Monster Mash Blogathon: It Came from Outer Space (1953)

I was having a discussion a few weeks ago with a friend of mine about Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). For a long time, The Day the Earth Stood Still was the touchstone for "thinking man's" sci-fi, and it's not hard to see why: it's sober, cerebral, and significantly lacking in bug-eyed monsters. Its plea for peace, too, is a refreshing change of pace for Cold War sci fi. But over the last ten years or so, I've kind of fallen out of love with that movie. The political undertones kind of bother me. Klatuu (Michael Rennie) strikes me as a neo-con alien, who is pursuing an intergalactic version of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. He brings "peace" with an ultimatum and a big goddamn stick. If I squint, I see the same kind of xenophobia in this film as I do in other fifties sci fi film, except for the fact that the movie has cast human beings in the role of monster. I'm also uncomfortable with the veiled religious allegory that casts Klatuu as a messianic figure, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

I find that I much prefer Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953) as a paragon of "thinking" 50s sci fi.

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Netflix Roulette: Night of the Comet (1984)

I'm not ashamed to admit that when I saw the movie the roulette wheel spun up for me this week, I couldn't resist smiling. Thom Eberhardt's ebullient Night of the Comet (1984) is a film I remember fondly. I remember seeing it when it was in theaters in a crackerbox twin theater in a town in podunk, Missouri, back when independent movies were still likely to be interesting genre efforts like The Terminator or The Hidden or crap product from Cannon Films like Tomboy and Avenging Angel. That's all gone now, and movies like Night of the Comet don't show up at the multiplexes anymore. Or if they do, they show up as bloated remakes. Blech.

Night of the Comet is the living end of the "last man on earth" subgenre, what you might get if I Am Legend were filtered through a John Hughes movie. Instead of hardboiled survivor types getting on with the business of, well, surviving, the heroines of this movie are a couple of self-reliant teenage girls whose first instinct upon arriving at the end of the world is to go shopping at the mall. Their main story conflict isn't survival, but who gets to "make it" with the last guy on earth. It's not a film that takes its subgenre seriously, though it never really mocks the subgenre, either. It's a lot more fun than many another more stomach-churning zombie film.

At the very least, it's a time capsule, an effect heightened by the film's long absence from home video during the 1990s and early 2000s. The cultural signifiers of the Reagan era are all in the foreground, from the big hair and shoulder-padded fashions to the hints of illegal wars in Central America to the conspicuous consumption to the empty synth pop of the post-New Wave to an emphasis on video games. Having played second fiddle to the master gamer Lance Guest in The Last Starfighter, Catherine Mary Stewart graduates to the role herself. The whole thing has an ersatz feel to it appropriate to its time. Lending the film some gravitas--if you want to call it that--is Mary Woronov, whose character suggests a different kind of survivor: a survivor of the B-movies of the 1970s. She projects a kind of tired decadence the likes of which is completely alien to our duo of Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney. It's a nice contrast.

The film's not without its faults, of course. After a while, the fact that the lights are all still on and that the roads are clear starts to strain the audience's credibility. For that matter, the degeneration of the partially exposed victims of the comet creates some convenient plot turns (as well as an excuse for some zombies). On the whole, though, it makes the best of its modest resources. Its portrait of an abandoned Los Angeles is certainly creepy and indelible, while its hand-crafted make-up effects are as convincing as they have to be.

This is a movie that doesn't think too hard about the nuts and bolts of the Apocalypse. In this film's universe, the machine still works even after people are removed. It would be interesting to see what these characters do once the machine stops, but the film elides this at the end, when our sister heroines argue about crossing against the light. Civilization, the movie says, is in their hands and rather than be cynical about it, it's kind of hopeful. As the last line of the movie suggests: "Bitchin' isn't it."

Random, Drug-fueled Rambling

This week has been a dead loss for me. I've watched a lot of stuff, but most of it comes through in fragments. I've been laid up by a leg injury, and the pain meds tend to fracture my attention. I once watched Solaris while doped up on codeine and vaguely delirious with pneumonia, and I won't make that mistake ever again. "Nothing challenging," was my mission this week. I had to abandon Oliver Assayas's excellent and propulsive Carlos when I realized that the girlfriend character had changed somewhere along the line and I failed to notice it. I'll get back to it when I can actually pay attention to the entire through-line of the narrative. I also watched various television things, from the X-Men Evolution cartoon to the pilot episodes of Twin Peaks (also probably a mistake), Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Enterprise. In my current state, Star Trek: Enterprise trumps the hell out of Next Gen. I was surprised at how good that opening episode was, crappy theme song and all. X-Men Evolution, on the other hand, was just what I needed. The episodes were short, and didn't insult my intelligence. They actually managed to capture the charm and broad themes of the classic X-Men comics without ever going near the Dark Phoenix story. Bully for them. Between this and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Marvel appears to be catching up to DC's animated output. It was only a matter of time, I suppose.

One thing that did engage my attention was Zombie Girl: The Movie (2009, directed by Justin Johnson, Aaron Marshall, and Erik Mauck), which documents the efforts of a 12 year old girl in Austin, TX, to make a feature-length zombie movie. The girl, Emily Hagins, has the full support of her parents and her mom is her best ally in the project, but over the course of the movie, you begin to see the strain between Emily and her mom. It's a fascinating relationship, though it's one that tends to drag the film down a little in its third act. What carries the movie through is the sheer "Let's Put On a Show!" moxie of Emily and her friends. She has the drive to make the movie and, by golly, she does. It takes her two years, but when she premiers the movie at Austin's Alamo Drafthouse, it's cause for celebration. Hagins, who is 18 now, has made a couple of other films since Pathogen, and I'm kind of curious to see them. This is the movie that Super 8 probably should have been, but that's another matter entirely...

Two-Faced Lovers

I have to admit that I don't really understand all of Luis Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), and that may be the point. It's a deep mystery. I think this is appropriate, actually, because desire and love and obssession--which are things I can say with some assurance by the movie itself that the movie is about--are all the kinds of deeply mysterious noumena we all keep locked up inside of us that can never be explained to others. Perhaps the film's best joke is that its main narrative consists of a man trying to explain it to others. I'd like to say that he's an unreliable narrator, that his essential untrustworthiness is why the movie plays the epistemological games that it plays, but that supposition isn't supported by the film.

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Face to Face

This originally appeared in another form on another now-defunct blog back in 2010.

So, I feel kind of embarrassed that I clicked on the news links for pictures of the first successful full face transplant last week. I'm not entirely sure why I did it. It's more complicated than just the attraction of a freakshow--not that I think the man who received it is a freak, just that some of the people who look at him may be doing so for the same reason people used to go to sideshows. This is part of why I'm embarrassed to admit that I clicked the link. But not all of it.

I'm fascinated by plastic surgeries. I've spent hours looking at the before and after pictures of trans people who have received facial feminization surgeries. I've even had consults myself. FFS is kind of a raw nerve for me. On the one hand, I don't actually think I need it. On the other, I like the idea that it would reduce the chances of random people identifying me as trans. There are times when I'm sure that this is the crazy part of my brain talking, because I know perfectly well that I look fine. If you saw me on the street, you probably wouldn't think twice. Be that as it may, when I look in the mirror every morning, I see the male face I wore for a couple of decades staring back at me. I don't know that bankrupting myself on FFS would even change that perception for me. It's all in my head, but the impulse remains.

All of which got me thinking about Eyes Without a Face, the great 1960 French movie about a mad plastic surgeon who kidnaps and murders women to harvest their faces in a vain attempt to restore his own daughter's ruined face, and how it completely demolishes the beauty myth as an instrument of patriarchy. The movie portrays an attempt to enforce a standard of beauty by force. The recipient of our mad doctor's radical treatments never asked for them. At the end of the movie, she retaliates against her oppressors and wanders into the night.

It goes without saying that Eyes Without a Face is a ghastly movie if you're even a little bit squeamish. It's notorious for its scenes of surgical gore, expertly faked. It looks real and it's filmed with a striking clinical clarity and dispassion. It's less obvious that this is a feminist movie, a fact obscured a bit by the outrageous violence perpetrated against women in it. But it is. It's an indictment of what patriarchy values in women: beauty and obedience. During most of the film, Christiane Genessier, Edith Scob's character, wanders through her father's palatial mansion with a featureless mask. To the world, she's dead. The combination of this plot point and the visual of the mask suggests that a woman without beauty is a woman without identity. There are persistent images of animals in cages--especially birds--that further suggest that Christiane is imprisoned by her father's obsession and that her function is decorative, like a songbird. The actual depiction of Christiane's disfigurement suggests the horror patriarchy feels for the physical bodies of women, though it's greatly exaggerated for effect. Also built into the fabric of the film is the doctor's accomplice, a nurse played by Alida Valli. Her character is a stand-in for the way that patriarchy co-opts women themselves as enforcers of unrealistic beauty standards.

Trans women feel that enforcement more keenly than most, I think. We're sometimes held to an impossible standard relative to cis women in order to even be accepted as women, so I feel for Christiane Genessier, because she's an avatar for anyone who submits to the surgeon's knife in order to have her identity as a woman, or even as a person, validated.

Baboons and Ninjas

So I did the Twitter bad movie live event last night, and it was fun. I had to bow out of the third movie because my dogs needed walking and I was nodding off during the second film of the trio. The first two, however, are all kinds of bad movie awesome.

The first film of the night was a James Bond rip-off from 1987 called The Order of the Black Eagle, directed by Worth Keeter. Keeter, it should be noted, has made a career out of directing Power Rangers projects, and this movie is a harbinger of that career. As a bad movie, this one doesn't offer the usual bad movie pleasures of excessive blood and boobs, which is vaguely disappointing, but this offers up a variety of batshit that's all uniquely its own.

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Blogorama Part V

Short notice on this one, but I'm doing the Netflix Instant Bad Movie Marathon on Twitter tomorrow night, hosted by Mr. Gable over at Mr. Gable's Reality. The movies we'll be liveblogging are The Order of the Black Eagle, Mafia vs. Ninja, and Trespassers. This one promises to bring the pain. If you want to follow along, or, god help you, participate, the hashtag will be #badnetflix. I'm @doctor_morbius, but y'all knew that already, right?

Ungendered*: Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. A Dialogue

This was originally published a couple of years ago on another blog. I still haven't gotten around to seeing the film again.

So, I finally got a round to watching Fassbinder's A Year of 13 Moons. It was recommended to me on the IMDB's Classics Board earlier this spring after I was outed as a transsexual. Well, not recommended, per se, but I was asked what I thought of it. Here, many months later, is the conversation I've been having about it. The asterisk in the title of this post? To remind me to give apologies to Julia Serano.

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My initial, knee-jerk reaction:

I'm still sorting out my reaction to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year With 13 Moons (1978). It's been a while since I was more conflicted over a movie. On the one hand, the cineaste in me recognizes a keen cinematic intelligence behind the film. But another part of me, the transsexual who is completely fed up with the way transsexuals are depicted by cisgender media, is completely appalled by it. I mean, DEEPLY offended by it. She wants to take the cineaste part of my mind, tie her to a chair and make her watch Jess Franco movies A Clockwork Orange-style as penance for even suggesting that this is a worthwhile movie. Well, you can see my dilemma. I'm sure I'll have a LOT more to say about this when I actually sit down to write an in-depth analysis. I'm going to watch it again, first. But for now, I have this to say. First: while it's striking from both a cinematic and symbolic standpoint, this film's tour of a meat packing plant is probably what most pissed me off. The suggestion is that our heroine--if you can call her that, rather than "our object of pity"--is a piece of meat, not a human being, mutilated by her desires and ultimately disposable. That the film ends the way that it does reinforces this idea. Frankly, this sucks on so many levels that it has an event horizon. Second: I can see this film's influence on European cinema's depictions of transsexualism ever since (which is NOT a good thing). Three: when I was sorting through critical reactions to the film, I stumbled across Ed Gonzalez's review of the film for Slant. I rarely agree with Gonzalez under the best of times, but he's never written a review that actually offended me before: from his occasional tendency to put the words "she" and "her" in quotation marks, to his egregious use of the phrase "she-male" (which is more or less equivalent to the "N" word when you're talking about trans people), to his condescending sympathy with our object of pity, this is the work of someone who has bought in to the kinds false truths Fassbinder arrives at by setting up a false set of conditions under which to examine his characters.

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Labor Movements

I'm not entirely sure how to take Horrible Bosses (2011, directed by Seth Gordon). It's a sterling example of a film that sets out to offend every sensibility (and succeeds) in the name of comedy. I've maintained for years that the only yardstick for comedies is the question, "Is this funny?" Obviously, this is subjective. I'll get this out of the way right now, then: I laughed my ass off at Horrible Bosses. So, yeah, it's funny. End of story, right? Right?

Well, it's not as cut and dried as that, because even though it's intentionally offensive, it's also unintentionally offensive. I say I laughed, and I did, but I also squirmed a bit in my seat, and I feel a LOT conflicted about laughing at it. Dirty about it, actually. There's an old joke: Q: "How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" A: "THAT'S NOT FUNNY!" I so don't want to be that person. I don't. But, y'know, I find myself drifting that way.

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Hey, kids! Comics!

Well, in keeping with yesterday's vow to colonize this blog with comics and with the additional promise to recycle old material, here's a comic strip I did last year for another blog. Enjoy.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Womanthology Edition

Please pardon this interruption of my usual movie-review format, but I'm participating in Heroic: A Womanthology, a HUGE comics anthology, created entirely by women. The line-up for this includes some completely awesome artists and writers, including Gail Simone, Devin Grayson, Ming Doyle, Stephanie Buscema, Lauren Montgomery, Colleen Doran, and Ann Nocenti, as well as unpublished creators like your's truly. Believe me, the thought of appearing in a comics anthology with the likes of Gail Simone and Colleen Doran has me more than a little bit starstruck. If all goes to plan, then the whole thing will be published by IDW. More than that, this is a charity book, with the proceeds going to the Global Giving Foundation. For more information on the entire project, visit our web page. And take a look at the awesome promo video put together by the project founder, Renae De Liz:

There's a catch, though: we need to raise the printing bill. That's where Kickstarter comes in. In order to print the book, we need to come up with $25,000, at a bare minimum. More than that would be great. There are a ton of awesome incentives, including art, books, and other goodies. So if you want to see this project come to fruition, please become a backer. I don't like to beg, but, hell, this is worth it.

On a more personal level, participation in this project has rekindles my (relatively) dormant love of comics and cartooning. I've always been painfully shy about posting my own work (though I've gotten over that in recent years thanks to some profound changes in my life). This is a step into the broader comics community for me. It's the kick in the ass that will get me back to the drawing table. Don't be surprised if comics begin to colonize a wing of Stately Krell Manor. I'm excited beyond belief by this project, and I hope to share my enthusiasm in the coming months.

Terrorist Chic

I'm going into low content mode for a while. I'll be reprinting some short movie reviews from another, long defunct blog, including this mathom from 2005.

So what makes a suicide bomber do what they do anyway? That's a question at the heart of The Terrorist (1999, directed by Santosh Sivan) a film that follows the last week in the life of a suicide bomber. It examines both the pressures that have made her what she is, and the countervailing pull of basic humanity. It makes for a startling drama. On the one hand are her militant handlers, all of whom are intent on easing her into her role as a fanatical assassin. On the other hand is the old man who owns the house where she is staying until her appointed time. The old man is the voice of reason and conscience in the film, the face of decency and good will towards fellow human beings. More of the events of the movie I will not describe, because it's best for a first-time viewer to know nothing more, but I will state that it's fascinating to watch a narrative arc in which every moral issue starts as a crystal clear, black and white certainty, only to dissolve into a quagmire of moral ambiguity. Most movies about assassins make the audience complicit in their crimes. This one is quite the opposite.

On the whole, the film functions as an allegory for the terrorist impulse: there is no specific ideology espoused by the film or its terrorists, nor does the film specify a geographical location. We can make some assumptions, though. The director, Santosh Sivan is from India (though this film is very far indeed from standard Bollywood cinema). The film was shot in Sri Lanka (which has been embroiled off and on in a long civil war). The details of the plot resemble the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. These details are provocative, but the film resists them, much to its benefit. In the years since this film was made, the reticence of the filmmakers has worked a change on the film's relevance. As more and more terrorists take up their various causes, this film's terrorist becomes something of an everywoman. As a result, it's a film we NEED more than ever.

Netflix Roulette: It's Alive (2008)

I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to remakes. As I'm fond of telling people, the Bogart/Huston version of The Maltese Falcon is the third screen version of that story within a ten year period. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get it right. Which, by the way, is why filmmakers are better off rethinking bad movies rather than classics. Of course, this line of thinking presupposes that the remake improves on the original. The nature of contemporary remakes means that the actual quality of the movie is an afterthought.

Here's the thing about Larry Cohen's original version of It's Alive: it's ridiculous. It's a film that attempts to exploit the unease that pregnancy generates for new parents. It exploits the fear that something is wrong with a newborn child. It's the product of the thalidomide tragedy. The method it uses to examine this unease is a mutant killer baby. This is it:

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More Youth Misspent

I was having a conversation about Super 8 (2011, directed by J.J. Abrams) last night with a friend of mine who didn't much like it. She gave as one of her reasons the fact that the story of the kids who are making a movie when a monster escapes in their town has no connection whatsoever to the story of the monster itself. She has a point. The kids in this film have no agency of their own. The story--much as it pretends otherwise--is NOT about them. They are inconsequential to what happens in the movie. For the most part, they're a point of view rather than actual protagonists, and their actions ultimately do not direct the course of the movie at all. My friend also complained that J. J. Abrams has the dream job of coming up with monsters and the Smoke Monster in Lost, the monster in Cloverfield, and THIS monster are the best he can come up with? Seriously? As I say, she didn't like this movie, but I kinda do, in spite of all of this.

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15 Questions

I'm suffering a little from blog fatigue right now. Since last September, when I really started to ramp up my efforts here, I've been on kind of a tear and it's starting to burn me out. I didn't even write about all of the queer films I saw this month. There are three that I chose to leave be, mainly because all I had to say about them was that they starred cute boys with a certain idealized "look" and what does that say about the gay male gaze? I never got around to writing my exegesis of gender construction in Looney Tunes, either, though I may come back to that in the future because I've actually done a lot of the preliminary legwork on that. It's a matter of will at this point, and I don't have the will to do the rest. I've also had some real-world things rearing up to bite me in the ass.

So I need to pause for a bit to catch my breath. As a stopgap, I thought I'd answer a movie meme I've seen rattling around the blogosphere. I first saw this over at The Girl with the White Parasol (and pay Rachel a visit, she's a terrific blogger), but I've seen it elsewhere, too. It's fifteen questions about my movie habits. So without further ado...

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Martyr Complex

One of the things that struck me as I watched the opening scenes of Derek Jarman's Sebastiane (1976) was how closely both it, and through its influence, subsequent gay cinema resembles porn. I mean, the opening pantomime for the pleasure of the court of the Roman emperor, Diocletian, is an art house version of a bukkake reel, what you might get if Fellini decided to film a reel for the gay bathhouse rough trade. And it doesn't change much when it focuses its attention on its (mostly nude) male cast of exiled soldiers a few minutes later. It films their bodies in long, lingering idylls. These are the same kinds of longueurs one finds in any given Emmanuel movie, complete with the slow motion splashing of water and the frequent voyeurs watching the action. Jarman throws in some kink, too, with several flogging scenes.

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The Krell Labs Podcast! Episode 1: Interview with a Queer Pornographer

This is a new experiment here at Stately Krell Labs. It's a podcast! The first episode interviews transgender activist and feminist pornographer Tobi Hill-Meyer, who makes and distributes sex-positive, trans-positive feminist porn through her company, Handbasket Productions. She's also a frequent contributor to the GLBT blog, The Bilerico Project. In the interview, we talk about the conventions of porn, especially as it relates to the trans and feminist communities and we talk about the practical elements of DIY filmmaking.

Hopefully, I'll make more of these. So without further ado, on with the show:

Crazy for trying...

The title of Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) pulls double duty. It's most obviously a reference to the Patsy Cline/Willie Nelson song, which finds multiple iterations on the film's soundtrack. The way it's punctuated, though, indicates that it's an acronym, consisting of the first letters of the names of the five brothers whom the movie is about. They are: Christian, Raymond, Antoine, Zach, and Yvan. The film itself is primarily interested in only two of the brothers: Raymond (Pierre-Luc Brillant), a drugged out, burned out fuck-up, and especially Zach (Marc-André Grondin), who struggles from early childhood with his sexuality, and with their father, Gervaise (Michel Côté). The main conflicts in the movie are fueled by Zach's denial of his own homosexuality, and by his father's intransigence when it comes to accepting anything that might be tainted with a gay brush. We experience the movie from Zach's point of view. He narrates the film, and we are privy to his vision of the world and his fantasies about how he would prefer the world to be. On a basic level, the narrative of C.R.A.Z.Y. is kind of banal. It's a queer coming of age story. It covers twenty years of Zach's life, from birth to adulthood. The relationships between Zach and his brothers and between Zach and his father follow well-trodden queer narratives. And that's fine, I guess, because what the movie lacks in narrative originality, it more than makes up for it with both its cinematic elan and its tendency to completely blow up those well worn tropes in unexpected ways.

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Run for the Shadows

A couple of weeks ago, Wyatt Weed, the filmmaker who made the promo reel for the Vincentennial, sent me a message on Facebook. He complimented my blog and asked if I reviewed small independent horror films (which, of course, I do). Let me back up a bit and talk a little about the promo reel at the Vincentennial. The premise of the reel was a ghost walk through St. Louis to the locations where Vincent Price grew up, went to school, etc. At every location, there was a ghostly manifestation of Price, culled from his films. It was well done and it fit very well with both Price's screen persona as a horror star and the celebratory nature of the festival. Wyatt clearly knew what he was doing. So we traded emails for a bit, and then his movie showed up on my doorstep last week.

The film in question is a vampire movie called Shadowland (2010), and when I saw that it was a vampire movie, I groaned a little inside. But then I perked up a bit when I saw the DVD cover because I remembered seeing a pair of prop vampire-sized bat wings from this film's cover at Contamination last year. Contamination is St. Louis's fledgling horror media convention.

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Another Mermaid

There's a statue in Copenhagen of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid, looking mournfully back out at the sea. This is it right here:

Photo credit.

This is one of the saddest pieces of art I've ever seen, based on the most bittersweet of fairy tales. Whenever I think of the lives of mid-20th Century trans people, I think of this statue for some reason. Not because I think they've suffered some irretrievable loss, mind you, but because so many other people believe this. This is an attitude that persists unto the present day. In my own life, I cannot count the number of well-meaning cisgender acquaintances who have come up to me and said: "It must have been very hard for you," with that note of condescending sympathy. Maybe the condescension is something I only hear in my head. I'm sure it's sincere, but, man, it gets old. And it's so clueless.

Copenhagen itself is where Christine Jorgensen underwent her surgery, substituting her fins for legs, and if you believe the end of the movie version of her life, The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970, directed by Irving Rapper), she suffered nothing but heartache in the bargain. The movie has that same condescending sympathy. The form of the movie--styled as a 1950s weepie--builds this into the very fabric of the narrative. And it's so earnest! Mercy, it's earnest! So much so that it barrels right through its own cluelessness. This is a combination that usually results in really bad movies, and this one, it turns out, is a howler.

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Bring Out Yer Dead!

One of the things that's really started to bother me about some horror movies is the way that they function as Christian propaganda. This is most prevalent in vampire movies, but it's not exclusive to them. The Exorcist, for one example, is one of the most cunning pieces of Catholic propaganda ever filmed. This is, of course, the nature of the beast. Most horror movies postulate a supernatural universe, so it's almost inevitable that they would turn to conventional religion as a counterweight to the forces of darkness. There is, however, a smaller subset of movies in which religion itself represents the forces of darkness. Movies about the horrors of The Inquisition, for example, or movies about sinister priests. It's a rare movie that tries to have it both ways. Such a movie is Black Death (2010, directed by Christopher Smith), in which the forces of the Church and the forces of secularism are two sides of the same rotten coin.

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Green is the Color

True story: The first time I saw a trailer for the new Green Lantern movie (2011, directed by Martin Campbell), a little girl a couple of rows behind me said to her parents: "That's not right! Green Lantern is black!" All hail the power of television, because the John Stewart iteration from Justice League is the version of the character that has had the most mass-media exposure, in spite of DC Comics' best efforts. John Stewart supposedly makes an appearance in the movie, but I didn't spot him. Perhaps as a kind of sop for going back to a whitebread Green Lantern, the movie makes room for Amanda Waller, head of DC's version of S.H.I.E.L.D., but it doesn't solve what may be a fundamental miscalculation on the part of the filmmakers if their intent is to build a franchise on a familiar character, because the Hal Jordan iteration of Green Lantern hasn't been the dominant one to the world at large for more than a decade.

I realize that I'm speaking in code. I apologize to any non-comics geeks out there. But then, this is the kind of movie that's really tailored for an audience of comics nostalgists with deep knowledge of the material. If a general audience can penetrate its mysteries, well, bully for them.

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Netflix Roulette: Bloody Mallory

The title character of Bloody Mallory (2002, directed by Julian Magnat) is a gothy anime-ish asskicking supernatural superhero whose team takes on demons and monsters. Assisting her are a statuesque transsexual named Vena Cava and a telepathic girl genius named Talking Tina. The team drives around in a hot pink hearse and dress like a cadre of cosplayers. The whole thing plays like a kids movie gone 'round the bend, or more probably like a post-modern update of a silent serial, though Mallory ain't got nothing on Irma Vep. Or Buffy, for that matter. From the description of our heroes, you can probably surmise that this is one of those "supposed to be campy" films. It's French, too, so it's shot through with a fair amount of Gallic theater of the absurd.

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More Noise about Silence

My answers to a couple of the comments on yesterday's Silence of the Lambs post seem like they deserve a post of their own. So here it is.

Mykal (of the excellent Radiation Cinema--you should seriously check it out), writes:

"Vulnavia: Wonderful analysis. I agree. Lector is a monster, pure and simple, and a great one. Thus, a horror movie. I can’t agree with your reservations about grading this film as great as I find your prism too specific, if completely valid (that is to say, it didn’t occur to me but probably should have). For my part, I reserve "great" status because I find it too easily entertaining. Hopkins himself said that Lector was one of the easiest parts he ever played. Once he got the voice, the rest was like falling off a log. It’s basically a softball waiting to get lashed out of the park. I would happily watch it anytime and never feel the slightest challenge, and there certainly isn’t a thing wrong with that. It just keeps it from reaching the upper strata.

Another great post - always challenging."

Hi, Mykal,

This is one of the reasons I try not to "rate" movies. Is The Silence of the Lambs a great movie? Absolutely. Does it have less-great things about it? Let me give you another example outside of my specific prism: After the FBI bursts into the wrong house near the end of the movie, Crawford gets that one moment where he goes "Clarice!" This moment is utterly stupid. I mean, there's nothing to give any indication that she's in any danger at that moment. This DOES establish Crawford as some kind of patriarchal "protector" who has somehow failed. It's kind of galling, actually, given the way the movie is sending Clarice out as a kind of knight errant.

The way this sequence is crosscut is interesting, too, so permit me a non-sequitur: Demme's subversion of the conventions of cinema in this sequence is brilliant. When the caption on the exterior shots says "Calumet City," and then the interior--without attribution--is in Pennsylvania, the director is having fun screwing with the audience's mind.

That being said, "perfect" movies are boring. There's nothing to write about. Give me flawed masterpieces every time.

J. Astro, who runs the Screen Grab blog, writes:

"I didn't, even as a youngster when I read the book, necessarily assume that Buffalo Bill was any sort of overall representation of the transgender set. I just viewed him as another wonderful cog in this well-crafted story. As I grew older and learned to appreciate films more on different levels, I've actually become entranced with Ted Levine's portrayal of the character and I like him more than the widely-loved Lecter.

This may be just be my mis-reading this, and if so lemme know, but it seems you kinda resent the Bill character out of the assumption that he is meant to be a scary shorthand for all transgender personalities. Did you feel the same way about Norman Bates when you watched PSYCHO? (although not strictly "transgender" by definition, Bates was the closest thing that era would've come to depicting a Bill-like character in that day)... Just curious."

Hi, Astro,

This particular objection is a quagmire for me. As I say in my second paragraph, it's one of the reasons I've held off writing about the film. There are some differences between Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill. For what it's worth, I love Ted Levine in the movie and the character is certainly indelible. But...

The transgender psychopath is a cliche, and a pretty harmful one at that. It's one of the four dominant depictions of transgender identities. The others are "the pathetic, the prostitute, and the punchline. These are collectively the four "P"s. The trans person as psycho has its origins in the Gein story, natch, and it WASN'T a cliche in Psycho, which was the first film to exploit it. And Norman doesn't necessarily "read" as transgender because the image of him in Mom drag is so patently absurd. He's not fooling anyone. I'm more troubled by the daughters of Psycho in movies like Homicidal or Dressed to Kill or Stripped to Kill, et al., because these films have a vested interest in deceiving the audience in a way that suggests that trans identities are inherently deceptive. But that's another argument. In the case of Buffalo Bill, the depiction exists in a more specific political context, which I enumerated in my post. It also does some very particular things that I chose not to write about. I'll cover some of those now:

First, it fetishizes the exterior. Bill doesn't seem trans when he's not dressing the part. It suggests that the trans identity (which, of course, the movie claims he doesn't actually have) is all about the surface. The fetishistic nature of Bill's crossdressing feeds my second point: The Silence of the Lambs sexualizes trans identities. When Bill is done up in his human-scalp wig and his frou-frou, he mouths at the camera "Would you like to fuck me?" He gets off on dressing up, and on the image of himself as a woman, and here's where the movie becomes inextricably entangled with trans identities in spite of its best intentions. Bill is exhibiting a paraphilia, and it's one that has been used to categorize transsexuals in the DSM until VERY recently. He also exhibits a condition called "autogynephilia", which is a quack science description of why transsexuals do what they do. The fetishistic sexualization at work here feeds the public discourse on the rights of transgender people, because it feeds the moralizing tendency of opponents of trans rights. If it's done for sexual pleasure, then it must be sinful, ipso facto, it must be okay to sanction this in the public sphere. Now, I'm well aware of the fact that as a matter of ethics and as a matter of law, it is and should be illegal to legislate from this position, but that doesn't stop people.

While it's easy for me to rationalize all of this as a depiction of a specific character in a specific movie with a specific pathology, my eyes tell me that this just isn't so. One of the first depictions of transsexuals I ever saw was John Davidson on a 1974 episode of The Streets of San Francisco who was as close to Buffalo Bill as 1970s television would allow. So if I resent Buffalo Bill, it's only because he's the most prominent incarnation of this archetype of the last 25 years. It's because the specter of the transgender psycho is so strong in the popular mind that it's used as an argument to bar people like me from the public restroom that is appropriate to my gender or prevent me from adopting kids or teaching school, it's hard for me to turn a blind eye.

Anyway, thanks to both of you for commenting.

Clarice in the Underworld

One of the things that really irks me about hanging out in horror fan spaces on the internet is the persistent question of whether or not The Silence of the Lambs (1991, directed by Jonathan Demme) is a horror movie. To which I say: Of course it is. The argument that it's "really more of a thriller" doesn't hold any water with me on multiple fronts, not least of which is the notion that movies that are "thrillers" aren't also horror movies. Even granting that dubious division, Silence passes the smell test, because if you think Hannibal Lector is a natural human murderer and not some unnameable creature from the outer dark, you are wrong. Not only does he possess abilities and insights that are beyond human ken, the movie tells you outright that he is some kind of more-than-human monster. "Never forget what he is," Jack Crawford tells Starling at the movie's outset, and the film cuts to Dr. Chilton answering the elided question with, "He's a monster." Later in the movie, Clarice is asked if Lecter is some kind of vampire. She replies: "There's not a word for what he is." What he IS is a conflation of every horror-movie mad scientist ever to stalk the silver screen. He's Dr. Caligari (a psychiatrist guiding the actions of his protege), he's Svengali (grooming his follower for success), he's Dr. Mabuse (ruling the world from his cell at the asylum), he's Dr. Jekyll (after Hyde has taken over completely). So let's dispense with the notion that Lecter is a presence that could exist outside the context of the horror movie, that he's not a creature of fantasy. That notion is absurd. But more than that: Buffalo Bill is based on Ed Gein, and by my lights, any movie that's based on Ed Gein is, de facto, a horror movie. We'll come back to Gein in a bit.

In any event, the previous paragraph is one of the reasons I've never really written about The Silence of the Lambs, despite a long familiarity with the movie (and the book). It's a discussion with which I have no patience. The other reason I've never really written about The Silence of the Lambs is because it's a movie that gives me all kinds of fits when it comes to the politics of its imagery, and writing about those politics--which for me are completely unavoidable--is going to make me sound like an apologist or (and) a scold. I don't intend this. We'll see how it goes.

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Love and Undeath

"I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine" --J. Sheridan le Fanu, "Carmilla"

Although Harry Kumel's Daughters of Darkness is more well-regarded by critics, Hammer's The Vampire Lovers (1970, directed by Roy Ward Baker) is the grandmother of lesbian vampire movies. It's one of the few relatively faithful adaptations of "Carmilla" (that eternal wellspring of lesbian vampires) and it was one of Hammer's biggest hits. In spite of all of this--or maybe because of it--it's a film that makes me uneasy.

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Netflix Roulette: Hellraiser: Bloodline

I gave up on the Hellraiser movies after the third installment. The fourth installment, Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996, directed by Alan Smithee) was not promising and I never got back to it until now. For one thing, it was directed by "Alan Smithee," in reality special effects man Kevin Yagher. When you have a director making his first film, a director promoted from the special effects department, and he hides behind the DGA's pseudonym for directors who are disowning their work, that bodes ill. For another, it was one of the first horror franchise installments to take its characters into a science fictional setting, usually a sign of a property that has gone way past its sell-by date. And for all that, it was a Dimension project, and before there was Platinum Dunes, there was Dimension and its anti-Midas effect: everything they touched turned to shit and ashes. With all that in mind, I still had the idea in my head that it couldn't possibly be worse than Hellraiser III. Could it?

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Members of the Wedding

I wish I could write about Bridesmaids (2011, directed by Paul Feig) without writing about the sociological issues surrounding it. In years past, this kind of comedy would have been no big thing. In 2011, its success or failure is a referendum on movies made by, starring, and targeted at women. Which is complete and utter bullshit, by the way. I mean, 51 percent of potential moviegoers are women, guys! This is NOT rocket science. And all those tickets you sold for Titanic and Twilight? Who do you think bought them? But Bridesmaids is being sold with lines like "Chick flicks don't have to suck!" and is being characterized by its gross-out humor (one freaking scene! ONE!), as if they're selling a movie for women to an adolescent male audience. Which, of course, is exactly what they're doing. They don't know any better. They're a bunch of entitled fucking dude-bros in the boardrooms of the movie studios these days. They've transplanted the frat house to the corner office. None of which should have even the slightest relevance to Bridesmaids. But it does, and we're all poorer for it.

It's hard for me to review a movie like Bridesmaids, actually, because all critical standards are suspended for comedies in the face of the one true comedy imperative: Is it funny? I mean, I could write a masters thesis on the patterns of class warfare in this movie, and on the existential plight of the single woman in a society that demands she have a partner, but while that's all well and good, it doesn't matter if the movie doesn't get laughs. And laughs are produced by some weird alchemical process involving personalities and timing that no one can quantify. In the case of Bridesmaids, the ultimate verdict I can render is that it made me laugh more or less consistently. So there's that. That won't stop me from writing about the existential dilemmas of a single woman, of course, but I thought I'd put all that right up front. It's a funny movie.

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Mutatis Mutandis

Way back in 2003, writing about X-Men 2, I wrote the following: "A more subversive queer subtext can be derived from Mystique, whose character suggests a polymorphous transgender sexual revolution. She's the ultimate genderbending mind-fuck; the perfect sexual object, one that can take the shape of your heart's desire. Furthermore, she likes it and is unrepentant about it." I'm kind of surprised to be resurrecting this line of thought concerning X-Men: First Class (2011, directed by Matthew Vaughn), but this theme isn't even subtextual anymore. I mean, it's true that the X-Men have always been a vehicle for examining the oppression of any given "other," but what Mystique articulates in this movie, and how it relates to both Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr seems to me to be unmistakable. It causes some serious problems for the movie itself--as was the case with X-Men: Last Stand, the villains have the moral high ground in this movie--but, damn, it makes the movie more fun to watch than any other dumb tentpole movie this year.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

I remember being fairly disappointed with Frank Oz's In & Out (1997) when I saw it on its initial release. My memory of it is that I thought it wasn't nearly funny enough and that it was entirely too middlebrow. It didn't have the strength of its convictions. Choosing to watch it again for Pride month and the Queer Film Blogathon was an act of laziness on my part, actually. It was on Netflix instant and I didn't have to scroll through a bunch of titles on my Roku to find it. Easy peasy. It turns out that my memory of it was pretty good, to a point. It IS entirely too middlebrow for its own good. It's also a pernicious fantasy and a bundle of unfortunate stereotypes.

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