Monster Capsules: BIG ASS SPIDER, WAKE WOOD, WOMAN IN BLACK, DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VALLEY OF GWANGI

BIG ASS SPIDER

2013 - ***

A sometimes not wince-inducing monster film, Big Ass Spider shows director Mike Mendez knows how to keep a low budget giant monster flick fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) shoots for a Seth Rogen vibe as the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that eventually proves him the best man for the job of tracking and wrangling the titular amok experiment. First it gets loose inside a hospital, then grows to titanic proportion and climbs a downtown L.A. office building. Playing a kind of PG version of Seth's unforgettable psychopath in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies regulations by showing full monster too early, and even though the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the nerves, low-key bemusement endures throughout. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with the dopey Grunberg; Clare Kramer is the hottie lieutenant who winds up all webbed up and waiting for rescue. Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña from Observe and Report (my review here). That's not a dis on Boyar, he's fine, but Peña is hilarious because he's genuinely dangerous, Boyar is merely genial. If Pauline Kael had been alive to praise Observe and Report in 2009 she would, and maybe it wouldn't have bombed and as a result Boyar would be edgier. She'd probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider, because she liked bad bug movies. She was a great, great lady, man.

WAKE WOOD

2010 - ***

Hammer is back with this keen medley of Monkey's Paw-ish family grief, Wicker Man pagan rural secrets, and the never-gets-old 'terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason' motiif. When a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moves his family to the small rural England town of the title, and his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. But the grief-stricken mother (Eva Barthistle - who was in the similar The Children two years earlier) doesn't want to let her daughter go when time's up. Ungrateful woman! Doesn't she know what will happen? Did no one tell her?! No they didn't. Pretty short-sighted of them! Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her dull yellow raincoat in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish unease. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some crowbar blunt force trauma, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!

WOMAN IN BLACK

2012 - ***1/2

Hammer does it again! They are really on a second roll and, despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail--enough to suffocate any ordinary picture--Woman in Black is never stuffy and really rather ripping. A surprisingly solid Daniel Radcliffe is a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to inventory to a dark decaying mansion in a remote, fearful hamlet. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a vindictive wraith like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit, but not some Disney type, she's a genuine fright. And if the story follows a too familiar pattern (Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents), hey, Hammer practically invented this shit. The ample presence of tight-lipped, suspicious locals at the inn harkens back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get a similar cold shoulder while asking for directions and ordering a pint, and the sense of pacing is superb. Even if there's the usual stretches of our Harker-ian hero running around the dark mansion with a drippy candle, here it's done briskly with the dark always a breath away from swallowing him whole. Director James Watkins shows that the chilling power of his Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke, that he is not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and that he is a new force on the scene, poised to become the next Terence Fisher.

 DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS

1966 - **1/2

Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always Terence Fisher, such as in this second entry in Hammer's Dracula series (or third counting the Drac-free Brides of Dracula), which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terrible non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc which I could never get into, thanks to terrible color fading. Well, this new Blu-ray version is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out dullness that made it so avoidable. Even pristine and robustly colored it's a bit of a silly mess, depending on all sorts of idiocy (like a heroine who falls for the same trick twice, and never thinks to keep wearing the cross that saved her life mere scenes ago) to generate suspense. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely debating whether to spend the night at Dracula's castle. Once Christopher Lee is revived he seems to resent having to wear fangs again, so churlishly appears only 1/3 the way through, and the script thinks one can make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films), yet the vampire's got no problem at all strutting around a monastery. So he's fine in a house of God, just not if some atheist points out the cross pattern in the tiles on the floor.

Oh well, the Blu-ray is deliciously un-faded, with rich sickly gold yellows and cherry lifesaver red gels, a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle, laden with all those masonic triangle candle holders, shields and soft serve swirl columns that constitute Dracula's and nearly every other Hammer castle (which is not a dis- I prefer their sets to real castles which always seem moldy). It's good that it's gorgeous, in short, as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds, saying they'll be right back, slowly walking down halls, entering rooms, slowly pushing doors open, and never returning. So while Darwin chuckles from on high, we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last real-time moment involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. The yellow mist is cool, but still... both Hammer and Universal seemed to think audiences wouldn't buy a character killed in the last film if he didn't get magically revived or de-thawed in the next, as if we couldn't imagine say, a prequel. At least old Drac has good taste in brides as usual. When he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley we all benefit: she finally undoes her prim bun and dour persnickety grousing manner, unleashing a wave of beautiful red hair, a gorgeous alabaster gold neckline and a truly English posh bloodlust, thus expressing within a single film the full breadth--from repressed bitter grouse to uninhibited carnal free spirit--of the English Woman, a force to be reckoned with!

The absence of Peter Cushing, though, is felt like a kidney punch.

VALLEY OF GWANGI

1969- **

Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels wayy too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys, led by James Franciscus, stumbling onto a desert paradise, long hidden from man, that looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert they just were traversing, with no sort of ecosystem on evidence remotely close to being able to realistically nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus (colored purple here, for reasons which I'm sure exist). I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still knew more than the alleged paleontologist riding with the cowboys --at one point he even calls a dinosaur a "styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to enunciate two such Latin syllable-enriched names in one sentence. At least he knows to get out of the sun when it's time for the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down!

And no disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen, but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up in a flat ugly middle shot diorama desert (these films always imagine dinosaurs as being in the desert, since that's where the bones are found, which again betrays a contemptuous disregard for paleontology, since America's deserts used to be fecund jungles) and here their monochrome purple colors and lack of close-up inserts make them look like plastic kid's toys. Harryhausen's no slouch; he even animates the eohippus! A movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk... but taken all in all, it's not even as interesting as a typical arc in Land of the Lost and that used goddamned puppets.

So yeah, I tried to love it for as long as I can remember (it used to be on TV a lot) but I still can't dig Gwangi and I with its recent TCM screening I finally figured out why: it's not just that I hate children in monster movies--especially the burdensome cliche'd big-eyed local boy, 'one peso senor,' moppet that all monster movies set in Mexico, Italy, Greece, or Spain seem to insist on (as if to be in any sunny country is to be swamped in cute little scam artists--and it's not just that its sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, it's mainly because of the unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to grab the still surviving beasts of Gwangi's valley for public display, killing any of the ones that challenge their safety, and ensnaring the rest, thus proving the point that man destroys every thing he touches all in the name of a measly profit or science. Are we supposed to find Franciscus a hero for trapping the beast in an old church, currently under restoration but still clearly the pride of the city, and torching it. Gwangi screams and screams as Harryhausen captures his burning to death as the sacred edifice topples around him.

Harryhausen is famous for getting us to care about his monsters, but that can backfire, such as in Twenty Million Miles to Earth, which also has the tiresome 'one peso senor' kid and a climactic scene where our abused creature here even has to battle another abused creature -- a circus elephant, (also Harryhausen-animated). I love Howard Hawks, too, but have the same problem with Hatari!  I can't abide abducting animals and keeping them captive for no reason other than for a zoo or circus, or worse, medical experiments and/or forced labor, not any more. Hey, maybe we're growing more sensitive as civilization advances, so what was once normal and natural now seems unduly savage, and all the more callous for being so unconscious.

Luckily, that kind of empathy doesn't apply to Big Ass Spider/s, grasshoppers, plant or rock beings, and mantises --they never manage to earn my sympathy which is how I prefer it; the last thing I want from a giant monster film is to feel like I'm getting a PETA guilt trip. Even a genius like Harryhausen can't give a bug a soul, and for that I am truly grateful. It's this realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead to look away, look away, towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955) like the one man who finally realizes what matters in life... a giant spider... in love... with Mara Corday...

(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)

Mater Testiculorum: SCARFACE, SUSPIRIA, CARRIE

"Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day.
Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant."
-Camille Paglia (proud Italian-American)

"Son? I wish I had one! He's a bum!"
--Mama Mantana (Scarface)

 You can argue that gangster cinema began at Warners with Cagney and Robinson, but a few pre-code masterworks aside, the gangster never hit his grandiose peak until it became a distinctly Italian-American saga, directed by an Italian-American with maximum tactility. Robert Evans knew this, and so insisted on Coppola for The Godfather (1972). An Italian director for an Italian story, this according to Evans' Kid Stays in the Picture. Defamatory? Maybe. But the Italian-American Anti-Defamation league was founded by one of the heads of the five families, Joe Colombo, as a front for mob activity, so who can you truss? Me, 'ass who.

And so you need an Italian-American director, or an Italian straight-up, one who is going to ideally bring in a sense of Italian flair and artistry, i.e. the Scorsese 'boy pack' forward momentum, the Coppola darkness, and the De Palma operatics. And just the word "opera" should make you think of Argento, an Italian, straight-up, whose films have such elaborate beauty, brutal violence and strange rhythms that he even called on of his films Opera (check out my 10/2009 companion to this piece, "Nightmare Drive-In Logic, Italian-style); they transform the work of everyone who sees them... whatever that work may be. Mine included

Italian-Americans and Italian-Italians don't all love opera but it's emblematic of their artistic genes, along with the poetry of Dante, the art of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the masochism of Catholicism (each centurion lash upon the wrecked torso of Christ fantasized about in excruciating detail). All this and more pumps, drives, twists the flagellant Italian heart, consumed by "original sin," which stretches its exposed raw nerve beating-heart history back through Roman orgies, gladiators, court intrigues, brutal inquisitions, the plague, Il Duce. Thus the murders in Argento and De Palma and Scorsese and Coppola sing like operas of the damned, in which every emotion is heightened, and played out in full, wringing every last drop of blood and pain. They present characters who are adults, who sometimes joke around with each other, but never about business, and who keep their wives and mother out of it --wayyy to the side, and do not let the apron string hydras devour them the way they devour our 'sensitive' liberal guys. They're real men, unless they're really women, and when violence occurs to or through them it's always painful, always transmitted across the screen with time for the victim to scream, or scrawl a note on the tile steam, or be confronted by his own pulled-out small intestine, to protest, cringe, plead, try and crawl away and--recognizing the end, to screw forth enough macho courage to stare one last time into the eyes of their killer and shout "Fack Yew!"

In these films, death may be cinematic and beautiful, but it also hurts. No one dies easy; no one just gets shot or strangled and dies in a second. Characters get time--even if just a second--to register the horror of realizing their whole life is about to end, suddenly and with no good reason, and so much left undone. They see death coming, and if they live long enough to kill in kind they make sure their opponents get the same luxury. There's a feeling in this operatic Italian schemata of what might really involved with killing people. In normal gangster films people just get shot, Blammo! But being true to Italian operatic rhythms means one needs time to die, a whole scene for one lengthy tortured aria while Ennio Morricone strings play a semi-mocking eulogy overhead and you look at your killer with a slow turn from pleading to fear to anger and oaths, to resignation and then downwards or up into the infinite abyss, or onto some busy Rome street while passers-by hustle past you on your way to work and it's not until you fall face down and the blood pools in the middle of the sidewalk do they finally stop and scream. Death isn't the scariest thing in De Palma or Argento films, it's the loneliness of it that hurts the worst.

Thus it makes sense that De Palma has no real interest in capturing the Cuban culture of Miami, filling the score instead with the boss Italian synths of Giorgio Moroder, and the gaudy pre-fab architectures of the Floridan disco. Hawks' 1932 Scarface bounced around with merry good-cheer and a mock-Italian comedy-team rhythm that made a stunning counterpoint to the violence; Paul Muni showed that thing we all love about our one Italian-American friend: their positive life force--always on, never wavering, how-- even when they're breaking your thumbs for not paying your debts-- they can joke around and make you feel like a regular guy and ask you how's your mother and seem to mean it. And if you dated one then you know how nurturing their women are, cradling your head when you throw up, and only crying and freaking out when they realize you are never going to stop drinking long enough to be much of a take-home-to-the-parents-style boyfriend.

Scarface's ice princess blonde Elivra, played as a bundle of nerves snaking themselves through sheer brass will into the shape of a svelte cat-eyed bombshell (by Michelle Pfeiffer in her big breakthrough) is the opposite of the gaudy Italian persona. She's so trapped in the narcissist WASP mirror she can't wait to snort the lines off it, all the better to see herself with. But if you can get her to laugh, a woman like that? Ah Manolo, she break her septum for you. Plus, she's forbidden. That's the boss's lady, ogay? But Tony values only that which he cannot have because he's too dumb to know in advance that attaining it will bring him no satisfaction. when he gets all he wants even then he has to look closer to home, towards the ultimate taboo of incest. He falls for his sister the first time he sees her as a young woman. That he's been in jail for five years in Cuba excuses it somewhat at first (the way it didn't in the original) but then he makes no effort to rein in his incestuous impulse. He can't even admit he feels it, so makes no attempt to question the violence of his jealousy.

As Tony, Pacino is filmed first in long shots, his musky tan face paint dripping off when he's hot--which is all the time--or being bathed in Angel's watery blood with a gun to his head, the blood and brown make-up swirling together to form a muddy rust. In the early scenes, when he's bluffing his way up into Lopez's good graces, he seems to fold into himself like a sullen teenager. All terrible bangs and loud shirts, short frame and hairy arms, he's an illiterate peasant trying to cover up his clueless innocence with tough talk and bravado and big cigars (see below). De Palma's camera doesn't circle at this early stage, but rather observes him from on high, in a kind aloof regard. As Tony increases in stature and drive, De Palma's camera moves in for close-ups and lower angle shots, subliminally accentuating both his rise in stature and the disorientating effect of chronic cocaine abuse. Pacino's performance imperceptibly mutates to accompany this slow trend, oscillating at first back and forth between tough guy killer and loyal clown, gradually losing the clown aspect along the way and replacing it with self-absorbed money-obsessed paranoia, as if Elvira's glum narcissism is seeping into him through prolonged proximity. 

We learn from books like The Devil's Playground that De Palma 'knew something about gogaine' and if you look at this movie and the bloated satire of Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and The Untouchables (1987), as a trilogy, you get a saga of desire, loss, and how empires might be built on the underbelly of America's endless thirst for getting fucked up vs. the futile attempts to inflict the morals of senator's wives onto the common people while their rarely-home husbands get rich from under-the-table kickbacks, the money increasing relative to the intensity of government crackdown. The importance of not getting high on one's supply is understood so deeply you can feel De Palma's good judgment slipping away as the film goes on, for he too, clearly, is breaking that rule. I don't think that's libelous to say - it's not like it wasn't the style of the time. I'm not judging - you know me.

To bring it back to opera, consider that Verdi's La Traviata begins at a beautiful party and a party girl luxuriating amidst a rich paramour's baubles and ends with her broke, dying, all her remaining furniture being carted away as she dies in bed, alone but for a nurse who wonders if she'll ever be paid. Substitute Tony's paranoia for Camille's noble self-sacrifice, i.e. her betrayal of her courtesan code by turning noble, and the way Tony sacrifices his empire because of some dumb refusal to kill kids, and then you see it all so plain... Tony is a whore. 

Fade to Black, from sun to setting sun image to dark marble death

Looking back at it now on an anamorphic DVD (after decades of watching it religiously on pan and scan VHS), Scarface looks badly blocked: sets seem to end a few feet from the side edges of the screen and the backdrops often look like freestanding drywall in the midst of slow waterlogged-curling. We start the film sensing this will be a big budget panorama: Cuban refugee stock footage, crowded sweaty scenes under-highway encampments, dishwashing, stabbing, twilight phone booths, the wild Colombian chainsaw set piece, but then the gradual tightening noose of opportunity boils it all down to that La Traviata garrett. As Tony "makes his own moves" there are only a few places to be, and fewer actors stick around as the scenes tighten up in a forward Apollonian arc that begins to wither into fecund limpness: real Miami sunshine devolving to that car dealer backdrop of a sunset, its edges just visible enough on either side of the action to seem meta-textually accidental; hot disco lady dancer montages devolve into some dorky dancing 'El Gordo.' More and more mirrors dilute Tony's vibrancy, as if the vast empire of Scarface merchandise was already draining his snarl of tragic meaning. The architecture eventually turns to gold trim and black marble (a symbol of death like the 'X' markings in the 1932 version) that Gina finally enters like a ghostly echo with her flimsy negligee open and gun like the fish-eyed demoness at the climax of Suspiria. I'll go even further on a limb and say that Suspiria borrows quite a bit in color and nightmare logic pacing from De Palma's big break-out Carrie which came out the year before (1976 -though Carrie was still in theaters, and drive-ins by then, as it had become such a cultural landmark even parents were going to see it).

But this crazy "Fuck me Tony" scene with Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and her nightmare black halo and temple of Dionysus sacrificial dress, is where De Palma truly comes to life: mixing that queasy, death-saturated Argento color scheme and slowed-down time (which he mastered with the nightmare pace of the prom queen stair climb in Carrie) with the queasy sense of post-modern sexual displacement emblematic of his idol Hitchcock (i.e., Tony can't realize he's in danger until it's 'on TV'). Not until this final bloody incestuous kiss-off does De Palma find the pitch black death rattle wide-eyed in the face of horror wit that Hecht and Hawks understood better than any others before or since --though for them the preparation for facing death took courage, the actual death itself was a bit of a joke, whereas with De Palma death comes before there's much time to fix a game face, but the actual process of dying stays as felt and faced as in the grimmest of Italian horror films.

Despite all his problems, Tony lives on today, twenty years later, as a kind of living demi-god - his image is as ubiquitous within hood cosmology as Tupac, Jesus, and Che Guevara. But as a character he has aged less well than the the emulators might think. If there's something heroic about his "say 'ell to my leedle fren!" last stand, it's tempered by his blindness to his monitors, his letting his security team get slaughtered, his own impulse killings of Manny and Alberto the Shadow. Mired in cocaine and confusion, he pulls the plug on his existence by letting his coked-up ego and repressed love of kids and guilt over his mama get the best of him (sooner or later, the apron string hydra wins out). His final shoot-out can be read academically as a zero point tantrum of grief and self-absorption. He doesn't know how to handle success, but blazing shoot-outs? Why not - if it comes to him, delivered like a pizza so he doesn't have to try and cook. He's comfortable when he has nothing to lose, but having everything is too much responsibility, especially if his mama won't take any of it.

To get back to the "Italian thing" - one aspect we admire about these mama-free men is how true they stick to their working class roots. Scarface was--the original version--modeled very clearly on Al Capone, so naturally the Untouchables' version Al Capone doesn't let wealth compel him to hide his working class roots. Note the pic below where he's getting shaved by his old barber in a beautiful palatial space under twisted dark manly flooring. This is wealth spent by the man, to realize his aesthetic, not to placate some rich wife's drive for respectability. No flowers, white tiles and dinner parties with all the best snobs. This is instead the nouveau riche bachelor in full flower, wherein the dark sleek look of the Corleone compound, the Italian aesthetic, free of WASP petit-bourgeois wife redecorating, is allowed to flower in its own dark orchid fashion, and it is beautiful, because darkness is beautiful and because today's man gets only one room, his 'man cave' in which to express his taste.

From top: Suspiria, Untouchables, Bonfire of the Vanities

Carrie

The only real separation between Italian-American gangster films and Italian-Italian horror perhaps is that death is where the gangster film stops, but horror keeps going. And the brutal circumstances of that trip, the violence of going out, is everything. If you look at non-Italian American horror of the same approximate time, once it appears, death doesn't dawdle. Even most slasher films, the American ones, like Halloween, are really about the stalking and POV camera: when death comes it's almost a relief, since as I pointed out in "A Clockwork Darkness", we now know where the killer is, so there's no more worrying from where and when he will strike, how the person will die or if they will escape. They're dead, so they're safe. For the slasher era suspense-sufferer, no onscreen death can match the dread of not knowing when it will strike. But Argento's murders, De Palma's or Scorsese's or Coppola's first two Godfathers, are the exceptions: the moment of the first bullet, stab, or slash doesn't necessarily end the escape chances of survival, or mean a close to the episode. Death throes might go on for a full reel of near escapes, feeble cries for help, and forlorn looks up at the uncaring sky or (as in Fulci's Don't Torture the Duckling) busy highway, pleading for someone to stop...

And architecture plays another part in prolonging the sense of helplessness. In the apartment building where the first murder goes down in Suspiria, the multiple reflective frosted windows, the bizarre wallpaper, strange vertical angles, unholy lighting, and the howling, strange music and create a sense of complete alienation, an inescapable interior 'Hotel Overlook'-style space (though far less recognizable), we feel we recognize from our own nightmares. We're never sure what is a mirror and what a window; the smoked glass of the bathroom shower stall seems to look right out on the hallway elevator!

De Palma is more rooted in the concrete at least in Scarface, and his vision less baroque, more enthralled by the surface, the mirrors reflecting Tony in ever increasing distortion. De Palma has a natural tendency to use crane shots to create a mood of unease. In the climax, it is Tony himself who is the Mater Suspiriorum, or rather Mater Testiculorum Fide and the Bolivian hit squad is Jessica Harper sneaking in with her sewing scissors.  

In the above quotes at the top of this article I wanted to exhume the roots of the Italian artistry as the constant need to escape from mama (or even kill her symbolically, as in Suspiria). In the end of Scarface, Tony realizes even a macho endeavor like criminal empire management can turn him matronly ("Got tits," he drunkenly laments to Manny, visualizing his future as another complacent Lopez, "need a bra"). I say unto thee, blessed is the filmmaker who can recognize his own mom-haunted apron-string slashing anger as art and not feel the need to apologize to both women and the social order in general for his venting. As long as he's conscious of it. And both Argento and De Palma revere strong women, but fear them as well. They are conscious of the animas' warped ferocity and respectful of its power. A strong woman can make a man feel outgunned at every step, emasculated (since nothing he can do--even killing--will ever measure up to the raw violence of giving birth) but if he can stare death square in the face and say hello to his little friend --this is his balls. And balls alone can deliver us into the sad twisting architecture of the last breath, the byzantine nightmare realm where reality and dreams switch place, and life disappears like those fading scraps of a dream after you just woke up.

Mom would pull you back from that void. She's afraid you'll fall. If you heed her, you no longer have your balls, just your word, and the words is: be good, call more often, and take out the trash. Being a safe distance from the void may please her, but bores the rest of us stiff. God bless the director who says mama, back off-a me, and then dives right over the ledge with his camera

He who chooses hell over heaven, death over life, he is alone truly free of those apron string jelly fish stingers. He looks at the modern reverence for life, health, the family, and winces. He knows these gym rats and granola moms are all just scaling heights to nowhere, preserving their mortal husk on entomology's display board both in vain and vanity (or that old excuse, 'for the kids'). We men are from birth trained to apologize for our own measly drives, our desire for younger girls rather than the husks our own age; we apologize even our desire for death, and so we follow some vague plan of being 'good' or even 'true' -- yoking ourselves ever further beneath the plow to compensate for our inexcusable appendage. Missing the brass ring circle of light on the swim out of the merry-go-round abyss, we may well wind up permanently trapped in Lucifer's pool filter. All we can do when that happens is throw some of our magic seeds out onto the grass over our heads and hope it's enough to leave some kind of weed in our name that will survive the mower. All we had in this world was balls and words, but mama's world can find no use for either. Our writing is still ours, at least, unless-a someone pays us for the rights. Either way, our balls are yours, Cook's Tours! Take them around that womb globe. Sow their seed like Set sowed Osiris's chopped-up body, or else get stuffed, into the palatial tree coffin, the polluted womb. Marry well and often and love your chil--no, don't do either, just run! Run before she gets here she .../// Vito! Where are you going now, you silly boy! 

See Also:
Two hearts stab as one: Brian De Palma + Dario Argento = split/subject psychic twins of the reptile dysfunction

TWILIGHT's Cinematic Ancestors: THE WIND, DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY, MOROCCO, TITANIC, PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, LITTLE WOMEN

I'll always stick up for TWILIGHT (the films at any rate) because I love the death drive, and what other series is the lead girl allowed to have an unrepentant disdain for life? That's so ninja! What other teen series is it not only sanctioned but wholly recommended to die for love? That's pre-code woman's picture Hollywood, as old and venerated as Lilian Gish and D.W. Griffith. In refusing to be embraced by the positive life energies of the social order that pines for her, Bella becomes an Antigone-by-way-of-Camille tragi-diva. She may be a virgin, but she's not afraid to give it all up for the idea of love.

It's important for hand-wringing moralists to remember that most everyone in the world knows the difference between fiction and reality, so these kinds of death drives are meant for films -- films are their outlet. They are death on a stick, 50 cents a seat. In a dream, does it really matter if you live beyond the credits? Doesn't Oscar prefer a gloriously overwrought death scene over a happily-ever-after fade to nothing?  Don't we love to pretend to die as children? To achieve true immortality the ideal lover must become only a memory, a twinkle in Gloria Stuart's eye, rather than one who ages into her sofa and squintes at the crosswords through dirty bifocals.

TITANIC (1997)

What could be more functionally Goth than the frozen Arctic ending of this film? I was deeply surprised the frosty hair, pale skin, chattering teeth and purple lip look didn't sweep the world as a fashion trend after this film came out. Sometimes in cultural hypothermia a lag effect doth dwell. A decade or so later, TWILIGHT sped the lag to a close.

LITTLE WOMEN (1994)

I saw this in the theater the same weekend as INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, and was hungover and repentant both times and cried at each. For the purposes of this post, however, WOMEN trumps VAMPIRE. Why? Here's why: a) Brad Pitt's ethical guilt tripping over biting folks in VAMPIRE gets soooo tiresome, and b) Tom Cruise as Lestat? Who cares if he was actually good at it? It's just wrong, no matter how sexy is the Antonio Banderas.

LITTLE WOMEN, meanwhile, has super young Christian Bale, Kristen Dunst (not quite as good as she was in VAMPIRE but who cares), Clare Danes (I cried a thousand drunken times over My So-Called Life reruns on MTV) and Winona Ryder! And even today, the film has a weird charm, like you're staying over at the spooky-cozy mansion house of a group of very, very cool girls in long nightshirts and candles, and that sense of 'belonging' to a cool group of beautiful people is really what TWILIGHT hinges on. Also, Ryder's combination of brainy, brunette and no bullshit-taking becomes a steampunk version of Jo that's a clear forerunner to the whole Kristen Stewart-Bella Goth thing, which Ryder basically invented anyway, six years earlier in BEETLEJUICE.

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (1951)

Here's a love story where the guy is a legendary romantic hundreds of years old and only true love will set him free from sailing on into the horizons for centuries, eternally alone. He's willing to give up his chance at salvation when he meets Pandora, though. She's a free spirit who all the boys kill themselves, and each other, over. As Pandora, the girl whom a macho toreador, a dry British sportsman motorist, and the wise older archaeologist who narrates the tale all pine for, Ava Gardner lolls languorous and luxuriant under the painterly camera eye of Jack Cardiff. And the parallels with TWILIGHT are, like, super obvious. The coveted 'full of life' mortal beauty giving up her mortality to be with her centuries-old cursed lover; he, meanwhile, giving up the chance for her to give it up because her life means so much to him. And even with all the rivals fighting over her, she chooses the immortal with the British teeth. No matter the thousand pleasures of the land, this is for her the chance to become mythic, this earthly plane be damned... 

DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY (1933)

Death is played by Frederic March, who poses as a count and meets a far-away-eyed debutante (Evelyn Venable). She's death-obsessed enough to make Bella seem like Mary Poppins and her Edward ain't some deer-blood drinking Puritan but the Grim One himself. Love + Death = Modernism is a cry-in-your-whiskey highball tradition. This isn't available on DVD, except as an extra on the two-disc Meet Joe Black (Ultimate Edition), which since you can pick it up for under nine dollars, is worth getting just for Venable's haunted performance if nothing else (avoid JOE BLACK itself, and I say this as a man who deeply adores Claire Forlani).

MOROCCO (1931)

Marlene Dietrich's cabaret chanteuse courts androgyny and shuns rich Adolphe Menjou (the Jacob), knowing he'll eat it up. She's defined more by what she's not than what she is, and that's why she falls for 'tall drink of water' Cooper, a shadow in the Foreign Legion who, like her, is bored with the opposite sex throwing themselves all over him. They're each surprised by their deep yen for one another, but both are so used to being pursued they barely remember how to actually do the pursuing. Not to worry, since neither one gives a damn about life or death and Dietrich's final renouncement is as valiant and Goth as anything in the back of Bella's death-drivin' mind.

THE WIND (1929)

Silent (or sound) films have seldom spun along with such crazy spirit as in THE WIND: Lillian Gish is the poor virginal girl who gets way less than she bargained for when she moves in with her deep dish dust bowl dirt-dwellin' mail order husband. His homestead is so windy she spends the bulk of the day sweeping sand out of the shack, and repelling her husband's would-be rapist friends. The whole thing works well as a metaphor for virginity and the loss thereof, the endless sacrifice and loss in exchange for nothing but maybe love. In a way, it's the most sexually and emotionally 'mature' film of the lot. It's the REPULSION of the silent era! Don't miss it, and don't front if you have to read intertitles, or you may never understand DOGVILLE. You been warned! Smarten up!