I don't know where this will take me, so just bear with me. This is a new style of journalism I'm innovating called 'fevercrit;' I've been running a temperature for two days and my brain's been running wild with all sorts of streams of consciousness - some pleasant, some not so pleasant. Like Professor Pyg, "I want to be sick in front of everyone..."
Verhoeven. Last time I saw one of his films was about two years ago. And yet, he became one of my favourite directors lately (while I've been a fan of his work with the Jesus Seminar for somewhat longer). It might be because my housemate bought the Alien boxset. The first Alien film... well, what can you say that hasn't already been said. An excellent film, and sci-fi to the core, because it's all about that fear of the viral invasion of the body, not to mention AI anxiety. Then again, it's also all about working class solidarity, and anti-colonialism. Drawing deep from two the two great wells (or Wells) of specfic there. Whereas Aliens turns things rather on their head. It's the retribution of the colonialists - masculinising Ripley into a kind of intergalactic John Wayne from The Green Berets (but with a feminine side, so Cameron still gets his violent woman... uh, I mean, female action hero... kick), and transmuting the xenomorphs into space gooks who will soak up plenty of American... uh, sorry, human... bullets. Aliens is unforgivable for two reasons - it creates a franchise, and reclaims Alien for the populists, even going so far as creating a blue collar family at the end (and David Fincher basically had no choice but to slaughter this Space Family Robinson right from the getgo, but that's another story).
So I started reimagining Starship Troopers as a kind of response to this. Maybe it's just the European citizen in me, wanting one of our lot to go and give what Zizek calls Cameron's hypocritical Hollywood Marxism a kicking. But I think there's something to it. Cameron seems more than willing to go along with the American flavour of the Just War while ostensibly criticising it, much like how films like Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Rambo: First Blood and Predator were used to recruit mentally deficient highschool jocks, and left themselves open for it by not offering up a single valid characterisation of the other side. Verhoeven, on the other hand, just doesn't truck with it - Soldier of Orange is far from the usual hoo-rah for military heroism, and this comes back again in Black Book, which completely removes the moralistic aspect of anti-Nazi resistance and instead places emphasis on survival under occupation.
Let's be honest with ourselves here. Service-men and women aren't heroes. They're real, breathing people, and they range from the exploited poor to psychopaths who have played too many video games. Some of them are even normal people. In conjunction with the generally rightwardsly retarded political awareness and miseduction of Americans, making stuff like Stone's movies and Cameron's is not just questionable, it's downright bad fucking ethics.
So roll on Starship Troopers. While Cameron's Aliens are space gooks, Verhoeven's space gooks are whoever's been on the end of an American propaganda campaign. And while Cameron's heroes are the troopers, Verhoeven's troopers are the sorts who saw Aliens/Predator/Rambo/Platoon and signed on the dotted line. While Cameron sneaks in the back door with his propaganda, Verhoeven has Arnie bursting through your window with a ripped shirt and an implausibly big gun screaming THIS IS PROPAGANDA THIS IS PROPAGANDA THIS IS PROPAGANDA until we can recognise the propaganda tropes more clearly.
(Wait, that was Total Recall... point still stands. Recall, along with Robocop and Troopers, forms a thematic trilogy of satire and subversion. The uninitiated might see Total Recall as an American sci-fi action flick. When in fact, it's two European con-men, Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger, oiling themselves up and giggling the whole time. But while it's sodden with bitter sarcastic loathing, it's also bursting with invention (which is true of every Verhoeven film), with genetic mutants and colonies on Mars and dual personalities and virtual realities.)
We might here recognise Verhoeven as a deconstructive director, but that's only if you weren't paying attention when Basic Instinct deconstructed the genre so that Sharon Stone is in fact the wide-eyed innocent and Michael Douglas the exploitative villain. This is playing with the conventions of the Hitchcock knock-off, and he did the same with The Fourth Man in case you're one of the Bill Hicks crowd who just doesn't buy it. And then we might look at his sarcastic, camp and knowing takes on the historical movie, the sports movie, and the social realist movie, and returning to sex again with Showgirls.
Indeed, I fancifully imagine Verhoeven getting off the boat, looking around, seeing neon dollar signs everywhere, knowing they're all traps, and asking himself "how can I milk these cunts for all their worth, take the utter piss out of them, and stay true to myself?" The answer he came up with was to turn his career into a drag act, wearing genres like Divine wore wigs, 'whoring' himself so blatantly that it made the pimps feel uncomfortable, gave all the patrons a good time and thoroughly pissed off the literalists and moralists who just didn't get it.
He then has to ask himself what the American people want. And he doesn't like what the answer is. They want to be couch potatoes, and have the fucking cops or the army save their ass, and then they want to be the American James Bond, and they want Sharon Stone to be their wife, and they want to be the great individual myth hero standing up to the evil corporate machine, but really they just want to have done all these things already, because really they want to be sitting on the couch, and they want to be drinking a Coke, and if they can't have done those things that's okay because Arnie's got that covered and aren't we all Arnie anyway? What they don't want to do is examine these ultraviolent crypto-fascist fantasies, or in any way consider that maybe those fantasies have something to do with why the gooks/commies/sand niggers/japs don't like us, or why Private Joey Sixpack Jr., American Hero™, got killed overseas last week. And they certainly don't want to know what the real life Rekalls or Omni Consumer Products like Coca-Cola get up to in places like Colombia or India. Because a Coke goes down really well with another stupid fucking Arnie action movie.
VERHOEVEN: "Here is your Nazi propaganda, you fucking moron. And here's some more. Here is you being made into a real man by the army. Here is your American fascist narrative being taken into space. Recognise it yet? No, no, of course you don't, you fucking moron. Here's some women being exploited. Not ringing any bells? Here are some women, being exploited, to the point, where they have had to grow six titties! Got the joke yet? Of course you fucking haven't. You cunt. Here, buy the fucking action figures. Hahahahaha I'm rich!"
All of which is not without precedent. And we should mention that Verhoeven isn't doing anything that Pat Mills and John Wagner weren't doing for longer in Britain with 2000 AD (fitting that Stallone and other Americans would later take Judge Dredd on face value). Robocop borrows liberally from this, as well as from Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, and the whole thing came full circle when Chaykin acolyte Frank Miller wrote for the Robocop sequels and TV series. But that puts Verhoeven in a good company of sardonic, and perhaps evil, creators who didn't let their cynicism about their audiences prevent them from creating great art.
Original publication date: December 17th, 2010
Thursday, 16 June 2011
Friday, 4 March 2011
The Modern Epic: Kenneth Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle
It's difficult to follow Kenneth Anger. There are few figures in cinema, or in the 20th century as a whole, who were as unwilling to be satisfied by the status quo as he. At the age of 19 (probably; he claims 17) he made the film Fireworks, a homoerotic and sadomasochistic avant garde piece that sheared good taste and linearity like the unwelcome vestigials they are, and brutally skewered the unpleasant American tendency of military glorification.
All in 15 minutes. Not bad going, had the film came out this year – Hollywood is to this day struggling with the idea that gay love is not to be patronised as some idealised romance (see Milk, Brokeback Mountain) but rather subject to the same issues as every other kind. That it was made in 1947, before homosexuality was even legalised (and only two years after the War, when admiration for 'our boys' in Uncle Sam's Armed Forces was at an all time euphoric high), seems an astounding anachronism.
If that had been all Anger did, it would be a lot more than almost anyone else. But that wasn't all he did.
Fireworks itself is, of course, viscerally striking – the opening shot, with its dockside fog, brings to mind another film by a subversive enfant terrible, 1939's L'Atalante. This shot melts into the narrative (as much as one exists) to re-emerge as photographs, personal curiosities on the floor of the protagonist (played by a delectable Anger). What follows is a fever dream of sex, rape, murder, and ascendancy; with an anxious, transgressive sensibility to rely wholly on symbol and subtext that would not arise again until Lynch's Eraserhead.
Because, as we see with The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Anger is distinct from, say, Louis Bunuel in that he does not set up a machine of free association for the viewer to draw from but rather weighs each aspect of movie-making, from costume design to background colour, to connect to a specific pool of (in this case, occult) meaning. Described as a “Dionysian revel,” Pleasure Dome could be analysed literally by any fair mystic. Myself, a dabbler in the arts arcane, recognised the odd Pan or Lord Shiva, gathered in an undefined space distinct from their pantheons. This place-outside-of-places could have a fair few Qabalistic or mathematical correspondences, but what's really interesting is that this means the events before our eyes are actually happening; film-making having been described by Anger as “a spell.” Unsatisfied with merely the symbolic language, Anger moves into the performative speech of religious texts, for instance casting (pun intended) Marjorie Cameron in the Scarlet Lady role she fulfilled in other genuine Thelemic rituals. As Maya Deren, Anger's contemporary in avant garde cinema, reminds us in Divine Horsemen, as much as Cameron is the Scarlet Lady, that, too, is Bacchus, or Diana, or whoever, on the screen; the material body of the participant or actor having shed its gros-bon-age, or spirit, to be inhabited by the lwa, or god. Especially since the lwa in many cases has long outlived the actor portraying him or her, and is recalled to life every time we watch the film.
So the gods gather, and they laugh and drink wine, and from the wine they trip. The God-Trip is here represented by a sophisticated montage of visions and repetitions, until time and space both are meaningless. The geography of the film has been fractured by the excesses of the deities, and we can only look on in astonishment. It reminded me somewhat of the K-hole, the disembodied, depersonalised state ketamine can place an abuser, vaguely unpleasant but endlessly fascinating.
Scorpio Rising (1963), the first film set to rock and roll, preceding the music video by decades, and Lucifer Rising (1970-80), complete the cycle. Despite the similarity of their titles, the former has more in common with Fireworks, while the latter shares an occult meaning-field with Pleasure Dome. I am sorry to say I walked in slightly late to Scorpio Rising, and much of it washed over me. It feels like a collection of clippings from the dark side of the 50s noosphere, brought to light as a portent of what was to come, in the midst of the 60s Love Generation. Anger revels in his role as outsider: just as he refused to bend a knee to the oppressive patriarchal environment of the post-war years as a young man, he now sets himself in opposition to both liberal and conservative mindsets of the 1960s. He imbues his film with shocking, sexual and frequently fascist imagery, sending up the rebels while joyfully offending the structures of power (Scorpio Rising was, I believe, banned, just as Fireworks was subject to an obscenity trial).
Lucifer Rising, on the contrary (naturally), is far more optimistic. While its predecessor reports on the defeat of Christ, Lucifer muses on what might take his place. There are some lovely sequences – the Egyptian gods awakening in the sun and signalling to each other, a crocodile emerging from its leathery egg, monks carrying flaming torches up a hill temple. The latter reminds us that Lucifer means 'light bringer,' meaning he shares an etymological source with Jesus himself.
One wonders if this, then, is a rejoice in the demise not of the Son of God, but of the Manichaean dichotomy in Theistic religion. Anger, though he was friends with Anton LaVey, has never himself been a Satanist. Consulting Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth, we note The Devil card in the Tarot is in symmetrical opposition to Death, both of which exude from Tipareth on the Qabalah, with Art between them. Crowley associates Tipareth with human consciousness, while G.I. Gurdjieff, Crowley's contemporary and rival, and John Lilly call it “Christ consciousness.” Gurdjieff and Lilly are far from unique, here – could we then say that Lucifer Rising is about our Qabalistic growth from Christ?
If this seems too far fetched an analysis, consider that Crowley's photograph features prominently in Lucifer Rising. Anger was a huge fan, and has been a follower of Thelema for most of his life. Consider also the almost incessant symbolism of the eye in Lucifer Rising, from the Illuminati-esque monad to the Eye of Horus, and that in the context of the Qabalah, the Devil Tarot card corresponds directly with the 'Ayin path, which literally means 'eye.' And that's before we bring Baphomet, pentagrams and the Evil Eye and their relationship to the Devil card in the Thoth Tarot deck into it.
If so, what does Anger reckon we are growing towards? The 'Ayin path lies between Tipareth and Hod, which means Splendour. But that is only part of the story of Lucifer Rising. To quote Crowley, The Devil and Death lead from Tipareth, consciousness,
“to the spheres in which Thought (on the one hand) and Bliss (on the other) are developed. Between them, [Art] leads similarly to the sphere which formulates Existence. These three cards may therefore be summed up as a hieroglyph [leading us again to the Egyptian overtures of Lucifer Rising] of the processes by which idea manifests as form.
“[The Devil card] represents creative energy in its most material form […] The formula of this card is then the complete appreciation of all living things.”
Crowley goes on to say that 'Ayin, along with Aleph and Yod in the Hebrew alphabet, form the sacred name of God – a threefold explanation of the male creative energy. This reminds us that everything, Lucifer included, is, Qabalistically, manifestation of the divine. But it is 'Ayin, and thus The Devil, that is creative energy at its most masculine. It cannot be doubted that Anger's films are indeed creative, masculine (he once said he personally preferred the solar, masculine Thelema to the lunar, feminine Wicca) and energetic, and none more so than Lucifer Rising. It is at once enthralling and disturbing, not least because it is scored by and stars Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson Family, and it is as desolate in setting as it is rich in meaning and visuals, much of it being shot up mountains or in the desert beside the Pyramids. Anger, like Crowley before him, identifies Lucifer as Set, the ass-headed god of the Egyptian deserts, and recognises that, to quote Crowley once more, “Essential to the symbolism are the surroundings – barren places, especially high places. The cult of the mountain is an exact parallel.”
The Apollonian force of Lucifer Rising makes it a fitting book-end to Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle, coming as it does after the Dionysian excesses that preceded it. Viewed holistically, it is difficult not to see the Cycle as a Homeric report on the mutually defining existence of humans and their gods, of the material and the divine.
All in 15 minutes. Not bad going, had the film came out this year – Hollywood is to this day struggling with the idea that gay love is not to be patronised as some idealised romance (see Milk, Brokeback Mountain) but rather subject to the same issues as every other kind. That it was made in 1947, before homosexuality was even legalised (and only two years after the War, when admiration for 'our boys' in Uncle Sam's Armed Forces was at an all time euphoric high), seems an astounding anachronism.
If that had been all Anger did, it would be a lot more than almost anyone else. But that wasn't all he did.
Fireworks itself is, of course, viscerally striking – the opening shot, with its dockside fog, brings to mind another film by a subversive enfant terrible, 1939's L'Atalante. This shot melts into the narrative (as much as one exists) to re-emerge as photographs, personal curiosities on the floor of the protagonist (played by a delectable Anger). What follows is a fever dream of sex, rape, murder, and ascendancy; with an anxious, transgressive sensibility to rely wholly on symbol and subtext that would not arise again until Lynch's Eraserhead.
Because, as we see with The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Anger is distinct from, say, Louis Bunuel in that he does not set up a machine of free association for the viewer to draw from but rather weighs each aspect of movie-making, from costume design to background colour, to connect to a specific pool of (in this case, occult) meaning. Described as a “Dionysian revel,” Pleasure Dome could be analysed literally by any fair mystic. Myself, a dabbler in the arts arcane, recognised the odd Pan or Lord Shiva, gathered in an undefined space distinct from their pantheons. This place-outside-of-places could have a fair few Qabalistic or mathematical correspondences, but what's really interesting is that this means the events before our eyes are actually happening; film-making having been described by Anger as “a spell.” Unsatisfied with merely the symbolic language, Anger moves into the performative speech of religious texts, for instance casting (pun intended) Marjorie Cameron in the Scarlet Lady role she fulfilled in other genuine Thelemic rituals. As Maya Deren, Anger's contemporary in avant garde cinema, reminds us in Divine Horsemen, as much as Cameron is the Scarlet Lady, that, too, is Bacchus, or Diana, or whoever, on the screen; the material body of the participant or actor having shed its gros-bon-age, or spirit, to be inhabited by the lwa, or god. Especially since the lwa in many cases has long outlived the actor portraying him or her, and is recalled to life every time we watch the film.
So the gods gather, and they laugh and drink wine, and from the wine they trip. The God-Trip is here represented by a sophisticated montage of visions and repetitions, until time and space both are meaningless. The geography of the film has been fractured by the excesses of the deities, and we can only look on in astonishment. It reminded me somewhat of the K-hole, the disembodied, depersonalised state ketamine can place an abuser, vaguely unpleasant but endlessly fascinating.
Scorpio Rising (1963), the first film set to rock and roll, preceding the music video by decades, and Lucifer Rising (1970-80), complete the cycle. Despite the similarity of their titles, the former has more in common with Fireworks, while the latter shares an occult meaning-field with Pleasure Dome. I am sorry to say I walked in slightly late to Scorpio Rising, and much of it washed over me. It feels like a collection of clippings from the dark side of the 50s noosphere, brought to light as a portent of what was to come, in the midst of the 60s Love Generation. Anger revels in his role as outsider: just as he refused to bend a knee to the oppressive patriarchal environment of the post-war years as a young man, he now sets himself in opposition to both liberal and conservative mindsets of the 1960s. He imbues his film with shocking, sexual and frequently fascist imagery, sending up the rebels while joyfully offending the structures of power (Scorpio Rising was, I believe, banned, just as Fireworks was subject to an obscenity trial).
Lucifer Rising, on the contrary (naturally), is far more optimistic. While its predecessor reports on the defeat of Christ, Lucifer muses on what might take his place. There are some lovely sequences – the Egyptian gods awakening in the sun and signalling to each other, a crocodile emerging from its leathery egg, monks carrying flaming torches up a hill temple. The latter reminds us that Lucifer means 'light bringer,' meaning he shares an etymological source with Jesus himself.
One wonders if this, then, is a rejoice in the demise not of the Son of God, but of the Manichaean dichotomy in Theistic religion. Anger, though he was friends with Anton LaVey, has never himself been a Satanist. Consulting Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth, we note The Devil card in the Tarot is in symmetrical opposition to Death, both of which exude from Tipareth on the Qabalah, with Art between them. Crowley associates Tipareth with human consciousness, while G.I. Gurdjieff, Crowley's contemporary and rival, and John Lilly call it “Christ consciousness.” Gurdjieff and Lilly are far from unique, here – could we then say that Lucifer Rising is about our Qabalistic growth from Christ?
If this seems too far fetched an analysis, consider that Crowley's photograph features prominently in Lucifer Rising. Anger was a huge fan, and has been a follower of Thelema for most of his life. Consider also the almost incessant symbolism of the eye in Lucifer Rising, from the Illuminati-esque monad to the Eye of Horus, and that in the context of the Qabalah, the Devil Tarot card corresponds directly with the 'Ayin path, which literally means 'eye.' And that's before we bring Baphomet, pentagrams and the Evil Eye and their relationship to the Devil card in the Thoth Tarot deck into it.
If so, what does Anger reckon we are growing towards? The 'Ayin path lies between Tipareth and Hod, which means Splendour. But that is only part of the story of Lucifer Rising. To quote Crowley, The Devil and Death lead from Tipareth, consciousness,
“to the spheres in which Thought (on the one hand) and Bliss (on the other) are developed. Between them, [Art] leads similarly to the sphere which formulates Existence. These three cards may therefore be summed up as a hieroglyph [leading us again to the Egyptian overtures of Lucifer Rising] of the processes by which idea manifests as form.
“[The Devil card] represents creative energy in its most material form […] The formula of this card is then the complete appreciation of all living things.”
Crowley goes on to say that 'Ayin, along with Aleph and Yod in the Hebrew alphabet, form the sacred name of God – a threefold explanation of the male creative energy. This reminds us that everything, Lucifer included, is, Qabalistically, manifestation of the divine. But it is 'Ayin, and thus The Devil, that is creative energy at its most masculine. It cannot be doubted that Anger's films are indeed creative, masculine (he once said he personally preferred the solar, masculine Thelema to the lunar, feminine Wicca) and energetic, and none more so than Lucifer Rising. It is at once enthralling and disturbing, not least because it is scored by and stars Bobby Beausoleil of the Manson Family, and it is as desolate in setting as it is rich in meaning and visuals, much of it being shot up mountains or in the desert beside the Pyramids. Anger, like Crowley before him, identifies Lucifer as Set, the ass-headed god of the Egyptian deserts, and recognises that, to quote Crowley once more, “Essential to the symbolism are the surroundings – barren places, especially high places. The cult of the mountain is an exact parallel.”
The Apollonian force of Lucifer Rising makes it a fitting book-end to Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle, coming as it does after the Dionysian excesses that preceded it. Viewed holistically, it is difficult not to see the Cycle as a Homeric report on the mutually defining existence of humans and their gods, of the material and the divine.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Kenneth Anger at FACT
Kenneth Anger's whole Magic Lantern Cycle will be playing at FACT on the 27th February as part of a Queerfest that also involves a John Waters double bill on the 16th. I'll follow the Cycle with some of my thoughts on the matter.
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