18. Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)

I was one of those kids that always seemed to grow up a little too fast. As a result, I quickly outgrew the literature that was deemed acceptable for me and at a rather precocious age become totally fascinated with the books of Stephen King. So I used to make trips to our local library, until one of the employees there actually forbade me to take them out, as he was of the opinion I was too young to be reading such decidedly adult material. It was the first (it obviously wouldn't be the last) time I became aware of how, instead of fostering encouragement, most of our society instead wants to control everything and desperately tries to keep everyone in what they perceive to be their proper place. By clinging to such narrow and general notions instead of recognizing the unique place everyone takes in this world and treat people according to that, society also prohibits people from truly flowering – or at least does it try its damnedest to do so. Luckily my little tale had a happy ending, because after I ran home in tears to my mother, she came down to sort it out with the librarian, after which he never gave me any trouble anymore and I was free to develop myself in my own way and tempo. But you could say this whole episode marked the moment I came of age as I'll never forget the horror I felt at this petty attempt at control.

I don't think I ever read the Stephen King novella on which 'Stand By Me' was based, but I wouldn't have understood its deeper meanings anyway back then, probably feeling somewhat cheated as it didn't live up to my taste for horror and bloodshed. In fact, I very likely would have thought it a peculiar change of pace for a writer whose name, for me, was synonymous with the horror genre and I wouldn't really be surprised if this was still the general assumption held by most people. With the writer being a rather obvious substitute for King himself, the whole film does play with this idea even, as in the moment when young Gordie relates the story of Lardass to his pals. The fat kid complains he doesn't want to hear any of his horror stories, so the story told is one that is consciously announced as being something other than a horror story. Yet, as the tale develops, it becomes painfully clear it is one of the most horrific stories King has ever committed to paper (or to celluloid) and coming as it does at the very heart of the movie, it obviously serves as much more than just a story that's told. In a brilliant parody of the fifties it lays bare all the horror of society, and because it focuses on real horrors instead of merely fantastic creatures and such, one could argue it's far more terrifying than the stories King usually churns out. On the surface, the parable about the pie eating contest and the revenge of Lardass is all stereotypical fifties friendliness and cheer, all done in those pastel colors that are completely absent in the rest of the film. Yet, as soon becomes clear, all those smiling faces only hide all the pettiness, hypocrisy, oppressiveness and taste for revenge that society is really made of: the humiliation of Lardass (with even a woman who's just as obese screaming his awful nickname at the top of her lungs) is incredibly painful to watch, as is the revenge through excessive vomiting that ensues – with the whole scene being one of the most horrible moments in movie history. It's of course 'Carrie' all over again, only this time thinly veiled as low comedy.

The scene also illustrates the difference between myth and reality that runs through the entire movie as a structuring principle, with the mythical image of the fifties being ruthlessly punctured by its dysfunctional reality. This gap between myth and reality is specifically mentioned when the boys are chased by the supposedly dangerous dog Chopper, who turns out to be nothing more than just a regular watch dog and Gordie says it's the first time he became aware of the difference. But the theme also surfaces in the difference between surface appearance and what people really are underneath that surface and the ensuing difficulty of breaking loose from it. The kids are constantly referred to not by who they are, but in relation to their family or background. This gets its most poignant expression in the moment when Chris tells the story of his stealing the milk money from school for which he was blamed. The irony is of course, that he did steal the money, only later to regret it and try to give it back, but was more or less made a convenient scapegoat by the woman who accused him in the first place and who ended up with the money, while blaming Chris. So, when people accused him of being of thief (like Gordie's father who instantly brands Chris as one, without even knowing any of the facts), they were right and wrong at the same time and in essence Chris was being branded merely by his family background. As always people are only judging by appearance, probably because myths and surface are much easier to work with than reality, which has the rather annoying tendency to be much more complex.

Crucially, the episode of Lardass is also the only one in the entire movie that's concerned with the communal activities of adult Western society and as such it becomes highly significant. The trip of the four young boys through the wilderness obviously serves as something of a rite of passage, quite similar for instance to the tradition of the Walkabout of the Australian aboriginals, where a young adolescent is sent into the wilderness to mature on an emotional and spiritual level. There is one significant difference though: the Walkabout is always done alone, as it’s all about learning to fence for yourself without the help of others, so that later someone can be of more help to other people. The four boys of 'Stand By Me' are not alone of course, which would prohibit any form of true soul initiation, but that doesn't seem to be the purpose of the trip. What the journey of the boys on their own away from society is all about, then, is quite explicitly the bonding and building of the feeling of togetherness, and one that is not based on the competition and petty revenge of the adult society, but on mutual respect, love and friendship instead. Broadly speaking there are three generations presented in this picture: the young boys, their older brothers and the adults. As we have already seen, the adults openly participate in highly degrading activities like the pie eating contest in the Lardass story and the parents of the young boys who rule by oppression, which makes the entire generation built on violence and revenge. This holds also true of the older brothers, who are only seen engaging in criminal and violent acts, ranging from the trashing of mailboxes to even murder. The only one of the three generations that's exempt from true violence and oppression (there is some peer pressure, but that's still of the innocent and playful variety) is that of the young boys, with every older generation being progressively more violent and oppressive. This raises the rather subversive possibility that we are somehow doing quite alright, until the moment that society 'gets' us. In many ways this is impossible to deny, as every child is born from the Mysteries and therefore still has close ties to it, but that grow only weaker when we 'grow up'. One could compare it with a dream: when one awakens the dream is often still fresh and vivid, but this lasts only for a few moments as the dream imagery will quickly fade back where it came from. And what are dreams other than our direct contact with the spirit world, with those invisible forces that are all around us, whether we like it or not? Dreams are really only the memories of that mystical world that every child is born from and that modern Western society so emphatically tries to repress. They are our everyday reminder of the innocence that's still in every one of us, even though we are conditioned to neglect it.

The tagline of the film “For some, it's the last real taste of innocence, and the first real taste of life. But for everyone, it's the time that memories are made of”, clearly positions 'Stand By Me' as a coming of age drama, with the difference between myth and reality being reworked as the difference between the innocence of childhood and the responsibility of adults. This is in any case exactly how virtually all of Western civilization regards the process of growing up and seen through this lens, the entire movie might not be anything more than just a throwback to some idyllic childhood memories, right before the children have to ‘grow up’ and take their 'proper' place in society. But the film goes much deeper than that, as it strongly suggests that society is the biggest myth of them all. It's not so much the process of coming to age itself the movie so amazingly analyses, but what people are coming of age to. Growing up is a wonderful and wondrous thing, but only if there is something at the end of the rainbow to go to. And, as the parable of Lardass already made clear, the only thing that lies in store in the way our current society has been organized is taking part in degrading leisure activities like pie eating, with everybody cheering like idiots and concerned with getting even. Not a very enticing prospect to be sure.

According to Bill Plotkin, the main cause of the disarray modern society finds himself in, is that most people don't truly mature past the adolescent stage. Now since willful blindness is the modus operandi of our society, this idea tends to be vehemently denied by most, but it's hard to really argue against it, as the pie eating contest makes abundantly clear. As most people don't truly mature emotionally and spiritually (as described here in context of My Dinner With Andre), they are left with a certain psychological lack, and instead of trying to fill this hole themselves, they tend to use their children in a desperate attempt to make themselves more complete. The result of this is that the children are as much dependent on their parents (as is normal), as the parents in turn need their children to fill that gaping hole in themselves, as they never quite got around to fixing it. It's not that hard to see how this puts an unbearable strain on the development of these children, as parents don't give them the necessary freedom to flower according to the child's own configuration, but force them to behave and develop in certain ways that are first and foremost suited to fill the parents' psychological needs. With this, one has of course described the classical pattern of trauma, as trauma is always continued from one generation to the next. So, when a person has been emotionally neglected by his parents and has never fully addressed this problem, he or she will very likely perpetuate this pattern by also neglecting his or her children (or possibly doing the exact opposite and smother them with love, which can obviously lead to other but similar problems), who eventually will also do the same with their children. And this pattern will continue indefinitely, with each generation passing down the original trauma along the line.

This historical trauma that's unconsciously handed down from generation to generation is already mentioned at the very beginning of 'Stand By Me' when Gordie describes his friends: the already mentioned Chris has a father that's no good, so everyone, including himself, knows that Chris will end up the same way; Teddy's father turns out to be a World war II veteran who 'stormed the beach at Normandy' and has since become a 'loony'. The situation with Chris' father is never fully explained, although it very likely is 'just' a case of the kind of parental neglect I've just described. The war trauma Teddy's father suffers from has been instilled in his son too, as he is always seen wearing a dog tag and is obsessed with the army and war, even at the tender age of 12. So what we've got here are two different cases of trauma, one that could be considered personal (the bad father) and the other cultural (the war veteran) and society tends to distinguish between these two, treating them as if personal and cultural problems are somehow unrelated to each other. But to its enormous credit 'Stand By Me' strongly suggests they are, like everything else in this world, unconditionally connected. Whatever the cause the, trauma is trauma and it will inevitably affect both personal lives and society as whole, as even the more sensible upbringing of Gordie makes clear.

Because even though his family is not as evidently dysfunctional as those of Chris or Teddy, this is only true on the surface, as Gordie’s father illustrates. His allegiance seems to have been only with Gordie's older brother, the classic stereotype of the star quarterback whose qualities as a football player serve not so much for the son's own good, but more to fulfill the dreams of the father who more or less wants to live his own life through his son. Because the father clearly needs the son to fill in for his own psychological needs, he is also blinded by the little fact he also has another son, with his own needs and ambitions. So when the older brother tries to focus the attention of his parents to the writing of his little brother, this is rudely ignored by the father, who is only afraid it will ruin his concentration and therefore his chances in sports. Consequently, when the brother dies at a young age, the love for Gordie seemed to have died with it, as the father can't see him for who he really is, but only as someone who’s not his older brother. 'Stand By Me' ironically illustrates that modern Western society is structured in such a way it has inherited only the negative aspects of family or communal life, without any of its advantages: the young boys are constantly defined by other people only in relation to their background and are also dragged down by their dysfunctional families. Yet, there are none of the usual advantages that traditional earth-based indigenous cultures gain from living together, such as a true feeling of belonging, sharing and an encouragement towards true flowering based on one's particular strengths and weaknesses. This is of course why there's a crucial difference between the wilderness journey of the boys and similar indigenous traditions like the Australian Walkabout: the latter come from a true community and can also return to it, while their Western counterparts can only form a real sense of community by escaping society. It's a frightening situation where the process of growing up is not really growing up, but just growing older and where true adulthood is not measured in spiritual maturation but only by accepting more responsibility, doing one's 'duty' and taking the designated place in the system. 

With only highly dubious role models around them (the one difference is Gordie's older brother, the star quarterback, who is the only one outside their age bracket who is kind and supporting, which could either mean all is not lost in this world or could perhaps be seen as something like an idealization on the part of Gordie), it's up to the boys themselves to create their own viable alternative in close proximity to nature. There is the somewhat mysterious moment when Gordie has an encounter with a deer, something that's strongly emphasized without ever explaining its importance and which could be interpreted as flirting with the idea of strong feeling of interconnectedness with all living beings that close contact with nature usually encourages. Many believe the loneliness and disconnected way of life is a direct result of modern city life, and that by reconnecting with nature we can not only connect with ourselves again but also with our fellow human beings. Although this idea is never fully developed in any way, the fact that some importance to the encounter with the deer is given, is does suggest it subtly flirts with it. However we may want to chose to interpret this brief moment, what is made abundantly clear, is that the four boys, hovering on the brink of adulthood, posses much more compassion and even wisdom than any of the adults. Chris in particular, despite his troubled background, is presented as having all the wisdom of a sage, exactly because he has not yet fallen prey to society and can still cut through the surface. At one point, he has a deep conversation with Gordie and even expresses the wish he could have been his father. Gordie's friends are the only ones who seem to recognize his talent for writing and telling stories and Chris encourages him to truly develop this gift. Even though Gordie's talent in seeing things for what they are have been made clear by his Lardass story, he is already starting to internalize the doubts and lack of support he is getting from his parents and it is subtly suggested Gordie perhaps never would have pursued his ambitions, had it not been for Chris' encouragement at that pivotal moment in his life. It's a breathtaking scene that recognizes the need for a true community and support, in order for any sensible kind of upbringing. That not all kids that age are as wise and insightful is also made clear by the discussion Teddy and Vern are having about whether Mighty Mouse can kick Superman's ass. It's the beauty of that age in a nutshell, as it can combine innocence and playfulness with wisdom.

The moment the boys return from their adventure, the voice-over remarks how the town somehow never looked the same as before, how it seemed smaller – clearly indicating the growth and maturing they have accomplished. Yet, the moment they return to society, it's fragmented structure immediately takes over, as two of the four boys are never seen again. 'You know how it goes', Gordie says in his voice-over and their close bonding with each other vanishes almost at once. Of course, people do lose sight of each other and relationships will come and go, which is only natural. But the feeling of belonging and being together should stay in our lives always, not just in idyllic childhood. He will always treasure the memories of those times, adult Gordie writes at the ending of the film. But as the title 'Stand By Me' also forcefully points to, he mourns much more than just the loss of a friend,  a childhood period without too much responsibility or the passing of time in general, as he will always remember the sense of belonging and togetherness that adult life as we now know it could never have. Our society considers the togetherness and close bonding of childhood a myth, something that's unsustainable by the realities of adult life. But this is an illusion: the fragmented structure of adult society itself is the myth and the interconnectedness of youth should be the reality, as it has been for millions of years of human existence, when people were living in close contact with the earth and each other. Several so-called 'primitive' societies still live this way at the very edges of our Industrial societies and many believe we should look to their ways of life as models for a more sustaining society, one that does honor the earth and its people instead of habitually destroying it. And while there's undeniably much to be learned from looking back to those cultures, to its great credit, 'Stand By Me' suggests we needn't even look that far, as all that wisdom is still present in our own children before they are contaminated by society. Until the moment these children have internalized all the conditioning we force onto them, they are in fact able to form relationships that are based on caring and playfulness, seeing each other for what they really are instead of just where they come from or who their parent is. And here lies the ultimate paradox of the tagline: the moment we get our first taste of real life, we lose our innocence and become confused. In early adolescence, as we come to look at all the things that we have been taught through our own eyes, we suddenly become aware of the difference between myth and reality and suddenly realize how things can turn out quite different than we were taught. But this coming of age period, when we are poised on the threshold between innocence and conditioning is but a very brief moment and it's only at this time we are able to see life clearly. We move from the sheltered myth of childhood to the harsh reality of experience, but unfortunately we also immediately move back again from the reality of experience to the myth of modern Western society. How easy it is to start confusing myth and reality again can be gleaned at the ending of the film, when Gordie's two children storm in and they complain how he is always so distracted when writing. This could indicate of course Gordie has internalized his own fathers lack of interest so much, that he has become unaware of it, even though he has just so incisively told the story we have been watching. It's not just the memory of that age that should stand by us, as memories are nothing but nostalgia. It’s primarily also the feelings and insights that we should never forget. 

Stand by Me (25th Anniversary Edition) [Blu-ray]

17. Wolfen (Michael Wadleigh, 1981)

“In his remarkable novel ‘Ishmael’, Daniel Quinn makes the distinction between ‘Leavers’ and ‘Takers’. The Takers are the people often referred to as ‘civilized’, who formed a culture out of an agricultural revolution that began about ten-thousand years ago in the Near East. The Leavers are the people of all other cultures, referred to by the Takers as ‘primitive’. The Leavers and Takers have very different stories. Each of these stories contains a core worldview that forms the basis of their respective cultures. As Quinn’s character Ishmael puts it: “The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man. The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world.” These premises make all the difference, defining whether people live in balance or imbalance with nature.

Currently, here on Earth, it is the era of the Takers, and their habitat is the entire planet. The Leavers still exist here and there, but their humble voices have been nearly silenced by the onset of the industrial age. The Takers – and now almost everyone is one – have taken almost everything. They have steadily increased their dominance, not because their story is better or more adaptive than that of the Leavers, but because it has been backed up by superior firepower. That’s the stick behind the Taker’s success. The carrot, now sustained by a dizzying amount of technological innovation, is the seductive illusion that industrial civilization can keep growing forever, and that population and consumption on Earth have no limits.”

This passage, taken from Bill Pfeiffer’s book ‘Wild Earth, Wild Soul’ makes clear just about everything that’s underlying the remarkable ‘Wolfen’, a reimagining of the old Takers vs. Leavers story, cleverly disguised as a werewolf picture. Or is ‘Wolfen’ really about lycanthropy? There has been some discussion about that, and although it definitely shares several traits with the werewolf genre, strictly speaking it isn’t one at all. The transformation scene so crucial to most pictures of its kind is conspicuously absent and is replaced instead with a sequence that seems consciously designed to poke fun at the very concept of a man transforming into a werewolf. But if not werewolves, what are we dealing with then as it should be clear the Wolfen referred to in the title are more than ordinary wolves? I suppose it all boils down to how one defines the werewolf and if it is restricted to the transformation proper, it wouldn’t qualify. However, if we take a broader view of the ideas underlying the werewolf myth, things change somewhat (forgive the pun): because what all werewolves point to is what film critic Robin Wood has termed ‘The Return of the Repressed’. Wood saw that as central to all horror pictures, but it most certainly directly applies to werewolves, as the myth clearly points to the irrational fear modern Western society has of the wild and animalistic emotions that lay buried in every human being. Most of us seem to want to forget it, but every man or woman is still an animal, even though a highly developed one. We’ve done everything we can to tame these wild emotions, because for some inexplicable reason these wild feelings remind us of the animal within each of us, which drives us wild with fear (again, forgive the pun). Consequently, we have come to believe that wild and civilized cannot coexist. Or to say it differently: we have lost contact not only with the wild nature within each of us, but also with Nature all around us.

Which brings us to the story of Takers vs. the Leavers: Takers believe the world belongs to man and Leavers believe man belongs to the world. Takers are the technology-driven industrial societies which believe Earth and its vast resources are there to be taken and used by man, because man is somehow outside of Earth. We live on it and have to rely on its oxygen, but are still somehow superior to it. In other words, there is a fundamental imbalance in the Takers story, as it views mankind as somehow separate from nature. It is exactly this illusionary separation that makes the systematic rape of the Earth, as it continues to this very day, possible, because if we would truly feel connected with everything around us, we wouldn’t be able to treat it the way we do. Which is where the Leavers cultures kick in, as they don’t experience such curious disconnectedness and see all of life as one vast web of relations. When rainforest activist John Seed says he doesn’t feel he’s saving the trees but really just saving himself, it’s much more than just a clever play of words, pointing as it does to the harmony with Earth that the vast majority of modern society lacks. We human beings are just as much a part of Earth and all its ecosystems as all the rocks, trees, animals, oceans and insects, and to disrupt them in such horrible ways in the end will only hurt ourselves too. All this, of course, forms the basis for the whole deep ecology movement which will hopefully lead to the changes necessary to create a life-sustaining way of life. As valuable as the protests of some environmental agencies can be, deep ecology feels they are in themselves not enough as they often lack the vision that’s the basis of this thinking. What’s needed is not really more protests and actions against nature’s destruction, but a profound change in thinking and being – one that supplants the fragmented lifestyles so common to most Takers cultures to the harmonious way of life of Leavers. So if we could just get people to start feeling connected first with themselves and then with everything around them and bring their lives in harmony, Earth will take care of the rest. If we just wouldn’t Take so much and Leave the Earth be, we would be much better off, because not a single man-made system can be better than the perfect systems Nature herself has designed. Only in recent years have scientific discoveries begun to point to the same conclusions so many religious or mystic beliefs have always spoken about and has science started to view nature not as a machine, but as something that’s alive.

Although it has a default mode that’s so subtle as to become obtuse to many viewers, everything I’ve just described is already there in the opening of ‘Wolfen’: after some shots of the skyline of New York, we see two Native Americans perform some odd rituals; a host of wasted old buildings are taken down by explosives and we see some guy opening a new construction site. After this, we see strange, distorted points of view from inside one of those decrepit buildings, instantly insinuating some sort of alien presence, perhaps a threat even. Then some people, safely snug in their comfortable limousine and a clear focus on technology and surveillance. Or in other words, the distinction between Takers and Leavers is already being set up: the Takers live in huge cities and are capable of mass destruction because they are aided (and captured) by their precious technology. The Leavers (the Indians and the ‘alien’ presence of the Wolfen) are much more modest in this respect, as they don’t have the power to kill or destroy in such great numbers (nor do they want to as they understand that such mass destruction also hurts themselves). Yet they are characterized by a certain kind of efficiency and mystery that the Takers entirely lack. The close-up on the monitor in the car which says ‘executive surveillance systems’ is the first of many to set up an implicit contrast between two systems, between the system of man-made technology (Takers) and the organic one of nature (Leavers). The success of any system is, of course, entirely determined by its own balance, which is why Nature wins out: it may lack all the gadgets man has accumulated, but human technology can never measure up to the perfect construction and harmony of nature’s systems of organization. It is really no coincidence the POV shots from the Wolfen are taken with the Steadicam camera, new at the time, which with its precision mirrors nature’s efficiency most closely, even though its slightly mechanical quality lacks the organic spontaneity nature always has.

This strange conflation of Nature being represented by technology is not inconsistent with the rest of the film, but rather its point, as it leads us toward some kind of sensible combination of the two. We shouldn’t just go back to living like cavemen, but find some way of adapting technology to nature instead of just subjugating it. Nature can be cruel, that’s for sure and it’s something that ‘Wolfen’ emphasizes even. But not only is a healthy awareness and acceptance of the inevitability of death crucial to any kind of sanity, it’s also helps to see nature’s inherent cruelty in the larger scheme of things. ‘Wolfen’ also directly questions our basic assumptions of what constitutes cruelty, as it clearly invites us to see man as more savage than the Wolfen and thus criticizes our much too easy distinction between savage and civilized. Bill Plotkin tells a beautiful story in ‘Nature and the Human Soul’ about a tribe in Africa that sends their children into the wilderness at the tender age of twelve. They know beforehand some of them will not return, but they also know that those that do return, will have done so because they have truly found themselves and their place in life, and they see the whole process as little more than natural selection that weeds out the weak. When seen through Western eyes, this may very well be perceived as horribly cruel, but if you think about it, our own ways are perhaps even more cruel: we don’t send some off to die in the wilderness, yet are apparently entirely comfortable with the idea very few of our young people ever find themselves in the way those in Africa do. Besides which we also lose quite a large percentage of our adolescents to suicides and murders that are a direct result of the fact we don’t feel the need for the kind of guidance that’s so normal for the African tribe. So in the end, the same percentage (or probably even more) of our children die anyway, while the African tribe at least makes those that survive better people by consciously embracing death as an inevitable part of life. So which is more cruel then? 

While the film’s poster doesn’t even hint at this, the film ultimately doesn’t present the presence of the Wolfen as a threat at all, which may well be the most subversive and radical aspect of ‘Wolfen’. Even though the killings by the Wolfen is initially seen as a threat to humanity, it is also made clear at the end they kill only for survival. They are described by the Native Americans at the end as highly intelligent wolves, who were forced underground by the humans (whether we should take them as real wolves or only metaphorically in our minds as the wild nature that we’ve forced underground, is left open to interpretation) and, thus taken out of their natural habitat, have to prey on the homeless that nobody really misses. It is insinuated they have been doing this for years in cities all across the continent and only have begun to expand their attacks to the rich businessmen who directly threaten (again) their habitat by tearing down the old deserted buildings in order to resurrect new apartments, that used to form the dwelling places of the Wolfen. As such, they only kill to eat and when their immediate survival is threatened and it’s interesting to see the clear parallels ‘Wolfen’ implies between the Wolfen/Nature and the Native Americans, the only Leavers culture still existing in America. Despite the negative portrayal of so many Western pictures, the various Native American cultures could (and should) serve as a model example for the future of the world. They lived in close harmony with the American continent for thousands of years, giving back as much as they took from it and thus insuring balance and harmony. Within a matter of just a few hundred years, white colonialists managed to undo all that, and completely destroyed the harmony by turning the American landscape into a wasteland, almost annihilating all the native tribes in the process. What is probably even more impressive is that through all this the Native Americans not only kept their basic dignity intact, but also their ways of life – something that stands as one of the greatest achievements of mankind. They may have killed too, but, like the Wolfen, only for defense and survival, not for the more dubious reasons that Takers culture still present as necessary for Industrial growth. As the Wolfen in this movie virtually equal the role of the Native Americans in the history of the United States, there’s the rather intriguing notion that ‘Wolfen’ can be more properly understood not as a werewolf horror picture, but as a Western instead. The time and setting may have changed, but little else: it’s still Garden vs. Wilderness and white man dominating and expanding at all cost. The Garden has turned into high-luxury condominiums, and Wilderness is represented by the old buildings that are being torn down; the gunfighters and settlers of old are now businessmen with ascots, trying to impose civilization on the wilderness – all in the name of Progress. ‘Progress’ is such a lovely word, but also extremely frightening, as it is always blindly accepted and never scrutinized, which is thankfully what ‘Wolfen’ so brilliantly does. Because by making something of an updated Western, it basically implies the domestication of the Wilderness has been a total disaster. Most Westerns were firmly rooted in the white, dominant point of view that was seldom undermined and this is where ‘Wolfen’ differs – as it suggests that an alternative way to dominant culture is possible or even necessary. And this is the genius of the film’s opening, when one wonders how all these disparate elements could possibly be related. It uses the fragmented, disconnected world view that pervades our society and is often thought of as the only way to view the world, only to supplant it, through its detective plot with Albert Finney as the viewer’s surrogate, with the harmonious and interconnected way of looking at things that’s so common amongst indigenous tribes.

By fusing the Western with elements from the werewolf picture, it challenges the often unspoken assumption that being civilized is somehow inherently ‘good’ and wild ‘bad’ and strongly suggests that by taming the wilderness around and the wildness inside of us, we have lost something that’s extremely valuable. This is already admirably mirrored by the casting of Albert Finney, who became famous for his animalistic vitality of his roles in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘Tom Jones’, with the latter picture entirely focusing on his refusal to be tamed. When Finney got to 1981 he seems to have lost most of his energy, however, as he seems almost somnambulistic in both ‘Looker’ and ‘Wolfen’, which is especially effective in our picture as it so forcefully suggests a taming of the beast (apparently Dustin Hoffman lobbied quite aggressively to land the role, but it’s hard to imagine how his nervous energy could have worked in this part). Just about the only thing that still suggests Finney’s untamed nature buried deep beneath his expressionless face, is his awful hairdo as he quite literally looks he just got of bed during the entire film. Besides that, he dulls his senses by over-eating and drinking alcohol all the time, which leave him senseless in the most strict sense of the word – in sharp contrast with the Wolfen who live through their senses. So if not really werewolves, the creatures in this film do function in a somewhat similar way, as they have to rekindle the extinguished fire within Finney, to make him reconnect with his wild self once more. With this, ‘Wolfen’ turns the basic concept of werewolves upside down, as the (metaphorical) transformation from civilized man into a wild animal is here presented not as something to be feared, but as something that’s to be cherished. Finney’s character will always be fragmented and distorted until he accepts and embraces his own wild self, something that’s beautifully portrayed in the climax of the film. In a moment that recalls nothing so much as John Boorman, Finney is seen through the distorted glass, which through its funhouse effect metaphorically points to the fragmented nature of his being. The glass windows of the apartment also symbolize the separation from Nature at large, something that’s undone when the Wolfen magically break through them, seemingly threatening Finney. But the threat is only imaginary, as Finney comes to realize by not resisting the wildness they represent, but by embracing it instead. It is at this point they disappear as mysteriously as they came, because they have served their purpose: to reconnect Finney with his wild self and the Earth around him. 

Although Finney’s trajectory from separation to inclusion (which neatly mirrors deep ecology, by the way) is presented as a way out of our malaise, his lack of present-centeredness are not the cause of the problem, but merely a symptom. Because as I’ve said earlier, the lack of harmony doesn’t limit itself to only our individual wellbeing, but also contaminates every system we develop. ‘Wolfen’ is quite explicitly modeled as a battle between systems, between the ecological systems of Nature and those that are based on human effort, with the latter constantly being revealed as inferior. Throughout the movie for instance, the detectives are constantly expressing their admiration for how effective and precise these murders are, even though they can’t figure out what is causing them. So when Gregory Hines wonders aloud how the killers could have known so quickly some of the organs were deceased, as it took him an hour to figure out even with all his equipment, he implicitly says all man-made technology can’t even hold a candle to the efficiency of Nature’s ways. It is also why the highly protected businessman who gets killed at the beginning, with even phones and surveillance inside his limousine, doesn’t stand a chance against his Wolfen attackers, because ultimately man’s technology is far inferior to Nature’s organic systems of organization. The Wolfen are in complete balance and accord: they move like one, think like one and attack like one. As the Native American’s say “Hunter and prey. Nature in balance. In their world, there can be no lies... no crimes, no need for detectives”.

Man can be no match for them, because mankind lacks this kind of balance, both in themselves and in man-made structures, as all of modern society is fragmented. The Takers have forgotten the harmony of the Leavers, as this story related by Chellis Glendinning in her book ‘My Name is Chellis & I’m in Recovery From Western Civilization’ attests to: when a woman was visiting an indigenous tribe, she began drinking from a glass she had brought with her. The tribe people were much confused by this strange looking thing they had never seen, and were curious as to how glass could be made. When the woman was at a loss for words and had to admit she didn’t have a clue how to make glass, the people started laughing, as it confirmed what they had already thought: this woman was banished from her culture because she was totally unfit for it, as she lacked even the basic knowledge of how to produce an item she used on a daily basis. This little story should serve to illustrate how far modern people have drifted away from such basic logic, as few of us ever learn the basic skills of our life. As most of us have internalized this, we have come to believe it normal, while in fact it does nothing but point to the general lack of harmony of our entire lives. We don’t know better than society is made up of specialists, with everybody having learned a certain skill or bit of knowledge, but with no-one being able to transcend all this and see the big picture. That is not to say indigenous tribes don’t have specialists; they do, since some people are either by learning or natural talent more suited for certain areas of life than others. But all members of every tribe are skilled in and have knowledge of all the basics that make up their everyday life, so they could survive entirely on their own, if necessary. Unfortunately this doesn’t apply at all to our own lives. I use my bicycle every day, yet I don’t know how to repair it when it breaks down, something that scares me deeply on a certain level. Of course, since I have the money and there are specialists around who will do the work for me, I can get by, but it does make my life as a rule more fragmented than that of indigenous people.

References to this division of work and tasks are scattered throughout ‘Wolfen’: the mayor is seen with two shady fellows whose exact role there remains rather unclear. All the work on the police force is of course divided amongst specialists, who can only by working together reach the same kind of harmony every Wolfen has in itself. The most sour example may be the remark Finney makes at one point to his female colleague Diane Venora, when he sarcastically says “you’re here for the motivation”. It’s one of those many off-hand remarks in a remarkably subtle movie, but it exemplifies the troubles pervading our society, like the physical detective work of Finney is somehow different from the psychological motivation aspect of Venora. They all know their own specialist side of the puzzle, but not one of them is able to see the puzzle as a whole, which is of course why they don’t come any closer to unraveling the mysteries of Nature. In order to overcome this problem, mankind should learn to think like nature again, because only then can our fragmentary view reach anything approaching wholeness. We should undo our civilized taming and learn to ‘become animal’ again, to use a phrase of David Abram’s. So, when the police officer remarks to Finney that the death cases on Park Avenue and the Bronx couldn’t possibly be related as they don’t fit the regular police M.O., this only makes sense when seen through the deficit logic of isolated humans who see everything as fragmented. Because as the combining of Park Avenue and the Bronx so evocatively suggests, the animalistic worldview even builds bridges between the very rich and the very poor, two worlds that couldn’t be more apart from conventional human points of view. Many horror and science fiction films use outside threats to form some kind of sudden allegiance between human beings that were fighting each other just minutes before, but what makes ‘Wolfen’ virtually unique is that it recasts what the threat really is. The people are not united because they have to fight an outside agent, even though the Wolfen are initially presented as such. But at the end, their threat was unmasked as an illusory one and it’s made abundantly clear that but by fighting nature, mankind is really fighting itself. The battle is already over, it’s just that most people don’t realize it.

“In arrogance, man knows nothing of what exists. There exists on earth, such as we dare not imagine. Life as certain as our death. Life that will prey on us, as we prey on this earth”.

Buy Wolfen from Amazon

16. An American Hippie in Israel (Amos Sefer, 1972)

My boyfriend and I have something of a running gag whenever we talk about his grandmother, by saying ‘she means well’. See, the thing is, she often does or says things that are really quite unacceptable when you come right down to it, but if I were to complain about this to someone, the stock answer would always be ‘but she means well’. I don’t doubt for a second that she indeed does mean well, but it bugs me no end that for most people this seems to be something of an excuse, like meaning well exempts people from all further responsibility. Obviously meaning well is much better than not meaning well, but in itself isn’t nearly enough, because if something that’s well meant isn’t accompanied by an execution that’s also up to snuff, these intentions will become quite worthless. One of the major examples of people meaning well, but even so doing almost more harm than good, is that peculiar phenomenon called ‘hippies’. It’s clear as day that the basis of the whole hippie movement was undeniably well-meant, but by unfortunately remaining stuck in intentions and not being able to come up with any solid plan of action, these hippies in the end probably destroyed more than they anticipated.

Perhaps we mustn’t be too harsh on them, as they did carry the rather heavy burden of being the very first generation of the entire Western civilization to have widespread access to psychedelic drugs like LSD and mescalin and, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in one day. Terrence McKenna said the psychedelic revolution failed because the hippies didn’t have anything like a plan or agenda, which is hard to disagree with and which is to say: they basically just didn’t have a clue what they were doing. This problem of giving LSD, the most powerful drug on the planet, into the hands of such irresponsible youngsters has often been compared to the situation of a knife and a child: when a child cuts himself with it, is the knife to blame and should therefore all knives be forbidden? Or are the parents to blame for carelessness by not making sure the knife should have been out of reach for the child? It would certainly be rather impractical if we were to suddenly forbid the use of all knives, just because some kid was bestowed more responsibility than it could reasonably handle. Yet, this has been exactly the solution to the LSD problem by merely banishing it completely, thereby also entirely ignoring all the profound possibilities the drug unquestionably possesses. Because let’s face it, the hippie movement did generate some amazing things, like the development of something like a general feeling of awareness and care. For once, more than just a handful people actually cared enough to protest a war and other social injustices. And with this heightening of awareness also came an unparalleled platform for more demanding art, as all kinds of experimental techniques and styles came crashing into the mainstream. If all this was already made possible even with so much confusion and lack of commitment on the part of the hippies, the mind boggles to think what could indeed be accomplished with a little more guidance and knowledge. If people had given up at the first sign of trouble when a few planes crashed down and killed some brave pioneering souls, we still wouldn’t be able to fly now. 

But again, as the history of the psychedelic revolution has made so painfully clear, intentions are in themselves not enough, no matter how well they are meant. No one’s a better example of this than Timothy Leary, a name that’s bound to elicit widely divergent reactions. But while I do agree he may not have been the ideal poster boy for LSD and in the end could’ve done a much better job by going somewhat deeper instead of relying so much on catchy sound-bites, I also feel he is often treated much too cruelly. His famous phrase ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out’ proves this point well: if you truly understand its meaning, it’s an almost scientific truth, but because it’s so obscure, it’s also very easy to misinterpret, something that seems to have happened all too frequently. The first two parts don’t pose a real problem: ‘turn on’ means basically just the taking of LSD and setting the process in motion; the ‘tune in’ part is already somewhat more difficult, if not in meaning than in execution, as everybody understands it to mean something like this: tuning in to the own inner wavelength that’s often referred to as ‘Soul’, but this is much easier said than done, and in any case involves much more work and discipline than just eating acid. But it seems the last part has given rise to the most misunderstandings, as a film like ‘A Hippie in Israel’ all too vividly illustrates. Because all too often it has been interpreted in a rather facile way, as people used it as an excuse for some escape into hedonism by just dropping out of society and relinquishing all responsibility. Like one of my drug pushers once said to me: ‘after I took acid for the first time, I got myself a tattoo and never worked again a day in my life’. While I understand where these feeling are coming from, I never regarded it as a real solution, nor do I think Leary meant it that way – he was not that shallow. I have given away one of his books and never got it back, so the exact phrasing escapes me at the moment, but if memory serves, he said something like ‘dropping out of the matrix or chessboard of society’ – or some words to that effect. What I take that to mean is not at all dropping out of society entirely, but quite simply this: to become aware of the many ideas, concepts and ideologies society imposes on everybody (and that most people remain unaware of) and by becoming conscious of them, being able to reject them in order to build something new instead. Like R. Buckminster Fuller reminds us:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”.

As ‘An American Hippie in Israel’ illustrates so forcefully, the hippies failed miserably exactly because they were only fighting existing reality. For a movement that was ostensibly built on self-awareness and insight, most of the hippies showed very little of that and instead seemed only interested to use LSD either as party drug or to escape the realities, instead of confronting them – most hippies never seemed to have grasped the fact that psychedelics, like LSD, are highly unsuited for such escapism, which remains the forte of the narcotics like alcohol and cocaine. In the beginning of the movie, the girl asks the hippie of the title why he’s a hippie, something he answers with a rather silly diatribe about the horrors of the world and what an awful experience the fighting in Vietnam has been. Very little in the way of a real argument can be given against this, yet only talking about it isn’t going to change anything and his running away to Israel is only the first of many indications that the man is totally blind to himself. This contradictory feeling of simultaneous freedom and imprisonment is probably what  the film most powerfully evokes: all the dialogue and the actions of the characters are about freedom and the wide spaces of the Israel landscape also reinforce this idea of openness; yet by making absolutely certain from the very beginning all of this is an undermined by a lack of inner freedom, Amos Sefer undercuts this sense of freedom and transforms it into a confining nightmare of illusion: in the very first scene Hippie Mike comes across two pale guys who, he complains, keep following him around and evidently function as his own unconscious mind trying to remind him of his own inner blindness. He may run, but he cannot hide and all his future actions (which are kept to a minimum anyway as most hippies were content to be just bumming around instead of doing anything constructive) consequently take on a sense of doom and utter futility. 

By not having any sensible outlet for all their energy, the hippies were all dressed up with nowhere to g, and in the end see their energy dissipated by loafing – or dancing around as if their life depended on it. Most hippies were basically just a couple of really scared kids that were on the right path but came frightfully unprepared and which took Leary’s dictum of ‘dropping out’ a little too literally and did just that: they escaped dominant society and ran away from it, which is also what the hippies in the movie rather naively do when they go to a deserted island. Once arrived, they state their noble intentions with force and conviction, shouting things about freedom and corrupt society, all the while being entirely ignorant to the fact that you first got to have a free mind if you are to have any true sense of freedom in any society. By only impulsively following their hedonistic instincts and rushing to the island without any thought of what to even do there, their lack of purpose comes to bite them in the ass. Finally cut off from the society they so desperately wanted to escape, they only too quickly come to realize their inner emptiness as they forgot to ‘tune in’ and because of this can only fall back into the very trap of dominant civilization they claim to despise so much. The moment the going gets tough, they immediately start behaving like the irresponsible children they really are and begin complaining about hunger and start to behave as nasty to each other, exactly as they accused society of. Significantly, Hippie Mike, despite his earlier dreams about a civilization without orders, is quite unaware of the fact he begins doing just that when he’s talking with the other guy (who looks very much like Dario Argento) whose knowledge of the English language seems limited to the word ‘freedom’. Mike’s saying things in English, with the other guy talking back in Hebrew, but Mike even gets angry at him because he can’t understand a word he says, quite oblivious to the fact that Argento doesn’t understand him either. But because he’s so blind to himself, he comes down all imperialistic and dominant, thereby obviously doing everything he wanted to escape from. From this moment on, things only get worse, as the men descend to being cavemen who drag their females by the hair, before eventually all turning on each other in a grunting match and a fight for the last bit of food on the island – the goat they brought along. It’s a wonderful allegoric dissection of what happens when people remain stranded in good intentions and why the hippie movement failed like it did. It’s impossible to deny the core truth of every bit of dialogue that’s delivered with as much conviction as the actors could possibly muster. If only these hippies would have found some balance by doing something that showed even a bit of the insight of their diatribes, they could perhaps have countered their now actions, which now remained senseless.  

While the hippies in the movie didn’t do but at least meant well, the same unfortunately couldn’t be said of the general reception the film has received, something that the truly disgusting liner notes accompanying the Grindhouse blu-ray release bears out all too well. Without even the slightest bit of exaggeration, they may be the worst liner notes I’ve ever read in my life. But then again, I may be one of the only people alive who truly doesn’t understand what it means to be ‘so bad, it’s good’. I see the phrase everywhere I look and I’ve tried to wrap my head around this concept for years, but with no success whatsoever. Like Richard Dyer once said: ‘some art is good, some of it is bad, most of it is neither’ and that’s all there is to it – so where the ‘so bad, it’s good’ category should fit, I really don’t know. And this has little to do with my seeing the world in black and white or my being autistic – I simply don’t know what it means. Or as Stephen Thrower once put it succinctly: “there are no bad films, only boring ones”, which would go a long way toward freeing ourselves from the restrictiveness of the good-bad dichotomy and would liberate us from judging everything from the dominant paradigm. Because what scares me most about this strange category of ‘so bad, it’s good’, is that it forces people into an uncomfortable split and precludes any possibility of true harmony: they claim to love something, yet the most positive thing they can say about it, is how bad it is? How fundamentally absurd this is, can already be gleaned when somebody gives a rating to a movie, obviously wreaking havoc with their entire ratings system as they are forced to give it a rating of, say 2,5 stars out of five, which according to their own system should mean it’s a bad film. Yet, they claim to love it and if they are sincere, shouldn’t the rating reflect their feelings and if not, what’s the point of having a rating system in the first place? Because if you’re gonna use one and start giving 2,5 stars to both movies you really don’t like or think are bad and to those which you claim to like or even love but are somehow still magically bad, it would make the whole system pointless.

I’ve asked someone about this once, as he wrote a glowing review of ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’ while giving it a rating that would mean it’s a piece of shit, and he answered quite confusingly that it may have been entertaining, but wasn’t of any high quality. But is being entertaining not a quality in itself? The crux of this matter, of course, is what constitutes a good or a bad movie or how you deal with a rather obscure concept like ‘quality’. When people talk about quality they invariably seem to be talking about the well-made, professional movie that’s exemplified in most Hollywood productions or an Ingmar Bergman film. But whoever decided this yardstick could and should be used for all other expressions? While the sheer professionalism of those films can certainly very attractive, why should that also mean that everything else immediately fails the moment it doesn’t meet those standards? Is it really so difficult to embrace several different standards and try to meet every artistic expression on its own terms, instead of those imposed by society? I remember reading an interview with Irmin Schmidt, keyboardist of legendary Krautrockers Can years ago, where the interviewer kept harping on the fact that by modern standards the keyboards he used back in the days were old-fashioned or obsolete, something Schmidt quite aggressively kept denying. He maintained, quite rightly I think, that those keyboards were not inferior to those of today, but really just different. Every single thing or mode of expression has its own intrinsic qualities and should be embraced and celebrated for that and by insisting, for some reason, all things have to be measured by the same homogenizing standards of ‘quality’ is to deny all this diversity. It’s really the imperialistic and domineering sensibility that forms the basis for our Western culture, that people seem to internalized so much they have become blind to it, without realizing this way of thinking has always destroyed other cultures or modes of expression by deeming them inferior. Indeed, it is also the very same arrogance that has enabled us to destroy most of the natural world.

I love the music of George Jones, who’s by many considered to have been the finest vocalist ever brought forth by Country & Western music. He is technically perfect, without ever becoming slick and combines an impeccable sense of phrasing with a rich voice. Now someone like Floyd Tillman on the other hand couldn’t have been further removed from Jones, as he constantly sings off-key, has the oddest way of rhythm and phrasing and generally sounds like a trash heap. If we were to judge Tillman by way of the professional norm set by George Jones, he would never make the cut and would only come off as rather amateurish. But doing so, also completely overlooks his own qualities, which are rooted into his very eccentricity and strong personality. When you get down right to it, they both possess something the other person almost by necessity lacks: Jones may be technically perfect, yet sometimes a tad impersonal because of it, while Tillman may lack the professionalism but does have that personal touch that’s mostly absent in Jones. Neither one of them is better than the other and both can easily be embraced for what they represent, but when it comes to film this has seemed incredibly hard to do for most. Because when cast into movie terms, George Jones would be the equivalent of the mainstream norm, while Tillman would squarely fall into the ‘so bad, it’s good’ category, thereby immediately implying some critique on the latter by blaming him for not living up to the standards he probably never was interested in anyway.

 

But more damagingly than the inherent lack of harmony of such an attitude, is the fact people don’t seem to realize they are quite literally shut off from the world by it. By condescendingly treating everything as a joke or laughing at the ‘so bad, it’s good’ attributes, they fall into the trap of that horrible post-modern ironic way of looking at life again, where people use this irony as a wall to close themselves off from any real experience. Because it is very easy to try to position yourself above it all and laugh at what you perceive as bad, all the while not realizing it’s your own stupidity you’re laughing at. It quite neatly exempts you from truly engaging with something, as you (perhaps unconsciously) create a distance between yourself and that which you encounter, the exact same distance that creates all the separation that’s raging rampant in our society and which I’ve talked about endlessly on this blog. It’s far easier to behave like those Roman emperors who laughingly looked down upon those slaves being torn apart by lions, than it would be to place yourself in the position of those slaves. Because then you would have to give up your safe distance and get your hands dirty and expose yourselves to risks most would rather avoid. That by doing so these people inadvertently cut themselves off from true experience is something I could live with, as they are the ones who content themselves with a mere facsimile of life, but what’s more problematic is the fact they also hurt quite a lot of films along the way.

Which brings us again to John Skipp’s liner notes for ‘An American Hippie in Israel’, which blithely perpetuates this sorry state of things by simply encouraging people to laugh loudly during the whole movie. But let me be absolutely clear on this: I’m not at all advocating some hugely grave and serious way of looking at everything with all laughter banished, as I am a very strong adherent to camp and deeply in touch with my own outrageousness. But by treating everything as a joke and even inviting people to create this distance, these people hurt not only their own sanity but also quite a lot of these movies in the process, as they will create an aura of superficiality which will inevitably make it impossible to truly perceive the world. Simply put, I don’t see what’s supposed to be bad about this movie. John Skipp talks about ‘all its astonishing flaws’, but it’s a real pity he doesn’t point out what those flaws may be, as perhaps then his piece could have been illuminating instead of the pure garbage it now is. Of course it could be that Skipp is much more refined than me, but aesthetic idiot that I am, I’ll have to try to figure out those flaws for myself then, taking his lead. He writes:

“the chief culprit, as usual, is the script: full of dialogue so ripely insane it rivals Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert. But as a fable, it has a weird cohesion. It knows what it’s trying to say. Tries to say it really hard.”

One would wish Skipp’s writing has the same cohesion as he endows the film with, because I can’t figure this out. Now, I’m not saying the film is impossible to penetrate and does everything it can to hide its meaning, but at the same time one wonders if Skipp knows exactly what that meaning is. He never explains what he thinks the movie is about, as he seems to presume it’s all self-explanatory, but I doubt that. In fact, it could never be that transparent, as the entire film is told through metaphor, which Skipp even acknowledges, so how can the dialogue be both on the nose and metaphoric all at once? Even the most simple fables have to be translated and thus makes interpretation necessary, which is what Skipp so conveniently forgot to do. Since he is so evasive on the subject (it’s all so bad anyway, so why bother, right?) I’ll have to assume he sincerely seems to think all the dialogue about freedom really is meant to be taken at face value. But if this were so, if the movie is nothing but a naïve celebration of hippie values, then how are we to explain the mysterious fact everybody dies because of those values? What are we to make of the two death-like figures and the trajectory of the film into barbarism? Apparently, the film tries to say something really hard, but for the life of me I can’t make out what Skipp seems to think what exactly that something is and since he’s entirely silent on the subject, we have to assume he himself doesn’t it know either. Because if he hadn’t been so busy laughing at everything and being such a condescending prick, he may have found time to notice the film is quite obviously a critique on hippies instead of a celebration, which would also explain the ‘ripely insane’ dialogue Skipp apparently finds so hilarious. It is meant to be ‘screamingly on-the-nose’ as the portrait of hippies is anything but flattering and they are supposed to look like a couple of babbling idiots who have taken the road to nowhere. It’s the whole ‘Showgirls’ thing all over again, with people apparently not even noticing it’s a parody and mistaking the supposed shallowness of the script for their own. The “wonderful yet painfully redundant soundtrack does its folk/mariachi best to make a fake Judy Collins and the Tijuana Brass upstage Harold and Maude’s Cat Stevens and the half-a-jillion rock stars propping up Easy Rider”, according to Skipp. What it exactly means I’m not even sure of, as my mind usually starts breaking down at the sight of so much condescending cleverness, but in any case would only make sense if the film were really so purely sincere as Skipp sincerely seems to think it is. Things change considerably the moment you start reading it as a parody, which in fact makes all his ‘criticism’ irrelevant. Because it would only leave the ‘committed’ performances of the actors, which is basically a given for films of this budget, and in any case to critique it for this can only be possible when you use that imperialistic yardstick I referred to earlier.

So with all these hilariously bad facets of this movie suddenly vanishing like snow in the Israeli desert, I have to wonder aloud what is to be gained by all this condescension and why this film is a ‘glorious disaster’? Because to me, even though it may be technically rough around the edges, it’s decidedly assured from start to finish. At the ending the two couples are even color-matched, which admittedly is nothing but a small detail but does point toward the fact Sefer did have at least some inkling of what he was doing instead of being the well-intentioned but blind fool Skipp makes him out to be. It has all the emptiness and desperation of the hippie experience nailed and makes its point through what may seem like broad allegory, but which is apparently still too subtle for some to get its finer points. What is ironic in this respect, is that John Skipp falls into the same trap as the hippies he can laugh so safely at, as they are both unable to extricate themselves from the domination of Western ideology: the hippies think they can escape society only to be confronted by their own emptiness, while Skipp also attempts a vanishing act with similar results by trying to hide behind laughter only to expose his own blindness. He laughs at Sefer and his film and chides it for only meaning well, but his arrogance has blinded him for the fact it’s much more profound than Skipp seems to realize. And if John Skipp would mean well, I suppose he could be forgiven. But can condescension ever be meant well?  

An American Hippie In Israel (Limited Edition/Blu-ray/DVD Combo-3 Disc Set)

15. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde (Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, 2003)

Even though I usually refrain from basing my reviews directly onto the negative criticism of others, there are those moments when the opportunity is just too good to pass up. It’s not that I like focusing on the negative, far from it in fact, but when I feel the need to throw my hands in the air out of sheer desperation when reading one of those reviews, I know there’s something fundamentally wrong. The funny thing is that they take me by surprise time and again, although by now I should clearly know better: I’ve read so many baffling reviews in my life that I should be able to somewhat accurately predict the usual responses, but to no avail. Perhaps I’m just really naïve in all this, always hoping that people are able to move beyond those stereotypical reactions, which then means that I have to swallow the bitter pill of disappointment every time. I mean, obviously, a film that’s called ‘Legally Blonde 2’ has as much chance of getting ahead in this world as some poor kid born in the slums of Mexico City, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to read some negative reviews. Yet there I was again, throwing those hands into the air after seeing the film and then reading this review  by Casey Broadwater, as if it really was the first time for me. I suppose I could get behind the heavy criticism if it would make some sense or if the reviewer would make some good points, but since that’s not the case I feel obliged to come to the rescue of this cute little movie.

Some people will probably be freaked out for even suggesting this, but yes, I truly believe both 'Legally Blonde' is entirely compatible with the deep ecology movement that hopefully will bring about the necessary changes that will secure a viable future for our planet. Now before you say, “Elle Woods as deep ecology environmentalist?!” - please let me explain. The whole movement is based upon two main principles: harmony and diversity. To use the words of Mary Evelyn Tucker and Brian Swimme:

“In the midst of these formidable challenges, in an era that Paul Crutzen has dubbed the Anthropocene, we are being called to the next stage of evolutionary history. This new era requires a change of consciousness and values – an expansion of our worldviews and ethics. The evolutionary life impulse moves us forward from viewing ourselves as isolated individuals and competing nation states to realizing our collective presence as a species with a common origin story and shared destiny.  The human community has the capacity now to realize our intrinsic unity in the midst of enormous diversity.”

The last line could easily serve as a tagline for 'Legally Blonde 2', as Elle Woods is all about harmony and diversity. Her unusual sensitivity to her environment is a direct testament to the kind of harmony that has unfortunately become quite rare in modern society. She molds everything around her to suit her peculiar vision, which is obviously more than mere materialistic vanity. In the beginning Luke Wilson asks her, “You've customized my ring, again”? This alone would of course be nothing more than just a detail, were it not for the fact it's part of an intricate network that points to a much bigger vision than just that one detail would suggest. In the first movie, she uses scented paper in her law study, which she explains as 'it gives it a little bit extra, don't you think'? - a joke that gets carried over to the sequel. Listing all the customizations that Elle applies to her direct environment could take a whole essay on itself, as the writers of both movies clearly delight in inserting them in every nook and cranny. So let's just suffice it to say that the moment she moves in her Washington office, she immediately proceeds to make her whole desk pink – of course much to the chagrin of her direct colleagues and probably half of the viewers also. But it's much more than just a joke, it's absolutely essential to the central vision of both the movies, as it acknowledges the influence our direct environments have on our well-being. In Eastern lingo it would be termed Feng Shui, but it just as much applies to our Western sensibilities as well: everyone, whether they are aware or not, responds to his environment psychologically and emotionally, so it would only make sense that it's something that's taught in schools all around the world. Yet, it isn't. In fact, one could easily say it is one of the most overlooked aspects of modern Western society. Chellis Glendinning relates a story in one of her books in which she visited a modern high-tech research lab where a bunch of absurdly intelligent scientists were working together to produce something brilliant. As she was given a tour of the compound, she was horrified to learn that nobody had taken the effort to actually decorate the whole thing. It was just a bunch of computers thrown together with not even a single plant or anything that would make it look even remotely appealing or human. When she quizzed her tour guide about this, he apparently looked at her as if she came from Mars, as if asking such a question was exceedingly absurd. Indeed, the whole issue may seem extraordinarily trivial to some, especially when it concerns such an 'important' issue as scientific discovery. But isn't is really frightening to contemplate that such brilliant minds could be so insensitive to their immediate surroundings, as if they were somehow immune to their influences? It is precisely this kind of split between intellect and emotion that the deep ecology movement is fighting, because it is exactly this kind of insensitivity to our surroundings that has enabled mankind to treat Mother Earth in such horrible ways without feeling any guilt about it. If people would really care about their immediate environment they could not bear to see it destroyed so systematically because mature, healthy people simply can't bear to see things they care about treated so badly. It is because of this, that we as a species need to re-learn our instinctive connectedness to everything around us and one of the ways to accomplish this, is developing any kind of awareness of our direct surroundings. And this is exactly what Elle Woods does in both movies: she cultivates an extreme sensitivity to all things around her. It could of course be argued her dedication to it is somewhat extreme, which is only normal since 'Legally Blonde 2' is clearly a satire. But besides this, if only a little bit of her sensitivity would rub off on the average viewer, we would already be on our way toward a more healthy relationship to all that's around us.

Not only does Elle’s pink decoration of her desk point to her inherent harmony, it also signifies the diversity that she represents, with diversity being the second pillar deep ecology is based on. Nature has blessed us with an amazing variety of species that’s important for its own sake. Because surely, one of the most wonderful things about this earth lies in that diversity, in the differences that exist between a cat and a whale or between a tree and a lion. But this diversity is also there of course in the differences between the seasons, or between the divergent character traits in different people. It should stand to reason we would do everything in our power to preserve and celebrate this diversity, but we’re doing our utmost best to annihilate it instead. Every day, hundreds of species go extinct and whole eco systems disappear forever. Scientists have confirmed that right now we’re in the middle of the sixth period of extinction, with the last one occurring when the dinosaurs went extinct. But still precious few people seem to care about this, because we apparently still care more about financial gain than diversity. But it’s not just the wanton destruction of nature that robs us of our natural diversity, our whole culture is being homogenized: the same commercials and programs are transmitted on TV all over the world on a daily basis, all bringing the same message and thereby creating one giant world culture where differences between indigenous cultures become increasingly smaller. The same products and companies pop up all over the world and insure the domination of the Industrialist-technology economies of the West. And this is surely the most subversive aspect of ‘Legally Blonde’, as it takes the extreme outwashes of this kind of homogenized consumerism and gleefully turns it on its head. Elle Woods uses the very weapons Western society has given her to change the system from within. By the simple virtue of her consumer extremism, she becomes a direct threat to it as she breaks away from the suffocating molds that she’s supposed to remain in. 

Her very presence is like a fresh wind everywhere she goes, which is clearly emphasized so many times, already because of her love for pink outfits that contrast markedly with the usual dress codes. She uses her particular gifts to blow the fossilized ways of behavior and action wide open, which is exactly what deep ecology needs now. It’s time to acknowledge that the technological carrot that has been used to lure us into the industrial society, that would free ourselves from labor and toil has not lived up to its promise and never will. Our society has failed. The model of economic growth is quite simply ludicrous, as economies simply cannot keep on growing since we live on a finite earth. Earth’s resources are almost exhausted and the entire planet has almost reached a breaking point so it’s about time we woke up from our technological dream and smell the coffee. A profound change in our ways of thinking and living is needed now. As John Stanley & David Loy put it:

“The challenge is to create a new story that brings together the best of science with the best of the non-dual spiritual traditions – Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Sufism and other mystical traditions. By looking deeper than the duality of a God who created the universe, deeper than the duality of a nirvana to which we can escape from earthly samsara, and deeper than the duality of scientific materialism, we recognize that the universe is a self-aware creative process. This pure creative potentiality is in us too. It can awaken and free itself from the limiting identities and games of the human condition.”

If these last two lines don’t describe Elle Woods to perfection, I don’t know what will, as her whole character is creative potentiality made celluloid flesh. When she decides to get married, she tells her husband to be they have to invite everyone that matters to them. But when pondering this, she suddenly realizes she doesn’t even know who the mother of her stray Chihuahua dog is – oh no! Exhibiting the kind of dedication to other than human life forms that’s crucial to all ecological feeling, she proceeds undaunted to hire a private detective to find the mother of her dog. When she’s directed to a facility named V.E.R.S.A.C.E. she automatically assumes finding the dog won’t be a problem now as she’s in proud possession of a Versace VIP card as she has shopped with the firm on five continents. But to her horror she discovers that this is quite a different animal, as V.E.R.S.A.C.E stands for ‘Veterinary Experimentation Research Science And Critter Exploitation’ – in other words a company that uses dogs for make-up experiments and tests. When she gets fired from her law firm for even suggesting of taking on a case that fights the cruel treatment of animals (“I think you're confusing the right thing and the law”, she’s told), she decides to go to Washington in order to pass a bill that prevents such practices. Here of course, she’s yet again quite a unique and disruptive influence by her very presence. When she suggests something like the Snap Cup to boost morale, she’s told “to follow the protocol, it worked for 200 years, okay”?

And that’s the problem, right there. Protocol has emphatically not worked for 200 years, since it has gotten us nowhere except to the brink of annihilation. By insisting on doing everything the ‘Elle Woods way’, she is the exact “creative potentiality that can awaken and free itself from the limiting identities and games of the human condition”. She is the fresh voice this world needs now to awaken our species out of this horrible nightmare of individualism and people blindly following protocol. Of course she is pitted against a dyed in the wool woman who scoffs at her alternative vision and insists on doing things ‘the Washington way’. Following this logic, this woman painstakingly manages to secure an appointment with a congressman several weeks later. The Elle Woods way works significantly better though, as she manages to come into personal contact with the man himself and gets to see him that same day. Now some people will probably decry all this as highly improbable and unrealistic but that would be missing the point completely. Because subscribing to the Washington/realistic way would already be a kind of defeat in itself, as it would only recognize the tried and true ways without realizing these ways have failed us in the first place. Our conventional ways of behavior are clearly not enough to get our planet back on track again and the legal channels take too much time anyway, time which we simply do not have. So a new perspective is needed, one that breaks away from our usual channels that would enable us to bring about the chance of our mindset that’s needed. There’s a lot of people out there who claim that biological food or ecological ways of living don’t really help as it is already to late to change the system, but that’s defeatist in the extreme. Besides it’s not that we really have a choice anyway, because as Terence McKenna once said ‘go green or die’. 

Besides the mere fact it’s an alternate lens that show a new light on our old ways, the Elle Woods Way has another, highly welcome, side to it: the fact that she’s able to channel her particular gifts to serve a larger good – she has a special kind of intelligence, which comes directly from her peculiar viewpoint. In the first movie, the daughter of Raquel Welch is unmasked because she claims to have been in the shower even though she also said she had done her hair just before. Similarly, Sally Fields in the second part is discovered as a liar because she claims she had a facial and breaks the “rule of a 24-hour window between a facial and any major social occasion”. In both instances, Elle is able to detect things that would go unnoticed my most, because of her insane knowledge of all things that have to do with make-up. But not only is she able to use her own strengths, she also exceptionally good at recognizing that which is good in other people. Here she is of course well-served by her immense sensitivity to all that’s around her, as she’s constantly praising people about things they themselves were often not even aware of. For instance one of her girlfriends, who’s carried over from the first part, is obviously not the sharpest knife in the kitchen block, which according to conventional thinking would mean she would be useless in the political machine of Hollywood. But she is very good at doing hair and by giving away hair treatments for free, she is able to secure some of the necessary votes for the passing of their bill. Again, this may not be realistic in any way, but first of all a satire is not supposed to be realistic and secondly it really doesn’t matter in the end. Because everyone has got to do his or her part, no matter how small or insignificant it may look as we are all part of the bigger whole. 

What Elle Woods is so adept in then, is in realizing “our intrinsic unity in the midst of enormous diversity” that Tucker and Swimme spoke of. She embraces everybody who’s sympathetic to her cause, no matter what background, sexual orientation, skill or ethnic background. She’s just as easily at home with her lawyer husband as she is with her air-headed girlfriends and does in fact manage to forge a marvelous unity out of all those diverse influences. Early in the movie, she strikes up an unlikely alliance with the doorman Sid Post, who teaches her some of the finer intricacies of Washington politics. But far from using him only in a narcissistic, egocentric manner she openly acknowledges the importance of his part when she says she really wouldn’t know what she would do without him. This is really crucial to the movie as a whole, because despite her own ingenuity and almost unlimited energy, there are several moments in both movies when she is at the end of her rope in the face of so much hostility. And it is always other people who help her through these moments, establishing a wonderful network of interdependency that, combined with her open embracing of diversity, could serve as a virtual model for any healthy eco-system. That’s why Casey Broadwater’s remark following remark is so baffling:

“Yes, it has a you can do it if you set your mind to it moral, but Elle Woods, minus her enthusiasm and quitters-never-win spirit, makes an absurd role model, one that perpetuates too many gender clichés to count. If you told me Legally Blond 2 was made by virulent misogynists bent on making women look ridiculous, I'd almost believe you”.

What’s absurd about a role model like Elle Woods is beyond me and how it perpetuates gender clichés I’d very much like to know. The only way to see Elle as an absurd role model would be to take her entirely at face value without recognizing any of the deeper aspects of her character and her direct kinship to the models of nature. I hope now that describing an obviously plastic fantastic kind of creature like Elle Woods in terms of nature, may not nearly be as far-fetched as it may initially seemed. I would indeed argue this is the greatest accomplishment of both movies as a whole, to be able to make such a conceit not only believable but even logical. Because when I describe the Elle Woods Way as being quite identical to the ways of Nature itself, this would automatically also mean that her way has much in common with the ways of the indigenous people who have been living in close proximity to nature for millions of years and of which some of them are still living this way. One of the general arguments of the deep ecology movement, and one that I also firmly believe in, is what Terence McKenna called the ‘Archaic Revival’, by which is meant that we should somehow find a way to model our ways of life just like primal people did and some still do. But as with the Elle Woods character, quite a lot of people can only interpret this in the most literal way, and take it to mean we should all give up everything, leave our houses and live in nature again – obviously such a thing is not only undesirable, it’s even impossible. But what is very much possible is to combine the best of both worlds: technology has gotten us into this mess and it is also capable of getting us out of it again. This will not be easy of course, but all that is required is the willpower and the mindset to do it and ‘Legally Blonde’ does point the way. Both movies rather slyly suggest it is possible to go back to some primal truths, not by going back to nature but by going through the opposite route of materialism and consumerism instead. That even by falling prey to the most extreme symptoms of our consumer society, we can actually gain some kind of special intelligence that will enable us to see clear enough to make change possible. Elle Woods is all about change, ‘don't fight the fabric, you change it’ is her motivation to go to Washington. Her final pep speech is not so thinly disguised call to arms of ecological awareness:

“I know what you're thinking. Who is this girl? And what could this simple, small-town girl from Bel Air have to say to all of us? Well, I'll tell you. It's about something that's bigger than me, or any single act of legislation. This is about a matter that should be of the highest importance to every American: my hair.

You see, there's this salon in Beverly Hills. It's really fancy and beautiful. But it's impossible to get an appointment. Unless you're Julia Roberts, forget it. but one day they called me. They had an opening. So I was gonna finally get the chance to sit in one of those sacred beauty chairs. I was so excited. Then, the colorist gave me Brassy Brigitte instead of Harlow Honey. The shampoo girl washed my hair with spiral perm solution intead of color-intensive moisturizing conditioning shampoo. Finally, the stylist... gave me a bob. With bangs. Suffice it to say, it was just wrong. All wrong. For me, you know? First I was angry. And then I realized my anger was completely misdirected. I mean, this wasn't the salon's fault. I had sat there and witnessed this injustice and I had just let it happen. I didn't get involved in the process. I forgot to use my voice. I forgot to believe in myself. But now I know better. I know that one honest voice can be louder than a crowd. I know that if we lose our voice, or if we let those who speak on our behalf compromise our voice, well, then this country is in for a really bad hair-cut”.

It’s one of the supreme ways in which Elle is able to use her unique gifts for the greater good, as she turns the problem of her hair into awareness, plain and simple. “She had just let it happen”. “She didn’t get involved in the process” – could the parallels with our current destruction of the earth and the apathy of most people to it be any clearer? 

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde [Blu-ray]