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Craig D. Lindsey Recalls His Correspondence with James Wolcott

I think it’s about time I told you about my association with
James Wolcott.

It
started in early 1997. I was going to college back in Houston, and I was a
major Wolcott-head. Throughout high school and college, I’d venture to the
various libraries around town to read and/or photocopy articles he did for the
Village Voice, New York, Harper’s, Esquire, Vogue, etc. The previous Christmas,
I asked my mother for a year-long subscription to The New Yorker, where he was
doing duty as a TV/media critic at the time. I started getting the magazine at
my place of residence, but I started to sense something was amiss. I wasn’t
seeing his byline much.

It
wasn’t until I was in line at a Blockbuster Video (R.I.P., by the way) and saw
his name on the cover of Vanity Fair that I realized that he had gone back to the
magazine, where he did the “Mixed Media” column all through the ‘80s and early
‘90s —that is, until the magazine’s famed editor Tina Brown announced in 1992 that
she would be presiding over The New Yorker, taking several VF writers with her,
including Wolcott.

I was
incensed that Wolcott moved his byline back to Vanity Fair. Now, what the hell was I gonna do with this damn New Yorker? The only reason I read the magazine
was to see his latest pop-cultural dispatches. I was so livid, I actually wrote
to Wolcott, via the VF offices, where I said how disappointed I was that he
left The New Yorker. I also requested a free subscription to Vanity Fair for my
troubles. (Man, I was ballsy—or nuts—back then.)

I
stated the case that I was a major fan of the work and was studying to be a
journalist and critic much like himself. Considering that he once famously
wrote to the late Norman Mailer, informing the author of how much he inspired
him (which resulted in Mailer sending him a letter of recommendation that
Wolcott used to get into the door at the Voice), I figured he’d see my
intentions were positive. I also enclosed some articles I wrote for some free
publications to show him that I wasn’t a nutjob pissed off that he changed jobs
without my knowledge.

I sent
the letter, virtually oblivious to the fact that I sent what could be seen as
deranged hate mail to one of my heroes. Not too long after that, one Saturday
morning, I got a letter in the mail from the one and only Wolcott. It started
off as so:

“Dear Craig D. Lindsey,

I was reluctant to open your envelope because the big
writing on it made me nervous; as an amateur handwriting expert, I pride myself
on my ability to spot what is known in the trade as a ‘crank,’ ‘nutcase,’ or
even ‘a troubled loner.’ My suspicion turned out to be well-founded.”

He then
went on to say I couldn’t get a free subscription to Vanity Fair and I should
give The New Yorker another chance. (I believe he was being sarcastic about
that since he gave a few writers less-than-flattering nicknames and referred to
the magazine as “quality infotainment.”) He also said he liked the clips I sent
him, and I should send him some more. Hell, you don’t have to tell me twice.

I sent
him another letter filled with clips, and he responded with a letter that
included his New York address. (Guess he didn’t think I was as nutcasey as he
initially assumed.) I could send my correspondence directly to him now. For the
following five years—we slowed down on the letter-writing after 9/11—Wolcott and I would send missives back and forth, each filled with various
musings on pop culture and the world around us. Sure, we could’ve emailed each
other (he did hip me to his email address at one point), but for me—and I
don’t know how he felt about it—receiving letters from him felt like I was
getting exclusive, privileged content. While the rest of the world was reading
Wolcott on a monthly basis over at Vanity Fair, I was getting these personal
pearls straight from the man himself. I even got to meet Wolcott during this
time when I flew to New York for a movie press junket. We ventured to a diner
and shared a gargantuan slice of some dessert as he delighted me with stories
of his journalistic travels.

So,
what prompted this trip down memory lane? Well, Wolcott’s latest book, Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays,
Reviews, Hand Grenades and Hurrahs (Doubleday) has just been released,
filled with many of the pieces that made me want to get in this damn business
in the first place. What I love most about the collection (which has been a
long time coming; when his debut novel, The
Catsitters, came out in 2001, there was talk he’d follow it up with a
collection of pieces called Personal
Attacks) is that it shows how, when it comes to the various aspects of
popular culture, Wolcott is well-versed in practically everything.

Wolcott
may have been branded as a snob once or twice during his 40 years or so
of writing, as he racked up various enemies thanks to the printed
pimp-slappings he often gave his subjects, but the man’s pop-cultural tastes
are fascinatingly versatile. Anyone who read his 2011 memoir Lucking Out knows that dude can enjoy
both a lovely evening at the ballet and a skanky night out at CBGB with the
same wide-eyed enthusiasm. Wolcott can write about books, TV, movies, punk rock
and stand-up comedians, all with the same sharp, savvy, florid analysis, for
they are all connected. For him, a well-done episode of SCTV merits the exact kind of sophisticated kudos as a Brian De
Palma movie or a Kingsley Amis novel.

Throughout
his travels, writing for various publications, Wolcott subconsciously preached a
sense of open-mindedness. It’s OK if you love or hate something, but goddammit,
give it a chance first, especially if it’s not in your comfort zone, and it just
might be something that surprisingly suits your tastes. His writings certainly
taught me not to be instantly dismissive as a writer and a critic. You can find
critical analysis in anything, and make it quite entertaining for the reader as
well. I once remember giggling my head off while reading a piece he
wrote on Baywatch and a Sports Illustrated swimsuit-issue TV
special – IN THE NEW YORKER!

It amused me to see the articles he
compiled for the book, especially since I have photocopies of many of them in a
box in my bedroom closet. (Technically, I’ve been reading this book for years before
it came out.) It’s interesting to see what he chose
for each of the book’s five sections. For example, in the “Movies” section, he includes several
reviews he did back when he was the film critic for Texas Monthly in the ‘80s,
which became a fertile ground for him to strip down the blockbusters of that
era. As a critic, he was able to recognize the rampant homoeroticism in Top Gun, the sadistic violence in the second Indiana Jones movie
and the pitiful display of merchandise that was Return of the Jedi. It wasn’t a completely bad time—he caught
flashes of Bill Murray’s comic genius when he saw Ghostbusters.

Unfortunately,
he didn’t include any of those reviews. He also didn’t include the assessments
of Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Janet Jackson for Vanity Fair in the 80s in
the “Pop, Punk, Rock” section, which includes many essays on the myriad punk/underground
rockers he saw and admired in his younger days. A lot of his TV pieces I adored
– he did a 1993 New Yorker review of Def
Comedy Jam that reminded me how coonish that show could be – aren’t around.
Also missing is that 1983 New York review of Late Night with David Letterman that Letterman himself publicly
said felt like endless blows to the body. (“Dead Letter” was the headline.)

In the intro to the book, Wolcott wrote
that he omitted including pieces for various reasons: too dated, too arcane,
too mean. (He purposefully left out his notorious 1997 Vanity Fair takedown of mentor
Pauline Kael and the critics she’s influenced—the “Paulettes,” he dubbed them—since it caused a regrettable rift between Kael and him that continued right up
to her 2001 death.) But that’s the funny thing about Critical Mass: even though it clocks in at 512 pages, it only scratches
the surface. Wolcott has written so much throughout the years, enough to merit
another collection. And if the day ever comes for Wolcott to compile another
tome, perhaps his old penpal could be of some archival service.

Craig D. Lindsey used to be somebody. Now, he’s a freelancer. You can read all his latest articles over at his blog. He also does a podcast called Muhf***as I Know.

By the way, if Helen Mirren or Christina Hendricks is reading this, get at me, ladies!

In the Future We Will Have Less of Everything: On HOW I LIVE NOW and Its Predecessors

Has there ever been a film about the future that advocated in favor of progress, rather than against it? Metropolis, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner, the Mad Max series, AI, and then onwards to such recent films as Never Let Me Go, The Hunger Games, and, most recently, How I Live Now, do not offer a bright outlook for the results of our ostensible progress, in technology, government, or in any form of broader social structure. The days of the Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon visions of the future, in which everything is easier, happier, better, or faster, are long over–increasingly, films purporting to be about our society’s future either involve an apocalypse which has left devastation behind it or predict one which may well occur during the film itself. If there is no apocalypse, then something else has been taken away: consider Children of Men, in which even women’s fertility has been taken away. The theme, then, seems to continually be one of deprivation, or a sense that something has been removed which was once present. This could occur for a number of reasons, ranging from the sense, on a given director’s part, that to predict the future carries with it a moral imperative, to the more basic sense, frightening as it might sound, that a happy future is a weak basis for a story, that unless something bad is coming, characters have nothing against which to gird themselves.

How I Live Now, the latest film in this trend, starts interestingly, suggesting that it might just be a film about the future in which the future itself doesn’t play a lead role—and, despite odds, it is successful in this attempt. Saoirse Ronan’s Daisy, resplendent in dark eyeshadow, dyed hair, and a host of voices whispering encouragements and admonishments in her head, charges through an airport, punk-ish music blasting on her headphones, to meet her cousin; she will be staying with her aunt in the English countryside because, as she views it, her father (her mother is deceased) would rather not have her around. From the beginning, relationships are foregrounded, even as little visual cues that we are in the future (such as retina identification devices at the airport) continue to pop up. This continues as the movie progresses; Daisy can’t stand her cousins, dismissing them as naive and vaguely obnoxious. There is even a love interest: Eddie, portrayed with silent charm here by George MacKay. Eddie talks to animals and seems to have a knack for accessing Daisy; he wins her over when he’s able to make an entire herd of cows and bulls move out of her way. Daisy gradually loses her punk/goth affectations, relaxes, begins to enjoy herself, make conversation: the film shows signs of being a heartwarming tale of an angry girl’s growing-up, with a winning mood of immediacy.

Then, the future enters in more aggressively. London is bombed, an attack claimed by 15 different terrorist groups. Daisy’s aunt, played briefly but memorably by Anna Chancellor, is away on a business trip when it happens; she is always away, in fact, leaving the children on their own, and at the very most she is around late in the evening and early in the morning. This core loneliness at the heart of the childrens’ lives—Eddie, being the oldest, serves as a surrogate parent, but he is, after all, only a child himself, and so he can’t provide much nurture for his younger siblings—is only the tip of the iceberg. The London bombing serves as a harbinger of what the rest of the film sets out to prove, and what many films that attempt to forecast what lies ahead tell us, as well: that the future we have to look forward to, as a race, is dark, and that self-reliance will be important because, to put it simply, there will be less of everything. Fewer people, less food, fewer landforms (after bombing has destroyed them), fewer cities, fewer options; as daily processes become more efficient, this simplification itself will come to resemble a form of deprivation.

Slight statement though this might be, How I Live Now ends on a more optimistic note than it could have ended on, which is significant; after Daisy and her very young cousin Piper (Harley Bird) take a Homeric-cum-Arthurian-cum-Grimm’s Fairy Tale-esque march through deep woods in search of the others, from whom they have been separated (by rough, aggressive soldiers, seemingly separating them for their own good, as there is an invasion in progress), there is a homecoming, of sorts, but it isn’t without substantial loss along the way. Ultimately, the title says it all. In the film’s last moments, we see a very simple tableau: humans, caring for each other, taking care of themselves. And what are they surrounded by? A forest in the film, but nothingness, in another sense. So the future is a metaphor? Not entirely: the message of the film, and the films that have come before it, might well be more literal than this, a suggestion that more and more may be taken away from us as the decades pass, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, until we are left, finally, staring at ourselves. There may well be any number of slap-happy movies about our future in the depths of film history–Brazil, for example, was gleeful, but in a highly mordant way, or one could always, in a pinch, try Woody Allen’s Sleeper, overcast as it was by its director’s inherent neurosis–but the films which have made the most cultural impact have, at their heart, substantial melancholy: one part regret, one part fear, one part uninventiveness , one part guilt. How I Live Now, in its own quiet way, works beautifully and admirably against this trend, pervasive as its gloom might be, in suggesting that the sanctity of human relationships can create a barrier between the self and the crumbling world.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

SUNLIGHT JR. and American Film’s Misunderstanding of Poverty

American filmmakers don’t understand the poor. From Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp films on through Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, the portrayal of impoverished people in films has settled into a comfortable group of cliches: living rooms crowded with children and toys. Bad teeth. Extreme lighting: either too dark or too bright. Bad posture: usually slouched. Dilapidated cars. Disgruntled employees, merciless employers. Bad pop music. Drug habits, usually debilitating. Bad luck, often contributing towards plot developments. Poor judgment in sexual, financial, and interpersonal matters. Terrible diet, often consisting of junk food. Crumbling housing, run-down neighborhoods. A taste for petty crime. Ragged clothes. Lack of personal upkeep. These are but some of the guideposts by which we, as viewers, are misled about the nature and the pervasiveness of poverty in America, or the different forms it might take. (Hey, why doesn’t someone make a film about poor graduate students, or, better yet, adjunct professors?) Sadly, Laurie Collyer’s Sunlight Jr. does little to reverse these cliches. Muzzling gifted actors with a middling script, it plunges into a sadness so deep but also so shallow that, despite the despair at the core of the storyline, about a man and a woman facing one set of closing doors after another in the strip mall territory of Florida, the film at times seems near-comic.

Matt Dillon, as Richie, and Naomi Watts, as Melissa, are both actors with a tremendous amount of control, though this manifests itself differently in each case. Films such as Drugstore Cowboy, Factotum, or even Beautiful Girls show Dillon’s comfort with his body and his size, whether he’s playing a drug addict, a drunk, or a washed-up high school hunk–here, Dillon plays a man in a wheelchair, and he looks as if he’s been in it for years. And, likewise, anyone who watched Naomi Watts in her best performance, the budding actress in Mulholland Dr., couldn’t argue that she is willing to take the risks necessary to embody an emotion fully, as in her near-orgasmic eruption during a movie audition. And yet, natural as both these talents might be, the words Dillon and Watts say in this film simply don’t fall comfortably out of their mouths, giving it more the feeling of an educational filmstrip than that of a story or a narrative.

Or perhaps it’s not so much the words as the structure in which they’re placed. Very early in the film, punishingly early, when Melissa shows up for work at the convenience store which gives the movie its name, she asks her boss, all-too-brightly, if he’s found out about the store’s college program, tapping us on the forehead with a hint that she’s ambitious. The moment doesn’t float. Later, once she and Richie have been evicted from the motel where they’ve shacked up, and she’s staying with her mother (who has a living room full of adopted children), she points at a hot plate and asks one of the kids, “You know what’s that?” Does anyone actually talk like this? And who would make conversation about a hot plate, if not to bring attention to it as a symbol of poverty? Watts fares more poorly than Dillon here; he gets through his lines by achieving a state of depressed relaxation. When he announces, early in the film, that he’s going to repair a piece of electronic equipment, and bring some money in, he almost mumbles it, which makes this exposition, this introduction of the concept of “scraping by,” a smidgen more believable.

The film takes us from one depressing locale to another. It starts in an intensely dark motel room which stays dark throughout, its bedside lamps dim, its shades always drawn. The bar where Richie goes when Melissa is at work is similarly dim, and nearly empty. The cheaply carpeted home where Melissa’s mother lives and drinks excessively isn’t necessarily dark, but it’s ratty and, as Melissa discovers, infested with bed bugs. One would think the palm trees native to Florida would provide some small uplift here–but instead they tower above the film, as if they might fall on it at any moment. The interior of the Planned Parenthood clinic where Melissa goes when she find out she’s pregnant is, as one might expect, lit by bright flourescent lights. The only seemingly hopeful moment occurs in a daydream, when Richie is (surprise, surprise) being told by a government worker there are few work options for him; he imagines that he gets up, walks out of the office, and out into a gloriously bright day that offers us the first ray of sunshine we’ve seen yet in the film.

As one might suspect, things don’t go well for these downtrodden figures–how could they? The film often reads as if Collyer took Nickel and Dimed, the Barbara Ehrenrich book about the working poor which gave the film its inspiration, a bit too literally, bleeding the element of surprise or unpredictability out of her subject matter, presenting viewers with a tale which is resolved before it has begun. And yet, as America’s economy declines, this subject matter may become increasingly common–and those who wish to render it will need to find a new way to approach it.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

The Good Struggle: ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE

What do we do when things get worse than we can stand? Or better yet, what do we do when things have been worse than we could stand? Some of us crumple. Some of us lash out, and in so doing, may make things more horrific for ourselves. Many of us, though, choose a much more complicated response: we create, we do things, we act. The creation of art as a sublimation of pain or suffering is not a new concept, but it comes close to being made new in the work of Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, born and raised in Soviet Russia, an American expatriate for nearly 25 years. In one of his sculptures, a pair of booted legs descends from the ceiling, soles firmly planted on the ground. The work’s title is “What Is Our Place?” In one of his installations, we see a room papered with all kinds of wild, colorful posters; the ceiling of the room contains a gaping hole, plaster from the ceiling hanging down, along with peeling paint. The work’s title? “The Man Who Flew Into Space from His Apartment.” Amei Wallach’s Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here is less a documentary than a study of the ways we react to tragedy, to trauma, to past suffering–in Kabakov’s case, the trauma was the time he spent living under Soviet rule, from 1933 to 1987. And yet, miraculously, these works never seem overburdened by the past behind them: they are always guided by the urge to narrate, to tell a story. You might feel, bumping up against one of his installations, that you’ve been dropped into the middle of a surreal novel. The works suggest that for Kabakov, the telling of a story provides the means for one to leave suffering, to fly into space.

It is significant, then, that the documentary concerns itself with a trip Ilya and Emilia Kabakov took in 2008, back to Moscow, which they had not visited in 20 years (they currently live in Long Island, outside New York City), for a vast retrospective of Kabakov’s work–well-deserved, given that Ilya is one of the most widely-known Russian artists now living. The film shows little of Moscow itself, but the little it does show, along with the references made to it in the film, are enough to communicate the essence: raw, oppressive, intense, unhappy, dark. The artist’s acquaintances–fellow artists, patrons, scholars–establish that Ilya’s time in Soviet Russia, illustrating children’s books for survival while also secretly making work which would certainly have earned him punishment by the government, was quite difficult, even soul-destroying.

Kabakov’s work itself displays this same sort of truculence, only in a quieter, more inventive manner. The exhibition described in the film occurred in three different locations; the most elaborate and eccentric of these exhibits was staged in a former bus garage–in fact, the site of Dziga Vertov’s famous 1929 film, Man with a Movie Camera–now the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. One part of the exhibit was called the “museum”; in this museum hung rows and rows of paintings, meant to emulate the Soviet-approved artwork that permeated Kabakov’s youth, filled with false happiness: happy workers returning home from their (dreary) jobs; cheerful, rosy-cheeked families eating dinner together; delighted children playing in the snow. As we watch Kabakov setting up this exhibition, we notice things one might not normally notice in a documentary about an artist who has worked his way, literally, out of years of oppression: his masterful walk, the strangely humble expression on his face, his grace when instructing workers about where to place parts of the display. He resembles nothing less than a little Prospero, exercising magical powers when necessary to keep the island of his sensibility in order. His wife is a presence here too; a frequent collaborator with Kabakov, she most resembles a guide for her extremely intense husband.

My own first experience with Kabokov’s work was in 1993, at the Whitney Biennial. Young as I was, I harbored incredibly jaded, cynical feelings as I walked through much of the exhibition. The works I saw, with their loud colors, their video loops, their larger-than-life signage, were more than I could digest at one time, or perhaps more than I could stomach. Only two artists paused my arrogant 23-year-old’s wandering eye–Ida Applebroog, with her storied, direct approach to her subject, seemingly antiquated in this context, and Kabakov. The work on display was an installation, a small crowded, cluttered room, with numerous tiny, human figures arranged on the floor. My immediate response was wonder: how did these figures get here? What was I to think? And it is this same sense of wonder that drives Enter Here. One wonders out of what recesses in his imagination Ilya Kabakov is able to pull the concept for his works–and beyond that, how he is able to keep producing them. In the presence of his work, we all become like those small figures, dropped down into alien territory, trying to make sense of it all, and yet feeling, at the same time, as if the scenarios we witness are strangely familiar.

Max Winter is the Editor of Press Play.

A NEW COLUMN BY ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: The Princess, The Queen and The Warrior: Part 1: Teeth and Swagger.

A NEW COLUMN BY ARIELLE BERNSTEIN: The Princess, The Queen and The Warrior

PRESS PLAY HAS A NEW COLUMN.

Having been thrilled and impressed by Arielle Bernstein’s previous essays for this publication, on topics ranging from the cinematography of Breaking Bad to Melissa McCarthy to Lana Del Rey, we are excited to announce that she will be beginning an eponymous column here at Press Play, in which she will continue to surprise and awaken readers with insightful, poetically well-composed analyses of cultural and artistic issues. Please welcome–and read–our newest columnist!

In
Pitchfork’s review of Janelle Monáe’s latest album, Jayson Greene describes Monáe
as an auteur. He argues that “her music
has always been about the exhilaration coming from the sensation of total
control.” When I saw Monáe perform live
recently, I was struck by the same sense of her intensity: Monáe is a tiny
wide-eyed powerhouse, strong and savvy. While artists like Nicki Minaj and
Taylor Swift enjoy playing the princess, Monáe emerged on the music scene
completely suited up, and her first single off her new album, The Electric Lady, is regal, rather than
docile. “QUEEN” is female power all grown up.

The image of the princess remains a symbol of idealized American
female identity. From the oft-lambasted pink toy aisle of the department store,
to princess-themed weddings and sweet 16 parties, much of female coming-of-age
is still centered around the narrative of a young maiden finding her prince.
Certainly the princess myth has been modernized in new stories. Today,
princesses are often smart, capable and strong. Sometimes the princess wants a
career. Sometimes she rejects marriage. Sometimes she is the one who rescues
her prince. Despite these outward changes, the princess figure persists because
it resonates with everything our culture expects, loves and hates about
girlhood. What defines a princess is not her docile nature, but the fact that
her very position is one of subordination. She may have a voice, but she is a
child, under the rule of her parents. She is in a state of perpetual
adolescence. Warrior princesses like Brave’s Merida, or
Mulan, appeal to us because they are adolescents on the verge of realizing
their power. Princess Jasmine may claim she is not a prize to be won all
she wants, just as Ariel can flex her fins at the notion of discovering a world
of her own: In reality, both are still under the lock and key of a father who
wants to protect them.

Queens, in contrast, are sinister figures in our culture, much
more threatening than the cute female warrior types that our culture has grown
accustomed to. We are used to Buffy and Hit-Girl, badass warriors who are often
accompanied by a male guardian to ease their transition to adulthood. Likewise,
we laud the lone wolf mother narrative: Ellen Ripley and Beatrix Kiddo are seen
as strong and powerful, while still staunchly feminine, as their primary
objective is about protecting their young.

Queens, in contrast,
protect nothing but their personal influence. The queen in fairy tales is
fierce and autocratic, heartless and self absorbed. She is a threat to the
princess and is also often presented as a threat to the kingdom. She is feared
rather than beloved. While Snow
White has been given various reboots that render her less passive, the evil
queen remains an arch nemesis. Similarly, Cinderella’s various iterations are
more outspoken, while her stepmother remains a brute, uncaring force. In
Disney’s Tangled, we are given a
fiery Rapunzel with another controlling, domineering and repulsive version of
mom. In other words, for every Ripley that we praise for being assertive and
adventurous, there remains a queen alien that the princess must destroy.

This hero narrative is substantially different from the male
hero’s journey. Young Luke Skywalker has many father figures that guide him on
his journey. The male rise to power is perceived as multifaceted. The male hero
is allowed the agency to choose to become a good, benevolent leader, or a
selfish one. The female hero is only allowed tempered bits of power—she gets to
flex her little muscles a bit before finding love, but we don’t get to see her
exert her influence on the throne.

In today’s culture, power is often synonymous with dominance. We
may gently chide Don’s cheating ways, but we are poised to identify and
sympathize with his desire for power even more so than redemption.
Masculine displays of power and dominance are seen as a force, which is
as creative as it is destructive. We rally behind Don Draper, Walter White, and
Jax from Sons of Anarchy. Even when they do terrible things, we are fascinated by their
decisions and by their gumption. Women, unless they are leaving an abuser or
protecting their children, are simply not given the latitude to commit these sorts
of actions without consequence. Indeed, women who rupture male narratives of
power are seen as threatening. Characters like Breaking Bad’s Skyler White and Mad
Men’s Betty Draper are seen as far less sympathetic than their spouses.

This column will be centered on the question of female agency,
which I see as being fundamentally tied to positive images of women in power,
rather than princesses on the cusp of coming-of-age. Most visions of queens in
our culture today buy into male ideas and ideals of power: The dominatrix is a
popular figure in music videos for this very reason. We see Britney whip a
pretty young collared thing in her video for “Work Bitch,” just as we see Queen
Bee Beyonce tell us to bow down. But is the power displayed in these videos
substantive or reductive? In this column I’ll consider a range of media—movies,
TV shows, music videos, video games—in order to consider how power is
constructed in regards to gender, and whether power is a collaborative force,
or if it is always necessarily combative, a world of swagger and bared teeth.

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed three times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book. She is Associate
Book Reviews Editor at The Nervous Breakdown.

12 YEARS A SLAVE: Glory Without Redemption

12 Years a Slave has arrived in
theatres already barnacled with expectations. In its festival appearances, it
met with critical acclaim, and Oscar odds-makers had already slated it for various
awards. Viewers buy their tickets, sit down in their seats, wait for the lights
to dim, and expect great things. But viewers also have other, deeper
expectations. The dominant cinematic story of slavery has been the story of
white redemption and white heroism against an unfortunate institution
perpetuated only by the most sadistic of bad white men. Even today, it is
exceedingly rare to find a story about slavery that doesn’t emphasize how
good-hearted white people can be and how inherently just, good, and equal
America is. In American movies, black suffering redeems white characters and
affirms white nobility.

12 Years
a Slave
tells a different story, but because the familiar narrative has conditioned us
to view “slave movies” as a genre, we — especially white viewers — may find our
expectations unsettled. This unsettling is one of the great virtues of the
film.

This is a movie about slavery in the United
States from 1841 to 1853. We watch such a movie anticipating not entertainment
but enrichment, enlightenment even, though only after emotional hardship. We
expect to see terrible deeds committed by white men with Southern accents and
whips, we expect to see downtrodden, suffering black people. We expect
feelings. This affective and narrative pattern dates back at least to Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, published a year before Solomon Northup, the movie’s
protagonist, was returned to freedom. The pattern was reiterated through
various slave narratives, where it usually served the specific and necessary
purposes of abolitionist propaganda: to educate white people, to help them see
and feel the horror of slavery, to teach them that slaves and escaped slaves
have emotions and thoughts, that such people can and should be empathized with,
that laws should be changed and slavery ended.

Solomon Northup contributed to this literature
with his own memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, one which was especially
detailed and forthright because, unlike many other ex-slaves (relatively few of
whom were able to escape from the deep south, as he did), Northup’s status as a
free man was well-established in court, so he had little to fear from his
former owners.

The average contemporary American viewer — and
particularly, like me, a white viewer — likely has a head full of ideas and
images of slavery not so much from primary sources, but elsewhere: various
novels, educational documentaries, television movies. Even Northup’s story,
which waned in popularity after the Civil War, was adapted for PBS’s American
Playhouse in 1984 by director Gordon Parks as Solomon Northup’s Odyssey,
a staid, conventional, lugubrious adaptation. (Parks might have made a great
movie from the material, having directed not just Shaft but also an occasionally powerful biopic of Leadbelly. He was
not, though, able to break out of the standard formula for TV movies about
historical characters, and the performances often seem forced and amateur.)

Despite the images in our heads, though, there
have been few feature films that have sought to depict the everyday realities
and brutalities of slave life in any extended way, and most have been, at best,
problematic. The most viscerally affecting slavery films have both in some
manner been based in a tradition of gothicism and spectacle: Mandingo
(1975) and Django Unchained (2012). These films dig deep into the
sordidness and violence of the milieu, highlighting the sadistic psychopathy
bred by the system and, in the case of Mandingo especially, the flows of
psychosexual power. More than representations of any actual history, both are
in dialogue with the history of slavery’s representation on screen, and they
draw their effect not only from what they show but how they evoke, parody,
critique, and enact the cinematic past.

Too often, Hollywood has been unable to escape
the patterns established with The Birth of a Nation (the first movie to
be shown in the White House) and Gone with the Wind, those two great
gravitational forces that warped the depiction of race and slavery in cinema
for decades. “For many years,” Robin Wood wrote in Sexual Politics
and Narrative Cinema, “Gone with the Wind, with its
overwhelming prestige and popularity (reinforced and perpetuated by its various
revivals), had offered general audiences a sentimental travesty of white/black
relations and the ‘realities’ of slavery in the Deep South: the proposition
that some Southern families were kind to ‘their’ blacks (the truth of which one
doesn’t have to doubt) not only distracted attention from the many that weren’t
but obliterated the fundamental humiliation, the fact of slavery itself.”

Wood points to a key fault with many of even the
most liberal and best-intentioned films depicting slavery: they distract
attention from fundamental evils by focusing on the sympathies and
sensitivities of white audiences. This tradition of appeasing white audiences
was central to the success, for instance, of the phenomenally popular 1984 TV
mini-series Roots. In that case, the producers were careful to highlight
white actors in promotional materials and to not only deliberately increase the
presence of white characters in the story, but also to provide more positive
and sympathetic white characters than Alex Haley’s book had. The head writer of
the TV series, William Blinn, said, “It was … unwise, we thought, to do
four hours of television without showing a white person with whom we could
identify.” Roots also deliberately emphasized the inherent goodness
of the United States and the exoticism of Africa in a way that Haley had not. Africa
became, in the words of scholars Lauren R. Tucker and Hemant Shah, more like
“an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institute than the living, breathing,
thriving community Haley describes.”

The precedent of these patterns and proclivities may
condition many viewers’ expectations for what is acceptable and appropriate in
a movie that depicts slavery. Our idea of what a “slave movie” is or
should be gets coupled with our idea of what a “great movie” should
be, and that’s further coupled with our expectations for what makes a movie
Oscar-worthy. These assumptions shape the lenses we wear when we sit down to
watch 12 Years a Slave.

Steve McQueen is aware of these assumptions, and
part of the power of his film derives from his careful acknowledgment and then
undermining of those assumptions. The wonder of 12 Years a Slave is that
it is, indeed, fully a movie about slavery, a great movie, and an Oscar-worthy
movie.

It is a movie about slavery in a way that almost
all movies concerned with slavery have not been. It pays attention to details
of slave life with rare patience and precision, vividly conveying not only the
horrors and humiliations of that life, but the basic details of the labor
itself: what it is to pick cotton, what it is to cut sugar cane. Further,
because this is a film for an adult audience, a film not seeking to be shown as
an after-school special, it does not flinch from the violence inherent in the
slave system. As he did in his first film, Hunger, McQueen allows the
camera to linger on bodies in pain. This is not violence as spectacle — the
actual representation of blood and gore is no worse than the average episode of
Criminal Minds or Bones. But the violence feels more graphic than
anything in a splatter movie, never mind network TV, because McQueen is willing
to let pain linger.

Further, our identification is consistently with
the victims, which keeps the pain meaningful. In the book Twelve Years a
Slave, Northup speaks of the power of the slave system to make callousness
contagious, and especially of the power that witnessing daily atrocities has to
numb even the best souls and turn otherwise peaceful people into brutes.
“The influence” he writes, “of the iniquitous system necessarily
fosters an unfeeling and cruel spirit, even in the bosoms of those who, among
their equals, are regarded as humane and generous.” We similarly worry
about the effects of representations of violence on audiences — could watching
even the most honorably and realistically-presented acts of violence have the
effect of inuring us to its horror? Could a well-intentioned film about
slavery, one that tries to represent its viciousness without blinking, instead
dull viewers’ concern?

It’s a problem that 12 Years a Slave
confronts through the time it spends on particular people and images, and thus the
manner in which it asks us to think and feel our way through the narrative.

In an early scene, Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a
man born into freedom in the north, has just woken to discover he has been
kidnapped and bound in chains. He denies that he is a slave to his jailer, who
takes a paddle and beats him. We see the board smash into Solomon’s back again
and again, but from a side angle, not one that shows us the damage being done.
We see some bits of blood here and there. We hear Solomon’s screams, see the
agony on his face, the torture through his muscles. We see the paddle splinter
and break. The scene goes on longer than most directors and editors would let
it, but it needs to: to cut too soon would be to allow it to be less painful,
more entertaining, more a spectacle. We may think: “Okay, I get it, he’s
being beaten. Okay, can’t we move on? Isn’t there a story to get to?”
Finally, it stops, and we are relieved.

But McQueen is not done with this. We might relax
as the next scene begins, as we are ready for our emotions to be given some
moment of respite, but this is, in fact, masterful misdirection. As Solomon
talks with a slaver, the man tells Solomon to take off his ruined shirt. We see
Solomon from the front. The shirt is, indeed, torn and soiled. Reluctantly, he
removes it. Finally, we see the shirt’s back: fabric soaked with blood. The
audience I was with gasped at this moment. We had let our guard down. We knew,
of course, what the paddle would have done to his back. We knew,
intellectually, the pain inflicted. Here, though, we felt it in a deeper way
than if we had simply seen Solomon’s back as he is beaten, or immediately
after.

12 Years a Slave is distinct because,
again and again, McQueen chooses to make his film more about experience than
information. Many incidents from Northup’s narrative are either barely glanced
at or skipped altogether. The challenge for any adaptation of this story is to
fit the experience of twelve years into two hours.

And this is where 12 Years a Slave reveals
its greatness. First, there is the triumph of its structure (how much of which
is the responsibility of screenwriter John Ridley, I don’t know, as I haven’t
seen the script). The film begins with Solomon having been a slave for at least
a few years, learning to cut sugar cane and trying desperately to figure some
way to write a letter to someone, anyone who might be able to help him. This
information is mostly established visually. At night, as Solomon is approached
by one of the female slaves (we don’t yet know anything about her) for sex, the
experience is unfulfilling for both, and then the film moves us back into the
past as he remembers a much more satisfying moment with his wife when he was
free.

Why start here? Why not just tell the story in
order?

There are many possible answers to these
questions, but I tend to think that opening segment forecasts the film’s
primary patterns. The story is similar enough to other tales of American
slavery that we don’t need any training in understanding it, but the style and
conventions of the film are not as familiar, and we do need to get accustomed
to those.

Consider, for instance, how the opening segment
helps us understand a potentially perplexing shot at the end of the movie.
Solomon has finally managed to get someone to take a letter from him to the
post office, but he does not know whether he can trust the person. Solomon looks
out at the landscape. The camera stays on his face for an extraordinary amount
of time. From the very beginning of the film, Solomon has been trying to get
word out to his family or anyone else who might be able to help him. In this film,
the relationship between shots can be associational rather than strictly linear
or expository, especially concerning Solomon’s attempts to communicate to the
free world. His desire, his yearning for freedom, shifts the representation of
time. Like Solomon, we, too, are bewildered: what is happening, what is going
on in the world beyond? Time freezes. We stare.

The next shots show us that the gazebo Solomon
had begun working on at the time he wrote his letter is now completed. Time
speeds forward.

Similarly, a refusal to cut a shot at the point
anyone conditioned by mainstream films would expect provides one of the most
powerful moments in the movie — indeed, it is among the most remarkable scenes
of any film I know. After Solomon attacks one of the white men who has been
tormenting him, John Tibeats (Paul Dano), Tibeats returns with a friend and
tries to lynch the impertinent slave. He is halted by the general overseer of
the plantation, Chapin (J.D. Evermore), but Chapin does not then cut Solomon
down. Instead, he says they’ll have to wait for the plantation owner, William
Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), to return that night. And so Solomon remains, his
hands tied behind his back, his toes barely touching the ground, his throat
roped to a tree branch. The shot goes on and on. Solomon gasps and straining to
keep himself from strangling to death. Once, a slave sneaks to him with a small
cup of water.

The extraordinary, excruciating length of the
scene forces us to confront the physical reality of slavery to an extent
unparalleled by any other film. The audience becomes a body of witnesses. Here,
no soaring John Williams-style music plays our heartstrings, no character later
offers moral exposition. A man swings from a rope and tries to stay alive. We
watch. It is all the film allows us to do.

Yet, if the film’s power and importance come from
its careful construction of the audience as witness, what sort of witnesses are
we, and of what use is our witnessing?

These questions are hardly unique to 12 Years
a Slave — they apply to some extent, at least, to any film with serious
intentions of recreating and representing historical atrocities. Toward an
answer, all I can offer is a hypothesis: what matters is not the recreation,
but the quality of witness, and the quality of humanity, it requires of us.

There is already a tremendous amount of Oscar
buzz around 12 Years a Slave, which more than one critic has dubbed
“the Schindler’s List of slavery movies”. In the sense of
carefully recreating a particular life from one of the great horrors of
history, and generating strong emotions in audiences, this is true. But the
Oscar talk gives a false impression of what McQueen’s film is up to.

Even in his most serious and self-consciously
“artistic” films, Steven Spielberg is a Hollywood director to the
core, a genius of audience manipulation. McQueen is no more Spielberg than Spielberg
is Michael Haneke. The kind of historical dramas and social justice dramas that
win Oscars flatter their more privileged and powerful audiences, allowing —
even encouraging — such audiences to feel good about themselves. The same choices
that propelled Roots to extraordinary popularity are the sorts of
choices approved and awarded by the Oscarati. They are also the choices that
Steve McQueen and his collaborators carefully and determinedly renounce.

And yet I would not be at all surprised to see 12
Years a Slave sweep the Oscars–mostly because McQueen brilliantly chose to
apply his particular aesthetic to material that is deeply appealing to Oscar
voters. Northup’s original book, edited and perhaps ghostwritten for him by the
white lawyer and writer David Wilson, had to be aimed at a primarily white
audience, for, like any other slave narrative popularized through abolitionist
circles, it had a particular propagandistic purpose. An advertisement for the book in the
abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper The Liberator included
numerous quotations from reviews that testified to the book’s ability to
confirm the horror of slavery for an audience that previously might have
dismissed Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other novels as fictional exaggerations.
One reviewer, for the Cayuga Chief, highlighted the qualities of the
book which McQueen’s film emulates: “It is well told, and bears internal
evidence of being a clear statement of facts. There is no attempt at display,
but the events are so graphically portrayed, that the interest in the perusal
is deep and unabated to the last. The sunshine of kind treatment sheds a few
bright beams athwart the dark canvass of twelve years of bondage: but, in the
main, the darker cruelty and wickedness of oppression is still more revolting
by the contrast.”

There we have, too, the key to why characters
like William Ford and Bass (the man who ultimately delivered the letter that
would begin the process toward Northup’s freedom, here played by Brad Pitt) are
important to the story. They are not there to appease white sensibilities, but
rather are placed in the film in proportion to their presence in Northup’s
actual life, and they highlight the oppressiveness and irredeemability of any
system where people are considered property.

Further, audiences have very little chance to sympathize
with good white characters, because they simply have too little screen time.
This is as it should be. Our sympathies and identification should be with the
slaves.

If the work of traditional, white-audience slave
movies is to encourage us to look for good white people to identify with, and
to make us witnesses to narratives in which there are good white people in even
the most hellish circumstances, then 12 Years a Slave works to undo
that. 12 Years a Slave deprives us of the familiar pathways to
identification with white saviors, and instead requires us to identify with the
people we should have been identifying with in the first place.

Matthew Cheney’s work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Rain Taxi, Locus, The Internet Review of Science Fiction and SF Site, among other places, and he is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy. He is currently a student in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire.

The Tragic Absorption of THE MOTEL LIFE

There are times, during THE MOTEL LIFE, when it seems as if the film is sustaining itself on pure mood. Directors Alan and Gabriel Polsky have put substantial energy, in their delivery of this story of two brothers with flawed judgment but unfailing commitment to each other, into its darkness, into drenching us in the dim light of motel rooms or the darkness of city streets at night, so that when the film moves into a brighter location, such as a hospital room or a casino (the film is set in Reno), the shift comes as a shock, as if someone were shining bright lights on the story, asking us to look it in the face, possible interpretations of it being as various as the viewers themselves.

The story is a sad one, without much room for light. The two brothers, Jerry Lee and Frank, ran away from home as children after their mother’s death from cancer. In an accident which occurred while they were train-hopping, Jerry Lee lost half of one leg–and as it is, the lost half-limb comes to serve as an outer manifestation of his personality; as Stephen Dorff plays him, he seems only half-present for much of the film, as if he were talking to others while also having another conversation with himself. By contrast, his brother, played here with depressed immediacy by Emile Hirsch, seems more grounded, carrying the burden of the brothers’ perpetual rootlessness along that of his brother’s needs. After Jerry Lee kills a young boy in a hit and run accident, what was a dour story becomes much more dour–the brothers have to run from the police, and what was previously a seemingly hand-to-mouth existence becomes rife with traditional images of desperation and outsiderhood. All the motels look the same. All the meals are take-out. Frank carries a bottle of whiskey around with him like a holy chalice.

What is amazing, in the body of the film, is how much texture and soul the directors manage to reap from such a bleak story. The Nevada landscape is sublime, in the truest sense of the word, its grand, uncrossable mountains a comment on the impossibility of the brothers’ situation. Kris Kristofferson shines here in a minimal part, as an old boss of Frank’s who tries, beautifully un-invasively, to counsel Frank on how to lead a responsible, or at least a forward-looking life. Dakota Fanning is mature, and sad, and memorable as a girlfriend of Frank’s, left and then found again, living in the tiny, poetically barren town of Elko. And then there are the oddballs: one sadsack who we first meet after he’s been hospitalized following a liquid-acid binge, and another old friend of Frank, a generally unlucky gambling addict who persuades Frank to go in with him on an implausible-seeming bet.

True to itself, the progress of the movie is both sad and upbeat. As options decrease for the brothers, their trajectory becomes more wild and stealthy. They sustain themselves, as they have since childhood, through story-telling; Frank tells Jerry Lee possible anecdotes from possible lives he hasn’t lived—and the directors take a risk by animating these stories in the style of Jerry Lee’s own cartoonish drawings, a touch which doesn’t necessarily work in all movies (such as Howl, which was at its most successful when most simple, its animated sequences a distraction from James Franco’s responsible performance) but which gives a pleasant sense of release, of taking off, to this work.

As we’ve learned from Breaking Bad, from Cormac McCarthy, from Sam Shepard, from Badlands, and even from the recent COG, the land west of the Mississippi can be a fecund setting for stories having to do with loss, or restlessness, or despair, or hopelessness. The Motel Life, while it operates on a quiet enough register that it might not reach all viewers, brings home a meaningful story without significant compromise, a promising debut feature from two very skilled filmmakers.

Why DEEP THROAT Should Be Placed in the National Film Registry

It’s almost that time again. Every December, the National Film Preservation Board, with the sheltering authority of the Library Of Congress hovering benevolently over its shoulder, announces the twenty-five “culturally, historically,
or
aesthetically
significant”
movies
that
will
join
the
honor
roll
of
American
cinema
enshrined
in
the
National
Film
Registry.
To
the
Board’s credit, the list is startlingly egalitarian and unfussy, honoring not only obvious contenders like Gone With The Wind (1939) and Citizen Kane (1941) but also representatives from every corner of American movie-making: independents like El Mariachi
(1992) and
Night
Of
The
Living
Dead
(1968), masterpieces
both
sung
(The
Godfather
(1974), and
unsung
(Daughters
Of
The
Dust
(1991), Killer
Of
Sheep
(1977)), technological
watermarks
as
far-ranging as The Jazz Singer (1928) to
A
Computer
Animated
Hand
(1972), and
unique
visions
like
Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and The Matrix (1999).

But, despite the Board’s inclusion
of up to fifty nominations suggested by the American public into its deliberations each year, and a curatorial eclecticism that honors diversity as far-ranging as Dog Star Man Part IV (1964), Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies (1930s-40s), and Let‘s All Go To The Lobby (1957) ( you know, with the dancing popcorn and hot dogs — “to get ourselves a treat!”), one essential American movie keeps getting unfairly overlooked. It’s a movie no less essential to the trajectory of American film than Dickson Experimental Sound Film (c. 1894). In fact, it’s another early sound film, if one considers all meanings of the verb to sound: to test the depth of a hidden space. It’s Deep Throat (1972).

Gerard Damiano’s semi-surreal porno-comedic fantasy about an anatomically irregular woman (Linda Lovelace) and her search for unorthodox clitoral stimulation isn’t more cinematically interesting than other features from the so-called “golden age” of porn. (Behind The Green Door [also 1972] is the most
visually inventive of the bunch, with an aesthetic borrowed from video art of
the era—Nam June Paik, with cum shots.) Deep Throat, by contrast, is poorly directed, scripted, shot, and “acted,” and almost as dull as Warhol’s experimental movie/endurance exercise Empire (1964), with about the same level of phallic obsession. (Empire is enshrined in the Registry. Perhaps tellingly, Warhol’s Blow Job [1964] is not.)

But all aesthetic shortcomings aside, Deep Throat certainly qualifies as a culturally significant movie. Much has already been written about how its ensuing multiple legal battles carved out First Amendment rights for all cinema to splay whatever sort of grotesque delight it saw fit across the screen, to say nothing for the
way its “four quadrant” success set in motion the current mainstreaming of pornography in American culture. In her memoir Post-Porn Modernist, porn star turned performance artist Annie Sprinkle remembers working as a popcorn girl at an Arizona theater during the height of “porno chic”, amazed at the cross-section of American humanity lining up to see Linda Lovelace “untangle her tingle”, as promised by the poster’s tagline: “[The audience was] young and elderly, couples, singles, groups, college students and teachers, blue- and white- collar workers, all types of people. I sold tons of popcorn.” (Let’s all go to the lobby, to get ourselves a treat.)

Deep Throat‘s historical importance is also undeniable because of its connection to the Watergate scandal. Disgruntled FBI agent Mark Felt was willing to confirm details for journalist Bob Woodward about the Nixon-backed burglary of Democratic National Committee offices, but only in secret. Woodward’s mysterious source, who would only meet with the journalist in Beltway parking garages at 2 am, was given the nickname “Deep Throat” as a smirking play on the journalistic phrase “deep background,” meaning a never-quoted source who will secretly confirm confidential information obtained elsewhere. The investigation brought Nixon down, but not before revealing all sorts of unsavory tidbits about the commander in chief to the American public. (For example, Nixon’s preferred term for double-crossing was “ratfucking”—an activity Lovelace never got around to, despite the dog-on-woman action displayed in the stag loop Dog Fucker [1971] she made before Deep Throat.)

What hasn’t been acknowledged is how, despite its failures of craftsmanship, Deep Throat is not an artistically devoid movie. Its success is in the realm of theory and criticism, in providing the mathematical proof to Godard’s theorem that “film is truth 24 times a second”. While it’s laughable to think that Deep Throat invented pornography, or even the pornographic film, the fusion bomb it created by merging the tropes of Hollywood film (and all its attendant unspoken eroticism) with the animal reality of intercourse was a Manhattan Project moment. Imagine what that first vaginal penetration, twelve
interminable minutes into a previously quite dull movie, must have looked like in 1972, as big on screen as
the thrown animal bone that becomes the space station in 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968), or the parting of the waves in The Ten Commandments (1956). And the sacred waters keep rising: semen, snot, vaginal secretions, spit, and, holiest of American elixirs, Coca-Cola, in the scene in which it is poured into a glass dildo inserted into Lovelace’s vagina.

And there are tears, too. Later in life, Lovelace maintained that she was violently coerced into a pornographic career by her abusive husband Chuck Traynor. There are bruises visible on Lovelace’s thighs, and, while her acting is uniformly quite cardboard, the frightened tears she summons instantly in the scene where her doctor informs her she has no clitoris are startlingly real. The National Film Registry has seen fit to include important documentation of many atrocities, including Hindenberg Disaster Newsreel Footage (1937) and the Zapruder Kennedy film (1963). Lovelace’s disavowal of her “performance” as a documented rape can’t be ignored, but it shouldn’t disqualify Deep Throat.

Then what’s left? Is the Board’s sheer unwillingness to address Deep Throat‘s ultra-sexed subject matter what keeps it from having its lovingly restored negative swaddled in a temperature-controlled vault in the Library of Congress for all perpetuity? Maybe. But to acknowledge Deep Throat as a benchmark of American cinema would mean acknowledging the bigger genie we can’t put back into the bottle. Deep Throat and “Deep Throat” put an end to the idea that anything is private. Sex tapes, Wikileaks, an intern’s navy blue dress spattered with presidential semen, yawn. It’s hard to believe there was a point in time when Americans could be shocked to the point of national paralysis over a piddly dirty trick burglary and the slobbery reality of a blow job. Those crowds lining up in 1972 couldn’t conceive of the day Deep Throat could be enshrined in the Library of Congress as a testament to our naivetë and innocence. We take in the whole truth now, up to the tonsils, without a thought.

Violet LeVoit is a video producer and editor, film critic, and
media educator whose film writing has appeared in many publications in
the US and UK. She is the author of the short story collection I Am Genghis Cum (Fungasm Press). She lives in Philadelphia.

VIDEO ESSAY: Monsters Are a Child’s Best Friend

Most responsible parents will tell you that using the
television as a surrogate nanny is bad for kids. My own experience as a child
would argue against this. My parents knew that they couldn’t raise me
alone, and the only reliable guides were creatures of the night.

This first became clear to me on Halloween night, 1971, when
my mom promised my sister and me a very special evening’s entertainment. As the clock ticked towards 8:00 the lights
were dimmed in our basement rec room, the jack o’lanterns were lit, and the
popcorn was popped. Though I’d probably
seen programs in black and white before, what soon appeared on the TV screen
would surprise me: these images seemed to come from a different world than the
Technicolor landscapes I had known.

The sense of drama was heightened by a creepy old man coming
onto a dimly lit theater stage, offering viewers a “friendly warning” about the
frights to come. As the credits rolled,
my anticipation intensified. Soon the first unforgettable images of James
Whale’s Frankenstein rolled across my
five-year old eyes and plunged me into a realm I have never entirely escaped.

In subsequent years I would revisit this world with greater
frequency. Frankenstein opens with a
marvelously constructed graveyard set. The mourners are surrounded by looming
grey sky, skeletal trees, and morbid gravestone figures. The clanging church bell and quiet sobs of
the grievers sound as if they were recorded in a dank well.

The looming angles and impossibly long staircases of
Frankenstein’s castle draw from the nightmarish qualities of the
Expressionistic German horror cinema of the 1920s. When I watched UFA productions like Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Vampyr years later, I would experience these angular horrors in
their purest form.

What struck me as a child watching these old Universal films
for the first time, and what still amazes me, is the concentrated power of their
characters. The dead stare, wild arm
movements, and disconcerting forward lurch of Boris Karloff’s Creature have
become iconic. They are easy to imitate, as I would come to learn by donning a
“Frankenstein’s Monster” costume the following year. However, there is nothing
quite as compelling as the real thing.

In the days before VCR, one could experience the most
arresting images of horror classics repeatedly through grainy photographic
reproductions. Magazines like Famous
Monsters of Filmland, Creepy, and
Fangoria were the pulps of my youth. Their
garish covers splattered across drugstore and supermarket magazine racks across
suburbia. The amount of time I spent
gazing at still images of movie monsters dwarfs the time spent watching moving
images on the television screen.

Yet the classic Universal monsters also offered a more
profound attraction: compassion. The
Monster of Whale’s Frankenstein is a
creature more sinned against than sinning.
He appeals to children because he is a child himself, his momentary joys
pathetic against a background of perpetual torment and tantrums. In the famous scene in which he throws a
trusting little girl into the stream moments after tossing daisy petals with
her, his regret and shame is as poignant as the horrific senselessness of the
act.

Monsters, like children, can be cruel. However, the tragic
fate of figures like Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and King Kong taught me
something essential about human behavior. Where strangeness and difference
tread, the torches and pitchforks aren’t far behind. Classic monster movies don’t just depict the
monstrous. They convey what it feels like to be monstrous.

Since my first encounter with them on that Halloween night
long ago, monsters have helped me cope with feelings of alienation and anxiety,
teaching me a valuable lesson: friends may come and go, but monsters are
forever.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Jeffrey Canino grew up editing video on stacked VCRs. He holds a
Master’s in English Literature from the State University of New York at
New Paltz, and he blogs about horror cinema at his website, Nessun
timore: http://nessuntimore.com

A Video Essay on THE X-FILES: Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head

What is the American Dream?

Is it wealth? Power? Or it is something more existential like raising a family with a particular set of values?

By season 4, the X-Files was already considered one of the sickest, most graphic expressions of pop culture ever to be featured on a major network. That reputation could only have encouraged writers Glen Morgan and James Wong to craft “Home,” with imagery so disgusting that it transcends its place in X-Files lore and stands next to the classics of the horror genre.

In October of 1996, 18 million viewers watched their favorite paranormal FBI investigators, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, enter the realm of The Peacocks, a mysterious family living in an isolated village called Home, Pennsylvania.

A grotesquely disfigured baby has been discovered near the Peacock house, buried at home plate on a baseball diamond frequented by young boys.

But what the writers of this story really want you to know is that this traditional American town is really . . . . Mayberry.

Yep, that Mayberry. And Mulder can’t help but lose himself to the allure of Main street America, its nostalgia proving too strong to resist.

Sure the town of Home has baseball, cadillacs, a sheriff named Andy Taylor, a deputy named Barney and the traditional small-town architecture. But, don’t be fooled. If this represents the pinnacle of traditional small town American values, then what we see portrayed in “Home” are the rat-infested ruins of those same ideals. But, like Mulder in the opening scenes, Sheriff Taylor doesn’t see the rotting corpse.

An examination of the dead baby’s body reveals the Peacock’s are somehow breeding with each other, producing offspring with serious physical and health defects.

It is at this moment in the episode where Scully and Mulder make the fateful decision to invade the Peacock’s homestead with guns drawn.

Do the Peacocks deserve to be invaded this way? There doesn’t seem to be authentic evil shrouded beneath their lifestyle choices. For certain, an investigation into the baby’s death is warranted. But, is this an FBI matter? When you consider that incest law varies from state to state–in New Jersey, for example, there are no criminal penalties if both partners are over 18–Mulder and Scully’s case looks weak. They are entering this house under false assumptions. One can argue this is an out-of-control government provoking a confrontation. No one is in danger — that is . . . until Mulder utters this single sentence:

“The mother of the dead baby is listening. She’s not only having sex with her grown boys, but she is also out to protect her children. And that threat to arrest her children leads to this :

The Peacocks remind us that baseball bats have many uses.

Under what circumstances does the government have the power to abridge the civil liberties and personal freedoms of American citizens?

The town of Home had few problems.

Until the FBI got involved.

And besides . . . .

Scully is flat wrong.

And the sheriff and his wife would be alive had the government handled this case differently.

“Home” is beautifully directed by the late Kim Manners, who packs this episode with unforgettable images, all of which contribute to the horror.

In the end, it is Mulder who finally comes to understand the Peacocks. Morally speaking, they are less like humans and more like wild animals.

And as everyone knows, if you do something stupid or dangerous to a wild animal, you might get killed. [cut to Mulder and Scully pulling a screaming Mrs. Peacock out from under the bed.] This is not their finest moment. Agent Scully is the first to realize the case against the Peacocks isn’t open and shut.

With this simple ending, the writers of this episode remind us that with in every cherished axiom — there exists the very opposite of that truth. The Peacocks may not look like your family, but the love and fierce loyalty they have for each other is not hard to understand. Besides, when was the last time you told your mother how much you love her.

There’s always tomorrow. The Peacock’s future is just an American dream away.

Ken Cancelosi is the Publisher and Co-Founder of Press Play.

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.