Sunset Gun

Jonathan Demme has passed away. To honor his life and his musical, deeply humanistic films, in love with the odd and the beautiful, and the oddly beautiful, the art of everyday people who aren't so everyday, and the depth and complications of love —  I'm posting my New Beverly piece on one of the great films of the 1980's — Something Wild. Rest in peace, Jonathan Demme.

“I’m glad to see you finally made it to the suburbs, bitch!”

Love can be traumatizing. It’s also exciting, unsure, bizarre, freeing and imprisoning (at times, somehow, simultaneously), and when it starts – that delicate, vulnerable starting point – there are messy shifts in mood that mirror a kind of mental illness. It might even be a mental illness, an abnormal interruption of serotonin levels causing mania, anxiety, depression and obsessive compulsive behavior. Of course that sounds more troublingly clinical than romantic, and people really don’t like viewing themselves as mentally unstable lunatics while in the throes of lovesickness (this is the socially acceptable sickness, one tells oneself), but if you read British clinical psychologist Frank Tallis (who wrote an entire book about it), you might be convinced of its psychopathology: “Love seems to have the power to destabilize people emotionally. Particularly in vulnerable individuals, it can be very difficult to cope… Some people are referred to me because of an admission to depression or anxiety disorder, but in fact, once we’d explored issues around their problems, it was clear they were just in love.”

With that kind of dysfunctional amore in mind (isn’t it always at least a bit dysfunctional?), Jonathan Demme’s moody, transgressive, genre-bending, weirdly romantic (and unromantic) Something Wild isn’t such a strange hybrid. For a love story, it mirrors what often happens when people do fall for another – it’s destabilizing and terrifying. A movie that upsets some viewers with its stark shift in tone – from winsome, sexy, romantic comedy to violent, obsessive thriller – it stares directly in the faces of its male protagonists – one, a dorky stuffed shirt type, the other, a charming, murderous criminal, and wonders if they are at all so very different. And in an especially powerful scene utilizing the Demme close-up, it wonders if anyone is at all so very different.

This question, through shifts of persona and the crazy act of falling in and reclaiming love, makes the character’s desire to embark on a quest, whether it be a journey through the past (to quote Neil Young), a new identity or the liberating adventure of a road trip, all the more poignant and unsettling. And relatable. It begins when the buttoned-up, newly appointed vice president of a Wall Street firm, Charles Driggs (Jeff Daniels) commits a sneaky criminal act for his own personal thrill – he pockets a check in a Manhattan diner and walks out without paying. Spying him is the pretty Pandora’s Box of a woman, appropriately named Lulu (Melanie Griffith) sporting a Louise-Brooks-bobbed wig and African jewelry – this is not the type typically drawn to Charles. The dark-haired stranger follows him outside and confronts his “closet” rebelliousness of which he protests – he made a mistake! He’s already lying. Once he learns that she doesn’t work there and that she doesn’t actually care that he lifted his lunch (she’s, in fact, turned on by it), she offers to drive him to work. Work doesn’t happen. Instead she takes him to a seedy motel room in Jersey where they have handcuffed sex to the tune of Fabulous Five’s “Ooh! Waah!” Natural to all uptight men confronted with the free-spirited, screwy dame going after what she wants (in movies), he’s reticent at first, but succumbs, which isn’t that tough.  After all, sex is involved and Demme does not shy away from showing the eroticism of this encounter, allowing Lulu to enjoy herself and take control. You also sense something more problematic going on with this woman. Maybe she has a drinking problem? What is she evading?

She has other aims too – thinking Charlie (he’s now anointed Charlie) is a square (but rebellious enough to ditch a check), and a decent-looking, upstanding fellow, she convinces him to join her on a road trip to her Pennsylvanian hometown. It’s her ten-year high school reunion and she needs a fake husband to tag along. She also needs to show him off to her sweet mother, Peaches, who, in a charmingly affectionate scene, tells Charlie she knows Lulu (now going by her real name, Audrey) is pretending. She says nothing to Audrey about it; Peaches accepts her daughter’s impersonation of a “normal life” likely touched by the need to please her mama. This is the first tonal shift in the picture and another alteration  (or doubling) of what men desire – going from the fantasy of the erotic, madcap siren to the toned-down, sweet, high school vision – the lovely woman, the kind Charlie could take home to his mother.  From the so-called whore to the proverbial Madonna, she cleans up well. But why on earth this woman cares about her high school reunion shifts her to a place decidedly more squaresville than the viewer originally imagined. She saunters into the ballooned, name-tag wearing event as nearly an all-American girl, albeit the wild one – the blonde hair, the pretty white dress, the white shoes.  But even before the dark force of romance past shows up, there’s an edge to this presentation, enough where, you can almost hear the song Demme used so powerfully in a film he hadn’t made yet, The Silence of the Lambs – Tom Petty’s wistful, mysteriously spectral “American Girl.” Here it’s The Feelies (fantastic) singing the mournful, menacing “Loveless Love,” and the guy remembering that girl thinking, “there was a little more to life somewhere else,” turns out to be Ray Liotta.

This is when the movie is akin to Bringing Up Baby as interrupted by Born to Kill, with an obsessed, jealous Lawrence Tierney pistol-whipping Cary Grant and kidnapping Katharine Hepburn. Can you imagine that? Demme did. The kooky, sexy girl isn’t so much charmingly incorrigible any more, and she instead brings with her menacing, abusive baggage. There’s now a reason why she’s drinking so much. And being the estranged wife of a criminal, she might even be complicit with this psycho (what did they do together in the good old days?). And yet, Liotta’s Ray, all blue-eyed and charming with his rough trade handsomeness, freshly sprung from prison, isn’t immediately a threat to Charlie. Charlie likes him, in fact. Charlie’s so stupidly loved-up at this moment, he’s both naïve and not paying attention; he’s not even paying attention to Audrey’s nervousness, so self-absorbed he is while indulging this new love-struck feeling. He’s also caught up in the masculine energy of Ray.

Through Demme’s direction (and his brilliant cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto), Ray’s entrance is something to behold – the camera moving in on Liotta’s smiling, ominous face, we know this guy is chaos. We’re also positively struck by Liotta’s charisma – it hits the viewer so much that they feel a dark thrill, even a kind of love at first sight. Liotta is scarily sexy in this movie and Demme knows it, aptly understanding that being drawn in by Ray is going to become something more complicated than merely rooting against a stock villain. We even feel for Ray at times, in spite of how inexcusable his actions are. After all, he’s in love too. Even worse, he’s still in love, and she doesn’t love him anymore. Thinking back to love as mental illness, that might make you crazy. Add prison time to unrequited emotions, and you’ll be even more incurably “romantic.”

Intelligently allowing Ray to partially take over the picture, Demme (and screenwriter E. Max Frye) raise the stakes, making us question how we feel about this smiling jailbird. He’s so fit and so focused and so fucking damaged. And yet, he’s appealing. When Demme has Ray turn so shockingly violent (it’s not cute) he becomes some kind of nightmare delirium of jealousy and fear – namely Charlie’s. As if, when a woman talks about her most recent ex, the bad boy ex, and her new boyfriend wonders, worried, what their relationship was like. How will he measure up? In this movie, that guy appears, not only taking her away, but also taking her away with charm, brutality and mockery. Ray tests Charlie’s masculinity so much, but with such a powerful combination of desperation and violent angst, that the viewer, and perhaps Ray, questions what being typically masculine means in the first place (a question Demme studies in other films, and directly after this one with Matthew Modine’s heroic, but quirky straight arrow F.B.I. agent in Married to the Mob).

And yet, Charlie takes to him. You understand why. He feels stimulated being around the animal magnetism of Ray. At first. And then, again, the story shifts, the mood gets darker, and boy meets girl becomes boy meets boy, transforming into two boys pursuing one girl, albeit with different means. Or are they so different? They’re both, in a fashion, and in their own kind of feverish love, chasing/casing Lulu. Charlie is, of course, saving her, and from obvious threat, but what is he releasing her from, really? And does she have much choice in the matter? Does she even really love Charlie?

Perhaps it wouldn’t have gone so terribly awry had Audrey done something she shouldn’t have to do and simply told Ray she still loved him – as in, lied – but he seems like the one person she can’t lie to. Charlie’s fibbing about his wife and kids (revealed via Ray) and that lie pisses off Audrey enough that she resigns herself to Ray’s entrapment. The kinky S&M she brought to Charlie is no longer role-playing, it’s real, and the veneer of Charlie’s normalcy and of Lulu’s uninhibited allure is fully lifted (when rewatching the picture, we’re observed it slowly revealing itself from the beginning, however). How we present ourselves when falling in love, what we want that other person to see (and notsee) and often, what we choose to ignore, undergoes a transformation here, with Charlie and Lulu gazing at each other in the exposing bare light bulb glow of Ray. Gee, is this movie any fun? Yes, it is.

What’s so wonderful about the picture (among other things) is that while skating on the edge of a potentially joyless thriller, it never becomes one, even as it upsets you.  It’s still fun and, importantly, it’s still moving. In Demme’s view of this particular corner of America, there’s life and joy bursting out of every frame. With the picture’s music (49 songs) providing such a singular, superb soundtrack to these lives, people serve not just as scenery but as distinct individuals, sometimes poignant, sometimes musical. Among many stand-out, small performances, there’s a group of rappers outside of a gas station market, an inquisitive girl checking in on Charlie as he sits in his car, and a lovely moment in which Charlie engages with a clerk named Nelson (Steve Scales) who helps him pick out attire from the tacky tourist gear. It’s delightful, how long Demme allows this scene to go on and how much he, Daniels and Scales underplay what could have been a rote “wacky” incident. Charlie is changing in the store (appropriately in a “Virginia Is For Lovers” tee shirt) and Nelson is not at all perturbed by this, instead he’s encouraging, even casually life affirming. When Charlie asks Nelson if he should buy new glasses (he’s wearing Lulu’s colorful kiddie-looking specs) Nelson says, “Nah, keep ’em. You’re beautiful.” The world is not such a shitty place after all.

Within that strange, disarming world, cameos like John Sayles as a motorcycle cop, Demme favorite Charles Napier as an angry cook and John Waters as a used car salesmen fit right into the environment without any kind of showy strain. I especially love a small moment when, after Charlie has rescued Audrey from Ray, Ray sits angrily by a diner window trying to figure out what to do. An extra passes by outside, saluting him with a little wave.  Just a little wave. It’s a humorous and endearing punctuation mark. Soon after, in that same window, a young woman Ray’s already flirted with at a gift shop, cheerily taps on the glass, and seeing his way out, Ray exclaims “Oh, thank you lord!’” He kisses the window and then manically laughs to himself. You kind of love Ray at that moment – just for being so damn charming and resourceful. And amused. It’s infectious.

Which is why Ray’s final moments wind up so strangely touching. He’s not without his own vulnerabilities; we’re not hoping he dies. We’re not sure what we’re hoping for. As mentioned earlier, Demme employs his now famous close-up shot; the character’s eyes full of sadness and regret, staring at each other, and we look directly at them. In some ways the two men merge at this moment, provoking complex feelings of identification, fear and empathy. This is not a happy ending. Charlie will never be the same. But who was he in the first place? And who is Lulu? Not long before this moment, Lulu/Audrey asks Charlie: “What are you gonna do now that you’ve seen how the other half lives?” He says, “The other half?” She answers: “The other half of you.” Good question.

 

"The risk is high but so is the profit. I wasn’t born this way. I trained myself. I eliminate personal feeling. I feel hot. I feel cold. I get sleepy and I get hungry.” — Claude (Vince Edwards)

My next piece for Ed Brubaker's issue 8 of "Kill Or Be Killed" with art by the great Sean Phillips: Irving Lerner's spare masterpiece, Murder By Contract starring Vince Edwards. Order a copy!

Out April 26, order here.

The April Sight & Sound is out — I interview the brilliant Anna Biller — discussing her varied influences (Dreyer, Demy, Losey, Fassbinder, Hitchcock, John Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven and John Brahm's The Locket) as well as Biller's unique style and complex, intriguing ideas about … many things. See The Love Witch. And pick up this issue. Here's a small excerpt:

Kim Morgan: Writers often apply easy labels to female characters, particularly in noir with ‘femme fatale’, when many women [in noir] are actually rebelling – much like your character, they’re rebelling against the patriarchy or the pressures that society places on them.

Anna Biller: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s very similar to a noir film or a film like Leave Her to Heaven – a woman who is locked in the patriarchy, doing the best she can. A lot of people think that’s old-fashioned, that I’m creating a character that is out of time, but I feel it’s very relevant to today. Many women respond to it because it feels so relevant to their own lives. A lot of men actually can’t see that, which is why a lot of them are calling it ‘sexploitation’ or ‘pastiche’. They can’t see what I’m doing. They think it’s a joke about other types of movies from the past, when it comes from personal trauma, actually.

KM: That makes me think of John Brahm’s The Locket, a great, underseen picture.

AB: It’s such a masterpiece. It really did inform The Love Witch. Laraine Day in The Locket is kind of a Stepford Wife, right? She’s perfect on the outside, but completely wacko on the inside. She’s been destroyed somehow by childhood trauma. But you’re sympathetic towards her because you see the trauma. John Brahm also made Guest in the House [1944], another fascinating movie about a crazy woman. He was such an interesting director, picking stories about female psychology. It’s very unusual for men to be like that now, whereas before there were [several] male directors and writers who did so. Like Hitchcock – his female characters are brilliant.

KM: Which brings me to parallels with The Birds [1963]. When Tippi Hedren drives into town, it’s like she starts Armageddon by her very different female presence; she’s disturbed the universe somehow. It’s the same with Elaine in The Love Witch.

AB: Female sexual power destroys an entire town. I don’t think Hitchcock is judging her either. He’s just saying, “This is what happens.” Melanie’s aggressive. She’s pursuing a man. She goes to his apartment and then drives out of town and she sneaks up on him in a boat. As she’s rowing towards him, she gets the attack from the gull and it’s brilliant because you’re almost fearful for her because she’s so sexually aggressive for that time! I think the movie is on her side. It’s about women who socially transgress, so it’s similar to The Love Witch. It’s like when Elaine is attacked in the bar. In bringing out this mythos of the feminine, you don’t have to have a negative or positive judgment about it, you just have to be aware of it. [Some critics] don’t acknowledge the mythos of the feminine as being a serious thing to explore in films, so they call it parody. Men feel they’ve effectively tamed us so they don’t have to deal with the mythos of the feminine any more, and they’re relieved. They sure as hell don’t want it coming back… so they just call it what they want and then reduce it down to something that it isn’t; this compact little parody thing. The reality of watching the movie is different – it’s powerful. But whatever they say afterwards, that’s still the experience of watching it. They’re experiencing it, whether they like it or not.

KM: There's personality and art in the artifice and the masks that women wear through makeup in cinema – think of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis… So when Elaine is taking off her wiglet and looking in the mirror and you hear the critical voices, I thought of when women remove the mask and how women do think of these things when gazing in the mirror.

AB: Yes. You see her putting on her mask and taking off her mask. That was really important to me. The mask is something outside of herself, and also that Trish [Elaine’s outwardly prim landlady and friend, played by Laura Waddell] could put on the mask. That was meaningful because you think of Elaine as this kind of woman and you think of Trish as that kind of woman, but actually they’re both just women. They’ve made different choices about self presentation, but either could switch at any time. I’m trying to undo some of those stereotypes and to show that this is a choice to make, to become this woman, to become feminine. A lot of people find the feminine so ridiculous now, they find a movie like this campy or silly because the feminine to people is campy or silly. I’m trying to change that, hopefully, by keep making movies like this so people take feminine women more seriously.

Read the entire interview by ordering or picking up the magazine, here:

"I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours – an actress – was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn’t plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live." – Joan Didion

All of us live in our own movie. (Don’t we?) But how do we control our narrative? Well, of course we can’t. With all of those around us – family, friends, lovers, husbands, wives, one-night stands or just a single conversation at a desert rest stop with a stranger, our self-perception is passed on to another person, translated by other eyes and ears creating their own movies – movies either on replay or nearly forgotten, a flickering memory of that one person in that one place at that one time. Unless it is told to us, or, in the case of those writing about or filming us (or both), we can’t know. And we can’t control the sometimes warped perception of “the truth” (whatever that is), their truth, not ours. (Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s untrue either.) There is so much that others can pour into us, or live through us, particularly lovers and friends, and if we are depressed or troubled especially, the end result may be banishment or beauty or, if embittered, a mythologized distress, an exaggerated fantasia of spite. In many cases, muses are born from this kind of heightened narrative. And drained. Magnetic lightning rods like Edie Sedgwick and Neal Cassady, artists themselves, were alluring and inspiring. And troubled. And in the end, weary, depressed and drug-addled. They sparked genius, but Sedgwick (a gifted model and actress) and Cassady (a brilliant writer), both of whom everyone wanted to fuck (and fuck and fuck, sometimes they probably didn’t want to fuck) found themselves, by the end of it, lost. And nothing brings out the vipers and the leeches like a vulnerable person, traveling along to the next adventure towards oblivion.

In Frank Perry’s Play It as It Lays (adapted from Joan Didion’s novel by Didion herself with her husband, John Gregory Dunne), Hollywood, already filled with vipers and leeches and artists and muses, is the perfect backdrop for this type of dramatic discernment, as model and actress Maria (Tuesday Weld, very much a Sedgwick/Cassady mold breaker), wanders through the spread-out city with all of its surrounding areas and high desert lonesome in a state of depressive detachment and grim determination of … something. She’s not sure. Geographically, Los Angeles provides ample space for this kind of physically roaming narrative as Maria drives the labyrinthine freeways, stopping off in small desert towns, drinking cold cokes or engaging in little dramas (or big ones), whether with another human or talking on a roadside payphone. She has her own story and she’s trying to weave together her own narrative connection – to be her own film editor. Fragmented trips to hotels, Malibu dinner parties, Beverly Hills shindigs, movie shoots, apartments and swimming pools propel her to her who-knows-what future. And so, like many an emptied Angeleno, she’s “not too crazy about people.” There are friends and lovers, she’s always one step away from a party or a conversation, good, bad, banal or momentarily exciting, as she talks or listens to others talking, but she sometimes says nothing at all. She wonders what others close to her are thinking. She’s decided to not give a fuck. In the novel Maria observes:

"If Carter and Helene want to think it happened because I was insane, I say let them. They have to lay it off on someone. Carter and Helene still believe in cause-effect. Carter and Helene also believe that people are either sane or insane. Just once, the week after the desert, when Helene came to see me in Neuropsychiatric, I tried to explain how wrong she had been when she screamed that last night about my carelessness, my selfishness, my insanity, as if it had somehow slipped my attention what BZ was doing. I told her: there was no carelessness involved. Helene, I said: I knew precisely what BZ was doing. But Helene only screamed again. Fuck it, I said to Helene. Fuck it, I said to them all, a radical surgeon of my own life. Never discuss. Cut. In that way I resemble the only man in Los Angeles County who does clean work."

Carter ( a terrific, perfectly cast Adam Roarke) is her husband, a director on the rise, a guy quite different than the producer he works with who happens to be Maria’s only true friend who sees her – the nihilistic, sometimes sharply funny, sensitive and smart B.Z. (Anthony Perkins), who is gay but in a marriage of convenience. Maria and Carter are heading towards divorce,  their marriage is troubled, and she talks with B.Z. and his languorous, sharp-tongued wife, Helene (Tammy Grimes), about her various predicaments. She doesn’t seem to like Helene much, but she’s almost terrifyingly close to clever, haunted B.Z. – her only confidant. B.Z. gets her like no one else does and he wants her to fall into his philosophy of … nothingness.  There’s a lot of cold comfort in their acidic conversations and beach strolls and like their characters in Pretty Poison, they’re beautiful oddballs (Perkins is strangely beautiful) and in this film, two Hollywood animals who seem a skip or two away from the norm, and five steps ahead of everyone else. Of course that’s not easy for them.

Carter’s second picture, in which Maria appears (in the novel, she’s gang-raped in the film, not for real), was a hippie biker movie (kind of like the movies actor Roarke actually starred in), and his first picture, named Maria, is a cinéma vérité work starring… Maria. Carter followed Maria around with his camera while she, in the only scenes in which she appears momentarily happy (this was a while back), talks about her own life. She laughs and smiles discussing her parents from a dusty one horse desert town (Silver Wells, Nevada), her western mythology, she seems proud of, sad (her parents are both dead, and died tragically) but it defines her. He prods her on camera, asking about who her father was balling and if she was jealous of this, assuming she wanted to ball her own father, clearly intending to provoke a reaction the way Chuck Wein did to Edie Sedgwick in Andy Warhol’s Beauty No. 2. Carter likes showing this movie, and she hates watching it when he does. One night she sees him on TV discussing Maria with a panel of cinema intellectuals recalling how Maria’s personality was so her – as he addresses her in his view through his camera, now framed though his discussion. His most artistic success is Maria’s own life and presence, filmed and edited by him, which must annoy her. As their marriage is disintegrating, Maria listens to Carter and the moderators, a bit pretentiously, dig into performance and real life:

Carter: “I was experimenting. I was trying to see how far I could go before breaking down the barrier between film and real. And yet the personality constantly shattered the conventional camera, subject relationship.

First moderator: That personality being your wife’s.

Carter: Well, she wasn’t my wife, yet. No.

Second moderator: You didn’t just hire her, Carter. You couldn’t have gotten that kind of performance.

Carter: Well, that’s the whole point of the film. It wasn’t a performance.

Third moderator: You mean, existentially it wasn’t a performance.

Carter: It wasn’t a performance. It was not a performance.

First moderator: This was her life, as it were.

“As it were.” And with that Maria turns off the TV. In another scene on a film set directing his newest picture, Carter talks existential while being interviewed by an on-set reporter, and Maria is once again irritated. Later that day when Carter seeks her out to talk, she’s buying lunch. She snaps back at him: “Existentially, I’m getting a hamburger.” It’s a funny line (not in the novel) and you get the feeling Carter knows she’s probably smarter than he is. This runs through Didion’s book and reminds me of Didion’s idea about performance and writing – if only Maria could write her own story, not rely on acting in someone else’s story, perhaps she could help herself and not spend so much time waiting. As she wheels around in her yellow Corvette just to drive, cracking hard boiled eggs on the steering wheel, the wind blowing through her long blonde hair, she is attempting escape and a certain kind of organization through the Los Angeles freeways, as one pieces together the various routes and towns snaking around the city. You’ll always end up somewhere, sometimes even proud of finding your destination (Barstow, Oxnard, Palmdale) which Perry observes, beautifully, in shooting desert towns, those places that, even just a couple of hours outside of Los Angeles, feel like another universe. Carter’s making a movie in the desert, likely inspired by Maria’s background, and she’s more at home there than anyone else on set it seems, talking to a waitress in a diner without any condescension or awkwardness. These scenes are lovely – Perry casting desert denizens as those who couldn't care less about Hollywood, but not the wiser for it necessarily (and people out there tend to not give two fucks about Hollywood). Maria remarks that the waitress sweeping up the same desert dust – it’s only going to return seconds later with the wind – but the woman ignores her. She just keeps sweeping. Everyone has their rituals.

Maria and Carter have a disabled daughter who is shuttered away in a sanitarium, which distresses Maria to no end. Though she visits her, Maria’s constant hope is to take the little girl away and raise her alone – canning fruit and jams, she thinks, in a strangely banal fantasy that becomes startlingly dramatic for the way Weld pronounces “apricot preserves, sweet Indian relish, pickled peaches,” comforting a despairing and dying B.Z.  In one of their many almost blackly humorous arguments, Carter threatens that Maria will never see their child again if she doesn’t get an abortion (she’s pregnant from an affair) and he throws the doctor’s number on Maria as she sits up in bed. This is an abortion she’s not sure about getting (“He does clean work”) but Carter doesn’t want his career in jeopardy should his wife wind up in the gossip pages. The abortion does not help Maria’s mental health and she goes alone – save for the abortionist’s assistant, wearing all white and smacking gum, who accompanies her. This makes for one of the greatest sequences of the movie – a grim distillation of Maria’s need to roam mixed with this terrifying invasion into literally, her most private places.

With cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth and editor Sidney Katz, Perry shoots this trip to the abortionist beginning with Maria trying to find where in hell she’s to meet the abortionist’s assistant who rides with her to the doctor. She picks him up under a big red “T” (“What big red T?” she asks, discussing directions over the phone. He answers exasperated, “The Thrifty Mart. The Thrifty Mart, Maria.”) After picking him up in a gorgeously composed shot (it looks like a William Eggleston photograph) under the looming “T,” a beacon of “T” to the abortionist, they then share a perfectly normal conversation that stars out with: “Don’t take offense if I ask you something…” You suspect the “offense” will have something to do with the prospective abortion, but instead, it’s about her Corvette: “What kind of mileage you get on this?” He then discusses his thoughts of getting out of leasing cars and buying himself a Camaro. They pull into the abortionist’s office, and in a series of swift cuts (the movie is filled with intense, razor-like cuts that could almost slice your hand and bleed), we see in quick succession, a bloody object dumped in a garbage can, gloved doctor’s hands washed in a sink and the loud droning drain as Maria drearily asks, “What do you do with the baby?” When finished, Maria walks back out to the assistant who is watching a western on a small black and white TV. She sits down and an Earl Scheib advertisement starts playing. The assistant, not understanding the absurdity of the statement  (or perhaps he does) says to the woman who just received an abortion: “You missed a pretty fair movie, Maria.”

The picture floats and swerves and cuts with observations and weirdly timed statements like this throughout, brilliantly matching the fragmented time fame and switching POV of Didion’s novel, while wandering from place to place and person to person with Maria’s depressed but succinct sensitivities. It’s often genius, so that the film was poorly to adequately received at the time (though Roger Ebert loved it) seems unduly unjust to me. Many critics thought it very pretty, and Weld and Perkins fantastic (they are), but very empty (it’s not, and it is, precisely the point). Or that Perry was all wrong for Didion (he’s not). Didion’s novel has sometimes single-paragraph sentences, terse observations met with deadpan responses and Perry visualizes her manner stunningly. And he does so as a Perry film, not just a Didion film – this is what happens when another is helming your own work, even if you write the screenplay – you cannot control your narrative once it’s in the eyes of the other beholder. No surprise Didion has expressed admiration for film editors. Those who construct.

Weld and Perkins float through the picture almost as phantoms haunting their own story, and Perry’s sharp scene shifts, from loud planes flying overhead to Weld’s wild gun shots from her car, hair mussed all over the place, to an entrancing opening and closing of Weld walking the perfectly manicured tree-lined grounds of her institution (in real life, it’s the famed Greystone Mansion, where oil tycoon William Doheny’s son Ned was found dead in a murder/suicide with his assistant/rumored lover, Hugh Plunkett) accords and intersects Weld’s (and Perkins’) thoughts, spoken outright and interiorly felt. Perry’s style is as graceful and as jarringly angular as Perkins’ thin frame, cuddled in Tuesday Weld’s lap, overdosing on Seconal. The picture is loadedwith style (which some unfairly hold against it), a necessary surface beauty, critiquing that very surface beauty while reveling in it, showing spurts of intense film work to be met with many more lazy, debauched days dragging into nights in which bored rich people discuss fresh lemon or lemon reconstituted, how they eat breakfast (Carter’s breakfast discussion is amusingly dull) or the jolt of poppers that a vacuous actor inhales before shagging Maria. The actor must also watch himself on TV before getting aroused, another comically caustic moment via Didion and Perry.

Weld, Perkins and Perry are a divine threesome – all three serious but grimly funny, attractively understated with bursts of psychodrama and shock, weird but never too crazy. And sad. (Also why Carrie Snodgress, Richard Benjamin and Frank Langella are perfect in Perry’s bleakly amusing and disturbing Diary of a Mad Housewife.) Perry has an offbeat, singular talent for dissecting despair and upper class ennui that’s entirely recognizable yet ambiguous, allegorical and often chilling. His wife Eleanor who had been his screenwriter up until Diary of a Mad Housewife, and an excellent artistic partner, was gone by the time this film was made (they divorced), but working with another married couple, Didion and Dunne, was a successful match for Perry. I’ve heard that at one point, Sam Peckinpah was attached, which would have been fascinating (Maria has a restless outlaw in her as well, her Corvette the horse she rides through the desert), but Perry is mightily in sync with Didion’s words and universe. A movie about a troubled woman, marriage, movies; about trying, sometimes in vain, to tell your own story, and a movie about Los Angeles – this was something Perry and Didion understood dry desert air bone deep. In “The White Album,” Didion wrote:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live … We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience … Or at least we do for a while.”

Maria is doing this for a while too. At the end of the picture, she walks the spectral grounds of her mental institution, again, filmed at Doheny-haunted Greystone (ghosts communing with ghosts) and narrates: “I know something Carter never knew or Helene or, maybe, you. I know what nothing means and keep on playing.” The off-camera voice asks, “Why?” and she looks directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and answers, “Why not?” It’s simultaneously nihilistic and Zen, letting go like Sterling Hayden at the end of The Killing or Warren Oates reinforcing William Holden in The Wild Bunch (“Let’s go!” “Why not?”); it also continues her endeavor to define her own story, even if she’s seemingly given up, this time controlling through nothing. Perry wants us to know that this is a movie by film end and now, Maria, her own muse, will play it however she likes, or at least, “for a while.”

 

The day after Prince died, I happened to catch a moving screening of Jeremy Saulnier’s punk-band horror thriller Green Room (2015) in the ArcLight cinema in Hollywood. If you’ve not seen it, one of the film’s threads is that perennial test of musical fandom – which one musician or musical group would you keep with you on a desert island? To begin, the film’s various hardcore punkers pick their expected choices – Poison Idea, The Misfits – though the film’s star, a superb Anton Yelchin, is more contemplative. When they’re later trapped in the titular green room by sundry Nazi skinheads and a dog of death, the question is again put to them under duress, which brings out the unvarnished truth. “Simon & Garfunkel!” one blurts out. And the badass of the band (Joe Cole), the guy who in another movie would lead the group to victory, spills his heart: “Prince!” 

Memories of adolescence can come to you in a multitude of ways. Some thoughts are often so hazy, and in many of us, so strange, that even happy reminiscences take on a peculiar sensation of both centered familiarity (we are all still who we are), our teenage years directly in our body and in our being, and yet, entirely remote. All that excitable, depressed or terrified youth has drifted so far off shore that one must stand on their toes and block the sun to see it bobbing in the water. Other times, it hits you like a sharp pain and you are living it all over again, right in your core. This can come to you happily but that rarely seems to be the case – wistfulness usually greets a nice memory. It’s the trauma, loneliness, alienation, guilt – those sensations – that overwhelm us while lost in thought or living through a crisis or from very little drama at all. You could be looking out of a car window or looking at a fish tank or talking to a grocery clerk who treats you like you’re 14 and something just overcomes you. You could, like John Cheever (writing in his journals), be walking outside:

“Walking back from the river I remember the galling loneliness of my adolescence, from which I do not seem to have completely escaped. It is the sense of the voyeur, the lonely, lonely boy with no role in life but to peer in at the lighted windows of other people’s contentment and vitality.”

As Cheever so movingly observed, these are senses one can never escape – because, well, one just can’t. Frank Perry’s Last Summer is suffused with all of these impressions, a movie that reflects the sexually charged, weird, freeing and, at times, inexplicably perverse feelings that swirled in and around you as you were about to touch adulthood (which seems like it happens too fast). As you watch these teenagers on screen, you are right there with them, and yet, at the same time, you feel removed, observing from a distance. In direction, setting, texture, light and sound, the picture feels powerfully foggy, as if these are the last teenagers on earth, or a collection of sensitives we’ve conjured from our own memories. It’s quite an artistic and emotional feat – this in-body/out of body experience the movie manages to convey, a pull in and float out – and you drift along with these characters almost in a hallucinatory state. The sharper moments come to you like Cheever describing his young loneliness – they are “galling.”

The movie begins with what will appear to be a sad but sweet moment – two healthy, tanned, good looking blonde boys meet a lovely, bikini-clad, long-haired brunette girl on the beach at Fire Island as she leans over what appears to be a dead seagull. It’s actually still alive she tells them, with one remarking unconcerned, “Not for long.” In another movie, you might think immediately of innocence crushed or the kid’s yearning for the seagull to be free, but Perry (and his wife, the great Eleanor Perry, who adapted the screenplay from Evan Hunter’s novel) are not trafficking in such thudding clichés. Already the picture feels different, edgier, and these kids appear like how teenagers actually are – more interested in the girl than in the seagull, the girl sizing up her power in this dynamic of two cute boys. Also, there appears to be no one else around – not on the beach anyway – no other kids at all – giving the picture an extra intense lyricism. There’s a dark undercurrent to the sunny exterior with the focus on just these kids – outsiders seem unwelcome or even alien. Later, one alien will eventually appear.

Sandy (Barbara Hershey) snaps back flippantly at the boys, Peter (Richard Thomas) and Dan (Bruce Davison), after requesting they help her move the gull off the beach, which one warns could give her rabies: “Rabies my ass!” she says. Certainly her looks are enough to interest them, but something about her ease with her body and informal exchanges, her intelligence is especially alluring to them, and they indeed help her bring that gull back to her mother’s beach house. You never see any of these kid’s parents in the movie, giving the picture a focused, particularly desolate feel, the kid’s alienation more trapped than exuberant.

Swiftly, the three become best friends, so inseparable that it verges on a sexual three-way, but not quite at intercourse. The boys want to sleep with Sandy, of course. Smart-ass, rather typical Dan, more intent to bang her than the more sensitive Peter, who suddenly feels badly when he bugs her to remove her top – and she does – discuss the coming-of-age query of “should they or shouldn’t they?” These conversations are between boys who are both insecure and confident – or in a more sinister view – boys who will ask or demand. Sandy is free with her body, unafraid to pull her top off or roll all over the hormone raging boys, her hormones raging as well, laughing and drinking and dancing; washing their hair, and in a dark movie theater, letting one feel up her breasts, while the other feels up her legs and up to her panties. It’s a bold, kinky scene, but not unlike many hot and horny teens pushing closer and closer to going all the way. The double grope is sexy to her, and she says so, she gets all the attention, while the boys are observant and even sophisticated enough to question whether she does this to merely flirt, or if she’s just that way and that’s fine. Even if it’s driving them fucking crazy, they’re friends, they play “trust” games and they’re not going to go somewhere creepy-dark. Until they do. All of them.

While occupied with their gull on the beach, which they’ve harnessed and are teaching to fly again, a plump 15-year-old in a dowdy bathing suit, one who looks very much not in their crowd approaches, demanding to know what they’re doing with that bird. Rhoda (Catherine Burns) is lonely and looking for friends, but bold and even bossy, enough to where Sandy tries to wave her off with, “Oh, go suck your mother’s tit!” Rhoda continues to harangue the kids who simply want her to go away, but she’s unyielding about the gull:  “You’ve traumatized him. You’ve taken away his sense of identity.  He doesn’t know he’s a bird anymore.  Well, look at him squatting there. He probably thinks he’s a crab…. He can’t help it, you’ve turned him into a schizophrenic!” It’s a fascinating introduction – part future Shelley Winters in her more tragic roles (like A Place in the Sun), part likable, intelligent voice of reason (they are making that bird crazy). You have no idea where this character is heading, but the Perry’s deepen her, giving her a complexity that’s beyond just the chubby girl who feels left out. Her mother is dead – recounted in a brilliant monologue where you can practically smell the booze and the salt water, where you can see the thinness of her mother, feel a man grasping Rhoda’s backside, all rolled into this vivid, heartbreaking recollection. (Burns was Oscar nominated for this performance) Rhoda even writes a column for her school newspaper called “Feelings,” which sounds corny as anything, but given her monologue, she’s likely a fine writer.

We will become wary of Sandy, if we weren’t already. She’s clobbered the gull’s head in, secretly (the boys find out), after the poor thing bites her. She’s upset that this damn gull turned on her after she saved his life, and so she simply kills it – either out of demented power, or hurt that anything could not love her, or both. (The novelist, Evan Hunter, also adapted Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock, and I can’t help but think of the woman vs. birds subtext of that picture, and the one panic-stricken woman unfairly blaming the bird invasion on outsider Melanie Daniel, screaming: “I think you’re evil! Evil!”)  Here, Sandy demands and commands the gull: “I’m absolute ruler over your world and I have absolute power over you and what I say goes… Therefore when I say fly, you fly.” That sounds all tough-cute in the moment, perhaps, but it’s actually more fitting of her personality, which is revealed to be manipulative and cruel. Something is off and disturbed in her – or maybe she’s just not learned anything about empathy yet (her family life isn’t entirely stable, but then no one’s is) – or maybe she’s drunk on her feminine power. Whatever the case, the picture’s not going to give you an easy answer. Sandy and the boys put up with Rhoda, sometimes casually annoyed, or curious to see her in a funny situation and they set Rhoda up on one of Sandy’s self-humoring computer dates (with a sweet Puerto Rican man) whom they treat terribly. Rhoda is appalled by but remains “friends” with them, even as their silly games continue and, as smart as Rhoda is, she trusts them. Or is willing to. Again, she’s only 15-years old.

She even trusts them to teach her to swim, and they, or rather Richard sticks to the task. The kids think it’s weird she can’t swim (given that her mother drowned one can understand why she is scared), and Richard starts taking a more tender, romantic interest in her. In one moment, the two lie on the beach and he waxes poetic about the ocean: “Wait till you see how beautiful it is down there. The colors, the way the light shines on things. The plants. Just the shape of things. You know, even a piece of broken glass can be like an emerald! And the fish move, gentle, you know, nice  … You do everything I tell you to do. You learn how to swim, and you learn how to dive, and you know what?” Rhoda asks, “What?” And Richard declares, romantically, “I’m gonna kiss you at the bottom of the sea.” It’s lovely and heartfelt the first time you see it, and maybe it is, but watching it a second time when you know what happens to Rhoda, it seems a bit sinister: “You do everything I tell you to do.”  Richard’s small soliloquy reflects the shifting tones of the movie – poetic and pretty to subtly disquieting. By film end, Rhoda’s sexual “awakening” will not be her choice.

Last Summer was the Perry’s fourth collaboration, their first three: David and Lisa, about two mentally ill teenagers (one can’t stand touch, the other suffers a split personality, talking in rhyme, the other can’t speak), Ladybug, Ladybug, about school panic under nuclear attack, in which a 12-year-old girl locks herself in a refrigerator and suffocates, and then The Swimmer (starring Burt Lancaster), a transfixing, powerfully allegorical and disturbing adaptation of John Cheever’s short story. The direction was taken away from Frank Perry on that picture (an uncredited Sydney Pollack shot the rest) but what you see is another expression of their lyricism and cynicism that, through the early 60s and up until 1970, made them two of the most unique and fascinating independent filmmakers of that time. Probing the alienation and/or rot within adolescence or in the supposed stability of suburbia, or of marriage, they were a potent pairing – their partnership ended with their divorce (Frank went on to make films without Eleanor, notably Doc, Play It As It Lays and Mommie Dearest). Their last film is one of their best, Diary of a Mad Housewife, an especially lacerating portrait of matrimony, which also weaves a dreamlike, almost mentally insane spell of both abuse and masochism.

Characters are trapped in the Perry’s films, literally, in refrigerators, or swimming pools, or in marriages and affairs giving no profound satisfaction or release. Burt Lancaster banging on the door of his empty house, as if he’s trying to break through to another consciousness or world (one he’ll never reach) while revealing how lonely and empty he feels, is a refrain in the Perry’s work. This all may sound incredibly depressing, but there’s a sly sense of humor to these pictures as well (Housewife in particular), a mordantly humorous touch that, at times, comes off like Sandy’s weird charm in Last Summer – disarming.

In Last Summer, Rhoda is lonely but she’s certainly not empty, and her emotions are right there on the surface. In this particularly cruel universe, that makes her prey to the socially dominant Sandy, Peter and Dan.  She’s a kid who, like Cheever’s memory, “peers into the lighted houses of contentment and vitality,” only the other kids in Last Summer aren’t exactly content. In the cinema of the Perrys, no one is.

From my piece that ran at the New Beverly

Out now! My essay in the newest Ed Brubaker "Kill Or Be Killed" # 7 all about Noel Black's Pretty Poison starring Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins. Art by the great Sean Phillips. Order here.

Here's the first paragraph:

Those little eyes So helpless and appealing One day will flash and send you Crashing through the ceiling — Maurice Chevalier (Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe)

I got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming La la la la La la la lie Sooner or later, we all gotta die — Nick Cave

There’s a scene in Noel Black’s 1968 Pretty Poison that’s so creepy- sexy, so erotically unnerving, that it still makes a viewer feel off balance and disturbed in 2017. Tuesday Weld’s beautiful, blonde 17- year-old high school majorette has just bashed some poor night watchmen on the side of the head – near dead. She and her new boyfriend, psycho but sensitive Anthony Perkins, have been mucking around at the chemical plant he works for on one of their dates/clandestine missions. Perkins is loosening a chute that dumps chemical waste into the town’s water supply and, filling her head with lies that he’s a spy for the CIA, she’s excitedly helping him. She loves the intrigue and mischief and she loves being bad. The factory guard catches him and Perkins stares back terrified – for good reason – he’s recently been released from a loony bin. Weld is not scared of anything. She’s a remarkably pretty girl with enviable hair and straight A grades and a bright future ahead of her. She calmly brains the old guy, blood oozing all over his face, and she seems a little proud of herself too. Like she just solved a relatively hard algebra equation. Without asking or alerting the freaked-out Perkins she, with all of her sociopathic common sense and know-how, drags the dying man’s body into the water. He’s now good and dead. And then she sits on his back.

Read it all here.

“David set it up . . . There are eighteen different places in that film, if you look at it, where he could have stopped the whole thing. He didn’t. He let it go on . . . As so often in life, we let things happen to us because we want it to . . . I’ve had to lecture twice now, really, about the film to psychiatrists . . . They say, ‘How did you find out about this?’ Well, I got married a few times.” – Sam Peckinpah

Romantic relationships, revenge, jealousy, masculinity, femininity…  these are complicated matters in life, emotionally messy matters, things that, when up against serious impediments, aren’t easily resolved by valorous, well-adjusted people doing the right thing. And often, when feeling a looming problem, and a looming problem particularly in our relationships, we act out in little ways to both avoid the crescendo of drama while subtly stoking those fires, making what we wish to prevent (total collapse) a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Through committing small, nasty acts of reprisal (justified or not justified), grievances and resentment can build and build and build until they are fully ignited, gasoline poured on the flames, the house nearly burned down. This is what happens (and literally) in Sam Peckinpah’s controversial masterpiece Straw Dogs, a movie about a man struggling with his masculinity and what that even means (and unleashing his savagery when pressed in the most extreme way possible) while also observing, in most lacerating detail, a failing marriage – two people falling out of love, and indeed, when all is said and done and killed, hating each other.  Scalding liquid thrown on faces, bear trap coup de grâce, bloody bodies piled up in a farmhouse. Through severe, in part, metaphorical terms, Peckinpah’s dysfunctional couple is, by film’s end, stripped of their microaggressions to see things for what they really are – they are not in love anymore and why did they get married in the first place? I can only wonder if Ingmar Bergman saw this picture and admired it. I’m going to believe that he did.

Straw Dogs opens with a Peckinpah motif – children are awful, readying to be awful adults. Like the kids torturing scorpions in The Wild Bunch, the children of this Cornish village (Cornwall, UK) are laughing and screaming and singing while circling a wagging dog in a graveyard. Though the dog’s not tortured, you sense something ominous will happen to the pup, and one can deduce that Peckinpah meant it as such (I highly doubt he opened his film simply to show how adorable little children are). Underneath all of the “cute” childhood play is a creature who could turn around and bite their little hands off. We then see the film’s protagonists walking through town, stocking up on sundries – that’s Dustin Hoffman’s American mathematician David Sumner and Susan George’s Amy, David’s young and beautiful British wife. George gets an eyeful of an introduction, something that’s offended and titillated viewers and critics since its opening: wearing a white sweater and jeans, she is braless, and Peckinpah takes visual notice of this right away.

The male gaze is exactly what Peckinpah has placed front and center (even if women also look at and admire George), as you feel a palpable sense of dread, the townies staring at her as we stare at her, making us feel immediately aroused, and some of us uncomfortable, perhaps even complicit, and a little sorry for Susan George who is simply braless. To a young woman in 1971, going braless wasn’t that big of a deal, and for some (then and now), even if she knows everyone is looking, she doesn’t really care. And why should she? Yes, it’s always wise to assess the danger of your surroundings (and David brings it up later, though with little concern, this isn’t James Stewart lecturing Lee Remick about wearing a girdle in Anatomy of a Murder), but the idea that she deserves any kind of aggression based on her lack of an undergarment is absurd. I can’t believe that I’ve read this subtly questioned, even in reviews from the 2000’s. I recall reading that Amy was “gallivanting around” in one piece, which suggests she’s being overtly ostentatious in her attire. Jeans and a turtleneck sweater? I’ve seen sexier getups worn by Marcia Brady on “The Brady Bunch.”

So … maybe Amy just doesn’t like wearing a bra and Peckinpah noted how men view this and placed us directly in that view. It may come off as exploitation at first but it serves a purpose throughout the entire picture. Amy is both knowing and wagging a big middle finger to those who look. Both times she’s caught in erotic visual (topless in the window, or her mini-skirted leg and panties from the car) she stares down her gawkers more with a challenging “what?” than a flirtation. That many critics view this as merely flirting seems strange to me, not taking in the complexities and the impressive subtly of George’s performance.

But that kind of liberated manner is scary in this setting and furthers the animosity the locals feel for Hoffman’s American, whom Peckinpah also describes via wardrobe – ineffectual, sweatered-preppy in white tennis shoes, walking into a pub full of hard-drinking manly men who clomp around in work boots and scruffy beards. David even requests American cigarettes. You feel sorry for him too. He’s immediately an outsider. This is Amy’s hometown and so the watchful locals may make her feel both more comfortably accustomed to their roughness and wary at the same time and yet, she must know they resent this return. Already a man she’s had romantic involvement with, Charlie Venner (Del Henney), is getting aggressively fresh.  But you get a feeling, immediately, that something is not right in David and Amy’s marriage; that it likely wouldn’t have worked out even in a different setting. It’s just that this was the entirely wrong town to relocate to. This will be the place to inflame their already apparent strain. Much like the way Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse make a fresh start at the Dakota in Rosemary’s Baby, you can already see the tension before the Satanists show up.

So much of the picture is building on this dread and animosity – between the villagers with the husband and wife, and between the husband and wife alone, that every little infraction is loaded. David has left the states during the Vietnam War (some believe Peckinpah viewed this pacifism as cowardly, I do not think it’s that simple), and he’s trying to accomplish work on complex math problems in the farmhouse. At one point he tells a worker, Norman Scutt (Ken Hutchison), why he ventured out there: “I’m just glad I’m here where it’s quiet and you can breathe air that’s clean and drink water that doesn’t have to come out of a bottle.” It’s an innocuous yet amusing line because, one it’s timeless, someone would say that now, and two, nothing appears bucolic in this town at all – not even the air. Muscularly shot by cinematographer John Coquillon, the town is potently grimy, where nature is tangled and cold, the green of the earth damp and dirty, everything is effectively oppressive, a place where people are self-medicating illnesses (physical and mental) at the pub, and disease-ridden rats are proudly caught by a giggling rat catcher psycho named Chris Cawsey (Jim Norton) who sings this dreary little ditty: “Smell a rat, see a rat, kill a rat!”

Amy and David are always being watched while the men working on the farmhouse lewdly discuss Amy’s attractiveness with perceptible violence, even stealing a pair of her undies. They don’t like David, whom they view as weak, and laugh at him as he attempts to start his sports car – an emasculating moment, backing up when he means to move forward, accidentally turning on the windshield wipers. Amy is the better driver, and the more reckless one as well. People may consider Amy as the most reckless at everything but I believe they both are. Or rather, everything around them is a torrent of recklessness, fueling their normal transgressions.

Adapted by Peckinpah and David Zelag Goodman from Gordon M. Williams’s “The Siege of Trencher’s Farm,” some changes in the script made the disparity between the couple more evident. Their ages – younger – and Amy young enough for us to assume she was once David’s student. The dynamic of teacher-student crush is now colliding with real life, with nature. That whatever intellectual control David had over her before, he is losing his power, and especially in this turbulent, rugged environment. Their bickering is that of a focused academic who doesn’t take his wife seriously (she also seems quite a bit more affectionate than him) and a wife who seeks respect and validation, even if she has to be annoying to get it. Amy is unhappy, even tortured at times (you can see it in her eyes), and young actress George displays this in knowingly subtle ways. She does small things to show her annoyance – crossing out a plus sign to a minus on David’s blackboard, even sticking her gum on it; talking to the workers only to mock David by telling him they think he’s “strange;” yelling at him to question the workers over who hung their cat in the closet (this seems pretty justified, though it would be hard to approach a group of intimidating men, accusing them of killing your cat).

They’re bickering like an old married couple while playing up their roles, perhaps to restore their attraction. In one scene, David gazes at Amy flopped out on a chair and remarks that she looks like a 14-year-old. He playfully drops the age to 12 and then 8, as she vamps up the Lolita wife by smacking and chewing her gum like a sexy teenager. This works for them. In that moment. But not-so-Lolita Amy has her small victories. Like when David says she’s smarter than he thought because she actually understands a mathematical concept or that Peckinpah shows her playing and studying a cerebral game like chess before going to bed. Amy wants to win at something and if chess won’t be taken seriously enough, her sexuality might, and so that sex, her braless beauty, hovers over the picture as, not just a torture device or Amy having it coming, more as impending doom through sexual extremity.

The working men invite David out to hunt and humiliate him further – they ditch him in the woods and one calls on his wife. Charlie Veneer returns to their farmhouse where Amy is alone. Here begins the notorious moment that has been studied, argued about, upset or confused critics to this day: in a meticulously crafted scene, through expertly horrific, ferociously real and yet, hallucinatory directing, editing and performance, Charlie rapes Amy. And then Scutt sodomizes her. It starts with Amy rejecting Charlie’s advances, but he overcomes her on the couch. Peckinpah does not spare Amy, her clothes are ripped off, breasts revealed, her quaking fear so evident you know (and this was indeed true) that the actress is terrified herself. What offends many is that Amy eventually succumbs; she climaxes and holds her ex lover tenderly. When Scutt sneaks in, unbeknownst to Charlie, Charlie at first tells him no, but then, disgustingly siding with a buddy over a woman, holds her down while Scutt rapes her. It’s horrifying, Amy convulsing in terror and pain.  Critics who loathe the picture feel that Peckinpah is suggesting that Amy is asking for it, through her attire, through her flirting (I still don’t view her as merely a flirt) or, that craving his masculinity, she’s turned on by Charlie’s brutality. I don’t think it’s quite that simple (though I’m not going to tell anyone what they should or should not be offended by). Amy is being victimized by someone she knows and, in my view, could be submitting to save herself from being further brutalized. She can’t overpower him. She can’t even move. It’s shocking and unhealthy and it makes her feel undeservedly guilty. To underscore this, the scene is intercut with David out in the woods, feeling like an idiot for trusting the brutes, holding a lifeless bird he shot with the look of someone who is thinking, what is the point of this? He’s no idea what is happening to his wife – making the rape also serve the purpose of ultimate cuckolded nightmare – something he’ll later learn and replay in his brain over and over – that she liked it. This is what men might think, even if a woman does not enjoy it. And this it is where many critics draw the line. Amy is traumatized and suffers a traumatic flashing, which returns to her in recurring trauma that will likely never leave this woman. Never mind the man’s issues. Amy has to live with this. It’s a fucked up moment, complicated and troubling but no, nothing Amy deserves. And I don’t think Peckinpah would view it quite that simply either. Though I’m sure some would disagree with me.

And this movie was very personal to him, according to Peckinpah biographer David Weddle (“If They Move . . . Kill ‘Em!: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah”). As discussed in the biography, the director’s soon-to-be wife Joie Gould was apparently a version of Amy, and David a version of Peckinpah:

“The costumes used for Amy in the final film bore a striking resemblance to Joie’s own wardrobe, and Dustin Hoffman wore many items that could have been pulled out of Sam’s closet. (Peckinpah was dressing – coincidentally or purposely – more preppily than he had in the States.) Peckinpah was not only using his own past as raw material for the film, but manipulating his present, himself and the people around him, to help feed the psychodrama. A dangerous game, as Joie would learn the hard way …  The slightest smile or exchange of pleasantries with another male would throw Sam into a fit of jealousy. By the time they returned to the house in the evenings his eyes were two red pulsing sores and his mood swings were rapid and unpredictable. He flew into a rage at the slightest provocation.”

That some critics believe Peckinpah sided with the savage men of the town, and the savage unleashed in passive David seems too simplistic – that he was picking sides and not, perhaps, addressing problems within himself. Pauline Kael famously called it “the first American film that is a fascist work of art.” (Peckinpah was incensed by this review). The director likely viewed himself as both type of man, which, by film end, David is. The film is hard to wrap one’s mind around, or place tidily in a box (just as A Clockwork Orange, also released that year, was and still is) as it confronts the difficult realities of innate savagery – and not for the better of us. But not for any better or for worse – that Peckinpah is observing it’s there  and in David’s eventual circumstances, he’s going to unleash (for protection, but also for satisfaction). Even as the brilliantly choreographed siege (arriving from even more violent/sexual hysteria) which takes over the final third act of the movie, is as exciting as hell, it also underscores how fucking unfair everything in this movie (and life) is.

The emotionally disturbed (or simple, one might say) Henry Niles (David Warner) has gone off, quite innocently, with teenager Janice (Sally Thomsett) which enrages her father – the stupid, volatile Tom (Peter Vaughan) – and he rounds up a group of townies, including Amy’s rapists, to find her. Of course they blame Niles who, in an Of Mice and Men-Lenny moment of fear, accidentally chokes Janice to death. Amy and David have left the church party since Amy cannot stand the sight of her rapists, and David hits a fleeing Niles with his car. Taking him home against Amy’s objections (no one in the town trusts Niles), David refuses to release him to the lynch mob outside the house. David finally takes a stand, and not necessarily for his wife – she has turned against him but is now forced to help him because what else can she do when marauders are breaking into her house, ready to kill them? David is sticking up for himself, for his home and for Niles, though Niles seems more a symbol of his rage and pent up frustration, an innocent who inadvertently isn’t innocent (and maybe a savage too, after all he attacks Amy; David slaps him and says, “No,” to him like a misbehaving child). Niles is an enormous organism of confused impulses and guilt, and perhaps, helps David focus his rage to act and think. And David thinks fast when combating such radical violence and horror.

A few critics at the time saw this as implausible and even melodramatic, but to me it’s a vicious fever dream of not just David’s inner barbarian, but of marital discord exploding to bloody bits – every passive aggressive slight, every sexually unfulfilling night, every jealous moment, every moment of feeling lesser, either intellectually or physically, coming to a literal boiling point of hot oil tossed in a rapist’s face. Much like Warren Oates’s Benny channeling his pain and rage and revenge into a flurry of focused madness, driving with that bloodied head in a sack in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, David must preserve his self-respect, through retribution. But does he? Oates’s Benny has more loving reasons – he’s lost his love to death, and, dammit, “nobody loses all the time,” as he says, but, perhaps through everything, David loses anyway, because there’s nothing romantic about his vengeance.  The brilliant Alfredo Garcia, though dark and unsparing, is also romantic, as is The Ballad of Cable Hogue and The Getaway. But David’s just lost his love to … life. To marriage. All pretense is removed as David (and Amy, I think people forget Amy does help David, even if she resists, ready to bolt out the door towards the townies) defend what’s left of themselves against this leering, loathsome, all-impulse, no-thought mob – hypocrites, since they see no connection with their rape of Amy to anything Niles has done.

Amy is just doing what she’s told, we’ve no idea if she’s going to stick around (doubtful she will) as this Frankenstein creature is saved, the child they wrought. The idea that this is a merely anti-liberal, pro-violence movie in which savagery triumphs over passivity seems too easy for such a difficult story with such confused characters in such extraordinary circumstances. As David drives away with Niles, Niles says, “I don’t know my way home.” David, smiling, curiously, remarks, “That’s okay. I don’t either.” Did he find himself through becoming lost? Or is he merely gone? It’s unclear and it should remain unclear. Straw Dogs is overwhelming and, in the end, thought-provoking because even through violence, nothing is solved. Nothing is easy. And, like the best Peckinpah, it forces you (and force is the right word) to look within yourself, to ask questions. As Peckinpah said:

“I’m defining my own problems; obviously, I’m up on the screen. In a film, you lay yourself out, whoever you are. The one nice thing is that my own problems seem to involve other people as well. . . . Straw Dogs is about a guy who finds out a few nasty secrets about himself, about his marriage, about where he is, about the world around him . . . It’s about the violence within all of us. The violence which is reflecting on the political condition of the world today. It serves as a cathartic effect.”

“Someone may feel a strange sick exultation at the violence, but he should then ask himself: ‘What is going on in my heart?’”

From my piece written for the New Beverly.

Sad day. Rest in Peace, Robert Osborne. A big part to my enjoyment and learning while watching classic cinema. A King in the household. So it was a thrill and an honor sitting across from him as a guest programmer for TCM. That day Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was shooting a segment and we were getting hair and makeup at the same time (I was already nervous and in walks legend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was incredibly nice and talked to me about the greatness of Peter Lorre. It was wonderful and seemed like an "only at TCM" kind of moment which Osbourne brought out — everyone who loved movies wanted to talk to him. When I shot my segment Osborne put me at ease immediately. He was so gracious and funny and charming and, of course, he knew all about the pictures (Jack Garfein's "Something Wild" and John Berry's "He Ran All the Way"), that should go without saying. He knew about everything and his knowledge and enthusiasm was infectious and so truly respected, which is why audiences were in such able hands and loved him so much. Thanks for one of my greatest movie moments, Robert Osborne (I treasure the framed photo TCM sent after my appearance, signed by Osbourne). And thanks for everything you gave to classic cinema.