In the beginning, God said “Let there be clown white.” And there was, and it was tacky and held facial powder without leaving too much runoff, and God said it was good. For ever after, the religious teachings of Christ have been delivered to us in the unique, multi-faceted manner of the clown ministry brigade. Because God stole the clown race’s ability to communicate through words at the same moment he ripped language from the throats of poor, defenseless baby lambs and goats in a fit of Old Testament pique, clowns have developed a poetic means of delivering their very important message without the use of the shockingly loud voices they used to have in the pre-Christ times. They use dramatic metaphor and props with concise, editorial cartoon-esque labels.
Note how different the message is thanks to the words on the paint bucket. If she had come in and started smearing red paint crosses all over the faces of Sunday school kids and her bucket was labeled “REDRUM,” that would’ve altered the parable a tad. Thankfully, clowns have had many thousands of years of genetic trial and error to arrive at the point where they instinctively know that “GOD’S LOVE” just makes more sense.
The linguistic skills of ministers might demonstrate their evolutionary advancement, but clowns represent the missing link to our theological past.
The history of clowning is a heady proposition for the novice. So it’s a good thing that there’s a comprehensive video out there to guide the curious, the wanna-be clowns and the stupid. It’s called Clown Ministry Video and it’s 90 electrifying minutes, chock-full of the information that you want and that you need. It’s the Power Bar of clown ministry educational videos. (In fact, there’s so much going on that I can only deal with it one section at a time.) Right from the opening title credit, you know it knows what it’s talking about.
Not Group Produtions. Not Group, Inc. Not Group Group. It’s like “hey, we’re Group and we don’t even need to tell you that we’re a production company because you already know that. You bought or rented the video in the first place, so we’re not going to spoon-feed you the details. You’re better than that.” It also brings us back to the idea that clowns don’t talk.
It opens with a sample of the vox populi. “Clowns, clowns and more clowns,” says the narrator. “I think they’re funny,” says a straw-voiced woman. “They’re crazy… but they’re kinda neat,” another man hesitantly adds. “They seem so free,” says the third, much wiser girl, “I think I’d like to try it some day.” Who wouldn’t?
Our professor/sultan of clown worship moves quickly from the neo-secularism of Barnum and Bailey to the powerpoint chart showing exactly how we know that God is, in fact, a clown.
Of course, there are further similarities that don’t get covered. I jotted down a couple other comparisons while watching: God created the universe in seven days, clowns erect big top tents in seven hours. God brought Job closer to him by taking everything else away, clowns make people feel better about their own jobs. God kills children, so do clowns.
Somehow, Prof. Clown links the act of clowning with children’s amplified awareness of their own senses. Meaning things they can feel, taste, hear, smell and touch. These are sensual gifts, a word that’s often misused because it means “of the senses.” Also, gifts mean gift cards. And nothing screams gift cards like stomping around in a pool of sensual mud.
It’s fun like being cornered by clowns… until you realize that what you thought was mud on your hands is actually raw sewage.
Which sort of reminds me of my childhood days and my typical reaction to clowns and their sermons.
Problem was that I used to view clowns as economic jesters, pretty low on the totem pole (you know how suburban kids can be when they discover they are still at least a decade-and-a-half from ever having to contemplate the reality of bouncing checks or starting fires in discarded Folgers’ cans)…
…and I sort of thought they’d steal my lunch money given the opportunity.
(Bet you didn’t realize that Don Rickles was a clown minister, did you? I didn’t either until I checked out his book at the library. Something called Bite My Theology, or something.)
So, back to the video which, if I didn’t mention it before, is comprehensive. Clown aerobics, check.
Laundry tips for mixed, polyfiber loads with complicated color issues, check.
Tips for how to handle the eucharist at a cocktail party, check.
Not to mention clever ideas for happy hour.
The video’s first segment, however, is mostly concerned with discovering your inner clown minister, grabbing it by the nape of its mute neck, rejecting complicated philosophical dialogues…
… remembering childhood’s various sensualities, removing your primative construction paper heart…
Wait, what? Why take the only thing that a destitute clown minister has on his person? Because clown doctors need them for complicated sin removal operations.
If only dealing with sickness was so simple in the human world. Can you imagine? You wouldn’t have to tell the doctor anything. And people who, like me, keep all their various ailments, aches and filthy sins to themselves could still get a swift cure with one swift swoop of the pliers. “Oops. Did I commit that sin? Thank God you were already in there fishing for my false witnesses. I wouldn’t have even remembered about that little brush with adultery.” In a matter of minutes, our sins would be discarded into the appropriate hazmat bin along with the clown syringes and clown exploding rubber gloves and we could get back to our daily, bicep-ripping weight routines.
So that pretty well covers the first section of the education video.
Oh, you’re right! I forgot the most important aspect of any video starring slightly amorphous, square-tie wearing fiftysomething-ish men: the make-up lesson.
If you take only one rule to the void where your heart used to be before you cut it out, it’s that clown ministers’ vanity tables should be cluttered like two notions’ counters worth of bottles and scents and powders loaded onto the space of a peanut stand. The clowns-in-Volkswagon theory reveals itself to be a blanket initiative.
Do you reckon that old guys use clown ministry as a front for their secret desire to slap make-up on their chapped faces?
Clown ministry is an unmistakably Lutheran phenomenon. (Rumor has it that after nailing the 95 Theses onto the Castle Church doors, he buffaloed his way across the continent to slip a whoopie cushion under Sylvester Mazzolini’s mattress.) But that old Catholic guilt still surfaces somewhere between the time the first bit of clown white putty hits the right cheek and the moment the red yarn wig completes the transformation. You may recall that scene in What’s Love Got To Do With It in which a black-and-blue Anna Mae Bullock sits in front of a backstage mirror to put on her Tina Turner face but the suicidal dose of sleeping pills she swallowed kick in before she can finish the job, leading her to trail the eyebrow pencil all the way across her forehead?
Luckily, Catholic guilt (unlike Lutheran depression) is only transitory.
And both the guilt and the make-up can be removed with clown lube.
That pretty well covers the first section of the video. Next time, I’ll report on nursing home hijinks, the concept of street clowning.
Remember, charity is the reason for the season. Merry Christmas, sad hobo clown!
Stephen Gaghan was probably the best choice to direct a screenplay by Stephen Gaghan, given just how in love with his own words he is. Like Traffic, the muckraking Big Oil patchwork Syriana is impressive in the scope of its detail, but numbing in its sustained insistence on dangling your complete grasp on the overall thrust of events just out of reach. You know which characters fall on which side of the valiant/nefarious continuum (or, in the Gulf scenes, the victimized/blackmailed continuum), but you never fully know to what extent they intend to demonstrate their moral alignment. And, to be sure, most of the characters only exist to demonstrate moral alignments. Gaghan is devoted to screenplays that function as schematic maps and dialogue that infotains with the lingo of confidential memos and corporatespeak. Occasionally he panders to the base, sensationalistic element probably required to keep anyone in the audience who doesn’t subscribe to the National Review at attention. I’m not just talking about the much publicized scene where George Clooney’s C.I.A. operative is strapped to a desk while a double-crossing Middle Eastern contact rips his fingernails out one by one, but also the D.C. Cliffs Notes bridging sequence where Tim Blake Nelson shouts from the enlightened heavens to Jeffrey Wright’s sneaky, whistle-blowing lawyer a very Paddy Chayefsky tirade about how “this whole town, the entire government was built off of corruption!” But mostly each half-scene begins when a messenger enters a room to notify their boss of some important international development, or that they’ve been summoned to a luxurious, intercontinental diplomats’ pool party, or, again back in the Gulf scenes revolving around a disillusioned youth’s drift towards Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, how you can’t get a job at the oil barracks unless you learn to speak Arabic. Gaghan’s subject matter is undeniably heady, and his commitment to remain completely syrianous is to be commended. But, from a pedagogical standpoint, it’s a tad difficult to take much away from it other than that you, yes you, are insignificant in the grand scheme of the world’s system of corporate alliances, and can’t possible comprehend its structure. What Gaghan has yet to demonstrate is an understanding that movies aren’t steno pads.
From its opening shot depicting what look like hard-nosed sperm with searchlights, Larry Cohen’s first non-blaxploitation feature should’ve initiated a fresh new illicit trend: Roe v. Wadesploitation. The coochie-coochie horror flick It’s Alive is as awesomely ridiculous in conception (in every sense of the word) as it is dependably, self-consciously true to Cohen’s warped ambitions. Seriously, how many movies do you get to see four cops aiming their pistols point blank on a quizzical-eyed toddler? (His follow-up film, the astonishing God Told Me To, throws St. Patrick’s Cathedral Catholic iconography in with this earlier film’s birth anxiety resulting in one of the most unique premises in movie history… it could’ve been titled He Is Risen because Sylvia Sydney Magdalene didn’t kill Him when she should’ve.) At the film’s open, fresh-faced Sharon Ferrell informs her husband (John P. Ryan, seemingly directed by Cohen to let his testosterone guide his performance) that she’s ready to give birth, her face showing no sign of contractions and her voice resembling that of a kid at a minute past midnight on Christmas morning. But as soon as they’ve dropped their until-impendingly-only son with his creepy, pedo-cryptic uncle and Dad has retired to the expectant fathers’ waiting room to wax environmental-sophic about the amount of chemicals floating around in today’s atmosphere, the miracle of birth has tragically turned into the agony of delivering a malformed child. One that bloodily dispatches an entire delivery room staff in a matter of seconds. But Mom shows no post-partum depression at all; in fact, she’s bat-shit maternal, secretly harboring her murderous offspring while impatiently waiting for Dad to accept his parental role. Cohen’s allegorical implications are thankfully as sloppy as his gore effects and his (possibly intentional) haphazard cinematography, and the demon spawn’s symbolic purpose bends and morphs so often that I can almost imagine a few confused right-to-lifers taking the film to their bosum. Because, the underlying (and, when the fanged tyke is shown weeping in a dingy sewer, completely heartwrenching) message that all children deserve to be loved aside, the movie is both hysterically anti-procreation and a social re-enactment of a couple besieged by a representative abortion that went uncontrollably public. The film’s double barrels of horror imagery and emphatic allegorical winkery allow It’s Alive (and a number of other horror films of the era) to address social taboos in an outrageously candid forum. To wit: the parents’ names go out on a radio bulletin the very night of the hospital room massacre, and when Dad calls Son-They-Allowed-To-Live (and, thus, a figure occasionally presented as the “aborted” fetus’s immortal enemy) with news of the birth, he says “the baby’s… sick… everything’s a mess right now.” One cop tells another cop “folks who don’t have children don’t know how lucky they are.” An ice cream truck is branded with the rainbow-decal homily: “Stop children.” Mom’s beside nurse tries to trick her mother into admitting on tape what horrific act she committed with some anti-abortion rhetoric, badgering: “Did you see it? Surely you must’ve gotten one glimpse. They say it has teeth and claws.” I mean, even some of Bernard Herrmann’s music cues are aborted (like when Dad flips on a light switch to end the building atmosphere of terror). But, like all of Cohen’s high concept, low execution films, It’s Alive is unfailingly true to its outlandish design (try the shots that quote Nosferatu and The Passion of Joan of Arc for size). But I don’t know what it would feel like to be one of Cohen’s kids.
A seventy-three minute morality litmus test in the form of a crime caper haiku, Crime Wave’s first and last “lines” are extraordinarily terse and clipped, and the more elongated middle “line” reveals a new shade with each carefully considered syllable. That is to say, the film’s framing story involves Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson), an ex-con trying to maintain his lower-middle class, happily married, one-bedroom flat paradise. Unfortunately, he doesn’t get much help from a trio of prison buds who just busted out of the clink with the blueprints for their ten-years-in-the-making bank heist. Key increments in their titular wave of iniquitous ingenuity include murdering gas station chubbers wanton, bribing a nebbish veterinarian (who’s extremely pervious to the fuzz) to look after their battle scars, and holding Lacey and his private, problem-solver wife hostage so that the certified pilot will fly them across the border after their stick-up. (Because apparently the police would never expect it, aside from the fact that they put the pressure on flyboy Lacey before the con trio even arrive at his grey apartment.) That’s the nutgraph, but one of the film’s longest and most memorable shots shows the P.O.V. of investigative officer Sterling Hayden as he walks down a line of desks providing the backdrop for jittery 1 a.m. interrogations, beginning with an apologetic married couple trying to explain off a moment of seemingly pre-coital domestic abuse and winding up with a teary blonde of the night, which widens out the story’s barely-there noir premise into what is almost Italian neorealism. Like the shot of the warehouse filled with pawned sheets in The Bicycle Thief, it momentarily widens out the scope of the story to suggest that Lacey’s plight is but one of many, that there are tons of relatively innocent people who are (depending on your view) either the police force’s bitches or the only hope for an overwhelming wave of crime. This is the first film by André de Toth I’ve seen, so I can’t yet parse what some of his signature concerns might be. (Of course, there are no doubt some auteurists who would recommend watching films by de Toth while covering one eye with your hand.) Anyway, the director’s zero-flab momentum centralizes the film’s acting to an intimate extent, and the pert casting decisions extend well beyond the expected bulldog professionalism of Sterling Hayden (who gets a winning Sterling Hayden® digression when he jabbers on about having to quit smoking and his swift switch to toothpicks). Protagonistic Nelson exudes an appropriately albino translucence that shoulders the burden of explaining just why three beef-eating thugs would choose a reformed Saint as their mark. And Charles Buchinsky (soon Bronson) puts in an early beefcake appearance here, picking his caps with a page ripped from the Stanley Kowalski method manual.