Lagniappe Podcast: Antiviral (2012)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Brandon Cronenberg’s debut sci-fi horror grossout Antiviral (2012), a dystopian satire about the commodity of celebrity illness.

00:00 Welcome

06:30 Web of Death
08:50 The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
12:15 Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023)
21:29 Infinity Pool (2023)
28:24 Knock at the Cabin (2023)
36:43 Missing (2023)
42:55 Lost Junction (2003)

44:57 Antiviral (2012)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023)

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Ten years ago, my friend Alicia and I walked into the Cinemark at Citiplace in Baton Rouge with a lot of excited middle-aged women to see Magic Mike, the then-new film directed by beloved (by us anyway) BR film icon Steven Soderbergh. Magic Mike had largely been marketed as an upbeat romcom about a hot dude raising money to start his own business by working as a male stripper. In the trailer, which starts out pretending that the film is about Channing Tatum as a cop before revealing his true profession, there’s a very 2012 needle-drop of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and some romantic tension with romantic lead Cody Horn that would lead you to assume that you’re in for a much different kind of film than the one that hit theaters lo these many years ago. The advertising focused on star power — not so much of Tatum himself but of his taut body and the promise of a tantalizing thrill ride that still featured a traditional “Guy wants more from life, girl wants him but doesn’t know if she can handle his past” plot structure. You know, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation but with a lot more dry humping.

That wasn’t the movie that we got that day. Instead, Magic Mike was kind of Diet Cola Boogie Nights, which is strange considering that we already had 54. The 2012 movie is one that spends most of its first half focused on Alex Pettyfer’s newcomer character and his introduction to the world of male stripping, and his narratively inevitable fall into the sex/drugs/rock’n’roll dark side of that lifestyle, while Tatum’s Mike is very focused on finding a way to grind—pun intended—-at whatever comes his way until he manages to rise above his current economic class. There are plenty of sexy dances, but they’re shot with a bit of a remove, and so what we’re left with is a tonal mishmash of cheesy rom-com dialogue, writhing torsos, and a storyline about drugs that doesn’t moralize further than “Some people can handle them better than others.” I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that it wasn’t what I was expecting or what I wanted, and that the deluge of Baton Rouge moms who walked out of that screening also seemed to think that something different was supposed to have happened in that multiplex that day. 

Brandon is a big fan of the first follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, which eschews the first film’s director and direction, subbing in Gregory Jacobs for Soderbergh and, as Brandon wrote, “ditching its predecessor’s despondent character study in favor of an aging-boy-band-goes-on-a-road-trip slapstick comedy.” I understand the appeal, and I don’t think it was a bad idea to make a sequel that followed through on the unfulfilled promise of the first film’s marketing and also give it a lighter, fluffier narrative, and I find Donald Glover to be a welcome addition in anything that I’m watching, but it still didn’t connect with me. The first film purposely contrasted the dour realities of living under a broken economic system and the ways that people learn to cope inside of them with the larger-than-life stagebound fantasies that the boys got to portray. In XXL, the plot gets tiny little conflict injections as infrequently as narrative requirements allow while mostly taking the form of a goofy picaresque that mostly existed to hang strip sequences upon, and while I certainly understand the appeal, I just don’t connect. 

There was a moment in the screening of Magic Mike’s Last Dance when I turned to my friend who had accompanied me and asked: “How is this the best one?” And it’s not just better than the others (in my opinion), it’s actually great. 

This time around, we’ve got a narrator, and for reasons that don’t come into focus until the end of the first act, she’s young and has a British accent, and she’s telling the story of our old friend Mike Lane to catch us up on what’s happened in the intervening years. Mike’s furniture store folded during COVID, and he broke up with the woman he was presumed to have a happy ending with at the conclusion of XXL. Now he’s back to doing gig catering work, and he still hasn’t managed to claw his way out of his economic situation. While bartending at a charity event hosted by Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (Salma Hayek), who is recently separated from her media empire heir husband due to his infidelity, Mike is recognized by one of Max’s lawyers, who also happened to be one of the sorority girls from the party in the first film. To cheer up her boss, she recommends that Max invite Mike to give her a private dance, which he does after very little convincing. When the two wake up together the next morning, Max offers Mike a mysterious job, but he has to fly with her to London immediately. Once there, he meets her daughter—and our narrator—Zadie (Jemelia George) and their butler Victor (Ayub Khan Din), neither of whom approve of what Max is up to or, by extension, Mike’s presence. 

Max tasks Mike with a challenge: she owns a theater that was in her husband’s family for generations, and she’ll give him $60,000 for one month’s work of “redeveloping” the play that is currently being performed there. It’s a dreary-looking love triangle Victorian-era period piece called Isabel Ascendant that is considered old-fashioned and misogynistic even in-universe, and Max wants Mike to use his supposed knowledge of how to give women what they want to turn the play into an erotic, hip-thrusting masterpiece. This means firing the play’s director and, as a quirk of actors’ union labor laws, keeping on the actress playing the titular Isabel, Hannah (Juliette Motamed), who turns out to be as free of spirit as Isabel was repressed. With only three weeks until the curtain rises, Max and Mike have to recruit sexy dancers from all over Europe to fill out the ensemble while also dodging the various obstacles thrown in their way by Max’s soon-to-be-ex-husband. 

When I texted Brandon about doing coverage for this movie after I walked out of the theater, I was shocked to learn from him that it has such mixed reviews, but I think I have to chalk that up to … let’s politely call it “demographics.” Magic Mike wasn’t what it purported to be, sure, but it also wasn’t much of a fantasy either. Cody Horn is a gorgeous woman, but she’s not one with whom the presumed target audience of this kind of movie can readily identify. She’s hot, she looks great in her bikini, and she’s effortlessly cool. The same could be said of Amber Heard in XXL, and in neither movie is there ever any doubt about how the film will end and thus there are no stakes in those relationships, rendering them flat. Salma Hayek is also a gorgeous woman, and although she doesn’t look it, she’s 56, a full 14 years older than Tatum, and here she’s playing a woman with an ungodly amount of capital. I’m sure it’s not very common for someone’s wildest dreams to be about their partner cheating with their assistant, but there’s a lot to be said for the power fantasy of being a powerful older woman who can hire a maturing stud to create the ultimate sexy stage experience. Last Dance understands that better than the other two, and even though we know that the show will eventually have to go on, even if Max is rolling around in her overstuffed down comforters in a state of depression because it seems like her ex-husband has “won.” It’s called “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.” We know there’s going to be a big sexy revue at the end (and boy howdy is there). 

There’s a lot to really enjoy here. No one is more surprised than I am at how much I was won over by the ongoing subplot of Zadie and Victor. It would be so easy that it would almost be cheating to have Victor secretly be in love with his employer like something out of a Merchant-Ivory production, but there’s none of that nonsense here. I normally find precocious children to be grating and cloying in these movies, but it’s actually rather fun to watch Zadie have to occasionally step up and parent her mother as she goes through hard times, and for Victor to act in an unofficial grandfatherly capacity to get her back up to snuff. It’s not the stuff of Man Booker prizes—Zadie gets her mother out of the house and to the theatre for the finale of the film by finally addressing her as “Mum” instead of using her first name, which is a device that’s older than the hills—but it’s engaging in a way that I wasn’t really expecting for the third trip to this particular well. Hannah’s emceeing of the event is a hell of a lot of fun, and Motamed is a magnetic presence who leaves an impression on the viewer, standing out in a parade of male flesh that could easily wash her out of the mind completely, but she remains firmly rooted. 

In another way of fulfilling the fantasy, we the audience get to sit in on and attend the auditions for the revamped Isabel Ascendant and see all of the dancers get selected for their various individual talents: breakdancing, contortion, modern dance, ballet, and, of course, good ol’ fashioned stripping. It’s a fun montage, but also because it’s a montage, we never have to learn any names or have to try and keep track of them and their individual narratives as we were expected to in the previous films. As Peter, Bjorn, and John sang so long ago, “Flesh is flesh,” and that’s all that there is to it. All we need to worry about is having a good time, and although I’m sure that theatre reeked just as much of creatine farts as the back of the van in XXL, there’s something very classy and fun about it. As promised, the film does end with Magic Mike’s last dance, and it’s truly stunning, a demonstration that as much as mainstream critics like to tease Tatum, he is an amazing dancer who’s lithe and fluid in a way that belies his athletic build and his himbo public persona. The stakes are never too high or too low in the narrative, and the film rides that sweet spot for all that it’s worth, ensuring that this series goes out on a high note. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Missing (2023)

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When I think of movie sequels that best their originals, what come to mind are the ones that go bigger, broader, and cartoonishly extreme, exploding the comparatively timid premises of their source texts – titles like Gremlins 2, Ghoulies 2, Child’s Play 2, Paddington 2, Batman Returns, and Magic Mike XXL.  In all of those examples, though, I still like the original films that preceded them, which is more than I can say for the volatile, twisty screenlife thriller Missing.  Missing is a spin-off sequel to one of my least favorite entries in the screenlife genre, Searching (a film that I should note Britnee reviewed very positively for this site back in 2018).  Searching wasn’t embarrassing in the way that lower-budget screenlife schlock like Safer at Home and Untitled Horror Movie can be, but I still resented it for cleaning up a trashy genre I love for its illogical technophobic fearmongering by turning it into safe, This Is Us-style melodrama.  Laptop-POV thrillers should prey on the eeriness of life on the internet, not act as tech-friendly advertisements that constantly reassure parents their terminally online children are actually doing okay.  It was basically Unfriended for the corniest of suburbanites, a perspective I was happy to see dropped in its much meaner, trashier sequel.

Missing improves on the Searching formula in practically every way, most of all in how it maintains a healthy paranoia around modern tech even while explaining why it’s useful (and in how it’s willing to put its characters in actual, sustained danger instead of just pretending to).  Storm Reid stars as the mouse-clicking, keyboard clacking internet detective du jour, a teenager who investigates the sudden disappearance of her mother—lost while vacationing in Colombia—from her laptop control room in California.  Missing‘s tone echoes the hokey schmaltz of Searching‘s parent-child melodrama, scoring its petty mother-daughter tensions with heart-tugging piano flourishes you’d expect to hear in an engagement ring jewelry store commercial.  Only, while Reid clicks away at the Ring cameras, location trackers, search histories, password workarounds, and username paper trails at her fingertips to solve the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, she’s revealing more than just the speedbumps & heartbreaks of modern familial bonds; she’s also cataloging the tools of the modern surveillance state.  The surface-level text of the film details the twists & turns of a Dateline-style “true” crime mystery and subsequent familial grief, while the glaring subtext is all about how deep privacy-invading technology has already seeped into our daily lives in ways we’ve learned to ignore, simply because it’s convenient.

One of the major things I love about screenlife thrillers (and one of the major reasons they’re dismissed as frivolous novelties) is their nimble ability to document of-the-moment trends in modern life online.  It’s something most other genres are scared to touch for fear of looking gimmicky or dated, despite computer screens accounting for so much of the visual data most audiences absorb on a daily basis.  There’s something fearlessly honest about engaging with that supposedly uncinematic imagery, but I also just like to imagine how incomprehensible screenlife aesthetics would be to earliest cinemagoers who were astounded by The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in 1896.  For its part, Missing doesn’t have many updates in modern screenlife to document, except maybe the frustrating ambiguity of Captcha challenges and the low-key hostility of a thumbs-up emoji.  It does have plenty notes about life outside of the computer, though, marking our cultural obsession with turning real life tragedies into true crime #content; zoomer teens’ uncanny savvy in navigating the back roads of social media; and our casual, collective acceptance of privacy invasion from vampiric tech-world capitalists.  On a more practical, immediate level, it’s most useful as a showcase for Reid’s skills as a young actor and editors-turned-directors Will Merrick & Nick Johnson’s understanding of screenlife’s unique visual language, since those three collaborators account for almost everything we see onscreen.  It’s a fun, well-staged mainstream thriller with just the right balance between social commentary, shameless sentimentality, and trashy what-the-fuck twists, when Searching only hit one of those three metrics.

-Brandon Ledet

Bijou (1972)

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I’ve been trying out a new strategy when purchasing Blu-rays & DVDs lately, and it’s resulted in my modest collection quickly filling up with smut.  Instead of prioritizing tried-and-true personal favorites I know I’ll revisit in the future, I’ve pivoted to blind-buying movies I assume will never be accessible on streaming.  The plan was to finally see some independent, arthouse obscurities that fall through mainstream distribution gaps and, thus, eternally gather dust of my watchlist, but in practice it’s only prompted me to purchase more & more vintage pornography.  I can pretty safely assume that titles like Bat Pussy, SexWorld, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street will never populate on Hulu or Netflix, so I figure the best (legal) chance I have to see them is to own them.  That’s not to say there’s no overlap between high-brow experimental art and vintage porno.  In my casual, sporadic splurges on discounted discs, I’ve found plenty of artsy-fartsy filth to help refine my porno palate, including heavy-hitter titles like Equation to an Unknown, Pink Narcissus, Luminous Procuress, and, most recently, Wakefield Poole’s seminal classic Bijou.  There is a three-way intersection between D.I.Y. independent filmmaking, pretentious arthouse mindfuckery, and prurient perversion in these films that you can’t find anywhere else in cinema, which somehow makes owning them feel like an academic pursuit rather than a masturbatory one.

In that arthouse porno context, Bijou is considered by many connoisseurs to be the best of the best.  There’s a girthy stretch at its warped, misshapen center where I totally understand that claim.  I can’t fully vouch for its most stunning sequence’s lengthy bookends, though, which occasionally tested my patience despite their flagrant obscenity, as if I were watching Apichatpongian slow cinema instead of vintage smut.  The opening sequence is effectively a non-sequitur, featuring our main POV stud (Bill Harrison) leaving his construction site job, witnessing a deadly car accident, and snatching the purse of the woman who was run over.  He shakes off the guilt of that petty theft by masturbating in the shower, attempting to focus on the porno mag centerfolds hanging on his apartment walls instead of the tragedy he got himself needlessly involved in.  It takes 20 languid minutes for our well-endowed construction hunk to give into his obsession with the mysterious woman, following an invitation in her purse to the titular Bijou theatre, when the movie finally comes (and comes and comes and comes) alive.  The Bijou turns out to be less of a secret sex club than it is a phantasmagorical otherworld.  After following a few Alice in Wonderland instructions (signs flashing “Remove shoes” & “Remove clothes” instead of “Eat me” or “Drink me”), our main man finds himself in an endless black void decorated only with smoke, mirrors, tinsel, and nightclub lighting rigs.  His descent into the subliminal bowels of the Bijou is a gorgeous, disorienting display, recalling the funhouse mirror freakout at the climax of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai.  Then, a 30-minute orgy ensues among the “all-male cast,” gradually overpowering the D.I.Y. psychedelia with the monotony of a nonstop sex scene.

Wakefield Poole directed Bijou the same year that the Golden Age of Porno was supposedly kicked off by the mainstream success of Deep Throat, a film with much less pronounced artistic ambitions, to say the least.  His previous film The Boys in the Sand was a similar cultural landmark, covered like a Real Film by the trades in a way no previous gay porno could have hoped for, despite its weirdly muted legacy as a porno-chic landmark lurking in Deep Throat‘s shadow.  As a follow-up to that early critical success, Bijou seems less interested in mainstream attention than it is in academic pursuits.  The way Poole transforms his tiny NYC apartment into an endless liminal pleasure realm can’t help but recall the arthouse porno sensibilities of James Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, which was filmed on the same kind of D.I.Y. “studio” set (although much less efficiently).  In its best moments, Bijou plays like the scrappier, more brutish kid brother of Narcissus, doubling down on the abstraction & obscenity of Bidgood’s work instead of the sub-Technicolor beauty.  Poole includes self-portrait camera tests and screen-test cast interviews as side-by-side slideshow projections, the kind of visual experimentation that was making waves in that era’s art galleries, not its porno theatres.  The classical soundtrack makes even the orgy sequence play like a perverse parody of Disney’s Fantasia, the closest that studio has ever gotten to genuine pomp & prestige.  In its most transcendent moments, Poole’s version of pornography can only be compared to art film experimentation, more often recalling Kenneth Anger than Gregory Dark (although all three directors likely had major influence on the music video as an artform).  Unlike Pink Narcissus, though, Bijou isn’t entirely comprised of transcendent moments, and it takes a little patience to get to the core down-the-rabbit-hole sequence that makes it such a well-regarded all-timer.

I don’t know that I have the passion nor the stamina to make it as a full-on, well-versed porno sommelier (for that, I will defer to Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell, longtime Bijou advocate), but I do think it’s a genre I owe more time & attention, so it’s one I’m likely to continue collecting.  Swampflix doesn’t have much of a guiding ethos beyond promoting appreciation for low-budget, high-art genre filmmaking, and there is plenty pornography that deserves to be discussed & exalted in that context, alongside more frequently cited genres like action, sci-fi, and horror.  In that canon, Bijou is clearly a central, definitive text, even if its loopy, unrushed entirety can’t live up to the psychedelic transcendence of its best stretch.

-Brandon Ledet

SexWorld (1978)

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I can only think of two feature-length porno parodies that I watched before catching the original films they “erotically” spoof: 1974’s Flesh Gordon (a parody of the 1930s Flash Gordon sci-fi serials and subsequent 1950s TV show, later adapted again into a fully clothed action-adventure feature in 1980) and now 1978’s SexWorld (a parody of the 1973 sci-fi Western Westworld, later adapted into a semi-clothed prestige series for HBO in the 2010s).  In both cases, I basically got the gist (and the jizz!) of their parodic targets from their loglines and through general cultural osmosis.  Besides, both of those vintage pornos are more interesting for how they reflect the mainstream sexual attitudes of their era than they are for their thin satirical commentary on their respective source texts.  For its part, Flesh Gordon plays like a corny softcore holdover from the Russ Meyer nudie cutie era, shying away from taking full, explicit advantage of the porno chic movement that arose post-Deep Throat.  By contrast, SexWorld is unmistakably porno chic.  The Anthony Spinelli Golden Age porno shares some of Flesh Gordon‘s wink-wink-nudge-nudge cornball humor in its hardcore perversions of the Westworld/Futureworld premise, but its polished production values, abbreviated sex scenes, and vague gestures towards social commentary make it feel deliberately designed as a date-night dare for yuppie couples to giggle through, rather than pandering to the trench coat brigade.  Both films soften hardcore’s harshest edges to make porno publicly palatable for curious-but-cautious mainstream audiences but, of the two, only SexWorld gave those audiences their money’s worth.

As you would likely assume, the titular SexWorld is an isolated luxury resort that simulates “a world devoted entirely to sex,” realizing its horned-up tourist’s “wildest” fantasies though sci-fi convention make-em-ups that are never fully explained in the plot (but are hinted to be a combination of hologram projections & shapeshifting animatronics).  What you might not assume is that SexWorld’s high-end customer base travels to that resort via bus, a detail significant enough that it gets its own shout-out in the titular disco theme song.  The bus itself proudly advertises the SexWorld logo to lookers-on—no brown paper bag covering the label in shame—which was apparently somewhat risky to stage, given that the bus ride montage is mostly composed of a few quick shots repeating in an endless loop.  During that bus trip and subsequent interviews with the SexWorld staff, we get some insightful flashbacks into the dysfunctional sex lives and escapist fantasies of each tourist.  The staff repeatedly remind their guests that the far-out, unexplained SexWorld technology can realize their wildest, most unfathomable fantasy fucks, referencing taboos like incest, BDSM, and water sports that no one takes them up on.  The most transgressive their fantasies get are in exploring interracial taboos (including a bonus mini-parody of Behind the Green Door), but the less said about those particular vignettes the better.  Otherwise, between the budget restraints and the presumed hetero POV of its audience, the actual sex in SexWorld is relatively tame, unless you’re somehow still shocked by mostly straight women indulging in some momentary bisexuality in an otherwise straight porno.

The sex looks great, though, and Spinelli makes the most of the production’s cheap sets with a few well-positioned gel lights and some complicated wallpaper.  There isn’t much to the sci-fi conceit beyond a few SexWorld employees milling around in white lab coats, pushing useless light-up buttons on a switchboard to nowhere, but it’s all in good, hokey fun.  As a cultural artifact, its greatest value is in imagining what hipster city couples were supposed to get out of seeing it publicly projected in its original porno chic context, besides the obvious visual titillation and transgressive thrill.  Most of its characters’ fantasies are presented as quick-fix resolutions for common marital conflicts, to the point where it’s just as much couples’ therapy for straights as it is porno sleaze.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the film came with its own pre-loaded discussion topics on index cards for audiences to sort through as they travel from theatre to bed after the credits roll.  Personally, my favorite two characters are the evil shrew wife who desperately wants her husband to be more forceful in bed and the phone sex addict who feels intense shame in her post-nut-clarity every time she enjoys a dirty call – the shrew (Sharon Thorpe) because she reminds me of Mink Stole’s legendary comedic performance in Desperate Living, and the shy phone-sex pervert (Kay Parker) because her pre-cure flashback scene is genuinely hot.  It’s kind of a perfect porno chic movie in that way: a little sexy, a little silly, a little offensive, a little historically insightful, and—most shocking to anyone who grew up watching porn in the video or internet eras—a little considerate in its lighting & composition.  You don’t need to have seen Westworld or Futureworld to understand the appeal of that.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Peyton Place (1957)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer, Brandon, and Alli watch Peyton Place (1957).

Britnee: I love drama. Soap operas like The Bold and the Beautiful and Days of Our Lives were the inspiration for “playing pretend” with my Barbie dolls when I was a wee one. Now, as a grown adult, I spend most of my time in the BravoSphere obsessing over everything Real Housewives (when I’m not watching movies, of course). Yes, I like my drama on the trashy side, so it’s no surprise that I fell in love with the classic melodrama Peyton Place. 

Peyton Place is adapted from Grace Metalious’s debut novel of the same name that shocked the world in 1956. It was regarded as smut by the public and banned in various cities and countries due to its racy subjects, including incest, rape, abortion, and adultery. Film producer Jerry Wald jumped on getting the rights to Peyton Place from Metalious less than a month after the novel was released. The result is definitely a sanitized version of the novel, but it’s still pretty scandalous considering that the film was released in 1957.

In the small New England town of Peyton Place, the gossip is hot and the secrets are plentiful. Michael Rossi (Lee Phillips) arrives for his new job as the high school principal along with his “liberal” education methods in tow. We soon find out that he is taking the position from Mrs. Thornton (Mildred Dunnock), who is a tenured English teacher more than fit for the job. There’s a plethora of sad moments throughout the film, but Mrs. Thornton’s heartbreak at that disappointment hits me so hard. We are then introduced to multiple families who have all sorts of juicy secrets, particularly the MacKenzies and the Crosses. Constance MacKenzie (Lana Turner) is a widow and shop owner, raising her only-child, Allison (Diane Varsi). Allison is best friends with Selena Cross (Hope Lange), who’s mother Nellie (Betty Fields), is Constance’s maid. Selena has an extremely rough life, especially compared to Allison’s. She lives in a shack with her mother, younger brother, and horrible alcoholic stepfather.

The judgmental and hypocritical society of Peyton Place causes irreparable damage to much of the community, particularly the youth. Allison is judged harshly by Constance for an innocent kiss, only to find out that she was the product of an affair. Selena is raped and impregnated by her stepfather, struggles to get an abortion, and miscarries due to an accident. Her mother, Nellie, then commits suicide at the MacKenzie residence. To make matters worse, she murders her stepfather in self-defense when he tries to attack her again and is put on trial. And that’s not even getting into Rodney & Betty’s struggles outside the main drama. There is never a dull moment in the film, since we are following so many different families and couples, which is one of the things I appreciate most about it. You can rewatch it multiple times and focus on a different character each time. It’s movie magic!

I’m dying to know what the rest of the crew thought of this movie. We’re there any characters y’all found more fascinating than others?

Brandon:  I loved this.  It’s the exact intersection of high and low art sensibilities where you’ll find most of cinema’s shiniest gems.  For whatever reputation Peyton Place might have as a trashy paperback, this adaptation treats it with the same wide Cinemascope vistas and sweeping orchestral overtures you’d expect in a David Lean adaptation of a literary classic.  A sprawling, gossipy epic of small-town scandal & melodrama, it’s essentially Douglas Sirk’s “Harper Valley PTA”, an exquisite rendering of sensationalist pulp.  The material at hand earns that treatment too.  No matter what prurient curiosity the novel may have held as the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time, it also functions as politically-minded sex education advocacy.  It argues that good, healthy sex habits should be openly discussed and even taught in schools, since the small-town sex shaming of all “dirty talk” is what causes heartbreak & tragedy in these doomed characters’ lives.  There’s something genuinely radical about its 50s-era sex positivity, especially when the proudly horny Allison explains to her male classmate “Girls want to do the same things as boys,” a truth that still hasn’t been fully absorbed in small-town American rhetoric.

Singling out individual characters is a smart way to discuss this film, since there are seemingly hundreds to choose from, each representing their own hot-button issue meant to inspire hushed watercooler & beauty salon chatter among anyone lucky enough to have visited Peyton Place.  I was also heartbroken by the professional disappointments Mrs. Thornton suffers in the first act; I found myself crying over her open-hearted kindness within seconds of meeting her, as her students pooled money together to buy a congratulatory gift for a promotion that never came.  She’s only a small part of the story, though, especially as her potentially pompous replacement proves himself to be just as noble & progressive in his approach to teen-years education.  What I was more hanging on the edge of my seat about was the character arc of Allison’s friend Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn). 

Throughout the film, Norman is portrayed as sexually timid & confused, to the point where he was an obvious representative of closeted (and maybe even oblivious) homosexuality.  What was unclear was how far the movie could possibly go in openly discussing his sexual orientation, beyond broad, Freudian characterizations of his overbearing mother and his self-hating nature as a “coward” and a “sissy.”  My fear was that Allison would be romantically paired with Norman as a narrative attempt to “cure” him, but thankfully they just remain good friends & co-conspirators.  Like many of the hot-button issues the movie collects like Pokémon, Norman’s status as a sexual outlier is never exactly challenged or resolved.  It’s more just plainly represented as a simple fact of life (as much as it could be in a time of intense sexual repression).  The difference with Norman’s sexual identity crisis, though, is that it’s never openly discussed like the affairs, suicides, rapes, and miscarriages playing out elsewhere in town.  Even for a movie that proudly tackles the most sensational topics of its day, Norman’s (ambiguous, unconfirmed) queerness is too controversial to be discussed in clear, honest terms, which is what makes him such a fascinating character to keep track of in the larger crowd.  There’s a tension to seeing just how far the movie is willing to go in his characterization in every scene he enters.

Boomer: It’s funny that Brandon should mention “Harper Valley PTA,” since that’s the only real exposure that I had to Peyton Place (other than its use as exactly the same epithet that Jeannie C. Riley used) prior to this viewing: “You think that as the mother I’m not fit / Well, this is just a little Peyton Place / And you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites.” That is to say, a Peyton Place is somewhere that there’s an awful lot of funny business going on, if you know what I mean. I don’t know how much of that was born out of the film itself and how much was the result of the various sequel soaps and other adaptations that were released in its wake, because in practice, there’s actually very little sex in the film, with what little there is being unspoken or deep in the back story, while the forefront is composed of so much suspicion and gossip. There’s one really frisky classmate of Allison and Selena who flirts with the former before devoting himself to his one real childhood sweetheart (to whom he seems faithful despite his raging hormones, especially in combination with his disdain for his father’s own implied adulteries), and then in the backstory Connie had an affair with a married man, of which Allison is the product. It’s barely salacious, even for the time period, and only the first of these is common knowledge, though it enters the town’s thriving marketplace of gossip attached to the incorrect players. Peyton Place’s prosperity comes in the form of its textile mill, but it runs just as much on the rumor mill, as very little information that gets passed around is accurate, and real secrets get covered over in the rush. Connie’s affair could have remained hidden forever, just like Lucas Cross’s crimes and sins, because town gossip was mostly concerned with fiction. 

I, like Brandon, also thought of Douglas Sirk while watching this, but in my mind I titled it “Sirk’s Twin Peaks” because in both titular towns, the deepest and most harrowing crime is at the expense of a teenage girl and mostly concerns itself with her peers and the people of her parents’ generation who are supposed to be looking out for their children. (And they both have Russ Tamblyn!) It could just as easily have been Sirk’s Blue Velvet, however, given that it was the earlier of David Lynch’s works about an idyllic town with a monstrous underbelly of violent unchained id and a facade of perfect Americana with a maggoty core. (And they both have Hope Lange!) But the film is only Lynchian in its topic, not in its tone or its temperament, and in this mixture between the cheerful color of full-on Cinemascope melodrama and its seedy story of suspicion and vice that makes it feel at once both dated and timeless in the best possible way. 

Alli: I went into this movie, as I do with a lot of movies from this era, with my 1950s housewife lenses on. I like to imagine that I’m completely fresh and contemporary to an old movie. From that perspective, Peyton Place is positively lurid. Teenage sexuality? Class consciousness? Education reforms? Abortion? Absolutely shocking. Which is why I couldn’t stay in that frame of mind for long. It’s just too ahead of its time. I’m honestly astonished that it even got made. It’s not always an easy watch, but it is a worthwhile one, filled with drama, critiques of small town America, and necking. If this movie were made on this scale today, there are still people who would find it absolutely shocking and controversial. 

It starts off strong with Michael Rossi arriving in town observing the dilapidated shacks on the wrong side of the tracks, only to arrive on mainstreet in this idyllic New England hamlet, complete with beautiful green trees, gorgeous homes, and quaint local businesses. He has a conversation with a restaurant owner about the state of employment in Peyton Place where we find out that almost everyone works at a woolen mill and that business has a stranglehold over everything in town. Like any town where one industry dominates the entire economy, the business owners have a vested interest in making sure that education is undervalued and that the status quo is maintained. Rossi does manage to haggle for a better salary, even with the reluctance of the school board, probably because he is not the “older” woman Mrs. Thorton (“older” in scare quotes here because it’s later revealed that she’s in her mid to late 40s). This clash of capitalistic American values against an educator’s desire for fairness and equality for all students is riveting. When he’s demanding a salary and refusing to do the unpaid labor of coaching sports teams, I was elated. We need more movies where characters stick up for themselves in the faces of tycoons.

All these teens’ stories are so good. I love them sneaking around and indulging in horny teenage rebellion. I love Betty slutting it up. It’s extremely satisfying when Allison stands up for herself to her hypocrite mother. Norman suffering his Psycho-esque Norma Bates mother is just oedipal perfection. Selena’s story, however, is heartbreaking, and quite frankly, it was extremely difficult for me to watch. The abuse she suffers at the hands of her stepfather is presented so starkly and realistically. In a movie full of overblown drama, this plot line unfortunately feels the most realistic until the town rallies behind her (real life is rarely that hopeful). When she snaps and kills Lucas, it is weirdly satisfying, even with the thought that she may have just doomed herself by trying to save herself.

I’m so glad that I watched this soapy, melodramatic epic. It is going to stick in my mind for a long time.

Lagniappe

Alli: I was so focused on how great the narrative is, I forgot to mention it’s beautiful too! How about Mrs. Mackenzie in that red dress going to Rossis’ house for Christmas? The bright, saturated colors there are just wonderful.

Brandon: My only previous exposure to Peyton Place was the shot of Jayne Mansfield reading it during a self-indulgent bubble bath in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a visual gag that’s much funnier now that I know of the novel’s sub-literary reputation.

Britnee: I find myself referencing Peyton Place more and more as I get older. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but it’s a reminder of how relevant the film still is. It should come as no surprise that a Peyton Place themed excursion to its Camden, Maine filming location is on my vacation wishlist. The Camden Public Library even put together a map of Peyton Place landmarks. The majority of the locations haven’t changed much since 1957. It’s the melodramatic time capsule of my dreams!

Boomer: I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see which actor I knew from their appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents or The Alfred Hitchcock Hour would appear next. I immediately recognized Mildred Dunnock (Mrs. Thornton) from her three appearances in the former program and her singular appearance in the latter, in the episodes “None Are So Blind,” “The West Warlock Time Capsule,” “Heart of Gold,” and “Beyond the Sea of Death.” Arthur Kennedy (Lucas Cross) appeared in the Hour episode “Change of Address,” Betty Field (Nellie Cross) was in the Presents episode “A Very Moral Theft” and “The Star Juror” episode of Hour, and Staats Cotsworth (Charles Partridge) had a role in Hour‘s “The Thirty-First of February.” Even Lorne Green, who will forever be the original Battlestar Galactica‘s Commander Adama to me, appeared in the Presents episode “Help Wanted.” Surprisingly, the big one was Robert H. Harris, who played Peyton Times editor Seth Bushwell: the was in no fewer than eight episodes of Presents (“Shopping for Death,” “The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby,” “The Hidden Thing,” “Toby,” “The Dangerous People,” “The Safe Place,” :Graduating Class,” and “The Greatest Monster of them All”) and an episode of Hour entitled “Consider Her Ways.”

Next month: Brandon presents Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)

-The Swampflix Crew

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

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I’m not yet exhausted with M. Night Shyamalan’s schtick, but I am beyond exhausted with the MPAA.  Shyamalan could continue making corny Twilight Zone episodes for the rest of his life, and I’ll always line up to witness his latest stunt, even if they more often land as fun novelties instead of great cinema.  When I think about him, I smile.  Meanwhile, I’m becoming increasingly angered by the continued existence & influence of the MPAA, our modern echo of retro Hays Code moralism.  With Knock at the Cabin, my backburner delight with Shyamalan has inevitably clashed with my overboiling anger with the Motion Picture Association of America, an archaic institution with the power to determine who gets to see his work.  Shyamalan’s latest film is not only an earnest goofball headscratcher from one of Hollywood’s foremost earnest goofballs; it’s also the latest glaring data point in the MPAA’s long history of institutional homophobia.

I was already grumbling about recent MPAA offenses before I sat down to watch Knock at the Cabin the theater.  In just this past month, the original cut of the animatronic horror comedy M3GAN was noticeably defanged to meet the MPAA’s outdated standards for a PG-13 rating, a threshold far below what young teens can freely access on television & the internet at home.  Even more egregiously, the MPAA neutered Brandon Cronenberg’s sci-fi freakout Infinity Pool by cursing it with an NC-17 rating, forcing the studio’s hand in distributing a tamer R-rated edit that national theater chains would be willing to program (even though those chains could freely, legally ignore MPAA rulings whenever they want).  Listening to Cronenberg explain in interviews that the MPAA review & appeal process still involves guiding input from Catholic & Protestant priests in the year of Our Dark Lord 2023 was flabbergasting.  Much like how Blockbuster & Wal-Mart’s self-censorship against distributing immoral, ungodly pop media has guided what the movie industry was willing to produce in the recent past, the MPAA’s relationship with larger theater chains is still directly, purposefully limiting what art I can legally consume as an adult.  It’s corporate, Puritanical bullshit.

The frustrating thing is that M. Night Shyamalan is extremely accommodating to MPAA standards for safe, consumable art.  I remember a behind-the-scenes DVD featurette for The Happening where Shyamalan declared himself to be “Mr. PG-13” and was showing squirmy anxiety over directing his first R-rated feature.  In that film, Shyamalan went out of his way to earn the R, including an onscreen depiction of young children being blasted with a shotgun (which is exactly the shot he was setting up for in that “Mr. PG-13” interview).  By contrast, Knock at the Cabin makes no overt efforts to earn its R rating “for violence and language.”  If anything, its obscured, dulled-down violence and cautious “You piece of crap!” expletives play like the film has been preemptively compromised & edited down for a PG-13 rating, if not for a broadcast television premiere.  Unlike his last one, Shyamalan’s latest widespread disaster film finds him working in “Mr. PG-13” mode, and I can’t help but assume that the only reason the priest-guided MPAA condemned it with an R-rating because its lead couple is gay.  After all, the organization has a long history of rating sexless, violence-free gay content unsuitable for minors, including the even more innocuous titles Pride, Love is Strange, and 3 Generations (not to mention John Waters’s A Dirty Shame landing an NC-17 despite being relatively tame compared to the hetero Farrelly Brothers comedies Waters had indirectly inspired).  Knock at the Cabin is just their latest target.

Beyond noting my personal, petty indignation, the reason the MPAA’s rating matters here is that it’s a real-world example of the fictional homophobia referenced in the text itself.  The world at large is still violently hostile to the public existence of same-gender couples, which is what makes the selfless sacrifice asked of Knock at the Cabin‘s leads so politically loaded.  While vacationing in a remote cabin with their adopted daughter, a married gay couple (Ben Aldridge & Jonathan Groff) are taken hostage by four doomsday zealots who met online (led by the imposing gentle giant Dave Bautista).  The home invasion scenario quickly turns into religious parable, as the armed intruders explain that the hostages must make a Jellicle choice: sacrifice a member of their own family or watch the rest of the world suffer a Biblical apocalypse.  The movie spends a lot of time debating the mechanics & validity of this supernatural scenario, approximating the exact middle ground between Richard Kelly’s sprawling Twilight Zone whatsit The Box and the Evangelical parable The Shack.  Once those debates are settled, though, the real watercooler discussion questions posed to the audience get pretty thorny: Why should this tirelessly persecuted queer couple sacrifice themselves to save a world that spits in their general direction?  How much grace & compassion do they owe to Q-Anon fascists, dive-bar gaybashers, and the institutional homophobes of the MPAA?  Doesn’t the world, on some level, deserve to burn?

I am no priest, so I wasn’t part of the decision-making process for how, exactly, Knock at the Cabin “earned” its R rating.  Maybe “Mr. PG-13” put his foot down on removing the one or two “F-bombs” that put the film over the cussing limit.  Maybe the MPAA took a harsh stance because the film was largely self-financed—not pre-approved corporate product—and Shyamalan didn’t have the extra funding to fight their decision (another sin the organization often repeats).  Maybe none of this matters at all.  Shyamalan still got to screen his off-kilter camera angles, his off-putting cornball humor, and the stunning off-type performance from Bautista (whose hulking presence alone is a sight to behold, recalling the awesome image of Frankenstein’s monster gently, disastrously stooping down to relate to a little girl in 1931).  The MPAA got to decide who’s allowed to see Shyamalan’s latest, but they didn’t stop him from making it, and they didn’t prevent it from earning the #1 box office slot on opening weekend, despite their efforts.  Still, their harsh rating of the film reads like old-school, textbook homophobia to me, enhancing its themes in glaring, unintentional ways.  I pray someone will Jellicle-choice them out of existence as soon as possible.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #179: A Detour into 1940s Noir

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Welcome to Episode #179 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of 1940s noir classics, starting with Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poverty Row cheapie Detour (1945).

00:00 Welcome

01:04 Infinity Pool (2023)
06:12 Liz: The Elizabeth Taylor Story (1995)
08:53 The Big Chill (1983)
13:51 Deep End (1970)
19:10 The 4th Man (1983)

26:23 Detour (1945)
46:44 The Letter (1940)
1:07:45 Laura (1944)
1:17:25 The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Podcast Crew

The 4th Man (1983)

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Paul Verhoeven is the great American satirist.  There’s only the small matter of him being Dutch.  In his 80s & 90s Hollywood heyday, Verhoeven was the master of self-satirizing American pop culture, riding a fine enough line between moralist condemnation and gleeful participation that his cartoon parodies of Hollywood schlock were often mistaken for the genuine thing.  Titles like Showgirls, Starship Troopers, and Robocop were often overlooked as biting American satires in their time, mostly because Verhoeven was obviously taking perverse pleasure in the exact sex & violence he was chastising mainstream audiences for craving.  He was making truly subversive art, in that he was subverting the meaning & intent of his oblivious Hollywood collaborators with a self-satirical exaggeration of the industry’s cruelest, most salacious smut.  His mainstream films were, without hyperbole, among the greatest ever made and, as such, were often misunderstood by critics & audiences in their own time.

You did not need me to repeat that tidbit of recent pop culture history.  Verhoeven’s subversive Hollywood works have been reassessed to the point where their covert satirical genius is now common knowledge (even if that cultural reassessment hasn’t translated to more robust budgets for his more recent, small studio works like Benedetta & Elle).  What’s less often discussed—among American audiences anyway—is what Verhoeven was up to before he reached Hollywood, as his early Dutch features currently have no legal distribution in the US.  If his semi-supernatural erotic thriller The 4th Man is any indication, Verhoeven arrived here as an already fully formed auteur, since the film essentially functions as a Basic Instinct prototype (with some light touches of Benedetta for added flavor).  And if The 4th Man is not typical to the movies Verhoeven was making pre-Hollywood, you’ll have to forgive me for the assumption.  I only got to see this one because a friend bought a bootleg DVD copy off of eBay; the rest remain a mystery.

Jeroen Krabbé stars as a hotshot alcoholic novelist who travels to a small town to big-time his fan club at a public reading of his work.  He quickly falls in lust & bedsheets with the literary club’s treasurer, Renée Soutendijk, an obvious femme fatale who will quickly lead to the buffoonish author’s doom.  He suffers bad-omen visions of his own death throughout his travels, but powers through them for the promise of hot sex, both with Soutendijk and with her younger boytoy lover, Thom Hoffman.  Unlike in Basic Instinct, it isn’t the ice-cold blonde bombshell who’s a bisexual hedonist, but rather the himbo-dingus who trips all over himself lusting after her (and her accessibility to hot trade).  Exactly like in Basic Instinct, whether that bombshell is a murderer or a sexually liberated innocent is a Schrodinger’s box game that Verhoeven teases the audience with all the way through the end credits.  Only, this version of the story follows a different genre template, going for more of a small-town-witchcraft Wicker Man vibe instead of foretelling Basic Instinct’s cop-falls-for-murder-suspect neo noir revival.

Verhoeven’s meta-satirical exaggerations of Joe Eszterhas’s sleazy Hollywood scripts are artistically subversive.  With no major-studio industrial tropes or morals to subvert, The 4th Man is, by contrast, simply artistically blasphemous.  Verhoeven’s Dutch dry-run/wet-dream precursor to Basic Instinct is just as hyperviolent and explicitly horny as his later Hollywood films, but outside of the Hollywood system its shock-value offenses register more as a personal indulgence than an act of cultural satire.  When Krabbé envisions Hoffman’s heaving, sweaty gym body rocking a tight red Speedo on the crucifix, Verhoeven is not exactly subverting cultural or religious norms.  He is perverting them for his own amusement.  When Soutendijk’s witchy femme fatale leads her boytoys to their ruin by the prick—sometimes snipping those pricks off entirely in castration nightmare sequences—Verhoeven is not subverting misogynist Hollywood tropes about women’s poisonous effect on men; he’s celebrating her transgressive power.  The closest he comes to true subversion in The 4th Man is in an early sex scene, when Krabbé covers Soutendijk’s breasts to pretend she is “a boy”, thrusting into him, flipping the power dynamics of the traditional nude scene into something overtly queer.  Even then, it still feels like he’s only doing so to delight himself and to shock the audience, not necessarily to declare something political about sex in cinema.

If there’s any way that Verhoeven doesn’t feel like a fully formed auteur in The 4th Man, it’s in the film’s similarities to Euro cinema of its era, from the bitter romantic doom of Barbet Schroeder’s Maîtresse to the intense reds & witchy dream imagery of supernatural gialli (complete with an echo of Fulci’s signature ocular gore).  He couldn’t reach his full power as a subversive pop culture satirist until he left Europe for America, where his blasphemous indulgences in sex & violence could punch upwards at Puritanical social norms instead of just delighting the man behind the camera.  The 4th Man‘s greatest asset, then, might be cinematographer (and longtime Verhoeven collaborator) Jan De Bont, who stretches the budget with as many on-the-fly crane, zoom, dolly shots as he can manage to match the look & feel of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.  Judging only by The 4th Man, it’s clear that Verhoeven was already making great films before he reached America; all that really changed was finding a cultural context that made them feel politically dangerous instead of just deliciously perverse.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Salesman (1969)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Maysles Brothers’ door-to-door Bible salesmen documentary Salesman (1969)

00:00 Welcome

05:09 Triangle of Sadness (2022)
12:00 Heavenly Creatures (1994)
14:00 Skinamarink (2023)
20:22 Glass Onion (2022)
22:32 Luminous Procuress (1971)

29:42 Salesman (1969)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew