Welcome to Episode #85 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our eighty-fifth episode, James drags Brandon back into the sordid realm of Adrian Lyne’s erotic-thriller melodramas of the 80s & 90s, including Indecent Proposal (1993), Fatal Attraction (1987), and 9 1⁄2 Weeks (1986). Enjoy!
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-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet
If there’s anything in particular that the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child excels at, it’s in offering Oscar Winner & all-around Hollywood legged Faye Dunaway a free-range actor’s showcase. Resembling neither the restrained thrill-seeking-beauty of Bonnie & Clyde nor the detached-from-good-taste camp of Mommie Dearest, Dunaway’s lead role in Puzzle of a Downfall Child reaches for a more disorienting, heart-breaking knockout of performance. Much like Gena Rowland’s similar onscreen breakdown in A Woman Under the Influence, Dunaway’s mental unraveling in our Movie of the Month is purely a one-woman-show, fully immersing the audience in the heightened emotions & distorted perceptions of her character’s troubled psyche. One of the major factors in her mental decline are the Patriarchal pressures & abuses that arise naturally in the industry of high fashion, where she works as a model. Inspired by recorded oral history interviews with the mentally unwell fashion model Anne St. Marie (after she was used up & discarded by the fashion industry in real life), Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a scathing view of couture’s effect on the women who model its wares – especially once they need personal help or simply age out of their perceived usefulness. Dunaway’s heartbreaking performance at the center of the film would be a damning portrait of what the Patriarchy does to women’s psyches in any context, but the fashion industry setting in particular has a way of amplifying that effect to thunderous proportions.
When Dunaway returned to portraying a fashion industry artist later in the decade, her role was seemingly poised to exude more professional power & control over their own well-being. That sense of agency & solid mental health does not last long. In 1978’s The Eyes of Laura Mars, Faye Dunaway jumps the chain of command in the world of haute couture from fashion model to fashion photographer. There’s much more creative control & professional clout to be enjoyed on that side of the camera, especially in the fictional Laura Mars’s case, since she happens to be a very famous celebrity photographer at the start of promoting her first book of collected stills. In that position of power, it’s arguable that Dunaway’s protagonist even perpetuates some of the social ills that torment her character in Puzzle of a Downfall Child. Laura Mars is famous in her fictional art world for portraying misogynistic violence & extreme sexual kink in her photographs. Worse yet, a deranged serial killer has started to recreate the sordid displays in her work when killing her own fashion models, putting people like Dunaway’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child character in direct physical danger. Whereas the abuse & mania at the center of that earlier work was anchored to the recollections of a real-life artist & public figure, however, the crisis in The Eyes of Laura Mars is more of a supernatural fantasy. Dunaway’s tormented fashion photographer sees through the eyes of the killer during their slayings in uncontrollable psychic visions, directly linking the eyes of her camera to visions of real-life violence. This unreal occurrence shakes her belief that her photographs are enacting the social good of showing the world as it truly is for women by having her work directly inspire violence against women while she helplessly observes from the killer’s POV.
When initially discussing Puzzle of a Downfall Child, I mentioned that ”Between its thematic discomforts, its deliberately disorienting relationship with logic, and its gorgeous visual palette, it’s practically a couple brutal stabbings short of being a giallo film.” The Eyes of Laura Mars follows through on that train of thought, almost explicitly functioning as an American studio attempt at producing a Hollywood giallo picture. Boomer has even written about the film for this site before in reference to former Movie of the Month The Psychic, a Fulci-directed giallo thriller it shares so much DNA with they’re often accused of ripping each other off (depending on which one the audience happens to catch first). Director Irvin Kershner (of The Empire Strikes Back & RoboCop 2 notoriety) bolsters this supernatural murder mystery (originally penned by a young John Carpenter in its earliest drafts) with plenty familiar giallo touches – complete with a gloved hand protruding from offscreen to dispose of victims in Mars’s psychic visions. The fashion industry setting is a major factor in that aesthetic, as it was a world familiar to gialli at least as far back as Mario Bava’s Blood & Black Lace. What’s interesting here is the way these stylistic & hyperviolent giallo indulgences even the playing field between Dunaway’s two fashion-world archetypes. In The Eyes of Laura Mars she starts from a position of creative power far above her less protected status in Puzzle of a Downfall Child, but the violent & carelessly sexualized way women are framed (if not outright abused) in the industry eventually makes her just as vulnerable. Her own mental breakdown is more of the calm-surface panic of Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom than it is akin to Dunaway’s genuine soul-crushing illness in Puzzle of a Downfall Child (or her screeching madness in Mommie Dearest), but the misogynist ills of the couture industry had a way of breaking her protagonist down into a powerless distress in either case.
Almost inconceivably, The Eyes of Laura Mars was originally pitched as a starring vehicle for Barbara Streisand, who reportedly turned it down for the concept being “too kinky.” Having seen Babs pose in leather fetish gear for a Euro biker mag in her younger days, I’m a little baffled by that claim, but it’s probably for the best that she turned it down all the same. We still have evidence of Streisand’s involvement through the torch ballad “Prisoner” on the Laura Mars soundtrack, while also enjoying the fascinating double bill of these two Faye-Dunaway-loses-her-mind-in-giallo-adjacent-fashion-industry-narratives. Of the two pictures that cast her as a victim of fashion-industry misogyny’s strain on women’s mental health, Puzzle of a Downfall Child is both the better film and the better performance. Both titles are worthy of Dunaway’s time and energy, though, and together they conjure an imaginary crossover sequel where she plays both mad model & unhinged photographer – taking pictures of herself in an eternal loop of giallo-flavored mania.
For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our exploration of The Neon Demon‘s subversion of its traditional power dynamics, and last week’s look at director Jerry Schatzberg’s relationship with reality in his early work.
-Brandon Ledet
There’s no better way to convey how divisive of a film In Fabric is than to recount an utterly mortifying social confrontation I had while watching it. Sometime during the first act of our Overlook Film Fest screening of the picture, a woman leaned over to scold me for laughing at its absurdity. She explained that what we were watching was “not a comedy” and that my amusement was ruining her own experience of the film. The general subjectivity of humor aside, I was a little shocked that someone could be taking this giallo pastiche about a killer dress 100% seriously. Even with time, as the humor of the picture became more blatant & undeniable, my finger-wagging nemesis ended up laughing through much of the absurdity on display. I do somewhat understand where she was coming from in her initial annoyance with my laughter, though. In Fabric is a gorgeous, pristinely crafted object on a pure sensory level. Set in a high-end department store (of the damned) in 1980s London, the film’s prêt-à-porter fashion and sexually arranged mannequins cheekily poke fun at the pretentions of European arthouse horrors of yesteryear, while also genuinely indulging in the sensory pleasures therein. It may be a high-fashion variation on killer-object horrors like Velvet Buzzsaw, Maximum Overdrive, and Death Bed: The Bed that Eats, but it presents its murderous dress and the department store weirdos who worship it in a genuinely chilling arthouse horror context. A lot of my personal amusement with In Fabric derived from that tension between form and content; it’s a beautiful arthouse horror film about a demonically possessed dress that flies through the air to kill its cursed victims. I do contend that the film is openly joking throughout in its absurdism, though; it just apparently takes a particular comedic temperament to immediately lock into its humor.
On a practical level, In Fabric essentially functions as a horror anthology. We watch in abject terror (or delirious amusement) as a cursed red cocktail dress drifts through the lives of several unwitting, unlucky victims. Like the magical Traveling Pants of the early aughts, this dress mysteriously conforms to the size & body type of each poor soul who dares wear it. It also marks each victim with an identical rash on their chests, then systematically ruins their work & homelives until the dress is all they have left. The dress doesn’t only cause damage through curses & misfortunes. It mangles washing machines, causes car accidents, and flies through the night like a vampiric ghoul – all with sentient intent. The only constant in these crimes of fashion is a network of Nosferatu-type department store employees who seemingly worship the murderous dress as their Dark Lord. These saleswomen and their ghoulish manager also worship the smooth plastic crotches of their store mannequins, which they pay tribute to in appreciative cunnilingual rituals. Customers are lured to the store with Tim & Eric-style television ads for a seemingly never-ending sale. Once inside, they are seduced in absurdly purple dialogue from the demonic saleswomen, who coax them into purchasing their doom. Everything in In Fabric is deliriously overwritten. Saleswomen pontificate on the philosophy of dress sizes as if they were discussing Sartre. The department store doesn’t have a dressing room; it has a Transformation Sphere (which looks & functions exactly like a dressing room). The soundtrack is provided by a maybe-fictional band called Cavern of Anti-Matter. The film is wholly committed to over-the-top excess in every frame & decision, whether it’s indulging in an artsy collage of vintage fashion catalog advertisements or deploying a killer dress to dispose of a goofball victim entirely unaware of the occultist backstory of their sartorial selections. It’s both funny and chilling, beautiful and ludicrous. It’s perfect, as long as you can tune into its left-of-the-dial demonic frequency.
Director Peter Strickland has pulled off this same balancing act between sensual art & sly humor before in Berberian Sound Studio & The Duke of Burgundy, but I personally believe In Fabric to be his most outright silly film to date. If you want to take the film 100% seriously, it leaves you a lot of room to do so, especially in the way it peeks in on fetishistic sex through bedroom keyholes and the way it uses its genre film premise to extensively discuss the politics of labor & corporate management. I don’t believe you’re fully appreciating what the film has to offer, though, if you don’t allow to yourself to be chilled by its arthouse scares and tickled by its over-the-top camp. I wonder if the woman who sternly shushed me for laughing in the first act enjoyed the picture as much as I did, or if its ultimate veer into full-blown silliness was a disappointment for her. Personally, I don’t think its giallo-flavored sexuality or labor-relations philosophy would’ve shined quite as vividly if the camp & excess weren’t there to provide contrast. I loved In Fabric for all its lush sensory pleasures, old-school horror creep-outs, and delirious indulgences in campy absurdism – while I can also see any one of those elements detracting from someone else’s enjoyment, depending on their own expectations & default sensibilities.
-Brandon Ledet
Fresh out of a delightful mid-day screening of One Cut of the Dead at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I took a leisurely stroll down a hellishly hot Decatur Street to catch the next film on the docket, only to find myself unintentionally trailing that film’s star. Looking positively adorable in some crisp denim overalls and a patterned button-up, Elijah Wood was playing tourist along the riverside tchotchke shops on his way to the Come to Daddy Q&A. He was travelling in my exact path to Sidney’s Liquor Store, where I was headed to pick up some cold beverages to enjoy in Jackson Square before the screening. I felt like a total creep on that walk, entirely too aware of this oblivious stranger strolling just a block ahead of me, someone who probably spends way too much of their life wondering who’s looking at them and why. Luckily, the tables were eventually turned on me, as the film Elijah Wood was in town to promote was far creepier & more disturbing than any awkward eye contact I might have conveyed on that walk down Decatur. Despite his adorable exterior & chipper demeanor, Wood has a deeply fucked-up sense of humor and appreciation of the macabre – which is a major factor in why he’s so lovable.
Elijah Wood stars in Come to Daddy as a cowardly hipster & a shameless liar who responds to a reconciliation letter from a deadbeat dad who abandoned his family decades ago. The horrifically mismatched pair, drunken brute father & effetely timid son, enjoy an intimate family reunion in an isolated home on the California coast. It does not go well. The decrepit bully of a father mocks every physical & verbal communication his big-city hipster offspring dares to offer, bringing their tension to a point where its only possible outcome is physical violence. Then, just as the tragically mismatched men are about to come to blows, the film shifts the intimate dynamic of what we’re watching into a much more sprawling, chaotic kind of mayhem. It would be criminal to spoil exactly how the film unfolds after that first act, but I can at least say that its twisted humor & unrelenting brutality only become more severe as it veers into flashes of torture porn, slapstick gore, deep sexual discomfort, and all other kinds of fucked up Freudian delights. As Elijah Wood’s cowardly protagonist sinks further in over his head in sinewy ultraviolence, the picture begins to play like a farcical mutation of a Jeremy Saulnier picture – not unlike Wood’s recent turn in I Don’t Feel at Home in this World Anymore, just creepier.
As amusingly weaselly as Elijah Wood is in the central role, the real star of the picture might be screenwriter Toby Harvard, who also penned The Greasy Strangler. Harvard brings the same aggressive, repetitive anti-humor and nightmarishly greasy Daddy Issues that fueled The Greasy Strangler to this more reality-bound picture. It’s not enough that the hipster’s drunkard father calls his son a “rat fucker.” He has to elaborate that his son “stuffs rats up his cunt” and that when he dies they’ll find “rat skeletons in his pelvic area, where his cunt used to be.” After the director of The Greasy Strangler floundered without Harvard in his own follow-up, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn, I’m starting to think Harvard is the name Greaseheads should be keeping their eye on. Elijah Wood has been making a career out of funding & promoting grotesque art projects from folks like Harvard in recent years – producing titles like The Greasy Strangler, Mandy, The Boy, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. As playfully disturbing as his tastes continually prove themselves to be, he mostly just seems like a wholesome horror nerd who loves to make fucked-up moves with his friends. His presence in horror nerd spaces like Overlook Film Fest are entirely appropriate & expected; we just have to make sure to not ruin his good time by awkwardly trailing him down the street. We need him out there to raise funding for fucked-up, greasy oddities like Come to Daddy, so we better not scare him off.
-Brandon Ledet
I closed out my experience at the Overlook Film Festival this year the exact way I started it: with a comedy that wasn’t at all funny. Just like with my opening night selection, Porno, I sat through much of Satanic Panic in the festival’s closing hours not laughing at any of the film’s proper Jokes but being amused by the absurdist excess of the sex & violence onscreen anyway. Humor is entirely subjective, as I learned a day prior when a total stranger scolded me for laughing during Peter Strickland’s killer-dress giallo pastiche In Fabric because it is “not a comedy” (hard disagree), so I’m sure this splatter comedy has a core demographic of genre nerds out there who are going to slurp up its cutesy occultist humor like so much blood & viscera. For the rest of us, the film is at least committed to exploiting the full absurdist potential of its sex & violence, perhaps the two most reliable sources of entertainment in the history of commercial art.
This film picks up where Rosemary’s Baby leaves off. Upwardly mobile suburbanite aristocrats gather in a beige McMansion to worship Satan as their Dark Lord. Their ritual du jour involves summoning the demon Baphomet to impregnate a sacrificial virgin, providing a physical form for an Evil deity. Our POV character is the virgin sacrifice in peril – a pizza delivery driver who dares speak up when the cult stiffs her on her tip, only for them to single her out for their depraved ceremony of untold horrors. Most of the film details her fight for survival over the course of a single night as she must first accept that witchcraft is real, then adapt to overthrow the black magic Satanists who want to destroy her with it. Luckily, her blue-collar pedigree has better prepared for the fight than the pampered suburbanites that surround her, whether or not they have all the forces of Hell to summon for backup.
In its least convincing moments Satanic Panic attempts a weirdly earnest emotional throughline about personal courage & survivor’s guilt. Its Society-esque thematic territory in which the Rich are an evil force that are actively trying to kill us is much more successful, but still a little hollow. Mostly, the plot is a thin excuse to juxtapose a wholesome cutie who loves fuzzy bunnies with the blood-soaked horrors of Satanic worship. It’s a relatively harmless source of humor (excusing a rape joke or two, re: preemptively losing her virginity), but also not a particularly novel or clever one. For me, the film worked best when the humanity of its characters was forgotten entirely in pursuit of sexual, gory mayhem: strap-on “killdo” drills, poisoned children, fisted neck wounds, Cronenberigan anus monsters, blood-soaked occultist orgies, etc. It may not be the pinnacle of joke writing or emotional drama, but Satanic Panic at least knows how to deliver the goods when it comes to over-the-top ultraviolence & softcore sexual mania.
From a production level standpoint, this should’ve been able to accomplish much more than what Porno pulled off. While that film was a more amateur affair populated by unfamiliar faces and limited to just a few locations, this is a Fangoria-supported debut feature for Horror Industry notable Chelsea Stardust and features supporting performances from Rebecca Romjin, Jerry O’Connell, and Arden Myrin among its suburbanite Satanists. It’s far from a major studio production, but the fact that it amounts to the same general effect of something as cheap as Porno can’t be a good sign. Because both of those titles were able to earn their place on the schedule for the same generally well-curated horror festival, and both screenings were met with uproarious laughter from plenty of genre nerds besides me, I assume there are many people out there who will find Satanic Panic hi-larious, whether or not they would enjoy it more than Porno. Admittedly, I did eventually have fun with its commitment to bloodlust & excess myself, but I also walked away a lot more cautious about making time for these unvetted splatter comedies the next time I’m prioritizing what to see at a genre film festival. I now know that they’re a type, and not necessarily my type.
-Brandon Ledet
Is there such a thing as low-key camp or subtly played melodrama? Are those descriptors too oxymoronic to effectively describe anything? I’m picturing the “silent runners” window blinds subplot of Twin Peaks, Laura Dern’s monologue about the robins in Blue Velvet, the thin barrier between humor & heartbreak in The Elephant Man. Basically, anytime a David Lynch movie makes you laugh but you can’t pinpoint exactly why. The D.I.Y. teen mystery Knives & Skin operates entirely within this difficult-to-define subtle melodrama paradigm, somehow sustaining the quiet, off-putting humor of the silent runners gag for its entire runtime. It filters the Lynch Lite teen melodrama of Riverdale through a hallucinatory overdose of cough medicine, so that it sticks with you only as a half-remembered dream. You can recall laughing, but you’re not entirely sure why, or whether that was even its desired effect.
Much like Twin Peaks, the premise of Knives & Skin concerns the disappearance and possible murder of small-town teen Carolyn Harper, whose sudden absence shakes the foundations of her community. Unlike Twin Peaks, the film has very little interest in building mystery or menace around that disappearance. We all know exactly what happened to Carolyn Danvers & who was involved. The only mystique at play is in puzzling our way through other characters’ erratic expressions of grief in the weeks following the incident. If your favorite touches to Twin Peaks were the silent runners or the creamed corn or the fish in the percolator or Leland singing “Mairzy Doats,” you’re likely to be tickled by the quietly absurdist character quirks that run throughout Knives & Skin. Mothers dress in their daughters’ clothes and wander around wielding giant bread knives in a total daze; birthday clowns attentively perform cunnilingus full make-up; high school Beaver mascots trade mixtapes to cheerleaders in exchange for alcohol-soaked tampons. It’s a deceptively wild, over-the-top film, considering how much of it is communicated in hushed, sleepy tones.
Since it isn’t especially invested in its own central mystery and filters everything though a lethargic camp remove, this is a film that lives & dies by its aesthetic. There were some audible grumblings from the more macho end of our Overlook Film Festival audience about how it was the worst film they’ve ever seen at the fest, but I also heard other people say it was their favorite feature they saw all weekend. That harsh divide makes total sense. This is not crafted to satisfy your traditional Horror Bro. It feels like a murder mystery novel that was scribbled into a bejeweled Trapper Keeper with scented gel pens. Every single frame is bathed in bisexual crosslighting. The few possessions Carolyn Danvers leaves behind magically glow like fluorescent highlighters. Her classmates often breaks into acapella choir arrangements of 80s pop songs like “Our Lips are Sealed” and “Blue Monday.” It’s a gloomy, but aggressively femme teen aesthetic, as if Lost River were made by Ryan Gosling’s adoring superfans instead of the heartthrob himself.
I’m not exactly sure what Knives & Skin is trying to accomplish. In brief flashes it discusses parental grief, sex work, mental illness, enthusiastic consent, and how talented clowns are at giving head, but never with anything clear or nuanced to say. I still very much appreciated it as a beautiful, delirious slow-drift though a Teen Lynch aesthetic, though, especially once I realized how much it was antagonizing the more macho end of the room. I’m still not confident in saying there is such a thing as low-key camp or subtle melodrama, but if they do exist this movie is steeped in them – like so many alcohol-soaked tampons.
-Brandon Ledet
Here are the few movies we’re most excited about that are screening in New Orleans this week, including a couple verified classics and some brand new genre trash.
Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)
Child’s Play (2019) – I’m not entirely sold on the new CG design for Chucky himself and there’s almost no chance it’ll compare to the best of its franchise (1990’s Child’s Play 2, obviously), but this big-budget remake at least tries something new in updating the evil doll by connecting him to automated future-tech like drones & home security systems. Plus, Audrey Plaza’s there so it can’t be all bad.
The Dead Don’t Die – Jim Jarmusch’s latest is disguised as a goofball horror comedy about a zombie invasion but is reported in its early reviews to be yet another low-key, meandering indie dramedy from a director who’s built an entire career off just that. There’s no telling whether Jarmusch’s low-stakes, low-effort schtick will be charming here (as it was in Down by Law) or painfully pointless (as it was in Coffee and Cigarettes), but it’s also impossible to deny the appeal of a zomcom with a cast this stacked: Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny, Carol Kane, Tom Waits, Iggy Pop, the RZA, Selena Gomez, etc.. etc., etc.
Movies We’ve Already Enjoyed
Rear Window (1954) – An intense, perversely funny Hitchcock thriller about a disabled man (Jimmy Stewart) who can only watch in horror as he pieces together the mysterious murder of a neighbor by her traveling salesman husband. Screening as part of The Prytania’s Classic Movies series on Sunday 6/23 and Wednesday 6/26.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) – A Tennessee Williams stage adaptation (featuring performances from Paul Newman & Elizabeth Taylor) just boiling over with alcoholic fury, repressed homosexuality, and intense Mississippi heat. Enjoy it out in the authentic Southern humidity on the roof of the Catahoula Hotel Wednesday 6/26.
-Brandon Ledet
Our current Movie of the Month, the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child, has a very curious relationship with reality. Its entire narrative about a young fashion model (Faye Dunaway) who’s chewed up & spit out by her industry is filtered through its protagonist’s distorted perception of real-life events. There’s a dissociative effect between the audio of Dunaway’s narration and the logic of the events depicted onscreen, to the point where she becomes entirely unreliable for parsing out what’s “true” and what’s fantasy. This is largely because the Patriarchal pressures from her personal & professional life drive her to a complete psychological break, so that she can’t even trust her own recollection of her life’s events. As subjective as her memories are and as experimental as the film can be on a sensory level while expressing that unease with Truth, however, Puzzle of a Downfall Child still somewhat traffics in verisimilitude. The original inspiration for the film was a series of interviews director Jerry Schatzberg recorded on reel to reel tapes with fashion model Anne St. Marie, who he had formerly collaborated with as a photographer. Screenwriter Carol Eastman then reinterpreted those interviews into the semi-fictionalized narrative seen in the film, so it’s difficult to determine how much of the final product is true to St. Marie’s version of the real-life events without studying her recorded interviews for comparison. So, then, we’re left with a film that’s both true & untrue, fact & fiction, with an undeterminable balance between reality & madness.
Although Schatzberg’s follow-up feature, The Panic in Needle Park, didn’t derive from a real-life oral history like his debut, it seemed much more invested in conveying unmitigated Truth in its own narrative. The Panic in Needle Park steps back from the subjective relationship with reality Puzzle of Downfall Child explores by filtering the real world through the distorted perceptions of Anne St. Marie. Featuring a cowriting credit from journalist Joan Didion, The Panic in Needle Park is more of an intellectually-distanced docudrama than its predecessor, an experiment in the cinema verité style of its 1970s era. Its central tragic romance (performed by Kitty Winn & first-time lead Al Pacino with great dramatic weight) is entirely a work of fiction, but the film strives to remain honest to the real-world subculture & locales it depicts in all other ways. The ”Needle Park” of the film’s title is an actual location in NYC, known officially as Sherman Square at Broadway & 72nd street. In the film’s era, that small park had become a notorious haven for heroin addicts, and Schatzberg make a point to stage large portions of its action on-location there, including many real-life junkies & hangabouts among its extras. Released the same year as The French Connection, The Panic in Needle Park is cited as the first mainstream film to document the real-life preparation & injection of heroin on the big screen – trivia that hints to how honest & raw Schatzberg was hoping the film would come across, depicting real-life junkies as they lived. Whereas Puzzle of a Downfall Child experiments in replicating the dreamlike state of a psychological break, The Panic in Needle Park took pride in supposedly presenting the tragedy & grime of the real word as it truly was. Its own narrative was entirely a fictional creation (based mostly on a novel by James Mills), but it somehow seems less affected by subjective interpretation of the truth.
For all practical purposes, The Panic in Needle Park feels less like a shift away from the subjectivity of Puzzle of a Downfall Child for Schatzberg than it does a direct response to the melodramatic youth-culture romance of Love Story, released just a year prior. Love Story’s own depiction of a doomed young couple’s tragic downfall maintains a certain romantic detachment in the way of teen-marketed melodrama. The Panic in Needle Park, by contrast, feels entirely disinterested in appealing to anyone. Its story of a young small-time heroin dealer who falls in love with a homeless woman and ruins her life with addiction and subsequent survival-based sex work is devoid of romantic escapism. It’s brutally honest & relentlessly grim, only truly worth its discomfort if you’re already on the hook for its era of cinema verité morbidness. The attention to detail it pursues in recreating authentic-looking track marks via Flexible Collodian effects and then covering them up with long-sleeve shirts at the height of summer is almost perversely fixated on “reality.” Its title even refers to a real-life phenomenon that occurs within junkie communities: a “panic” of users turning on each other when supply is low. The theft, prostitution, ratting to cops, jailtime, and overdoses that define a junkie scene in the middle of a panic guide the ups & downs of this film’s tragic couple, leaving very little room for joys or victories, no matter how brief. Even the film’s casting of then-unknown Al Pacino in the central role can be read as an attempt at conveying realism in all things, as the much more famous Jim Morrison was initially considered for the role. Even as a fictional romance, The Panic in Needle Park is absolutely fixated on staying true to reality, and its interpretation of reality is that it is nothing but death & misery.
Because Schatzberg seems to equate reality to relentless misery, I can at least report that Puzzle of a Downfall Child’s looser relationship with verisimilitude is somewhat easier to digest than The Panic in Needle Park’s cinema verité morbidness. However, the Faye Dunaway fashion industry drama does often hit equally grim notes in its own tragic downfall story, especially when you keep in mind that it was inspired by a real-life fashion model’s severe struggles with mental illness. I’d also argue that it probably gets to a larger truth about the inner life of woman in that model’s position than The Panic in Needle Park does about the inner lives of heroin addicts, since its immersion in her subjective interpretation of reality is much more personal & distinct that the journalistic distance of that latter work. In either case, Schatzberg’s earliest films both experiment with an interesting balance between truth & fiction, and both likely deserve to be represented more often in critical discussion of the auteur boom of the early 1970s.
For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1970 mental breakdown drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last weeks look at The Neon Demon‘s subversion of its traditional power dynamics.
-Brandon Ledet
I should have known better than to venture out to the theater for the Elton John biopic Rocketman. I was at least smart enough to skip last year’s big-deal musical biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, even before I knew it had a notorious rapist attached as its official credited director. The uncredited director who was tasked to save that drowning production (when Bryan Singer was rightly booted from it), Dexter Fletcher, promised a little more cohesion & stage-musical fantasy in this follow-up, but everything else about Rocketman looked just as cheesy & false as Rhapsody. If I’m being totally honest, the only real reason I was curious about Rocketman was the news reports after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, which slated it as the fist-ever major studio Hollywood production to feature onscreen gay sex. I had to see (and support) that decades-late “achievement” for myself, but it put a lot of unfair pressure on the film to, em, perform in that one specific way, setting me up for disappointment before frame one. Very few people are wholly successful in their first full-on gay sex encounter, so I’m not sure why I expected Hollywood to be any different.
Rocketman was only willing to give me wholesome showtunes gay when the material at hand clearly called for drunken, sweaty dive bar gay. The framing device of this post-Walk Hard biopic is an AA meeting where Elton John looks back on his life in sappy, musical flashbacks while gradually stripping off a gorgeous bejeweled-devil stage costume to reveal the vulnerable man underneath. His narration continually reassures the audience that his life was ravaged by sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, but everything we see onscreen is musical theatre kids playing dress-up in squeaky clean sound stage environments. Taron Egerton does a decent-enough job embodying Elton John both onstage & off, except that his vocal performance is more Broadway musical than coke-addled rock ‘n roll. As I should have expected, the onscreen gay sex early reports promised is similarly neutered. The most intimate, extensive scene of two men bonin’ is accompanied by the least sensual Gospel soundtrack imaginable and quickly averts its eyes just when the room is steaming up. Later, an expressive, Old Hollywood musical staging of a pansexual orgy is intercut with childhood memories & returns to the AA frame story, zapping the moment of any potential titillation. Elton John reports in the picture that he “fucked everything that moved,” “abused every drug there is,” and “enjoyed every minute of it,” but it all amounts to the effect of a “Footage Not Found” title card, a classic case of telling-not-showing.
That’s not to say there’s no fun to be found here. Bryce Dallas Howard is an unexpected hoot in a career-high role as John’s cruel alcoholic-housewife mother, essentially a half-speed Mommie Dearest drag routine sponsored by Quaaludes. There are also a few Baz Luhrmann-esque poetic breaks from reality among the musical numbers, the highlight being a moment of communal levitation at John’s first American concert. Even those moments are hindered by Fletcher making the safest choices possible, though. For instance, when John announces “For my next trick, I’m going to kill myself,” and overdoses at the bottom of a swimming pool, he’s greeted there by a childhood version of himself singing “Rocketman” – not the obvious, more daring choice of “I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself.” Other sordid, sweaty rock ‘n roll numbers like “Dirty Little Girl” & “Sweet Painted Lady” are missing in favor of safe Greatest Hits tracks, which are further softened with musical theatre, Bollywood dance homage, and – I swear to God this is true – second-wave ska. Elton John’s life story is honestly not all that interesting. He’s a blue-collar kid who worked hard to develop his talent, did a few too many drugs when he first got famous, and is now happily married with kids and a swelling bank account. When you remove the sweaty, hedonistic danger of the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll from that template there isn’t much left worth an audience’s time. I didn’t show up to celebrate a millionaire’s (albeit admirable) success in sobriety; I showed up for gay sex & fabulous costumes – of which only the latter satisfies.
-Brandon Ledet
Director Michael Dougherty has gradually made a name for himself in genre nerd circles over the past decade with just three feature films. I can say without a doubt that his biggest budget, highest profile release is the worst of the bunch so far. Lacking the perversely dark humor of his cult classic horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat and the delirious camp of his Christmastime fairy tale Krampus, Godzilla: King of the Monsters displays none of the personality or wit that has earned him goodwill among horror aficionados over the years. Even as Dougherty’s least interesting release to date, however, I still found King of the Monsters to be entraining enough as a big-budget monster flick on its own terms. In fact, I’d even argue that it’s the best entry in its kaiju-revival franchise’s recent run, which began with Gareth Edwards’s “post-human” blockbuster Godzilla in 2014 and continued with the Vietnam War Movie parody Kong: Skull Island in 2016. Whereas Edwards’s Godzilla was punishingly dour & sidelined its own titular monster until the last minute and Skull Island indulged in frequent but short bursts of monster action with no dramatic heft to them at all, Dougherty’s follow-up finds a nice balance between the two approaches. He may have only stumbled into a decent-enough monster movie through the Goldilocks method of finding the perfect temperature for porridge that was already made before he arrived, but hopefully that accidental success will help fund more interesting projects from him in the future – like a Trick ‘r Treat 2.
The standard complaint for all modern Godzilla moves is that they don’t feature nearly enough screentime for Godzilla. It’s as if people are misremembering early entries in the franchise as being all-out monster action from start to end (which they never were). There is plenty else to complain about in King of the Monsters, but I feel like balancing screentime between monster action and human drama is the one thing the film happened to get right. It’s a pretty major detail to nail, at least, and a significant factor in why the film is not a total waste. Dougherty & company take a Pokémon-type approach here in collecting all our favorite skyscraper-scale yokai for lengthy onscreen battles that are only occasionally interrupted by the tedious humans who witness them. Relying on Skull Island & the 2014 Godzilla to justify the indulgence, the film operates in a world where there are seventeen (and counting) kaiju positioned all over the globe, hibernating until it is their turn to battle for our entertainment. Mothra gets an armored makeover, but is still allowed to be a majestic beauty; Rodan looks like a flaming update to the goofball vulture from The Giant Claw; Ghidorah is bathed in a metal-as-fuck swirl of dark clouds & lighting, so that every frame where he’s featured could pass as an 80s-thrash album cover. It almost doesn’t matter how often Godzilla himself appears on the screen, since he has plenty company amongst his loyal (and disloyal) monster subjects. The bare minimum a Godzilla movie must achieve to be worthwhile is striking a proper balance between its human and giant-monster characters. King of the of the Monsters excels only at that singular metric, but the accomplishment is enough to allow it to skate by elsewhere.
I have nothing especially urgent to say about the film’s human characters or its themes of nuclear pollution, since every detail outside the monster action is so thin & half-hearted that it immediately slips through your fingers. From a movie industry standpoint, I suppose it’s interesting that any film with a cast this saturated with familiar faces would’ve been an automatic box office smash in the 90s blockbuster days of megaproducers like Jerry Bruckheimer & Michael Bay. If nothing else, central actors from two of the most widely obsessed-over television shows of the decade (Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things & Charles Dance from Game of Thrones) star in substantial roles and were featured heavily in the film’s advertisement but failed to draw in wide audiences in droves. I suppose you could use that failing as evidence that star power no longer means anything in Hollywood filmmaking, but the truth is that it’s never meant anything in Godzilla films in particular. This franchise lives & dies by the quality & frequency of its monster action, and King of the Monsters tests the limits of that dictum by wasting zero effort on anything else besides collecting various kaiju & parading them around for our entertainment. I had the same reaction gazing at these gigantic, destructive creatures as I did watching the parade of pint-sized cuties in Detective Pikachu – mild, adequate amusement. The only difference is that I’d describe the monsters here as “badass” instead of “adorable,” give or take a Rodan. It’s understandable to want something more from Michael Dougherty after the precedent he set with his two previous, superior films, but I also don’t want to downplay how difficult it is to calculate the exact right amount of kaiju action to include in your kaiju film. No matter what, people will always complain that there wasn’t enough, but I do think King of the Monsters got it right.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 