MYTHCOMICS: '"THE GURU OF OURS" (MAD #128, 1969)

 Some critics sneer at everything MAD Magazine printed after the departure of Harvey Kurtzman. I'll admit that there were some features that were essentially "get off my lawn" rants from aging artists like Dave Berg, but some writers and artists turned a sharp satirical lens upon the shibboleths of the "now generation." One of the best sendups of the counterculture was the Frank Jacobs-Mort Drucker spoof of 1939's classic WIZARD OF OZ, described in a header as "the story of a teenage girl who loses touch with reality and meets a lot of way-out characters."

So here the heroine-- played by Liza Minelli, daughter of the late WIZARD star Judy Garland-- doesn't seek to escape the dullness of Kansas by visiting foreign lands with her little dog Toto. She wants to escape the "real world" by getting her freak on:

Someday.. with an insane glow...

I'll get high...

And I'll freak out until my 

Brain starts to petrify...

Drucker's caricature skills are excellent here as elsewhere, but for this story his choice of imagery is a lot more free-form than in most of his MAD movie/TV spoofs. At far left we see the entirely predictable figures of Dorothy's Oz-crew, although to one side of Minelli-Dorothy, Drucker crammed in the side-wise head of mature Judy Garland, who passed away the same year this satire appeared on newsstands. As if the artist is seeking to duplicate drug-induced fantasies, Minelli-Dorothy's body has morphed into the head and body of a minatory-looking owl, and a flower-wreathed skull appears next to her, with the legend "Love Me" just beneath. The other images all reflect standard hippie-images of the era, possibly with some Peter Max influence here and there. (The Jimi Hendrix analogue has the name of MAD contributor Al Jaffee on his shirt.)

Minelli-Dorothy sings this, BTW, to an "Auntie Em" that might as well have been called "Auntie Tim," since he's played by novelty singer Tiny Tim. A handy tornado-- the only marvelous phenomenon in the spoof-- whisks up the farmhouse and drops it down in an unspecified city. (Given all the freaks and actors she meets, San Francisco seems like a good nominee.) Incidentally, while the heroine has a dog with her on page one, on page two she addresses a pig by the name "toto." Said porker follows Minelli-Dorothy for the rest of the story without anyone commenting on the discrepancy.

So the house gets dropped on the stereotypical enemy of hippies, the college dean, and the Munchkin-hippies, led by Dustin Hoffman, celebrate the functionary's passing. Minelli-Dorothy expresses her desire to "groove in on that Cosmic High and rap with the Universal Ooom," so the Munchkin-students send her to meet "the Biggest Head of Them All," the Guru of Ours. (The pun, an attempt to associate the Big Head of Oz in the Garland movie with the slang for a doper, as in "hophead," doesn't come off that well.)

In the space of a couple of pages Minelli-Dorothy meets her Three Musketeers: (Pat) Boone-Scarecrow, (George) Hamilton-Tin Man, and (Michael J.) Pollard-Cowardly Lion. They all sing their "I want" songs, and unlike Dorothy they all want some sort of societal satisfaction, not to groove on any Universal Oooms. Nevertheless, the foursome (and Toto the Pig) continue following the Dirty Dark Street in search of the Guru of Ours.

The spoofs of Boone, Hamilton and Pollard for their acting-personas have nothing to do with the Oz spoof. However, the celebrity-identity of the Guru is insightful, for he's played by none other than Ed Sullivan, the presenter who introduced Middle America to such counterculture figures as Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones. The Guru  immediately gives the three schmoes "solutions" to their deficiencies that are as empty as the flapdoodle tossed out by the 1939 Wizard, but the Guru makes a lot of money off these phony cures.

"But what about Dorothy?" Well, she makes a weak request for Nirvana, and the Guru suggests "sensual mysteries" in his bedroom. Called a crook and a fake, he posits that the only "Nirvana" is money and that his fakery extends to both hippie-fantasies and all of avant-garde sixties culture.

With the greed of a vulture, 

I keep cashing in on culture, 

'Cause I'm nothing but a fraud...

And in the final panels, Minelli-Dorothy, her musketeers and Toto the Pig all get with the commercialization program and sing about how "merrily off to the bank we'll go."

The full spoof is here.

WORK PLAY ACT PT. 2

At the conclusion of the first WORK PLAY ACT essay I wrote:

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.

In the essay I cited Humphrey Bogart as an example of an actor renowned for his performances in many films, not least the 1941 flicks HIGH SIERRA and MALTESE FALCON. I focused on those two films because it was rumored that both lead roles were originally offered to George Raft, an actor of more limited abilities. The likelihood that Raft would have done little for either of these roles does not, of course, mean that Bogart alone could have depicted the characters well. Without doubt, many actors existed then, and still exist now, who could've brought the same level of acting-imagination to those lead characters that Bogart did.

Now, the scripts for both films were above-average as well, so any actor embodying those characters might be said to have "a leg up." In the majority of my movie-reviews I've tended to credit any mythicity films may possess to their writers or their directors. Understandably, the primary aspect of the acting craft relates to the dramatic potentiality: the art of showing how a given character interacts with other characters. The actor can also put across aspects of the other three potentialities-- the kinetic, the didactic, and the mythopoeic-- but in most cases, I would tend to think that the actor translates these from the script he or she works with.

Having conceived of this general rule, I considered possible exceptions. George Raft in MALTESE FALCON would not have been able to bring many of the potentialities of the script to life, even as, arguably, Ricardo Cortez failed to do playing Sam Spade in the 1931 adaptation. But what about actors who realize potentialities that the script does not?

In this review I gave the 1992 SLEEPWALKERS, directed by Mick Garris from an original script by Stephen King, a "poor" rating for its mythicity. If I were rating the film on its other three potentialities, it would prove equally dismal on the didactic level, but might get a "fair" in terms of kinetics (lots of sex and violence). "Dramatic" is a little dicier, since most of the main actors-- Brian Krause, Madchen Amick, Ron Perlman-- turned in no more than serviceable performances for the undercooked, inane script. But I had to give special credit to Alice Krige:

King may have been thinking of Egyptian myths involving incestuous content when he conceived Mary and Charles, for like Horus and Isis in certain tales, the mother and son are sleeping together. As a plot-point this doesn't add much to the story. But it does allow for the film's one source of merit. Though the other actors put across competent performances, only Alice Krige, playing Mary, distinguishes herself. She brings to the under-scripted role a heady ambivalence, in that she's simultaneously a woman jealous of her young lover's possible affections for their targets, and yet also a mother who cherishes her son and perhaps, on some level, wishes he could have a normal life with someone other than her. But as I said, this is only suggested by Krige's performance, for the thud-and-blunder script gives her no help at all. 

Given that I've not seen the script used for the 1992 film, it's not impossible that Krige was given some cues by it, or by director Garris, that enhanced her performance. However, I think it's more likely that she showed the same quality of acting-imagination that I imputed to Bogart in the earlier essay. Much of this imagination was dramatic in nature, just as I've described it in the excerpt. At the same time, Krige's acting shades into the mythopoeic, insofar as one can see in her attitude a complex of emotions comparable to, say, Isis linking up with her son-lover Horus. I doubt that Krige got any help at all from the script, but in a really good script on this mythic theme, Krige's performance would have enhanced by the narrative of such a film. To see how such a film on that theme might be done right, one might look at Stephen Frears' 1990 adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel THE GRIFTERS. Even though the Frears film takes place in a dark and seedy reality, with no metaphenomenal presences whatever, the interaction between son John Cusack and mother Angelica Huston is actually closer to both the dramatic and mythopoeic potentialities of the Isis-Horus myth.

WORK PLAY ACT

In FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PART 2, I mentioned that:

both "work" and "play" are interdependent necessities, not opposed in the conventional sense that people oppose, say, "right choice" and "wrong choice."

Nowhere is this more true than in the domain of art. There are countless professions that do not invoke the spirit of play. No one asks whether a plumber or a carpenter infuses his labor with such spirits.

It's arguable as to whether some forms of art may be easier to turn out as on an assembly-line. Certainly any number of popular genres, be it mysteries, romances, or superheroes, have been critiqued as being all but identical in form and function. Nevertheless, this elitist criticism overlooks the fact that not every genre-product seems identical to its audience. Writer X succeeds more than Writer Y precisely because the audience thinks Writer X has some quality that Y does not. Often, if not always, this quality stems from X's ability to come up with characters or situations that fire the audience's imagination. This is only possible if Writer X possessed what Kant called (in a different context) "the free play of the imagination."

The art of acting might be considered less amenable to the assembly-line ethic. Millions of actors perform in stage and screen every day, and all of those performances, whether judged as "good work" or "bad work," fall under the rubric of work.

Yet the dynamic of "play" in acting is harder to pin down. On one hand, an actor must strive to mirror the emotions of a given character with as much fidelity as is possible. If the actor plays a tough guy, he must project toughness; if a buffoon, buffoonishness, and so on.

And yet, even though this reproduction sounds like "work," in the same way that an assembly-line worker would produce one identical automobile part after another, the superior actor is distinguished from the inferior one by his imaginative qualities.

To take a couple of examples from Classic Hollywood, I would compare contemporaries George Raft and Humphrey Bogart.

George Raft broke into Hollywood stardom thanks to his role in Howard Hawks' 1932 SCARFACE. Though Raft enjoyed his share of cinematic successes, today he's also known for passing on a number of potentially career-building roles, HIGH SIERRA and THE MALTESE FALCON (both 1941), ostensibly because he thought the roles would make him seem unsympathetic. In my view, he was a limited actor who couldn't manage to put himself in the shoes of such morally ambiguous characters.

One anecdote avers that Humphrey Bogart and George Raft knew one another, and that Bogart sometimes advised Raft not to take this or that role, only to take the role for himself. This has the ring of truth, since actors have been known to undercut one another to get ahead. But if Bogart did this, his actions probably produced better results for films like HIGH SIERRA. It's hard to imagine Raft putting across the combination of toughness and sentiment that make up the character of Roy Earle, as did Bogart.

How does "play" manifest in a performance, be it live or preserved on celluloid? It may be through innumerable bits of physical "business" that convey to the audience a more organic sense of the character's actuality, or it may be something more sweeping, a mental concept of the character that assembles all of the disparate "parts" of the performance into a whole greater than the sum of those parts. But in any case, the profession of the actor seems particularly apt as a means of distinguishing the interacting forms of work and play.