It's that screwy, supposedly joyful, yet depressing time of the year again: the holidays. And they're almost over. Thank God, the Master, Freddie Quell or my beloved Marilyn Monroe -- my woman of the year (I'll get to my movies in the next few days).
I despise all year-end parties, which is why I'm now enjoying New Year's Eve, safely tucked away in a sleeper car on a train, ringing in 2013 somewhere at the Oregon/California border. I only wish Sugar Cane was in the next sleeping car, Manhattan in a paper cup. Or better yet, champagne. Marilyn loved her champagne.
When I see MM holding a champage glass in a picture, I often think she is New Year's Eve -- a glistening light, all bright, blonde, silver, slinky-curvy and drunken and gorgeous and who gives a damn if she's had a few too many? Like our New Year hopes, she always embarked on a new start (and succeeded quite well, brilliantly, at times) but fell, like many of us into those ruts. Those fuzzy ends of the lollipops. But she tried. And even if she failed (or fell down drunk), it is she who so famously said, "It's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring." Thank you, Marilyn.
Marilyn was flesh and blood, but she's such a holiday to the eyes. I wish to god she'd been more careful and not mixed her meds but... I can't change that. She's many things, that artist Marilyn, but she's our drunken angel. She's my drunken angel, anyway.. I love her.
So, this New Year's Eve, I will think of Marilyn and one of my favorite New Year's movies, George Cukor's blissfully ebullient "Holiday." A picture that I think Marilyn (MM obsessive that I am) probably loved. And perhaps related to. Freedom! Expression! It's hard not to. Funny, carefree, silly, inspiring and yet, curiously sad -- sad because you get the feeling that all the exploring dreams its lead character (a joyous, lovable Cary Grant) hopes and plans for, well, they may not work out in the real world. Can one be that simple yet complex and happy and live their life that way?
So, for me, it's the perfect New Year movie, filled with fresh starts, all night parties, dreams and happy/poignant revelations -- those things we make lists of before the clock strikes midnight and usually ditch a few weeks into the month. But not Johnny, we hope.
An extended, wonderful portion of this movie does indeed take place on New Year's Eve during a society party where Johnny is set to announce his engagement to wealthy Julia (Doris Nolan). But he's falling in love wih her rapturous, different sister (a luminous Katharine Hepburn) who's attracted to his counterculture desires. The movie works subtly and elegantly, infused with an almost startling blend of comedy and pathos.
As Johhny and Linda clearly fall for each other and even literally tumble (in a jubilant scene, the two stars perform a beautiful bit of acrobatic talent) they leave us all bubbly MM intoxicated and charged up for something new ourselves. But what? Is it possible to ever feel elation like that? Is it? We can always do as Cary Grant's Johnny does and attempt a little blind faith. Blind faith can get you through the night. I'm sure it helped Marilyn more than a few times. That, and a sweet glass of champagne. Happy New Year.
It's not Christmas without Nat King Cole. I love "The Christmas Song" but "Stardust" is one of the most beautiful songs he ever recorded. And, I think, one of the most beautiful songs of all time.
Another Christmas, another posting of one of my favorite holiday movies -- Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. I could write about countless other Christmas or Christmas-themed movies I revere (Ernst Lubitsch's masterpiece The Shop Around the Corner is a prime example), but I've got other things on my mind, it's my day off and another Tom Cruise movie opened -- Jack Reacher. I'll see it, but not today. I'm interested in Tom Cruise (I always have been), and for Christmas, he's wrapped up in Kubrick. Cruise is a strange force. A movie star and a fascinating, sometimes brilliant actor, who thinks he's sincere and you really believe that he thinks he's sincere but, man, is he charismatically creepy. And wonderfully so. Is there any other actor like Tom Cruise? No. There is not.
And Stanley Kubrick must have understood this. All that insanity-inducing yuletide anxiety (and then some) is so perfectly conveyed in Eyes Wide Shut via his leading man that Tom Cruise is Christmas stress -- pretty, festive, overly serious, overly grinning, and often hilariously, creepily Christmassy. And then, scared. Terrified, even, delivering Kubrick's social, sexual, surrealist themes within the director's gorgeous holiday milieu. Bathed in Christmas style, Eyes Wide Shut uses Christmas lights, background Christmas trees and traditional colors of red and green with almost perverse relentlessness. And perverse relentlessness is really what I seem to be about this season (I think. And did I just write that?). Well, this year has been an odd one. Wonderful and horrible and inspiring and sad and fulfilling and mysterious. Whatever Tom Cruise is hiding underneath that perfect smile of his, however much he is "quietly judging me" (a la Magnolia), I sensed throughout this mercurial strange-love of a year. So this movie fits my mood. With that, I'm dipping into my archives to consider one of Kubrick's most underrated pictures -- a film that in terms of love, sex, death, fear and träume remains timeless. And again, it's a perfect Christmas movie...
In Kubrick's cinematic universe, reality, dreams, order and insanity progress on distinct, intersecting planes. Whether he was depicting an absurd, chillingly real war room in Dr. Strangelove, the disturbing but oddly sexy ultra violence of an Orwellian future in A Clockwork Orange, the siren call of insanity in The Shining, the hyper fantastical yet authentic Vietnam War in Full Metal Jacket, or the irony and powerlessness among such transcendent opulence in Barry Lyndon, life was a surreal work in progress -- an ambiguous joke that veered from hilarious to sexy to terrifying, sometimes within seconds. Attempting to understand order, or how any system designed to make our universe more rational or safe seemed fruitless. Think Sterling Hayden approaching such a predicament at the end of Kubrick's The Killing. He watches his life literally fly away on an airport tarmac and bitterly spits one of cinema’s greatest final lines: “Eh, what’s the difference?”
Which brings me to the final line of Kubrick’s frequently misunderstood Eyes Wide Shut in which Nicole Kidman states rather flatly, “Fuck” -- as in, that’s the answer, that’s what we need to do. A movie I’ve defended since its release, it’s a picture that deserves closer inspection and a worthy finale for the enigmatic auteur.
The controversial movie (some thought it silly, some, un-erotic) Eyes Wide Shut found the director once again studying the perplexing nature of dreams and reality, this time exploring them in a more personal and private arena: sexuality. As he did with Lolita, Kubrick created more than a film about sexual desire; he created a film about bitter romance, troublesome marital bonds, societal contradictions and, significantly, the fear of death.
An updating of the 1927 Traumnovelle (Dream Novel) by the sardonic Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, the picture remains an unsettling blend of antiquated garishness and modern transgression -- an alternate sexual universe haunted by ghouls of the past, present and future.
In this universe “live” the healthy, handsome walking dead -- Dr. Bill Harford (an impressive Tom Cruise) and his wife, Alice (a slinky, wonderfully creepy Nicole Kidman), a glamorous, rich couple who appear the picture of storybook perfection. But like most supposed perfection, there are cracks in that portrait, and in their case, it’s the usual: they want to screw other people (or at least they think they do). At a sumptuous party given by Bill's obscenely wealthy friend Victor (Sydney Pollack), Bill almost strays upstairs with two models while Alice flirts with a bizarre Hungarian man who looks like one of the cadaverous party-goers from The Shining. The next evening, in a fit of jealousy over Bill's near indiscretion (he ended up contending with a beautiful, naked drug overdose instead of a debauched roll in the hay -- though the way her body sits in this shot is disturbingly erotic), Alice confesses that she’s had thoughts of cheating and, even worse, reveals that if things had been different, she would have thrown her entire life away for one flight of sexual fancy.
Unmasking something that should remain one of those deep, dark secrets you never confess to your significant other, Alice deftly rattles Bill's perception of her fidelity and the strength of their marriage in a speech that makes his mind spin out of control (Kidman's performance here is superb). After this confession, Bill is abruptly called away to confirm the death of a patient and keeping in tune with the love/death/sex of the picture, the daughter of the deceased makes a pass at him. The grief stricken but, considering the circumstances, kinky gesture aids in Bill’s decision to not immediately return home. Instead, he wanders the streets of New York and embarks on a sequence of actions that, though not as outwardly comic, somewhat resemble those in the Scorsese movie After Hours: He discovers a surreal sexual underworld that he’s both attracted to and repelled by.
A prostitute, a piano player, a bizarre costume-store owner and his Lolita-esque 14-year-old daughter lead Bill to the film's infamous ritualistic orgy sequence, during which participants are cloaked and masked, and naked women are used as sacrificial sex lambs. The gothic, terrifying yet titillating feel of this sequence walks a fine line between horror and parody and true to Kubrick’s genius, manages to cross into both camps. The magnificent, exacting camera work and unrelenting music compel us to look, no matter what happens, and though I was actually a little scared the first time I saw this moment, I found myself highly amused, laughing even. If ever a person was out of place in a Bohemian Grove-like orgy, it is Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill. And yet, I was absolutely hypnotized, watching these moments like a waking dream and investing it with multiple meanings. What the hell is going on here besides a bunch of silly old rich men getting their jollies with beautifully breasted, long legged Helmut Newton models? And further, what do all of Bill’s adventures mean? Are Bill's encounters simply nightmares that will damage his marriage beyond repair, or are they mere titillating fantasy -- fodder for a closer relationship and better sex with his spouse?
Well, I can’t answer that. Given the picture's ominous tone, however, there is something definitely rotten within its slinky, Christmas-lit loveliness. Like the impeccable environment of The Shining, the aura of Eyes Wide Shut is one of beauty ready to be defiled, sexuality ready to be slaughtered, lovely exteriors that reek of formaldehyde. The pall that hangs over this picture is fear: fear of the unknown; fear of yourself or of others; and fear that if sex can lead to freedom, it can just as easily lead to death.
In fact, the picture can be viewed as a commentary on sexual attitudes in the last few decades -- a time when meaningless indiscretions can lead to horrifying blood-test results. It is no surprise, then, that Bill is a doctor and that throughout the film, he flashes his physician's ID as a police detective would his badge. "I'm a doctor," he constantly says, for both reassurance and intimidation.
In a profession that requires intimate investigation of flesh that may well be on its way to the morgue, sex is serious. These unsettling references to AIDS, necrophilia and forbidden sex (not to mention Kubrick's own death upon bringing the film to completion, une petite mort of sorts) permeate the picture like one giant prick tease. In today's world, sex is still there for the taking, but at what cost and for what gain? Kubrick's frustrating, brilliant coda neither answers nor ignores its own questions. Rather, it leaves us in a mysterious, contradictory mishmash of dream and reality, where not only are our eyes wide shut, but our legs are too.
“I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.... I guess I am a fantasy.” --Marilyn Monroe
Lists. Numbers. Number ones. My number one movie this year was Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master and my number one woman was Marilyn Monroe, a woman who, no matter how much I research, how much I study in photographs and moving pictures, how much I think about as a living woman and as a departed icon, remains powerful and powerfully vulnerable, real and unreal, obvious and inscrutable and in the end, an artist. A master at her art. She's one of my number one women of all time.
And yet, she often felt unloved. And frequently disliked. "I'm the only one that likes you!" The Master's Philip Seymour Hoffman hollers and repeats to the broken, ugly/beautiful, self medicating Freddie Quell, a line that manages to be simultaneously manipulative and completely honest. I thought of how I have heard that in real life, and how much that schoolyard taunt works when you're feeling especially vulnerable. It resonated so much that I thought of Marilyn, who surely heard the same, and probably from a few attempted Masters (good, bad or likely a mixture of the two) who could never contain her (Hyde, Lytess, Miller, the Strasbergs, Dr. Greenson). But in front of the camera, she was her own master, even if she wasn't entirely sure of it, and even if she, like Quell, popped the pain away with booze and pills and feared genetic insanity (real life Marilyn and movie-made Freddie both had mothers stuck in loony bins.)
Which led me to last year's number one movie, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia, a movie that never left my thoughts in 2012 and reached out to Monroe in dreamy reveries. I felt many personal things as I was writing about Marilyn (and Bob Dylan played a vital role) but Von Trier and Melancholia were right there, holding her up, not down in its beguiling, joyous expression of depression. I thought, My God would Lars Von Trier have understood the artistry of Marilyn! And he would have worked with her beautifully.
As I wrote of Cherie, her Bus Stop "angel" to Don Murray in this December's Playboy, "she’s an earthly woman. A woman who sleeps in
all day and a woman who probably bleeds on the sheets and spills liquor on her
clothes and continually embarrasses herself, and a woman so lost or sacrificial
that she just gives up her dreams and leaves with that insane Cowboy. But that
makes her even more interesting, and
almost guiltily desirable... I can imagine
Marilyn, like Kirsten Dunst’s Justine, basking under that doomsday planet, naked
and pale and accepting -- absorbing and eroticizing that pain -- and, as Marilyn did
in film, giving us the pleasure of looking at her beautiful body."
When I absorb my thoughts about Melancholia, I feel I could be describing Marilyn. She got it. When calling up photographer André de Dienes late at night, Marilyn insisted he snap photos of her as she was: tired, sad and disheveled. She directed the powerfully poignant and darkly beautiful shoot and she even titled it: "The End of Everything."
So before I discuss my new lists and those damn numbers (one and two and three) I'm returning to Melancholia. And Marilyn and Von Trier who are universal and personal, blatant and mysterious, sorrowful and funny, nihilistic and yet, sublimely, romantically celebratory.
Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia takes the black bile of its namesake -- the depression of its heroine -- and transforms the “humor” into exaltation. A planet -- a terrifying, dazzling planet that, true to Dane Von Trier’s inspired swan dive (black swan dive) into German romanticism, is set to destroy life on earth: Götterdämmerung via "Tristan and Isolde" (which he uses in the picture’s rapturously beautiful overture), via Ophelia via Cassandra via Marilyn via Von Trier’s own personal mythology. Marilyn and Milton (Greene) and Von Trier's sexy, gorgeous enigmatic "Black Sessions."
Clinically depressed Justine (a stunningly raw Kirsten Dunst -- Von Trier’s surrogate) does what’s often expected of those afflicted -- wear a brave face and don that damn wedding dress (a creamy dream of a dress that Justine seems strangled by, until she lifts it up and fornicates with another man on a golf green…). Further, she must embrace love, work, family (no matter how dysfunctional) and rules.
Well, Von Trier cannot accept that fate, and in the picture’s first half, in which Justine destroys her nuptials, her actions serve as depressive, rebellious self awareness: “What did you expect?” She asks. Indeed (Marilyn may have asked the same). And then comes planet Melancholia, inching closer and closer, leaving stable sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) panic stricken while Justine, calmly, grimly and at times, cheekily, accepts annihilation, not as easy suicide but as a kind of cosmic extension of despair. Yes. Finally. Justine isn’t wallowing in depression, she’s embracing, seducing it, and in one of the picture’s most exquisite moments, lying beneath it naked -- luxuriating in the glow of doom.
Von Trier, a notorious and real sufferer himself, sincerely understands depression (just as he understood the horrors of anxiety in his brilliant and deeply misunderstood Antichrist), which may be why he maddens so many. How can he do this to these women? Well, because women do suffer, women get depressed, and not merely in simplistic, eye-rolling, I-cry-at-weddings ways (and Justine is not your usual runaway bride, god bless her), but in complicated, sometimes terrifying ways. And sometimes they die.
Von Trier gets women. I've been stating this for years and have fallen into heated arguments over my stance. But here's something else -- he’s also in awe, baffled and scared of them, which makes him one of the most honest male (and female) filmmakers working. I often don’t understand myself, frequently, and many women engage in curious, sometimes destructive acts that leave their lovers, family and themselves baffled. Not solely because they’re weak (which is actually a forgivable trait in a person) or simply irrational or evil, but because they’re multi-faceted human beings. He certainly understands much about human nature -- male and female -- but to me, he is the consummate woman's director. Like Dryer, Cukor, Sirk, and Fassbinder before him (but clearly, his own beast), the experimental, profound, bizarre, sickening, poignant and often genius Dane creates female characters of, sometimes, Joan of Arc proportions -- Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville are the most prominent examples -- and lets them both fight and fold under the weight of their existence.
His women, or martyrs, as many would, often rightfully assert, live in a hard, oppressive world, peopled with individuals who harbor little concern for their goodness or, at least attempt to understand their ugliness. They are human, and so, how they respond to such pressures or the conflicts within themselves often create knee-jerk reactions toward Von Trier. Chiefly, he must hate women. No. He does not. He appears to love women. And then, perhaps like most men, at times, he does not love them. They are maddening and victimized and glorious and, in the end, good (or not?). And master von Trier adds to it all a sardonic touch, spicing up his experimental melodrama with heavy doses of dark humor and personal reflection -- he surely both loves and hates himself as well.
Weaving himself into his characters, he’s sadistic, masochistic, empathetic, self-obsessed, morbid and morbidly funny and then honest and honestly confused. Which again, makes me think of Marilyn, on film and in photographs -- she weaves a similar spell. As I wrote in Playboy, "through it all, no matter what was happening in her life, Marilyn gave us that gift: pleasure. Pleasure in happiness and pleasure in pain and the pleasure of looking at her. And like the great artist she was, looking at her provoked whatever you desired to interpret from her."
Much like Melancholia, in which Von Trier grants depressives a gift. Taking Justine’s depleted darkness and imbuing her with celestial life through doomsday, he, to recall another German Romantic and again, Marilyn, creates an Ode to Joy through heartbreaking and gloriously inspirational…woe. "The End of Everything." Marilyn. Her beginning, middle and end is neverending.
