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From Playboy Magazine to Cult Classic Contender: The Box (2009) as a Literary Adaptation

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Richard Kelly’s sci-fi mystery thriller The Box might not ever earn the legitimate cult classic status it most certainly deserves. Kelly’s other two features, Donnie Darko & Southland Tales, have already found their own dedicated of cult followings out there in the wilderness of cinematic nerdom, but The Box remains largely unchampioned. There are many, varied complaints detailing exactly why The Box “doesn’t work,” but one of the most common is that it expanded upon a basic premise that needed no depth of context or detail. Before The Box was a sprawling, two hour critical & financial misstep it was a nine page story in Playboy Magazine & a 20 minute episode of the Twilight Zone. When it comes to adapting literary text for the big screen, the critical impulse generally tends to favor the source material in terms of legitimacy, especially in the case of something like The Box, which shows very little, if any regard for solely sticking to the script of its short story origins. By exploding the central mystery of its source material into a galaxy of other unanswered questions, however, The Box far exceeds its origins’ ambitions & successes in my mind. Its DNA in Playboy Magazine & The Twilight Zone is interesting for sure, but nowhere near as fascinating as the places Kelly took the story in his go-for-broke adaptation/bastardization.

Consider the shifted stakes & the heavy-handed morality lesson of The Box’s very first incarnation, a very brief short story published by Playboy Magazine in 1970. The Richard Matheson-penned story “Button, Button” is for the most party reminiscent of what Kelly later brought to the screen. Even its central character names remained largely unchanged: Arthur, Norma, Arlington. However, the story’s scope is ludicrously miniscule as a comparison point, with these three characters more or less representing the totality of relevant players. In “Button, Button” the mysterious agent Arlington Steward drops off a box featuring a button under the cover of a glass dome. He informs the married couple of Norma & Arthur Lewis that if they press this button someone they do not know will die & they will receive $50,000 cash. The husband urges the wife not to push the button out of basic human decency, but she does so anyway, as she does in all three versions of the story (it’d be a pretty go-nowhere plot if she didn’t). What differs in the original text is its last minute twist in which Arthur is the one who is killed the promised $50,000 is collected from his life insurance policy. Incensed, Norma calls out Arlington for claiming that the person who would die would be someone she did not know. Steward retorts by questioning if Norma ever truly knew her husband. As far as morality tales go “Button, Button” is a little slight, but very efficient. However, it raises a lot of interesting, open-ended questions about the origins of its mysterious box & the menacing organization who carry out its machinations, an ambiguity its down-the-road adaptations would greedily revel in.

“Button, Button” was published too late in the game to be included in the classic black & white, Roger Sterling era of The Twilight Zone. Instead it appeared in the much cheaper, much less charming 1980s run of the show. Its basic premise remains faithful to its Playboy Magazine roots, but it does make some significant changes to the details. In the Twilight Zone version the prize for pushing the murder button skyrockets to $20,000, along with an escalation in the economic state of the couple in question. The televised Norma & Arthur live unhappily in abject poverty, with Norma playing the thankless role of a nagging shrew wife & Arthur struggling to provide for the household in a less than glamorous economy. Their philosophical conversations around whether or not to push the button are largely the same as they are in the original story, but they’re nastily heated here in a way that low income couples arguing about money often tend to be. Unfortunately, because the production value of the episode is so ungodly cheap, their tension is conveyed mostly through shouty braying, two performances that might even stand out as over-the-top in an early John Waters provocation.

Besides altering the economic tension of the central philosophical crisis, the televised version of “Button, Button” also crucially changes the detail of its gotcha ending. Instead of killing Arthur, the box only instigates Arlington Steward paying the couple their previously discussed amount, then informing them that it will be “reprogrammed” & passed along to a new household, someone they do not know. Just like the original story, it’s a tidily little morality play, although in this case the lesson is shifted from what it means to truly know someone to the value of the Golden Rule, which was the lesson of most Twilight Zone episodes anyway.

Part of the sprawling brilliance of Richard Kelly’s The Box is how it’s a pretty faithful adaptation of both of these works, yet still drowns out their central life lessons with a deafening sea of existential concerns and batshit crazy plot twists. So much of Richard Kelly’s film adaptation is eerily faithful to its source material, from the exactly look & name of “the button unit” (mostly lifted form the Twilight Zone verson of the story) to the intense focus on domesticity & the home (very strongly emphasized in the Playboy version, if you can believe it). It’s all represented in the first 20 minutes or so of The Box before Kelly blows the whole tightly controlled story apart into something infinitely more expansive & strange. You can tell Kelly was a huge, adoring fan of his source material. It’s just that he gets hopelessly lost in his fascination with its minor details. In the Twlight Zone version, Norma asks “What is this, some kind of survey or something to see who will and won’t push it?” Kelly wants to know what that survey would look like, what it would mean, and what other similar surveys it would constitute. In the Playboy version, Steward admits that he “represents and organization of international scope,” but keeps the details vague & menacing. Kelly wants to know exactly how large & powerful such an organization would have to be to function. You can even see Kelly’s admiration for his movie’s “Button, Button” roots in the details he does decide to change. For instance, when he gives Norma & Arthur a child, he can’t figure out exactly what the child is good for in the story, except as a plot device that allows for more button unit-type moral/existential dilemmas once the plot becomes truly unwieldy.

The Box has a tendency to over-explain or provide too much context for what’s basically a very simple story, but Kelly leaves the overall ambiguity of his source material’s scenario exactly how he found it. He pokes & questions initial vague details presented in the early versions of “Button, Button,” but only so that they give way to even more immense & vague details once they’re prodded. The mistake a lot of reboots, prequels, and reimaginings make is in providing too much context & background info so that all mystery is sucked out of the room in favor of mediocrity. No one liked Death Vader better after knowing he was a little blonde boy who built C-3PO & held his beloved at the lakes of Naboo. However, the kind of context Kelly piles on how somehow makes the story feel more contextless. A lesser, more disciplined mind might’ve stuck to the basic outline of “Button, Button”, but stretched it out to a feature length slog of a moral dilemma. Kelly instead gives it the exact length of time it needed to work itself out on an episode of television, then expands his scope from there, chasing his fascination with the story’s vague, menacing details once the business of a faithful adaptation was out of the way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a literary adaptation quite like it, even from other films that started as Phillip K. Dick short stories or slight Roald Dahl novellas for children.  Kelly’s film is at once a faithful adaptation and a brazen, no-cares bastardization. Its gaze into the infinity can be at once both cripplingly silly & devastatingly impressive, but looking back to its roots as a miniscule 9 pages in Playboy Magazine only makes Kelly’s fascinating sprawl all the more puzzling. The question, then, is whether or not you find that puzzle entertaining.

For more on September’s Movie of the Month, Richard Kelly’s sci-fi mystery thriller The Box, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 19: Tootsie (1982)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Tootsie (1982) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 147 of the first edition hardback, Ebert recalls a time when his eccentric newspaperman colleague Paul Galloway hired professionals to dress him up like Tootsie at the height of the film’s popularity. It didn’t quite elicit the desired effect. According to Roger, Galloway wasn’t offended that no one mistook him for a woman. He was upset that no one recognized him as Tootsie.

What Ebert had to say in his review: “Tootsie is the kind of Movie with a capital ‘M’ that they used to make in the 1940s, when they weren’t afraid to mix up absurdity with seriousness, social comment with farce, and a little heartfelt tenderness right in there with the laughs. This movie gets you coming and going.” – from his 1982 review for The Chicago Sun-Times

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There’s a lot of pressure for Tootsie to perform for a modern audience for two entirely different reasons: 1) it’s often lauded as one of the greatest comedies of all time & 2) gender identity politics have shifted drastically in the three decades since the film’s release. I think it helps both of the film’s expectation problems if you consider it more in the context of over-the-top farces like Some Like It Hot & (maybe to a lesser degree) Mrs. Doubtfire, where deeply flawed men learn a lesson about humility & empathy by surrendering their gender-based privilege instead of a joke-a-minute laugh riot with pointed things to say about gender politics, something the film pretends to be in brief, fleeting moments. Tootsie’s cultural significance can be a little puzzling when you consider that it was nominated for ten Academy Awards & still makes the cut on a lot of Best Films of All Time lists, since to be honest, it’s not all that funny on a minute to minute basis, something that should probably be a requirement for a great comedy. As an intricately woven farce, however, it’s a fun screenplay to watch unravel as the walls separating its protagonist’s Victor Victoria-type double life crumble and his lies amount to a total shit show of bruised egos & hurt feelings. Instead of watching Dustin Hoffman’s total jerk protagonist get his much-deserved comeuppance, we see him realize how much of an asshole he truly is once he trips up on his own tangle of deceits. It’s a surprisingly sweet trajectory for a film that can be nastily bitter in its early goings-on & the farcical fever pitch of its third act is a lot of what makes Tootsie such a pleasant memory overall.

A top-of-his-game Dustin Hoffman stars as an unemployed theater actor who is talented, but notoriously difficult to work with due to an oversized hubris. Unable to land a job due to his tarnished name, the unrepentant asshole channels his frustration into an indignant female character with a ludicrous, high-pitched voice and lands a major role on a televised soap opera as his in-drag persona, unbeknownst to the cast & crew. This dynamic allows both for some delicious mockery of soap opera melodrama (seen also in less respected comedies like Joy & Delirious) and for some occasional pointed criticism about gendered work place politics, something the actor was blind to as a man. As much as he now has a soap box for complaints about how power makes a woman be unfairly perceived as “masculine” or “ugly”, a voice that inspires other women to speak up for themselves in a hostile work environment, donning a dress doesn’t instantly make him a better person. Tootsie is smart to hold onto the idea that its protagonist is a deceitful, selfish ass, allowing very little room for him to be excused for his manipulative transgressions, especially when it comes to his two love interests: a supposedly dear friend & an unsuspecting coworker. Watching this film as a kid I had never picked up on how much of an asshole Dustin Hoffman’s character is in this film; watching it now it’s the only thing I can focus on at all. Luckily, the film feels the same way & deals with his actions accordingly.

There’s not a lot going on in Tootsie formally that would really justify its inclusion on a Best Films of All Time list outside the weird imagery in a montage that includes a surreally out-of-place Andy Warhol cameo and a shot of Tootsie saluting before a Patton-esque American flag backdrop. The film’s performances are mostly serviceable, with very few moments allowed for a standout actor-centric showcase. I was especially bummed over  Bill Murray’s performance as a wisecracking bitter artist roommate, who was even more of an ass as the film’s starring role, as his entire part boils down to vocal discomfort with the idea of crossdressing (in what I’m afraid was supposed to function partly as an audience surrogate). If there’s anything impressive about how this film was made it’s in the efficiency of its screenplay. Not only does the mass confusion & chaos of the climax amount to a complex web of hurt feelings; the lead-up to that moment is also surprisingly effective. I especially liked the way the film bravely jumps into the drag persona conceit without an initial dressup montage and the way line readings from its fictional soap opera mixes with its protagonist’s true sentiments as well as the way the protagonist’s identity becomes confused as he starts making decisions based on the desires of his female avatar. Besides, you have to somewhat respect a film that can effortlessly work in a line as convoluted as, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man, you know?” and make it count for something. Some of Tootsie’s gender-identity politics are as outdated in a modern context as its total garbage “Go Tootsie go! Roll Tootsie roll!” pop music theme song, but it’s still a well written film with a timeless message: don’t be an asshole.

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Roger’s Rating: (4/4, 100%)

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Brandon’s Rating (3.5/5, 70%)

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Next Lesson: Help! (1965)

-Brandon Ledet

The Five Most Surprising Comedic Actors Lurking in Galaxy Quest (1999)

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As a full-length ode to what made the original Star Trek television series such a joy to watch, you can’t do much better than 1999’s sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest. I guess you could argue that there’s a little influence from the The Next Generation incarnation of Star Trek mixed into the film’s DNA, considering that the spoofy homage was contemporary with titles like Nemesis, particularly noticeable in the design of the space crew’s alien enemies, but for the most part it feels true to the original Star Trek run. I suspect our resident Trekkies Alli & Boomer could do a better job explaining exactly how Galaxy Quest captures & lovingly mocks the post-Lost in Space philosophical ponderings of Gene Roddenberry’s 1960s cultural landmark, but I can say for sure that it’s difficult to think of an example of an homage that does old-line Star Trek better than Galaxy Quest. The depressive black comedy Space Station 76 might come close and JJ Abrams’s reboot of the franchise might nail a few stray details, but Galaxy Quest is more or less the pinnacle of lovingly farcical Star Trek sendups.

Besides the film’s accomplishments in capturing the spirit of its obvious, but unspoken source material, what always strikes me about Galaxy Quest is the strength & likeability of its ridiculously stacked cast. The film follows the actors who played characters on a Star Trek-esque sci-fi show as they’re misunderstood to be a real deal spaceship crew and unwittingly recruited by an alien species they mistake for enthusiastic fans of the show for a real, life-threatening outer space adventure. The casting of the Galaxy Quest crew has always struck me as inspired. The sadly deceased Alan Rickman is perfectly pitched as a Leonard Nimoy surrogate: a self-serious stage actor who’s annoyed by his genre nerd celebrity, yet still wears his prosthetic alien makeup around the house as he glumly performs simple chores. Tony Schalhoub turns “phoning it in” into his own artform as an in-over-his-head engine room technician amidst a constant state of crisis. Sam Rockwell’s role as a bit part actor justifiably paranoid about dying on the mission because he played a one-line, no-name character on the show is great meta humor. Similarly, Sigourney Weaver’s space bimbo with no real purpose on the crew besides displaying her breasts is a great subversion of her resilient, insanely competent role as Ripley in the Alien series. Even Tim Allen is a joy to watch here, bringing his iconic role as Buzz Lightyear to full live action glory as the crew’s self-important ass of a captain. Once Galaxy Quest hits its narrative groove each of these crew members helplessly find themselves slipping into their scripted roles and lift tactics from old episodic plot lines to problem solve their way back to Earth, much to the delight of their extraterrestrial fans/kidnappers.

Those famous actor crew members are largely what makes Galaxy Quest such an iconic work in the first place. It was on my most recent watch, however, where I discovered that they’re far from alone in terms of recognizable faces in the cast. It’s been a good few years since I’ve revisited Galaxy Quest, which always struck me so one of the heights of easy, pleasant viewing, and I was surprised by how well both its humor & its CG special effects have held up in the past couple of decades. What really surprised me, though, was the number of familiar faces lurking behind the film’s main flashy space crew. Here are the five Galaxy Quest supporting players that most caught me off-guard, listed form least to most exciting.

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5) Enrico Colantoni

I really shouldn’t be surprised that Colantoni is in this movie because as a kid I probably knew him just as much for his role here as an alien nerd as I knew him as the chauvinist photographer from Just Shoot Me (I watched a lot of trash television as a youngster). In the years since its release, however, memories of Colantoni in the role had faded thoroughly to the point of vague déjà vu and I’ve come to think of the actor solely as Keith Mars, one of the great television dads (from the cult show Veronica Mars, in case you’re unfamiliar). Colantoni is damn funny as the lead alien kidnapper/nerd here, bringing a distinct Coneheads vibe to the performance. However, I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I was waiting for him to say “Who’s your daddy?” at some point during the production, a moment that obviously never arrived.

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4) Missi Pyle

The eternally underutilized character actor Missi Pyle probably shouldn’t surprise me by popping up in a bit role as one of Colantoni’s alien underlings. Pyle’s career has long been relegated to supporting player parts on TV comedies & straight to DVD/VOD farces (she’s actually pretty phenomenal in her role as a drunken loser in the mostly unseen Parker Posey/Amy Poehler comedy Spring Breakdown, a part that seemed tailor made for Jennifer Coolidge). I think I was mostly surprised by Pyle’s inclusion in the Galaxy Quest cast because I had mentally placed Milla Jovovich in the role as I reflected back on the film. Her character’s space goth visage recalled amalgamation of Jovovich’s roles in Zoolander & Resident Evil and her super geeky, posi, genuine vibe in the role recalls Jovovich’s most iconic performance as Leeloo in Luc Beson’s ludicrous space epic The Fifth Element (a film Galaxy Quest resembles in a few production details, especially in the design of its alien weaponry).

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3) Justin Long

Much like Missi Pyle, Justin Long has been in almost-famous purgatory for decades, never quite breaking out of bit roles in low profile comedies while his friends & collaborators “make it big” without him. Outside a few standout parts in comedies like Idiocracy & *shudder* Tusk, he’s mostly a background player who’s asked to allow other comedians to take the spotlight. That small potatoes status is still true in his diminished role as a geeky, convention-going superfan in Galaxy Quest, but looking back I had no idea he was in this movie at all. It’s no wonder that I didn’t recognize Justin Long in 1999, since Galaxy Quest is listed on IMDb as his first credited roe, but I was still surprised to see him onscreen here, all bright eyed & babyfaced. His few scenes as the Galaxy Quest crew’s #1 (human) superfan, the kind of dweeb who obsesses over decades-old plot holes that don’t quite match the blueprints of a fictional spaceship, is more serviceable than scene-stealing, but he was still a pleasant addition to the cast. It’s a status I’m sure he’s used to filling.

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2) Rainn Wilson

In case you’re not noticing a pattern here, a lot of the more surprising supporting players in the Galaxy Quest cast are the alien kidnapper/fans that kick the film’s plot into action. Although the presence of Pyle & Colantoni caught me off-guard, what really threw me off was that Rainn Wilson was lurking among them. Much like with Long, Galaxy Quest was a kind of a career-starter for Wilson, who had only appeared in an episode of a soap opera before joining the ranks of this sci-fi comedy’s geeked-out aliens. As an unproven newcomer (this was obviously years before Wilson’s star-making turn as Dwight Schrute on The Office), Wilson mostly lurks in the background as a stealthy member of the extraterrestrial superfans. However, he fits in perfectly with his compatriot dorks & the film stands as an early glimpse at the total-weirdo energy he’d later bring to his iconic television role, as well as the strange diversity in his choice of projects, which include recent strange outliers like Cooties & The Boy.

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1) Kevin McDonald

Speaking of the ridiculous range of underutilized talents lurking in the film’s geeky alien troupe, I spent a lot of Galaxy Quest asking myself “Is that Kevin McDonald? No, it’s not. But is it, though?” while watching character actor Patrick Breen fill out their ranks as a Spock-like superfan of Rickman’s eternally inconvenienced personification of nonplussed stoicism. Patrick Breen, it turns out, is not Kevin McDonald. They are two separate people. Imagine my surprise, then, when the Kids in the Hall vet did show up in the film’s closing minute in a thankless, jokeless role as a sci-fi convention MC who announces the arrival of each crew member as they make their inevitable return to the Earths’ surface. Just when I thought Galaxy Quest could hold no more room for further casting surprises, Kevin McDonald swooped in at the last second, as if the film were reading my mind.

I guess that’s to be expected in a movie where Sam Rockwell plays a full-length tribute to the very nature of a thankless bit role actor, but how could Galaxy Quest’s casting director Debra Zane have known that all of those supporting players would eventually become such big names in the first place? Her intuition seems to have been just as futuristic as the film’s sci-fi setting and her work of gathering up all of these strong personalities is a large part of what makes the film such an enduring delight.

-Brandon Ledet

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), Ponyo (2009), and the Weirdly Relaxed Plotting of Hayao Miyazaki Features

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Although the animation medium he works in sometimes pigeonholes his accomplishments, Hayao Miyazaki is truly one of the masters of cinema, right up there with names like Bergman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Corman. And just like with a lot of the masters of cinema, I’ve only seen a small fraction of his work and I’m scrambling to catch up. Lately I’ve been making more of an effort to familiarize myself with a wider range  of Miyazaki classics outside re-watching Spirited Away & My Neighbor Totoro multiple times a year, which has lead me to a few less readily recognizable titles like Howl’s Moving Castle & Princess Mononoke over the past year. It’s been difficult for me to distinguish Miyazaki’s work form the rest of the filmmakers at Studio Ghibli in terms of style outside of his fascination with themes like immersion in the natural world & the wonder of flight. While recently watching the features Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service in a single weekend, though, something struck me about the way Miyazaki’s features’ approach plot & pacing I hadn’t yet noticed. Once the director establishes the majesty of his films’ worlds & settings, he’s remarkably comfortable with bringing the story down to a full stop simply to marinate in the immense beauty he’s constructed. I had never noticed before how his films all tend to work this way in their own individual moments of lowkey self-reflection & immersion in setting before watching these two titles in rapid succession. Nor had I noticed how oddly comforting that plot structure can be.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is a simple story about a young witch coming of age as she leaves home to start a new, autonomous life in a foreign city. In an early jaunt of exposition the Miyazaki trademarks of intricate, detailed animation (seen most easily in its shots of wind blowing through tall grass) & wonder with the majesty of flight (she’s a witch after all; she even made her own broom) seem to promise an epic story of witchy misadventures as Kiki tries to find her footing in an overwhelming, sometimes terrifying world. I was more or less expecting The Worst Witch restructured as a big budget adventure epic. The film does feature some dangerous run-ins that fit the mold I’m describing, like an early tussle with some vindictive crows & a climax revolving around a downed zeppelin, but for the most part action & adventure are the furthest thing from the film’s mind. Most people in Kiki’s new city are supportive of the witchy visitor, especially once she becomes familiar & finds a sense of purpose in her broomstick-driven delivery business. For the most part the film’s plot is centered on small scale concerns like “Will she make new friends?” “Will she make her deliveries on time?” and “Will she beat the rain?”  Kiki’s Delivery Service isn’t a tale of a witch venturing out into the world as much as it’s about a witch finding confidence & autonomy within herself, with the film’s most major crisis being whether or not she’ll get her mojo back once her magic begins to fade. The way Miyazaki allows this inner struggle to play out & resonate is to establish a living space (an indoor-kid’s fantasy of an attic loft above a bakery with an ocean view) and allow Kiki to ruminate within it, as if she were morphing inside a cocoon. To pile any more action onto the plot would detract from the impact of Kiki’s inward journey & Miyazaki’s brilliance is in the way he’s comfortable with letting his protagonist’s downtime breathe & slowly mature.

Although its setting trades Kiki’s Delivery Service’s high in the sky adoration with flight for a polar opposite physical realm deep under water, Ponyo follows a similar trajectory in terms of plot & pacing. Miyazaki opens the movie with an immensely intricate galaxy of deep sea wonders, dazzling the audience with a majestic display teeming with underwater lifeforms. This peaceful balance is disrupted when a humanoid fish befriends a small human boy on dry land & shapeshifts to please him, playing out a strange slant on the fairy tale structure of The Little Mermaid. Ignoring the warning that “Fishes with faces who come out of the ocean cause tsunamis,” the two unlikely friends explore a life together at everyone else’s expense, causing a massive flood, as promised, that separates parents – both underwater wizards & overworked nursing home employee mothers alike – from their young children. Again, what’s interesting in the way Miyazaki constructs this fable is that he doesn’t push for big, exciting action sequences at every turn in Ponyo but instead seeks out a languid kind of majesty that’s remarkably confident & emotionally affecting in the way it allows you to sink into the places he’s created. Ponyo’s story works twofold in its development of a heartfelt, but doomed friendship and its sense of loss & confusion in the search of a misplaced loved one. What sticks with you in the film isn’t necessarily specific events or plot points, but rather visual details like a jellyfish galaxy or a candle-powered boat and, yet, an emotional story arc caries through in that setting-specific artistry

I think a large part of the brilliance of Miyazaki’s slow crawl pacing & sparse plotting is the way it allows you to sink into a space. The underwater world of Ponyo & the above-the-bakery apartment of Kiki’s Delivery Service live vividly in my imagination long after the end credits, feeling as real or as tangible as real-life spaces I’ve physically inhabited. As I look back to past films I’ve seen from the director I realize that this aspect has always been a major aspect of his appeal to me. I don’t always remember the finer points of the various adventures & mishaps in his films as much as I remember details like the gloriously crowded bedroom in Howl’s Moving Castle or the inside of the catbus in My Neighbor Totoro or the old woman’s cottage in Spirited Away. I was pondering the other day about what didn’t quite work for me in the recent French animated feature April and the Extraordinary World and I’m starting to think it had something to do with the film’s decision to crowd its runtime with an action chase plot instead of slowing down & luxuriating in the intricately detailed space it had created. The only animated film outside of Studio Ghibli I can think of that similarly pulls this trick off is Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (it even features a Ponyo-like flood), which, no surprise, Miyazaki himself had apparently worked at some point during its long, troubled production. The director’s reverence for defined space over quickly plotted pace has a special touch that allows you to mentally live in his worlds that some less pointed works would allow to fly by in a blur. For some reason it took rapid succession viewings of Ponyo & Kiki’s Delivery Service for me to catch onto that aspect of his work, but looking back I realize it had been there with me all along.

-Brandon Ledet

Black Moon (1975) was the Most Honest Surrealist Take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice . . . Until Alice (1988)

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We were having a hard time in our initial conversation about August’s Movie of the Month, the fantasy realm art piece Black Moon, in pinpointing an exact interpretation of the film’s basic plot or intent. It’s highly likely, of course, that director Louis Malle didn’t want his exact intent or a definitive plot to be discernible at all in the film. Black Moon feels very much committed to a certain mode of surrealism that points to the coldness & seemingly random cruelty of existence by being, you guessed it, cold & randomly cruel. The interpretation we more or less settled on as a crew was that Black Moon was best understood as a down-the-rabbit-hole story that aped the structure of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland series as a means of capturing his young protagonist’s unsettling journey into womanhood. Whatever that journey means or what it even is largely falls under the umbrella of personal interpretation but the Wonderland influence was undeniable as an overarching aesthetic in its basic structure. Black Moon is by no means a strict adaptation of that source material, but it does wear the influence on it sleeve, as openly admitted by Malle himself in interviews. I’d also argue that the film was the best surrealist take on Wonderland’s cold, random cruelty depicted on film for well over a decade, capturing that aspect of Carroll’s work better than any of its many peers that were straightforward adaptations of the novel. That is, until it was upstaged by 1988’s stop-motion animation classic Alice.

Czech director Jan Švankmajer had been producing short films all the way back to the same art scene in his home country that produced 1967’s Daisies before making his feature film debut in Alice. To be honest, Alice’s structure & pacing reflect his short film past in a lot of ways, recalling modern filmmakers like Guy Maddin & Roy Andersson who are remarkably adept at constructing individual images & vignettes, but struggle a little when it comes to piecing those moments together to achieve a digestible feature length work. Alice is a stunning visual achievement, a tactile work of stop-motion animation that values the specificity of curio cabinet oddities, Joseph Cornell shadowboxes, and taxidermy animals over the clay figurines we’re used to seeing in titles like Coraline & Kubo. What makes Alice interesting as an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s source material, however, is not in the visual achievement, but in a tone that matches the cold surrealism of Louis Malle’s Black Moon. As Švankmajer put it himself, he wanted to reinvent the interpretation of Alice in Wonderland in other adaptations that posed it as a fairy tale with a moral center and instead present it as a cold, amoral dream with no point to be made outside its own absurdism, a reading that captures the essence of Black Moon just as much as it hints at the power & intent of Carroll’s source material. Švankmajer explained, “While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect – it works with the moral of the lifted finger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realization of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realized dream.” Considered in that context, Black Moon also functions best as a dream & not as a fairy tale, despite what you’d expect based on its talking unicorn.

The difference between the dream structures of Alice & Black Moon, however, is that the latter often functions as a nightmare. Both films’ plots survive on the surreality of minute to minute obstinate confusion, but there’s a lighter tone to Alice that isn’t quite matched in Black Moon. Black Moon can be funny at times, but it often veers into uncomfortable imagery like hawk murder & interspecies breastfeeding, while Alice finds its individual vignettes in moments like a cute rat cooking a can of beans on its young protagonist’s head. Most of the film’s creepiness lies in its old world imagery, a curio cabinet specificity that recalls a similar immersion in Nature, strange animals, and odd domesticity to what we see in Black Moon’s languid sleepwalk through an earth tone dreamscape, but with noticeably less malice. Black Moon pulled a lot of its surrealist influence from Carroll’s creation in Alice in Wonderland, an uncaring, dreamlike tone that recalls the structure of a fairy tale, but without the lesson to be learned. 1988’s Alice picks up that torch & runs with it, applying that same amoral interpretation of Carroll’s intent to a straightforward adaptation of his novel. Together they have a lot to say about the potency of dream logic, the philosophical implications of surrealism, and the meaninglessness of meaning. I highly recommend them as a double feature next time you’re feeling particularly existential & loopy.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, Louis Malle’s surrealist fantasy art piece Black Moon, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s comparison of its lame duck unicorn with the divine unicorns of Legend (1985).

-Brandon Ledet

Cuddles Kovinsky as the Ultimate Edith Massey Performance

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The almighty Divine is John Waters’s most infamous collaborator (even if that means her name is unfortunately synonymous with eating dog shit in a broad cultural context). Mary Vivian Pierce is the only Dreamlander (as Waters’s recurring cast is often known) to appear in every one of the director’s features. Mink Stole is, perhaps, the coolest kid in the room, the one with the most adaptable talent & willingness to commit. There’s an argument to be made, however, that Baltimore personality Edith Massey was Waters’s most readily fascinating featured player, his most consistently striking & bizarre screen presence. There’s no one else in all of cinema quite like Massey. The only actor who even comes close is Waters’s idol Russ Meyer’s frequent collaborator Princess Livingston (not surprisingly, the two women were discovered while working as a bartender & a motel manager, not as actors), but even Livingston’s bizarre charisma couldn’t quite match the weird energy & depth of content Massey brought to the screen in her decade-long stint as a Dreamlander. Massey’s odd, snaggle-toothed visage helped define who John Waters is as a filmmaker with a striking, idiosyncratic specificity that makes him my favorite living artist, if not person.

A lot of the shock value humor of Waters’s early, transgressive films often outshines the more even-tempered work he delivered later on in his “mainstream” titles like Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and (the utterly perfect) Serial Mom. Waters is often misunderstood in the context of shock cinema due to his earliest provocations, most notably Pink Flamingos, and the weirder trash-art surreality of his work is sometimes overlooked because of his youthful pranksterism. Massey was with Waters from day one during these formative provocations, putting in the bulk of her work as an actor in the director’s so-called “Trash Trilogy.” Easily, Massey’s most iconic role is her turn as Divine’s mother, The Egg Lady, in the aforementioned Pink Flamingos. The Egg Lady was an underwear-clad humanoid who demanded a constant supply of eggs at all times of the day: a strange, unsettling image that afforded Massey a lifetime of celebrity & provided the name of her short-lived punk band Edie & the Eggs. Massey’s screentime & command of Waters’s strange brand of humor grew in her two subsequent roles as villains in Desperate Living & Female Trouble (two films that are far more attention-worthy than Pink Flamingos, as much as I adore that scrappy filth fest). Massey devours scenery in these two wicked roles, whether she’s coaching her beloved nephew on the lifestyle benefits of “turning queer” or sentencing an entire village to death before her royal firing squad. Much like Waters’s overall aesthetic, however, I’m not convinced that Massey’s work reached its pinnacle in the wild, punk days of the “Trash Trilogy”. Her work wouldn’t meet its peak absurdity until it was juxtaposed against the much more mundane avenues of suburban America (and because we’re talking Waters here, I guess that specifically means suburban Baltimore).

The film that bridged these two halves of John Waters’s career, the trashy & the suburban-surreal, was his 1981 feature Polyester. Presenting Douglas Sirk by way of Russ Meyer, Polyester is a wonderfully strange slice of American pie, one molded & poisoned by melodramatic fits of adultery, alcoholism, teenage delinquency, and sexual perversion. Both halves of Waters’s career have endless merit in my eternally gushing eyes & it’s wonderful to watch the way Polyester can teeter totter on both sides of that divide without ever losing track of what makes either half special. Additionally, this is where I find Edith Massey’s most outrageous, knee-slappingly funny performance to be. Massey’s performance as Cuddles Kovinsky is her finest work as a Dreamlander, a true tour de force of delightfully terrible acting that somehow steals a film from a top-of-her-game Divine, which is no small feat. Watching Massey do her weird, off-putting thing in films like Pink Flamingos & Desperate Living is one thing, but her transgressive screen presence made total sense in the context of those films’ early punk depravity. In Polyester, she’s presented as a normal human being, an upstanding member of regular society, and it’s an outrageously ill-fitting role for a foul-mouthed, snaggle-toothed bartender with her braying style of line delivery to fill. Waters & Massey both knew exactly what they were doing when they airdropped Cuddles Kovinsky into an unsuspecting suburbia and it ended up being both a pivotal turning point in Waters’s trajectory as a filmmaker as well as the pinnacle of Massey’s work as a Dreamlander. Unfortunately, it would also prove to be their final collaboration due to Massey’s escalating health problems and inevitable death.

Cuddles Kovinsky is a wealthy heiress & former housekeeper of Divine’s much put-upon housewife archetype Francine Fishpaw. As Francine’s life spins out of control due to her teenage children’s hedonism & her husband’s flagrant adultery, Cuddles’s own path hits a rags to riches upswing. Cuddles lives the lavish fantasy of the nouveau riche, traveling around Baltimore in a limousine with a boy toy European driver behind the wheel, shopping for fashion’s high end designer finery (none of which looks at all natural or comfortable on her weird, little egg-shaped body), rubbing elbows with Baltimore’s country club elite, and just straight up murdering the French language with a never-ending recital of high society clichés & platitudes. Cuddles is the ever-optimistic ying to Francine’s depressive, alcoholic yang and Massey plays her with the exact right tone of complete obliviousness. When Francine passes out on the floor blind drunk her best friend Cuddles mews, “You’re so cute when you’re tipsy!” When Francine attempts to hang herself to end the pain, Cuddles exclaims, “We’re going on a picnic!” Polyester is mostly centered on Francine’s struggle to find happiness in a world where its existence seems unlikely at best, but Cuddles is perfectly happy throughout, concerned only with what she’s going to wear to her debutante ball at the country club. Divine & Massey’s performances compliment each other nicely, but it’s near impossible to take your eyes off Cuddles anytime she graces the screen. Even her over-the-top pantomime reactions to every syllable of someone else’s lines are attention-grabbing in a completely absurd, living cartoon kind of way. Of all of Massey’s wonderfully weird onscreen creations, Cuddles stands out as her most arrestingly unique & distinctly out of place.

I don’t mean to downplay the early works of either Waters or Massey here. The “Trash Trilogy” is pure cinematic chaos, a hedonistic whirlwind of freaks & weirdos I don’t know where I’d be without. I love each of those films & Massey’s performances in them dearly. With Polyester, however, the degenerate duo (with the help of Divine & other Dreamlanders, of course) struck upon something much more subversive. Watching Massey don leather dominatrix gear or wax poetic about the virtues of cocksuckers fit in very closely with what you’d expect from her image & her gaudy barroom personality. There’s something much stranger & more unexpected going on with Cuddles Kovinsky, a character that allows Massey to wear French schoolgirl & horse riding outfits and bray lines like, “There must be a God. Everything is so beautiful!” It’s all too easy to picture Massey fronting a punk band or tending bar, but gleefully praising God & enjoying a picnic in the woods? That’s some weirdly subversive shit. Waters capitalized on that taking-the-circus-to-suburbia aesthetic more or less for the remainder of his career, but unfortunately Massey wasn’t able to come along for the ride. Polyester ended up being Waters’s final collaboration with the actor and after a role in the forgotten schlock title Mutants in Paradise, she died. At least we can say her career as a Dreamlander ended on top, though, as Cuddles Kovinsky brought some of her weirdest, most unexpected energy to the silver screen, helping reshape the trajectory The Pope of Trash’s career would take in the decades to follow. At least we’ll always have Cuddles

-Brandon Ledet

The Reverence & Irreverence for Unicorns in Black Moon (1975) & Legend (1985)

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When we were discussing August’s Movie of the Month, the surrealist fantasy art piece Black Moon, it was all too easy to pick on the film’s depiction of a plump & frumpy unicorn, since that’s not the image we typically associate the mythical beast with. The movie itself even picks on the unicorn, with its protagonist Lily (one of three Lilys) stating plainly to the poor beast, “You’re not very graceful. In my books unicorns are slim & white.” The Eeyore-esque unicorn then laughs in her face & brays “The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.” Black Moon playfully subverts the iconic image of a unicorn with what is essentially a horned donkey with a smartass sense of humor. The most realistic depiction of what Lily & ourselves were picturing when we mentally conjured a basic unicorn wouldn’t gallop onto the screen until a decade later in Ridley Scott’s fantasy epic Legend.

As a European art film featuring cross-species breastfeeding & a literal battle of the sexes, Black Moon isn’t at all interested in basic cinematic concerns like clear narrative or commercial appeal. It wouldn’t be until the mid-1980s when American movie studios would start mining the same fantasy realm representation for wide commercial releases, but you can see echoes of the Natural World magic & down-the-rabbit-hole story structure of Black Moon in popular fantasy titles like The Neverending Story, The Labyrinth, and Ladyhawke. Although Legend was an outright commercial flop it was a big studio picture that firmly fit in that category. Legend is more of an adventure epic than Black Moon in a lot of ways, structuring its tale around dual journeys to restore order to a broken world instead staying put & feeling out the weirdo magic vibes of one particular location. Both films do pursue a dead still sense of pacing, though, concerning their narratives more with an overwhelming immersion in Nature than any kind of action-packed pursuit. Legend‘s scope & budget allows for the inclusion of goblins, demons, fairies, zombies, and swamp witches that you aren’t going to see anywhere near Black Moon‘s small scale domestic horrors, but both films do depict a mortal woman in over her head in a magic realm and they do share  a common talisman: the unicorn.

In Black Moon, the unicorn doesn’t do much but trot lazily & crack wise. It’s just one element among many that confounds our hero Lily in her quest for simple answers about where she is & why that world is so hostile. In Legend, on the other hand, unicorns are everything. They’re exactly what Lily was conjuring when she insulted their Black Moon equivalent: slim, white, majestic, and (just like everything else in Legend) slathered in glitter. Lily chases down the Black Moon unicorn out of sheer curiosity and the consequence of the transgression is a line of dismissive insults no worse than anything else she suffers in her newfound home. In Legend, princess & Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend Lili (Mia Sara), lures a unicorn in for an intimate moment, but her indulgence’s consequences are much more severe. When the princess calms the mythical beast into standing still a goblin severs its horn, instigating a fantasy genre version of the Ice Age. There are only two living unicorns in Legend‘s folklore and their existence & health affects the state of the world no less than almighty gods. According to Tom Cruise’s woodland nymph character (who’s a decent stand-in for Black Moon‘s mute Fabio houseboy Lily), the unicorns “speak the language of laughter” & “Dark thoughts are unknown to them.” Furthermore, the princess “risks [her] mortal soul” when she says that she doesn’t care that the creatures are sacred. Like in Black Moon, the unicorns can talk, but they communicate in beautiful whale songs. Everything about them boasts divinity. And when “a mortal laid hands on a Unicorn” the whole world goes to shit.

Recent try-hard films like Deadpool & Suicide Squad and their like-minded internet memes have made the image of the unicorn a sort of cheap visual gag supposedly humorous for its Lisa Frank brand of femininity, a likely result of its brony-based cultural resurgence. Black Moon, similarly (but more purposefully), pokes fun at the divinity & femininity of classic unicorn representations by subverting the mythical creature’s attributes in an image & demeanor that pokes fun at the importance of physical beauty. That subversion wouldn’t mean anything without a unicorn hegemony to buck against, though, and you’ll find its best contrast in the divinity of Legend‘s horned equestrians. Ridley Scott’s mid-80s fantasy epic is maybe a little lacking in pace & plotting, but it’s a jaw-dropping work of gorgeous production design if I’ve ever seen one (I could happily spend 1,000 mall goth lifetimes in Tim Curry’s demon lair if nothing else) and that attention to glitter-coated beauty is a perfect stage for a traditional white unicorn ideal, the exact antithesis of what’s presented for laughs in Black Moon.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, Louis Malle’s surrealist fantasy art piece Black Moon, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 18: Call Northside 777 (1948)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Call Northside 777 (1948) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 140 of the first edition hardback, Roger recalls meeting Chicago newspaperman Jack McPhaul, whose reporting inspired the events of the film. He recounts McPhaul’s anecdote of a photographer at a 1940s demonstration of an atom being split pitching the following preposterous photo spread: “I’ve got a great idea for a series of three photos for the top of page one. You puttin’ in the atom, splittin’it, and standin’ around looking at the pieces.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: Ebert never officially reviewed the film, but he does mention it in his essay “The Best Damn Job in the Whole Damn World,” a collection of thoughts on what it means to be a newspaperman. Again, he mentions meeting McPhaul, an opportunity he clearly considered to be an honor.

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There’s a long history of celebrated newspapermen in celebrated films, from the William Randolph Hearst archetype of Citizen Kane to the Watergate investigation team of All the President’s Men to the recent Oscar-winning profile of Bostonian sex abuse scandal breakers in Spotlight. Roger Ebert was lucky to be born in a time, perhaps the end of a time, when print journalism was still a viable career and he knew it, proudly calling his occupation at The Chicago Sun-Times “the best damn job in the whole damn world.” Long before The Chicago Sun & The Chicago Times merged into a single paper, it had its own movie-worthy story of a newspaperman doing good. Besides boasting a general pride for his career path, Ebert was proud to have met/worked with Jack McPhaul, who he credited with penning the articles that inspired the “based on true events” drama Call Northside 777. The opening credits of Call Northside 777, however, state that the film is “based on an article by James P McGuire.” The truth is that both Chicagoan newspapermen were responsible for penning the articles that freed the wrongly convicted “Stop Me Before I Kill Again Killer” Joseph Majczek after 11 years of imprisonment for a crime he didn’t commit. Instead of playing the story like a group effort of an investigative team, however, Call Northside 777 sells its narrative as the efforts of one dedicated reporter’s “refusal to accept defeat,” presumably because it made for a better story.

Said amalgamation of McPhaul & McGuire is brought to life by none other than Old Hollywood mainstay Jimmy Stewart. Structurally speaking, Call Northside 777 isn’t too much to speak of in terms of innovation. It borrows a page from Citizen Kane in mixing newspaper reel stock footage & narration in with its narrative to establish a documentarian tone and attempts to construct the shadowy crime world aesthetic of a noir (except with a missing sense of urgency or moral ambiguity to its danger), but doesn’t do anything particularly inventive or memorable with either element. It’s the specificity of James Stewart’s lead performance as a skeptical-but-noble reporter, from his unmistakable vocal patters to his little-guy-vs-the-big-system demeanor, that makes the film a joy to watch. Although a 2010s audience wouldn’t likely be as familiar with the real-life events the film was based on as a 1940s audience would be, it’s still all too easy to guess how the story will turn out in the end (there wouldn’t be much of a plot if Macjzek were guilty). As so, the entertainment appeal of this non-mystery depends largely on Stewart’s performance, a burden he handles well. At first Stewart’s eternally exhausted newspaperman believes Majczek (or his fictionalized surrogate Wiecek) is guilty and only takes on the story because of a pushy newspaper editor & the prisoner’s sympathetic mother, who scrubs floors to earn money to investigate his long dead case. At first he’s reluctant to follow up on the supposed innocence of a man who I believes to be a cop killer, asking “Don’t I get time off for good behavior?” but he eventually unravels a story about drunk lawyers, faulty investigations, spineless judges, and Prohibition-era police department corruption that reveals Majczek/Wiecek to be a victim of the system. Stewart plays the part with a befuddled nobility only he could sell with such immense credibility and his efforts to free his articles’ star subject are likened to his wife’s hobby of slowly piecing together complicated jigsaw puzzles. It’s a methodical, frustrating process, but it’s rewarding when the picture finally comes together for the newspaperman & the wrongly convicted “cop killer.”

Besides Jimmy Stewart’s show-stealing performance Call Northisde 777 is mostly interesting for its historical curiosities. The first Hollywood production shot on location in Chicago, the film tried, when possible, to include actual locations from the real-life Mazcjek story to help establish its documentary tone. The inventor of the polygraph test, Leonard Keeler, plays himself & puts on a very extensive, detailed demonstration of his invention/methods. There’s also great attention paid to old fashion newspaper press machinery & the magic process of sending a photograph over a wire. For the most part, though, this 1940s non-noir is of interest for the way it captures an ancient Chicago, struggling to portray its immense, dangerous spirit, with its great fires, great violence, great corruption, and great newspapermen. Although Stewart’s noble sweetheart protagonist is an unmistakably decent guy, he still navigates an ancient journalism world built on lies, hard liquor, hard work, and cigar smoke. The true crime mystery thriller Call Northside 777 tries to sell isn’t particularly interesting or unique, but Stewart’s portrayal of noble newspaperman in an ignoble world is an easy emotional rallying point and it’s no wonder that meeting the man who helped inspire the character was a proud moment for Ebert, as McPhaul represented “the best damn job in the whole damn world” in what I’m sure the legendary critic considered the best damn city in the whole damn world.

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Roger’s Rating (N/A)

Brandon’s Rating: (3.5/5, 70%)

threehalfstar

Next Lesson: Tootsie (1982)

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Black Moon (1975)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Alli made Britnee, Brandon, and Boomer  watch Black Moon (1975).

Alli: It’s hard to describe the plot of Black Moon, but I’ll try my best to sum it up simply. A young girl, Cathryn Harrison, is fleeing certain death in a war. It’s seemingly everywhere as she tries to get away. She eventually winds up at a magically untouched farm house. There she seeks refuge. Life at the farm house is surrealist chaos. Things that exist in this movie: an operatic yet mute man, nude children with farm animals, a unicorn, and a mumbling rat. It’s more an Alice in Wonderland type story than an actual escaping the war movie.

In the credits, I noticed Sven Nykvist listed as cinematographer. He was Bergman’s cinematographer for many, many films, but the two most relevant to this one are Persona and Hour of the Wolf. Those two titles, to me, function in the same sort of dream-like time frame and space. There’s a scene in particular that’s an extremely beautiful shot where the cast is in a living room type space and there’s this family production of an opera. There’s these two children standing and singing and to just freeze that frame I think is a lovely picture.

Something I forgot about was the strange politics of this movie. It’s set against the backdrop of this war, but it’s set up to be a battle of the sexes. By showing this as a brutal and seemingly senseless battle, it seems to be a very clueless attempt to say, “Why can’t we just get along?” By not giving context it kind of trivializes a lot of what was going on in mid-early 1970’s, given that this was during the height of second wave feminism and Roe v. Wade was only two years before. I think the reason I forgot about the politics in this film is that they get brushed aside very early on by its strange tone and pacing.

This movie is extremely surreal. It has the rare quality of having the most dream-like logic of any movie I’ve ever seen. I frequently have sort of stressful dreams where I’m running in and out of buildings and rooms struggling to find something. The something is always vague. Watching this movie kind of put me into a familiar, trance-like state, which I’m not entirely sure if that’s a positive or negative attribute. In a way I think is dreamlike surrealism finds its own kind of horror whether intentionally or not.

I find that surrealism is an either you’re in or out sort of thing, especially in film. What do you think about its dreamlike feel, Brandon? Were you onboard? Why or why not?

Brandon: Black Moon does reach for a languid Spirit of the Beehive style of horror in ambiguity & the unknown that I genuinely appreciated, but will admit that the film’s deliberately alienating mode of obfuscation took me a minute to sink into. Early on in the runtime I found myself searching for direct metaphor in the film’s War vs. Nature imagery & a clear, linear sense of plot in what was happening minute to minute, but I don’t think the move lends itself to that kind of literal examination. That’s not to say that there is no prevailing structure or that the movie is generally meaningless, but I do think trying to “figure it out” is a little besides the point, which is a kind of submission on the audience’s part that can be difficult for a film to earn.

I think Black Moon shows its hand in this way when its initially stoic, Mad Maxian brat protagonist demands “Would you please tell me what’s going on around here?” and her panties immediately hit the floor, signifying nothing but an oddly tawdry, whimsical joke. Then there’s my personal favorite moment when she opens a picture album in search for answers only to find pictures of the same confounding characters & objects that frustrated her in the first place. It’s gags like these that signaled to me that it’s okay to relax and enjoy the film’s odd visual pleasures & loopy dream logic without having to solve some kind of complex metaphorical puzzle. The movie knows exactly how silly & absurd it’s being.

As Alli noted, the best way to wrap your mind around Black Moon‘s structure is to consider it as an Alice down-the-rabbit-hole story (an influence explicitly acknowledged by the director, Louis Malle). Our de facto hero Lily (one of three Lilies, a super popular name apparently) leaves a masculine-governed war-torn world in the midst of a female rebellion to mysteriously find herself transported to a decidedly matriarchal, magical realm of Nature. These two realities, War & Nature, seem to paradoxically occupy the same space, alternating in dominance but rarely interacting as Hero Lily tries to make sense of where exactly she fits in. She begins the film as a defiant non-participant in the War realm and ends the film wholly indoctrinated in the Natural one, with all of its naked children, strange critters, and nonverbal communication. It reminded me of fairy tales where you’re not allowed to leave a magical realm once you’ve tasted the food, except in this case you’re stuck once you breastfeed a mythical beast or a human adult.

It’s in that War vs. Nature dichotomy where I have to slightly disagree with Alli’s suggestion that the film’s central war-of-the-sexes political message is “Why can’t we all just get along?” Although both realms depicted in Black Moon are horrifying in their own bizarre way, there’s a peace & freedom to the feminine, Natural world that simply doesn’t exist in the male-dominated War world. It’s a tranquility you can see in the slow-moving beauty of the film’s odd little bugs or in the wild, screaming abandon of its hoard of naked children. It’s only when Man Lily disrupts this serenity by dismembering an hawk with his giant, phallic sword that the semblance of order & freedom is disrupted and the Nature realm starts to resemble the War one. Like I said, though, the film is so aggressively nonsensical that it’s risky to read anything this concrete in its story or allegory, as tempting as it is.

Britnee, what, if anything, do you think Black Moon has to say about the war of the sexes? Was the film’s social or political metaphor at all strengthened by its deliberately confusing story & imagery or only muddled by them?

Britnee: When initially viewing Black Moon, I felt completely lost. I’m usually slow at catching on to art house films such as this one. As the film came to an abrupt end, I planned on heading home and Googling the hell out of Black Moon because I felt as thought there was some deep movie message that I completed missed. A strange feeling sat with me for a long time after watching the movie. It was a mixture of fear, confusion, familiarity, discomfort, and bliss. What a combination, right? I loved the way that Black Moon made me feel, and I loved how I was given the freedom to figure out the film for myself. So, thankfully, I decided to not do one bit of Googling for Black Moon.

The film begins with a very violent and terrifying war of the sexes. With such an intense opening, I thought the film was going to be a surrealistic war movie, and Lily was going to join the women in their fight. Well, that didn’t happen at all. Once Lily ventured off to the magical farmhouse, the war of the sexes makes very few appearances for the rest of the film. I didn’t think the film had much to say about the war of the sexes except for that it simply existed. I also didn’t recognize any social or political messages within the film, so, in answering Brandon’s question, it’s quite possible that the film’s confusion prevented these messages from coming across (if they exist at all). I viewed Black Moon as a bizarre film about a young girl stepping into womanhood. Lily’s breastfeeding of the old woman, the sexual tension between her and male Lily, and just the way that she goes from having a tantrum about something silly to taking control of the situation led me to believe that this film could be a coming-of-age tale. Oh, I almost forgot about the snakes! I thought it was strange how there were multiple snakes that made appearances in this movie, but the snake represents transformation (shedding its skin) and Lily is transforming from a girl to a woman. The film sort of makes a bit of sense when I view it as story of a young girl transforming into a woman, but maybe I just shouldn’t be making sense of this movie.

Boomer, did you think the film was attempting to make a statement about entering womanhood? What parts of the film were you able to easily clarify and what parts, if any, were you simply not able to make any sense of?

Boomer: Like you, Britnee, the first thing that I did after watching the film was looking for interpretations of it online. I was primed to assume that the movie would be about burgeoning female sexual maturity as soon as I learned it was a film with the word “moon” in the title and was about a young woman. Overall, that reading bears itself out, although it seems like a shallow and decidedly male (maybe even chauvinistic) lens into that world. I’ll admit that point is arguable, but I have to say I would feel less annoyed by a film that has a girl’s underpants falling down when she tries to understand the strange world around her if there had been a woman in the director’s chair.

This is the primary rhetorical methodology used to dissect the film as well. Ginette Vincendeau writes in her essay “Black Moon: Louis in Wonderland” (released with the Criterion DVD of the film) that the “dominant interpretation, unsurprisingly, has been psychoanalytical. [Black Moon] is a tale of a young girl’s sexual awakening, explicitly modeled on Alice in Wonderland…. [Georgiana] Colville offers the best sustained analysis in this vein, pointing out, for example, Lily’s positioning as an onlooker, frequently seen on a threshold or at a window, observing the adults’ and animals’ behavior.” It’s certainly an interesting idea, but I’d go so far as to posit that the pervasive surreality may render any attempts to parse the film a bit of an academic exercise.

Before going in to the film, Brandon told me that he perceived a distinct Suspiria vibe in the proceedings, and I can see the similarities between the two in the dreamlike nature of the narrative (for lack of a better term), although Suspiria benefitted from a structure and a more colorful palette (although the dream elements in Suspiria don’t have the same metaphorical quality that Black Moon‘s losses). Given the parallels and the very brief period of time between each film’s respective premiere, how do you feel these two films compare to each other?

Alli: There’s actually a lot of things in common with Suspiria that I didn’t think about until you guys brought it up. They both employ a sort of Wonderland style story arc. There’s the idea of girlhood and girlhood terror through the lens of a male director. Then, you’ve got the idea of witches as old terrifying hags, sort of Queens of Hearts. You could even make a strong argument for the woman in the bedroom being a similar kind of witch as Mater Suspirium, both bedridden and cared for by their followers. Both Lilia and Suzy navigate their worlds with a similar brazen, Alice-like curiosity. Though Suspiria relies on the terror of being young and small in a world controlled by ageless beings, while Black Moon sticks to the well-trodden fear of growing up.

I think Black Moon presents coming into womanhood and growing as giving up some natural freedom. The only truly free people you see the entire movie are the nude children running around. Sister Lily is stuck disdainfully caring for everyone, even this new arrival. Every other adult woman is stuck fighting the men. Even old age is presented as horrific since the old lady is bedridden and sickly and mean. There’s the unsettling ticking clocks as the passage of time with alarms going off as a prominent thing in this film, as if a reminder that Lily is just getting older and older. Her chasing after a mythical creature, one that only appears to virgins and maidens, is a kind of way of chasing after youth and imagination.

I guess the thing that always stands out to me when I watch this movie is the talking animals. Usually they’re only seen in children’s movies, so it’s kind of refreshing to have a character like Humphrey appear in a wacky, surreal arthouse movie. As apposed to being lighthearted, It sure seems that creatures like Humphrey and the Unicorn have sort of a disdain for humankind. Nature in general seems pretty eager to let people kill themselves off so that it can get along with things. It feels a little bit like it’s all looming, especially at the end with the sheep everywhere. I know you said, Brandon, that there’s sort of a peace and freedom in nature, but to me it seems a little bit like it’s biding its time. What do you think about this idea of ambivalence? Is it menacing or comforting?

Brandon: I meant to use the terms “peace” & “freedom” in more of a political sense than anything. There is plenty of discord & danger to be had in Black Moon‘s take on Nature, but I get the general sense that its societal structure is far more functional than the War realm’s. The children & animals (both mythical & otherwise) run freely in an overwhelming, menacing sort of way in Lily’s new home, but it’s difficult to imagine them existing at all in the War realm. According to the film’s central philosophy, “All is illusion. Set us free of this world,” a sentiment that points to an ambivalence & frivolity on both sides of the coin, the same kind of everything-is-pointless mentality you see in anti-war art movements like surrealism & Dadaism. Even as both worlds pose their own sort of existential threat, though, as any kind of mortal life would, I still found the Natural one more hospitable.This isn’t quite the ultra-feminine Nature utopia of The Duke of Burgundy, especially with the masculine romance novel cover model Lily chopping birds out of the sky, but there’s still food on the stove & (goofily ugly) unicorns milling about, dispensing life advice. It’s, to me, a preferable existence in a world that’s bound to be dangerous & ambivalent either way Lily chooses to go.

Britnee, you said earlier that Black Moon is at heart a bizarre tale of a young girl stepping into womanhood. Besides the girls running amok among the wild children, there seem to be three distinct snapshots of what womanhood looks like presented here: the panty-dropping frivolity of youth in Hero Lily, the confidently self-assured adulthood of Sister Lily, and the bedridden, infantile bitterness of (as the credits bill her) Old Lady. What do these portraits combine to say about the womanhood Lily is presumably stepping into? How does it differ from what little we see of the film’s masculine archetypes?

Britnee: I didn’t initially see the three main female characters as representing stages of womanhood, but I completely agree with your theory, Brandon. My mind is completely blown right now. These “snapshots” combined really make womanhood seem like it’s going to, for lack of a better term, suck. Hero Lily (insert the incredible Trey Songz hit “Panty Dropper”) is so confused about who she is and what she’s doing that I get stressed out just thinking about her. Sister Lily seems to have her shit together and really holds down the fort, but as Alli previously mentioned, she’s stuck in this caretaker role (serving dinner to the naked kids, maintaining the cottage, breastfeeding the Old Lady, etc.). The cruel Old Lady is completely envious of Hero Lily’s youth, and spends most of her time talking to a rat and radio. Nothing about her life is remotely appealing.

Brother Lily serves as one of the only representations of masculinity in the film. He really seemed to be ignorant and immature when compared to Sister Lily, who seems to be the same age. He doesn’t really do much but garden and sing, and the only time he really stands out is when he becomes violent by killing a hawk and having a deadly fight with Sister Lily. When comparing him to the symbolic female characters of the film, he just looks really dumb. I’m starting to feel like Sister Lily is the strongest character in the film. That could say something positive about a woman entering adulthood, but still, she doesn’t seem to have much freedom.

Boomer, were there any parts of the film that made you uncomfortable? The breastfeeding of the old woman, spanking of the young girl, and the nude kids are a few things that made me shudder a bit. Even the parts with the talking animals were a bit unnerving because their voices were so whispery.  Of course, this could be because of my own ignorance.

Boomer: That’s not ignorance at all; I’m fairly certain that the parts which made you uncomfortable did so intentionally. For me, one of the things that stood out the most was the recurring motif of breastfeeding, not because of the feeding itself but because of the way that it subverted the paradigm of top-down caretaking that was referenced above. There’s a definite Maiden/Mother/Crone element at play that runs parallel to and inhabits the stages of womanhood, and the upending and general scattering of what personification/stage performs what actions and when is, I think, deliberately evocative of the general topsy-turviness of this world. That distance from the (presumably natural but really socially inscribed) norm lends even the more quotidian actions a general sense of uneasiness.

The thing that disturbed me most overall was the general destructiveness of our heroine, especially the sequence in which she stomps around the yard and takes delight in snuffing out the screaming cries that emanate from under her feet. There’s such a sociopathic quality to it that I couldn’t stop thinking about it after the movie ended. It’s a pretty mundane sequence (as much as anything in this film could be considered mundane) in comparison to the other surreal oddities on display, but it’s really stuck with me.

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Lagniappe

Britnee: I really feel like a terrible person for being so judgmental of the film’s unicorn. When seeing the unicorn for the first time, I was so pissed off that it was a donkey with a horn. Unicorns are supposed to look sort of like Fabio as a horse and have silky hair and shiny horns, but being a short, stubby donkey with an ugly horn shouldn’t make the Black Moon unicorn any less of a unicorn.

Boomer: The death of the hawk made me think of Paget Brewster felling an eagle in the cold open of the “Pageant” episode of Another Period, which made me laugh inappropriately. “Ha! Majestic no more!”

Alli: I’m going to take this as a Humphrey appreciation moment. I love his constant mumbling and that he slams doors every time he leaves the room. Also, I think that he’s extremely relatable. If I were that old woman’s pet rat, I’m pretty sure I’d be perpetually peeved.

Brandon: I think my text message wires got crossed while I was gushing to Boomer about too many movies at once, something I do embarrassingly often. I was actually comparing Suspiria to to Refn’s latest provocation, The Neon Demon, and Black Moon to Ladyhawke, which I assure you are much lesser stylistic leaps. I do think the Suspiria similarities Alli drew on were interesting & valid, though, and funnily enough I had cited another Argento title in my notes for Black Moon: Phenomena, a work that similarly sets a journey into womanhood against a horrific world of supernatural Nature.

My favorite aspect of Black Moon is the way it presents magic & witchcraft as a Natural, feminine realm crawling with plants, bugs, animals, and mythical creatures. There might be a bone-headed, typically masculine lens to that style of storytelling that estranges womanhood to an otherworldly mystique, in essence stripping an entire gender of its humanity, but damn if we haven’t gotten some great movies out of that buffoonery: Phenomena, The Witch, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Juniper Tree, The Spirit of the Beehive, etc., etc., etc. The gimmick may not lead to great gender discussion, but it certainly has lead to some great cinema.

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
September: Brandon presents The Box (2009)
October: Britnee presents Funhouse (1981)
November: Boomer presents  Paperhouse (1988)

-The Swampflix Crew

 

 

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 17: Lady Jane (1986)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Lady Jane (1986) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 137 of the first edition hardback, Ebert recalls interviewing Helena Bonham Carter when she was 19 & promoting the film. He also recounts drinking at a particular English pub for such a long period of time that he remembers both the day she moved into an apartment upstairs as well as the day she moved out.

What Ebert had to say in his review: Roger never officially reviewed the film, but he does mention it as evidence in his declaration that Helena Bonham Carter is the “Queen of the Period Picture”.

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Lady Jane is a mid-80s British costume drama featuring members of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a babyfaced Helena Bonham Carter. In that simple one line description I believe I’ve told you everything you need to know about its value as an evening’s entertainment & an artistic endeavor. Lady Jane is near-indistinguishable from a lot of its costume drama genre peers, save for a few before-they-were-stars casting choices, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t pleasant to look at. At 2.5 hours, its lack of stylistic or narrative ambition can wear your patience a little thin, but if you’re a fan of the familiar cinematic territory it inhabits there’s no shame in zoning out & enjoying the film for its beautiful costumes, historically inaccurate romance, horseback riding, and beheadings. Honestly, it’s perfect background filler for Sunday afternoon housecleaning, especially for fans of Helena Bonham Carter’s costume drama work who’d like to get a glimpse of her early stirrings.

Carter stars as Lady Jane Gray, known to history as “The Nine Days Queen” due to her very short reign as an English Monarch at the bequest of her dying boy-king cousin Edward VI. At the height of the Catholic-Protestant tensions in Great Britain, Lady Jane Grey was something of an instigator, pushing for Protestant values in order to “free the people from bigotry & superstition,” namely Catholicism. She was publicly executed for treason as a reward for her efforts, a shameful end as a political martyr for one of the most highly educated women of her time. Somewhere in that short time frame she was married off against her will to an English lord, a man she never loved & barely knew.

Lady Jane Grey’s story had been adapted for the silver screen twice before this Royal Shakespeare Company version, which might help explain how the details of that arranged marriage get a little fuzzy in this take. Carter’s Lady Jane is physically forced, whipped by her mother even, into marrying the rakish lord who offends her bookish sensibilities, but she does end up falling in love with him thanks to his good looks & dry wit of a young Carey Elwes (brought to the screen by a young Carey Elwes). I guess this doomed lovers element of the plot was meant as a sort of movie magic tactic that could up the emotional stakes of its narrative (which, again, ends in a public execution of a teenager), but it also plays as if The Royal Shakespeare Company spaced out & mixed in a little Romeo & Juliet with its historical narrative. I’m not complaining. Who doesn’t little teenage romance mixed in with their spiritually bleak, true life tragedy?

Ebert once called Helena Bonham Carter “The Queen of the Period Picture,” a career-long trend that’s continued all the way to projects as recent as 2013’s Great Expectations, Kenneth Braunaugh’s Cinderella, and last year’s Suffragette. Lady Jane was Carter’s very first top-billed role and she’s a literal baby in this film (a baby with amazing eyebrows), but she’s already a high-functioning actor here, holding her own among some of Britain’s finest stage actors of the time. She’s not the only interesting pre-fame performance either. A pre-Princess Bride Carey Elwes is perfectly charming as her non-historically accurate lover & a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart nearly steals the show as her boisterous, warmongering father, a character that feels as if he were lifted directly from an episode of Wishbone. I don’t think this film is especially memorable or worth seeking out unless one of those roles jumps out at you as something you’ve got to see before you die (are they’re a lot of diehard Helena Bonham Carter completists out there?), but like a lot of costume dramas it’s thoroughly pleasant & easy to consume. If it pops up on television I’d suggest you linger a while instead of immediately skipping over it. Otherwise it might not exactly be worth the effort of tracking it down.

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Roger’s Rating: N/A

Brandon’s Rating: (3/5, 60%)

three star

Next Lesson: Call Northside 777 (1948)

-Brandon Ledet