Psychotronic Surrealism in Terrore nello Spazio/The Planet of the Vampires (1965) dir. Mario Bava
Visual Excitement: Terrore nello Spazio
Tag: Movies
Edging on Kinds of Kindness
In a more just world, some might argue that Kinds of Kindness is a masterpiece. It is a strong expression of the surrealist impulse, skillfully joined to the antique traditions of medieval art, and combined with Hollywood’s realist aesthetic by visual and textual threads so thin at times that they may as well be the result of a magic spell, or so obvious, at other times, that they compel the viewer to delight, disgust, or some exciting combination of the two. It is a remarkable film. Too bad, then, that this dazzling work is twisted into sad, disappointing shapes by the scalp-numbing banality of the Hollywood bankrollers and the professional creative class they’ve cultivated to reliably convert money into more money. Instead of a masterwork of surrealist cinema, Kinds of Kindness offers a masterclass in the contradictions of capital. What a shame.
First there is the merchandising. About three days after I watched Kinds of Kindness, I began to see the ads on Facebook. The first one that caught my eye was a plastic model of a severed thumb suspended from a keychain—$28 before shipping costs–floating atop an image of the movie’s logo. I tapped the image of the severed thumb keychain and found other oddball ephemera from the film at the link. A water bottle labeled “Contaminated” glows in the dark and costs $24. A sweatshirt—$80 before shipping–features the film’s logo on the front breast and the words “Take life from my hands” on the back. A glow-in-the-dark T-shirt—$42–reads “Contaminated” on the front. Whoever designed this merchandise had one idea they simply cannot not give up. Maybe some vertical marketing intern at Searchlight Pictures fed the script into a chatbot and asked it to produce ideas for obscure merchandise. Maybe these are the best examples of the insane tchotchkes the video cards at the data center could dream up.
The letters scroll quickly across the advert like trains going endlessly nowhere in opposite directions
This merch should not exist. Imagine, for a moment, that you could buy a Salvador Dali clock, or a Rene Magritte tote bag. Oh, wait, you can buy those things? That doesn’t make them any less fucking stupid than the merch associated with this film. What irritates me is that all of this, and all of us, are so utterly predictable. People often think Facebook and other data brokers tailor adverts to users by spying on them. Did Facebook know, from other data on my phone, that I had seen the movie? Maybe! But it is also all-too-sadly plausible that Facebook’s advertising placement algorithm can wager that I am the type of person who would like this movie, and who would like pointless and overpriced movie-themed merchandise. It’s not a bad bet for the algorithm to make.
Kinds of Kindness, with its 165-minute runtime, its playful subversion of power relations, and its careful deployment of colors, costumes, locations, and shots for maximum ironic affect, seems to want me to believe it is above this banality. It isn’t. It’s down in the shit with the rest of us pigs.
There are products associated with the film, and then there is the film as product. I watched Kinds of Kindness at an AMC Theater, where they screened the film last Tuesday in one of the smaller rooms, way in the back of the building past the MacGuffins Bar and the second bathrooms. There was me and my date and about ten other people in clusters of two and three scattered around the upper part of the room, decadently reclining in plush red faux leather seats where we dropped popcorn between the cushions while the film worked its magic on the screen. This experience happens in a material context we should not ignore. My AMC Theater is the only part of the old Tallahassee Mall that still feels like a shopping mall, carved like a holy relic of the 1990s from the claustrophobic maze of state government offices that used to be Bath & Body Works, Old Navy, and Aeropostale. This, or something very much like it, is how most Americans who see the film in a theater will watch it. They will be reclined in a seat they selected from an app, nestled deep within a massive multiscreen complex attached to a shopping center or mall. Almost everyone else will watch it on their couch at home, scrolling occasionally through feeds on their phone while their streaming device decodes an insanely long string of ones and zeroes into moving images on the screen.
Is it possible to experience transcendent art in a space like this? Those of us who saw the film in Tallahassee’s AMC 24 last Tuesday sat through a thirty-minute block of trailers and three advertisements for Coca-Cola which informed us to stay quiet and embrace cinematic enchantment following the introductory messages. At home, IMDB or Amazon beckon; emails, texts, and information feeds demand attention. Is any of this capable of leading the viewer to communion with the unconscious?
Let’s take off our materialist philosopher costumes and put on our hipster art-critic glasses.
Get past the advertising, the merchandising, and the distraction, and you will find in Kinds of Kindness an alluring, beautifully-rendered, sometimes disturbing, darkly comic triptych of interconnected short films featuring the same cast in different roles. The first tale features a man longing to be free of the total influence exercised upon him by his all-powerful employer and mentor. The second tale is focused on a police officer who questions the identity of his wife when she is rescued from a prolonged ordeal marooned on a desert island. The third featurette follows a woman from a sex-and-water cult seeking a spiritual leader who can heal the living and raise the dead. Each tale is interleaved with the others through visual and verbal cues, unified by a common style and a shared set of preoccupations. These generic unifying elements offer us a glimpse at the film’s beating heart.
First, style. The film is a triptych because it really wants to be a painting. Look at the painterly strokes throughout: the long focus on lips locked in a kiss, the lingering gaze on food, the absurd decor and serenely sinister landscapes. Lanthimos is clearly inspired by surrealism, but this is not a surrealist painting. Instead, Lanthimos approaches the subjects here with a medieval sensibility. The tales end on ironic notes, like vignettes in the Decameron or The Canterbury Tales.The first tale details the fall from grace and dark redemption of a wicked king’s favored knight. Maybe you’ve read something like it in a medieval fantasy. The second tale toys with themes developed in The Return of Martin Guerre, a 16th-century case of assumed identity. The third tale, with Emma Stone’s renunciation of her family and Jesse Plemons’ ascetic wardrobe, recalls monks and pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem.
What this film wants to be, then, is a medieval panorama, a Hieronymous Bosch allegory of absurd delights and tantalizing terrors doing their work under the discursive cover of moral instruction. However, the goals of this surrealist triptych and the medieval work it emulates diverge at the most basic level. Both triptychs and motion pictures are made for public display. The medieval tryptich turns the lens outward from the self, instructing the viewer in the many ways of the world and urging them to seek salvation through Righteous Action and Righteous Belief. Similarly, a Hollywood movie urges viewers to examine themselves by watching others. Absent the Church, however, or the personal and social imperatives of modernity which followed the Reformation, the instruction ends there. The lens points inward at the self. What you should do with the knowledge is up to you.1
So far we have peered at Kinds of Kindness through two interpretive lenses: surrealism and medievalism. Together, these constitute a dialectic worth exploring. Medieval art was dedicated to active contextualization: placing things in a narrative of meaning; breaking situations down to constituent parts or lessons; instructing and enriching the viewer. Figures point to where we should focus our attention. Beams of light shine down from heaven on meaningful people, places, and things. Surrealism is the antithesis of this contextual ideal. Surreal artists attack narrative and context at the root by refusing to grant them any supremacy. Nothing follows from anything; anything follows from everything. Thereby, the dual existence and non-existence of all things is revealed.
Why surrealism, though? In a seminal 1936 essay, the polymath physician, hermeticist, and surrealist writer Pierre Mabille argued that surrealism is interested in what he called the “unconscious of forgetting.” Separate from the indidivual and the “visceral unconscious” of social norms, the unconscious of forgetting is a sort of natural history shaping the self and society, from which ideas form like “islands which emerge from the ocean of forgetting…. They are the natural and normal protrusion of lands elaborated slowly by the ages and the corpses.” The unconscious of forgetting is not the self, and not the set of unconscious rules guiding our behavior, but something older, an often inchoate thing slithering deep in the recesses of human minds. This theoretical construct—the idea that dark and true things writhe deep in the recesses of culture and the psyche—unifies the three tales in the film. Without it they are just three short films.
Kinds of Kindness achieves neither the contextual ideal of medieval art nor the unsettling of oppressive norms by illuminating the unconscious through surrealism. Instead, the film attempts achieve these goals by serving up the empty calories of postmodern irony and self-absorption, sex and spectacle. These are its preoccupations. Go watch the movie and think about the scene where Margaret Qualley plays the little Casio keyboard. Think about John McEnroe’s broken tennis racket, the group sex film in the second tale, Emma Stone’s dancing, the masturbation scene on the beach. Think about the long, close, painterly zoom on the juice being squeezed from the orange, the eggs frying, or Willem Dafoe’s lips locked on Emma Stone’s face. Each of these leaves an indelible mark, but rather than informing or unsettling they are irritating, tantalizing, like riding the edge of an amazing orgasm but never falling into it.
That orgasm is the synthesis of context and consciousness. Setting up this strange dialectic, and then failing to synthesize its urgent questions, leaves the audience hot and bothered.
This failure to synthesize is not limited to Kinds of Kindness however, but in the system which produced it. Orange juicers, Casio keyboards, John McEnroe’s broken tennis racket, muscle cars, the massive spa at the cult mansion in the third tale: these are specific products, commodities if you’re so inclined, and they do hard work in the film. Revisit the key surrealist moments and you’ll find in almost every case a commodity at stage center or very near it.2 This is characteristic Hollywood irony. Billion-dollar studios excel at delivering viewers to these postmodern lacunae, as if by design. Every “artistic” film which makes it through the major Hollywood system in the past few years seems to ask viewers whether meaning is even possible or desirable. To what end? While this feels like the sort of cool detachment which has characterized the American counterculture since the 1950s, the question these films really ask is whether capitalism itself is desirable or undesirable.
Underlining the question with postmodern irony and detachment while partnering with the Walt Disney Company or Mattel Toys, Hollywood ponders on the screen whether anyone could ever truly know the answer to these fundamental questions while on the balance sheet answering in the affirmative again and again. Considering the cosmic formations of capital underwriting these films, and the commercial imperatives they must satisfy to be successful, this question might be better read as a taunt. Is capitalism bad, you ask? You will never know, Disney’s Searchlight Pictures says by bankrolling this dazzling but frustrating work of art, but it sure is good for us.
Kinds of Kindness hasn’t yet turned a profit, but its journey as a commodity is only just beginning. As it makes its way through the world realizing the immenseness of surplus value, it is certain to delight and inflame. It does this by juxtaposing the opposing contextual tendencies of medieval and surrealist art. Instead of synthesizing the dialectic these opposites create, however, it falls back on the forty-year-old playbook of postmodernism to avoid answering their urgent philosophical questions. Those questions remain. Maybe someone working outside of Hollywood can help us answer them.
- If postmodernism is, as Fredric Jameson argues, “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place,” the self and its observations of others through media are the only archives available to the postmodern subject.
- Where commodities fail, sex picks up the slack. As the principal interface of consumption, however, the body is a synecdoche of all commodities, and therefore the most important construct in capitalist culture. Capitalism routinely problematizes the body, driving people to consume more: more and better food, more space, more clothing, more makeup, more skincare, more pleasure. As its most psychologically acute pressure point, sex is the most effective way to problematize the body and drive this consumer growth. So when you see a hard nipple on the screen, instead of a sleek SUV, the image merely cuts closer to the bone in its effort to manipulate you.
Bereft Cinema
Some research this afternoon led me to an archive of FSU’s student-run newspaper, the Florida Flambeau, from 1985. Skimming over this issue from October 11, I paused to look at these advertisements for movies playing here in Tallahassee.
Look how many theaters there were! I’m counting eight theaters on the list, where now there are only three. And look at that variety! It’s not like now, where all of the theaters are playing basically the same features and differentiating their offerings based on screen size, food options, and app memberships. Instead of a cartel organized against streaming headwinds, this was a vibrant marketplace of competitors.
Aside from the number of theaters and the variety of features on their screens, I also thought about what has replaced these theaters in place. Where these independent cinemas once stood, there are now the following chains:
- Target
- YouFit
- Whole Foods
- REI Co-Op
- World Market
- AMC Theaters (still movies, at least!)
Plus an office building and an empty lot being developed into the new police headquarters.
Someone could probably tell me all the reasons why movie theaters and chains are better today, but I felt a rush of nostalgia anyway for this bygone era of variety and independent business when I saw this old newspaper page.
Why you Should Watch The Curse of the Aztec Mummy (1957)
I’m not going to pretend that this is a good movie. The acting and production are about as good as you might expect from a late-fifties crime/horror/monster/science fiction/action hero film produced in Mexico City and dubbed by a crew in Coral Gables, Florida. It’s bad.
I’m not pretending this bad movie is good, but I’ll make an argument for why you should watch it anyway.
- With all of the strikes against it, this is still just about as good as any Roger Corman feature from the era. And it was produced without access to the deep pool of Southern California talent that Corman could skim to make his schlock.
- While the Aztec story here shares similarities with Native American fantasies in US films—the Native Princess, the Brave Warrior, forbidden love, and so on—it treats indigenous names, culture, and ideas with sensitivity you won’t see in a film produced north of the Rio Grande.
- You won’t see a cast like this in a Hollywood film from the era. Stars Ramón Gay and Luis Aceves Castañeda were Mexican, star Rosita Arenas was born in Venezuela, Crox Alvarado was from Costa Rica.
- You’re bound to get a few unintentional laughs. Look at the obvious toy snakes in the snake pit! Come back and here tell me you didn’t laugh when you saw the Angel jump in his little coupe and drive away in his shiny Luchador costume!
Put it all together, and you get a decent little midnight movie to hell you forget the Sunday night blues.
Sketchbook: Life of the Mind
Sketchbook: Wendy
Imaginary Cinema: Near Dark
After watching this film last night at our incomparable local independent video rental store and theater, Cap City Video Lounge, I came home and asked myself: what if Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 vampire feature Near Dark was released in 1967 instead of 1987? Then I stayed up way too late and made this poster.
The Hidden Specters of Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Ghostbusters: Afterlife is supposed to be about ghosts. Thinking back over the film’s 124 minutes, however, I don’t remember seeing very many of them. If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ve seen most of the spooks in the script. There’s the Gatekeeper, of course. There’s the Keymaster and Gozer the Gozerian. There are the little Stay-Puft men, indistinguishable from Minions in an alternate movie universe. There’s an old miner and a new Slimer. A few more ghosts ramble around here and there, and some old friends return, living and dead.
There may not be very many ghosts on the screen, but Afterlife is a thoroughly haunted picture. Forget about those old Sumerian demigods, though. This reboot is haunted by two insidious specters that Stantz, Winston, Venkman and the kids could never hope to bust: the ghost of the American century and the ghost of science. When you put them together, Afterlife is something more than a comedy-horror reboot. Afterlife is an tragedy mourning the decline of twentieth century liberalism.
The first ghost is the specter of the American century. Like any ghost, it is difficult to pin down. Don’t seek it in the foreground. Look for it instead in the film’s sensibilities, in the aesthetic choices that shape its sets, costumes, vehicles, and props. Those choices outline a ghost of the American century. It is a warm presence, all golden hour and oversaturation, permeating the film. The prevailing kitsch of this ghostly mirage—the corn fields, main streets, drive-in cafes, grain silos, electric guitars, blue jeans, and other heartland mid-century ephemera—susurrates quietly in the background and tilt-shifts the perspective, rendering the town of Summerville and the surrounding landscape in idyllic miniature.
Like the seismic charts hanging on the walls of Summerville, we can trace the epicenter of the American century’s ghost to “Spinners,” the drive-in café in the middle of town. This oversaturated temple to the departed teen culture of the 1950s and 1960s is where Finn Wolfhard’s character, Trevor, finds love and gets a job. “Spinners” seems to occupy the vital center of the town’s social life as well. In the “Spinners” scenes there are people everywhere, drivers and pedestrians mingling in conversation, music blaring, peals of laughter, old people and young, pickup trucks and Subarus. Contrast this with the scene at your local Sonic restaurant, where rolled-up windows on idling vehicles enforce the separation of the patrons into family units. One would be hard-pressed to find the sort of inter-class, open social environment thriving at “Spinners” anywhere in the real America.
Follow the tremors of nostalgia outward from Spinners, and you will find the ghost of the American century everywhere. It drifts around the crumbling grain silos outside of town. It haunts the faded Stay-Puft marshmallow advertisement painted on a downtown wall. It inhabits the beautifully maintained 1978 Ford Ranchero GT owned, inexplicably, by one of the teenagers who works at Spinners. It squeaks in the wheels of junky Radio Flyer wagons in the old field outside of the factory. It acts as a preservative in the old half-eaten Crunch Bar young Spengler pulls from the pocket of her grandfather’s Ghostbusters uniform. See it once; see it everywhere.
Twenty years ago, a ghost of the American century would have looked like a character from a Norman Rockwell painting. All pastiche and cliché, it still would have carried itself with a sort of genteel dignity, a winking self-awareness that connected the living present to the departed past. It was both an aspirational cliché and a self-reflection: a ghost we could all see ourselves becoming someday, if we die righteously. The ghost haunting Summerville, Oklahoma is not as legible. This is a ghost haunting the post-apocalypse. The element of self-reflection is gone. We are encouraged by light, sound, and decay to situate the town somewhere in the past, but it is unclear where in time its development is supposed to have stopped. Is Summerville stuck in the 1950s? The 1980s? It doesn’t matter. Viewers in 2021 can no longer discern the difference between the two. All of it now is the 1900s, a golden era gone.
We have a harder time than ever before seeing ourselves in the old American century, but Afterlife wants us to understand that it was a better time. Rusted silos, sagging rooflines, and burnt-out lights on the marquee signs suggest that the town’s best days are gone. Except for flipping burgers, stocking shelves, or policing, it is unclear what anyone in town does for a living. The mine shut down decades ago. The farm infrastructure is old and unused. Spinners, Walmart, and the state are the only going concerns. This, too, is a manifestation of the American ghost. The signal fades.
The ghost of the American century is a specter of history. The second ghost haunting the town of Summerville is the poltergeist of science. You need not seek this spirit lurking in the background, however. It is there, everywhere, in perfect focus, lavished with thought.
Writers Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman cast these two spirits in opposition to one another. “History is safe,” Paul Rudd—who plays Gary Grooberson, a geologist moonlighting as a summer school teacher to study the seismic anomalies in the area—tells the kids in one scene. “Science is all particle accelerators and hydrogen bombs.” One is boring, in other words; the other is cool. One is quietly dead; the other seems almost alive.
Set aside the question of history for a moment. What is science? “Science is punk rock,” Grooberson says. “Science is a safety pin through the nipple of academia.” Punk rock, like science, is an attitude, a set of beliefs. We learn little of the philosophy of science in Afterlife, however. Instead, the ghost of science in Summerville is made of gear. Egon Spengler’s old workshop overflows with stuff. Ecto-1 is top heavy with racks, hoses, antennae, and other things. Proton packs, goggles, scopes, sensors, containment units, gauges, switches, pedals, buttons, and other bits of equipment surround the characters when they do science. There is no method. There are no hypotheses, no failed assumptions, no notebooks. Characters see a problem; they deploy a tool. The problem is solved. If academia is full of uncertainty, science in Summerville truly is the safety pin in its nipple. There is no uncertainty in the haunted mansion of science.
We do not pierce the veil of science in Summerville, but we are encouraged to see its moral shadow. This, too, is not what the characters claim. Grooberson says: “Science is pure. It’s an absolute. It’s an answer to all the madness.” It was “science,” however, which flowed from Summerville’s vein of selenium through the twisted hypotheses of Ivo Shandor to shape Sigourney Weaver’s apartment building in New York. “Science”—the sciences of mining, smelting, electrical engineering, et cetera—enabled the construction of the building. Science, too, brought the original Ghostbusters together and informed their work. In the Ghostbusters universe, as in real life, science is yin and yang, promise and peril. Afterlife buries the peril in the promise. Where have we seen that before?
A “pure” world without uncertainty was a key promise of the American heyday, too. The brutal efficiency of the marketplace, the genius of its innovators, the inherent righteousness of its existence: these forces had triumphed over fascism, the story went, as surely as they would triumph over communism, cancer, hunger, the colonization of space. Along the way maybe history itself—that incessant dialectic of class warfare—would come to an end. It is an idea worth mourning, perhaps, if you can believe it.
Try as they might, however, the filmmakers cannot separate the ghost of America from the ghost of science. My schoolbooks from the 1900s maintained that these two were symbiotically linked. American greatness flowed from the font of science, they argued, which flowed from the font of greatness, and so on. American power was transcendent, airborne, contemptuous of limits, devastating in its mastery of the natural world. The comfort it enabled was highly engineered.
The ectoplasm of American scientific power paints a different picture. The chronicles of nuclear devastation on Planet Earth, the inexorable decline which renders the memory of the American century in Summerville through a darkening glass, and the persistence of an ancient Sumerian demigod in a mountain just outside of town suggest that history is unsafe, and science is impure. We should not mourn them, but we cannot escape them. Like intrusive thoughts, they color our experience of the world. They refract our understanding, twist our nostalgia in subtle ways. They haunt even our blockbuster film franchises. Our only hope to overcome their decrepit influence is to leave them in the past.
Let us create new things.
Review: The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
There is a period of ten minutes or so at the beginning of a film when it can be anything. We have some idea of what to expect from trailers, posters, and other hype, but we are ready for the film to surprise us, to subvert our expectations and carry us into a world we did not expect to discover. That ten minute window is rich with opportunity for the filmmaker, and it is vitally important to the success of the film that follows.
In the first few minutes of The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Director Michael Chaves sets up a possession film. If the ritualized prayers and weird body contortions in the first scene aren’t enough, the ham-fisted homage to the famous poster scene from William Friedkin’s masterpiece of the genre, the priest standing in the accursed light of evil outside of the Regan’s house in The Exorcist, should clue us in. A few minutes in, therefore, I was prepared for a good possession and an exorcism.
Imagine my surprise when the story shifted gears, grinding awkwardly like the clutch in an old diesel truck from what seemed like a trite but entertaining exorcism feature to a haunted murder mystery. Imagine the complete whiplash, then, when the gears ground again, and the film turned into a kill-the-witch cat-and-mouse chase. A film is traditionally structured in three acts. The Devil Made Me Do It is three different films. With some investment in the story, any one of the three separate acts might have stood alone. When you stand them one atop the other, though, like children in a trench coat sneaking into an R-rated movie, the whole thing falls down.
The Devil Made Me Do It takes its title from a briefly infamous Connecticut manslaughter trial in the 1980s in which a young man named Arne Johnson claimed that a demon who had taken possession of his soul compelled him to stab his landlord with a pocketknife. Johnson’s case would have garnered little more attention than a few “isn’t that weird” news reports and a couple of law review journal articles if not for the intervention of self-proclaimed demonologist Ed Warren and his wife, spirit medium Lorraine Warren, in 1981. The “case files” of the Warrens, a New England couple who rose to fame in the latter half of the last century by cashing in on Americans’ growing fascination with the paranormal through a series of expertly marketed “investigations” resulting in numerous books and publicity events in the 1970s and 1980s, provide the basis for the films in The Conjuring series. The paranormal interpretation of the Amityville murders remains the most (in)famous of the couple’s investigations, but the success of The Conjuring franchise has certainly replenished the coffers of their estate for generations to come.
The story The Devil Made Me Do It tells is about as complicated and neurotic as you might expect a tale of demonic possession, crafted by master hucksters to defend a man from murder charges in pursuit of their own fame, to be. There are spoilers ahead, so skip a couple paragraphs if you think, for some inexplicable reason, that you might want to subject yourself to this film. I recommend reading ahead and then spending your time watching a better movie, but you do you.
In the first scene, we meet the Glatzel family and their possessed son, David. The Warrens are there—as charming and down-to-earth as the very capable Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson can render them—and so is Arne, David’s sister’s extremely friendly boyfriend. David and Arne share a moment of tenderness while waiting on a priest to arrive for an exorcism and, when the exorcism doesn’t go as planned, Arne invites the demon inhabiting his girlfriend’s brother to go ahead and enter his body instead. Things start to get weird for Arne after that, until he has a freakout that would have thoroughly amused Burroughs or Hunter Thompson and murders his drunk and stupid landlord while Blondie’s “Call Me” (1980) plays on the stereo for some reason. Thus ends the possession film in Act 1.
In Act 2, the haunted mystery, the Warrens need to build a case proving that Arne’s act was a consequence of demonic possession rather than a freak brawl with a lame soundtrack. Sure enough, guided by Lorraine Warren’s extremely reliable and specific connection with the spirit realm, they find a witch’s totem underneath the Glatzel house. Makes sense, right? The Glatzel kid was possessed, the demon jumped to Arne, bing bang boom, the landlord is dead. Seeking a pattern of similar occult influence in other crimes, therefore, the Warrens reach out to police throughout New England. The search leads eventually to a skeptical cop working an inexplicable murder and disappearance in Massachusetts and a former priest giving the world his best impression of a thousand-yard stare after investigating a satanic cult in Annabelle, a prior instalment in The Conjuring universe. After the Warrens solve the case for the cop—drawing, again, on Lorraine Warrens amazingly detailed second sight—the priest reveals that his own daughter is the witch causing all the trouble. How convenient! Thus ends the haunted murder mystery film in Act 2.
In Act 3, the Warrens must kill the witch to save Arne. After a conventional labyrinth chase in the occult dungeons beneath the priest’s home, the Warrens destroy the witch’s altar. This breaks her magical connection to Arne, which pisses off the demon to whom she had promised Arne’s soul. The demon kills the witch, Arne is relieved of his demonic tormentor, and the Warrens have another little toy to put in their collection beside the Annabelle doll and the painting of Valak the Defiler. Arne gets a light prison sentence, but it’s OK because he’s just relieved to be free of the demon, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Writer and filmmaker Jon Boorstin provides an excellent framework in his book, The Hollywood Eye, to explain how and why movies work. This notion—that Hollywood filmmakers, perhaps in distinction from those working in other milieus, are focused on what works rather than what is beautiful or moving or artistic—is important, Boorstin argues, because it is the font from which meaning and aesthetic value and all that other stuff flows. This is because, according to Boorstin, viewers watch a film with two “eyes” which must be simultaneously pleased for the film to capture and maintain their attention. Only when they are suitably rapt will they be responsive to the film as a work of art.
The first “eye” is the “voyeur’s” eye, focused on realism. This is the little voice in your head that says, “that would never happen,” or, “shouldn’t they have run out of bullets a long time ago?” Next there is the “vicarious” eye, focused on feeling. This is the part of you that is carried away by the story, the part that falls in love with the characters or causes you to bite your nails at the suspenseful parts. Boorstin says that these basically correspond to brain and heart, and I can think of no reason to dispute him.
There are things this film does well. Michael Chaves builds on the world of The Conjuring with interesting views of sweeping New England vistas. This pleases the “voyeur” eye. The cast is well put-together. The stars share good chemistry, and, at times, their talent breaks through a scene just enough to please the “vicarious” eye. There are enough such moments to say that this a functional bit of filmmaking. It progresses like a Toyota Corolla from point A to point B. It makes you jump a few times. It has a couple of good monsters and, I don’t know, you don’t see the boom mics in the shots. If you spent money on a theater ticket or forked out for an HBO Max subscription to see it, you would be hard-pressed to point to a particular moment where it went off the rails.
But let’s be honest. You would be hard-pressed to find that moment because the whole film is a god-damned train wreck. The Devil Made Me Do It just doesn’t work. Its three acts do not cohere. Its characters are only developed far enough to fit in the panels of the comic book tie-in that is sure to follow. Here are some examples. It was unclear whether the demon or the witch was the villain. As a result, both of them were shallow, shallow, shallow. Defeating them felt more like a chore than a quest. The skeptical detective in Act 2: why does he exist? (More on that below). And who is the protagonist? I suppose it is the Warrens, but then who is Arne Johnson? I didn’t care about Arne Johnson. Captain Howdy in the original Exorcist film has more screen presence than Arne Johnson in this story, and Captain Howdy only appears on screen for three frames. Was Arne Johnson a hero? A victim? A villain? Who knows? In any event, it didn’t matter to me whether the Warrens saved him or not. Nothing mattered, in fact, because the story was awful. The fat, naked ghoul in Act 2 will make a cool collectible action figure, I guess. Sorry for the spoiler.
One more thought before I slam the door on this one. I don’t know what Ed and Lorraine Warren were like in real life, but the characters Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring universe grow more insufferable with each new installment in the series. They’re always right; sanctimoniously pure; perfectly in love with each other. There’s nowhere for them to go, no way for them to grow. Perhaps this untouchability was a condition of the contract with the Warrens’ estate—a $2 billion deal for New Line so far—but it sets them apart from the characters written in the round. The villains in these movies are not the monsters and demons, who knock down like ninepens in the end, but the straights. The skeptics and normies who choose not to believe in the paranormal must be set straight by the Warrens, and there’s a mighty horde of us. We’re the baddies, the fools, wondering what in the world is going on in these movies. They’re not for us. That’s OK.
Review: The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and the Dark Underside of the Postwar Road
There was a prolonged moment after World War II when the road symbolized for Americans ultimate freedom. These were the years of interstate highways, land yachts, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, teenage hot rodders, drive-in movies and drive-up restaurants. Empowered by all things automotive, the story goes, Americans were footloose and wild. As a result they lived through hard drinking years, fast living, devil may care years. So it goes. From Happy Days to the good-old days long gone in the animated film Cars, we’ve idealized the period to the point of caricature.
Underneath all of this there lurked a menacing darkness. Killers roamed the highways. Cons, pimps, and addicts thrived in the automotive underground. Post-traumatic former GIs, reliving the horrors of Guadalcanal or the Bulge, struggled to hold it together. Women and minorities took the brunt of it. Woe betided those who happened to be both. Automotive freedom ran like a wine dark current beneath this moment, empowering some as thoroughly as it shackled and destroyed others.
A modest but brilliant noir picture emerged from this ambivalent milieu: Ida Lupino’s chilling feature, The Hitch-Hiker. Released in 1953, it is important that this is the only classic noir directed by a woman. It is not the only entrée in the genre to call the free-wheeling postwar world to account, but Lupino’s gaze, executed by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and carried out by deft performances on the part of the film’s three stars, is attuned to cruelty and power in a way that her male counterparts did not grasp in their cynicism or machismo.
The premise of the film is straightforward. It was based on the killing spree of Billy Cook, a drifter and small-time hood with a deformed eye who gained notoriety for a 22-day rampage that left six people dead on the road from Missouri to California. In the film, Cook is represented by the character Emmett Myers, ably performed by a dead-eyed William Talman in his best role before moving to the small screen on Perry Mason. We meet Myers mid-spree. His M.O. is to hitch a ride, kill the driver, and steal the car, along with the driver’s wallet, before moving onto the next victim. After another grisly killing, Myers sticks out his thumb and hitches a ride with fishermen Roy Collins, played by Edmond O’Brien, and Gilbert Bowen, played by Frank Lovejoy. These two are old friends enjoying a taste of freedom from their domestic lives on a weekend outing to the Gulf of California when they pick up Myers, who proceeds to lead them at gunpoint on a wild odyssey into Mexico, where he plans to kill them and board a ferry to freedom across the Gulf of California. A taut thriller ensues, driven by stark contrasts, interesting inversions, and powerful frustrations, until Myers runs hard into the arms of justice and the fishermen are delivered from their terrible captivity.
Lupino manages to achieve much in the film’s meagre 71 minute runtime. Most striking to me are the contrasts, both visual and atmospheric, that serve the story. The setting alternates from the hotbox enclosure of Collins’ and Bowen’s car to the wide-open desert spaces through which it is passing. Collins and Bowen are seated in the light up front; Myers is shrouded in darkness in the backseat. Myers is blind in one eye and sharp as a hawk in the other. These contrasts are amplified by inversions, however. Collins is a mechanic and driver. He possesses the most power, therefore, in the most enclosed space. Bowen is the only character who can speak Spanish. Myers holds a gun, then, but Bowen has the power of knowledge when they need to resupply in one of the sleepy Mexican hamlets along the way. Ultimately, the dynamic that emerges between the three characters is a sort of inverted buddy feature. I often found myself wondering whether Bowen and Collins would remain friends when the ordeal was over, or if they would go their separate ways.
The Hitch-Hiker was a B picture for a reason, however. Its weaknesses are plain. There are holes in the plot big enough to drive the fishermen’s Plymouth through. The opportunities for the captives to overpower Myers and run away are seemingly endless, for example. The plot does nothing with the interesting inversions of power represented by the captives’ advantages in mechanical and linguistic knowledge, either. When Bowen speaks with Mexican characters in the film—all of whom are represented in the round, an unexpected breath of fresh air for the time—the opportunities are as tantalizing as his failure to capitalize on them is frustrating. The outcome is predictable, and the film’s short runtime does not allow Lupino to introduce many curves in the road on the way there.
Despite these flaws, The Hitch-Hiker is a must-see noir thriller. Uncluttered and raw, beautifully shot and intelligently optimistic in the shadow of the dark real-world events that shaped its story, the film captures the ambivalence of a moment in American history rich with opportunity but scarred by violence and despair. Imagine watching it in the bench seat up front of an old Chrysler parked in a darkened lot, soundtrack blaring through a speaker hung on the window. After the movie you drop off the speaker on the way out and drive home laughing about your date’s white knuckles when they clutched your knee at the suspenseful parts. You round a bend in the road, straining to see in the weak headlight beams what might be in the dark pavement ahead, and there is a lonesome man in a dark jacket on the side of the road, thumb stuck out, pointing your way. You keep driving.
C.B. Crenshaw 