Blaming the Victims
An account of spree criticism.
I wrote my first review in fifth grade. I was part of an afterschool newspaper club that would type out issues on the blockish, orange-screened word processors in the computer lab. My mom had taken me to see The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain one weekend, and the following week I resolved to write about it. I can’t remember what I said, but I can only say it was a good review as I had only a faint concept of bad reviews. I was a very positive-minded child. Less so were my fellow club members who thought either the choice of film or the concept of reviewing altogether—or the fact that I, a special ed short bus-rider, was doing it—rather comical. The supervising teacher, whose identity escapes me, seemed sort of blasé about it. And because the internet’s presence was virtually non-existent, peer disdain and adult discouragement had weight.
I don’t blame them, there was a kind of impulse forcing itself out of me because of a reaction to a piece of media. One simply does not do these things for want of reason! And yet, 30 years later, these impulses persist. Though I’ve been able to do this professionally and to garner something like a reputation out of it, that is not always sufficient. With the right trigger, the impulse can blow out like Vesuvius. Such is what happened when I finally deleted my Twitter account a few weeks back, which brought me back to my own mind and some thoughts about, or somehow related to, films I’ve seen came out of the shadows. Knowing no other way to deal with them, I put them on Letterboxd.
Below is a fraction of that output. Clearly I did not abide by the spirit of the site. In fact seeing my reviews among all the others, they kind of spoil the mood. I feel bad about that; maybe if I write a few more they will make up a zine. In any case, I didn’t hold back on rhetorical tricks or lines of “argument,” whether or not they deal directly with the film reviewed. I am not working off of enthusiasm or ambitions toward authoritative canon-shaping. It owes much, in spirit at least, to Walter Pater, as well as to Kenneth Tynan, Pauline Kael, a whole bunch of others I’m sure. Call it punk impressionism if you like. I went on a spree; these are my victims. I take responsibility for what is written, even though it is the somehow movies’ fault. These are sequenced in order of posting with the exception of the Kenneth Anger films that work as nice bookends.
Scorpio Rising—Scorpio Rising is the cinematic equivalent to Walter Pater’s conclusion in Studies in the History of the Renaissance: a sort of mini-manifesto to revel in beauty and pure, momentary experience, estranged from ethical considerations of any kind. In a word, evil. Yet Kenneth Anger does Walter Pater one better by being neither Victorian nor British, but his counterpart for postwar America, our very own Victorian-style Golden Age. His short film possesses and flaunts the American’s cavalier attitude to any and all restrictions to his freedom. In which all manners are violable. And for which the most self-evident truth is “Fuck you, that’s what!”. It is as much a trans-oceanic corrective to Pater as Paglia was some 30 years later, and the guards of Abu Ghraib 40 years later. Scorpio Rising exalts our will to freedom even as it has us pegged. Appropriate, even necessary viewing for our 250th anniversary of independence as any fireworks show.
Cobra—If you’ve ever sent a letter, an email, or even a LinkedIn message in the tearful throes of personal betrayal, Cobra might be a little too real. Its carbon-copying of the Harry Callahan series is long remarked upon, less so its corrective agenda. Stallone is desperate to wash away the libertarian bleeding heart that Eastwood’s films came to embrace. Cobra wants to remind any and all that the facts of life don’t give a single fuck about your feelings, or your civil rights. The result is a right-wing art of total sensory overload, similar to what Mishima wanted to achieve with his later novels. It is as if Miami Vice lost its composure while somehow retaining its cool, because that cool is one of many certainties Cobra preaches. Lascivious violence is met with violence in kind, in pursuit of the beauty of order. If Cobra believes in freedom, it is freedom from, not freedom of.
The Hottie and the Nottie—A film that owes its existence to the power of the star it could attract. A makeup department possessed by a missionary zeal. An opportunity to launch an all-out assault on male disgust that the latter would be damned to let the former eclipse. The result is a more accessible gateway into the immersive repulsions of body horror than the .GIF of the exploding head from Scanners. Though maybe not a direct precursor to The Substance, it inhabits the same manopticon in which one woman’s ugliness-by-neglect endures harder labor than another’s inevitable aging, to say nothing of a man’s delusions of attraction. Yet none are punished more than the viewer, having been denied what they are truly owed: Paris Hilton using what minimal screen time she has to bring Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” up to date. The stars still have power after all. Or maybe no one thought of it.
You, Me, and Dupree—Response to art is not always about content, but about what you hope to get out of it by giving it your time. I wanted to be degraded. And I wanted the power of cinema to provide it. That seems reasonable enough. There’s no rule that all art should validate or comfort, even when discomfort is the comfort; or that it should want to entertain me. I would not be satisfied by a film that assumed my stupidity. I wanted one that would affirm it like the pig that I am (even if pigs are in truth fairly intelligent). I knew it would not be easy. Possessing a certain level of privilege renders experiences like degradation in a foreign aspect. So any sort of encounter would have to be through a kind of translation. And as translated texts offer mostly the meaning of words at the expense of their force, so translated degradation would off only a surface feeling. But that would have to do, and I approached this film thinking it would do the trick. But sometimes translations are poorly done, lacking the scholar’s daring nuance in favor of the amateur’s clumsy hesitance. Such was the case here. Nothing but pulled punches and averted risk. Where feeling could be sussed out it was closer to acid reflux than the total demoralization of my spirit in the process of cultural bottom-feeding. I could have just gone to Chuck-E-Cheese. I guess I could find some comfort in having made a poor choice and suffered by it. Sometimes were are our own best debasers. But that would be degradation cheaply bought against the luxury of having it lorded over you by an exterior force. Something we all aspire to at different levels of secrecy. Whatever. I take my loss; the search goes on.
Christine—In our age of data analytics, quantity justifies impact. That which “does numbers” has earned its plaudits. That which commands a fraction of them has earned its obscurity. By that logic, a wedding with 1,000 guests will be more lasting than one with 10. Or even one with 999. While this may seem perfectly reasonable in the heat of validation, its consequences cannot be overlooked. Particularly when it comes to our culture of mass shooting, wherein rampagers seek notoriety by racking up the biggest body count. But we know this is not where true merit lies. There is impact of quantity, and then there is impact of scale. Ed Gein haunts our cultural landscape more than half a century after his capture. Yet he only killed two people. He farmed aura as much as he farmed anything else. And so it is with Christine Chubbuck. She only killed one person, and that person was herself. But she did so in such a way as to make that shooting as massive as any we typically identify as such. (An irony she would appreciate in her capacity as a ratings-strapped broadcaster.) We just don’t make that connection because we are ever trailing behind innovators, who are not usually to be found among the number-hoarders.
Don’t Worry Darling—To win distinction in any competitive field, but especially in that of culture, charm will always triumph over merit. A person, or in this case a work, may have demonstrable ambition and penetrating ideas. But they may fail in delivery. Who knows why? Maybe they were badly organized or too dense or too aggressive or too confident in their superiority or too unhinged. Any of these accusations could have been, and very likely were, flung at Don’t Worry Darling even before anyone saw it. Olivia Wilde’s film is an expansive and visually rich depiction of what Germaine Greer described in The Female Eunuch as “the mortal combat between the sexes .. fought through inauthenticity and hypocrisy by concealed blows and mutual treachery.” Two characters suffer under the horror of dependence at different points of the film. They rectify it through the pursuit of power, whether by raw usurpation or cold indifference. But power gained is power deflated, taking away as much as the empowered get. Florence Pugh is a workaholic; Harry Styles is a customer for an elaborate, expensive, and brutal service. Both are products more than people. But so are the characters in another film directed by another elder millennial actress. Barbie says nothing at all different from Don’t Worry Darling, but it does so more pleasingly and patiently, with wit that is both accessible and sophisticated, with images that delight rather than overwhelm the senses, and a world with prior familiarity. Unfortunately Wilde’s film has no complaints here. But it does in one in important respect. While neither film is convinced that the mortal combat of the sexes can be resolved in favor of one gender with no significant consequences to the other, Barbie evades that conclusion by its spectacle, also by being way too long. It is revolution and counter-revolution with a plastic grin, soft coercion, and no threatening sexual organs. Don’t Worry Darling is not a film that knows better or worse, it just didn’t know the right way to say what it knew. At least not at the present time.
Lost Highway—I often wonder how painters regard David Lynch. Do they do so with envy, as one of their own who transcended the limitations of their early chosen medium? Or do they look on his paintings as false starts on the journey to his true form? I can’t help but split the difference. I’ve seen only a few of his paintings prior to making Six Figures Getting Sick, with their grim proto-gothic hues and amorphous Baconian figures. (Appropriate as “Baconian” anticipates “Lynchian” for good and ill.) They displayed formal confidence and revealed familiar patterns, but they also felt constricted in their flatness. While the early short films are the inverse. They are technically rough but are carried with a sense of liberation. Lynch always approached film as if he had discovered it himself; here, though, films like The Grandmother and The Alphabet present like living paintings: cavernously black undulations from the subconscious. But he expands them to explore themes we know pretty well by now: broken families and the struggle to keep one’s innocence, an intersection of fragile childhood and looming nightmares. Lynch set this aesthetic aside for much of his career thereafter. It wasn’t until the nadir of his ‘90s wilderness years that he picked it back up with a vengeance. There is no innocence left in Lost Highway, but no film of his after Eraserhead and before Inland Empire is literally or figuratively darker. Guilt makes itself at home in Lynch’s goth-noir Los Angeles. It hides in the red and maroon and consumes in the black. And no figure is more representative of this vision, or more terrifying within Lynch’s whole corpus of humanoid demons, than Robert Blake’s Mystery Man. He is Lynch’s answer to Judge Holden: not totally of this world yet fully apprised of its depraved dimensions. He is the Grandson all grown up and laying claim to this psychic landscape like the last surviving aristocrat. It is little wonder why not many Lynchheads enjoy it, or enjoy it without the appropriate tinge of shame. Lynch really does mean what he says.
About Alex— After a long day of frightening children and abusing the mentally ill, you bet I need to unwind. So I draw a hot bath, pour a glass of red wine, and prop my tablet at the end of the tub. Frightening children and abusing the mentally ill doesn’t afford me many opportunities to travel, but that doesn’t stop me from going on adventures and having a few laughs along the way. What I look for in a movie is a way out of myself. A new place, some different sorts of people, stuff we all want. I want to know what life has to offer. Once I’m reminded that life has to offer is crushing disappointment, new places that are inhospitable, and new people who are hostile, I drain the tub, put on a robe, and sway a little to and fro to Luther Vandross; maybe (no, definitely) with a second or third glass of wine in hand. Finally it’s off to bed, content in my choices and ready for another day with a brighter attitude.
Dinner in America—The American life as it is lived, not as it is dreamed. Not a film to be passively viewed as if it is a body dancing behind glass, compelling your loose change from your pocket. Not to be consumed like store-brand chicken tenders with chipotle honey mustard sauce. These things—The dancing body, the chicken tenders, the chipotle-spiced dipperino—are just iterations of the same pointless dream. A dream that you will never reach to the end because you will always trip and faceplant into a lightless chasm before it would ever let you see it. Forget your dreams, American or otherwise. And don’t watch this film. Waste away with it in a highway motel room. Shoot guns with it in a deserted hospital. Take unsettling Polaroids with it in a cold storage unit at three in the morning.
The Stylist—It’s not hard to watch The Stylist and see it as an eager descendent of May. Both center on homicidal females who derive their methods from their professional experience and who garner sympathy with their struggles to connect socially. May earned that sympathy easily by its narrative direction, showing May’s ascent from social outcast to killer. Yet The Stylist goes the other way, showing the killer’s decline. Claire is a confirmed serial killer, who in her capacity as a salon stylist has amassed an impressive collection of female scalps, donning each one as if to conjure the aspirational extroversion of the original possessor. But the effect is momentary, and dwindling. Claire wants out, and she thinks the way out is through Olivia, a bride-to-be with a loose sense of boundaries and a tendency to see the good in everyone. A bundle of recognizable neuroses, Claire does present as harmless. And Olivia’s status-conscious bridal party merely think that she is an intruder. But a desperation enabled by false hope makes her the sort of danger no one can see coming. Indeed, the midsized city in which she lives, to say nothing of her employer, is entirely oblivious to her activities. The narrative framing is actually quite ridiculous with its earnest tone. If it had been a satire about the complexity of female bonding and the snobbery of girlbosses toward the service class, its brutal conclusions would be more digestible. The Stylist is ultimately a film with a conservative message about the necessity of social compartmentalization and how you can, and often will, pay dearly for your kindness.
Begotten—Begotten is a lot like Westbrook Pegler. Their reputations for sensationalism precede them. They are objects of rites of passage, whether for a teenager in the suburbs or for a novice conservative journalist in DC. Your peers will mention them in hushed tones. They are forbidden artifacts, almost radioactive. Certainly to be kept under glass. And yet you are incomplete if you have not experienced them directly. Okay, you ask if you can borrow a copy. They don’t have one, but the Mom and Pop video store with shady bookkeeping and a loosely observed age-verification policy will probably rent it out to you. Okay, you go to the video store. The pimply, faintly derisive clerk says they don’t have it. Like anywhere. You wonder what went wrong. Maybe you lacked an R-rated swagger. Maybe the clerk is just a dickhead. Or maybe your “friends” were fucking with you. It ends there. And yet it doesn’t. You still feel incomplete. So you bide your time. And you prepare. You binge on the extreme films you can find. Pink Flamingos, Salò, Cannibal Holocaust, Singapore Sling, Irréversible, some Japanese tentacle stuff for good measure. Then years pass until it just appears on YouTube—ad-free! You clear your schedule. You cancel your anniversary date with your girlfriend. You put your mom‘s calls on silent. You get everything in order. Beer, popcorn, Sour Patch Kids, you’re ready … finally. That hole in your soul will be filled in with bubbling, gooey contentment. Five minutes pass. 10. 15. 45. Popcorn goes flying. A Sour Patch Kid almost chokes you. “What the fuck is this shit? What is this ashen, impenetrable JNCO-jeaned-and-black Sharpie-fingernailed Teen Arts festival profundovomit?” Much in the same way that Pegler was just a commie-hating fogey who just happened to write about FDR the same way Paul Krugman wrote about Trump, Begotten falls short of the hype. Or rather, it doesn’t survive the adolescent urge for sensory overload the precedes proper taste formation. Turns out you over-prepared with far better movies, and you’re not sure if it was worth it. Especially now that you’re single, and your mom is mad at you for not driving her to the Emergency Room for a burst appendix, even though it turned out to be bad gas.
Wet Hot American Summer—We have trouble distinguishing between films that take sociopathy as its subject and films that are sociopathic. Not without bad reason. A film like American Psycho lays itself open to accusations of pure sociopathy because its keenness to get under the surface of its sociopathic protagonist leaves no means of defense against them. A film that is sociopathic—that is, all surface—is never keen about anything, except deflecting scrutiny. Because like flesh-and-blood sociopaths, the sociopathic film has a devastating subtlety. It is eager to please, to provide for you, and give you comfort. That lets you in, gets you to spend time with it. Without knowing it, you are trapped by its whims and then it withdraws all comfort. Its needs now take precedence over yours. In fact, it turns out your needs are totally exaggerated and manipulative. How thoughtless of you! Better shape up unless you want the film to just go, cut off all contact completely. Of course you don’t. You’re in for the duration. In short order you are a husk of your former self. You’re emotionally crippled, having neither the energy nor the recourse to foment outrage against it, at least in such a way that anyone will believe you. The sociopathic film always wins and is always on the move.
Preaching to the Perverted—Sex is aristocratic. Anything enjoyed for its own sake is subject to develop standards of excellence to guide insiders and a code of manners to distinguish outsiders. The trouble is finding ways to prevent the aristocracy from lapsing into tyranny and, at best, falling into decay. Preaching to the Perverted is a film with two layers. On the surface it has a cerebral and campy energy that borrows as much from 1660s Britain as it does from 1960s Britain. As the country was crawling out from nearly two decades of Tory dominance, it seemed as good a time as any to show the masses that lifestyle hedonism was nothing out of the ordinary. Sure, it looks peculiar, and seems to hold uncommon priorities, but so does punk rock and so does the Church of England, and no one complains about them anymore. But underneath there is a more reactionary purpose. Hedonism is not free from corruption. And subversives are not immune from being subverted. Vigilance is crucial; so are sincerity and loyalty. They must be tested often; not for control, mind you, but out of a moral custodial duty, without which the excellence and liberty it pursues would mean nothing. And because not only does a new Revolution put them at the top of its Most Wanted list, but a Revolution worth the name will always develop from within the Aristocracy’s own ranks.
Invocation of My Demon Brother—“I’ve always considered movies evil,” Kenneth Anger famously said, “the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.” Anger’s own films sought to demonstrate the potency of cinema’s occult portent, and were often successful. But the more literal he went, the less interesting the result. The overvaluing the underground artists have placed on the wages of sin led in turn to an overpricing of the dimensions of Hell. Like the Satanists who claim allegiance to his dark path, Lucifer has no taste. Hell is not an arts community. If it has something like a form you may look at any senior living complex in Boca Raton for easy reference. The Devil is a good marketer, which is likely why this would be news to you. But he is not a creative director. And it may be time for artists to give up in appealing to his largesse. Because on top of all that, he is not a generous patron. It is left to us to impose our own evil on each other, for which there is never a shortage of opportunities; it is the one thing we are most free to do, as Satan’s counterpart in the other direction likes to remind us.