The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T

It's fun to consider works of art in historical context, and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T flies in the face of the era in which it was created, the Eisenhower 50's. This was a time of post-war prosperity, a forced return to normalcy where blandness and routine was considered ideal (compared to a world in flames a few years earlier, completely understandable). But this was America, where the center never holds. Dr. T's anti-authoritarian stance seems like something that would have found a welcoming home several years later in the late 60's. It's got autocratic leaders, restless youngsters who regard "discipline" as a dirty word, off-kilter music, and it's all awash in surreal, bendy colors meant to 'trip' you up, ahem. All that's probably why the thing tanked upon release.

But we don't live in either of those eras, so we must judge the flick as a stand alone piece of work (if such a thing is possible; I'll get to that later). The one absolute stand-out is the design with its proto Frank Geary curvilinear Terwilliker Institute. They didn't half-ass it. Twisty walls, giant pointy fingers, cumbersome musical instruments that dripped from Dali's brush, a ladder to nowhere. It's a real-life Dr. Seuss (pronounced "soice," like "rejoice," thanks, J) that contemporary attempts of filming his work failed at. Like The Wizard of Oz, the dream worlds, despite their dangers ("disintegrated, atom by atom"), both outshines and shines a light upon the real one. What I found myself doing, however, was admiring the obvious labor that went into the design and construction of the sets and immediately thinking that now some poindexter with a Mac can crank the same thing out in an hour. That's where modern filmmaking imposes its will (and invariably sucks the life out of) on the way viewers view the classics.

OK, so being forced to practice the piano isn't fighting against worldwide tyranny (or is it?), but you pick your battles. It's enough for it to become a life-or-death struggle against a dictatorship ("very atomic!") and search for a father-figure, for an impressionable scamp.

Wild At Heart, or life is a tarmac badly traveled 3/22/09

We chose this movie for Ron, who was visiting at the time, and nursing a healthy Nicholas Cage fetish.

This movie has an aesthetic mix of conceptual coolness and an unpredictably-tempered wildness that allows powerful images to gaze into the mirror of the other. What does this mean? The audience experiences the two sides of proximity and distance, the sense of security and exposure, the physical and the psychic, that Sailor and Lula presumably experience. The characters develop out of a highly personal and subjective exploration of a room or space in which they have sex, which forms the emotional framework for ideologically-spawned vestiges in sculptural, architectural, psychic, and narrative fragments of life.

It’s difficult to choose this movie between good and evil, adolescence and maturity, accountability and negligence. There are so many symbols in this movie that indicate a limbo, and the entirety of the story is looking for a home. Especially the violent rest in Big Tuna calls to mind the mythological “fish” static state between bliss and banishment. I particularly love cousin Dell’s “disappearance”--the ultimate escape, and Lula’s hope for ascension.

But part of me just wants to call “Wild At Heart” maniacal pop. It’s full of quotable lines. (I think that has come to mean to me, after knowing Erik for about a year, that the lines quoted out of context provide a considerable amount of amusement and pop-culture value. Would you agree, E?) My friend Donald came to movie night this week for the first time and created a kind of division between the regulars. Was it a failed attempt by Lynch to make a deeper, more resonant film, or is it supposed to be a simple love story, as Karen believes? The discussion was diffused by Ron laughing in the corner and then privately acquiescing to Donald’s theory. (Ron will get me back for saying that.)

Anyway: Maniacal Pop. Maybe I’ll re-write Dickman’s All American Poem and create the genre…

Badlands (1973) 3/1/09

Martin Sheen ends up playing the President of the United States on national television. And he's still got that hair. It's unilateral.

Badlands 3/1/09

Badlands is like a malpais, but not volcanic. Though you could say Kit erupts fairly easily. Badlands never gets to Mexico, but if it had, they would call it tierras baldías. Malpais is also in Brave New World, whose title is the opposite of what this movie is about.

There’s a lot of kicking in Badlands, but it’s all show and spark, and the dusty terrain lends itself naturally to the action. Kit kicks a cow, a rock, a dog, various trash, the ground, a tire. He kicks the cow to know it’s safe to walk over, like a bridge. He kicks the ground so he doesn’t have to shoot Holly. He shoots a tire to make it look flat, but not to make it be flat. He shoots a football to save space in the car. He rams cattle with the car to save on ammo.

In everything in this movie there is desolation. There are no surprises. The editing is fluid. There is no climax or dénouement. The lost paradise of the love story is perturbed by a free violence. It is particularly obvious.

Quentin Terantino said he wanted to be like Terrence Malick so he made Pulp Fiction, but it turned out to be too judgmental. That’s why Badlands is so good and so stupid, together.

I would never call this movie “poetry” like it had been described to me. Maybe only in that the main characters refused to be sustained by normal life, but that their fantasies could not sustain them, either. I would call that normal life.