Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 4

Stray Thoughts Before the Looming American Election

Tribalism, idolatry, an utter lack of self-awareness, a pathological disregard for those "other" people we murder as we pursue complacent comforts and psychotic dreams of power:

The four horsemen of Western collapse.

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If the polls reflect reality, then one half of the voting public in America will bow before a party that arms and supports genocide right now, today, while the other half will choose a party that merely promises to arm and support genocide.

No matter which party wins, Americans lose.

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When Trump wins, do you suppose the Democrats will suddenly discover that genocide (GASP!) is a crime against humanity, that aiding genocide (WHAT?!?) is evil, and that, by sending weapons and military support to Israel (HOW DARE HE?!?), Trump has become a war criminal who must be prosecuted?

I know, I know: it's wishful thinking, because genocide is a bipartisan policy; but still, given that the Democratic party are seasoned hypocrites, why not use their hypocrisy to save lives... and to stop Trump?

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When Trump wins -- or, to be precise, when Harris loses -- American voters are likely to turn against each other, to blame each other for the crisis of Trump.

This would be not only unfair, but a tactical mistake.

The Democratic party expected voters to legitimise the Biden-Harris policies of proxy war, direct confrontation with armed nuclear powers, and genocide. No sane voter on the planet would have swallowed these options, and no one should blame them for staying at home on election day.

At the same time, Americans faced with Trump in office will have to realize that they are now on their own, that any political opposition to Trump will have to come from the American people themselves.

Americans might discover, as they did during Trump's first term, that the threat of Trump is nowhere near as apocalyptic as the professional managerial classes had insisted; that Trump, like every American president of our day, is constrained and compelled by national security priorities, imperial structures, and financial demands of the donor class. Yet even if this becomes true, Americans will remain under the rule of this imperial warfare consensus, and will be no better off than they were under previous Democrat and Republican administrations. Once again, Americans will be left to fend for themselves.

When American voters blame each other for political outcomes, they leave untouched the people, the institutions, and the ideologies that have slowly made American lives intolerable. Without interruption from the street, this political-economic decay of the United States will go on until the country falls apart, or until fascism steps in to sort things out on its own terms.

Either way, the American people can no longer afford the luxury of hating each other. Somehow, against the odds, Americans must learn to speak with each other, to hear each other, to work together against the mindless, heartless forces that rule them.

When A Film Falls Apart: HEREDITARY

HEREDITARY (2018), written and directed by Ari Aster.

When a story or film falls apart, we can examine this failure to understand why certain approaches work for us, while other methods do not. From this we can learn about craft, or, at the very least, gain insight into our own subjective responses.

Not every failure to connect is a failure of craft. I have read stories and seen films that did nothing for me, but only because of my own tastes and limitations; I could find nothing objectively wrong in their techniques. Yet in certain cases, things fall apart because of expectations established by the work itself, expectations that are then abandoned or evaded. In my view, HEREDITARY sets up hopes for one type of narrative, but then runs away from the implications of that narrative.

It seems to me that most narratives using the supernatural or the uncanny approach this use in two ways. (I say "most" because there will always be exceptions -- absurdist or surrealist narratives, for example, along with accounts of actual dreams, or fictions that simulate the effect of dreams.)

I call these two approaches intrusion and externalization.

In a story of intrusion, a person, family, or community is invaded by some uncanny or supernatural threat from outside the group. Stories of this kind are perhaps the most common, and they succeed or fail based on the skill and conviction brought to them by their creators.

On the other hand, in a story of externalization, a person, family, or community is faced by a threat that seems to reflect or echo conflicts within the group. These conflicts existed before the supernatural event began, or become most apparent when supernatural events force them to stand out. Either way, any firm line between inner conflict and outer manifestation can become difficult if not impossible to find.

In films, the master of this approach might be Bergman, but it shows up elsewhere with equal effectiveness in THE BIRDS, in LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, and in THE INNOCENTS.

Inner conflicts need not be clear for externalization to work powerfully. We can recognize the isolating psychological struggles of JESSICA, the projected sexual anxiety of THE INNOCENTS, but the personal conflicts that drive THE BIRDS remain half-glimpsed, murky: they are not so much perceived as they are suspected. If anything, this makes THE BIRDS even more suggestive and haunting.

Because these two methods are both valid even as they set up different expectations, a story can succeed or fail by how it confronts the implications of its method. Craft and conviction matter, but so does honesty in following through.

Here is the danger:

A story of supernatural intrusion can reveal itself, gradually and with no loss of conviction or power, to be a story of supernatural externalization. But can a story that sets up expectations of supernatural externalization hold itself together, if it reveals that its conflicts were never actually internal, but were the results of manipulation from outside?

I would have to say, No, not likely.

Veering away from externalization to intrusion runs the risk of cheapening the human drama, the human pain, that fuelled the story in the first place. We empathize with suffering; we understand that we, too, have suffered in similar ways and will suffer again. If we are told, eventually, that this relatable pain is nothing but a plot device, then we might feel cheated.

This danger becomes even more stark when a narrative shows human pain with exceptional honesty and power. For example, the first half of the film HEREDITARY builds up a dread of mental illness that seeps from one generation to the next. It presents mental suffering and family tensions with an impact that, in better hands, might have rivalled THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, but while Bergman adds uncanny personal visions to enhance the urgency of this mental crisis, HEREDITARY veers away from its intense honesty to show that this family struggle has been prompted and perpetuated by nothing more than melodrama.

In other words, HEREDITARY flees from its implications of human pain by using the supernatural not as a mirror, not as an extension or intensification of this pain, but as a replacement, an evasion. Suddenly, this pain is no longer something that we can all feel, that we can all fear, as it is in a Bergman film, as it is in THE INNOCENTS, in THE BIRDS, or in LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH; suddenly, this pain is the work of cliched movie villains.

To quote from the Sonnet 94 of Shakespeare: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." HEREDITARY fails drastically, infuriatingly, because it had set itself up as a powerful example of one type of story, only to veer away into something different, something less emotionally confrontational and much less dangerous.

Some viewers might call this evasion a lapse in judgment. I suspect a loss of nerve. Either way, I regret the death of something good.

Lemora

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LEMORA, 1973, directed and written by Richard Blackburn.

During the 1970s, a few notable films overcame the hurdles of a low budget through sheer brutal conviction (THE HILLS HAVE EYES), through an unsettling, dreamlike atmosphere (LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH), through a merciless demolition of its characters' principles and confidence (RITUALS), through guerrilla filming techniques (GOD TOLD ME TO), through the implications of disturbing concepts (THE BROOD), or even through the irrepressible joy of amateurs who wanted to prove their abilities (PHANTASM).

A favourite of mine, and a film that has never gained the reputation it merits, raised itself through pure style. Richard Blackburn's LEMORA provides a consistent visual scheme, and a consistent mood, that overcome its one weakness: an amateur cast with more enthusiasm than skill. Yet even here, two performances are able to stand out: the naturalistic and convincing work of its heroine, played by Cheryl Smith, and the mannered yet interestingly alien performance of its antagonist, played by Lesley Gilb. Smith is clearly a seasoned actress; Gilb might not be an actress at all, but she does offer a strong, unearthly presence.

"Presence" becomes the ultimate virtue of LEMORA. The photography, the lighting and colour schemes, the music, the constant evasions and implications of the script, give the film a tone unique not only for its decade, but for today. Despite a few unconvincing make-up effects, LEMORA succeeds in building dread, and although it might seem viscerally mild when compared to something like THE EXORCIST, LEMORA carries its own dark fairy-tale spells of uncertainty and mystery. It explains very little: although its antagonist reveals vampiric traits, her actual nature is never clarified. She seems like something pretending to be human, like a mimic or a mechanism; her intentions remain foggy right up to the ending and beyond, which might frustrate certain viewers but which leaves me impressed.

In his commentary on the Synapse DVD, Richard Blackburn cites as an influence on his film Arthur Machen's "The White People," and Mervyn Peake's "Boy in Darkness." Although his film cannot reach the heights of these influences, it does echo certain of their ideas and moods, and in digesting the sources, gains a certain originality of its own. This, in part, is what makes LEMORA strange, perhaps too strange to gain a wide audience, but strange enough to win admiration from those, like me, who love the indefinable, the chimaeric, the neither here nor there that somehow becomes an unforgettable landscape of its own.

Genocide Then, Genocide Now

Imagine, for a moment, that the United States had never gone to war with the Axis powers, and that American politicians, American media, had called the French resistance fighters "terrorists," the Warsaw Ghetto uprising "an unprovoked act of violence," and had expressed admiration for the "precision," the "efficiency," of German extermination methods.

Go ahead: imagine.

Or, instead, you could just watch American television right now, read American newspapers right now, listen to the blather of Democrats and Republicans right now, as America provides cash and bombs and fist-pumps for genocide.

Go ahead: watch, read, listen.

And after all of this attention paid to the current genocide, would you still swallow the lies and brain-dead slogans of these presidential ghouls? Would you still be "with her"? Would you still want to "make America great again"?

Go ahead: ask yourself.

SHRINKING OLD -- A Sonnet

SHRINKING OLD.

Why do you flee, you faces of the night?
You crowd my dreams, but vanish when the day
Arrives to chase my scattered loves away.
I die a little more beneath your flight.

You friends who shared my scrapes, my grins, my fright,
You fragrant women, tearful as you play,
And you my mother, you my father: stay
A moment longer with me in this light.

The sumac reds of autumn line my path.
I hear symphonies and songs while I remain
Alive in my desire, in my grief,

Alive within my creaking shell of wrath.
Yet often, I pursue the reds in vain:
I see, instead, a face on every leaf.

Kubrick's THE SHINING

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THE SHINING forces me to wonder why a film so well-directed, so splendidly-photographed, should fail so thoroughly to scare me.

I could blame the source, a book that did nothing for me at all, but this would be unfair to a director as transformative as Kubrick. Like Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Lynch, Kubrick had his own perspective on the world, and his films owe more to that perspective than they do to any adapted text.

But unlike these other directors, Kubrick seemed to lack any strong sense of the non-rational. He was always good with the horrors of misapplied rationalism, and so we have the trial in PATHS OF GLORY, the megadeath plans in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, the failure of Hal 9000 to understand the need for human beings on a human mission. In a Kubrick film, tools of reason are often put to work on goals unreasonable.

The non-rational demands different methods. To create atmosphere and anxiety in a dreamlike story, directors can manage well without any belief in the supernatural, but they do need to accept -- and perhaps even to fear -- the subconscious. IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SOLARIS, THE MIRROR, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, THE SILENCE, HOUR OF THE WOLF, PERSONA, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, INLAND EMPIRE: these are nightmare films, and they speak directly to those functions of our brains that explore nightmares. Kubrick seemed more at home with fears of rationality gone cold: the military industrial complex in PATHS OF GLORY, DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, and FULL METAL JACKET; the manipulative state in CLOCKWORK ORANGE; the polite society unable to accept ordinary human strangeness in BARRY LYNDON; the tool that develops a will of its own beyond human concerns in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. These are nightmares of the conscious mind.

For this reason, the breakdown of Jack Torrance begins to seem as ridiculous and stylized as the antics of the cartoon characters who lurk at the margins of this film. Leering, rolling his eyes, lolling his tongue, he becomes Wile E. Coyote, and like the Coyote, he fails because of his own bull-headed stupidity. I, for one, have never been afraid of Wile E., neither in the Road Runner films, nor in THE SHINING.

This overblown, cartoonish view of madness becomes all the more unfortunate to me, when I consider the one moment of THE SHINING that left me unsettled. In the sequence where Danny sneaks up to the family apartment to get his toy fire engine, only to find his father seated on the bed and staring at winter light, Jack Torrance is calm and loving and, in his words, at least, reasonable -- yet I can see an odd glint in his eyes that hits me in places where his later bellows and prancing fail to reach. And the frozen alarm in Danny's eye tells me everything I need to know about his response to this calm and loving father.

Nothing But The Night

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NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT (1973). Directed by Peter Sasdy. Script by Brian Hayles, from a book by John Blackburn that I have not read. (Blackburn's tepid prose never fails to push me out before each book's Chapter Two.)

Why certain films become popular while others, no worse in technique or imagination, become ignored or even hated, remains a mystery. As a case in point, we have NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT -- hardly a great film, but at the same time, nowhere near as bad as reviews might imply. It moves at a rapid pace, it offers an escalating series of surprises, and it ends with a climax that even its detractors often praise.

One source of trouble might be the film's marketing. Promoted as horror, NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT is for the most part a police-procedural / manhunt / criminal investigation story. On these terms, I think it functions well, but anyone who expects the atmosphere and oddness of a horror film might be disappointed -- until the climax, which does convey a mood of sinister peril, and which does make the film stand out.

I would call this a structural flaw. At the heart of the film lurks an uncanny concept: far-fetched, but interesting. Yet this idea is tossed at the viewer in the final minutes. A writer like Nigel Kneale would have built up this concept at length, to explore its disturbing implications. Here, once the concept is revealed, the movie ends -- powerfully, strikingly, but abruptly. I would have preferred to see this idea given more attention.

I would have also preferred to see the good cast given more to do. After all, any film that includes Kathleen Byron had damned well better use her strangeness to its full extent, but this film never matches the courage of BLACK NARCISSUS. NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT's acting, like its direction and cinematography, are never less than competent, but could have been more.

The entire film could have been more, but it could have also been less. It never bored me, never forced me to look at the clock, never made me regret that I was watching it. Nothing would compel me to call this a bad film.

I only wish the film as a whole could have matched the power of its climax.

Robert Altman's IMAGES

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Certain films not usually categorized as horror might as well be called horror. KISS ME DEADLY, IVAN'S CHILDHOOD, SECONDS, THE SILENCE, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY, SHAME, PERSONA, THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN, all create a mood of escalating dread in ways that can rival or even surpass films people think of as horror.

In a similar way, Robert Altman's IMAGES, from 1972, might as well be called a ghost story. Even if the lead character is haunted not by ghosts but by mental illness, the manifestations of her condition appear and vanish like ghosts, lurk about like ghosts, cause eruptions of panic and anxiety that we would expect from ghosts. The result is a film that kept me on edge in ways that HEREDITARY and SINISTER never could.

Altman achieves his effects with simple techniques from horror films of the past, but applied here with a focus and confidence that stand out. Characters transform from one person to another in mid-conversation. The room-within-room complexities of an ordinary cottage in full daylight become frames-within-frames for sudden appearances and disappearances. "Ghosts" can wait quietly in the background in full view, or they can erupt from the foreground without warning or motivation.

In the role of protagonist, Susannah York shrieks in panic when these manifestations begin early in the film, but as the story continues, she develops a sinister tone: knowing, calculating, almost gleeful in her mental collapse. Her performance is aided by one of the few John Williams musical scores that I like: in its abstraction, its emphasis upon detached or unmotivated sounds, it reminds me less of a typical score by Williams than of a beautifully experimental score akin to those created by Jerry Goldsmith in the 1960s and '70s. I wish that John Williams had written more like it.

Compared to Altman's later quasi-horror film, 3 WOMEN, with its wide-open buildings and stark desert spaces, IMAGES remains more focused, more intimate, with a smaller cast, with smaller rooms, and with beautifully-photographed Irish hillscapes that seem at once grandiose yet magically compact, that begin to seem as haunted and sinister as the film's protagonist.

Never as popular as it should have been, IMAGES deserves to be rediscovered.

WENDIGO (2001), Directed and Written by Larry Fessenden

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"You know, a lot of people make up stories to make sense of the world. It's a big world, after all, and nobody really understands how it all works.... That's what myths are: they help us talk about stuff.... It's important to know that they're just myths, they're just stories. You'll end up being very disappointed when things don't come true that you're wishing for."

After I saw WENDIGO for the first time last night, I went online to check reviews. These were almost universally negative, which took me by surprise and saddened me.

The trouble, I think, is that WENDIGO comes with expectations of its being a horror film, when it actually works better as a film that, like THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, like THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, looks at the fears of a child too keenly aware of the fears of his parents, of the world around him, yet a child unable to fall back on experience or on mature insight to understand these fears. And so the child mythologizes: a method of coping that leads to complications of its own.

For most of the story, WENDIGO focuses tightly on this chilhood perspective, and in my view, succeeds. The hyper-awareness of a child, which, for an adult, might seem like paranoia, is conveyed well by dark rooms in an unfamiliar house, by shifting trees and gusts of snow, by the sudden dead stillness of a frozen landscape, by the barely-understood comments and conversations of parents who must deal with fears of their own.

WENDIGO captures these ordinary yet heightened aspects of life with good attention to detail, with dramatic set-ups and pay-offs that seem down-to-Earth yet unsettling. At the climax, however, its tight focus on the child and on his family shifts to something else, and this, I think, is a mistake: it jettisons the intensity of that narrow focus, and it also drags in traditional horror images that the film lacks technical resources to pull off. I regret this choice: it might not kill the film, but it does harm it.

In the final moments, WENDIGO returns to its narrow, subjective focus on child and family. The result is an ending that carries emotional weight, that succeeds on its own terms, that made me glad to have spent my time with a film that many despise as a waste of time.

WENDIGO plays by its own rules, pays attention to its own concerns, and if you can accept this, then I can recommend it.

A Few Thoughts on That 2024 Paris Olympics Fiasco

In politics, in social commentary, in relationships, religions, and philosophies, freedom of expression becomes not only essential, but foundational; this applies even more to the arts. (Pardon me for that offensively vague and often useless term, "art.")

Yet if I support self-expression for artists, I also urge their self-awareness. On at least a surface level, artists must understand their own motives, their own messages. They must accept responsibility for what they do and say; they must never hide behind excuses of innocence or ignorance.

In short, artists cannot run away from values and principles.

If their only values are the values of the neoliberal marketplace, then I submit that they have no values. If their only principle is to scream out, "Here I am," then I would urge them to shut the hell up. Yet I suspect that most people would indeed stand for some principle or value beyond a purely egoistic need for self-display; to uncover what that principle or value might be calls for self-awareness and self-reflection, but above all, for self-honesty.

What these values might be will depend upon the artist, and even within a single skull, these values might clash, but conflict has always been the rocket fuel of art.

But what if an artist finds value in shattering idols, in tearing things apart, in smashing the stupid complacency of the audience? There is indeed value in screaming, "Fire!" while the world around you burns, because too many people never feel the heat until the final moment, and fool themselves into thinking that they alone will never be seared by flame or suffocated by smoke. The world is full of sleepers, and so we need alarm clocks.

Setting off alarms can lead to resentment, even hatred, for artists by their own generation, but so what? Artists thrive on controversy. What kills them is the silence of apathy.

Sometimes, though, artists cry, "Fire!" not to warn people, not to wake people up, but merely to offend. Again, offense is better than apathy, but is it sufficient to justify deliberately offensive art?

In this case, too, I see no excuse for self-ignorance. Artists who strive only to offend must accept the same responsibilities of artists who strive to set off alarm bells.

One responsibility is the consideration of context. An openly sexual display might not raise eyebrows in a nightclub or in a film for adults, but when that display is presented to a global audience, and what is more, to a global audience of children and their protective parents, no artist can claim the excuse of, "I didn't expect people to react this way!"

A second responsibility is the consideration of broad impact. Religions, like political ideologies, are necessary targets for satire, but when offered to a global audience, mockery can create a tsunami backlash.

This becomes a third responsibility. Artists must expect and accept this backlash as part of the deal: "You sneer, and people will sneer back. Loudly." Artists should have no more freedom to censor critics and an angry audience than the critics and the audience have to censor the arts.

Artists cannot afford to be hypocrites, or self-righteously complacent pawns of the corporate media, or snobs trapped within a bubble of perpetually-reflected worship by the professional managerial classes. With freedom of expression comes freedom of response, and the two must never be cut away from each other. When an audience is no longer allowed to reply, to shout, to argue back, then the arts will rot.