The Point of the Matter

There comes a moment in Richard Linklater’s A SCANNER DARKLY (2006) that beg the question that until then was quietly simmering on everybody’s mind. And that is when Bob (Keanu Reeves), who’s in love with Donna (Winona Ryder), not knowing that she is also his boss Hank, and being rebuffed due to Donna’s repulsion at being touched, ends up on a consolation sex marathon with Connie (Lisa Marie Newmyer).

Said sex marathon is seen only after the fact, as Bob obsessively fast-forwards and pauses the surveillance footage of his intense sexual athletics. However, waking up from his post-coital slumber, and looking at her exhausted partner sleeping by his side, he seems to see her morph into Donna. Not only her face, but her body as well. And now, back at his voyeuristic observation post, his own identity hidden from his co-workers by means of a scramble suit (like the one Donna uses when being Hank), he freeze frames that fleeting moment when his mate turns into his dream-lover, moving the footage back and forward, back and forward, and even projecting that frame as a hologram for better to study – to worship, to adore? – the naked dream girl.

And it is at that precise instant, with that wonderful freeze-frame of a topless rotoscoped Winona Ryder, that the viewer feels the quiet question pressing the back of his mind, just as if it was the cold barrel of a metaphysical gun; and, just like Bob does, the viewer wonders: is that really Winona Ryder lying there, breasts exposed? Are we really seeing her topless? And, underneath that first, most obvious question, what one's really asking is: what is the point? Why did Linklater go the rotoscopic way?

I wonder if he himself has the answer. Technical showoff, probably. Or because no one had done it before (outside of spaghetti western’s opening credits back in the sixties). Listening to the technicians themselves in the DVD featurette “The Weight of the Line: Animation Tales” one’s puzzlement grows even deeper. Take, for instance, Christopher S. Jennings, who was lead artist in the making of the film: answering his own question – Why rotoscoping? Why drawing over footage? – he has nothing more significant to add than to state the obvious, that it is not Winona Ryder’s voice over the animation, it is really her performance. The actor’s performance. Well, yes. But then, why do it? Wouldn’t one have the same performance without painting over it with computer tools? In the same featurette, trying to voice his wonderment, Woody Harrelson, one of the actors, sounds equally puzzled, babbling about painting over the frame that exists. Well, no shit, Sherlock. But why?

Is it a way of superimposing one’s imagination over reality? Of pimping out the actors’ performance to one’s dreams? Is it really Winona’s tits one’s ogling, or merely the way the animators imagine them to be? Early on on the movie, as Charles (Rory Cochrane) and James (Robert Downey, Jr.) are ordering breakfast on a luncheonette, Charles starts fantasizing that the sexy waitress Betty (Natasha Janina Valdez) makes sexual advances to him while stripping down her waitress’ uniform. As the girl’s breasts come into view, one again wonders: are they really the actress’ or the way the filmmakers and animators imagined them to be? Want them to be? Are we watching drawn-over reality, or just the animators fantasizing the way her breasts look, just as Charles is imagining them to be?

Did Natasha Janina Valdez, or Winona Ryder, or Lisa Marie Newmyer really undress for their performances, or just like many before them, wearing pasties or capture-suits, did they just lend their shapes to be molded by the filmmakers’ minds? And, if so, then, what’s the point? Really. If all of cinema is illusion, what’s the point in adding another tier of make-believe over the actors’ basic performance? It gains nothing but an added degree of scrutiny of the cinematic illusion. Making the viewer even more aware that all that he's getting for his money is illusion? Isn’t that a defeat of the cinematic medium itself?

Like the multi-eyed creature that at one point of the film seems to be checking the inner workings of our reality, the viewer is prompted to challenge the sacred implicit contract which, since time began (cinema time, that is), bound him to believe the lies he's been shown on screen. And he believes, because fulfilling his part of the bargain, the filmmaker strives to make those lies seem true. That’s what we call verisimilitude. And that’s what got lost in the scalpeling of these scenes prompted by their sheer artificiality.

We know Woody Harrelson dind’t turn into a giant bug. That is all special effects. We buy that. But when the filmmakers ask us to believe that all they’ve done is to scrawl over the actual performance of the actors, we wonder not only if those are Winona Ryder’s real breasts, masked by virtual ink, but also about Reeve’s and Newmyer’s sex romp: did they do it? Is that really Keanu Reeves’ post coital dick still erect? Or is that part of the illusion, hidden under the artists' virtual pen?

If it isn’t Reeves’ pecker, or Ryder’s, Newmyer’s, or Valdez’s tits we see there, than what’s the point? If this is some kind of virtual body-double, why go the trouble? Why do you need the actors after all, and not only their voices? Why not use traditional animation, or 3D rendering, to convey your imaginanings? Wouldn’t it be more honest? Wouldn’t the illusion be truest? 

Summertime and guns

I like the barrenness of this beautiful film poster for 1988’s BACKFIRE. I like the way the paucity of information fires up the feverish search for meaning in a thunderstorm of firing synapses. I like the way its emptiness invites us to pour our feelings into it.

It gives us nothing, as if it has nothing to give away. There’s only color, and light, and shadow, and a pair of beautiful leg, and a gun. And us. Mesmerized. There’s no place to speak of. Just surfaces. Somehow I think of a beach house. And of a summer morning. Maybe it’s the way the light pours in from left side that makes me think if that shadow is that of an open door. A door that opens onto the beach, onto the ocean. If so, his she leaving the house? Is she waiting for someone to come? Is someone lying behind her on a rumpled bed with light linen sheets, in a pool of blood? Blood, yes. Red is the color we don’t see on the poster but as a flimsy trim around the film title. But that’s the red of burning embers. It speaks of passion, of sweaty sex. The idea of blood comes from the huge gun on the woman’s slender, elegant, left hand. Somehow one feels the imminence of something drastic. A crime, perhaps. Is she the perpetrator? Is she about to become the perpetrator?

And who is she? We don’t know. We see only those long, firm and sexy legs. Are they Karen Allen’s? Are they the same shapely legs we saw dangling above the Well of Souls in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)? It doesn’t matter, for that is just the actress playing the mysterious woman whose light summer dress the cool summer breeze – a sea breeze, perhaps, coming through the window above the blood-soaked bed? – is pulling aside to allow us to ogle. Those legs. Those enticing legs, so relaxed. No, if there is a crime, the deed has already been done. And, again, somehow, one feels she’s the culprit. Those legs, so perfect, suddenly bring to mind images of a slim anklet, and other mesmerizing legs, those of Barbara Stanwyck as the primordial femme fatale in DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944). Surely, that’s what our girl must be. A femme fatale. A killer. A man eater.

And yet, all that blue, all that sense of a luminous morning seem to want us to dispel the nightmare. That light, that summer dress, those naked legs, I don’t know why, makes me think of my favorite of all Edward Hopper’s paintings, 1943’s Summertime. It's as if they are the same girl; perhaps some kind of girls find themselves in the same situation, facing the same choices, having to overcome the same adversities, throughout time. In Hopper's painting, there’s also a wondrous summer morning, awash with light. A curtain flutters on an open window, just like the skirt of our unknown woman’s summer dress. Also, in Hopper’s, there’s a girl with a half-bent leg and a summer dress, a light seethrough summer dress that also reveals much of the girl’s legs. And she is there waiting for someone (or maybe just leaving the building where a similar drama has played itself out?). Her left hand is hidden from view. And one wonders, is she holding a gun? Has there been a crime? Is she the culprit? I love that painting. The paucity of information fires up the feverish search…

Time traveling with a sense of nostalgia

We are a fortunate lot, alive in an epoch when we can carry time-machines in our pockets, have time-machines in our homes, able to operate them without risking a collapse of the time-lines. Of course, I’m not referring to anything as expensive as a radically costumized DeLorean. But I’m referring to something that, contrary to all the science fiction inventions, really does work: the VHS tape, the DVD, the Blu Ray discs, the tablets and smartphones with access to vast virtual libraries of film and TV. With cinema a tad older than comic books, and TV a tad younger, in the almost 120 year-history of these visual art forms it is amazing the notion of vertiginous –yet unbroken – social change forever recorded in those cultural artefacts. Thanks to them, on the whim of a moment, one can visit another time-line; say one where it would be excitingly daring for a lady to lift her skirt above the knee; or unseemly for that same lady to sit at the dining table without waiting for a man to pull it back for her. On another whim, we can travel to a time when Janet Leigh is still alive and in her thirties, lying on a seedy motel bed in only a virginal white bra and a rumpled skirt. Jump after jump, we may by searching for a time when we ourselves were young and alive and attuned with the times, instead of surfing the timelines like lost retronauts in search of  archaeological memories. Excluded from the present by the ever-growing reach of the politically correct cancel police, one must dwell in the glow of days gone by.

On one of those jumps, I landed once more in the time when I was no more than twelve or thirteen, enjoying life and the endless pleasures only childhood allows, one of them being THE DUKES OF HAZZARD on TV. Bo and Luke Duke, just like Tom and Huck before them, were the epitome of youthful daring and sunny adventures. They lived in a fantasyland of dusty backroads and dense tree forests, of crystalline creeks and sun-softened two-lane blacktops. They drove a muscled up 1969 Dodge Charger with a characteristic charging horn and a Rebel Flag on its roof. And they had a cousin, Daisy Duke, that was as hot as the Sun and as cool as the Georgia rivers, and sexy as the sins country bumpkins went to confess in husky tones before Sunday mass.

This time around I landed in episode two of the second season, “Gold Fever” (1979). The plot, revolving around a gold swindle that almost puts Boss Hogg on a three million dollar debt to some Texas crooks, and Bo and Luke behind bars, is of no great concern to us here. What is, is a scene where, as the country narration of Waylon Jennings tells us, in order to impress the (to him, unbeknownst) swindler, Boss Hogg “shut the Boar’s Nest down, dressed Daisy up, and went all hog”. And the Texan swindler is dully impressed. Who wouldn’t be, with Daisy (Catherine Bach) dressed up in a frilly, v-necked mock-up of a French maid costume, all of it short skirt, black pantyhose and deep cleavage. Daisy is a wet-dream come true, and while the family-oriented comedy tone of the series makes us unmindful that she’s only working for Boss Hogg because he had loaned money to Uncle Jesse and the boys at a specially low-interest (to purchase the entry fee to run with their car, the General Lee, on a competition), the exploitative role of her attire makes any male viewer sizzle with desire.

Obviously, Daisy Duke is a country bumpkin caricature. But Catherine Bach has made the caricature come to sizzling live and throughout the entire run of the DUKES OF HAZZARD (1979-1985) she was able to turn Daisy’s sometimes unbelievable naïveté into one of her most charming assets, portraying her as negotiating a fine line between knowing she’s super hot and not believing that fact at all.

Not that Daisy is being naïve on the scene I’m considering here. When Boss Hogg keeps urging Daisy to put more food on the plate of his guest, she is plainly aware that when he answers with a subtly impolite “No, thank you, little darling, I’ve had quite enough. (Pause) Food, that is” he is plainly staring at her generous décolletage. As is Boss Hogg: “Careful, Daisy honey, the eyes of Texas are upon you.”

Daisy is there as mere eye-candy, an object of desire that Hogg exhibits as a way of mellowing his new business partner, impressing him; but also as a proud business man would exhibit one of his expensive acquisitions. And one could even perceive in Boss Hogg’s attitude a certain undisguised Georgian pride about the way this Georgian beauty is firing up the Texan’s concupiscence. Hogg and the Texan crook are on the same wavelength; Daisy however is not. She just rolls her eyes at such infantile infatuation and nonchalantly proceeds to embarrass Hogg by mentioning that a noise that came from the adjacent kitchen (Bo and Luke inadvertently tumbling some trays) came probably from the usual rats that dwell there.

This nonchalance on her part is what makes light – literally disarms – what could be perceived (and surely is, by today’s thought police) as the troubling objectification of a beautiful young woman in a family-oriented comedy/adventure series. For Daisy is at one with her hotness. It is part of her and who she is, and is something to enjoy and allow others to enjoy – on her own terms. The generosity of those terms made the happiness of countless kids in the late seventies and eighties, and will keep doing so while we’re able to travel back in time, to more simpler and happier days, through the oceans of time preciously stored in our jeweled plastic libraries.              

Ghosts of Summers Past

Back in the nineties, I enjoyed staying up well into the night, just writing. I used to tell myself that it was the sound of the world asleep that helped the ideas flow. But there is something more to it. The sense of going against the grain of society, just like a modern day vampire. It adds a frisson all its own. For at night, one becomes someone else entirely. Even if only inside one’s mind.

The light of day brings clarity. It shines on one’s limitations, brings forth the smallest imperfections; it draws you inwards, as the world presses down on your…hesitation. Yes. One hesitates a lot more during the day hours. Things are less certain. The clarity of form, breeds insecurity about intent. Can you reach what you desire? If so, will it live up to your expectations?

Somehow you withdraw when life proves willing. Again, you feel insecure. Unsure about making the choice, taking the step, accepting the risk. Again, yes, you hesitate. You fear to miss the right choice of words, to provoke the careful filigree to dissolve in a hapless mess. You fear failure.  

Oh, but at night. The whole world changes. Working at night, especially in those hot summer nights when the sweat runs over your skin on the wee hours of the night, like a cool blanket of molten lava pouring from your erupting, feverish mind, the ghosts of the day come alive. And all of life palpitates with promise.

Loosing yourself on the stillness of the air, without the merest hint of a breeze to flutter the curtains, you’re the sorcerer supreme of your all multiverse of desire. All hesitation is gone. Action seems incapable of error. Imperfection is erased, failure not a possibility. What you have denied is now yours to grasp. The stuff of your dreams is now putty in your hands.

And once day comes again, its light is no longer frightening. Hesitancy is gone. Every trembling doubt is answered with crystal clarity in the afterglow of creativity. You have beaten the blank page. You poured your dreams into the world, bereft now of insecurity, naked for all to see. Unashamed. Confident.

Such is the intensity of realisation, that you erase yourself from the picture. Your dreams have taken form and, when morning comes, they’re all that remains. Like ghosts of hot summer nights.  

What the Future Brings

 

So the wheel of time keeps turning, and once more there comes the painful time when one must look back into his past achievements and take measure of his worth. And, looking back over my shoulder, blog-wise, there’s not much to be seen… nor to be said. Just the vast empty space of posts unwritten, the silent digital wasteland of unfulfilled ideas, of promises unkept. As one year dissolves into another in the vertiginous movement of our rock around the sun, again there seems to be a springtime of the mind. A whispered promise that everything will be different this time. Will it? Or will it be just the same newfound impetus, bound to die on the first confrontation with the empty sheet of virtual paper on screen? Does it matter? To anyone but me? Will 2022 be just 2021 with a new coat of paint? Let’s wait and see. Let us brave it, and find out. Welcome to the new year.

I envied him.

Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) and Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) are strolling down Hollywood Boulevard on a sunny morning, when the above dialogue takes place. It is the morning after the riotous premiere of BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955) in a fleapit cinema, and they’re referring to the moment when one of the wild teenagers runs up to Vampira and grabs her breasts.

The movie is, of course, ED WOOD (1994) by Tim Burton, and Vampira, the TV persona of Maila Nurmi, is played by then Burton’s wife Lisa Marie, a model turned actress that was one of the most beautiful women of the nineties. So strikingly beautiful, in fact, that she was able to turn a non-speaking role in MARS ATTACKS (1996) into an iconic science fiction trope.

The scene above culminates in an impromptu autograph session when some passersby recognize Lugosi who is in a sunny disposition. It is a heart-warming moment. Watching the movie for the first time, one doesn’t realize that in the immediate scene, Ed will be told of Lugosi’s death. When Lugosi mischiviously says to Wood that he envied the kid who took a grab of Vampira’s breasts, he’s not envying him just that fleeting grope. He’s envying him the daring of youth (minutes before, when driving to the cinema, with Lugosi pressed against Vampira in the back seat of the cab, she tells him to watch his hands), the mindless hormonal rush ignited by the movie frenzy that practically tears the theatre down. He’s envying him the promise of a future that he senses he no longer has.

In a way, I guess, Lugosi was enjoying the chaotic walk down the aisle, with the howls of the savage hordes of teenagers reviving in him, for the last time, the long lost sense of success, of being a figure instantly recognizable by any, and all, moviegoers. As he still is, today.

Who really envies the kid (actor Johnny Meyer, I think) for his daring raid on the bountiful breasts of Lisa Marie, is the rest of us, immersed on the dream world of the movies, wondering if the kid understands that he is groping Lisa Marie, playing Maila Nurmi, playing Vampira, in an Escher-like illusion of erotic bliss.  The envy we mere mortals feel towards those like us who get to touch the sublime.