14. My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

"A long tradition of sudden illumination extends back to the beginning of Zen in China in the Golden Age. The light of realization flashes through one’s being in a blast of ionization. The image is of a tree electrified on a hilltop, crackling with white light. Nothing is the same afterward. […] Once ionized, you never forget”.

This above quote is taken from Kay Larson’s book ‘Where the Heart Beats – John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists’ and refers to the kind of sudden illumination that unfortunately has become quite rare in Western civilization – or at least is never recognized anymore. This could be because these flashes are indeed quite rare in anyone’s life, as they only seem to happen a few times – if that. I experienced two of these moments a couple of years ago, one shortly after the other. The first one was the morning I decided to take LSD for the first time, an experience that would radically alter my whole outlook on life. But the funny thing was, it had already begun to change immediately after I had taken the drug but before its effect had begun to manifest itself. Shortly after putting the little piece of paper under my tongue I was somewhat aimlessly surfing on the internet, perhaps as a way to take my mind off my considerable nervousness as I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But when doing so, I suddenly read that Ingmar Bergman had passed away that day (since then I’d like to think that Bergman died the day I had my spiritual rebirth as there’s more than a little poetic logic in that). But even more astonishing was that a week before I had decided, with some friends, to go see Bergman’s ‘Skammen’ in the theater that very same night. Seeing a Bergman picture in theaters was in itself not something I did every day, but doing so on the very same day the man died, was too much to be ‘just’ coincidence – although modern Western civilization will call it just that. Of course, this sudden bolt of realization that all things are connected preceded the proper LSD experience itself, so curiously my whole outlook on life had already began to change even before it technically could have.

Within the space of about four months, my whole life turned upside down after this: I quit my heavy drinking and ecstasy use from one day to the next, had the courage to finally drop out of the University and started living my life according to some radically different principles. And, most beautifully of all, it was also during this time I met my current boyfriend. We met online (yes, such encounters can lead to life-changing things), but we both never thought it would go any further than one pleasant evening. It was with this in mind anyway that I undertook the sizable voyage to his house, but when I rang the doorbell and he opened the door… I became ionized once again. I can’t explain the feeling to this day, except that I knew then and there this boy would be mine. Part of it is the old cliché of love at first sight probably, but there was something more to it than that. Call it Karma or whatever you will, but to me it was quite literally the ultimate manifestation of all the changes I had been going through these few months. Because it was again much too much of just a coincidence to first have made myself complete (or at least was shown the path to wholeness that I’ve since walked with my boyfriend), before finding my soul mate, making my life complete. Obviously I can’t give any evidence for this that’s even remotely scientific and since this is the only evidence most people can understand nowadays, this whole story is bound to fall on deaf ears –  which has in any case been the general reaction of those around me. Since my transformation I’ve found it quite hard to truly communicate with people (besides my boyfriend, with whom I have an almost telepathic relationship) and I’m often struck by the feeling that works of art speak more to me than most human beings. Which brings us to the truly amazing experience I had with Louis Malle’s ‘My Dinner With Andre’, yet another one of those rare moments of ionization.

In this quaint little picture, while having dinner with playwright Wally (which makes up the entire story), theater director Andre tells about a curious, somewhat too coincidental moment when he stumbled upon a surrealist magazine with the letters A in them, made the very same day he was born. The sudden burst of illumination Andre felt was not only very similar to my own moments of ionization, I also had the same kind of experience with this picture as a whole, incidentally made in the very same the year I was born. Watching it was without a doubt one of the most frightening and exhilarating moments of our (my boyfriend’s and me) life. Because you see, I just ‘happened’ to have had an encounter that was exactly the same as the one in the movie. Not similar, no – exactly the same. I wonder if people can understand how this feels, I wonder if I have ever felt it before. Clearly some kind of identification with a work of art is not only possible, it’s arguably the basis for virtually all people while watching a dramatic work of art. Everybody has to project his own feelings upon movie characters or have at least some part of the situation or emotions of a character projected onto him. For instance, Carl Dreyer’s ‘Gertrud’ (1964) is one of my favorite films as I can sympathize so strongly with the character of Gertrud: her absolute refusal to compromise the purity of her vision can easily be interpreted by people as plain stubbornness or lack of social skills (as I unfortunately know all too well from experience). But even as she dies a lone hermit at the end of the movie, Dreyer doesn’t present this as a failure, as common sense would have it, but indeed as a triumph – something that I can identify so strongly with I can almost taste it. But despite these incredibly vivid feelings the movie evokes in me, as it represents something I believe in so much – that’s not what I’m getting at here. It’s something much more than mere projection, it’s like seeing a scene from your own life enacted on the big screen, as I cannot emphasize enough how the entire movie ‘My Dinner With Andre’ was not similar to my own experience but virtually identical. How fortunate then for me, that one of the central themes running through the movie is how art and life can intersect and imitate! But let me give you a broad sketch of the particular evening of my life that’s so magnificently portrayed in the film – with only some of the little details being a bit different.

Like Andre, I had dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen for a very long time, although in my case it was not in a restaurant but in my own home and with two old friends instead of one, with also my boyfriend and one of their girlfriends present. Like Wally, they asked me what had happened to me during the intervening years, so, like Andre, I started talking about my encounters with soul and spirituality that has so deeply informed all the other pieces on this blog. At first, things were innocent enough with them just not really understanding what I was getting at, like Wally. Everything Andre said could’ve been a transcription of all the things I said that evening – although without the eloquence perhaps. The one crucial difference between the movie and my life was that, unfortunately, my discussion partners weren’t blessed with the intelligence and patience of Wally. Not that they were stupid, far from it, but our evening ended a complete disaster as especially my friend’s girlfriend got so defensive and angry at everything I said she eventually broke down in tears and totally upset stormed out the door. Sometimes you do wish you could live in a movie.

In any case, what both discussions of movie and my life have in common is the clash between what Bill Plotkin calls egocentric and soulcentric ways of life, with Wally representing the egocentric and Andre the soulcentric vision. As Wally’s position is unfortunately the norm in our Western civilization, let me try to explain Andre’s (and thus my own) a bit. From all the evidence the film gives us, it’s clear he has been just  going through the developmental stage of life Plotkin calls the ‘Cocoon’. Now in ideal soulcentric environments, the Cocoon occurs somewhere in the early twenties, but as most of us live in an egocentric world, many people enter the Cocoon much later (if at all) as is the case with Andre. It also directly explains why Andre has been feeling somewhat uneasy about all this, as he now feels mostly emptiness because he now realized his whole life has been a charade. In better circumstances though (as, luckily, in my case) people enter the Cocoon much earlier, which is to say: at the moment they have completed their first, improvisatory social identity. This identity is usually formed when someone is in his late teens and this is also where the rub is, as most people in egocentric societies snugly fit themselves into that role the rest of their lives, thinking it’s the end of their development when it really should be only the beginning. Of course this begs the question somewhat as to why someone would want to go to all the trouble of first forming a stable social identity (a process that lasts twenty years) only to jettison that again the minute it has formed? Well, this is a difficult question to answer, especially in egocentric society where the prevalent idea seems to be, that life in general is already so much trouble anyway, that one should try to make it easier instead of harder. Which would make sense probably were it not for the fact that the harder way is often the most lasting and valuable even if it’s not always the easiest. 

But let me drag out my old friend LSD again. The experience of LSD is difficult to describe, but is generally thought of as being a huge intensification of the senses and the temporary obliteration of the Ego. In short, it is just another way of looking at the same world and this is exactly where its value lies: the way you experience the world on LSD is not better than our default mode, just different. And it is this difference that makes all the difference, because now you don’t have just one way of looking at the world, but suddenly you’ve got two and they don’t contradict but complement each other. It’s little more than having two different ways of looking at the same thing, which is always, without exception, better than just one viewpoint. Say you hear that two mutual friends of yours had a fight together and one of them tells you his side of the story. With only this information you may very well think the behavior of the other friend odd, until the next night, he tells you what happened. Now at this point you are much better equipped to judge what has transpired accurately as you suddenly have two sides of the same story, which necessarily changes your whole relationship to said story. So it is with life too. The first forming of a social identity in adolescence is absolutely essential, but far from the end of the line. It is essential because you need this stability as a starting point, but it’s also just the beginning of your development as then you can utterly destroy everything you’ve build, only to start building a new life on the ashes of your former identity. And not only is this transformation (hence the name of the Cocoon) more complete because you have both your old ways of looking and thinking as your new one. If you do it right you can also start building it on your Soul instead of your Ego as access to the Soul only becomes truly available again at that point (all babies are in direct contact with Soul as Ego only begins to form around the age of five). So the basis of your new identity can now be rooted in authenticity instead of mere social acceptance. This may all sound very well to some, but it does leave the question of why one should try to leave behind familiarity and safeness in order to embark on this adventurous journey somewhat unanswered, mainly because trying to explain it is similar to trying to explain sex to someone who’s never experienced it – quite impossible. It is fact one of the ultimate conundrums of life: much too often you only know why you have to do certain things only after you’ve done them. Bill Plotkin calls it marching directly into the fire, as repeatedly and unconditionally as one can:

“What you can be fairly certain of is that the fire will change you, although not in a way you can accurately predict. Venturing into these unknown precincts, you’ll have experiences that might be ecstatic or harrowing and painful, or both, but either way they’re likely to alter you at your core, to reshape what you know as the world, and to provide you with psychological and spiritual opportunities you wouldn’t have had otherwise. Emerging on the other side of that wall of flame, you might find yourself standing before a mysterious and ominous door and choose to walk through, leading to a series of additional thresholds that could in time afford an encounter with the mysteries of your destiny”.

Alas, as ‘My Dinner With Andre’ (and my own life) makes all too perfectly clear, developing yourself soulcentrically in an egocentric society is far from easy. Because next to the considerable obstacles you already will find on your way to spiritual enlightenment, you’ll also have to deal with those who don’t develop in such a way and who will perceive your path as a threat, either consciously or unconsciously. Consequently, one of the greatest challenges is the fundamental difference in outlook and the lack of true communication this creates.  In my piece on Teacher’s Pet I’ve already spoken at length about the crucial, if often overlooked difference between merely intellectual understanding and a synthesis between understanding and feeling. ‘My Dinner With Andre’ serves as a perfect illustration: at first, Wally is still able to talk with Andre and they seem to agree on the general emptiness of most people living in modern societies now and how theater has become superfluous as most people do nothing more than perform all their lives. Wally is able to grasp this concept on an intellectual basis but can’t see the larger implication of all this, very probably because he himself is so much entangled in exactly such a life. Besides understanding this concept intellectually, he also has feelings about this topic, as becomes clear when he complains how he’s always confused at a party and always feel uncomfortable. So he both understands and feels about it, but the two don’t meet anywhere, which is because his feelings of inferiority are clearly rooted in the small Ego instead of the large viewpoint of the Soul. Andre on the other hand, because he is direct contact with Soul, is able to see the situation not merely as some intellectual concept furnished with some petty feelings, but to actually perceive the situation clearly for what it is. So when he talks about a Scandinavian friend who he has known for years, but suddenly can’t stand his pompousness, it’s not because he has become intolerant, but because he stands both inside and outside society at the same time and thus has the ability to see people in a certain light, that those who have been living in their egos can’t even begin to fathom. So what he is complaining about is not just the general lack of depth in contemporary society most people can agree on, but is in actuality a life led without the depth of Soul and the Mysteries of the universe. 

Because Andre knows both the position of Wally (because he has lived it almost all his life) and his own current position, he has the vantage point of two different viewpoints to Wally’s just one, which immediately makes the whole conversation fraught with problems. How deep these problems are becomes painfully obvious when Wally begins about his electric blanket, something that Esther Williams also refers to at the very beginning of her autobiography. Here she talks openly about her experiences with LSD and one of the things she describes was when shortly after her experience she had dinner (!) with her parents and felt she was able to see through them completely. It’s kind of scary as it’s the exact same feeling I’ve had since first taking acid, as I so often feel like Ray Milland in ‘The Man With The X-Ray Eyes’ in that I’m somehow able to see right into the psyches of other people. When I’m having a discussion with someone else, I always can tell the exact moment when that person gets hijacked by his Ego (or by one of his subpersonalities or subs, as Bill Plotkin would call it). If life were a comic book, you would see a red light flashing next to their head, with thick steel doors being rolled down automatically, sealing them off completely from what the Ego perceives as an attack. I don’t think I’ve ever seen another movie that captures this moment to perfection as ‘My Dinner With Andre’ in the moment Wally starts talking about the nice comfort his electric blanket gives him and Andre points to the dangers such comfort can bring. It is at precisely that moment that the subs of Wally start operating; before that he may have been somewhat incredulous at some of the more outlandish aspect of Andre’s stories, but either out of respect or decency he doesn’t say much about it. When Andre touches the comfort of Wally’s blanket though, things change considerably and he becomes incredibly defensive. Unfortunately, this hijacking usually occurs with the person who’s being hijacked being unconscious of it, which means these persons can’t really be blamed for it as they are themselves entirely unconscious of it.

When people are being hijacked by their subs, every kind of discussion becomes virtually useless, as people are prohibited from receiving any information at all – even though they themselves won’t see it this way. It was at this moment of course that my own discussion become highly problematic and the girlfriend of my friend became almost uncontrollable. It is yet another reason why soulcentric development is preferable, as it is the only way to be truly open to the world. Most people see themselves as really open-minded (ironically, my old friend said exactly this at the beginning of the evening, even though some time later he would prove the opposite), while they can only be as open-minded as Ego will allow them – which is to say, not very open-minded at all. But as the very concept of what open-mindedness is begins to mean something quite different, depending on whether one is ego- or soulcentred, it also points to the difficulty of true communication in this situation. It was true in my case, but also in Andre’s: he understands everything Wally’s says (because he thinks from a larger perspective) and in fact reacts to everything Wally brings to the discussion with openness and understanding. Unfortunately, it’s not the other way around, as Wally becomes hopelessly defensive and visibly frightened the very moment Andre touches his core (the electric blanket). In the exact same way as I could in my discussion, Andre can always think clearly, continue to see the bigger picture and be generally open to the world around him. But just as my discussion partners, at some point Wally became confused and crawled back into his little private world of comfort and security, threatened as he feels (or rather his Ego feels) by the radical implications of all that Andre stands for. He can perhaps understand them on an intellectual level, but is quite helpless to actually use any of it to transform his life. In the end, to Wally everything is just dinner talk – empty and meaningless words to get through a meal. Which of course is ironic, because at first he did claim he disliked exactly that kind of empty communication. But true communication can only be accomplished by true openness and true openness can only be found through contact with Soul.

  

But there is yet another argument why Andre’s position is much stronger and better (if more risky and fraught with uncertainty), which is the one aspect the movie fails the mention: the ecological component. I suppose Malle and his actors may be forgiving as ecological awareness in 1981 had yet to make its big burst onto the scene. Sometimes this is implicated as when Western civilization is blamed as the main perpetrator of all the problems, which does link the movie with an ecological book like ‘My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery of Western Civilization’. But the crucial thing here is that living through the Soul is virtually impossible without a thorough awareness of ecological issues as Soul is directly infused with Spirit and Nature – which encompasses all things. Seeing the big picture means not only being able to see the big picture in one’s own personal life, but also that everybody is part of the even larger picture of ecological and cosmological survival and well-being. It is exactly this awareness that is the reward for all the personal ordeals one has to go through when embarked on the soulcentric path, as it gives your life a sense of purpose and direction within a much larger whole. Religious people will probably notice that this purpose is quite similar to that which traditional religions have always provided and which so many modern, unreligious people nowadays lack. This lack of direction is also expressed by Wally when he says that everything just happens by chance and it was in fact the crucial point my own discussion escalated on, as my friends kept insisting on the very same thing. When I tried to explain how this insistence on seeing life as nothing but an unrelated string of coincidences made their live unnecessarily empty, as everyone should be aware of the bigger picture every organism is part of, it was at this point the girlfriend broke down in tears and left. Which was quite ironic as she was active in an ecological political youth movement! Though both she and I felt a deep rapport with ecological issues, this didn’t bring us closer together at all and in fact only served to separate us. But this was entirely unnecessary: it was nothing but an argument in which both sides wanted to convince the other one of why their ideas were more valid.   She obviously felt I was attacking her very foundation (like Wally and his blanket), which was true enough, but she did the same thing to me, which didn’t bother me at all as I was able to see the bigger picture and can easily handle criticism. So had she lived in her Soul instead of Ego, she could’ve seen my criticism was only meant to make her see certain things she refused to see about herself and she could have noticed I was only criticizing her position instead of her personally. Had she been able to make that distinction, perhaps then she could’ve seen how the deep ecology movement is based on two crucial aspects: diversity and harmony and how harmony will be quite simply impossible as long as people refuse to see life as the circular, connected web of influences that it really is. Now, as she was trapped within her Ego, she just shut down completely, closing her mind off and rendering all that has been said, like Wally, to meaningless dinner talk – yet all the while truly believing herself to be open-minded.

Ecologist Thomas Berry has coined the term of The Great Work, meaning that every human should play his role in the work that should ultimately make the transformation from a life-destroying society to a life-sustaining one possible. To perform this task, everybody first has to find out what place he should occupy in this world and what gifts are unique to him, in order to use these gifts not for mere self-survival or self–advancement, but to adequately fulfill his part of The Great Work. With ‘My Dinner With Andre’ Louis Malle and his two actors used their special gifts to give us what may be the most important picture ever made, as it points the way to a bright future. And I, in turn, have used my gift to uncover some of the meanings of this particular film that otherwise could have been lost on most, and in doing so I too have performed my little part of The Great Work. It’s all really simple, see? 

My Dinner with Andre (The Criterion Collection)

13. Friday The 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan (Rob Hedden, 1989)

There’s a moment in 'Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan' where the captain of the ship gives his son a sextant and laments the fact that such old skills of navigation are entirely disappearing due to reliance on modern techniques. It’s a theme that isn’t really developed in any way, nor does is get much emphasis, besides this one moment but still did it make quite an impression on me. Because I was quite struck by the seeming coincidence that this reference to navigation would pop up in precisely this type of film, since as I mentioned briefly here, I have been planning a piece on exploitation cinema in general for quite some time now, in which I was to take up the exact same navigation metaphor to illustrate one of my main concerns and which had to do with the liberation watching exploitation cinema can lead to, a certain freedom that centers on breaking through the barriers of prejudice and expectation. I had the intention of developing this argument by comparing two modes of navigation: one that relies mostly on instinct and inner feeling with certain instruments merely assisting – against the modern dependence on computers which more or less makes any gut feeling obsolete. Which of course, is just another way of describing the difference between relying on Ego or Soul. Now some of you who have been reading some of my earlier entries on this blog may at this point throw their hands into the air out of desperation at yet another mention of these concepts, which leaves them with the distinct feeling I’m trying to read them into everything I discuss here. Be that as it may, the fact this whole navigation metaphor was more or less thrown into my lap in such a movie is simply too good an opportunity to pass up and is yet another example of the interconnectedness of all things that would be clear to anyone if they only would want to see it. Which brings us to the difference between looking and seeing.

See, the thing is, I can't shake the feeling most people can't truly see the movies they are looking at, because they can't look behind the expectation created by the reputation of the movie they're seeing. Take 'Citizen Kane' for instance: it would be almost impossible to look at that movie now without being aware of its cemented reputation as being one of the most celebrated pictures ever made and my central idea is that people should really try to ignore this kind of information when viewing it because failing to do so would influence their experience too much. Generally speaking, those who like it often seem to like it only because it is expected from them, which would mean they more or less already made up their mind before seeing even a single frame of the movie itself. On the other hand, there will be a large group of people who will criticize the movie much too harshly because they feel it doesn't live up to its reputation and feel the need to rebel against its status – in which case the expectations influence the experience too. In psychological terms, these two opposite positions could be described as Conformists vs. Rebels, which are opposites on one level, but also quite similar in that both groups relate themselves directly to the accepted norm. So what they both share, is that it isn't really the movie itself they are judging, but its reputation. What I am proposing here is trying to get beyond that somehow, to truly perceive the film itself instead of its comforting surface and/or reputation. I want us to be guided not by generally accepted notions like 'a good script', 'great cinematography', or 'originality', as all these concepts tend to enslave people and actually prevent them from truly experiencing these movies in every sense of the word. Let our gut feeling be again much more important than that which you can understand intellectually. This may be impossible to accomplish completely, as cultural conditioning can't be obliterated  totally (nor should it), but what is definitely possible is trying to see the world with fresh eyes, as if you see everything for the first time. In other words, to reclaim our innate innocence as much as possible, which most have lost contact with since childhood. This is of course quite similar to what Stan Brakhage mostly wanted to accomplish with his movies:

“Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the 'beginning was the word.”

One of the many ways by which something like this return to innocence can be achieved is by watching (ironically, since most of them are anything but innocent) exploitation or trash films, which also returns us to the old dichotomy between Ego and Soul and to my navigation metaphor. This may sound downright weird to some, as exploitation films are usually thought to bring out a certain jadedness in the people who watch too much of it, as they’ve been assaulted with so much strong material their extreme nature in itself becomes ‘normal’. While a certain tolerance will inevitably arise, this can already somewhat be remedied by seeing a wide variety of films. Keeping an innocent attitude to the world around us is anything but simple, it may in fact be the hardest thing to achieve, and I’m really not suggesting it can be accomplished just by watching a couple of cheaply-made porn or horror movies; I am sure though it can be of invaluable assistance in trying to make such a shift in perception possible. Because what these exploitation films represent in a larger context is an amazing opportunity to move beyond established conventions and ideas to sail into a perhaps terrifying but also highly exciting uncharted waters. When watching mostly mainstream films (whether of the Hollywood variety or art cinema), it is virtually impossible to ignore all the reputations and prejudice because so much has already been written about them they are mostly set in stone. They come with so much baggage that people tend to crumble under its very weight. This is where exploitation differs: as the majority of these films has mostly been ignored, it is possible to see them with fresh eyes and to train your capacity of seeing the world as unprejudiced and intellectually innocent as possible. They throw you into the pit, forcing you to fence for yourself without the safety net the well-known films provide, a net that will almost automatically prohibit any true innocence. Or in others words, watching exploitation films is not unlike navigating through uncharted waters with the help of nothing but your own build-in instruments, forcing the captain to train and trust in his instinct, intuition and gut feeling. This may be much more work than just relying on computers that do all the work for you, but that's also the point. Because when you're only used to navigate with the help of computers, you don't really know how to navigate at all and problems will inevitably arise the moment you are cut off from their help.

Say there's an electrical defect because of a storm and you are forced to sail without any computer help at all; if you're not experienced in this, you are liable to panic and run into trouble. Which is more or less what mostly happens now with people who watch exploitation movies and are untrained in truly trusting their instinct, always relying too much on Ego and that which is generally accepted: the film they are watching doesn’t conform to generally accepted notions and as the computers or instruments they have become so dependent on go blank, it leaves them utterly helpless. All the assumptions and ideas they have always trusted in so blindly and never really put to the test, are suddenly unavailable to them, which means they have to start thinking on their feet, but since they have never really trained themselves in this, they are unable to meet the challenges exploitation provide. So, yanked out of the comfortable aesthetic categories they are so used to, they get scared at the prospect of all that true freedom suddenly looming up before them, and they invent new categories to get some grip on the situation. As a result, a ridiculous category like 'this is so bad it's good' is invented which is really just another prison wall people build around them to keep all that annoying freedom out. If people could only recognize the incredible opportunities for self-development and inner growth that are hidden in these exploitation movies and how they can be used to learn to navigate using only your own strength. We should embrace these films not only for their obvious wild subject matter, which already would do much to liberate ourselves from the unnecessary taming of Western society. But exploitation can also help us to learn how to find our own way in the jungle again without the comfort of a guide or map that shows us the way. It's a rough and rocky road to be sure, with lots of surprises and failures along the way, but one that can truly transform the way you experience the world. To use the words of anthropologist Bradford Keeney:

“The problem began when someone said that words and meanings must explain, domesticate, and cover up wild experience. Within this hegemony of words, we demystified whatever was mysterious and walked away from the wild in order to become semantically tamed. We sacrificed our link-to-the-universe-heart for a delusional body-less-head-trip that has imprisoned us far too long. Consider a re-entry into the wild.

To see how difficult it is to feel ourselves through the wild instead of just think our way through it based on surface concepts, let's look at the 'Nightmare on Elm Street' series, as it illustrates my point. Freddy Krueger became more grotesque and invincible with each entry, which seems to have been a huge source of irritation for most viewers, as most apparently see his increasing cartoon-like nature as the weakest aspect of the later parts. Without opening that particular can of worms, what should be clear is that by the time we get to 'Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare' (1991), the original Freddy had changed considerably from his original incarnation. The beauty of this particular film however, is that it recognizes this and amplifies it even more: treating every murder as a performance art piece, it sends Freddy's performative nature through the roof. People may not like the fact he more or less ceased to be scary and had become something of a stand-up comedian, but this was the legacy 'The Final Nightmare' had to grapple with somehow and its fascinating logic is not to try to conceal this but emphasize it even more. Yet at the same time, even as it makes him even more unreal and mythic, it also proceeds to cut Freddy down to size at the ending of the film. It does this by way of psycho-analysis, and the fact this was the very first time it entered into the franchise is almost unfathomable, as the whole series was based on a psychological principle. Because what was Freddy but the dreams and unconscious fear of the people he killed? He was the manifestation of all that was hidden in the unconscious, which is to say he was very little more than a neurosis and every neurosis can be cured by bringing it over to the conscious mind. So there's a poetic logic when at the end of 'The Final Nightmare' the girl kills Freddy not by burning or exploding him, as usually happened, but simply by the virtues of psycho-analysis and transforming him from mythic murderer to just an ordinary man with a questionable past. There had been references to this past in several of the earlier films of course, but none of them used the methodical approach of 'The Final Nightmare', which makes it probably the first film since the original that started it all to proceed along the lines dictated by the franchise itself; it first openly embraces the legacy it got handed over, only to take it out of dreamland by returning Freddy to his roots as a human being.

Yet despite this undeniable logic that makes total sense when viewed through the lens of the series, it is generally considered a terrible film. This would not be the fate of the next entry, 'New Nightmare' (1994), a film that’s often hailed as a return to form for the franchise since it was the first since the original that creator Wes Craven was involved in. Echoing the concerns of so many fans that Freddy had veered too much away from his scariness, Craven set out to make him more dark again, which must have resonated with all those that agreed with this assessment. Yet, when looking at the film, one wonders how this has actually been accomplished, as the concept of making Freddy scary again seems to have stranded in the wardrobe and make-up department: besides some new clothes and a facelift there's little to distinguish this new Freddy from the old one. As if to hide this deceit somewhat, the film has been injected with the highly ‘original’ idea (something that must also speak to many) that Freddy has somehow crossed over into the 'real' world with all the actors playing themselves. How this is possible is explained by Craven himself in a sequence that I still don't understand a single word of, even though I've seen the film twice now – I must lack the requisite intelligence to understand this complex idea. But besides this, one wonders how all this make-over has changed the dynamics of the film itself, because to my eyes it hasn't changed even a little bit: 'New Nightmare' is just another stale entry into a long franchise, only this time infused with a highly undeveloped 'Exorcist'-type of family melodrama and some desperate meta-concept put on top of it in a desperate attempt to make it look original. It's really just old wine in new bottles, which wouldn't be a problem if it were still good wine (or nice new bottles) and if it didn't try to conceal this fact by masquerading as something else entirely. Yet this film has constantly been praised over its arguable much better predecessor for reasons that seems to point directly to nothing but the surface: 'The Final Nightmare' is nothing more than it proposes to be, just another entry in the series, but with a highly intelligent script that’s sensitive to the tone of the others films, while 'New Nightmare' likes us to think it has an intelligent script which is in truth nothing more than a smokescreen that tries to disguise the fact it's just another entry in the series. Is it all just coincidence then that one has a much higher profile and surface 'originality' while the other is routinely thought of as nothing but the 6^th entry of an already too long series? I think not. But as I have been trying to explain, scratching away the surface to really see what's underneath it is exactly what's so difficult for most people as the prejudice of expectations has already decided for them – hell, most people probably had already decided upon their verdict the moment Craven agreed with their complaints about the loss of scariness of its main character!

The first thing to do now, I suppose, is come clean and confess I disliked 'Friday the 13^th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan’ very much when I saw it first almost four years ago. It's hard to determine what exactly has made the difference, as there would be many contributing factors anyway, although I was likely to be still a victim of prejudice myself back then. One of the things that certainly made a crucial difference was the beautiful looking new blu-ray this time, as I now had an aesthetic reaction to the film which had been entirely absent the first time; things like that can really make all the difference, especially if you are walking that thin line of direct experience and intuition instead of mere reliance on accepted notions and ideas. When you are learning to make this leap, it's vitally important to determine whether a certain film 'speaks' to you or not and I knew ‘Jason Takes Manhattan’ was speaking to me this time when I saw the scene right before they take off with the boat. It's hard to put into words really, as we are talking feelings here instead of notions like 'quality' or 'originality' which can be described more easily, but I felt something happening within me at that moment. There was something about the cinematography that swept me off my feet, which may surprise some as beautiful cinematography is usually reserved for Terrence Malick pictures and not something that's called 'Friday the 13^th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan'. But the combination of the sad and rainy surroundings – all gray, with here and there an isolated spot of color was breathtaking to me at that moment and made me instinctively realize this movie knew what it was doing. Something inside was instantly awakened, and a feeling of aliveness and excitement overpowered me, adrenaline perhaps even. I truly feel moments like these have been too much ignored in our society and we should try and learn how to honor them, because they can teach us so much more than those homogenized notions we’ve been taught in school. All too often I come across people who seem to regard movies as something of a checklist: good script – check; great soundtrack – check; impressive acting – check; result: a great film. But like human beings, every film is much more than just the sum of its parts as the individual parts really don’t tell you all that much – it’s all about how they interact. Clinging to these generally accepted ideas is of course much safer than truly jumping inside a experience and let yourself be guided by those inexplicable little moments that perhaps don’t even mean all that much in the greater scheme of things, but do speak forcefully to you. And because this particular moment spoke to me, I realized instantly it was much more than just another entry in a long and predictable franchise and I had been horribly wrong those four years ago by falling into the familiar trap of prejudice.

As is to be expected, the 'Friday' franchise progressed along similar paths as the 'Nightmare' films, as it wrestled with the conundrum of how to keep things fresh – with varying degrees of success: the first four entries more or less settled comfortably into the same pattern and are all the better for it – while I can't place any of them at the very top of their game, they are definitely right behind that and are all lovable slasher movies. The fifth one is the first to break with the pattern, with obvious disastrous results only to be invigorated by the incredibly energetic sixth part, with its reflexivity and pop-culture references. Intriguingly, the original plans for the 7^th part was supposed have Freddy and Jason in the same film, an idea that only materialized years later, and in its place they desperately tried to take the franchise into new territory to mix it with 'Carrie', which on paper perhaps could've worked but which probably should have stayed on paper. As this rather hapless seventh part made painfully clear, there's only so many ways to have a masked killer named Jason stalk teenagers through a forest and as a result the formula had gone stale. Something much more was needed to breathe new life into the series than just a new gimmick: it needed somehow to both keep the familiar elements but also reconfigure them at the same time, which is what 'Jason Takes Manhattan' does so admirably. For his contribution writer/director Rob Hedden had the incredible foresight to take Jason out of his true surroundings for the first time, ostensibly creating yet another variation on the same theme. But its change of scenery really brought a new dimension to the franchise, making this arguably the best part of the entire series along with the sixth part. It's interesting to see that 'Jason Takes Manhattan' came to a similar solution as 'Final Nightmare', by opening up the familiar ingredients.

The Jason that Takes Manhattan is explicitly presented as the stuff of film legend, as if the by now well-known film character somehow has become alive and has managed to break through the screen into the 'real world'. It's more or less the same as Lamberto Bava's 'Demons', where the demons literally tear through the screen to invade the movie theater of the film itself. As a result, Jason is made both more AND less real: he is even more superhuman than normal, while also becoming more human. As Jason has gotten progressively more mythical and stronger with each film, the film manages to acknowledge it and undermine it at the same time by reminding us he is in fact little more than a drowned little boy that has come to life to revenge his death and that of his mother, which is accomplished by the scattered references to the little boy that Jason started out as, by having the female protagonist having nightmares about him. But even as it constantly reminds us of the little boy in Jason, the use of his hockey mask is crucial to his role as killer, as it has become his most defining aspect (even if it only appeared in the third part for the first time). There are three major references to the mask: in the beginning of the film he takes the mask away from the guy he just killed and who scared his girlfriend with the Jason myth, thus becoming 'Jason' again, the man of myth. When he arrives in New York, the film has Jason looking confused at an advertisement for a hockey game, clearly demystifying him by reminding us of the pedestrian origins of his famous 'face'. And at the end, when Jason is 'destroyed', we see the mask limply floating in the water, which completes the process of inflating the legend. Which is to say, the film treats Jason as both the mythical film legend as it ties him again to his human roots, something that most of the previous films had lost contact with entirely.

This combination of reality and illusion make strange bedfellows indeed, as one may very well wonder how on earth a yacht could reach a place called Camp Crystal Lake! Some of the other parts already briefly flirted with outside influences, like in the sixth when the colored girls says she knows so much about something 'because she's seen it on TV', but generally all these films more or less took place in their own vacuum – even though the clothes were generally a good indication of the times they were set in, they did manage to keep most of it out of the door, probably because they are all set in the woods which eighties civilization hadn't entirely seeped into. But now, at the very end of the decade, it came back with a vengeance and in some way the entire film is not so much a battle between Jason and his victims, but more a clash between his timeless woods environment and the extremely loud and brash city life of the late eighties. Ironically, this shift into the real world makes 'Jason Takes Manhattan’ less realistic than most of its predecessors as it is a highly stylized film which also reinforces the notion all of it could be seen as a clash between the horrors of real city life and the film horror of Jason. Take the scenes in the beginning at the dock for instance, those that touched me so deeply: there's some subtle but definitely unreal quality about them, as the careful manipulation of color within a colorless landscape recalls Antonioni's 'Red Desert' more than anything in the 'Friday' series. There's also a remarkable scene in the fog which is so overtly a studio set as to become so highly jarring, that, to me, it very much felt like something straight out of Hitchcock around 'Marnie'. It's like the movie is scratching at its own edges, with reality trying to get in or fantasy trying to get out – take your pick. This idea is strengthened when we get to New York itself and Jason keeps stalking his two victims with most people doing nothing and Jason doing nothing to them. While this could easily be read as a comment on general apathy of city life (which it is on some level), it also raises the interesting idea these two main characters are almost escaped from a nearby movie set, with some extras filling out the space. Or perhaps one could see the film as one of those 'Godzilla vs...' films, with two creatures from different franchises battling only each other and relegating the rest of humanity to mere spectators. Because how could we otherwise make sense of the fact Jason doesn't take anyone on besides those that he has been following the rest of the film? He should have a field day in the city, feeling like a kid in a candy story with possible victims wherever he chooses to look. But of course, this is to be expected as even the title 'Jason Takes Manhattan' points to this. It's not 'Jason Goes to Manhattan', like 'Ernest Goes to Camp', no – he actually 'takes' it on, obviously setting Jason and Manhattan next to each other as two similar evils. 

By taking it out of the dark forest into the bright lights of the city, Jason Voorhees is no longer just a nightmare in some local forest, but it has the nightmare spread out through the world. Only as the film makes clear in the beginning, modernized city life has become so spiritually dead, that being hacked to pieces under a tree would be almost preferable. Usually the alternative to the dreary and dangerous city life is to move to nature again,  but here's the trick of course: that's not safe either as there's some insane masked guy roaming the. As Richard Louv, author of 'Last Child in the Woods' puts it:

“Our kids are actually doing what we tell them to do when they sit in front of the TV all day or in front of that computer game all day. Society is telling kids unconsciously that nature's in the past – it really doesn't count anymore – that the future's in electronics, and besides, the boogeyman is in the woods.”

The general atmosphere the film implies at the beginning then, is one of total despair; some hell on earth with all the horrible dangers of the big city but also no recourse to the usually regenerating wilds of our earth. That this makes the film a direct confrontation between two huge evils gets a comic if poignant expression when Jason, in pursuit of his victims, trashes the radio of some street punks, who immediately proceed by drawing their knives. Here are two evils eye in eye: a celluloid monster and the realities of daily life. The monsters comes from out of the dark of the woods (with darkness usually connoting danger) into the bright lights of the city (with light traditionally associated with safety), but this metaphorical trajectory from the darkness to light is thrown out of whack by making the light just as dangerous as the dark. The effect that's created by this is not unlike that of Andrzej Wajda's 'Kanal' (1957), in which people are crawling in a dark tunnel the whole movie, trying to get to the supposedly comforting light, only to find at its very end the light doesn't hold any more promise than the darkness they came from. A similar tone of despair infuses 'Jason Takes Manhattan', a film that begins in the oppressive darkness of the familiar Camp Crystal forests, gets literally more colorful along the way, starting on the ship and almost explodes with colors and sensations when they arrive in New York – only to find really nothing has changed and people are still stalked at every corner. This is also why the gray colors of the dock before boarding the ship spoke to me so forcefully probably, as the lack of color pervades the whole movie: as darkness and color ultimately cancel each other out they leave nothing but gray dullness. These people have nowhere to turn, finding despair wherever they look and are hopelessly drifting between darkness and light – just as the ship that figures so prominently in the middle half of the film. 

It is a movie filled with nasty characters, a world where people are only using – drugs or each other. It immediately begins inside the car, where Rennie is presented with a pen which supposedly belonged to Stephen King. It could have been a nice gesture, were it not for the fact there's the unmistakable subtext of lesbian lust and the feeling of pushing and manipulation from the side of the teacher. And she's probably her best choice, as her guardian McColloch (played by Dynasty's Andrew Laird no less!) is even nastier and self-serving, trying to impose his will on everybody every chance he gets. The boy Sean too, is plagued by a father trying to make his choices for him. McColloch is at one point seduced by one of his students who secretly films all of it in order to blackmail him later on. The protagonists have barely arrived in New York, only to have our heroine be kidnapped, injected with heroin and raped. The whole atmosphere is one of oppressiveness and fraught with dangers, like 'Adventures in Babysitting' without the sugarcoating, and also a masked maniac thrown in for good measure. It creates a world of predator and prey amongst which our pure hero and heroine are almost hopelessly lost. There's a lovely moment of peace and quiet, when they have found each other again in New York and they have a tender moment in which they kiss, only to have Jason barging in on them by crashing through the garbage. Speaking of garbage, it's really quite fitting to have Jason killed by it, as for the first time he isn't hanged, gauged, burned or chained to the bottom of a lake, but drowns – in toxic waste. It's by drowning of course he became Jason the killer in the first place, so the film comes full circle now as indeed we briefly see Jason as a little boy again. But with the strong cleansing connotations of water, the ending also strongly implies Jason is not only saved from his eternal thirst for vengeance, but in this way is also saved from society as a whole. Which is to say he should have stayed drowned all those years ago, because living in a nasty world like this is probably even more horrible than what he did to all those unsuspecting youth. In the end our hero and heroine may have been freed from the dangers of Jason, but the even bigger dangers of Manhattan city life will not go away so easily. The light isn't as comforting as it used to be, so they may even prefer the darkness of the woods after all.

Friday the 13th: The Complete Collection [Blu-ray]

12. Mixed Blood (Paul Morrissey, 1985)

   There’s a wonderful moment in a documentary about the singer Nico in which director Paul Morrissey says in that slightly nauseating voice of his: “well, you can always do it like Janis Joplin: just scream your lungs out and then die of a drug overdose.” It’s a moment that presents Morrissey in a nutshell: tough, brusque, unscrupulous, with savage and biting humor that cuts through all the bullshit. But his remark doesn’t necessarily mean he doesn’t like the music of Joplin, indeed it’s quite possible he listens to it all the time. What he certainly doesn’t like is all the circus around it, the mystique that’s been build around the figure of Joplin and all the adoration that comes with it. Because in Morrissey’s view, and it’s hard to truly deny this, when you place someone or something on a pedestal like that, it will automatically prohibit a true field of vision, as such adoration unnecessarily obscures the qualities not only of, in this case, Joplin’s music, but in a way also robs her of her humanity. Which is ironic of course, as it makes such people immortal while they have emphatically proven their own mortality by dying so young in such a foolish way. 

Dying young in a foolish way was something Morrissey encountered quite a lot when he entered Andy Warhol’s famous Factory in the sixties. Although he never really fit in (he never took drugs and openly despised most of the people there), he did manage somehow to get his foot in the door with Warhol until he eventually more or less took over almost his entire film output. The exact film authorship has since been a topic of hot debate amongst scholars, with people usually favoring Warhol over Morrissey, an attitude which has done much to obscure Morrissey’s work since then (virtually his entire eighties output is still unavailable on DVD, which includes amazing movies like ‘Forty Deuce’, ‘Madame Wang’s’ and ‘Spike of Bensonhurst’). It seems clear to me that everything from ‘Flesh’ onwards is very much the work of Morrissey alone with little input from Warhol and probably ‘Chelsea Girls’ the achingly perfect marriage between Warhol’s structural aestheticism and Morrissey’s biting satire. Morrissey is often blamed for destroying the old Factory and creating the new one, by pushing most of the freaks out of the door and replacing the anarchic old atmosphere with the more business-like spirit of the Factory’s later days. Although he probably had much to do with it, the nearly fatal shooting of Warhol shouldn’t be overlooked as a contributing factor. Whatever the case, when dealing with Morrissey you’ll have to deal with Warhol too as the former did come out of the Factory milieu.

Warhol’s genius lay primarily in his bringing together of two distinct cultures: upper and lower bohemia. Middle bohemia, with its artists and intellectuals roughly comparable to the Left Bank of Paris, filled Warhol with absolute horror as he couldn’t stand all their incessant talking and snobbery. Instead he was delighted by the glamour and extravagant lifestyles of the upper class of filthy rich socialites, pop and movie stars. This he combined with the street culture: the hookers and pimps, the hustlers, drug pushers and other assorted misfits. He took their vitality and originality and bestowed them with the glamour of the really rich, thereby creating an explosive cocktail which ultimately lead to the peculiar subculture now generally associated with the Silver Factory. As Warhol’s protégé, Morrissey inherited this culture and slowly but surely started to peel away all the glamour, which some may argue was essential to it and which certainly was what it made unique but which didn’t quite fit in with Morrissey’s conception. When you look closely at the famous album cover Warhol designed for the Velvet Underground & Nico album, you’ll see it consists of nothing more than a banana with the words ‘peel slowly and see’, words that easily serve as an accurate description of Morrissey’s strategy. He is only interested in the peeling away of everything that stands between obscurity and clarity and be assured Morrissey won’t rest until he has accomplished this. 

At this point one could very well ask, if he didn’t like the drug-infused freak culture of the Factory what was he doing there in the first place? It’s a legitimate question to be sure and also one that point to the many paradoxes that lie at the very core of Morrissey, which I’ll get into later. Morrissey disliked basically everything about the Factory, yet for years he tried to create a more disciplined and streamlined movie production there, which brings us to the eternally sticky question of morality. Warhol’s nickname was Drella, a contraction of Cinderella and Dracula as it points to both a certain naiveté and the fact he fed on other people like a vampire. Consequently he has often been accused of using the Superstars that peopled his Factory, perhaps encouraging them on to behave in ever more outrageous ways only to foster his own mystique. Was he, so goes the general argument, responsible for the many early deaths and should he have tried to make sure they didn’t happen? Or were all these self-destructive people responsible for their own actions and on their way out anyway? There’s no easy answer to this, but Warhol’s eternal passiveness will probably always be a sore point for many as he didn’t do anything to spur it on nor stop it – he just didn’t do anything, period. In sharp contrast to his former mentor, Morrissey did at the very least possess the brutal honesty Warhol entirely lacked, so consequently one of the first things he did was to lay bare the fact these people were not only being used – they were also loving it to bits. One could say he introduced the morality into the Factory that hitherto just hadn’t come into play. Where Warhol indulged the indulgence of his superstars, Morrissey destroyed it. ‘All is pretty’ Warhol loved to say, something that probably enraged Morrissey as it couldn’t have been farther removed from his own vision. He took all the glamour and mystique these people loved to build around them, flushed it down the toilet and filmed the process along the way. He was the first to hold a mirror before them and most people didn’t like what they saw. Morrissey exposed them for the clowns and lowlifes that they really were without the protective armor of their glamour and role playing. He satirized that which already was something of a satire.

The satirist falls squarely into what Bill Plotkin calls the East facet of the Self in his book ‘Wild Mind’, which he describes as the Innocent/Sage. The paradox this implies also neatly explains the tensions within Morrissey, because in common parlance one cannot be both innocent and wise at the same time. But as Plotkin argues “both exhibit a nonattachment to outcome”. He elaborates:

“Do we all have a facet of our psyches that is both innocent and wise, both joyous and serene, both goofy and insightful, that can help us lighten up and live beyond conventional rules and norms, and that can trick us and others out of everyday routines? […] Have you ever had a good laugh with (and maybe even at) yourself about how you take certain things oh so very seriously, as if those things – getting yourself through traffic, winning a game, writing a decent sentence – are, in the moment, the only important considerations in life? You know you’ve accessed your Innocent/Sage whenever it feels to you as if a veil has lifted and you’re able to see a situation, a person, or a place in utter clarity, and you wonder how you could have been so blind for so long.”

Morrissey too, acts with similar paradoxes: he is extremely world-wise and cynical, yet displays a touching innocence in his willful blindness to social conventions. He documents but steers clear from documentary. He freely mixes realism with gross exaggeration until both are so contaminated by each other they become one. By all accounts he is a highly calculating man, yet he openly embraces a ragged aesthetic. He is very crass, yet can also be more subtle than most would suspect. As both have turned their cameras to the streets so much, Morrissey is something of a bargain basement Martin Scorsese, but without the expressionist or operatic elements. Perhaps he is closer to Abel Ferrara then, but even he probably uses fantasy too freely for Morrissey’s taste. Because fantasy is a way to escape and there is no escaping from Morrissey: from his very first solo outing ‘Flesh’ with every cut being a jarring jump cut, he made his agenda very clear. Morrissey wants to tie you to a chair, point a gun at your head and make sure you don’t look away from all the squalor, depravity and misery he confronts you with. It is his way of saying: “you may think you live in an advanced and civilized age, but underneath it all we’re still animals and so many of us live in beastly conditions, either by choice or fate”.

If Noel Coward is the very height of the sophisticated form of satire, Paul Morrissey stands at the exact opposite of the spectrum. As all satire is always in direct relationship to something else, it may be illuminating to look briefly at ‘Andy Warhol’s Heat’ (1972), Morrissey’s satire of Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950). The Wilder film is in itself already a satire of course and quite biting too, especially for its time – MGM boss Mayer exclaimed in horror ‘Wilder should be run out of town’ after seeing the film. When someone asked rather naively what Gloria Swanson was doing with the monkey that’s buried at the beginning of the film, Wilder rather bitingly said ‘why, they were fucking of course’. Obviously, bestiality wasn’t something Wilder could have gotten away in 1950 (and he probably didn’t want to anyway), but it does shed some light on the biting nature of his satire and his desire to expose decadent Hollywood culture. Most people see the film as just a comedy, but as theorist Noel Carroll reminds us, it also has much in common with the horror film, as the basic theme points to the knack Hollywood has to turn its stars into monsters. But all this clearly isn’t enough for Morrissey who wants to take this already biting satire and turn even that completely on its head. So, he obliterates all the glamour that possibly obscures the true message (and very probably has in the case of ‘Sunset Boulevard’) and so makes ‘Heat’ nothing more than just a sordid tale of a sad old woman living off the body of her gigolo. With this, most subtlety disappears of course and many will prefer the more hidden critique of Wilder as ultimately both films do point to the same thing and subtlety always has been more in vogue than the ‘rub-it-in-your-face-techniques of Morrissey. But Morrissey doesn’t care about that, because all he wants is clear field of vision, he wants to aggressively pull off all the blinkers and force people to look closely. In this way, the relation between ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and ‘Heat’ is not unlike that between ‘Pretty Woman’ (Garry Marshall, 1990) and ‘Whore’ (Ken Russell, 1991). Apparently Russell was outraged when he saw the glorified life of a hooker in ‘Pretty Woman’ and so set out to make his most Morrissey-like picture ‘Whore’ with the tagline ‘if you can’t say it, see it’.   

Morrissey then, isn’t really unlike Sigmund Freud. When Freud died, his rival and colleague Carl Jung wrote a short piece ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ in which he pointed to what he perceived as Freud’s greatest achievement:

“He [Freud] put his finger on more than one ulcerous spot. All that glittered in the nineteenth century was very far from being gold, religion included. Freud was a great destroyer, but the turn of the century offered so many opportunities that even Nietzsche wasn’t enough. Freud completed the task, very thoroughly indeed. He aroused a wholesome mistrust in people and thereby sharpened their sense of real values. All that gush about man’s innate goodness, which had addled so many brains after the dogma of original sin was no longer understood, was blown to the winds by Freud, and the little that remains will, let us hope, be driven out for good and all by the barbarism of the twentieth century. Like Nietzsche, he overthrew the gigantic idols of our day, and it remains to be seen whether our highest values are so real that their glitter is not extinguished in the Acherontian Flood.”

So it is with Morrissey too. In ‘Mixed Blood’, as always, Morrissey gives his attention to the underbelly of the underbelly and obviously delights in putting his fingers on ulcerous spots. Beside the general feeling of despair and sordidness of the picture are the really in your face elements: there is a loving close-up of the needle when someone is shooting up heroine; a kid is thrown from a roof and splashes in the street; two couples make love on a mattress in the middle of the street (!) until one of them is overrun by a car – not to mention all the shooting and foul language that forms the default mode of ‘Mixed Blood’. This particular movie is Morrisey’s savage critique on the failure of the American melting pot, but he is much too clever a satirist to be preaching. In fact, the closest he comes to anything that could be seen as conventional social critique is the moment when someone asks the Brazilian drugs baroness why she came to America to which she replies that it’s easier there because America doesn’t have any laws. At first sight then, Morrissey seems almost indistinguishable from Freud as both seem to have had the same agenda, but there is one crucial difference. As Jung says somewhat further in the same text, Freud was very good at drilling out the carious tissue, but not so good at filling it again – which is what Jung so impressively set out to do and which is arguably the greatest difference between Freud and Jung. Freud was good at taking away the cobwebs that can cloud the mind, but he was far too focused on the negative aspects and the neuroses, which is where Morrissey differs thanks to his ever-present paradoxes. One could say he merges the techniques of Freud with the spirit of Jung, as Morrissey is never only interested in destroying or merely pointing toward all the problems: there is always a deep humanity underlying it all and a celebration of diversity (try finding a movie with more different accents than ‘Mixed Blood). He may take great pleasure in destroying all the social and emotional make-up our society likes to plaster us with and  he may force one’s head down the toilet bowl, but only in order to make visible the burning animalistic humanness that’s usually buried beneath all the make-up. In this way Morrissey is like a concerned father who wipes all the unnecessary lipstick off the face of his young daughter before going out, not in order to humiliate her, but to make her see she’s much more beautiful without all the cosmetics. 

This is surely also why I can’t think of any other filmmaker who has such a consistently beautiful array of actors in his movies. They may often not be pretty in any conventional narrow sense, but are almost invariably beautiful nevertheless. ‘Mixed Blood’ is no exception in this and is filled to the brim with boys and girls whose animal magnetism almost literally burns through the screen. Their stares are paradoxically both vacant and filled with humanity at the same time. When they are so lovingly captured in one of those achingly beautiful close-ups, they have all the force and impact of the Greek Medusa almost, as if them looking at you could turn you into stone. It’s why his casting is always so crucial, because in this way most of Morrissey’s film are almost like a battle between actors and director: Morrissey’s doing everything he can to destroy his actors, but try as he might, the personality and will of his actors is so strong they refuse to let him get the better of them. Which brings us to the ultimate paradox in Morrissey: he might be a bull in a china shop, he invariably only manages to shed light on the strength and vitality of what it means to be human. It is also what gives his movies their undeniable freshness: as he pushes and strips everything to their extreme nakedness, all he finds eventually is humanity, a flame that might flicker but never will extinguish – not even in those extreme circumstances he always turns his camera to. Near the end of ‘Mixed Blood’ this is so beautifully illustrated it almost hurts: some young punk shoots up and the camera moves around a completely white, unfurnished, decrepit room. It’s a despairing environment unfit for any human being, yet at the same time reality for more people than we usually like to acknowledge. But the room is also brightened up somewhat, merely by its presence of the humans: degraded and foul as they may be, their presence quite literally gives the room some color, as one stain of blood from a shooting and their colored clothes lighten up the room. It’s an extremely forceful and strangely poetic moment that can only be so forceful because it has been earned: Morrissey worked long and hard during the whole movie to achieve this effect and it wouldn’t have had the same impact without everything that preceded it. It’s like a great jazz concert, when at the end of the performance the room is thick with smoke and tension, brimming with aliveness. There’s no shortcut to this feeling, it has to be earned and worked through and few people are better at this than Morrissey. 

There’s also a the crucial difference between the pictures Morrissey made in the Factory and those he made entirely on his own, as the Warhol pictures had people who made a conscious choice to live that way, while virtually all his pictures from the eighties focused on people who were born into such circumstances and had to survive somehow. These eighties pictures in particular are human comedy pushed beyond the breaking point, as so many people do live that way and there’s nothing particularly funny about living in such subhuman environments. And this is what Morrissey wants us to feel, that they don’t live somewhere hidden where nobody can be aware of their existence but instead in plain view: everybody knows they exist and yet nobody seems to care enough to change it or doesn’t know how. Which is also where Morrissey’s hidden but nevertheless existing subtlety comes into play: in 'Mixed Blood' one of the characters asks why Carmen Miranda never stopped smiling, to which the Brazilian woman answers: 'why should she? She was the Abraham Lincoln of Brazil'. It's a brilliant but subtle joke, pointing as it does toward the strange conflation of politics and entertainment that has pervaded the world and that's the basis of virtually all Morrissey's movies. Because as he makes clear, we live in a world where a mere entertainer can be just as famous as someone who actually wants to try to change the world. But there’s more to it than that: a film like ‘Mixed Blood’ is in some way also a critique not only on the poor living conditions of so many people living in the city, it also functions as a critique of films that glamorize such conditions or treat them merely as a pretext for entertainment. These films can pretend to want to call attention to these social problems, but they are first and foremost considered as entertainment, with the social critique almost thrown in for good measure. For instance, many of the Italian Neo-realist pictures like those of Vittorio De Sica (whose casting in ‘Blood for Dracula’ was far from a coincidence) do critique the social conditions but at the same time fall squarely within the safety of entertainment or art. And it is precisely this protective armor Morrissey denies us as he wants to move beyond social conventions and niceties to expose the world as it really is – with both its despair and its beauty.

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