Retrofuturist Pharma III: The "Metatextual Cigar" Edition: ASCENSION, VENTURE BROS, SNOWPIERCER + the Plastic-Fantastic World of Kim Jong Un

While the weirdest war of isolated 'fake' reality constructs ever conceived by god or gardeners rages on-- a Hollywood stoner comedy about killing a dictator vs. a dictator whose constructed his own fantasy that's stuck in the past-- let us consider a new TV miniseries about an 'experiment' in social isolation, Syfy's ASCENSION!

This latest astro-swinger pad fantasia deftly commingles MAD MEN's early 60s cocktail sexist classist intrigue on a BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's space ark, with indoor beaches, wraparound window space views, reclinable chairs, oxygen masks for turbulence (or radiation belts), sexy stewardesses in short skirts, lower deck resentment of the first class passengers, and so on. This ain't no NOAH's space ark, baby. This ain't your mom's space ark. It is your dad's space ark (if you're my age). It took off in 1963 and neither their sexism nor clothing has changed since. So while we're all post-post everything down here, up there they're stuck at the RIGHT STUFF barbecue. In short it's a ginchier, bigger-budgeted, better written version of SPACE STATION 76 which came out this year, the same year BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW showed up on Netflix streaming! In short, it really is retro-futurism's "time," and if that wasn't enough of a post-modern anachronism (see part 1, and part 2), it's also TWIN PEAKS-y, as the focus is a Laura Palmer-esque girl's murder--that stirs up the soapy sediment as the ship passes year 51 of its 100 year mission to some far-off galaxy.

I got sucked into watching it last night via Syfy firsst showing INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), which never fails to get me teary-eyed and proud to be American, alcoholic, and human, in that order. And sure it's crypto-fascist Reagan-esque dogma, but so what? Jeff Goldblum walking back from their crashed saucer in the white salt flats, his macho fey hips swaggering in that flight suit with the cigar and Will Smith at his side, while a flaming UFO burns behind them? Perhaps the sexiest image of the entire 90s. Smith got the credit, got the 'Mr. Fourth of July' tag, but it's just as much Goldblum's movie. Both are in tippy-top form and bring out new depths in each other, and for once the wives are more than just hovercraft. Prez Bill Pullman's wife (Mary McDonnell --she'd become a de facto actual president in BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) is rescued by a a proudly non-cliche'd stripper mom / Will Smith girlfriend (Vivica A. Fox). Goldblum's ex is a presidential aide (Margaret Colin - totally off-brand sexy in oversize flannel "boyfriend" shirt, tied at the bottom in vague imitation of a halter-top). And everyone gets to hang out together, from the drunkest yokel to the most brassed-up general, with no buffers. Reagan's dream come true, it's the nations of the world quickly putting aside petty differences to fight the alien threat.

I was going to change the channel after the ID credits, but ASCENSION cleverly slid into place before they could even start rolling, as if subliminally tying itself onto the end as a post-credits teaser. Thet\ 'we're all one planet now' speeding locomotive or space ship crucible got me and I was crying too hard by then--'not until the fat lady sings' cigar smoke in my eyes--to find the remote and thus avoid another dippy Syfy-Canadian joint. But having been all up in the retro-futurist thing these past weeks, how could I switch away? I liked they 'get' how damaging it must be to one's psyche living an entire life in a giant spacecraft, doomed to never go outside and play, or learn to drive. But on the good side, it's an environment free of urban blight, STDs, and racism, though with a rigid class system of the oppressive sort most white people only ever experience while sulking past first class to our miserable 'main cabin' row. Fuck those idiots with their Wall Street Journals and entitled airs!

Cementing the Syfy connection is the indefatigable Tricia Helfer (Cylon #6- the girl in the red dress on all the posters for BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) as an enigmatic head stewardess / politico / master planner (top) who connives and controls her ambitious but weak-willed captain husband like a Lady Macbeth in space. Tall, statutesque, blonde, gorgeous with just enough Nordic alien hybrid to her TV star vibe to make her a fitting TV sci fi cult ruler, she's great but it's Laura Palmer--I mean Lorelai Wright (Amanda Thomson), a Megan Fox-esque bitch sleeping with, apparently, everyone--who becomes the focus. Her mom meanwhile has secrets, too, and the mysterious killer skulks around during radiation storms in a big hazmat suit like the killer in GREEN FOR DANGER. And the black cop (Brandon Bell) struggles to get answers while his scarred mom (?) works at the library that also rents out movies on disc (?) and tells her son to check out the works of Lang and Hitchcock to help him catch the killer. Bonus points! Not a lot, though.

There's an overriding fantasy in ASCENSION, SNOWPIERCER,  NOAH and INDEPENDENCE DAY, which is to smash through the TRUMAN'S SHOW-ish God complex-brand Ed Harris / Kim Jong Un/Jaweh-ishness of our miserable overcrowded lives and feel some direct control of our own destiny rather than being ruled by hypocritical far-off governments. It's an idea common to dreams and science fiction: one day being able to scale back the overpopulated, polluted, fucked-in-the-head society we live in, but not in a fascist brutal fundamentalist Christian or Muslim or Amish or Hassidic or TEENAGE CAVEMAN-style way--to go back instead into the locally sourced and small business past wherein the future was hip as the 60s-70s hetero-white-patriarchy could dream it, to somehow recapture the essence of what we lost as a tribe, we heterosexual white dudes. If we're just old enough to remember some of the shit our MAD MEN-ish fathers got away with in the 60s-70s, we feel resentful we can't get away with the same shit but at the same time we don't even own a tie, let alone need a whole rack of them, so gather ye perks while ye may. But oh me brothers, to have the social order openly privileging us again! To live in a cool space craft and drink martinis served by hotties in sexy outfits while stars spin by outside, isn't it worth it even if we have to wear ties all day? It's like Windows on the World or Crystal Peak, you know... the old "animals could be bred and...slaughtered" skidoo... hard to resist if you're disenfranchised from the tools of the system, como yo. And ASCENSION's pilot has a great twist ending that makes a great metaphor for what Salvia Divinorum is like if you know how to meet it halfway, or LSD or ayahuasca is like if you don't. Cuz who knows what weird things are waiting for us by the time we get to Arizona?

It's space, man... it's in the air. And we are made of dreams dreamt a million years ago by a serpentine morass of intergalactic exile DNA scary enough to make Carpenter's THING shit its pants. And we're still evolving and morphing and spinning madly through the abyss like Prometheus lashed to a giant golf ball that will never see the green.

Another example:  I used to be quietly fascinated by the Cartoon Network show, THE VENTURE BROS., which is like a queer Crystal Peak version of JOHNNY QUEST, with a well-constructed bizarro world retrofuturist vibe in which a bald ectomorph named Dr. Venture is the genius scientist son of the kind of square-jawed super dad space race titan of industry that Tony Stark had, and who's left his son this gigantic retrofuturistic scientific research center, laden with faded modular relics from the early days of the space race. There's a few things that irk me and are why I stopped watching after a scant five seasons, like the insistence on elements of gross bathroom humor that seems needlessly tacked on and which, thanks to my morbidly acute imagination, I can't really endure it unless I'm half-anesthetized upon the Usher crypt table, which luckily is how I spend a good deal of my life. That windy sentence said, if you're the type who can handle scatological humor, and loves retrofuturism , then know that it's on Cartoon Network, ready for the Pretty Polly plucking. There's a hybrid Kissinger-Mary Poppins; a foxy supervillainess with a voice like Harvey Fierstein; a Dr. Strange-ish neighborwho holds ayahuasca parties and keeps close eye on his sexy narcoleptic daughter and whose spirit guide is voiced by H. Jon Benjamin; a sex-changed Hunter S. Thomson working undercover as a female stripper; a bodyguard with a mullet and a shoebox full of Led Zeppelin cassettes; and even a secret sub-basement of mutants presided over by that weird haired haired singer of that old Brit band Prodigy. That's just off the tip of my head. And it's been years.

So savor the rich attention to retrofuturist Johnny Questian detail, the weird streak of faux-closeted gay stuff, and the brilliant idea that supervillains and superheroes have come to terms with their interdependence, and taken steps to ensure each other's continuation. And most of all, let the sweet lull of HD widescreen TV make everything that was old new again, even America... in the early 60s... as seen through Big Brother eyes... of Canadians.

Or super cool South Koreans.

SNOWPIERCER (2013, but released in the states this year) is directed by South Korean son Bong Joon-Ho, who directly addresses the brutal need for mass murder at the core of overpopulation and global warming, and how pulling the plug on the whole damned tub of foul humanity may just be the most heroic thing we can do.

In the film's post-apocalyptic ice age landscape, the only surviving life is crowded onto a giant speeding train that rarely slows down and just races around in crazy circles across the frozen tundra, mile after mile, years measured by laps around the course, frozen in time at the date it shut its doors, not unlike North Korea, circling in place above the wild American decadent south. Like NK, this train has a solar-powered silver bullet serpent pecking order, the lower classes are herded like concentration camp detainees in the rear of the train, fed bricks of gelatinous gunk and subjected regularly to harsh brutality by a police force led by a bespectacled Tilda Swinton. The front of the train holds the elite, and the very head of the train holds the 'engineer' - Wilford (Ed Harris) who makes the rules and lives high on the hog. The rear is presided over by filthy leftist John Hurt, and his right hand muscle, Chris 'Captain America' Evans.

They stage a revolt, which involves fighting (in Bong's favorite style: claw hammers in tight quarters) from car to car, each new car a shock or surprise as--among other things--the filthy urchins get to try sushi for the first time, and see just what sort of micro-livestock they've been eating all their lives. It's a brilliant, existential critique of everything from the rigged 'real truth' behind war, to conservative brainwashing, jet set decadence, reproduction's insidious con job, and class warfare. Watch it on your Kindle before boarding your Xmas plane, and see if you don't want to take a swing at one of the first class douchebags. It's better to go down swinging, after all, rather than sitting cramped in your seat for another 30 years and not lighting up your Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum victory dance cigar because they don't allow smoking on planes. You think Kim Jong Un wouldn't light that cigar? The 'No Smoking' sign went out as soon as the aliens attacked, General!

Bong's film didn't really come into any kind of theatrical release here until this year, so I'm quietly folding it in with NOAH, INTERSTELLAR and ASCENSION to make grand points about our longing to get some friends together, pack up, and head off-world, for a chance to begin again while the whole shit-house below goes up in Rekall-implanted digital flames behind us. Witness the latest slimy moves of Wall street and Republicans and tell me they all shouldn't be frozen by reverse global warming or burned in a sea of fire, or at least left behind in a shower of Matthew McConaughey sparks! Instead they'll probably have golden ark tickets and we won't. That's the depressing reality- that even in our imaginations we're third class citizens forced back into steerage, like John Cusak and his 2012 band of stow-away freeloaders. But at least if we're in the right movie we can maybe bash those first class passengers with a hammer real good. As long as we remember to do it onscreen, of course, and have the wisdom to know the difference. 

from top: TOTAL RECALL (Promo); INTERSTELLAR

NOAH even agrees. In Ridley Scott's film, Russell Crowe's plan is for his family to be the last surviving humans, and die out with grace after setting the animals post-flood free, because humanity is a vile plague, with greed and malice fueling a continual destructive turbulence wherever it flourishes.  But even then, his liberal shit of a son is sheltering the vilest of humans in the back of the ship. "My father Enoch told me that one day," Russell Crowe says, "if man continued his ways, The Creator would annihilate this world." Well that's some Creator you got, Russell, blaming all but two giraffes for the crimes of their cagers. This almighty Creator should really look in the mirror, or stick to something like a human-only plague next time, ala the forthcoming TV series version of 12 MONKEYS or the PLANET OF THE APES series, so the animals can roam free down the city streets rather than being cramped up with each other, seasick and with no room to even take a shit for over 40 days and nights.

NOAH's virtual water

Let 'The Creator' suck, then, on our own willingness to wipe ourselves out (at least virtually) before He gets a chance, or can stop us, yet again. Let us get the last laugh and a middle finger raised, the 'victory dance' cigar (or cigar wrapped blunt) smoked before we're wiped out by His humorless petty wrath. If He can't take a joke, it's by jokes we defeat Him. The fat lady sings do do doo dooo.

How bitter the fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to, goes the garbled threats to Sony. But, if terror's all we ever get, then terror better learn to loosen the fuck up. Because we're coming for it, with all the CGI and stoners we can muster. We put the props in propaganda, Kim, and we will bury you in unsold DVDs of THE GUILT TRIP. Activate... Mecha-Streisand... and George Burns forgive us.

-------

NOTES:

POSTSCRIPT 12-18-14: Sony backed off. The real has been eclipsed by the virtual - and watching it unfold on CNN, followed by BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS and then the final episode ASCENSION was a post-modern triple threat that has completely broken my sense of self, and of America, Don Geiss, and hope, and the wisdom to know no different. 

Tales from the Retrofuturist Pharmacy, Part II: PHASE IV, Boards of Canada, SPACE STATION 76 (1st 20 minutes)

See Part 1: 

And Tales from the Benway Pharmacy; BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, THE MACHINE

The future is always already then, as then is the future, so it is/n't written. Some tomorrows are maybe yesterdays' correct prediction and if you ever believed man the axis of his own spinning destiny, consider the wisdom of that hedonistic and empathic era known as the 70s --a scant 40 odd years ago, though it seems like it hasn't even happened yet--a time when we were much more collectively decadent and forward-thinking (about some things). Now it's all just a pipe dream, a smoke cloud we let be wrest from our collective lungs at the first wheezy indication of long-term damage. We let the revolution slip through our fingers. We were too hungover to find suitable hip answers to the terror of AIDS, and then the wearying, streaked excesses of home video, and the death of John Lennon (completing a JFK, MLK trifecta) made us realize how ugly the world really is. The low-res saturation that Nigel Kneale predicted in his 1968 BBC mini-series YEAR OF THE SEX OLYMPICS unleashed a televisual level sleaze and violence we'd been too scared to go to the inner city or X-rated cinema to hitherto know existed. We finally saw the dead end of vice, and the sheer number of grisly misogynist titles made us turn away... but not from the screen, from each other.

But before that, innocence let us think we were quite adult, even lewd and bawdy in this safe space called the swinging suburbs (ala Spencer's Gifts). In theaters there had been successful 'head trips' like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1969) showing us mankind itself as a giant brain ever expanding thanks to contact with big black rectangular slab of LSD sent to us by a highly advanced civilization. We were ready for his next stage of evolution, one with free love, Evelyn Wood, EST, ESP, and mood rings to go with the Valium, whiskey sours, wife-swapping at all night drunken block parties, and DoodleArt for all. The 'dark arts' were solely at the drive-ins and city theaters. TV itself was safe for all generations. We though Burt Reynolds using the "S"-word in car chase movies the be-all and end-all of badass subversion.

Everything was coming our way: the 70s offered a future we felt we were already reaching, aspiring to and achieving all at once.

Underneath all that was another element: we sensed back in the late 60s how even the future would eventually look outmoded one day, that commercial space flight would eventually be reduced to a few 'idle' commie intellectuals in the Howard Johnson spaceport lounge on ridiculously modular furniture. But we felt we could afford to admit our own tacky tendency to grow complacent and glazed-eyed without regular visits to the obsidian obelisk. The obelisk would be there, like a parent giving us kicks and threats to get out the door and looking for a job after college.

Yeah, and part of our evolution, according to Timothy Leary, is that our collective intelligence will meet and merge with collective intelligences from other kingdoms, like the kingdom of the insect or of plants (we already had merged with the mushroom). Today we can't imagine giving up the reins on Mother Earth without a lot CGI overkill and Space Marines "going in hot" and that's because we've yet to let go of the individual mind. We succumb to the lure of fascism (or cults) to reach glimpses of the power in letting our will be subsumed in collective oneness. But if we go too far in that direction, our leader turns megalomaniacal, greedy, delusional. The PHASE IV (1974) ants would be six moves ahead of us on that score, their collective hive intelligence seeing through our paltry mammalian herd cross-purpose milling. They'd dominate us: total victory--we wouldn't even be anything as coarse as wiped out. Wiping out itself is--as we learn at the end of the film-- a primitive notion that involves a fixed identity, and what is unfixed cannot be threatened. The unfixed never needs to worry about new kingdoms slithering over to visit and mate; they can dilate to encompass galaxies, or shrink in aperture to infinitesimal abstraction.

Groovy geodesic designs by ants... for ants (PHASE IV)

Recent retrofuturist head trips like the misguided SPACE STATION 76 (2014) and excellent BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010 -covered here), provide the full measure of timeless nostalgia for these times un-past, these nearly-fulfilled ambitions. A hauntological subgenre of electronic-analog music, initially spearheaded by Boards of Canada (see below), and sites like The Scarfolk Council, indicate a longing to return to the less covertly oppressive, more tactile and modular ur-Pagan future promised by the 70s... one where documentaries about The Bermuda Triangle could sell millions of tickets at the theater and no one ever imagined we'd lose that unified sense of an entire planet being ready for things to get weird.

Too bad, then, that SPACE STATION 76 (2014) was so trite I couldn't make it past the first 20 minutes. I kicked it out of my TV after three strikes: 1) the terribly anachronistic use of bad CGI for the space shots, instead of models which could have looked phony but would have been tactile, which is the whole fucking point; 2) wasting the fantasy of a druggy space station fantasia with a lot of anachronistic alienation and angst, as if writer-director Jack Plotnik couldn't visualize the 70s at all (beyond one or two unconvincing cigarettes and a strung out emotionally unavailable caregiver on Valium), relying instead on the cliches made banal from overuse in hack script workshops the world over. When the hot bad boy lights a joint in the garage/hangar for example, he does so with perfectly mussed hair, and rolled-up shirtsleeve, working on his motorcycle, such a useful device on a space station. And only one cigarette going at a time and even that one smoked like the person smoking never smoked a cigarette before, like a mime in an anti-smoking ad; 3) Hopelessly trite and obvious pop music choices, spelling out the mood they're hoping to generate rather than providing any interesting form of contrast or counterpoint (or cool analog synths). ZzzzzAP!

"Welcome to the future of the past" is the film's tag, but this isn't the past or the future-past. It's an idea whose time has come.... and gone, sunk by last minute second guess groupthink, or underthink.

Liv Tyler looks good though, even with a paralyzed upper lip and a mousy reticence utterly at odds with her character's supposed accomplishments as a pilot (but not at odds in the mind of a bad screenwriter using those trite cliches we mentioned). Compared to mighty feminist vanguards like Christina Applegate in ANCHORMAN or Denise Richards in STARSHIP TROOPERS, Tyler's girl pilot asserts no sense of competence or strength. Her polyester uniform is sexy in an offhand way I was glad wasn't overly obvious... it looks genuinely worn, lived-in, rather than, say, a sexy space girl outfit of the sort never worn outside a single slutty Halloween party. Even so, a good costume designer can't save a sinking ship. It's too little too late to care. I clicked it and ejected the silver disc like a character in a 60s Phillip K. Dick novel might.

I know that disqualifies me from a genuine review, so why did I mention it? The future, man. I'll see the rest one day, when I'm less picky about my retrofuturist serio/rom-coms. It does inevitably happen --there is a season, burn burn burn. While we're waiting for that fateful day to be come/gone, to gratify my frustrated retrofuturist jones I returned to a film I've already seen twice, and which just gets better every time, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010)

RAINBOW is a mad druggie psychologist's 70s dream of a geodesic dome paradise for people who are ready to leave behind petty moral strife, behind even if it means working or being worked on in a cold clinical red Cronenbergian psychiatric ward. In a flashback to 1966, the drugged-out shrink takes some powerful liquid LSD, is reborn, and rips out the jugular vein of his mentor's wife with his teeth.. or... something. Back to the mid-80s, and the rich scientist who set it all up is a shattered junky, his star child daughter a telekinetic Scanner-type kept under protective glass to contain her ability to project thoughts and melt people's brains. The drugged-out shrink delights in tormenting her and talking super slowly in their sessions, each word savored in his speedy mouth for its gorgeous liquid curvature. Does even he know he killed her mom? (more here).

Look close into the green in the blackness at right

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW

Right as I was writing this, Craig T. Nelson behind me said the words "phase four" in relation to the real estate development agency he works for in POLTERGEIST (1981). Is it any coincidence that this PHASE IV is the movie I'm writing about at this very moment? "Reach back and remember when you had an open mind," JoBeth Williams says to him, right before a chair slides across the floor. As I've written, Craig T. Nelson starts the film in the 70s great dad mode--and winds up a closed-down conservative Reagan 80s dad. "Remember when you had an open mind" could apply to our current world as well. I never thought, as a kid in the 70s, that neo-conservatism would ever resurface.

Even so, as a kid in the very early 80s, I wrote a short story about a stoner orgiast grandfather trying to turn his grandchildren onto punk rock and LSD while their parents (his children) preach strict joyless religious/conservative dogma. To me, at the time, such a willing retreat from decadent freedom was unimaginable except as science fiction. I was sure things would get more decadent, and/or stay as they were. In Buenos Aires, for example, which I was in only a few years back, it's still the 70s in a lot of ways--sideburns, jean jackets, big collars, open-heartedness. North Americans down there are considered mighty backwards, violent, and conservative - our pop culture has reflected a descent from the coolness we had back in the decade they still seem to live in.  It's hard not to agree when you compare the breadth of their interests to ours. At coffee my wife and I would discuss Freud and Lacan, Godard, and Dali with her friend who drove a cab and his painter girlfriend.  In America, that would be considered pretentious - we'd discuss The Simpsons and Britney instead.

Scarfolk!

Though the USA has grown too conservative to advance back into the 70s, there is still analog synth music at our disposal, most of it from the UK, via outfits like the Canadian Board of Education, i.e. Boards of Canada, whose eerie electronic music seeks to capture that late afternoon feeling of woozy instant hauntologique deja vu when we kids absorbed the 70s elementary school-enforced complex lessons of overpopulation, pollution, Saturn, the world of insects and the darkest ocean depths all set to murky analog synth space music. Though the BOC is actually Scottish, no doubt their ingeniously socialized education systems shared film strips and 16mm shorts, as did my own in, in a progressive 70s PA grade school - where my classmates and I saw short sci-fi films on themes like the hole in the ozone layer like THE ARK (1970) constantly, and I've been looking for it for years but can't find this one thing they showed a lot that was so weird I can't find mentioned anywhere: maybe you know it? It's the one where a lone color butterfly invades a depressing black-and-white industrial hellscape, almost initiates a revolution amongst the hazmat-suited workers, and then winds up pinned to the wall above the manager's desk. We saw that film a dozen times over the years! We kids could handle depressing industrial hellscape cautionary metaphors in the 70s, goddamn it. At home, on PBS, we watched things like LATHE OF HEAVEN and STAR MAIDENS. These hazy but profound persona-shaping memories of elementary school 70s films have spawned a whole genre of music, beyond what trail-blazers like Tangerine Dream, Eno, or the BBC Radio Orchestra could have e'er imagined. It's a music so time-specific that a certain generational swath (which includes me) grows hypnotized with a giddily ominous rapturous mix of sadness, dread, and delight --the future as imagined in the past, literally out-of-time, ultra-dimensional, soaring backwards and winding up ahead of itself.

RETROFUTURISTIC SCORES IS NOW

So if England made Scarfolk, Scotland made Boards of Canada, and Canada made RAINBOW, what did we make? Goddamned half-baked overthought de-clawed SPACE STATION 76. Jeeziss. We got to get it to / gether / then.

Luckily, los Estados Unidos rules the actual retro-future. We gave the world SOYLENT GREEN, SILENT RUNNING, BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES and LOGAN'S RUN, and--now on Netflix streaming (PS - not anymore 6/16) -- PHASE IV (1974), which used to come skittering through the usual after-school creature features on local TV, and had me thinking hyper-intelligent ants besieging a geophasic dome in the middle of the desert sounded pretty cool. But these ants aren't EMPIRE OF THE ANTS or THEM size. They're not giant, and for most of the film's running time we barely see them interact with the humans at all except through basic shapes related via fax machine. They wait until said humans are dead or 'right where the ants want 'em (in a giant hole) before they make their designs known.

Now, as grade school scamp, I saw, up-close, tons of insects, both on nature documentaries and living across the street from a thriving park where every upturned rock delivered unto us kids a vast eye full of struggling worms, pill bugs, centipedes, and spiders. I even had a bug collection for a time, pinned on a cork board, each one labeled, their exoskeletons slowly crumbling onto my desk. Most kids, small and powerless in a strange world of giants, come to depend on tormenting, killing, or capturing, or just cuddling with smaller creatures to feel any sort of power. As kids we relished the chance to feel bigger than something, for a change.

Now though, on the widescreen HD TV, the close-ups look like alien monsters. Now I've put away childish things, taken them back out again, and now left them at some party I lost the address to... and anyway am too embarrassed to retrace my steps and to admit I can't remember which bars I was in where I might have left them. I revisited that Lansdale park a few years ago and the creek was dried up, the trees dying, the park was now just a stretch of crabgrass with a softball diamond. Bugs got zero cachet for me now anyway, and besides DDT took the lot of them. Reality is parched and empty while the screen explodes with HD color. Reality is certainly the wasteland the 70s predicted it would be, and PHASE IV awaits rediscovery. See it!

Nigel Davenport plays an entomologist who has detected disturbing signs in the desert that all the different kinds of ants are working together, and that their natural enemies are all conveniently and mysteriously disappearing. With a big grant he sets off to build a high-tech research station geodome in the middle of the desert, near the disturbances, to find out what's going on and (hopefully) destroy the ants before they wipe out mankind. Recruiting a games-and-theory code breaker from MIT (Michael Murphy) to help him, Davenport hopes to communicate with the collective hive ant intelligence!

The film actually moves very fast, even truncated, like a Reader's Digest abridged novel, moving through a cycle of ideas briskly and intelligently. It's not at all the molasses drip of meaningless I remembered as a kid (though I understand now why I didn't understand it then). It helps to have taken some drugs, grasped some rudimentary structuralist precepts, I guess, in the decades between viewings, and so be able to better understand the psychedelic journey of the end, where the couple come together as the ambassadors of a new insect-commandeered Earth, one no doubt infinitely better managed. In short, 2001: An Ant Farm Odyssey

Theory of film recollection:

Sometimes in close film writing I start to get a thrill from remembering a scene in great depth. The more I write about it, the longer and more powerful the scene becomes, until it begins to change - and I remember elements that--when I see it again--are not there. Lines of dialogue I know clearly in my brain, have changed. Being able to revisit a film over and over while writing about it is something denied film critics until the age of video, but we lost something in gaining that ability. In going back to check whether what we remembered is actually in the film, we drain the essence of myth - the way form and structure change and warp as a kernel of deep truth forges and reforges its molten self. Sometimes though, the DVD version isn't the same film - director's cuts, editing for TV, etc. So sometimes we were right in the first place. How can we know which is which?

Sometimes I get convinced the film been edited, somehow changed with time, or else I was 'on' something at the time and aren't now. The film's presentation might be different - certainly the widescreen and HD makes a huge difference over the old analog square. But after writing and thinking about a film, revisiting it we realize we're the ones who have changed, and memories have accrued around initial impressions until what's there isn't there anymore. That doesn't mean the memories are false, merely that time is. END OF FILM RECOLLECTION THEORY--

PHASE IV is the only feature directed in entirety by Saul Bass, the genius who used geometry and abstract planes to shape animated credit sequences to Hitchcock films like VERTIGO and NORTH BY NORTHWEST. This indirectly makes him the perfect man for a movie about geodesic ant architecture and hive intelligence. The genius of the ants makes a perfect analogy to that kind of animation and design --and the script is masterful at conveying the idea of non-localized intellect, the hive mind. Each ant in itself is not smart, but the hive mind is. Combating a non-localized intelligence is almost impossible. We're forced to consider them as an entire new form of intellect, genuinely superior to ours because they're so self-sacrificing, so devoted to the whole. Davenport sprays the ants with a yellow poison, for example, they die en masse, but then we see ants dying as they relay a chunk of the green-glowing toxin through a long ant tunnel and into the queen's chamber, where she eats some of it and immediately starts to lay immune green-glow-tinted eggs, as if each new ant is born with a booster shot to immunize them to that poison.

Humans simply can't evolve that fast, not sober, not after AIDS, not after the Reagan 80s brought us into crash-and-carry modality, forever more.

LANGUAGE arm uakdfgrgdgum84deij-VIRUS:

'How come giraffes haven't learned to talk by now," we used to ask in class when arguing evolution in class. But now I know how that kind of thinking : Darwin is great, the theory of evolution is just a bitter pill we're afraid to swallow, so we misunderstand on purpose. This is not because we're weak, but because it means language doesn't necessarily make us stronger, so language resists our attempts to expose its limitations. Language, as the ants well know, is a soul-killing virus that slowly strangles our five human senses in favor of abstract symbology. Our dogs and cats look at us with concern, like we're crazy, as we stare at the TV in a state of zombie hypnosis, but they see more than we do of the world; when we're really troubled and ill, they know it before we do and comfort us without a word. Their senses are superior, they smell our souls, and so they get cuter all the time, that's evolution.  If we were animals we would have long ago adapted to our natural world rather than destroying it to the point it conform to the limitations of language, the way a normally free-thinking woman might be hobbled by a restrictive religious patriarchy (i.e. cutting off the fingers to fit the glove). Animals see what language and abstract thinking have done to us and they say 'no thanks, man.' Just say no. The giraffe's evolution involves reaching higher and higher to access more leaves than its neighbor, it has no need of talk. Humans, in our vanity, presume whichever dead-end we hobble down is the one true road out.

Maybe one day our evolution will involve curing ourselves of the curse of language, and we'll merge once more into the cosmic egg, fuse our intelligence to that of our Sky Mother, Shakti Kali Durga, the one without a second. There She is, waiting for us to swim once more into her lighted tunnel womb. And the two of every animals will all be waiting to welcome us when we return, saying "hey man, you finally evolved!" And we'll be like yeah, but what's wrong with you, you got the virus now too? And then we'll all look at each other with warm compound eyes and try not to say another goddamned word. ++

!

 Further 70s "learning" -


See also from Acidemic:

Tales from The Retroufuturist Pharmacy II: The Metatextual Cigar Edition

"You rolled, you really rolled" - ROLLERBALL and a 70s Blood Sport Overview. 

Tales from the Benway Pharmacy: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, THE MACHINE

If I ventured into the 'flix stream, between the viaducts of Dr. Benway prescribed drug-enhanced science fiction hallucination dream, would you find me?  Or would there no longer be a 'me' to find, and no difference between you, these words, the future, the past and all constructs of self I may adopt and discard over lifetimes? Yeah, it's the second option, because good films dissolve all difference. The screen is just the first in an endless banana peel of self (and vice versa).

I dissolved once or twice into that void this week, thanks to the following two films being available on Netflix and their modulating, droning and pulsing analog synth scores being available on Spotify. By Sinoa Caves and Tom Raybould respectively, these evocative scores make a big difference, especially this time of year, the autumnal Samhain, i.e. Halloween. These two films seem to occur in a realm of permanent ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) midnight where dangerously liberated prisoners/patients/experimental subjects break out of bizarro world environments, in the process etching out as fine a metaphor for the dangerous liberation offered by psychedelic drugs as anything I've seen since PSYCH-OUT (1968).

So, when you're on an all-night weird movie binge, save these two for the late late show slot, i.e. the high strangeness Interzone gateway stretch between three and six AM, when the straight and sober are fast asleep so their bland consensual reality can't interfere with your psionic reception, because thanks to Netflix, the future is then!

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW 

2010 - written and directed by Panos Cosmatos

***1/2

A lot of typical science fiction buffs are nerds, man, and they stay that way for one reason: they're scared of psychedelics. Scared to lift the throbbing rock of the known and scoop the writhing worms and scorpions from the muddy void and devour them, they live in a reality circumscribed by the trappings of the social order; the border between their fantasy life (as a fifth-level chaotic good paladin in D&D) and reality (high-school) is very well-marked. The closest they get to living their own fiction is, perhaps, LRP or paintball, but never the 'inside job' of acid or mushrooms.

This cautious avoidance is a wise decision. Unless one feels the psychedelic zone tug them towards it like a magnet, one is probably not invited, and would probably not be treated well. As Bill Lee says in Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, "the 'zone takes care of its own", implying: all others beware. Not everyone is meant to have their ego ripped like a bad tooth from their screaming psyche. Their self-centered fears lodged like a giant tick in the back of their skull, each wrench of the psycho-active pliers felt like fire consuming the crown chakra, and only the already in pain would want to stick it out in the chair, enduring the probing and inflamed wrenching, until that sucker is at last ripped out. But for nerds of the sci-fi role playing type, maybe their egos aren't solid enough to be killed. There's no formative I AM life experience to get cocky about, no hardening of yesterday's persona.

Lick the 2001-legged Monolith

Sometimes the sci-fi coterie do make it past their initial fear and enter the void, and if they do, they tend to run in packs, and--when running is done--retreat to the movies (as we all have), spending the come down from the peak watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), because it's the familiar made unfamiliar. Kubrick's movie is never entirely familiar no matter how many hundreds of times you see it, and on LSD or shrooms it's a whole other thing. From there, an adept sailor of cinematic madness will wind up leaving England along Commonwealth solar trade winds and winding up at two Canadian horror films: SCANNERS (1981) and BLUE SUNSHINE (1978). Each explore the long term psychic side effects of prolonged exposure to the drug-dealing elder god behind the wizard behind the curtain. In BLUE a particular strand of LSD makes people lose their hair and go on rampages after exactly ten years elapse. In SCANNERS a briefly marketed pill prescribed to pregnant moms has caused a offspring to be born with the power to blow other people's heads apart through conscious projection.

I mention these two films this for a reason, this acidhead tab of Canadian druggie sci-fi history is imperative for a deep lysergic appreciation of the 2010 Canadian homage to that golden era of tripping man's Kubrickian-Cronenbergian-Blue Sunshine maker crossroad science fiction, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW.

The first feature by Panos Cosmatos, RAINBOW stars Michael Rogers as a batshit crazy psychiatrist named Barry Nyle. His pet patient is a scanner-style mutant girl Elena (Eva Bourne) kept under sedation in a futuristic white room for reasons no expository monologue need explain (we having seen SCANNERS and deduced the drug side effect angle via the psychoactive experiment clinic prologue). During the daily sessions, Nyle tries to provoke any kind of response from Elena, talking molasses slow through a thick protective glass while jotting down 'notes' and going even more insane. He also has special guards called 'sentinauts' (their brains can't be exploded) and a weird white triangle device that can deliver sound vibrational (presumed) shockwaves to knock Elena to the ground and (presumably) jam her brainwaves should she try to escape. Clearly, she must have the power to transmit her thoughts and explode the heads of anyone in the same room if the puramid thing should be turned off.  The uncanny analogy synth score by Sinoia Caves heats and throbs and pitch modulates as the doctor and patient engage in a long drug-addled silent treatments and staring contests. Cosmatos trusts his viewers to connect the dots, to have seen the classics, to have had their egotistic wisdom teeth pulled at the psychedelic dentist, to know that fields of red and pulsing, throbbing analogy synth music is enuff.

To make it all just that much better, the institute is housed in a bizarre retrofuturist geodesic dome, which includes the office/drug den of a terminally-ill Buckminster Fuller-Timothy Leary-ish junky, the founder of the institute (and Elena's father). In a flashback to 1966 we see this guy taking Barry on his deep dish drug trip (the date is important: LSD was legal then and being used by forward-thinking psychiatrists the provinces over). Barry's trip resembles the 'Beyond the Infinite' section of 2001 if slowed down 99% and experiences while meditating as one's face melted off. It's so much like my last few salvia divinorum trips I nearly fell off the floor, but Barry is not like us. He is  reborn in an oil slick, crawling out of a black circle like a reptile from its egg, and latching onto the woman, some woman... I don't know...his wife? Elena's mother? Does he kill her by ripping her throat out with his teeth, or is that an ejaculation? Is she coasting on an orgasm, or is the light going out of her eyes?

Either way, when it's over it's clear the doctor blames himself; Barry's not held responsible... but the hope for the future is done, and though Elena shall be born with all the special extra sparkage having a dosed-out LSD-awakened mother can bring to one's junk DNA, she'll wind up a prisoner in an all-white room in a geodesic dome in the middle of nowhere, the captive of an insane doctor who killed her mother while in the throes of a deep dish LSD freakout.

 Meanwhile there's lots of delicious red walls and filters and the sense that time is melting (Barry pops pills from the Benway pharmacy--another nod to Burroughs) and though he's off-putting at first, Rogers gonzo performance grows on one over repeat viewings; he's committed to his work, he should be committed into the place he works, period. It fits hims snug like in a strait-jacket. Being a shrink seems like a pretty awesome occupation for a druggy maniac: you get to prescribe whatever mind-expanding things you want for yourself and go so deep into the void that reality ceases to exist and you finally get a peak 'beyond the black rainbow' and don't have to worry about a thing, as you have all the Ativan and Thorazine you need to bring you back down to 3D space-time if things get too terrifying.

If you get confused, just presume this is all meant as an analogy to the mysteries of consciousness itself as it may have existed in Canada after the collapse of the psychedelic movement: Elena is the unconscious, the anima- mutated along with the psyche's chromosomes; Barry is the amok ego trying to keep the sinful Jane Eyre attic madwoman lovechild locked up tight; the old man is the repressed superego dissolving from years of drug abuse (nothing nullifies a moral compass like addiction) and watching his high watermark 60s utopian vision for the future gradually erode under the deranged stewardship of his sociopathic protege. No matter how lofty one's intention, the ego finds a way to take advantage of it.

So remember, nerds: baldness = homicidal madness, and if you can't escape quickly, move so slowly no one can see you; otherwise you're dead at the hands of a guy who's so high he can't tell the difference between your skull and a stress ball.

THE MACHINE

2014 - written and directed by Caradog W. James

***

THe low-budget but highly intelligent (if unimaginatively titled) British film THE MACHINE (2014) has great gloomy electronic momentum (no daytime shots ever, which is great), a beautifully retro Carpenter-meets-Vangelis synth score from Tom Raybould, an overall aesthetic that splices the labs of the Tyrell Corporation to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK's Lee Van Cleef sub basement, And a script that mixes some TERMINATOR touches with CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (1962) post-humanist philosophy. The captivating Caity Lotz is great in a double role, evoking Elsa Lanchester in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, as both the inventor and the machine. And thanks to thrifty use of lots of Val Lewton darkness, a single, largely empty cavernous soundstage and great artistic (and ingeniously simple) touches like the way the bodies of the artificial beings light up in strange patterns when excited (though the lights are clearly just projected onto their skin), Caradog's etched out ONE of those economic sleeper B-movie gems that can sometimes be unearthed when digging around in Netflix Streaming, ranking it alongside other dusty gems I've found there, like BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, THE ORGEGONIAN, IRON SKY, BOUNTY KILLER, and JOHN DIES AT THE END. It's short, yet operatic. There's no filler, no corners are cut. Everything fits and it doesn't need trauma or didactic postures to feel justified in existing, though of course there is some of each. Even the bit with the dying daughter sidesteps all the usual cliche'd sentimental pitfalls.

The story begins with bigwig AI engineer Vincent (Toby Stevens --the Richard Branson-ish villain in DIE ANOTHER DAY) interviewing various freelancer-designed artificial intelligence programs via a series of surrealist questions to see which can answer far enough outside the box of logocentric thinking that genuine personality is possible. Ava's (Caity Lotz) program comes closest, and she's cute, sparks fly, so she's hired, and brought down into a deeply buried network of basement level research programs, all funded by the British military intelligence operatives for assassination work in China. Vincent's not a fan of the assassin aspect, but he loves the unlimited funding. It's enabled him to develop software that can scan and duplicate whole personalities via sensitive headsets worn during Voight-Kampf-style questions. Meanwhile, military vets suffering from brain injuries and missing limbs are turned into half-machine monsters, the trouble being they're liable to kill everyone in the room during the slightest existential tantrum. Meanwhile one of them steers Ava towards a possible cover-up conspiracy in the works - these soldiers are being cut off from their loved ones, treated essentially like slaves. She knows too much!

Ava is assassinated by Chinese assassins before Vincent can even work up the nerve to ask her out, not before doing all the tests of course. How convenient! Dennis (DR. WHO) Lawson is the ruthless installation director who wants to make sure this new Eva isn't so independent she'd refuse a direct order, especially since Vincent tells her killing anyone--even Chinese diplomats!--is wrong. She murders a guy in a clown mask during a routine test. She feels bad. Raybould's synth pads swell in mecha-grim portent.

Oh well, it's not hard to guess the rest, and we viewers we don't really give a shit about Vincent's Asimovian ethics, so Lawson needs to to up the stakes via an enforced robot lobotomy and another easy-to-guess subplot with the daughter. But what could be some douche chill sentimental nonsense in non-British hands (such as Guillermo del Toro's) doesn't rankle, and I've got a sensitive rankle meter for that shit.

Slick and dark, but with some genuine AI insight and vintage analog originality to back it up (See also CinemArchetype #13 - The Automaton / Replicant / Ariel), it's a good lesson in how you too can survive the coming robot revolution! Hint: treat the machines with compassion or at least tact, because they'll remember every last kind or derogatory word forever, no matter how far out of earshot you think they are when you say it. They are the past and future, reaching back and forward along your every gesture, like karma's own sweet engine.

Remember us, your future? CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS! 

If you have Spotify, click here for a mix of both the amazing scores of these films.

NOTES:
1. If you don't get that reference, see BLUE SUNSHINE!