If I had to I could drag you by the hair over hot coals in my bare feet. The depthless depths of pain and suffering I have experienced shouldn’t make any real sense to all that many people, only the most wretched and the most chronic, and when I show you your agony I want to show you mine also, my eagerness tripping on its lip as it tries to skip; the mangled, lately impaled tongue which is also that of earth’s wretched and the systemically crippled public estate of minced speech that binds us together at this dimly-lit table to eat odiferous coins shat by a giant avocado named Tyrannasorus Tex. Everybody, along with me: “Howdy, Tex!”
Le mépris (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
I was at my little out of the way table in the psych ward at the South Campus and a sweet young lady with all the hippie / back-to-earth vibrancy and vacuity came and sat down and we chatted amicably for a bit, until, upon my having told her that I am a writer, she encouraged me to try ChatGPT. It was amazing how decisive this actually was: the relationship ended unambiguously at this exact moment, nearly crystalline in its perfect celestial harmonics. Most relationships are cluttered and overwhelmed by peripheral business such that when decisive moments come they’re neither clear nor obvious. Consider just for the moment a comic scenario wherein a man hires a private investigator to find the one thing above all others that he the husband better not ever say within his wife’s earshot, for fear of God and womanhood, nasty and brassy and inured to sympathy. In Jean-Luc Godard’s immortal Le mépris—1963, CinemaScope and Capri!—in which Michel Piccoli plays a man most of whose day is spent daydreaming that he’s Dean Martin in Minelli’s Some Came Running (1958) until at some point he realizes that in the fairly recent past his wife Camille—played by Brigitte Bardot, who in the early-60s was stacked like a motherfucker—has stopped loving him for something specific he’s done but which he’s helpless to pinpoint and which she cannot or will not not communicate clearly.
The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, 1980)
Once when I was playing Minesweeper on the computer as a boy my maternal grandfather, who also used to stand in front of the garage and let me shoot tennis balls at him with my hockey stick and who was a mechanic and engineer who’d served in the Second World War and, because of his specializations, had in fact worked on some mine fields up close and personal...well, grandpa knew his business and he knew what he was saying when he said that the computer game I was playing was worse than stupid, irresponsible, a purely statistical business where the rat keeps punching the button, whereas in real life the distribution of mines is highly randomized and as soon as you set one off you’re dead. Or worse. Filmmaker and serviceman Samuel Fuller writes in his memoir A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking that most of the young men serving with him in North Africa and Italy were much more afraid of surviving having their genitals blown off by a mine than they were of being put out of commission by one permanentemente. I also saw a documentary once where French television was interviewing veterans of the First World War and somebody asked one of the old men if gas and chemical attacks were the worst part of the trench warfare experience and the veteran said, so chillingly a sparkly tingle ran through my whole body, that the chemical warfare was absolutely nothing compared to the flamethrowers.
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
I have for as long as I’ve loved movies almost, one hopes, loved them as they ought to be loved. Devotionally, worshipfully, manic making-of-the-rounds. For some reason very early only I took an immediate interest in the mysterious qualities of the visual style of Stanley Kubrick, originally a teen photographer for Look. The early black and white films struck me as being somehow the exemplar of what movies were supposed to be. The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). I have a sickly feeling in my gut that both that latter film and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) are no longer held in high common esteem the way proper decency would appear to demand. Some people don’t like the control and sadism in Kubrick’s God’s-eye view. Some people don’t like the way he has treated people, legends persisting of actors and actresses being forced to do so many takes on a given scene that they fatigue and collapse totally, a near state of psychospiritual ruination that the director clearly went after occasionally with intention. 1980’s The Shining is probably Kubrick’s best and most brilliant film, but nearly everybody knows of the traumatic experience actress Shelley Duvall endured during that film’s protracted production. It’s scarcely all that hidden. The reason her performance is so much more intense and more real than Jack Nicholson’s is because she is actually hyperventilating and in hysterics. There is something definitely disgusting but also a little shrouded and opaque about the whole business of how Kubrick treated Duvall and why, but I also don’t seem to suffer too much vicarious cross-traumatization when when I watch The Shining, which I’ve always believed to be a masterpiece. I don’t feel the same way about erotic death-bloat saga Last Tango in Paris, the infamous and lamentable Bernardo Bertolucci picture in which Marlon Brandon goes every which way but loose and then some, to the the extent that actress Maria Schneider, in the film’s most notorious and even meme-like sequence, involving sex and butter on the kitchen floor, was much more improvised than it ever should have been allowed to be; it is not that Marlon Brando penetrated or sexually assaulted Maria Schneider but rather that because of the chaotic and scary nature of the production situation overall, Schneider was genuinely afraid he might actually go ahead and do that...while they were rolling. I will absolutely never watch Last Tango in Paris again as long as I live. Yet I will be screening The Shining with some regularity for my own edification as long as I’m up and able, and it isn’t because I don’t respect Shelley Duvall’s trauma (which I assuredly do). One thing I would like to make a special point of here is that I don’t think that Stanley Kubrick’s sadism and cruelty are especially misogynistic as such. I recently had the pleasure of procuring a copy of the Criterion Blu-ray set for the marvellous and ingeniously ironic Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and the second additional disk of supplementary features gives us a peek at Kubrick’s wife Christiane and their three daughters, as attractive, good-humoured, dogged, and witty a group of ladies as you could ever hope to meet…and the people Kubrick hung out with daily on that giant rotating film set in England where he lived the last good heap of his life. I’ll bet you a million bucks that those four women were the best thing God ever gave the wily shutterbug from the Bronx.
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