. She can't follow you into that zone of play, so she can only try to lure you back out of it by showing you products she's brought for the house, or her own personal adornment. You being a character written by a communist, her consumer mindset seems suddenly small, shallow, pathetic, and irritating--in ways impossible to alter via the aforementioned spatial perception flux.


It's like if Hemmings' photographer had his elderly accountant interrupting constantly his 'flow' of jazzy image-chasing in Blow-Up, nagging him why he won't sit down and do his taxes, trying to steer the whole movie out of this kinetic signifier-melting 'Now'-ness and into fiduciary logocentric absolutes. (A three can never be a four in accounting, but in Blow-Up the only difference between those two numbers is that four has no curves and three no lines, other than that they are identical). Flavia can understand this as his agent--she's been cultivating his mystique to make them both richer--but as his lover she hungers for some kind of traditional pair bond, and that demands valuation.

Never afraid to seem manly or ghoulish, like some monstrous lesbian from an Aldrich hag movie one minute and a sexy carefree bird the next, trying on thing after another to reach him, Redgrave is achingly sad, funny - almost painfully human yet still full of British fire -seemingly beyond the confines of Britain's class system but nonetheless hung up on Leonardo. We're invited to see her from his side, her crying in a deep manly choke, in ways only Fellini would probably be moved by.

Wanda, the ghost nymph, is not moved, and scalds Flavia in the bathroom. We would cheer...

if we were able to close our agape mouths.

EPILOGUE

If you're still lost in the Italian 60s art house morass after this movie, still need to understand the bizarro world Joycean dialectic at play here, hey, I relate. Watch the newsstand scene where he orders all these dry political news magazines, calling their names loudly while whispering the names of the dirty ones below, alternating back and forth like a kind of crazy counterpoint jazz, building and building in mania while Ennio Morricone's score chides him like a gang of rock-throwing Catholic school truants. Got it? Now watch Bird with Crystal Plumage (with its sing-song chiding chorus) and then you will maybe not even or finally never know that any confusion on your part is the correct modernist response. Even Antonioni wasn't able to handle that level of all-consuming cinematic signifier meltdown. He followed his own clown's candy-colored exhaust trail to the American Southwest for Zabriskie Point in 1970 but within that confining vastness even he, the titan of lostness, was lost. Here the threes meant threes and love meant love and red state bullets meant the same as they always did--freedom, man --and too late, it's gone. So written history was blown in slow motion to Pink Floyd but there was only so many angles you could film the explosion in, so many speeds, to hide that fact that without the old world's effigy to throw rocks at there was nothing in the air to knock one out.

"I can hear him saying it now," the writer says at the end of Crystal Plumage, "it's a peaceful country, nothing ever happens there." Argento knew that art was the time travel portal where the demented past comes slithering out across the galleria floor like the molasses lava flood tide of the living dead. No need for Dario to chase hippies around, he'd chase the artists themselves. He'd chase Antonioni as the effigy of the curious artist, fit to be gutted or at least scared; the photographer voyeur suddenly face-to-face with the killer he's been chasing; the painting reaching out from the frame to stab the artist in his disaffected eyeball, to-- at the very least-- affect its own final image. Blow up as many post-neorealism hacks and paint as many graveyard hussies as you can find, dear Petri, but Wanda will never be sated, not 'til it's your soul dripping from her sexy gorgon fangs, and every Redgrave is dug deep for her departure.

NOTES
1. You can argue Bava was the first to mix fashion and gory murder --in 1964's Blood and Black Lace, but that movie was a failure at the time, never released to the States, so Bava turned back to the traditional genre forms. Argento's '68 film was on the other hand an influential success and explores a far wider post-modern field than just fashion and soapy backstabbing.

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. - 

Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice. 

"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt" --Vigilante Citizen

“This is no dream, this is really happening!” - Rosemary Woodhouse

The first film perhaps ever to exploit our deep dread of old folks, 1968's Rosemary's Baby gazes deep and diabolically into the murky waters wherefrom skeletal hands of grandparents reach up to pat their captive breeders' kicking bellies. With real life abominations against women, like the 2012 male-only hearing on women's reproductive freedom in the US, and the stoning to death of women whose hair is accidentally exposed at fundamentalist Muslim markets (so I hear), it's ever-trenchant--and the end goal, conscious or not, is the same: co-opt the womb, destroy the chthonic Kali Durga shell around it before it expands wide enough to envelop you and grind you to pussy-whipped vagina dentata oblivion. At a certain depth, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Satanism become indistinguishable, the same old testament wrath of the 'jealous' god (Moloch disguised as Yaweh), the same flood called in to wipe out the old advanced civilizations and leave us collectively barefoot and pregnant, unable to change a lightbulb for centuries to come, in other words, we learned how to repress the feminine from God his self. Read the Old Testament and it's pretty clear that God, back in those days, was a monster, demanding ever greater blood sacrifices and burnt offerings, thousands of doves nailed to the wall of the church, one of each of the animals on the ark burned alive after waiting a whole extra year in the Ark even though it was dry outside, that kind of thing. Comparatively, Satan seems pretty cool, the Prometheus who turned us onto mind expanding drugs when our creator just wanted our brains docile and unquestioning. 

And that version of God, the old one, had a wife. The Old Testament had female characters like Lillith and Asherah--AKA Mrs. God, Yaweh's female counterpart, all excised from the record.  A million witch burnings had to happen to restore male supremacy, and even then it's in doubt. So who can blame the devil worshippers for being so well-hidden from the public eye?  To the long extinct Asherah worshippers, matriarchal pagans or just women in general, Christianity is as the KKK is to African-Americans, or Nazis to the Jews, Andrew Jackson to the Native American Nation, proof that if you go too far in any direction you become your own opposite. 

A typical early Christian demolishing an Asherah pole (by Dakota O'Leary)

To reach a perspective high enough to see these patterns clearly, let us overlay over the pre-biblical murk of the past, a snapshot of NYC in 1968, a time and place, if there ever was one, for the ashes of Asherah to reform into our realm. Rosemary generated real uncanny paranoia that made the collective unconscious a dangerous place, and finally broke through into the collective consciousness in the Satanic panic of the early-80s. 

But no matter who many women go under man's thumb, Woman, Asherah, Mrs. Old Testament God, never can or will. She can, on the other hand, become a vengeful Medea for being locked out of the men's club Illuminati narrative; are we the brood she bashes for revenge? This feeling of being excluded from knowledge has leaked out into her children too -- if there is an Illuminati they never asked us to join. Like Rosemary with the cult, no one even asks if she wants to be a member. She has to literally break through her own hidden exit to find out what's going on in her own womb. And since we see the entirety of the film from Rosemary's point of view, we have to guess, just as she does, until the very end, where babies really come from. The entirety of the film is absent direct visualization of any devil practices (dream aside), the paintings at the Castavets are removed when Rosemary comes over, like she's a child kept in the dark about why she came from her mother but has her father's features, until she's old enough, or distraught enough, to break through.

Understandably, that paranoid hallucination conspiracy angle was jettisoned for most of Rosemary's imitators, to be replaced by external signifiers like robes, horns, pentagrams, possession, smoke and mirrors and screaming naked virgins. Far from being scarier, this external projection and performative evil came as a great relief, like Hammer's Devil Rides Out (also from 1968). Those films are for more fun than Polanski's. Those are the ones we return to again and again on Halloween. Once we see the horns and the licentious ceremonial dancing, the fear stops, replaced by fond amusement. 

 

Polanski knew to never show such iconography or mindless externalized malice, and even the "this is really happening" dream sequence is kept surreal and strange. Polanski knew a Satanist with a gentle smile and a natty bow-tie and no real malice in his eyes could be far scarier than one that 'looked' scary, i.e. with a goat horn cowl and black cloak. We're never allowed (not old enough?) to see Rosemary's unholy baby, or the rapist devil (a hand and yellow eyes aside); the old people chanting around her in the dream are naked, no robes (a motif repeated with the witches in Polanski's Macbeth); and no horns or forked tail can compare in uncanny dead to the mystery and horror of the human reproductive system, or a flock of naked old folks standing around your bed while you're writhing in a drugged stupor. It's so creepy it's almost never been repeated in these imitations, yet it's all right there - no wardrobe budget needed.

If you know this blog you know I've had my own drugged demon visitations (see here) -- I believe the boundary line between the real and the vividly imagined is traversable in ways our minds as yet cannot consciously grasp, but who knows if certain ancient cults haven't figured out how to do just that, to creep in through the basement of our psyches and partially manifest? They can't all have been wiped out by the flood and then Attilla the Hun, then Genghis Kahn and then the Christians. 

For instance just last night on Late Night with Craig Ferguson he was talking with an author about how characters sometimes break away from you when you're writing them - they show up in places and do things you don't consciously expect as you're writing - as if they notice you writing about them. I had that happen to me writing my first novel wherein my character realizes some people he met the other night at a coke party are Yaqui crow trickster shamans, and right at that moment I could feel real Yaqui crow trickster shamans sensing me writing about them, and they began to begin to stir in their far-off nests, sending psychic representations forth through the gossamer tubeways of thought to climb out of the page to get me, like they could blind me or destroy me with their unified field of chant just as the coven had done to Tony Curtis in RB. Were these the same shaman who guided Carlos Castaneda? That you only had to start writing about them and they'd flutter up through the interdimensional tubeways into your unconscious and take over the typewriter?

But there's more to the story of Rosemary's Baby than just combined creative unconscious drives commingling to blind God long enough that a dream lover spawn might sneak across the uterine expanse of Mother Gaia's unburnt-at-stake dimensional dividers (after all, souls, even those of non-devil babies, have to come from somewhere). 

It wasn't just Polanski's film /cross to bear, and his wasn't the only life it allegedly destroyed. Rosemary had as a producer the legendary master of ballyhoo, William Castle, and, by 1968, Emergo just wasn't gonna cut it. He needed to go deep for a new signature gimmick, one for the turbulent times. He decided to do as the Castavet cult does in the film, to stop with the cardboard horns and skeletons, the axes and insurance politics, and go right for the unconscious, the power of paranoia, of conspiracy and curses. I'm not saying, 'mind' you, that he made up a Macbeth-style curse hanging over the film's production, that his linking of strange on-set accidents and tragedies to the film's subject matter was straight up Castle ballyhoo for the age of Aquarius. But if he did do that, if he started the rumor up, in the vein of Tut's tomb opening curse, then maybe the daemonic tricksters of alternate dimensions noticed him weaving a paranoid associative rumor nexus and sent their Satanic kidney stone calling card across the gossamer web that connects myth, dream, mind, soul, and nerve endings... to 'help' Castle along, as it were. 

David Parkinson writes about the hate mail Castle received for the film, the curses leveled at him, and how Castle and composer Krystof Komeda were both struck down with crippling, painful ailments shortly after the film premiered, and then the murder of Polanski's real-life wife Sharon Tate (who co-starred in Eye of the Devil, see: The Blonde Devils of '66,) and the untimely womb ripping of their child, (he omits the eerie similarity to the violation of Rosemary in the film and Polanski's own rape charges), to end with a link to John Lennon's death in 1980:

John Lennon had spent the spring of 1968 with Mia Farrow at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India. During their stay, Lennon had written "Dear Prudence" for Farrow's sister (who shared a name with Sharon Tate's Yorkshire terrier) and it featured on The Beatles' White Album that November. Charles Manson claimed that the LP contained coded messages about the impending race war he hoped to provoke with the Cielo Drive slayings. Lennon himself met a violent end in December 1980 when he was gunned down in New York — outside the Dakota apartments." (more) 

For Polanski, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, the coven aspect of Levin's novel surely tapped into the paranoia of his childhood hardship. Part of the Nazi's rationale for their homicidal anti-Semitism was that Jews were a mystical black magic Protocols of the Elders of Zion cabal, and just as educated women had to lay low for centuries lest they be burned at stake, so too this feeling of a secret conspiracy lingered in the Jewish intellectual community, creating separateness, enforced perhaps by Aryan rivals for Jewish business (or property disputes--as in Salem), or disgruntled employees getting passed over for promotion in favor of some kid fresh out of Yeshiva school, or ghettoization (as in Merchant of Venice), or--if you're goy-learning your Jewish fiancee was being pressured not to marry you by the mother of one of your Jewish friends. So which came first? The secrecy and elitism, or the goy intolerance necessitating a strength in numbers that must be hidden from the non-Jewish population, lets they believe the anti-semitic conspiracy theorists? 

In America, we can't imagine what it's like to be invaded, to have an openly evil and oppressive system turn human compassion and morality upside down, to obliterate all traces of rhyme and reason, to be persecuted for something done centuries before we were even born, all our possessions confiscated or destroyed, starved and beaten. But for Polansk,i this is a formative experience. He knows all we see and hear of 'reality' as Americans constitutes only the tip of a black iceberg. Behind closed doors, who knows what monsters sit, working spells and deals to ensure they win all the marbles before the game is even started? If we knew those spells, wouldn't we use them, too? Didn't we, in a way, already? (we in this case being SWM Christians like myself).

Between 1933-1941, America benefitted indirectly from the Nazi's intolerance. Most of Europe's intellectual Jews, gays, physicists, artists, and filmmakers fled to our shores, bringing their strange occult customs, their atomic bomb formulas and expressionistic lighting designs.

But after the war, America turned away from seances and toward atomic age anxiety, less devil cults and more giant bugs and rockets to the moon. Then the suburbs were born (they didn't exist before WW2), a place where junior could play catch in the back yard and parents with rakes smiled from cross the street and cheered the space race on to the moon. Occasionally a dad could go insane (as in Nicolas Ray's Bigger than Life) or kids could grow up into spoiled brats (as in Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows), but childbirth was holy... and the country club was 'restricted.' 

Babies, housewives, and old people could never be, you know, evil --not in the straight white Anglo-Christian suburbs. 

A few exceptions came and went. There was The Bad Seed, and a spate of crazy old broad movies launched by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jane and Rhoda were psychotic, flash-frozen at childhood, before their brains developed the foundations of the empathetic response --we knew this from the get-go. They might be terrifying in theory, but it was an understandable evil, the suspense was waiting for the rest of the characters to realize it. But they were lone gunmen. And we knew where they lived.

But what about the sane, gentle sweethearts bringing you vitamin shakes to help your pregnancy, or the 'no arguments, young lady' condescension of top shelf pediatricians played by stalwart salts like Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein (who tells Rosemary "And please don't read books. Don't listen to your friends either.") Sapirstein could be espousing the Muslin fundamentalist sexist line, or America's before the dawn of the sixties. He might as well add "and for the love of Mike, don't vote or wear slacks." Rosemary's only form of revolt against this trap is her short hair-cut, an expensive 'very chic' affront, which to Guy is tantamount to her drawing on the wall in crayon, defacing his valuable property. As she's getting dangerously thin, pale, and pain-wracked, the effect of the short hair is to evoke the camps all over again... even right there on the UWS.....they're always there. 

In conveying Rosemary's gradual awakening from compliance ("you're gonna think I really flipped,") Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, almost as if it's in our DNA to do so (and maybe it is). The link between paranoia and pregnancy is made unilateral, and with Polanski's film we see how patriarchal 'big city' condescension and secrecy can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, "Rome's" story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by pregnancy-related estrogen surges) and the physical arrival, up from the subconscious realm, of an actual devil ("Hail Satan!") Like in a Lovecraft story, the womb functions as an interdimensional airport with connecting flights from unconscious hell to conscious reality, on the wings of combined chanting and herb-spiked dreams. Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is about a dream incarnated into reality. It happens all the time, like when writing a novel or something and you realize 'you' are really dictating your unconscious's voice, so that the finished product might get that voice's owner, your shadowed anima, closer to actual merging with your daylight consciousness (if only your ego wasn't always in the way, waving its rosary and uttering empty prayers).

HIDING MAKES YOU UNKNOWABLE.

When we sense something is being kept from us, that thing gains in power as our conscious fears project onto it (trying to pre-program our response) and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's nervous system. This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in. It's an ocean wherein all dreamers are linked together, like fish, drowning sailors, whales, swimmers, and dolphins are all connected via an oceanic matrix of nonlocal conductive consciousness ('salt water'). 

But not everyone swims, drowns, or paddles. The Satanist sails on the surface of this sea (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a Naval officer, like Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control). The psychedelic shamans surf until they're wiped out (whoa bro, you rode that wave?!); unconscious dreamers snorkel or bob in the waves, and the schizophrenics drown, and the mystic swims. (to paraphrase Joseph Campbell). Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing in the waves, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end, she joins with the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. The secret passage behind the cupboard at the end of the hall is like a mirror of the interdimensional womb/chanting gateway by which the horny devil entered her boudoir. "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes," Castavet answers. And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven. The oceanic matrix connects all parts of all things. They should name the child after the blinded rival actor, and close the circuit.

It's interesting to note that in both Rosemary and the Exorcist there is a mother alone with her child and an absentee father (allowing room for a 'new' one), and a kindly older male friend who dies in mysterious circumstances. The males are all either dysfunctional, absent, or very old and full of strange oaths and bearded like the bard. Is God Dead? so trumpets Time Magazine!

The last proper dad we see in the film, played by Maurice Evens, is the proper authority figure of the old school of monster movies, the backstory exposition scientist, the merry fire-toasted Van Helsing type, outlying some grim history: "Adrian Marcata lived there, so did the Trent sisters." It turns out of course that Marcata / Mocata, it's all the same old man in the painting above the Castavet's mantle. 

The name Adrian Marcata should of course remind Hammer fans of The Devil Rides Out and its villain Bob Adrian Mocata, played by Charles Gray (below left), which came out the exact same year but, compared the resonant contemporary realism of Polanski's film, seems to be from a much earlier era. Even Rosemary's utterance "Hey, let's make love," while they're eating dinner on the floor in their empty apartment, is straight out of the 70s, while in Devil Christopher Lee is throwing magic beans at giant spiders. Yet the two evil patriarchs - the same, just manifesting different powers. The devil may be thwarted in Rides but he wins in Baby -- and he does so by keeping a low profile, hiding his deeds even from the camera. 

Mocata / Marcata 

The first time we see Roman Castavet AKA Steven Marcata, he is wearing a Satanic dark red velour shit that contrasts sharply (especially in the recent brilliant hi-def version) with the dark surroundings. He sits off by himself, in a big chair far enough away from the couch whereon Rosemary, Guy, and Minnie are squeezed together to indicate his mastery over them, as if he's on stage, and just his talk about having been all around, every town on earth, makes him seem ageless, omnipresent (even as its folded into his folksy homilies) his ability to seem familiar with Guy's work is standard suggestive manipulation ala fortune tellers at the carnival. And if you've ever been in rich people's parlors where the furniture is all the way across the room, you may may have noted that they don't shout; it's kind of up to you to sharpen your hearing enough to comprehend what they're saying, amazed, perhaps, that you can. You realize you're so used to boorish loud people you've forgotten how to talk in a low voice to someone whose ten or 20 feet away. 

The cynical self-serving unconscious bluster of Guy is apparently sensed by the Castavets, which is why he's brought into their fold and not Rosemary. They sense in her a deep goodness that he--self serving prick that he is--lacks. What she is, on the other hand, is naive and easily smitten - the common thread associated with 'goodness' as mere lack of experience (otherwise she'd wise up to his snake oil charms) When the news announces "Pope Paul VI arrived at 9:47 AM" - he excitedly shouts, "that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial!" as if he has some say in media buying or that the pope doesn't exist outside the TV, he's just trying to weasel in to anywhere he'll get exposure. We later hear some of his true vitriol come out while he's rehearsing with his crutch, shouting the line "I'm in love with no one, especially not your goddamned fat wife!" as if anticipating Rosemary's swollen belly. He's bad at hiding things, and such a weak actor he can't even commit to the part of the concerned doting husband.

 It's a part that also shows Cassavettes' limits as an artist and actor which fits the character he plays and which would typecast him for decades: the charming swine who genuinely thinks we were all awed by his projected street savvy warmth.(1) Polanski nails all that down around Guy so all Cassavettes can do is squirm and pace the room and seem utterly confused by the fact that Rosemary's growing less and less charmed by his patronizing grin. She's growing out of him, while he doesn't change his act. His is a kind of evil we're familiar with, for it stems from vanity, like the fallout of getting by on your charisma for so long you're no longer able to function without it. When your looks fade, you find yourself without the one thing that masked your dysfunction. Such a person is so ripe for Satan's book it's easy to imagine Satan helped make him attractive to begin with. Any relapsed alcoholic knows too well how the devil is patient, willing to work a long con, planting a seed then coming back when it's a tree and chopping it down. 

But that kind of paranoia leads to madness. As we let ourselves get obsessive over the obscure elements of the film, it begins to take its place in the 'evidence' of a global Satanic conspiracy (for realsies). Take the central dream/rape sequence, a benchmark in how surreal dream sequences can enhance reality rather than diminish it. Most films' dream sequences are cop-outs, places to dump the sexy weird shots or artsy ideas that don't fit the story but which the producers want so they can use them in the poster and coming attractions. Only great surrealists like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel understand that dreams are the real part, it's life that's the mirage. When Rosemary momentarily comes out of her trance to note that "this is really happening" it's terrifying in a way no film has been before or since, because suddenly we can't really fathom which parts of what we see and hear are the dreams and which are reality. Polanski knows the power of the mind and the flexible nature of space and time and that in these areas lurk real horrors.

The blue laser eyes and telekinetic devil children of later films are just the opposite, which is not necessarily bad. In externalizing and materializing the threat, we can laugh at our own fears and so in some small way, allay them (i.e the smiling black man with the yellow eyes in The Devil Rides Out). But with no monster in sight, no matter how far we look, and no 'seen murders' (no blood), there's actually a crisper sense of dread in Rosemary. Of all the horror films of the last 20 years, only The Blair Witch Project has fully exploited this same murky power. 

"death is no dream..." - Rezső Seress

The conspiracy theories of authors like David Icke, re: the Illuminati and Zionist banking cabals, work on a similar level to these terrifying ambiguous dreams, all suffused with strange symbols and meanings. Irregardless of its authenticity, the Illuminati-Zionist-Rothschild-Bildenberg banking conspiracy is a vibrant, fascinating myth, operating between truth and fiction, allowing us to see through reality until it dissolves into a a series of stages, mirror reflections, or stereograms. As Peter Tork once said: "the mind can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." He said that in HEAD, also from 1968. And the reverse is also true - the mind cannot see itself except through hallucination, and what's the difference between a graphic artist working with a computer to create a hidden 3D pattern in a stereogram and a shaman chanting a spirit into existence? Nada. Just try doing eye surgery on yourself without a mirror, or cubism with one eye shut. This is why we have therapists -- to show us what we really are under all the bluster, make-up, and pageantry.

But there is also the 'anti-therapist;' filmmakers and SRA inflictors --who understand the significance  of performative or mimetic rituals we see today only in indigenous tribes or at Burning Man. It is the ultimate power of self-deception. 

HERS IS THE POWERLESSNESS, THE AGONY & THE GORY for Eve-a and Eva-a

There's a practical reason, apparently, why Satanists and CIA brainwashers inflict sexual abuse and physical torture on their children, The intense trauma creates in their growing minds a dissociative state, resulting in split personalities, where the daytime conscious one has no memory of these rituals. 

I myself noticed the way intense agony creates a split in one's consciousness when I dislocated my knee cap. The extreme sensory pain launched my perspective into a split where one side of me in agony at the slightest movement, screaming involuntarily, on the other me standing slightly back, floating over my prostrate form, hearing my own screams but muffled, as if I had earplugs in. The greater my body's physical distress the more the contemplative serenity increased. 

Surely the breathing exercises of Lamaze also tap into this, as well as Stockholm syndrome: the agony of childbirth shifts the consciousness of a woman into that of 'an' expectant mother to 'the" Mother-- her triumph for enduring the unbearable pain the flush rapture of being finally free of all that weight, floating like an angel in your own loving arms. Torturous initiations for boys becoming men; menstruation for girls; hazing for frat guys--all coincides with the journey from mythic third eye visualization, 'the becoming', the five senses perceiving 'the becomed' sixth in a kind of recoil motion, vomiting the soul up into the mythic outsider "observer" position, the subject moving from being a Rosemary-style child guest, kept out of the adult swim, to being initiated into a cosmic truth too ambivalent and full of surface hostility and danger (such as Christian persecution) for children and innocent Iowa girls to grasp without first heating up their rigidly naive flyover state consciousness through pain and tribulation.

Most devil movies end with the coven being swallowed up in flames (ala Suspiria, Inferno, The Devil's Rain, Ride with the Devil, etc.) which is mocked in Babt bywhy the burning church painting Rosemary finds when she finally breaks through the hidden door into the Castavet's apartment is so wry (and which she recognizes from when it was "really happening" below decks in her dream). There are no flames for the devils, the fiery climax is frozen in amber and it's the Christian church that burns down therein. When Marcata declares that God is dead you feel that he just might be right. At any rate, now that they're in charge, he advises them to accept Rosemary's outmoded belief (her "oh my god" outburst) in order to not become as barbaric as the Christians before them. The party Rosemary bursts in on is, after all, hardly threatening. They're eccentrics - they're funny - such as the miffed old lady trying to rock the cradle, and the weird guy from Japan. In finally solving the mystery, of merging into the unconscious realm, inverse to the way her baby has broken through into consciousness, Rosemary doesn't trigger the usual inferno that burns down the devil's house in all the other devil films, she just realizes God's church is already burned down, metaphysically, in reality, and in memory. Enlightenment isn't always a matter of restoring patriarchal supremacy, or conquering evil on behalf of good, it can also be about finally telling your husband to fuck off, and recognizing no amount of negativity has ever killed a devil yet. But slowly rocking it back to sleep, with a loving, forgiving gaze? Momma, that's murder. 

NOTES:

1.  (He's magnetic as the jazz scene beatnik TV detective Johnny Staccato in 59-60).

All you need is holes: WONDERWALL (1968) and the Entomological Mystery Tour

Thisbe and Pyramus loved through a hole in a wall, and that made it to Midsummer Night's Dream, so surely there's room for a more one-sided and decidedly creepier (though seemingly not aware of it) 1968 Britpop film called WONDERWALL about one amongst "all the lonely peepers." Prof. Oscar Collins (Jack McGowran), a waterworks entomologist, collects bugs and peeps through a microscope eyepiece-sized hole in the wall at neighbor and fashion model Penny Lane (Jane Birkin). She's got a very trippy pad, a photographer (Brian Walsh) who dresses in Apple Records green, and a two-timing boyfriend (Ian Quarrier, who tries to get her into a menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg) - all things of interest to old man Collins! Problem is: Birkin is so gorgeous and young, with such heavenly legs and crazy fashions--that we want to see her all the time and less--a lot less--of old Collins. We only see her framed in a round hole and, eventually, several holes, like little mod kinetoscope vignettes, intercut with long stretches of Collins' little rat face peering, peering peering.... the round light coming through the hole from Penny's apartment occasionally illuminating one of his round spectacles.

It's creepy, man, a grody PEEPING TOM made creepier because the film thinks he's a Paul McCartney lyric / color-coded cavalier and not a creepy peeping tom who just found something better than amoebas. When Quarrier visits him to borrow ice for a party, it's clear he needs an older man's counsel, but Collins, dressed in a tux as if hoping to be invited over, cannot provide even that, and it's very, very dispiriting. It becomes a helluva slog, this film. It drags and drags as Collins misses, again and again, the chance to actually connect with other human beings. Also, he doesn't see the less glamorous moments at his neighbor's pop art flat, like Penny's shaving her legs or drying her socks in a jar by the door, or visiting the doctor or eating cereal, as if that's supposed to somehow de-ickify his displeasing addiction (as the 80s porn stars used to tease, it's "for educational and scientific purposes only"). We never learn or care: will Quarrier help raise his forthcoming baby? Will the professor ride to the rescue, I mean in some capacity other than cocking his head quizzically as might a beagle unable to decode his master's command?

Whatever the motives, or intentions, the soundtrack is certainly a nonstop feast for the chemically-enhanced ear. It's an entomological freakfest, with George Harrison's psychedelic melange of sitars, guitars, harmonica, tamboura and Indian horns howling, tinkling, and buzzing like an array of electric insects.  The cumulative result of it all (music + a dysfunctional wretch watching pretty people pose) makes WONDERWALL a kind of no-talking Beavis and Butthead if they were just one guy who watched vintage Joi Lansing Scopitones through round holes in a wall instead of Heavy Metal on a TV set. The bug analogy is borderline impressive --only Norma Shearer in RIPTIDE (1934) and Isabella Rossellini in GREEN PORNO (2008) come close (but no spider ala Lansing's "Web of Love" to provide a threat) and Harrison's buzzing tamboura and sitar hovering deep inside the ossicles are like a bee in the ear.

From top: Joi Lansing, WONDERWALL, RIP TIDE, GREEN PORNO

The source story is by Gérard Brach, who wrote REPULSION and CUL-DE-SAC and THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who penned VANISHING POINT (1972). One gets the impression of Brach's earlier work that he never meant Professor Collins to be any kind of Monsieur Hulot-Chaplin type whimsy generator but a skeevy older version of Terence Stamp in THE COLLECTOR, saved from needing to abduct pretty young specimens for his killing jar as one lives right next door (and old Collins has drilled plenty of air holes). The idea that Collins loses himself and begins to demolish his apartment to better make a million holes in the wall to peep through is creepy in itself, but doubly so when filmmaker Joe Massot films these actions to a bouncy polka and double projection speed ala Harold Lloyd or Benny Hill. Instead of laughs, what Collins needs a good slashing by Catherine Deneuve's razor, especially once he makes it his business to break into Penny's pad and start nosing around her underwear drawer (imagine if Chaplin did that as the Little Tramp?). Does Massot presume we'd think he was just being irrepressibly, innocently curious?. That's the fundamental problem, or maybe solution, to this film --that young Penny just happens to be trying to snuff it right at the same evening he busts in to 'examine' her privies?  Good old Collins! 

But maybe it's also because this weird pro-scopophile schizodimensional angle that it's ultimately interesting beyond its basic function as a pretty eye-popping light show showcase for Birkin's heavenly gams and shiny straight hair. If you go in expecting it to be a dull story of a dweebish ratfaced peeping tom scientist shuffling around his apartment in his pajamas, a reverse-gendered REPULSION tale of mental disintegration coupled to some old nudie cutie comedy like THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, then the pop art YELLOW SUBMARINER tangents will throw you left afield; if you go in expecting a pop art whimsy-fest, though, prepare to be rather unnerved by the inordinate amount of time we watch Collins watching said fest and cocking his head.

So the big question is, just how did this creepy clueless perv ever get George Harrison on board, as well as the Beatles'/Apple affiliated haberdashers and pop artists The Fool to work on such a vile travesty of countercultural values? The reason should be obvious: Harrison wanted to get more things on record, to promote his Indian music penchants beyond his usual one track per Beatles' album. Wasn't Harrison at all spooked by the thought of recording a score for a film about a sick little man who spends every waking hour spying on his flashy Apple Records-affiliated rock star neighbor's sex and drug life? As perhaps it would also do in India, maybe blissful meditation made George blind to the perv in his midst?  I would think George would have read the script (slid under his door probably, written in creepy Henry Darger longhand) and as been as creeped out as if it had been pictures of him and his wife sleeping in bed.
Then again, there's some evidence he may have just recorded an album with insect-buzzing tamboura and let Massot use it as he wanted, you know, to get rid of him.

In the end Massott comes off as being an incompetent probably with some private funds that afford him the means to make films and hang out with pop stars (he got SONG REMAINS THE SAME by living next to Jimi Page and because Page knew he'd worked with George Harrison). The result is a mix of Polanski/Powell film critique and pop art made by a guy who thinks he's doing a mix if SHERLOCK JR. and WALTER MITTY. His dear old professor Collins is a Mr. Jones / Father McKenzie bowler hat type Brit flouncing around in a student art film, a REAR WINDOW's Jimmy Stewart if he had no friends and didn't even know Grace Kelly, but spied on her and no one else, and we were somehow expected to root for him, a creep too shy to even realize how creepy he's being, one who figures a movie about him watching old Grace Kelly through a hole was enough of a movie subject, especially with his imagining having a big duel with her boyfriend for her hand, using as weapons things like giant oversize pens, lipsticks, and cigarettes while the lime green photographer snaps pictures, all just so she can load his hookah while he stares off into space. Who pictures themselves as an old square duffer trying vainly to look hip? That defeats the whole purpose! Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Collins? Dear Mr. Collins! You should really be in jail, or a nice rest home, chasing butterflies with  a little net.

Now I should preface by saying I adore Michael Powell but I'm too skeeved out by PEEPING TOM to ever see it again, ditto THE COLLECTOR, which my English teacher actually showed us in Middle School, and it depressed me for years. Also, I can't stand Monsieur Hulot and all those damned (in my mind) terrible Jacques Tati comedies. And when it comes to the Beatles I'm more a Harrison-Ringo-John fan, and find some of Paul's songs insufferably cheeky and guileless. Paul was always trying to bring in the lonely old timers and bouncy children along on the picnic, dumbing shit down so they understood, while John and George were about leading the brave young adults into the future (and scaring the shit out of those same children and old folks).

So here, while the score is all alien and strange and Harrison-Lennon,  the colorful psychedelic whirligig is seen at arm's length while the foggy London codgers are front and center, the way, say, the Beatle's MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (below, above left) tried to be cheeky fun for one and all but instead was kind of like the dream of a kid who fell asleep on a dusty couch to his mom's afternoon BBC kitchen sink soaps while home from school with a high fever. Just look at the drab washed out image of the four of them in their animal maskies below - as creepy as the brown bear man in THE SHINING or the citizens of Summer's Isle. It's creepy, is what it is, am I right, Sir? Not at all for children, sir.

From Top: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, SHINING, WICKER MAN

It's sad too that Jack MacGowran, the great Irish Beckett interpreter, a titan of the stage capable of great oratory, who was fantastic as the gut-shot bank robber in Polanski's CUL-DE-SAC, is stuck playing a silent observer peeping tom scientist, his mellifluent orating voice for naught. Even happening to be in a position to come to her rescue, he hangs way back and lets the bobby get the glory and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (meant to resemble making out, all the better to agitate old Professor Collins, my dear). The whole film has the queasy vibe of someone trying to paint a DayGlo PG patina of scientific inquiry on something he knows deep down is prurient, puerile, and pathetic. Penny has to almost die for the prof to have a chance to kiss her without it being creepy (i.e. mouth-to-mouth resuscitation) but even then he just hovers near her and does nothing too scared to remember even how to use a phone for help (beseeching the audience instead). So really the idea a woman lives or dies by the whim of a timid man too wussy to even fantasize outside the tiniest of boxes is almost too sexist and objectifying to bear. If I am drowning I hope my life guard isn't some shy ugly girl with a crush on me who lets me die rather than risk, you know, it being weird or something, by giving me mouth-to-mouth.

For all that, again, WONDERWALL can't be dismissed easily -- it has a lot of British fans like Liam Gallagher at the band Oasis. And I imagine if you discovered the film at four AM on BBC-4 while coming down off LSD in your London hotel after a gig, then well then you might write a song about it, too. And seeing it all swanky with pop art colors exploding off of the screen on the Blu-ray while Harrison's music flows remastered and earthy-ethereal in a gorgeous remix, there can be no doubt it has druggy pop art allure: Both apartments eventually look amazing thanks to set design by The Fool, and Birkin is progressively more and more gorgeous. So on the proper chemicals I imagine and with no expectations I suppose it would be quite the thing, and for the rest of us can certainly provide some help in the old spatchka department.

Then again, me, I can't stand Oasis.

But this guy Prof. Oscar Collins is half the show and that's 100% the trouble. If we come to the Blu-ray, we come for a psychedelic plasmatic gorgeous pop art happening, presumably, not a sad lonely ratfaced entomologist, and that we do end up with just such a one addresses the lingering need of British counterculture to address the problem of the judgmental old duffer in their midst, his bowler hat and imperious chin and jutting umbrella as he waits for the morning train, the type Peter Sellers loved to freak out in THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN but Paul McCartney would bring on tour, citing just how clean he is. We just shush them away now, but in swinging London there was only the BBC and the cinema, and British cinema has always been a mixed collar bag, with a socialist streak, a hard-lost sense of labor/whig dichotomy, stodgy propriety and a penchant for turning nearly ever genre of film as dishwater grey as an English sky. And if an older fella really wanted to know what was going on in the swinging bird's pad, he risked the chance of letting his 'no sex please--we're British' bourgeois prurience get him in a stiff upper liplock. He might feel he has a right to move in and arrest them all if things look suspiciously salacious through the keyhole (and he can't admit to himself he too wanted to smoke hash with a naked Marianne Faithful on a bearskin rug or that he shouldn't have been peeping in the first place - he saved that girl, whether she thinks so or not!)

For all his criminal faults, an American filmmaker like Woody Allen at least understood that basic truth of viewer psychology. Woody's going after girls young enough to actually be his daughters isn't something he feels we'd root for, yet he at least is honest about how its his repressed incestuous longing that's the very core of his comedic art, an elaborate disguise for something too twisted to convey any other way. In real life, Polanski is on the run, but Allen strides free, and WONDERWALL is somehow convinced it's Allen when it's Polanski, the way Michael Jackson was convinced he was Peter Pan instead of Captain Hook; each believing that their artistic drive is coming from somewhere other than the drive to create enough distracting noises to cover up the hideous heartbeat of their buried desire. Allen's years of analysis have given him enough awareness to understand that it is the beating of his own hideous heart, his guilty conscience, and so his distracting noises are conveyed as self-aware comedy. And Polanski's awareness comes from feeling the need to film the tell-tale heart directly, that the heart is all he can see and so forgive him if he doesn't even deign to make distracting noises. But Joe Massot's WONDERWALL is so distracted by his own distracting noises it forgets all about the heart, and so mistakes its beating as the sound of butterfly wings, and so it is Massot never asks himself the tough sordid Flannery O'Connor question: isn't every butterfly collector more liable to sniff through his prey's old cocoon drawer than save her from self-immolating? And isn't chloroform handy for both abducting girls and killing insects... painlessly?

By the end of the film we more or less resolve this sad salacious episode in Collins' life, but for the rest of us we can't help but feel like Woody Allen trapped on that sad sack train at the start of STARDUST MEMORIES, if the entire movie was spent with him stuck in his Kafka-esque hell car watching Sharon Stone blow kisses through a window. 

But hey - it was 1968! The director, Joe Massot, had one more trick up his sleeve. In 1976, he was hired to make Led Zeppelin's SONG REMAINS THE SAME. He was Page's neighbor and had been pestering him and manager Peter Grant about it and they'd all knew WONDERWALL, his only other film, had Beatles mystique behind it (and they hadn't seen it, though I imagine it would have been a dealbreaker if they ever did). And so they hired him work unseen for SONG (and then fired him halfway through). I first saw SONG for the first time on TV after a wild party, with no expectations, and a bunch of friends of some girl I was halfway hooked up with (a tale for a different post-here!), and tripping on too much acid to find fault with it, and I loved it. So set and setting are everything, but most importantly, no Professor Collins, no Monsieur Hulot, in SONG, just the crazy, violent, talented, dangerous, beautiful young adults of the Zeppelin. And while WONDERWALL is a tolerabe curio for Beatles fans and Britpop lovers, I'd rather not be reminded how long ago that wild party was -and that I too am just a peeper now, a spy in the house of love, a fool on on the hill. So take your concern for the bowler hat chaps and shove it where no one comes near. All the lonely people hate looking at images of lonely people looking at images of pretty young people--it reminds them of their loneliness which is like taking an aspirin to enhance your pain. Cut out the middle man, the mediary who'd pin Jane Birkin's wings to the wall so you can pay him for a glimpse, and free her with thine own electric eyes! If she never comes back, you never really saw her to begin with, and so, Monsieur Collins, adieu! J'snooze!

from top: Song Remains the Same,
Stardust Memories, Wonderwall