Sociopathic Mammals in The Informant!: A Ranty Prelude

Last weekend I had the opportunity to see The Informant! at the Laurelhurst Theater in Portland, OR.  If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing a movie at this particular theater, you are missing out.  Your life is passing you by and you are depriving yourself of one of the great attributes of a great city.  The Laurelhurst is infused with rustic charm (a Portland staple) and happens to be one of several Portland theaters in which a moviegoer can enjoy second-run films with the welcome accompaniment of beer and/or wine.  Movie tickets at the Laurelhurst are $3, which is approximately 1/4 of the price one would pay for the same film only 3 weeks prior.   Instead of waiting in line with all of the riffraff for films on opening weekend and paying inordinate amounts of money to watch a movie without beer, why not wait until the same film hits the second-run beer theaters in Portland, and enjoy your anticipated film with friends and a nice buzz?  I’m making way too much sense.

And while I’m giving Portland a shoutout, I’d like to commend the city of my birth for producing respectful moviegoers.  In comparison, and for whatever reason, Vancouver Canada filmgoers seem to arrive to a movie theater carrying a zero-level of reverence underneath their tooks.  For Vancouverites there seems to be a general disregard for what is on the screen and overall lack of respect for the dozens of people surrounding them in a dark theater.  For the record: chatting during a film is never okay.  If words need to pass between you and your filmgoing partner/group, there is a respectful way of doing it.   Listen, you pink-faced sillies: your commentary is not welcome during a film.  Commentary should be reserved for your post-movie trip to the poutine restaurant.  Or for your blog.  Portlanders understand this for some reason.  Vancouver-Canadians do not.

Am I generalizing an entire city?  Yes.  Do I have evidence?  No.  But I do have some theories to explain this subjectively observed phenomenon.

1.) people in Canada are too polite.

This seems counterintuitive, I know, but hear me out.  In America, if you act like an asshole and jabber on through a movie, there is always the slight chance you will be shot.  No matter if it’s Christmas Day, or if your kid is with you– you need to shut up or you might be shot.  In Canada, if you jabber on during a movie, nobody says anything.  Unless I am there to tell you in a condescending voice, like a teacher talking to a 1st grader, “SSSSH!! We’re watching a movie!!!”  I actually did this while watching An Education in Vancouver to a young woman behind me who decided to announce “Awwwkward!” during an awkward scene, thereby puncturing the tense mood that the entire film was working to build.  I’m not saying that this woman, nor anyone, should be shot.  I’m just sayin.

2.) Canadians don’t respect American films

Perhaps it’s a cultural lack of respect for American products.  Many Canadians feel, if not an outright hatred, then at least a lingering distaste for American things.  Probably rightfully so.  But maybe this inability to embrace America and things hailing from there leads Vancouverites to treat the movie theater as their own personal rumpus room.  What adds some weight to this theory, for me, is that one of the only films that I’ve witnessed to hold an entire Vancouver audience rapt, to command the respect of every audience member, and the only film that a Vancouver audience I was a part of decided to be silent for, was Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story.  That’s right, a film that points out for 2 hours why the US and A might not be on the ethical up and up.

3.) Americans are innately more respectful of films/film culture?

Contemporary film culture was born and raised in Canada’s Southern neighbor.  Maybe the Canucks just missed the boat in the film-watching etiquette department because this American custom is innately foriegn to their value matrix.  Perhaps Americans do rude things while participating in hockey matches.  Maybe there’s a Canadian blogger out there decrying Americans and their inability to play hockey without ruining it for everyone else.  If this is the case, perhaps we can sketch up a treaty.

4.) Canadians collectively suffer from sociopathy

Perhaps the pristine, brisk Canadian air affects the brain in heretofore unknown ways.  We all know how Alaskan brains turn out.  Or maybe Universal healthcare makes Canadians a bit too comfy in their long johns.  Maybe they have reached a level of comfort that so goes against the natural discomfort of life that they have lost the edgy uncertainty that has historically kept us mammals in check.  Either way, sociopathy is defined as a disorder marked by antisocial behavior.  If anything is antisocial, then the utter lack of awareness of the feelings, concerns and motivations of the others around you is.  Granted, shooting people at a movie is also sociopathic.  I suppose it comes down to a matter of taste, and only one of these sociopathic manifestations leads to people shutting the fuck up during movies.

In any case, the Portland filmgoers, although they were alcohol-infused, were very considerate.  As I mentioned earlier, the movie at-hand was Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, a film based on a true story about an executive at a corporation called ADM.  I was intending to write about The Informant!, but I got a bit sidetracked.  Thanks for listening.  I feel better now.  I promise I will pursue this film in a couple days once I’ve spent a few days meditating and attempting to come to terms with all forms of life, even those that are determined to taint something that I love.

In the meantime, please listen to the This American Life episode entitled The Fix is In, which inspired the Scott Z. Burns’ screenplay for The Informant! and was based on the Kurt Eichenwald non-fiction account of the Marc Whitacre ADM saga called The Informant (sans exclamation point).  And, as Nerdy Two-Shoes pointed out with my last post, This American Life is a production of PRI, not NPR.  Apologies to the 1 person who gave a shit about the error.

Thanks but No Thanks, Sneaky Jesus People

On Monday at 8:30 am on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC I was approached by a bland-looking 20-something man who held up a book and asked, “Free book?”.  Coming from the US, my knee jerk reaction was to glare at this man who I assumed to be an Evangelical creep.  Continuing forth, I was approached by another man 20 paces away from the first, who had the same book and the same question.  After my glare, I heard him say to the back of my head, “Come on, it’s Charles Darwin.  It’s a good book.”

Exhibit A: Was this lamb duped?

After another 20 paces or so, I reached an intersection of two main campus roads which featured 3 more of these book givers.  It occurred to me that there had recently been various celebrations and educational events on UBC’s campus commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.  Feeling like I had allowed the American Jesus nuts to harden me into an irrevocably cynical person, I approached one of the book people and asked, “What book is that?” To which she replied “Darwin’s On the Origin of Species“.  I asked her why they were giving it away and she said “Because it’s a great book and people should read it.”

I said, “Oh” and accepted a book from her, which I examined on the way to where I was going.  It appeared like a cheap, paperback edition of Darwin’s book  with the words “150th Anniversary Edition” under the title.  It was the kind of paperback that an organization would purchase if it wanted to give out copies of a book by the wheelbarrowful.  I showed up to my destination on campus feeling like I had learned a valuable lesson about trust.  I noticed other people had the book and I chatted with them about how cool it was that a group of Vancouverites decided to take it upon themselves to spread the ideas of one of the 19th Century’s greatest thinkers.

I felt ashamed that I had allowed my heart to harden to a point of not being able to trust anybody — even like-minded thinkers.  I thought, “I’m in Canada — a place that appreciates the scientific method and freethinkers and not so much the blind religious zealotry.  It’s okay to trust people here.”

Later that night, when I had returned home, I pulled out the copy of Darwin’s most famous work, and decided I would read the introduction.  Guess what?  Yep, you guessed it: there are assholes everywhere, even in Canada.  I had been the victim of a classic bait and switch.  These nuts had published an edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species with an introduction that flouts Intelligent Design and instructs the reader to give his or her soul to Jesus, lest he or she burn in hell forever.

Contemplating our next scheme, are we? Hmm?

The lesson, as always: keep your hearts hard and don’t accept free books on the street.

This close encounter happens to correspond with a very entertaining recent episode of This American Life, an NPR a PRI show that never ceases to titillate.  The episode is called “Bait and Switch” and it even features an interview with an ex-Evangelical discussing bait and switch tactics employed in the name of Jesus that are very similar to those I fell victim to recently on the campus of UBC.

I’m sorry, but if you need to trick people into listening to what you have to say, perhaps there’s a problem with what you’re saying.  Also, the last time I checked, lying was a sin.  You know, a falsehood, as in when one portrays Jesus (an African man) as white-skinned.

You can stream the “Bait and Switch” episode of This American Life by clicking here.  Enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving!

“The Hideous Dropping Off of the Veil” in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: Part III

Editor’s Note: This is part III in a series  of posts on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.  For part I of the series, scroll down or click here.  For part II, scroll down or click here.  As mentioned before the first post: I reveal many plot points from these films, so please watch them before reading.

In my previous posts on Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, I touched upon some of the ways in which these films exploit the uncanny feelings we experience in relation to our own bodies, as well as how these films may have a comment on the ways in which contemporary power structures terrorize and appropriate the female body.   In this continuation of the larger discussion on Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, I am interested in investigating how these films might also be mining some horror from the inherently uncomfortable disconnect we all have between our minds and our bodies.

In support of this notion, I will posit that the eeriest things in life are not often the things prowling around outside your home at night, nor are they the things coming down from outer space to apprehend unsuspecting sleepers, and certainly they are not pitchfork-wielding goblins reveling in a fiery orgy of sin below the earth.  On the contrary, the eeriest things in life often originate within the confines of our own skulls.  Throughout our history, we humans have made a habit of projecting the weird things going on in our own psyches outwardly, thereby attributing anomalous or unsavory behavior or phenomena to demons, witches and the like.  For instance, Mary Beth Norton makes a compelling argument in her 2002 book In the Devil’s Snare, that the Salem Witch Trials toward the end of the 17^th Century can be largely attributed to the anxieties and other psychological ramifications of frontier life, and specifically the fear of Native American attacks on European settlements.  The dark-skinned men lurking in the unfamiliar forests, along with the constant bloodshed that was inherent to that time and place, created a fear that was coupled with an already-present collective belief in witches, demons and unknown evils lurking in the shadows.  While these settlers did have actual danger prowling outside their homes, they were not aware that the reach of Native American influence reached through the walls of their homes into their minds, leading to irrational behavior and decision-making.  Those weren’t demons in the woods, those were people tired of being slaughtered and otherwise molested by strangely-dressed white people.

The point is that our own minds are the source of our greatest terrors.  And historically, as with the Salem Witch Trials example above, it has been  much easier to explain away the most uncomfortable or undesirable aspects of our lives with a little bit of supernatural belief and magical thinking.  The most powerful of these supernatural belief systems are the monotheistic religions which, although they are very much thriving to this day, are much more difficult to accept absolutely than they were, say, 500 years ago.  Magical thinking was a pat way to explain away events and circumstances that otherwise were baffling or anxiety-provoking.  With scientific knowledge skyrocketing in the latter half of the 19^th Century and through the 20^th Century, it became much more difficult to blame everything on witches, angels, demons and god(s).  In this vein, both Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist share a subtheme of religious faith and the loss thereof.  Father Karras, the central priest character in The Exorcist (although not the “Exorcist” referred to in the title), is wrestling with his own loss of faith.  Father Karras resides in a slummy area of Washington DC, with poverty and squalor constituting his day-to-day world and, along with this, he shares his small apartment with this ailing mother, who eventually is forced to move into a mental institution brimming with the psychologically anomalous.  Karras finds it difficult to rectify these realities with his Catholic beliefs and the demon possessing Regan exploits this fact.  In Rosemary’s Baby, one scene has the camera conspicuously linger on the April 8^th, 1966 cover of Time magazine.  The cover simply features the question “Is God Dead?” in bold red letters over a black background.  This was an actual cover of Time that was attached to an article that stated that the age of religion was essentially out the door.  Rosemary herself, when asked by Roman if she is religious, states, “I was brought up Catholic, but now I don’t know”.

Both films take as their setting a 20^th Century backdrop that is turning more toward medical, scientific and psychological knowledge to assist with problems of the body and mind instead of relying upon supernatural paradigms.  Until recent modern history, many of us have told ourselves stories about the ethereal soul and its dominion over the base, corrupted body.  The soul is said to be made of otherworldly material that is unfortunately tainted by the fleshy, gooey spaceship that it must possess in order to traverse through our inherently dirty world.  If one begins to accept the idea that we – every part of us – are of this world and then supplants the soul idea with this way of thinking, then the means by which one thinks of oneself and the world becomes dramatically altered.  This paradigmatic shift would be seismically uncomfortable, and it is my contention that Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist place themselves firmly in the fault line created from just such a shift.

In his wonderfully entertaining 2007 film The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema, Slavoj Zizek shares some of his thoughts on modern cinema from a philosophical perspective that is rooted in the ideas of famed French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan.  In his film, Zizek pontificates on Ridley Scott’s Alien and claims that this film derives its power, particularly regarding the iconic scene in which an alien baby hatches from the stomach of its human host, from the idea that humans are essentially alien intelligences with a human body as a host.  We humans are uncomfortable in our own skins because of a fundamental disconnect; we tolerate our bodies, but we must also misrecognize our bodies as something different from ourselves in order to get by.  This disconnect is much easier to handle when one has, for instance, the Christian notion of the soul which advises comfortingly that there is no need to worry, that it’s right to fear your body, and that it’s really okay that you will die someday, for everything will be taken care of because your personality is actually not of this world to begin with.  For psychoanalysis as well as for Christianity, we are essentially ghosts inside a machine, or aliens inside of spaceships.  Christianity tells us that our alien souls will someday rejoin the Mothership (Fathership?)  in the sky, whereas psychoanalysis offers no such happy ending.  For psychoanalysis, life is weird and then you die.

Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist generate some wonderful creepiness by interjecting antiquated notions of Soul/Body and Good/Evil into a modern, scientifically-advanced setting.  One can have every priest and psychologist on call, but life will never cease to be strange.  It’s unfortunate that this basic concept is lost on many contemporary horror filmmakers.  These filmmakers spend too much time on computer graphics and convoluted story lines and not enough time looking into the mirror and contemplating the stranger staring back.

Note: I’m thinking there’s one more post on these two films on the way.  I’m thinking the next post will be about domestic spaces and antagonistic furniture in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.

Henry’s Handjob Screws Ireland

This has nothing to do with movies or books, but today Ireland missed a World Cup berth due to a 115th minute handball-assisted goal.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Anybody else looking forward to rooting against Mr. Happy Hands and France in 2010?

Movie Review: Love and Uncomfortable Endings in An Education

Switching gears from the horror/noir/gothic kick I’ve been on lately, I would like to devote this post to Lone Scherfig’s new film An Education.  While this movie is not a horror film per se, it does touch upon one of the themes that has come up recently in discussing such previously blogged-about  films as Rosemary’s Baby, The Others, The Exorcist and even Sunset Boulevard.  Namely, this movie shares with these other films the major thematic touchstone of the “trapped woman”.  The idea of a 1960’s British teenager who falls in love with an older man might not readily conjure up the images of, respectively, a woman raped by the devil, a woman trapped inside a haunted mansion, a girl possessed by the devil, or a delusional elderly woman secluded from the outside world due to her own warped convictions, An Education puts its heroine, Jenny, in a position that is just as helpless and harrowing as that of Rosemary’s, Graces’, Regan/Chris’ and Norma’s.  The one thing that keeps An Education, fine film that it is, from reaching the artistic heights of these others is the ending.  But, we’ll get into that later.

First off, you should absolutely eat up all of the superlative praise out there on the interwebs for Education’s lead actress Carey Mulligan.  This girl has chops.  She carries almost all of the emotional weight of a very emotional narrative, and does so without once ringing a false note.  She will win many awards for her work in this film and she will deserve all of them.  Playing alongside Ms. Mulligan is Peter Sarsgaard, who does what Peter Sarsgaard does best: play a creep.  I do not mean this in a pejorative sense; this film is reliant upon an actor in the David role who is able to come across as both creepy and charismatic simultaneously.   David seduces half-his-age Jenny and quickly reveals himself as a morally fuzzy suitor; yet despite Dave’s rough spots, the audience must never doubt that Jenny can be wildly attracted to this man.  Sarsgaard skates this line with aplomb.  Alfred Molina is his usual excellent self in the role of Jenny’s strict but vulnerable father.  Other notable cast members are Emma Thompson as the headmaster of a private school and Olivia Williams as a private school English teacher, a role that has interesting parallels to her role in one of my favorite films of the 1990s: Rushmore.  In Rushmore, Williams plays a private school teacher seduced by a much younger boy, whereas in Education she plays a teacher advising a young girl who is seduced by a much older man.  Her facial expression is very similar in both films — she plays both roles so well that I think she should slap a trademark on the “I’m upset at this romance involving incongruently-aged people” face.

An Education is Nick Hornby’s first foray into scriptwriting since 1997’s Fever Pitch (not the 2005 Jimmy Fallon Red Sox film, although this was also based on Hornby’s novel of the same name).  Education’s script is very well-written, with a slowly building sense of dread punctuated with moments of deep despair along with a sprinkling of humor.  Much of the light-hearted moments are piled on in the beginning of the film, and I noticed that many people in the audience at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas in Vancouver, BC really wanted to keep the good times rolling long after the initial Jenny/Dave meet-cute stops being cute and one realizes that Jenny has painted herself in a corner that she may never get out of.  Gleeful guffaws became nervous laughter which tapered off into pointed silence as the situation worsened and a story that could have veered into RomCom treacle instead carried through with the sometimes uncomfortable implications of its setup and its characters.  Imagine that.

However, as I brought up earlier, the ending left me feeling like a double-crossed Bubble-Lub.  The film earned my trust and then squandered it with the employment of a voiceover and a syrupy pan out in the final scene of the film.  I’m not entirely anti-voiceover, but there had not been a voiceover up to this point in the movie, so why introduce one  in the very last scene?  Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Others and Sunset Boulevard all have very effective endings.  The endings of all of these films ensure that the feeling that had been cultivated throughout will linger in the filmgoer’s mind long after the theatre has been deserted.  Sunset Boulevard, which employs heavy voiceover from the beginning (granted, the acerbic voiceover of a dead man), is witty enough to eschew voiceover in its final scene in favor of a Norma Desmond monologue that is, in the final shot of the film, drowned in black like the overpowering delusions within Norma Desmond’s mind.  Boulevard features one of the best endings in the history of popular film.  An Education, however, fizzles.   I realize that it isn’t fair to require that every film hold up to the standard of Sunset Boulevard, but still you get my point.  The narrative ending of Education didn’t bother me necessarily, but the spell invoked by the film prior to the final scene was broken by an uninteresting and too-neat visual and auditory wrap-up that comes across as lazy.  It just doesn’t do justice to a very well-paced, well-acted and otherwise well-made movie.  Regardless, I still recommend it — I simply suggest that you ignore the ending in the way that a teenager might look past the glaring faults of an otherwise sophisticated lover.

Movie Review: Home Creepy Home in Paranormal Activity

Last week I saw the newly wide-released Paranormal Activity at Scotia Bank Theatre in Vancouver, BC.  After the last scene of the film (a corker), some dumbshit in the back of the theatre called out, so that everyone could appreciate his well-rounded, thoughtful opinion: “That’s it?  One scary scene?!”  I’m not sure what movie he was watching, but Paranormal Activity is an expertly-crafted nerve-rattling film involving many scary scenes.  As long as you haven’t been lobotomized by Saw and its phalanx of sequels, you will find this film pulse-quickening at the very least.  At most, you will not want to go home afterward.  You will walk around aimlessly searching for others to be with, anybody really, so that you do not have to return to the confines of your own, private, secluded, tucked-away-from-society home.  You know: that place where nobody would hear you screaming and nobody would believe your stories later because you are being terrorized by something that only comes out when you and/or your loved one are alone – and most often when you’re sleeping.

The concept behind Paranormal Activity is very simple: a couple begins experiencing bizarre phenomena at their home and so decides to attempt to record said phenomena with a digital video camera.  Each night, the couple falls asleep with the camera aimed at their sleeping selves: on the right side of the frame is their bed and on the left side is their bedroom door, wide open, almost as if inviting anything creeping around in their dark house to come on in and do what it may.  Not really a spoiler to say “Boy, does it ever.”  The film returns to this setup many times; each time, the anxiety of the moviegoer is ratcheted up another notch, for you know something terrifying is about to happen, and the ante will be upped from the previous go-around.  I won’t tell you what the camera captures, for finding out for yourself is wherein the fun lies.

The phenomena are not isolated to the bedroom however.  The entire house is under siege by a malevolent presence, hell-bent on terrorizing this young couple.  As I mentioned in two previous posts on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, the home itself becomes a major participant in the terrifying substance of many successful horror films [There will be an upcoming post later this week in which the role of the domestic spaces in The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby are discussed in more detail – ed.].  As evidenced in many gothic novels and thrillers – not to mention Lifetime movies –  when your own home has becomes a menacing place, there are not many safe outlets for a body to pursue.

One Scary Scene Man (OSSM) in Scotiabank Theatre cannot fire the proper synapses to gather this concept, but luckily the man behind this film, Orin Peli, has the wherewithal.  Mr. Peli had this to say in an interview with Shocktillyoudrop.com:

I think a lot of people can relate to the question of what happens at night when you’re most vulnerable. You have no idea what’s going on. This taps into the most primal fear, if something is lurking in your home there’s not much you can do about it.

“There’s not much you can do about it” is a nice way of thinking about scary situations.  When there’s some unknown and unseen entity in your home, there is not much you can do about it.  The same can be said about the motivations of strangers.  The same can also be said about the mental activity of other people in general.  For instance, if the person you have trusted, entered a relationship with, and/or moved in with, turns out to have terrifying things going on behind their eyeballs, there is not much you can do about it.  There are not necessarily any psychotics in Paranormal Activity, but the movie does tap into another “primal fear”: that of the utter impenetrability of other people.  No matter how well you think you know somebody, how much you are related to somebody, or how comfortable you feel in somebody else’s presence, you will never truly know what it is like to be that person.  You will never know another person’s true motivations, wishes, desires or thoughts.  It’s hard enough to pinpoint how one’s self feels about things, let alone how another person does.  No matter how much you feel that you know some other person, he or she will still remain other; i.e. different, alternate, opposite.  While that concept is scary, watching victims get tortured for 2 hours is not.  Torture vignettes, as found in the Saw films or movies like Hostel, may be titillating, engaging or setup cleverly, but they are not “scary”.

What OSSM misunderstands is that scary does not equal CGI.  Scary does not equal excessive gore.  Scary cannot happen via repeated visual and sonic bludgeoning.  Scary is found within concept as much as it is found within execution.  Scary is subtle.  Scary must sneak up on you.  Scary is your home, scary is another person and scary is yourself.

On a final note, I was struck by the previews that ran before the screening.  Included in the bunch were a couple for post-apocalyptic CGI-fests: 2012 and The Road.  While I’m holding out hope for The Road based on the excellence of the source material, not-to-mention its wonderful cast (shout out to Omar from The Wire!), 2012 is fairly easy to identify as a waste of time.  After bestowing the Activity audience with visuals of historical landmark after historical landmark falling to the Mayan-predicted apocalyptic forces, the preview ends with John Cusack (has he contributed to a worthwhile film since 2000’s High Fidelity?) hugging his two children and saying something ridiculous to the likes of “We’ll get through this if we just stick together”.  Ouch.  This movie cost $200 million to make, and yet a decent screenwriter couldn’t be found to put worthwhile words in the mouths of characters facing down the end of the world.  The filmmakers are apparently banking on the fact that OSSM and his ilk are solely interested in blow-ups and the pixelated destruction of tourist destinations.

Regardless of 2012’s cynical success at the box office, there is hope my friends. Paranormal Activity cost its maker $.015 million.  That’s right – $15,000.  Saw VI, a direct competitor of Paranormal Activity and a film with a budget about 733 times more than that of Activity, has made $27,000,000 as of November 15^th.  Activity, on the other hand, has made $103,847,000 as of the same date, making it the most profitable independent film ever.  This is a nice tidbit, for it suggests that proud philistines like OSSM are perhaps not as influential as one might think.  But don’t fret young OSSM: you’ll always have the Saw series on DVD and you can spend the remainder your days in the comforts of your own home despising thoughtfulness and subtlety with your tub of Cheetos and with your gray matter switch firmly in the off-position.  I know you and I have a conflicting idea of what scary is, so excuse me when I say that, for me at least, the overwhelming success of Activity is perhaps the least scary aspect of the film.  The thought of you procreating and raising a brood of glazy-eyed mouth-breathers: now that’s scary.

“The Hideous Dropping Off of the Veil” in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: Part II

Editor’s Note: This is part II in a series  of posts on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby.  For part I of the series, scroll down or click here.  As mentioned before the first post: I reveal many plot points from these films, so please watch them before reading.

Regan MacNeil’s bodyin The Exorcist and Rosemary Woodhouse’s body in Rosemary’s Baby are commandeered by male entities who exploit these female bodies for their own self-benefit. (If nothing else, these films prove that the devil is indeed a Republican. As if this were in question.) Regan and her mother find themselves abandoned by the male-dominated team of doctors who further abuse Regan’s body through a serious of invasive testing. Chris MacNeil must then turn to the Catholic Church, which although having a history and a present of oppressing women, sends priests to their home: men who are removed from the traditional male-as-sexual-predator-toward-women role. These men are supposed to exist asexually, and therefore are perhaps the only ones who can save Regan from her plight. Yes, I understand that Catholic priests have a habit of sexually preying upon young non-women, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

In Rosemary’s Baby, young, early-20s Rosemary Woodhouse realizes that her husband and the neighbors around her are conspiring to exploit her fertile body and maternal drives for their own ends. When she begins to piece together the puzzle, she runs to her original obstetrician, Dr. Hill, for safety. She does this at the behest of her girlfriends, who console her in the kitchen during a party. Rosemary’s doctor, Dr. Sapirstein, who comes recommended by her nosy and invasive elderly neighbors, has advised Rosemary to ignore the intense abdominal pain that she has been experiencing for weeks. When one of her girlfriends pleads with Rosemary to see a new doctor, another friend chimes in: “Yeah, some doctor besides that… that… nut!”

This kitchen scene comes as a welcome reprieve to the creepiness that completely saturates most of the film. Rosemary’s girlfriends are concerned for their friend’s well-being, are not dismissive of Rosemary’s complaints and ultimately are among the few benevolent figures in Rosemary’s life. But alas, the kitchen scene is a set-up. After this scene, Rosemary begins to exert some agency within her situation, and runs away from her husband, the neighbors and Dr. Sapirstein. She makes it to Dr. Hill, and in maybe the most harrowing scene in the film, Dr. Hill reveals himself to be more aligned with the male-dominated power structure than with the needs and concerns of his female patient. Once again, the creepiness of this film comes from the focus upon already existent aspects of our day-to-day lives.

Rosemary’s husband’s name is Guy, a name which points to the fact that this man is not an anomalous and horrible person. He is just your average “guy”, an unthinking man who, if given the chance, would sign away his wife’s body for his own selfish gains. At the end of the film, Guy offers these words in the form of an apology after it has been revealed that Guy allowed his Satan-worshipping neighbors access to Rosemary’s body so that Satan could impregnate Rosemary with the anti-Christ fetus (you know, your average marriage snafus): “They promised me you wouldn’t be hurt and you haven’t been…really. I mean, supposing you had the baby and you lost it? Wouldn’t that be the same? And we’re getting so much in return, Ro.” Guy’s flippancy toward his wife is truly terrifying and the viewer, at this point, has seen many signs of it. Even before we begin to piece-together the scenario along with Rosemary, we see Guy give his wife dismissive pats on the ass, pooh-pooh her suspicions as resulting from the “pre-partum crazies”, and most scarily, admit to fornicating with Rosemary’s unconscious body — an admission that we discover is a cover-up for what really happened.  After the otherwise lovely night when Rosemary is raped by the devil (something Rosemary doesn’t realize until much later in the film), Rosemary wakes up and this back-and-forth with her husband ensues:

Rosemary: I dreamed someone was raping me, I think it was someone inhuman.
Guy: Thanks a lot. Whatsa matter?
Rosemary: Nothing.
Guy: I didn’t want to miss the night.
Rosemary: We could have done it this morning or tonight. Last night wasn’t the only split-second.
Guy: I was a little bit loaded myself, you know.
Rosemary: You… you had me while I was out?
Guy: It was kinda fun in a necrophile sort of way.

Rosemary shrugs off Guy’s excuse for allegedly having sex with her lifeless body, which is a very scary thought in itself — even without the devil business.  This is to me is the scariest aspect of Rosemary’s Baby — the utter helplessness that Rosemary experiences in relation to the whims of men.

When Dr. Hill opens the door and lets in Guy and Dr. Sapirstein, Dr. Sapirstein has this to say, with Guy standing sheepishly at his side: “Come with us quietly, Rosemary. Don’t argue or make a scene. Because if you say anything more about witches or witchcraft, we’re gonna be forced to take you to a mental hospital. You don’t want that, do you?”  In many modern works of fiction, the mental hospital becomes the last viable option for men in dealing with women who are for whatever reason not fitting into their system.  In Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood is given shock treatment and forced to spend much of her time in mental facilities because of her inability to behave “appropriately” for a young woman in her time and place.  Lisbeth Salander in the Steig Larsson’s Millenium series is institutionalized because of the threat she poses to the patriarchal powers that be (indeed, the Swedish title of Larsson’s first book translates as Men Who Hate Women).

In The Exorcist as well, the team of doctors strongly encourage Chris MacNeil to have their daughter institulationalized because of her strange disorder and their inability to properly label and deal with her problem.  While The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby utilize demonic possession in their films as a means of eliciting terror, it is through showcasing the status of women in society outside of the movie theatre that really makes these chills hit home.

Stay tuned for more on The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby! In the meantime, don’t forget to say your prayers.

“The Hideous Dropping Off of the Veil” in Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist: Part I

Editor’s Note: this blog post assumes that you have seen the films The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby and therefore we reveal central elements of their plots. If you haven’t seen them, please:  1) Netflix them, 2) watch them, 3) make me a pulled-pork sandwich and then, 4) return to this post.

A woman becomes pregnant.  A human stranger grows inside of her.  This creature exists in darkness, feeding off of its host, affecting her diet, her mood and many of her bodily functions.

A young woman goes through puberty: an unfamiliar body develops, a strange voice emerges and a new personality is born.  Her desires, thoughts and behavior become very different than those of her prepubescent self.

When viewed from such vantage points, natural human events and processes can appear very odd.  Uncanny, as Freud would have it.  For Freud, the uncanny feeling results when concepts or things feel familiar yet strange; what was once comforting and affirming is now hostile and threatening.  Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher is perhaps the quintessential piece of uncanny fiction.  In the beginning of Usher, the unnamed narrator confronts the house of his former friend Roderick Usher.  Poe’s narrator compares the feeling of looking upon this house as the same feeling he gets when coming down from opium – “the hideous dropping off of the veil” as he describes it.

It is by utilizing the uncanny and a “hideous dropping of the veil” that two of the 20^th century’s greatest American horror films gain their respective effects of terror.  Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973) deftly craft feelings of the uncanny by using young women as their respective focal points.

Both of these films involve demonic invasions as experienced by two young women during points of biological unrest: puberty and pregnancy, respectively.   Both of these women experience bodily invasion by male demonic entities who take control of their bodies as a means of furthering their own, literally devilish, schemes.  Both of these films utilize bodily orifices and bodily fluid in order to play upon our fears regarding our own bodies.  They also play upon the natural helplessness of women in a patriarchal society in order to cultivate terror, but more on this later.  The point is that although both films involve major aspects of the supernatural, the real terror is cultivated through enhancing and riffing upon elements of terror already found in our lives.

In the first third of Rosemary’s Baby, the viewer witnesses the intimate moments of a young couple checking out and then moving into a NYC apartment.  The actors, Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, deftly portray young lovers who, although clearly not in the most loving and supportive relationship, are in a relationship that one can relate to.  It’s a relationship that rings true: we can imagine being friends with the Woodhouses.  This verisimilitude is very important, for the feelings conjured by this seemingly real and run-of-the-mill relationship will compose the veil which the remainder of the film works to drop – inch by painstaking inch.

In the first third of The Exorcist, the viewer witnesses the intimate moments of a mother and a daughter as they settle into their new Georgetown home.  Once again, the actors portraying this duo, Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair, bring a certain aura of realness to their roles that will come in handy later in the film when we are meant to empathize with them completely as their lives fall apart via demonic invasion.  Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil is a woman who is flawed and vulnerable, just like us.  Her life is messy, but the viewer gets the sense that, even when we can judge her for how she treats her servants, this woman works hard for herself and her family and fights for what she believes is hers.  Just like us.  Except for the servants part.

In both films, and this is the crucial element that many horror and thriller filmmakers don’t seem to understand, the veil is gradually and surreptitiously placed before our eyes.  Lesser modern horror films will dance bloody corpses and fantastical monsters before our eyes as if that were all it took.  Such films amount to B-grade horror porn (horrporn?).  The better modern horror films will put as much craft into the non-scary aspects of their film as the payoff fright scenes.  You have to work just as hard weaving the rug as you do pulling it out from underneath our feet.

What the Exorcist team of director William Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty and the writer/director of Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski, understand is that very basic aspects of life are frightening, fundamentally, to the human consciousness.  What they realize is that in order to scare the shit out of people, one only needs to zero in on aspects of life that are already scary and then embellish.  Puberty and pregnancy are scary.  Puberty, with its unseen chemical surges and transactions and its utterly transformative effects on the human personality and body, is at the very least creepy for the child as well as his or her parents and siblings.  Pregnancy, with its parasitic invasion of the female body featuring an unseen life form growing and feeding within another human, along with its bloody and screeching arrival, is enough to put anybody on edge – including the baby.

Stay tuned for part II of this post, where I will further explore the sources of terror in these two films, including men in power, the soul/body binary and antagonistic furniture.

Nosferatu stalks Vancouver: Halloween 2009

Tonight I was lucky enough to attend a screening of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Horror classic Nosferatu at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC.  Full disclosure: I have previously blogged about this film here and here.

If you haven’t been, the Orpheum is a large theatre fashioned in the grand old style of Vaudeville.  It opened in 1927, which may not seem old to you Europeans out there, but by Vancouver-standards, 1927 is practically prehistoric.  It was the perfect setting for a couple thousand costumed-Vancouverites to fly their fright flags.

The best part: this screening happened to be accompanied by a live performance of the film’s score courtesy of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.  And, breaking a few stereotypes in the process, many of the musicians in the orchestra joined in the costumed mayhem.  Some highlights: a violinist in full lobster costume, two oboists in full Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle attire, a rainbow-afroed violinist and cellos featuring grim reaper scythes sprouting from the ends of their stems.

Also: the conductor of this performance happened to be named Gillian Anderson, which is hilarious if you were an American tv-watching child/young adult in the 90s.  No, it was not Agent Scully conducting the orchestra, but I think Ms. Anderson missed a huge chance by not dressing up as such.  You can’t tell me she hasn’t seen the X-Files.  As if she had anything better to do during the show’s ten-year run.

Really though, Gillian and the VSO did an incredible job.  I found myself as mesmerized by sight and sound of their instrumentation as by the titular vampire on the screen.  I particularly enjoyed the man operating the giant bass drums, because you could tell something frightening was about to happen whenever he assumed the ready position.

There was a costume-contest as well, which was deservedly won by a couple dressed as “Van Gogh painting Sunflowers”.  The dude was Van Gogh (with a bloody ear, duh) and the girl was the painting.  She had a canvas strapped to her with a hole cut out for her face, which was painted to blend in with the painting.  It was pretty good.  My date and I went as Linda Blair and Max von Sydow from the Exorcist, but we weren’t even among the finalists.  I can only conclude that our costumes were so realistic and terrifying that the judges couldn’t bring themselves to taint our mastery with a silly costume contest.

“A Bunch of Actors”: Social Interaction as Performance in The Catcher in the Rye: Part III

Editor’s Note: This is Part III of a III part series.

For Part I, scroll down or click here.

For Part II, scroll down or click here.

Holden is not exempt from social artifice, and directly following his distasteful response to the interaction of Sally and George, Holden again returns to making grandiose and unrealistic claims aimed at Sally.  After relating to Sally the extreme levels of hatred that he feels for school, Holden excitedly suggests that the two of them run away to Massachusetts or Vermont to live together and get married.  Despite his adamant suggestion – “Wuddaya say? C’mon!  Wuddaya say?  Will you do it with me?  Please!” (132) – Holden later admits that “I probably wouldn’t’ve taken her even if she’d wanted to go with me.  She wouldn’t have been anybody to go with.  The terrible part, though, is that I meant it when I asked her.  That’s the terrible part.  I swear to God I’m a madman” (134).  Once again, Holden emphatically makes a claim that he “means” at the time of its utterance, but upon retrospection, admits that his claims were ultimately false.  For Holden, true connection becomes impossible, for human beings are always interacting in a “phony” way, whether the phoniness comes from impulsive emotion or unctuous social custom.

Sally responds to Holden’s hysterical marriage proposal with the telling words, “we’re both practically children” (132).  These words exemplify another underlying problem with Holden’s inability to connect with people: he makes decisions like a child, but has the awareness of an adult.  This disconnect is showcased by Holden’s description at the beginning of the novel of his fluctuating displays of (im)maturity and his gray hair:

I was sixteen then, and I’m seventeen now, and sometimes I act like I’m about thirteen.  It’s really ironical, because I’m six foot two and a half and I have gray hair.  I really do.  The one side of my head – the right side – is full of millions of gray hairs.  I’ve had them ever since I was a kid.  And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve.  Everybody says that, especially my father.  It’s partly true, too, but it isn’t all true.  People always think something’s all true.  I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age.  Sometimes I act a lot older than I am – I really do – but people never notice it.  (9)

The erratic behavior that Holden describes in the above passage is showcased with his impulsive declarations of love to Sally as well as his proposal of marriage.  Holden’s gray hair works to symbolize the disconnect between his actions and his retrospective interpretation of his actions.  Constantly second-guessing the actions and sentiments of himself and others, Holden is never able to develop a lasting connection with another, besides Phoebe, in the entirety of The Catcher in the Rye.  It is not uncommon for teenagers to act impulsively and make “phony” statements, but to Holden, in his position between child and adult, this phoniness becomes indicative to him of the underlying phoniness of all human interaction.  Holden’s “madman” behavior can be interpreted as the awkward transition of childhood to manhood; as this young man attempts to come to terms with “adult” knowledge and adult perception, he finds himself continually making the decisions of a child.

Holden’s behavior with Sally is one of many ways in the novel by which he attempts to forge a deeper human connection.  While Sally rejects Holden’s marriage proposal and invitation to run away with him, her rejection is not devastating to him, for Holden’s words were “phony”.  In this sense, Holden Caulfield fits into DeMarr and Bakerman’s description of the typical response of adolescent males to female rejection.  Holden does not define himself based upon the rejection of others like the males that DeMarr and Bakerman are referring to, for in Holden’s case, human connection is preemptively eliminated to begin with.  When the world is filled with a “bunch of actors”, real human connection of the non-phony variety is all but impossible to come by.