In Passamaquoddy No One Can Hear You Scream

After more or less enjoying Prometheus I've been watching the Alien movies, excepting the Alien Vs Predator movies because enough is enough.

Part of what makes the original Alien so great is that it's full of unfolding mystery.  The alien keeps shifting, revealing new aspects of itself and new dangers.  You can't pin it down.  It's death itself, lethal, heartless, mindless; yet crafty, unpredictable, and unstoppable.  The lesson is that the cosmos is not exactly full of love for the Human, and you shouldn't mess with some things.

Aliens retorts that you can mess with any damn thing you please, so LOCK AND LOAD.  Director James Cameron, the Vincente Minnelli of monster movies, replaces the tension engendered by the polymorphing parasite's continual astonishments with the suspense of "Who will survive and what will be left of them?"  That suspense was part of the first film, too, but here it's the mainspring.  There's a bit of an addition to the aliens' characteristics, but it's more a reasonable extrapolation of what we knew (aliens have mommies too) than the nightmare twists of the original.  Furthermore, the escalation from alien to aliens robs the creature of its dreadful uniqueness (though it didn't need to; such are the urgencies of the action genre), reducing the Cosmic Godling to creepy cannon fodder.

Alien3 offers no surprises regarding the alien creature itself, other than that it can look awfully unthreatening in 90s CGI that resembles a Colorform slapped onto the cinematic image.  Also, the Alien's POV resembles an old camcorder with dubious filters.  Director David Fincher would soon do much better.

The surprises in the film (aside from "Boo!" surprises) come from the convicts with whom heroine Ripley must work; their alien religious motivations replace the unfolding of Alien characteristics.  The alien itself is thoroughly banalized by now; the Lovecraftian awe of the original film is reduced to "There's a rabid hippopotamus loose in the high school!"  Each of these films has fine ensemble work, but all the sequels feature overt thesping, while the original was nearly Altmanesque in its casual approach to line readings, etc.

At one point in the third film, a guy refers to the alien as a dragon, which inspired me to spend the rest of the film pretending the alien is actually Pete's Dragon.





This exponentially boosted the film's entertainment value.

Alien Resurrection, the last of the Sigourney Alien films, has the look of a particularly glossy Heavy Metal magazine comic.  The unfolding mystery in this film is as much about Ripley, newly reborn from hybrid human and alien DNA, as it is about the pureblood beasts.  Sigourney Weaver's cool delight in playing a bad-girl version of Ripley is one of the chief joys I found in this film.  Wynona Ryder is, as always, fun to look at, but her bitter-pixy appearance can't quite compensate for her undistinguished voice work, especially in the context of her costars. Sigourney and Brad Dourif have marvelous vocal instruments, next to which poor pretty Wynona sounds like a randomly selected person off the street.  If only she'd brought back her comical British accent from Dracula!  Brad Dourif is one of the few actors who could pull off his scenes of sensuosity with an Alien, though that's just a warmup for later developments.

Underwater aliens are fun, and we get them here, but the real return of Alien mystery comes when Ripley is lowered into a pit of distinct yet inchoate Alien anatomy in a glorious homage to Alien designer H. R. Giger's grotesque tableaus (too bad he didn't get a check or a credit for this film tho) and proceeds to have sex with an alien.  It's all presented with White-Elephant arty tastefulness, since who could bear to watch a hard-core version of such a thing?  Somebody, probably, but no one I want to have lunch with.  The death of the offspring of this union depressed me; as cloying as the creature was, it reminded me of the death of Tink; a creature that never had a chance at life, put to death to spare it further misery.

I didn't like the idea of humans and aliens merging and mating; it further undercuts the evident theme of the original film, that cosmic indifference trumps manifest destiny.  This film returns humanity to the center of the universe by showing that we can harmonize with the Alien, but better still if we kill the product of our miscegenation (not the first time inadvertent racism has crept into the franchise, as the many critics of Aliens' black-mother-with-too-many-kids can attest).

One more thing; most of the ensemble in this film seems to be a dry run for screenwriter Joss Whedon's nerd-favorite show Firefly.  I thought Firefly seemed like an advertisement for its own adorableness, so with this film I enjoyed pretending that it really was the crew of the Serenity getting gutted by monsters. It's a sad testimony that I have to pretend absurd things while watching films that are meant to take the burden of that responsibility off my shoulders, but that's franchise entertainment for you.

Prometheus, whatever its flaws, put the mystery back into the story by showing us Aliens that sprang from alternate hybrid pairings and, aside from certain basic hungers, are not like the on-model, canonical, in-continuity aliens that had become as exhausted as any other franchised monster.  Since the sense of wonder I experienced when the aliens came out looking wrong and strange and new is what I want from Science Fiction, I'm going to say that, for my purposes, Prometheus is the best of the Alien sequels.

Hands on Shoulders

As I approach my 40th birthday and my fourth anniversary, I recall something a friend told me on graduation day in 1996.  At 22, I was utterly out of ideas about how to make my way in the world, and I told her so.

"We'll have it figured out by the time we're 35," she said.

Over the years I clung to that like a talisman.  And at the age of 35, I began dating the woman who is now my wife.  Good stuff.

***

New topic: we saw a couple episodes of True Blood recently.  It's a soap about extravagant, camp vampires.  In the first of the episodes in question (Season 5, episode 3) we learn in flashback how two vampires, Eric and Pam, met; how Pam persuaded Eric to make her a vampire; why she wanted to be a vampire at all; and how they became a couple.  It's no spoiler to say that it involves some outlandish behavior, grandiloquent gestures, ultimatums, and lots of blood.

In the next episode we see how Eric and Pam formally sever their relationship.  It involves hands on shoulders; sensitive, quiet conversation; and a little tearing up.  Talk about a dropoff.

I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, so it's not like I'm averse to restrained, dialogue-driven relationship stories, but I can get hands on shoulders and restrained tears from a hundred lesser shows.  The writer or someone misunderstood what we come to this show for.

I suppose you could spin it as a demonstration of how the characters have matured over the years, but anyone who's watched the show this far know the characters have done anything but mature.  They're vicious, deadly hotheads.  That's why they're fun.

True Blood is produced by the creator of Six Feet Under, a more realistic soap that is special to me, and it had its fair share of hands on shoulders moments, but the show was calibrated that way.  For a while I was frustrated that True Blood wasn't Bride of Six Feet Under, but now I've learned to appreciate the depths that can be plumbed within the Pop Kabuki format of this show.

Food Building

In the late 90s I worked for a carpet cleaning company.  We would occasionally get sent to a town called Bessemer, which was generally the only time I ever went to Bessemer.  It was unfamiliar terrain to me, and I got lost a lot.

One day my partner and I were trying to find a house that was lost down one of the squirrelly little roads that capillary their way off the main streets through the town, and it wasn't going well.  Understand that GPS was not on the map, so to speak.  All we had was a big dusty map book, and Bessemer was shell-gaming us, sneaking that little road past us at each turn.

Eventually we'd stop at a gas station, buy some Corn Nuts (my staple diet at the time) and beg for directions.

"Just go on up that way till you pass the Piggly Wiggly..."

"All you gotta do is hang left when you see the Piggly Wiggly..."

"When you see the Piggly Wiggly, take a right..."

 Everybody's directions (And we asked a representative sampling of Bessemer residents) hinged on the Piggly Wiggly.

After about an hour of this we finally accepted that the big not-Piggly Wiggly grocery we kept passing as we zigzagged along the grain of peoples' directions must have once been a Piggly Wiggly before leaving the franchise and renaming itself Food Building or We Got Groceries or whatever.  Everyone's directions made perfect sense from there and we found the client's house instantly.  At this time Bessemer was not a flourishing economic center, and I find myself wondering if that stagnation was cause or effect of the locked-in folkways that prevented the Good People of Bessemer from informing us of the "Piggly Wiggly's" binary identity.

A few months later I was in Bessemer again.  This time I was alone, tooling around the back roads, searching for an even more obscure address.  It was night.  I got lost in the woods, and something went awry.  What was it?  Did I just veer off the road into a ditch?  Or was there a more robust mechanical failure?  You tell me.  Those vans broke down all the time; the cleaning gear was in fine shape, but the vehicles were old and strained, and at least one got towed to the repair shop every day.  Anyway, I try to remember the details of what went wrong and it's a smear.

But the van was in a syrupy ditch, and the wheels would cut no traction into that mess.  The road was virtually dirt.  It was dark outside my headlights.  Surrounded by woods, with little desperate dwellings here and there.

We had CBs that we used to communicate with base, but in that dead zone I couldn't get a signal through.  I had, as it were, no bars.  My only option was to walk till I found a phone.  I'd passed a little gas station some ways back, so I hoofed it.

At one point I passed a little watering hole.  Rough customers stood outside talking loud, then went silent as I passed.  There was a pay phone out front, but the scowls of the locals inspired me to press on.

I got to the (well lit) gas station and placed my call.  Home base told me to go back to the van and wait for the tow truck.  A handsome young man was waiting by the phone.  "Don't go back there," he told me.  "This is a BAD neighborhood at night.  I'm waiting on some friends to get me out of here.  You tell them to come here and pick you up."  (Let me point out that he was of the same race as the locals, and I was not).

Why didn't I take his advice?  Or why didn't I beg him to get his friends to drive me to my truck?  Look, if I'd been a problem solver, I wouldn't have been working where I was.  Marry a problem solver like I did (a decade later), folks, so you can learn like I have.

So the guy's friends arrived and took him away, leaving me alone outside a closed gas station.  His uneasy company had been some comfort, but the florescent light was bleak now.

A dutiful dope of a drudge, I walked back, through the dark, skirting around the watering hole.  Then I sat in the van, worried and frustrated.  Like a schmuck, I ran the engine, grinding it, the tires shrilling and spewing mud; loud, loud, worthless effort.

A tense-looking middle-aged man came out a door, glowered at me in silence for several minutes.  It was pretty late.  I prayed he'd offer me some help, but he just stood in the porch light like an icon of justifiably angry poverty.  Then he went back inside and the light went out.

Somehow I got the truck on the road.  Did I push it?  Did I rock it?  I dunno.    Was the trip complicated by a flat tire, a wobbly wheel, a twist of some snarled mechanism or other?  I got no clue.  I was frantic.  I got to a different gas station, an open one near the highway.  I contacted base (with the CB this time) and they rerouted the tow guy, who fussed at me for not staying put.

Next week I did something I'd been yearning to do for the entire year I'd worked there.  I quit.

You know why I worked there as long as I did?  Because at my interview they laid a guilt trip on me about how they didn't want to hire people only to have them quit after a month.  They expected me to work there at least a year or two.  That's why I stayed.

Suffice it to say I don't sell my own happiness so short now.

Homemade Yogurt, Water Engines, My Childhood, and Some Movies

Wicker Man.  A camp treat.  The first hour is basically an upright, uptight police officer sleuthing around a island-bound Pagan commune, and having a succession of tantrums about how not-Christian everybody is.  It’s spiced up with loads of bawdiness, Thistle and Psych-Rock music, and all the fruits of the filmmakers’ research into pagan bric-a-brac roughening the texture of a straightforward mystery plot. 

It reminds me of a family vacation way back when, touring around the coast of Maine, and we spent an afternoon at some Unitarian island retreat.  Everyone was very friendly, but I poked around the bookshop (as I was wont to do) and found a book of party games for consenting adults, or maybe it was supposed to be about spiritual/emotional growth, who remembers.  One of the activities involved openly, honestly, unhesitatingly telling everyone in the group which of them you wanted to have sex with.  Then and now, this struck me as a really dim idea, and I was relieved, years later, to find that Birmingham-style Unitarianism doesn’t involve such games (or if it did, I wasn’t invited.)

So watching this devout Christian fellow stomp around a lovely, sunny island and treat a bunch of sweetly smiling pagans like war criminals was deeply satisfying to my inner prig, just because that’s what I would’ve loved to do on Unitarian Sex Camp Island all those years ago.  Take that, nice people who make your own yogurt! 

Of course the movie ends with the Pagans turning out to be dangerous because horror movies always gotta take things to the bottom of the slippery slope.  Exorcist can’t just let the girl go through a sleazy, angry adolescent phase and then calm down, which is what usually happens in real life.  Texas Chainsaw has to turn its white trash creeps into cannibals, instead of just beer guzzlers who cling to guns and religion (in fact the Sawyer family doesn’t seem to have guns or religion, though they have weapons, totems and mummification.)  And the pagans, of course, of course, have to do human sacrifice, instead of just having psychic faires and selling homemade candles.  Such is horror.

Also enjoyed an item called Safety Not Guaranteed, which has been criticized for being yet another underweight quirky-cutesy comedy, but it stays with me for a couple of reasons.  For one, it understands that time travel is really about memory and history, and puts regret and relationships at the center of the narrative.  Some of the B plot romantic stuff seems weakly integrated into the film at first, but the end thematically unifies everything.  Second, the film’s tense, obsessive protagonist reminds me of a guy who did the tech for a theatre venue I used to perform in.  He was acerbic, scowly, and had a diagram of an engine that runs on water posted on the door of his office, with some notes on how They are suppressing this technology for their own greedy gain.  I went to his house one night with a group of theatre nerds, and he showed us his enormous collection of unopened Star Wars toys.  After that I tried to be warm to him, in my ungainly way, to show that I appreciated that he’d opened this part of himself to me, but he seemed even colder than before.  I felt I’d failed a test.  This movie is about a woman who passes the test.  

Finally, watched the first half of something called Modern Girls, a truly lousy film from the early 80s.  It’s well worth a look, though, if you’re interested in the more outrageous elements of 80s style.  New Romantic duds galore, chunky plastic jewelry, hair chandeliers, neon pink and blue on black, it’s all here.  As far as plot, thematics, character work, dialogue, all that stuff, it’s hard to imagine how it could be worse, but oh, it’s fun to goggle at.  I was a boy in the early 80s, and all that stuff was on the cultural periphery of my life.  Now it makes me feel like a kid again.  Maybe it felt similar to the people who dressed like that.  God bless ‘em.

The Ewgrossorcist

One of the fascinating things about the same-sex marriage cases before the SCOTUS this week is that the anti-gay marriage crew isn't using the old-school arguments of "Ewww, gross" and "As it is written in The Book of Hezekiah, Chapter Seven, Verses Eighteen to Twenty..."  I guess those arguments don't have as much currency as they once did.

"Ew, gross" has, at various times, struck me as a robust argument regarding such topics as homosexuality, girls, and vegetables, so it's time to declare disgust and revulsion to be unreliable moral guides.

I don't want to wade into religious arguments, but I would note that the story of Sodom and Gommorah, often cited as an anti-gay narrative, is a deeply weird and difficult story that doesn't leave anyone except maybe Abram looking good.  It's kind of like a Golan-Globus movie, an overwrought caricature of the big bad city, with abject, comically demonized villains   Homosexuality sure doesn't get a clean bill of health in it, but the residents of the Twin Cities are also rapists and murderers who have ceased worshiping God.  It's disingenuous, or just stoopid, to say (as so many do) that it's the homosexuality that forced God's hand.

 So what kind of arguments are they making, there at SCOTUS?  Arguments that may seem to have that New Talking Point Smell, but if you look up any article by Maggie Gallagher from 2005 or so, you'll see the current anti-gay marriage case has been copied and pasted wholesale from there, or from wherever she got it.  Still, the fixation on procreation as the be-all and end-all of marriage makes me think the Maggie Gallagher argument on this subject may be like The Exorcist or stuff about nuns... If you're not Catholic, and I'm not, it's hard to see the point.  I think this is gonna be a win for same-sex marriage, and I'm pleased, both for the right reasons (people I care about will be able to formalize their relationships) and the wrong ones (apoplexy looks delightful on my ideological opponents).

Speaking of The Exorcist, I finally saw it, but (as I've suggested) I couldn't give myself over to it.  I can accept pretty much any narrative premise, no matter how goony, as long as the storyteller doesn't go bananas trying to persuade me that it isn't goony.  The filmmakers practically grabbed me by the lapels, screaming "No, the demon possession isn't a narrative device gesturing towards parental anxiety about their children's' pubertal misbehavior... it's about REAL DEMON POSSESSION, which is a real thing that happens!"  C'mon.  I saw a recently redone cut of the film; I understand the original release was more ambiguous.

Outside the Cage, Outside the Stage

I used to get The Actor's Nightmare all the time, as I've posted about before.  Then I quit acting, and I started to get a variant: I'd dream that I was in a theatrical production, and I wanted to get out.  I'd be desperate, not to remember my lines, but to quit the show without getting into some ill-defined trouble.

So why did I quit?  Not in the dream, but in real life?

There's many answers to that question, as there are many facets of the problem.

Recently, though, I read something that gave me a fresh perspective on the matter.  I finally bought a copy of Genesis's album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and I was eager to learn anything I could about the backstory of the album's creation.

Sidenote:  My official position is that, post-college, I'd rather listen to Coltrane go to the toilet than waste time on english art-school boys of the 70s as they churn out maximum arpeggios per square inch and lyrics that play like Tennyson freestyling; but it's all a lie, a horrible lie.  I heart Progressive Rock.  Readers may remember Genesis for Invisible Touch, but long before they crafted slick pop songs with Phil Collins on vocals, they crafted ornate fantasy ballads with Peter Gabriel on vocals and Phil on drums.

I'd resisted getting Lamb even though it's reputed to be their finest hour (or 80 minutes) since I already own a few albums by the band, and one's pretty much interchangeable with the other for a non-fanatic. This one, though, really was different.  It starts in a gritty-ish urban setting, and while it eventually gets around to the usual fantasy material, the band manages some tasty atonal free-jazz, along with some stripped-down revisions of their prior lush sound.  It reminds me more than a bit of Abacab, a later album on which they made a clean break with Ye Olde Genesis and surfed a New Wave.  And while the Puerto Rican street tough who figures as their protagonist probably wouldn't listen to the synth-heavy Anglo plunkings of this band, that's not necessarily a fault.  Pynchon's characters mostly wouldn't read Pynchon's books.

Oh yeah but anyway, when they played this stuff live Gabriel put on a big theatrical show, with costume changes and stuff.  So poking around for info on this stuff, I found this website.  It's got a quote from Gabriel's wife at the time, pilfered from an authorized bio of Peter by one Spence Bright.  Take it a way, Peter Gabriel's ex-wife!

"He was angry, and it was a very powerful performance. He totally opened himself and put himself on the line to the world, but he wasn't in his relationship with me. I would say to him, 'Why can't you be like that for me?' I remember sitting in the audience and feeling completely turned on by this guy who I was married to. But he was not able to be that person outside the stage. And that is what has slowly broken down over the years, being able to take that part of himself into his everyday life."

So.  Back in 2000 or so, I was in a play which included a bit of flirting between my character and another.  The stage manager mentioned to me that I became a different person in that scene; "Your whole demeanor is different," she said, and she was right.  I became utterly free and open and flirtatious, in a way that was barred to me in offstage life.  The stage was a safe place to play at such experimental things as "flirting".  It would be years before I decided to take that onstage demeanor into my real life.

I few years ago I concluded that I couldn't sustain that energy, that power, in real life while bringing it onstage at the same time.  In performance situations (including auditions) I became enervated, lacking the will to give my first fruits to the 25-year-old white boys who handle the casting-call scut work in most regional theatres.  I had somewhere better to put my energy, my openness, my Eros.  I put it into my marriage.

Not long ago I dreamt of attending the theatre.  I was a cheerful audience member, enjoying a mysterious pageant upon the stage.  The actor's nightmare has been replaced by the audience member's sweet dream.

*  *  *

And speaking of sweet dreams, here's an old Yes song (more prog rock, I know) featuring Peter Banks on guitar.  Peter was the first of many people to leave/get fired from Yes, and is now the first former Yes member to die.  His death is more melancholy than the death of many other Yes people will be, because he never got to taste much success.  I've read a few interviews with him, and he seemed painfully aware of the missed opportunities in his career.  He made some interesting recordings, though.  Sweet Dreams.

Furies in Revolt.

Recently enjoyed a few movies.

The Furies stars Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Houston as daughter and father on a ranch, and if you're not leaping right this moment to add it to your Netflix queue on that basis alone then I don't know what's wrong with you.  Walter Houston's character is an icon of everything wonderful and terrible about the manifest destiny man.  Barbara, in the manner of daughters everywhere, dates a guy her dad can't stand, and there is drama!  There is also cruelty and payback, as Barbara and her on-again off-again city sharpie boyfriend scheme to rip Walter off.  I enjoyed watching the forces in play ping-pong off the walls at each other.

Mr. Arkadin, the Comprehensive version.  This is a lesser-known Orson Welles movie available in about 5 versions for some reason.  The story is a daffy thriller, and the style is peculiar... Welle's usual virtuoso stuff is all over it, but it seems a bit jerry-rigged as well, with a charming clunkiness counterbalancing the lusher elements.  For example, there's a bunch of sequences where the camera whips away from the action to end a scene, and I imagine it was supposed to be one of those whipes, you know.   But instead of blurring as the camera veers away, everything stays super-clear, so you see that the camera is whipping around to a parking lot or some other irrelevant detail, where Welles may have wanted no details at all.  It's fun that way.  If they ever make a Live-action Ranma 1/2 movie it should feel like this.

Women in Revolt.  Can someone explain to me why Paul Morrissey doesn't have a big a fan following as John Waters?  The three drag personalities at the center of this film are a near-perfect comedy trio.  Holly Woodlawn is manic and bizarre (she made me laugh till I was almost sick); Jackie Curtis is a flip verbal pugilist, and Candy Darling channels the glamour girls of midcentury tinseltown with a blend of archness and sincerity that I find absolutely beguiling.  Andy Warhol's cinematography is terrible, but this is one of my favorite viewing experiences of the year so far.

Also, I hated Peter Jackson's Hobbit.  I'll talk about that next time, maybe.