Jason Philip Wierzba turned twenty in November of 1999 and was thirteen when Teenage Fanclub's album Thirteen was released to much bubblegum-chewin' fanfare among the sneaker set and out across the soda fountain circuit. He's the same age as Robyn, Natasha Lyonne, and Pete Doherty and came by his Royal Trux Veterans of Disorder tour t-shirt honestly. (He saw them at the Dominion in Ottawa and they played Veterans of Disorder straight through, front to back, except that they opened with "I'm Ready," which they'd practically have to when you think about it). Consider also Wierzba's pedigree as a scholar of the cinema and the image culture more broadly. It's like the wizard who neeeeeds to win the war against God and who in his steadfastness and commitment believes only pure informational mass and inundation will cut the mustard.We can happily insist that we are of one shared mind on this one: ain't nobody better situated or equipped to give you both the lowdown and the dish when it comes to the people's secret American cinema of the 1990s or any other secret of less-secret cinemas. Information is like a secret kept by the secret from the secret indefinitely.
Scientists today agree that this really is a problem that we do indeed have with information.
Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1992)
Dangerous Game (Abel Ferrara, 1993)
Frameup (Jon Jost, 1993)
Menace II Society (Albert and Allen Hughes, 1993)
When Pigs Fly (Sara Driver, 1993)
The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994)
The New Age (Michael Tolkin, 1994)
Roadracers (Robert Rodriguez, 1994)
Vanya on 42nd Street (Louis Malle, 1994)
Full Body Massage (Nicolas Roeg, 1995)
The Wife (Tom Noonan, 1995)
Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996)
Kansas City (Robert Altman, 1996)
Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997)
Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997)
Nowhere (Gregg Araki, 1997)
Two Girls and a Guy (James Toback, 1997) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Claire Dolan (Lodge Kerrigan, 1998)
Luminous Motion (Bette Gordon, 1998)
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999)
Surviving Desire (Hal Hartley, 1992)
[Short excerpt]
My mother and I did tricks, prestidigitation, and sleight-of-hand
in order to entertain the bewitching female staff
over lunch at the Earls in Mission this afternoon. 🎶 That's me in the corner/
that's me on the wine list / losing my religion 🎶
Butthole Surfers
"Who Was in My Room Last Night?"
* The Last Seduction and Freeway were indies picked up and originally broadcast by HBO, though both did have modest theatrical runs. Both Roadracers and Full Body Massage were made for cable network Showtime, who for a brief period of time were bold and experimental in their approach, hoping to carve out a niche in the market. Hal Hartley's sublime Survivng Desire, the Long Island master's exceedingly dear third feature in which a refreshed connection is established with simplicity and universality, was produced by and for PBS's American Playhouse.
My head swirled. The Dexies merged with the A-bomb drink and rerouted my bloodstream. I scoped the bandstand. Mixed-race Playboy Bunnies did the twist and the wah watusi. Their Bunny Ears flip-flopped. Off to stage left: Playboy poseur Hugh Hefner and sleazoid Tommy Tucker. Hef and Tommy sniffed cocaine and went aaaaaaah, that's goooooood. - James Ellroy, Red Sheet
I made thirty stag films and never faked an orgasm.
- Jennifer Jones in Angel, Angel, Down We Go (Robert Thom, 1969)
Why don't you act like a man and go hide in the closet, cowboy?
- Millie Perkins in The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Matt Cimber, 1976)
Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. "Hello Good Child"
* When I was living out east from 1997 until 2003, the musical acts that seemed to me to have most effectively captured whatever it was that was in the air at the time were Royal Trux, No-Neck Blues Band, Wolf Eyes, Yellow Swans, Black Dice, and Acid Mothers Temple.
Though some strain of noble perversity in the gene pool made legendary British film director Alfred Hitchcock a showman and cult of personality by sheer insistence of nature herself, the art and craft of cinema he had to study first as an apprentice so that he might know what he was doing. In point of fact, though his greatest and most important silent film, 1927’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, was made for English enterprise Gainsborough Pictures, Hitchcock undertook his apprenticeship in Germany, first at Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam and eventually UFA and Emelka Studios also. Alfred Hitchcock relocated to Hollywood and the patronage/protection of David O. Selznick in 1939, the year the Second World War officially broke out. Thus it would come to pass that Hitchcock showed up in Los Angeles County at more or less the same time as a healthy number of German and Austrian directors who had determined relatively early that Hitler was an existential threat to them and a great many others: Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger, et cetera. Jean Renoir—gourmand, Master of Ceremonies, son of the painter Pierre-Auguste—made five narrative features in Hollywood between 1941 and 1947, all more or less forgotten but each individually excellent and worth checking out should an opportunity arise. (Swamp Water, The Southerner, and The Woman on the Beach remain perennial favourites around these parts.) Transcontinental German-born sophisticate Max Ophüls made four Hollywood films in the 1940s, including 1948’s Letter from an Unknown Woman, which we believe may well be the finest Hollywood film of that whole august decade. Running from 1955 until 1962, Hitchcok’s ingenious television tentpole Alfred Hithcock Presents indisputably made ol’ Hitch the most publicly recognizable film director in the United States, but what is not nearly as well remembered today is that Jewish-Austrian maverick and promotional genius Otto Preminger was right there, hot on his heels. Born in Vienna to a position of privilege and status, reified strata, Preminger’s father was a noteworthy lawman and had in fact served for a time as the Austro-Hungarian attorney general. It was dad who insisted that young Otto get a degree in law so Otto, hedging his bets, secured that law degree in 1928…and then proceeded to pursue a career in the theatre, which is what he had intended to do all along. Somebody who makes it in the theatre in Vienna in the late-20s/early-30s has made it in theatre period. A person like that could practically write their own ticket…or dance card. Both Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger were known widely as temperamental men capable of tremendous cruelty. An Otto Preminger set could often devolve rapidly into a toxic workspace, and yet the lavish attention and worshipful ardour he demonstrates toward his actors, especially with respect to the time and space he gives them, means that his work with actors has a keenness, sensitivity, and generosity that you simply do not see in the work of any of his contemporaries, no matter how respected. Preminger is a director who loves watching actors act and that’s no small thing. Certainly we cannot make similar claims respective of Hitchcock. Somebody once made a joke that goes a little like this (I believe it’s in the 2015 Kent Jones Hitchcock/Truffaut doc):
Actor: What’s my motivation in this scene?
Hitchcock: I need you to stand perfectly still for thirty-to-forty seconds with a nervous look in your eyes.
Four years before Hitchcock’s wry and amiably sadistic TV show hit the air, Otto Preminger, ace hustler and man on a mission, had finally managed to start his own production company with its own channels to distribution and exhibition. The first film he made under his own umbrella was 1953’s The Moon is Blue, which, though it is extremely tame by the standards of any period unless you are a neurotic church lady, was partially made to pick a fight with the Production Code Administration, who refused to allow the film to be shown unless the words virgin and pregnant, plus a few others, similar in their innocuousness, were to be removed. Preminger is a provocateur and dandy who believes than even the most idiotic controversies are money in the bank, tout court. There is an amusing episode of the long-running sitcom version of M*A*S*H where Alan Alda’s Hawkeye campaigns to secure a print of The Moon is Blue for the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital Camp movie night, expecting salacious filth of a transcendental nature and thus leaving the climactic screening moribund and crestfallen when that doesn’t turn out to be what it is at all. I was at the very least expecting to see somebody’s moon. If the words virgin and pregnant were hot button issues in 1953, by the time of 1959 and Anatomy of a Murder, probably the most ambitious and impressive film Preminger ever made and the greatest courtroom drama of them all, the words rape and panties are used with such self-conscious regularity that a person’s head can sort of start to spin. The judge and two attorneys even have a considered discussion about how often they are using the word panties and whether or not there’s a better alternative. Many audience members at the time were dutifully outraged, of course. We have a brief and beautiful moment with Jimmy Stewart’s decent-but-perhaps-slightly-pervy former-D.A. currently slumming as a defence attorney when not out fishing, as he shares ever-so-evanescent a piano bench with the one and only Duke Ellington, who finds himself in these remote parts for God knows what reason. Additionally, in a choice bit of stunt casting that may never be equalled in the annals of realpolitik, the presiding judge in Anatomy of a Murder is played by Joseph N. Welch, who was not an actor by trade but definitely was the man who, in the summer of 1954 and in his position as special counsel to the U.S. Army, rhetorically asked red-baiting pig-fucker Joe McCarthy on live television: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Duke Ellington, Anatomy of a Murder [Official Motion Picture Score]
Francis Bacon, STUDY AFTER VELÁZQUEZ'S PORTRAIT OF POPE INNOCENT X, 1953
The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson, 2025
It had been our intention as sovereign individuals to greet all who crossed our path with the requisite kindness and consideration, but once that became altogether impossible we did our best to make a clean breast of sticky situations with as much speed and finesse as we could muster. Like the old hag once said: I used to want everybody to love me, now I just aspire to leave the room with a modicum of dignity. We are not in the first place inclined to want to impress anybody and, besides, nobody’s taught us how. You may want the person you are today consecrated in gold and bronze as the forever you but that’s not the way we’d have it. We’re not the person we were ten minutes ago when we took out the recycling and attempted to engage a small, brown rabbit in polite conversation. He said his name is Ezekiel. The end of times, the end of the road, it’s all putty on the cheeks. We don’t mess with perfection and if that means total annihilation then we’re all for it, friend. The ultimate crime of humanity is humanity itself and eventually somebody pays the piper, no? You don’t get a clean slate using stasis as your model. We advance and build until inexorably pulled back. If the tide is to go out fast while we’re in up to our waist, well, so be it. If that’s the situation in which we find ourself then it’s us who put us in peril. You don’t outmaneuver the moon and tides with clever parley. If you weren’t forced into the hot seat by orderlies or goons then it’s you who opted to plop down and see what’s what. We arrive wherever we arrive, whether the correct destination or the wrong one, by planning a journey, gathering materials, and attempting to execute live and lithe in space-time. In his 1955 seminar on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter,” Jacques Lacan famously for the first time declares that “a letter always arrives at its destination.” We like this line as much as does Slavoj ‘Mr. Sniffles’ Žižek, onetime Elvis of Critical Theory and heavyweight snoozer. To us it means plain as day that the letter you never received went to its real home instead. How do you like them apples? We’d be inclined to get stubborn and short-tempered, i.e. who needs you, impertinent letter? The letter went to its real home, you say? That sort of makes sense, its sufficiently probable. Go do your thing, sly fox. The great lens-crafter and, uh, materialist metaphysician Baruch Spinoza in his absolutely mandatory Ethics observes that most people are happy to settle for the first explanation that makes enough sense. This is the way critical faculties atrophy. I have to make a decision, I’m wondering if you could make it easy for me. An idiot good at providing simple explanations can conquer 95% of the motherfucking pie chart. You don’t really need us to tell you that. We knew an entrepreneur from Huston, Texas with a big white Stetson hat who used to say: nobody ever went poor underestimating the intelligence of the American public. What do we do? We broker deals for the spiders from Mars. We surge come Expo time. We hold your pecker while you pout and snivel. The art life is a hard row to hoe. Why do all the Alberta separatists look like the ugliest sea creatures from the deepest most unexplored of the oceanic zones and regions? Why do all the sloppily angling Alberta separatist punters make Danielle Smith look like a fucking Rhodes Scholar? This province has meatballs for brains, I tell you. Within the basically situated Calagry, Alberta situation, based you might say, we like the mountains and the prairie and the two rivers meeting, whereas the people we’d just as soon pawn off for beer money and bottle rockets. The other day we found ourselves out at Bragg Creek where in the coffee shop folks were discussing the news of the day—Alberta separatism and France’s meltdown of the social commons foremost in rotation—and we must honestly confess that we were pleased to find everybody more or less making sense and abstaining from bogus conspiratorial conjecture or what have you. It was kind of refreshing. Ordinary, decent people, merely trying to make sense of the blasted news. How much hypernormalization can Bridgette from Windermere even take? “This is difficult stuff,” offers Kevin Cline’s Mack in an offer to console his son in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1991 state-of-the-nation prestige pic Grand Canyon. “Making a left turn in L.A. is one of the harder things you'll learn in life.” Man, those sure were the glory days. Today we have to worry about being locked out of our bank account permanently because we used a different search engine. We don’t play games of chance because the house always wins and we, sir, are no house, sometimes finding it advisable to keep on the move and at the same time to break up and then reassemble later, under a more auspicious sign, as with the pack of wolves or the bustle and pump of the jazz ensemble in full swing. We’d go ahead and tip the waiter 20% no matter what horrible names he’s just called us. Fumbling through improbable eventuations it stings you to know are all too real, it might just so happen that you catch your reflection in the mirror ball as you hang upside down like a bat and you see that you’ve gone green as an eel, your hollow cheeks like lunar craters. Not just anybody is up for the challenge of loving the likes of us. We cannot set aside our explorations to consider them anew. That’s how people die out here. We know we’re best off finding a river and following it until we find people and their tools and machines and their speckled emblems of civilization. It is those who are lost who are liable to receive guidance.It is those who receive care who are most likely to communicate gratitude. We wouldn’t want much to do with someone who showed up unannounced in order to visibly disapprove of us. There is a brief interval at the start of a person’s reaction where they don’t have any control of the reaction. Is their body language open or guarded? Where do the eyes intuitively go? Which direction does the body lean? Does a hand suddenly go into a pocket or behind a back? That’s our criminal justice bonafides accounted for, we suppose. Hot dog. If Donald Trump can make a deal then so can we. We are as gay as the day is grey. Vengeance and terror are the bully’s heartening loot. Fuck with us and it’s on you. If you knew better you would do better. What happens if we go out there and we’re pounded into the dirt? Then God rest our souls, I guess. You can always tell a Nazi from his stupid-ass haircut but you can’t always stop him from doing you dirty. In his stately and razor-sharp 2023 masterpiece The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer builds a narrative passage or tunnel through an extremely complex interior and exterior topography built out of the posh home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family—the cramped kitchen and spaces adjoining it very much remind us somehow of the house in Jacques Rivette’s 1985 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (though the choice of lenses predictably harkens to Kubrick)—and extending in concentric waveform rings outward from the grounds of the estate and into the immediate surrounding area while the SS begin to set in motion the monstrous and diabolical Final Solution (Endlösung) on the unseen periphery. All is as it should be in the garden. Slightly aggrieved to have it be known to just anybody, we confess all the same that The French Dispatch (2021) and The Phoenician Scheme (2025) are at the present time our most highly esteemed Wes Anderson pictures. He and Benicio Del Toro are simply a match made in heaven. In Paul West’s 1980 historical novel about him, Claus von Stauffenberg, the tall, handsome Nazi who plotted the assassination of Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944, denigrates the moody dictator as nothing more than a “wallpaper hanger.” Alexander Theroux called Paul West a “vital writer and man of irrepressible spirit” who is “able to analyze his every last dilemma.” “I believe that Paul West listens to music, earphoned for the night through which he writes,” gushes William H. Gass in a 2004 interview, “so that the rhythms will get into his blood, and for the energy he can draw from sounds that at the same time block out everything of the world but art.” We are melody, rhythm, and sound before we give you so much as our face. That’s the gospel according to Robert Bresson: “I’d rather people feel a film,” he insists, “before understanding it.” The eyes are directed whereas the ears roam. For the prisoner, auditory reach extends well beyond the cell and the canopy of night issues its own special hum. “One of the arts of being human, in whatever era,” writes Paul West in his 1995 reminiscence A Stroke of Genius: Illness and Self-Discovery, “has been to control ourselves and our lives even while having to live incoherently, as blank about tomorrow as about the purpose of life itself.” There is nothing left for a people who cannot generate kinship and support networks. We are after something that endures, encourages networks of care, and which encourages participation (especially if that participation is a little unorthodox). The Baby Boomers sit on a Money & Care time bomb and it’s still too early to prognosticate with respect to how that’s going to play in the near future. What happens when a hefty portion of the world’s wealth is held in the hands of the elderly and the dying? We can only hope that it might help to encourage better organized and more robust systems of care, supply following dutifully on the tail of demand. Atomized and divided communities impoverished in innumerable respects are not encouraged to care for one another and have never been provided with a healthy model of how to do so. In interfacing with the homeless community we find that what are even more ubiquitous than addiction and mental health disorders in the lives of these folks are bad communication skills and bad problem solving skills. That really oughtn’t surprise you. It isn’t any more their fault than who their parents are, who runs ExxonMobil, or…contracting pancreatic cancer. We do admit that the administration of education and healthcare are among the most confounding earthly conundrums we know of. People are resistant, people are stubborn, and it could not be more clear that God wanted it that way. How do we make everything better? I don’t know…pretend? There might actually be something to that. Fake it ’til you make it. We’ve been there and done that. The major downside is that it can get mighty Sisyphean. When we start to get anxious we on occasion find relief in the realization that nobody has dirt on us except for dumb shit. Sometimes in his work with Wes Anderson, it seems like right after Anderson has called action there is a brief moment where Benicio Del Toro discovers that he’s wearing unfamiliar clothes in a strange place he does not recognize before somehow recollecting nevertheless that he has scripted lines he must deliver. People don’t have to make sense. They’re basically burning with yearning, in several senses several. It is easier to understand cruel acts in the abstract than to bear witness to them directly. We can’t mourn everybody but we can definitely remember what we’d rather not. Lighten your load, it ain’t nothing but lampoon. Right? We do not advise occupying the seat of judgement. Put $100 in your tank and go buy some groceries. Take in the evening air. Just don’t come around here complaining about the gas prices. Kindly follow that there Yellow Brick Road.
Motion in discontinuous lines. Everything is perfectly fine.
The personal lived experience of the phantomic and physiognomic plentitude of simultaneity, uneasy and irreal, hairs perhaps standing up on the back of the neck, has found us in our sundry errant mysticisms demeaning of God direct revelation of God’s Being and Nature and then immediately apologizing to God on our knees for the unthinkably rude affront. What can we say? We’re antsy. Why are we here and what even is this place? Help! It is the Christians who have for a solid while been leading the pack in apologizing to God. But what we need to know about reality and the fundamental parts of which it consists will not desist in pestering us, demanding rigorous inquiry and meditation, the sort of scrutiny the very heartbeat itself would appear to be asking after, practically hounding us on days of heightened generalized agitation in the aether. Fairly late in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, a doper’s penny dreadful for the ages that haunts some of the author’s old haunts, scrounging for cigarette and reefer butts, Joaquin Phoenix’s Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello freezes suddenly whilst walking briskly down the street in the aftermath of a harrowing escape and near-miss at the hands of dope-peddling Aryan sadists. “Pssst. Doper's ESP, Doc,” warns Sortilège on the soundtrack, played and voiced as she is by the divine Joanna Newsom, her wry hard-nut commentary forever the antidote to all the dissonance and distortion frothing up off this intergalactically pretzeled, slightly droopy, and curiously disheveled lifeworld: “doper’s ESP... ohhhhh no.” If you get it, you get it. Consider yourself one of the minor oracles. This is what we mean, we brigands and flea-wranglers of the open road, as we slouch our way toward Bethlehem in Joan Didion’a sunglasses and our own cloaks and gowns, when we speak of uncanny simultaneity, prehension, and situated universal absurdity. Have you ever had a moment, for instance, where you saw a bird land on a branch in your peripheral vision and a chilling sensation shot through you that the exact timed and totally specific motion of the bird in apprehended space—space apprehended by you—corresponded directly and indeed cosmically, all hung and strung together, with other movements happening at the same time within your field of vision? Has something so stupid and absurd and strange ever happened to you that you thought: okay, reality isn’t even real at all?
Alive and absurd in defiance of popular disapproval. Simplify who you are so you can wear it like a medallion, a living invincible epitaph or epigraph underscoring bold tomorrows already sealed. Busy yourself about in the circuitry that has been arranged for you…and then quite badly tangled. When you speed up people and their machines and tools excessively, abandoning meaningful oversight and stewardship, you can expect heat, fires, and explosions in chain reaction.For the connoisseur watching Monte Hellman’s 1971 Samuel-Beckett-piston-head automobile western Two-Lane Blacktop for the first time, the film’s ending, which features an optical effect which makes it appear that the film you are watching is burning up in the projector, not only underscores what happens to machines and machine-assemblages when they run too hot, but also obviously pays direct homage to Ingmar Bergman, about halfway through whose 1966 Persona the image stammers, wobbles, and glitches, suddenly appearing to ignite, melt, and burn itself out inside the projector gate. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, there have been more and more narratives, especially in the cinema, that ignore the convention of three acts with a pattern of rising action and resolution, cobbling together instead runaway stories that go faster than they can handle and rise and rise like Icarus unto glitched-out overkill. Death by solar proximity. I guess because of TheTibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s 2009 colossus of overkill Enter the Void is a ragtag serpentine spree that lurches forward with lurid abandon until the film itself bursts through some interstitial cosmic membrane and is reborn as a human child, screaming bloody murder. One of his best two or three movies no matter what folks may say, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the truncated version of which was part of 2007’s commercially-ill-advised Grindhouse along with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, has, like many of the best Hong Kong genre movies of the ’80s and ‘90s, a story outline you could scrawl on a cocktail napkin. All the better. The payoff is we get to hang out with a whole bunch of incredibly fun young women, in two distinct spatiotemporal frames, as they talk, kid one another, drink, smoke pot, and cavort. It is a movie that is actually like hanging out with your friends and going places and doing things in a more or less extemporaneous way, activities delineated in a kind of purely ludic time, these idylls and episodes broken up by bravura action sequences that are shocking, inventive, surprising, and sometimes funny, including the final one, which culminates in Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thoms, and Zoë Bell going to town on Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, levelling him with roundhouse kicks and debilitating jabs, one after another, as the editing picks up speed, fragments, freezes, lurches, stammers, goes schizz-on-a-stick. The ending of Death Proof is the most Tarantino has ever resembled über-independent Japanese maverick Shinya Tsukamoto, whose quintessential cyberpunk urtext Tetsuo: The Iron Man builds to a climax that finds speed-freaking salaryman hero and metalloid demon villain merging in flesh, metal, and mindset, forming a single grotesque machinic entity and declaring, bound in newfound solidarity, that they shall turn the whole earth into metal, leaking fluids, and rust. Rust never sleeps.
When the film catches fire that is negation, when the film melts that is disillusion, and when it burns itself out that is inferno.
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich, "Hold Tight"
The ending of Two-Lane Blacktop (Monto Hellman, 1971)
