Another week comes to a close here at the catacombs. Once again on I am on 24 hour lock down as my lithe and mysterious superiors sequester themselves in the lower levels to commune with the Ogdru Jahad in preparation for the dissemination of horrible and blasphemous texts. This isn’t as much of an inconvenience as one might think, as my movements are usually kept to a mere three hours outside of my cell. The current situation just means that I have to call for a eunuch in order to send faxes or make copies. It’s really not that bad, though it does mean that I know longer have access to the aging and, admittedly understocked vending machines. This may be a good thing. It really depends on how you feel about consuming soda past it’s sell-by date I suppose.
Besides, I still have the internet to keep me company, entertain me when I’m bored, and distract me from the horrible chanting and voices from outside time and space emanating from caverns miles beneath me. To that end the Friday Afternoon Movie presents the BBC Channel 5 program David Icke: Was He Right?, detailing the history of the chief crusader against the alien lizard people who control the world, who previously had gone on television to declare he was the son of God, and looking at whether or not he may, in fact, be correct in his various, outlandish assertions about What Is Really Going On. Icke has made an appearance on the FAM before, but I think it’s well worth further exploring his theories, because they’re just so damn crazy. There’s almost a perfection to his insanity, as to ignore it is to let him carry on about alien lizard people controlling the world but to argue it is to acknowledge the idea of alien lizard people who control the world. Either way, David Icke has won. In that regard, the man is a genius. In every other, he is endlessly entertaining.
As many of you may be aware, tomorrow is Halloween, that magical day of the year where children are obligated to dress up in costume and gorge themselves on candy and where adult women are likewise, it seems, obligated to dress up like trollops. It is to the credit of the costume industry that they have managed to produce sexy derivations of almost every character type. I fully expect to see a salacious Mr. Belvedere walking the street this year; pinched and pushed cleavage heaving beneath a dapper moustache. That is neither here, nor there. The FAM is not so much interested in near nude women running through the streets in the guise of 80s TV stars unless, of course, it is part of an overarching thematic element. So let us get on with it.
Today’s FAM continues last week’s indecisiveness and results in a Double Feature, comprised of two classic and time-tested horror movies: Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist both based on novels, by Stephen King and William Peter Blatty, respectively. These two are well trod ground, and if you have never seen them you are, I would say, in the minority. In that regard, I doubt I will be able to say anything about these two films that has not already been said, both of their corpses being well and truly picked over.
It’s been what, a couple weeks since we last mentioned how fantastic Archive.org is? Just in time for Halloween, here’s another choice bit o’ public domain from their vaults:
Click Teh Debbil (performed by Häxan director Benjamin Christensen himself!) to be taken to the downloading page.
Häxan (a.k.a. The Witches or Witchcraft Through The Ages) is a lavishly strange Swedish/Danish silent film which, upon its release in 1922, received critical acclaim in its homeland and moral outrage just about everyone else, thanks to the many graphic depictions of nudity, torture and sexual depravity. Yum! An inspired mixture of documentary and lurid dramatization, it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to name Häxan as one of cinema’s first “shockumentaries”.
For all its butts and boobies and devils, Häxan is actually quite a rational study of how superstition and medieval ignorance of mental illness led to the the hysteria of the European witch hunts. Director and writer Benjamin Christensen plotted much of the film around his personal study and criticism of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors. You can see echoes of Christensen’s blunt, cavalier, often darkly humorous first-person narrative style in the documentaries of Werner Herzog. Luis Buñuel applauded its fractured “WTF is going on” cue-less edits.
In addition to being a bit of a mindfuck, much of the film’s imagery is just drop dead stunningly beautiful. From the Criterion release feature notes:
Under any title and with any modifications, Häxan endures because of Christensen’s tremendous skill with lighting, staging, and varying of shot scale. The word “painterly” comes to mind in watching Christensen’s ingeniously constructed shots, but it is inadequate to evoke the fascination the film exerts through its patterns of movement and its narrative disjunctions. Christensen is at once painter, historian, social critic, and a highly self-conscious filmmaker. His world comes alive as few attempts to recreate the past on film have.
Apparently, there was a version released in 1967 that featured a narration by William S. Burroughs and a jazzy score led by percussionist Daniel Humair and featuring violinist Jean-Luc Ponty. Any of you guys happen to have a copy of that?
Do you know why the anvil — the metal plate near the front of your stapler — turns? It’s so you can temporarily join pieces of paper, or “pin” them together. With the legs of the staples pointed outwards instead of inwards it makes them easy to remove without causing too much damage to the paper. Isn’t that amazing? Did I just blow your mind?
Ye gods, it’s so slow today.
Thankfully, the FAM is here to rescue you from the doldrums leading up to Fuck-It-O’Clock. Today, the 23rd day of October in the year of our Lord two thousand and nine we present the 2001 HBO movie, Conspiracy, starring Stanley Tucci, Kenneth Branagh, and Colin Firth giving his best National Socialist Fitzwilliam Darcy performance. It details the proceedings of what would come to be known as the Wannsee Conference. Held on the 20th of January, 1942 at an Italian styled villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee — Wannsee being a suburb of Berlin — it was attended by 15 senior Nazi officials, presided over by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and organized by SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann. The purpose of this meeting was to come to discuss “the final solution to the Jewish question”.
The above is a short but fascinating trailer for Dreamworlds 3, an hour-long documentary on the use and abuse of women’s bodies in modern-day pop music videos. You needn’t be a scholar of gender studies or media literacy to appreciate what you see here. If you’re a fan of thoughtful video editing, deadpan humor, or the ladiiiiies, this one’s for you.
Narrating over a relentless cascade titillating music-video imagery, Jhally finally explains the problem of sexual objectification in our culture in a way that does not, unlike many other texts that deal with this, make you feel like a real shit for objectifying others in your mind, or for wanting to be objectified. This point comes into clarity at the 29:30 mark:
There is nothing inherently wrong with [the techniques of objectification] in and of themselves. It is not that it is always negative to present women as ready to be watched, or wanting to be watched. We all – men and women – present ourselves to be watched, to be gazed at. We all – men and women – watch attractive strangers with sexual desire. To treat another as an object of our desires is part of what it means to be human. The problem in music video and in the culture in general is that women are presented as nothing else. If the story about femininity could be widened beyond sexual objectification to include many other qualities of individuals – [intellectual, emotional, spiritual, creative, etc] – then there would be no problem with a little objectification as a sexual aspect of femininity, to be balanced out and integrated with many other human qualities. The problem is that in our contemporary culture, the complexity gets crowded out by a one-dimensional femininity based on a single story of the body.
Click here for the full-length feature. It has a stupid watermark on it, but the documentary’s compelling enough that it really doesn’t matter. Even if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, the 5-minute version included here stands as a fascinating vignette on the subject on its own.
Dreamworlds 3 is only one of several media literacy titles that Jhally’s produced or contributed to over the years. Here are a few other favorites:
Dreamworlds 2 – Same as the above, but retro! Made in 1995.
Advertising & the End of the World – A discussion of advertising’s promise to deliver happiness, society’s high-consumption lifestyle and the coming environmental crisis.
Reel Bad Arabs – On the vilification of Arab characters in the American cinema.
Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying & Battering – Focuses on “professional wrestling and the construction of contemporary masculinity, they show how so-called “entertainment” is related to homophobia, sexual assault and relationship violence.”
You know what, screw it. We’re taking off today. Yeah, that’s what we’re gonna do. I mean, how many times have we been told that if we don’t take those sick days we’re gonna lose ’em. Fine, if that’s the way they want to play it then maybe we’ll just take off every Friday from here on out. We’ll see how they handle the end of the quarter when the entire accounting department is home with “the swine flu”. Hope you’re mighty familiar with a calculator, ’cause we’re off to the movies, suckers!
In a fit of indecision, the FAM is super sized today, a John Carpenter Triple Feature comprised of 1982’s The Thing, 1987’s Prince of Darkness, and lastly 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness; what the director has referred to as his “Apocalypse Trilogy”. Certainly, the man has directed someshockinglyawfulfilms but his earlier work is pure gold and the first two of these rank as some of my favorite sci-fi/horror movies.
Let’s be clear: I’ve spent some time on the internet. It is debatable whether it is too much time; but at this point I think my deathbed speech could be a meme re-imagining of Roy Batty’s death scene. There are times, regardless of the wonders which course through the tubes, that I find myself bored and listless. Regardless of how many strange bits of fascinating minutia there may be floating around, sometimes they fail to excite, to provoke any sort of response.
I’ll admit that this is due more to my own state of mind than the quality of the content on offer. Sometimes there is nothing that is going to inspire me; nothing to stir my sluggish and stubborn brain into action. Thankfully there are people like Keandra4ever. They know that, when you’re at your lowest, the best thing for it is a musical tribute to a dashing, Hawaiian little person; because no one ignites the imagination quite like Keanu.
“It was a terrible, indescribable thing… a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light.” – H. P. Lovecraft
Many thanks to Paul Komoda, ever the friend of Coilhouse, for pointing out the eerie similarities between this 1952 advertisement for vegetable-flavored salad Jell-O, spotted in a SocImages post discussing “how tastes are shaped by history” (see also: “The Social Construction of Prunes“), and this 1936 cover of Astounding Stories for Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness.”
Goddamn, your manager is a douche. I mean, it’s not just me, right? Like, he’s a total douche with his douchey paisley tie and his douchey, meticulously pressed pants, and his douchey attitude all sauntering over to your desk to “see how that proposal is going” and then launch into another retelling of his Labor Day weekend away from the “bitch and the brats” to go golfing with his buddies who are also, no doubt, just as douchey or perhaps more douchey than he is. Nah, that can’t be possible. This guy is too much of a douche; there can’t possibly be another person who could eclipse the blinding glare of his douchiness. This man is like the Platonic Ideal of a douche. Just…argh, such a douche.
Well, at least he’s reminded you that, at least in America, it was only a four day work week. This is good. Your boss, standing by your desk, reeking as though he bathes in Drakkar Noir, is not. Time to drive him away. Tell him you need to get back to work; have to finish that proposal. Is he gone? Yes he is. Don’t worry the Drakkar will dissipate soon enough, just power through it for now; for now is the time for the FAM.
This afternoon: David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Many of you may have seen it. If not, I’m only going to drop a few, key phrases on you. They are, as follows: whipping, televisions, pulsating, hand gun, stomach vagina, Debbie Harry. That is all. Press play and enjoy.
Coilhäusers, I’ll be in D.C. much of this week and will hopefully have a little free time. I’d love to meet some of you dear readers in person. Contact me at ampersandpilcrow [at] hotmail [dot] com.
Reich tore out of Personnel and over to Sales-city. The same unpleasant information was waiting for him. Monarch Utilities & Resources was losing the gut-fight with the D’Courtney Cartel. There was no escaping the certainty of defeat. Reich knew his back was to the wall.
He returned to his own office and paced in a fury for five minutes. “It’s no use,” he muttered. “I know I’ll have to kill him. He won’t accept merger. Why should he? He’s licked me and he knows it. I’ll have to kill him and I need help. Peeper help.
It’s a story old as a thousand distinguished corpses in a thousand drawing rooms: murder.
Alfred Bester’s futuristic murder tale The Demolished Manwon the first Hugo award in 1953. At the time, that may have come as something of a surprise, seeing as the novel isn’t an operatic space epic. But then, it’s no typical whodunit, either. Bester has set his story in a World of Tomorrow (!) where rockets can get you anywhere and telepaths have so suffused society, there hasn’t been a murder in over 70 years.
That’s not going to stop Ben Reich, though. Oh, no. The business mogul happens to be a wee bit of a sociopath, to put it mildly. He’s decided his similarly insane rival must be done away with. The novel opens with Reich plotting his crime and focuses not on whodunit, but on the mind-reading investigator Lincoln Powell’s cat-and-mouse game with Reich, as well as the unraveling of more complex reasons behind the crime.
Many, many once highly-regarded tales from sci-fi’s earlier eras haven’t held up well over time. But with this book, Bester took a quantum leap ahead of his. Building from pulp foundations, he stirred in a heaping helping of noir, innovative style, vicious humor and, for kicks, topped it all off with help from the gravitational pull of Sigmund Freud’s looming, dinosauric cigar. The resulting book was written a decade before sci-fi’s Deviant Age came roaring to life, but it’s deviant in all the best ways, and has only gotten better with age.
