TROLL PLAYING PART 2

"The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-exerience is understood."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 98.

The other major facet of TROLL 2 that brought about its unlooked-for cult popularity is identical with the facet that vaulted Ed Wood to prominence in the 1980s: a lunatic disregard for the discursive mode of storytelling. What takes the place of this mode is just this "pandemonium of sheer impression," though in contrast to Langer's formulation it's a pandemonium that fails, due to authorial incompetence, to resolve itself into a presentational (or, to use Cassirer's term, "expressive") order.

Late in '08 I wrote an essay on the early Superman stories of Siegel and Shuster, titled "OCD on a Hotplate" as a way of describing how Siegel's scripts seemed to "wander without knowing what effect they're shooting for." But even Siegel's scripts are governed by more of the Aristotelian unities than TROLL 2. Rossella Drudi's script for the film clearly is trying to riff on many things at once. Two aspects already noted in TROLL PLAYING PART 1 include both vampire tropes and folklore about cannibalistic boogiemen (for which Scandinavian trolls *might* actually be better suited than Celtic goblins). I'll also speculate that given the film's heavy emphasis on the goblins forcing the beleaguered human protagonists to eat tainted food so that the humans will turn into plants, Drudi might even have been influenced by the mythic motif I'll call "eating the otherworld's food," which invariably causes mortals from Persephone on down to remain in the otherworld. All of these myth-motifs could have been arranged into some impressive presentational order, perhaps on a par with Jim Henson's 1986 film LABYRINTH.

But of course, Drudi and her director-collaborator Claudio Fragasso DON'T manage to arrange their sensational concepts into any kind of order, and what one gets is pure pandemonium. There have been many popular authors whose essential way of impressing their public involves basically throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at the audience in the hope of grabbing its attention. It's been a particularly popular strategy in the world of animated cartoons, which as I noted here are often the first contact young audiences have with presentational symbols lacking any discursive rationale. Of course, when Tex Avery bombards his characters with rapid-fire sensational events lacking any rationale beyond "telling a joke," both he and his audience know that they're participating in this kind of non-discursive form of entertainment. I view this form as identical with the sort of non-discursive order that Langer finds in the fairytale, whose "purpose is to gratify wishes."

But though TROLL 2 has sequences that were probably meant to be broadly humorous by Drudi and Fragasso, Fragasso's complaint that audiences were laughing at a lot of the other sequences indicates that neither he nor his wife could see how weirdly incongrous their rewritings of archaic myths had turned out. It may be remembered that Schopenhauer considered incongruity the basic appeal of all humor, and TROLL 2 is almost as much a montage of incongruous scenes as Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA. If cannibal vegetarian goblins don't seem incongrous enough, one encounters also:

--The kid-character pissing on a table of tainted goblin-food to prevent his beloved family from eating it--

--a spectral protector, the kid's grandpa, who in one scene can blast a goblin with lightning and in another gives the kid a mundane Molotov cocktail to throw at the boogeymen--

--the aforementioned use of a "double decker baloney sandwich" as a crucifix--

--an evil witch-goblin who can transform herself into a hot babe who then proceeds to have sex with a young dude while popping him some popcorn in a unique manner--

--and the source of the evil ones' powers, a "Stonehenge magical stone" which the heroes use to defeat the goblins, even though the creatures come back for a horrific coda looking none the worse for their defeat.

Appropo of my "kitchen sink" remark, I'd be tempted to call all this "kitchen sink surrealism" if an online search hadn't shown me that the term has already been used for a distinct artistic movement. But maybe something like "presentational incoherence" would be just as good to distinguish works like TROLL 2 or GLEN OR GLENDA from works that may be equally non-discursive but which show more authorial control, as per the examples of Tex Avery and Jerry Siegel. Certainly the makers of TROLL 2-- including the actors, costumers, etc.-- were all guilty of incoherence of some sort, be it conceptual or purely linguistic.

TROLL PLAYING

Troll2 is a fable for children a crazy horror, much comic. The film did not have to be prohibited, nothing censorship, therefore nothing blood that I have replaced with the chlorophyll, using the green color of the goblin, North European Celtic legend, like monster vegetarians many fanatics us of the salutista, macrobiotico food. I have used the goblin like vampiri, using the amburger (tipical american food) of meat to [sic] the place dell' Saint water...-- a poster signed on as TROLL 2 writer Rossella Drudi on this review comments-thread.

My most recent cinematic viewing was a double feature consisting of TROLL 2, a recent claimant to the title of "best worst movie," and BEST WORST MOVIE, a documentary about the making of this 1990 cultfilm and its slow word-of-mouth revival over the ensuing 20 years.

Written and directed by Michael Stephenson, who as a child starred in TROLL 2, BEST WORST MOVIE is an enjoyable documentary whose most interesting subtext involves showing how easy it is for one person's enthusiasm to become another person's "move away slowly from the creepy guy" vibe. BWM (as I'll abbreviate it here) is as full of oddball viewpoints as Zwigoff's CRUMB, not least the TROLL 2 scripter Drudi, quoted above. (Of course I can't be sure that a poster on a review-site is the real Rossella Drudi, but nothing this poster says contradicts the words of the Drudi of the documentary.) There she justifies her notion of cannibalistic vegetarian trolls (actually called "goblins" in the film proper) by noting that at the time the film was scripted she had a serious mad-on against vegetarianism. True, in the doc Drudi doesn't mention having modeled her goblins on vampires, but it's pretty obvious: the scene in which Stephenson's kid-character drives away the goblins by brandishing a "double decker baloney sandwich" is an obvious parody of a familiar vampire trope. Even here, though, it's amusing that the poster confuses two different vampiric banes: the "amburger" is being used in place of a cross, not "Saint water" (holy water, one presumes).

Drudi's husband Claudio Fragasso directed the film and appears in BWM as well, and he doesn't seem to agree that the film was meant to be "much comic," becoming visibly testy whenever he realizes that the audiences aren't just laughing at the things he meant to be funny, but at pretty much everything in the film. But bruised egos aside, the question must be asked-- does TROLL 2 deserve the title of "best worst movie?"

The short answer for me is no, for I can think of many, many other bad movies which I liked more. I do appreciate the lunacy of TROLL 2, but watching it in the theater proved more of an endurance test than (say) my experience watching a revival of Jack Hill's dynamic SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975).

Still, TROLL 2 can't help but be a contender for my list of, say, the top 20 badfilms. Part of the flick's appeal falls into the same Burnsian "to see ourselves as others see us" mentality that comes across in the documentary, for all through TROLL 2 the characters-- most of whom were played by amateur American thespians-- speak what may be the most amazing English patois ever devised for a professional film. This was a consequence of the fact that the film was being shot in Utah by an Italian crew that barely spoke English, and though director Fragasso claims in BWM that during the shooting he became "more American than the Americans," a big part of TROLL 2's appeal is seeing cornfed Utah residents spout weird, hyperbolic dialogue. A minor line that might sound perfectly ordinary in conversational Italian, such as Stevenson's line to his sibling-- "You're a genius, big sister!"-- becomes horrendously over-the-top and laughworthy coming from the Utah-born actor. In a dubbed Italian movie, one is always aware that the English dialogue is coming from Italian actors, and so one doesn't necessarily laugh at the weirder verbal sallies. But in TROLL 2, the disconnnect is a constant source of fun.

And so the disjunction between two modes of speech is at least one big facet of TROLL 2's burgeoning appeal.

However, it's not the only one, and I'll address yet another facet of the film's popularity in Part 2 of TROLL PLAYING.