Monday, May 30, 2022

Happy?


The best essay ever written on "our veterans."

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Undying

 
Takeshi Kitano has always been perhaps the strangest of film artists, a moving combination of extreme violence and extreme tenderness -- a sort of Japanese mix of  Peckinpah and Max Ophuls. Who else, other than Nicholas Ray, can claim such range? Dolls -- released to empty Tokyo houses back in 2002 and at last making it to the cinematically barren shores of the USA in '05 (for one week) -- is Kitano at his most tender. Three stories are interwoven, and the dolls of the title refer to those among us -- a vanishing breed -- whose depth of love is too strong for the world: they live in a world beyond ours. Characters such as these once held a primary place in the focus of world art. (Balzac made a career of them.) No more, outside of hearts such as Kitano's. Much in this movie, I imagine, comes from his life. The aging Yakuza (wonderfully played by Tatsuya Mihashi) is Kitano the guilty husband. The lonely idol disfigured by car accident leads us back to Kitano's near-death in a motorcycle crack-up. Perhaps the forsaken woman embodied by Chieko Matsubara and the main character Sawako (Miho Kanno) is the director's dual valentine of apology to his loyal (and constantly betrayed) wife. Where it comes from does not matter. What does are some of the most moving moments in all cinema: the fade out on the groupie madly in love with the pretty pop star, as he rocks out, headphones on, alone in his bedroom; the moment of recognition by Mihashi as he sees Matsubara still waiting for him, years later, at their chosen bench; Sawako holding up her angel necklace, as she and her lover gaze back into time, seeing the moment when the necklace was first given to her; the groupie and pop star "smelling the roses"; and the incomparable moment when Matsumoto, Miho Kanno's betrayer, realizes his fate is forever linked to hers -- because of the betrayal -- as he leads her toward the road they must travel together. . .

Kitano's films have often been about the struggle to protect love (romantic and fraternal) through violence. Hana-bi (translation: Fire Flower) is the greatest of these. In Dolls, there is no violence. Only the sadness at the end of all roads taken to embody love, at the cost of everything else. The music by Joe Hisaishi and the photography by Katsumi Yanagijima are beyond compare, in one of the very few great films of the 21st-century.

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Winter is Coming

"The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis."
-- Thomas Merton
Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds premiered in New York City 59 years ago and for 59 years audiences have asked the movie the same basic question: Why do the birds attack? You could fill a small library with the monographs and books which have tried to answer the question, almost all of them throwing up their hands in confusion, cliché, or pedantry: God's punishment of Man; Nature's punishment of Man; Fate; Science; the Unknown; the Absurd. Or mere storytelling incompetence and exhaustion on the part of an aging, burned-out director (in Pauline Kael's aging, burned-out "analysis"). Yet the movie, I think, does provide the answer, a mystery solved consistent with Alfred Hitchcock's chain of wounded masterpieces beginning with The Wrong Man (1956) and ending with Marnie (1964) -- a run of artistic achievement equal to any of the 20th Century.

When do the birds attack?
Gulls attack Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) when she reverts to posing and primping, after exposing herself emotionally to Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) by finding out where he lives, buying love birds for his little sister's birthday, traveling to his family home in Bodega Bay, and dropping off the love birds. Love birds.
A gull crashes into Annie Hayworth's (Suzanne Pleshette) door after Annie and Melanie have opened their hearts and emotional secrets to each other -- their love for Mitch -- on a night of full moon. Perhaps a warning to them from the witch of the Bay: Lydia (Jessica Tandy), Mitch Brenner's mother.
Gulls attack the children at Cathy Brenner's (Veronica Cartwright) birthday party -- immediately upon Melanie's revelation to Mitch of her hatred of her own abandoning mother: a crooning that opens the door to Mitch's own mother-hatred -- while Annie Hayworth, the junior witch of the town and its sole elementary school teacher, watches Mitch and Melanie talk among the dunes, as Lydia stands close by also watching. The birds attack the children. . .
Sparrows explode into the Brenner family house as Lydia's hysteria is made manifest, over Mitch's invitation to Melanie to sleep overnight in an upstairs bedroom.
Handsome neighbor Dan Fawcett -- whose chickens won't eat -- is murdered by crazy birds, his eyes eaten out -- mother Lydia's rage killing the man she'd been having an affair with (or hoping to) -- the better to focus on Mitch; the better to keep him near.
Crows attack Annie Hayworth's world, her school and school children, her house where Melanie Daniels is also staying -- the attack beginning instantly after Lydia sends Melanie to the school to check on Cathy Brenner's safety; Lydia willing to risk the sacrifice of her young daughter if it will forever take Melanie and Annie out from between herself and Mitch. Perhaps take Cathy out as well, another future rival.
At last, Lydia loses control, her nightmare of loss released into the open air, as her fury begins to destroy all. Her home and neighbors. Her town. Perhaps Mitch himself.
There are witches in Bodega Bay. And does in lovely human forms. And a cold calculating cunt on her way to becoming a doe. It is always overcast in Bodega Bay, the whole place haunted, the colors muted, earthtones exhausted, like a Braque. The only vibrancy here is the blood red of Annie Hayworth: she is the earth, the wounded, with heart and orgasm -- vows taken for life and the furies of vengeance if one is untrue to the depths of passion.

And something else. The personal panics of Hitchcock's characters seem born of their time. They can hear the ominous, distant drums. The powerful, perhaps smug, confidence of American life growing since the War is reaching a cross-roads -- the Eisenhower consensus is coming apart, so is the Nuclear Family, as sexual repression comes home to roost. Kennedy -- and Rod Taylor could be his twin -- as Fertility God. All the terrors and conflicts to come, as much of the best in American life is about to go away forever. He is in danger! So is the love. The Birds rejects the Kennedy promise. The call for togetherness and love, emotional exposure, sexual relaxation, will be destroyed. The year the movie is released will be the call's high point -- all downhill from there. Hitchcock rejects the promise -- not emotionally or spiritually -- but as a simple impossibility, as something forever out of character with the brutish, hateful, mob-oriented, and violent American "character." Togetherness will not work, cannot, against the furies of reaction to come, Just as he sensed in Psycho (1960) the new-born lone-gun Oswald sickness emerging from the American miasma, here Hitchcock senses the Kennedy hope -- and the doom it will soon face.

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Sacred Hearts


[Originally posted during the autumn of 2011.]

"Film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long." -- Norman Mailer

There were movies made during the 1940s war different from all other movies, from all other times; as tens of millions lost their lives in waves of newborn death-machine technologies, these works exist, on the cusp of noir, somewhere between life and death: La Nave Bianca, 47 Ronin, Heaven Can Wait, Ivan the Terrible - Part I, the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur RKO masterpieces.

Robert Bresson's Ladies of the Bois de Bologne.


The Magnificent Ambersons.


Day of Wrath.


And the greatest directorial début in movie history, Bresson's 1943 Les Anges du Peche (Angels of Sin), a film Bresson -- because of Occupation and air raids -- had to shoot entirely at night. (Also occasionally lacking were electricity and heat: you can sometimes see the actresses' breath.) The movie is the Catholicism of my youth: secrets, magic, sorrow, hysteria, purity, suffocation, mystery, passion, furtiveness, wonder, humiliation, pride, miracle, sacrifice, self-abnegation, monumentality, prostration before power, ceremony, despair, blood, terror, lust, suffering, severity, ecstasy, longing, relics. There are many Holy Relics in Les Anges: Anne-Marie's mirror and family photographs, Thérèse's gun, police handcuffs, the dour Assistant Superior's black cat, the nuns' beautiful bare feet, the hands of Anne-Marie and Thérèse.

Although reshaped by the fresh winds of Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, and Vatican II (eventually causing inanities such as singing masses, church architecture more suited to high school gymnasiums, Saturday services, folk guitars, no Latin, congregational call-and-response, and the elimination of incense because it was making some people sick), my parish embraced the individual over the communal, mostly divorced from good works. One burns for good or evil by one's own flame, not in relation to others'.


A young and beautiful aristocrat joins a convent dedicated to the resurrection of lost souls -- female prison inmates released at the end of their sentences (or commuted) into the Grace and mercy of the Sisters. Anne-Marie (Renée Faure) becomes obsessed with inmate Thérèse (a hard-bitten girl who rejects the convent upon release, but who later runs to it for sanctuary after killing her ex-boyfriend, the man who framed her). Because of excessive willfulness and pride, Anne-Marie is asked to leave the Order. She refuses to return to her family, instead sneaking onto the convent grounds at night to remain close to the Sisters and to Thérèse. The characters float through Bresson and photographer Philippe Agostini's black-and-grey-and-white labyrinth of moral hierarchies and dimensions, embraced by Grunenwald's awe.


"Love, unannounced, soon has God's ear. Intelligence and wit He takes longer to hear." -- Silesius

Les Anges du Peche was released the summer of Simone Weil's death:

He entered my room and said:
“You understand nothing,
you know nothing.
Come with me and I will show you things.”
I followed him.

He took me into a church.
It was new and ugly. He led me
to the altar and said:
“Kneel down.”
I told him I had not been baptized.
He said, “Fall on your knees,
in love, as before the place where
truth lies.”
I obeyed.

He took me out and made me climb up
to his room. Through an open window
I could see the whole city, and the river.
The room was empty, except for a table
and chairs. He told me to sit.

We were alone. He spoke. From time
to time, other women would come in,
then leave.

Winter had gone; spring had not yet
come. The branches of the trees were
bare, without buds, in the cold air
full of sunshine. The light of day would
come shining, and fade away; then the
moon and stars would enter through
the window. And then once more
dawn would come.

At times he would be silent,
take some bread from a shelf,
and we would share it. This bread
really had the taste of bread.
I have never found that taste again.
               
He would pour some wine for me,
and some for himself ~ wine which
tasted of the sun, of the city. Other times
we would stretch ourselves out on the floor,
and sweet sleep would enfold me.
Then I would wake with the sun.
He had promised to teach me, but he
didn’t teach me anything.
We talked about all kinds of things,
as do old friends.

One day he said to me, “Now go.”
I fell down before him, I clasped his
knees, I implored him to not drive me
away. But he threw me out. I went down
the stairs unconscious of everything,
my heart was in shreds. I wandered
down the stairs. Then I realized I had
no idea where his room lay.

I have never tried to find it again.
I understood that he had come for me
by mistake. My place is not in that room.
It can be anywhere ~ in a prison cell,
on a train, in a red plush lobby ~
anywhere, except in that room.

Sometimes I cannot help trying,
with fear and remorse, to repeat
to myself a part of what he said
to me. How am I to know if I remember
rightly? He is not there to tell me.

I know well that he does not love me.
How could he love me? And yet deep down
within me something, a particle of myself,
cannot help thinking, that perhaps in spite of all,
he loves me.

"I know there is a God -- and I see a storm coming.
If He has a place for me, I believe that I am ready."
-- John F. Kennedy
Comparing Les Anges to Lilies of the Field, Bresson to Ralph Nelson, is like comparing Missa Solemnis to "If I Had a Hammer" or "Blowin' in the Wind." Still, both movies embody their time and place via a detailed, beautiful, and intense Catholicism as different as Vichy France and Kennedy's America, as apart from each other as were the most despairing moments in man's history from some of the brightest.

Driving across the flatlands of some southwestern state, Homer Smith's car breaks down near to a broken-down convent. He asks the nuns for some water for his engine, and allows himself to be roped into doing odd jobs for what Homer (Sidney Poitier) assumes will be for pay. The pay does not come, the odd jobs multiply, and eventually Smith agrees to personally build the Sisters -- a platoon of German/East European nuns on the run from Godless Communism, in director/producer/actor Ralph Nelson's genuflection before Cold War liberalism -- a new church, brick-by-brick. The local community -- the poor and working class, plus one cracker businessman with a heart of gold (nicely played by Nelson) -- insist on contributing, as Homer steps away from his pride, toward the common good.


In another season, the movie may have been ignored. 1963 would be the last year before Nixon without a Long Hot Summer. Instead it had a March on Washington, George Wallace standing in a schoolhouse doorway, the death of Medgar Evers in the first American political assassination of the decade, four little girls blown up in a Birmingham church, a Civil Rights Bill, and the President of the United States declaring the elimination of race prejudice the supreme moral issue.



So a small, dignified, kind movie gets lots of attention and its star becomes the first black actor (playing a human being) to win an Oscar. A handsome, gleaming black man can appear on screen before white nuns, some of them young and pretty, in his underwear. Quite a-ways from 1960, movie-wise.

The experience of our lone Catholic Administration can be seen as the country's Stations of the Cross, on the road to the Golgotha of Dallas:

First Station -- Kennedy refuses troop involvement in a collapsing Laos, instead helps form a neutralist-coalition government which stands until the middle-1970s.

Second Station -- Kennedy refuses United States air cover and troop involvement during the rout at the Bay of Pigs.

Third Station -- Berlin Wall goes up. Kennedy takes no action.

Fourth Station -- South Vietnam on the brink of collapse, as most of JFK's government pushes strongly for the sending of 250,000 troops to stabilize the Diem regime. Kennedy sends 10,000 "advisers" instead.

Fifth Station -- Kennedy takes on U.S. Steel, forcing the leaders of the steel industry to rescind a price increase which violated a Kennedy-brokered agreement to combat inflation.

Sixth Station -- Refusing calls to bomb and invade Cuba, refusing the calls of some to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Moscow, Kennedy resolves the Missile Crisis by agreeing to not attack Cuba and to remove U.S. nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey, on the Soviet border.

Seventh Station -- Kennedy and Indonesian President Sukarno take steps to form a neutralist government in troubled East Borneo, JFK again refusing to approve any covert actions aimed at the country, a refusal reversed two years later by LBJ, leading to the murder of over 1,000,000 suspected "leftists" and the overthrow of Sukarno.

Eighth Station -- Kennedy forms back-channel to Castro government.

Ninth Station -- At American University, JFK calls for an end to the Cold War, reminding us that "we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal."

Tenth Station -- The next day(!), Kennedy announces his intention to help lead the Black Revolution instead of fighting it.

Eleventh Station -- Kennedy forms back-channel to North Vietnamese government, through the Ngo brothers.

Twelfth Station -- Signs the Nuclear Test Ban treaty with the Soviets, banning all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underground, or underwater.

Thirteenth Station -- Kennedy orders first 1,000 Americans withdrawn from South Vietnam by the end of '63, in phase-one of a planned total Vietnam withdrawal.

Fourteenth Station -- At the United Nations on September 20, 1963, JFK calls for world disarmament, for a world government in the interests of peace, a world center for conservation and food distribution, and a world system of health bringing all people of the earth under medical protection. He also calls for an end to the Space Race, for a unified effort to explore the stars, the planets, the moon -- and a ban on all outer space weapons and military-oriented satellites. This, combined with Kennedy's refusal to Americanize the war in Southeast Asia, would have cost the corporate/military/intelligence vampires trillions of dollars.


Liberation Theology begins here. And continues under Pope Francis.


To have defined the Catholic Church by the likes of the former Nazi pope and his fellow pederasts was like defining togetherness along the lines of the Manson Family. In the face of virulent attacks from Rome (most of them directed by Ratzinger), the magnificent socialist liberations across Central and South America flowed from the Theology as does the continuing model of the Cuban Revolution.

The timing of the original attacks on the Church, ignited by the child abuse scandals, has always smelled. One thinks of Chomsky's defense of government: "There's a lot of things wrong with government, but what the US Elites hate about it is what is right: that government is reachable and controllable by the people, that is it the only weapon available against increasing privatization and inequality." The attempt to destroy the public face of the Catholic Church -- a jihad coincidentally begun under the most extreme WASP war administration in U.S. history -- emerged to destroy what is right with the Church: its remaining preference for the poor, its involvement with anti-war, anti-globalist, anti-capitalist movements across the world.

As far as is known, no part of the Catholic Church is currently engaged in the destruction of Palestinian and other Middle Eastern cultures, homes, women, children or old men. Nor is the Church part of the Holy WASP Capitalist Crusade against the world in places like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan or Afghanistan. (Or Europe.) The buggery of children has gone on forever in the hallowed halls of:

Yale Skull & Bones
The Council on Foreign Relations
The TriLateral Commission
Sullivan and Cromwell
The CIA
The Carlyle Group
Lutherans, Calvinists, and Presbyterians
Methodists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans

And all the other WASP bloodsuckers who have caused the deaths of billions of people over the past centuries.


Nuns, the poor and working class, the despairing. Who notices now? The message is clear: you are waste product, the world would be better off without you; in fact, doesn't even see you. The generosity of the country's heart has shut. Liberation Theology is Occupy Wall Street, our current Lilies of the Field. Doubtless they are generally unprepared for the shitstorm which will rain down once the show stops and the corporate walls begin to crack, but they are the few honorable, those here in this once great city, now a lost heap of sorrow and rage who still try to do their best and to do good. They are fine troops, with the courage to live at war every day in a society now run by beasts.

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Friday, May 13, 2022

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Beauty and Balls

Monday, May 9, 2022

Happy Victory Day!


While Woke Western vampires deny the deaths of 30,000,000 Soviets in the defeat of Hitler (while Ukrainian scum claims to have been the "liberators of Berlin" -- sure, after helping the Nazis exterminate 500,000 Jews), the truth of Victory Day.


RT's (banned!) "Crosstalk":