Observe these royal honeys…

… clearing for themselves a path through the urban jungle. They live in danger, but know that the going rate on barrels of testosterone, like OPEC oil, has priced most men right out of the game.

In researching for the Slant dance list (or rather buttressing my take that, as far as disco is concerned, blacker and looser equaled better), I ended up paging through Peter Shapiro’s Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, which jumped right into the thick of a well-tred social scene-setting that anyone misguided enough to take disco music seriously against pig-headed rockists is no doubt overly familiar with.

Disco was the height of glamour and indulgence. But while disco may have sparkled with diamond brilliance, it stank of something far worse. Despite its veneer of elegance and sophistication, disco was born, maggot-like, from the rotten remains of the Big Apple.

I know, you’re all “tell me something I don’t know. The term papers humping this vamp number in the thousands, as many per semester as there are beats per minute.” I admit that I am still reactively resistant to this critical model on account of there doesn’t need to be an overt reason to allow rockism to dictate the ground rules of the debate. In other words, just because any number of musically-circumspect rock artists have been critically baptized by their political prickliness doesn’t mean we have to listen to Chic’s breezy “Le Freak” and mentally redress their revision of the original title refrain (aimed at the scenesters of Studio 54) and switch it back to “Fuck Off.” Even if it’s true. Disco was born on streets you wouldn’t walk down at midnight, but the music itself was a transcendent, escapist trip uptown. The worst disco denied the former (robots can’t get track marks, y’know), but even stuff like Baccara could be validated by its campy otherworldliness.

Still, sucker for sexual subtext anyway I can get it, I can’t totally dismiss the earmarks of where Shapiro, et al, are really aiming when they dissect disco by defining it (and New York) against its own backlash (and Chicago/Detroit, ironically the nexus of disco’s rebirth, but that’s another story).

To fully comprehend New York in the seventies, it’s necessary to look at where the previous decade and its progressive agenda fell off course. The liberal experiment of the 1960s was fueled by the youthful enthusiasm and swaggering confidence of a generation that had never known anything but the greatest prosperity the world had ever seen. But as soon as the economic conditions that had made the Great Society possible started to falter, the dreams turned into disillusionment, the promises became retractions, and the sweeping vision became blinkered and myopic…

And New York was the Ground Zero (Shapiro talks extensively of the Bronx going up in flames during the ‘77 World Series), as it appeared to retain its Maude Findlay pose of liberal defiance even as other cities went up in student uprisings and race riots while the Archie Bunkers stroked their ire. I understand how disco could trigger a Lacanian sort of reaction from the Bunkers, an outrage not so much that society was unravelling on their behalf, but that they could actually have the gall to apparently enjoy themselves despite the creeping debasement.

Obviously the tension all leads up to Steve Dahl’s over-documented Disco Demolition Derby at Comiskey Park in ‘79. But even here Shapiro manages to put a wickedly incisive edge to his take on the patently obvious psychosexual significance of the event and what, exactly, was at stake for the American beergut male and his precious AOR. (I apologize for the extensiveness of the following quote but, even between ellipses, the guy’s on a well-researched roll.)

Despite [Anita Bryant's] efforts, it was Steve Dahl and his foot soldiers—even though they were the ones who desecrated the altar—who managed to have the most visible flowering of gay liberation excommunicated from the church of American popular culture. It wasn’t just deviant sexuality, though, that rankled the straight white male of the Midwest. It was something far worse: impotence. Detroit had once been the shining industrial beacon of the American economic miracle… and the images of third-generation Germans, Jews, recent Polish immigrants, and newly arrived African Americans from the Deep South working side-by-side on the shop floor were enduring symbols of both the might and the beneficence of American capitalism. In the face of the gasoline crises of 1973 and 1979, and with a tsunami of cheap Japanese cars flooding the country, Motor City was in deep trouble. In the freezing winter of 1976-77, the electric company was forced to cut voltage throughout the state of Michigan, “dimming lights and darkening moods,” as historian Bruce Schulman put it. The beacon was shining no more… Inflation was running rampant, exacerbated by OPEC price increases, and President Carter seemed powerless to do anything about it… The ultimate humiliation, though, occurred on November 4, 1979, when Fundamentalist Muslim students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, Iran, and took its sixty-six occupants hostage. America’s might had not only been questioned but openly mocked by a country that had escaped feudalism a mere twenty-five years earlier. With its mincing campiness, air-brushed superficiality, limp rhythms, flaccid guitars, fey strings, and overproduced sterility, disco seemed emblematic of America’s dwindling power. The high falsettos of disco stars like the Bee Gees and Sylvester sounded the death knell for the virility of the American male. Disco came from New York, “Sodom on the Hudson,” the home of both namby-pamby knee-jerk liberals and Spiro Agnew’s “Northeast liberal media elite.” Viewed in this context, Dahl’s military pomp makes a bit of sense: He was waging war on the enemy within that was draining America of its life force.

So what the backlash against disco was really fueled by wasn’t straight-up homophobia (though I notice that Shapiro didn’t make mention of any queens down there on the Detroit assembly lines) but an honest sense of betrayal. Disco was a genre created by and in celebration of women, non-whites, and guys who could swivel their hips every direction on the compass… or at the very least had no trouble finding them as they weren’t hiding behind rolls of fat. And from the ashes of disco’s demise was born a more organized civil rights movement in defense of the newly-debased straight white male. And the scorched land of what used to be Oz has proven mighty fertile for non-SWM cultural studies majors.

And, apparently, Noo Yawk filmmakers. And, by extension, pop culture junkies like me for whom the New York of the Ford/Carter years is as much an iconic “setting” for films as Nero’s Rome, Hitler’s Europe or San Fernando’s pool-cleaning service trucks. What’s especially gratifying is how intrinsically linked the disco scene is with the grindhouse circuit, in more elusive ways than simple temporal concern. Spike Lee’s 22nd anniversary disco v. punk epic Summer of Sam probably gets disco more right than punk, but it’s the only other film of his that rivals Do the Right Thing (and maybe School Daze) for effectively conveying a fully-conceived microcosmic world, and it remains his most unjustly underrated movie. But Abel Ferrara’s 1981 castration parable Ms. 45 was practically contemporaneous; the curdled stench of an army of blue balls hangs throughout the film like serrated limbs dripping juice into a refrigerator’s crisper. And Ferrara’s directorial flamboyance, pitching the film somewhere between Carrie and Death Wish, would appear to be a mask…

… behind which is lurking a wounded prick-ego. Ms. 45 is not, as Meathead cinephiles would have you believe, a “feminist” “vigilante” “fantasy” but rather an irrational excoriation of a sexual waking nightmare, directed by what one headlining NY Catholic filmmaker would probably label an underground, scuzzball NY Catholic filmmaking smuggler with a diseased mind but a healthy sense of humor. Zoë Tamerlis’ mute title character, a rape victim who turns two consecutive rapes into a murderous rampage against Manhattan’s entire male demographic, isn’t mute because she’s been silenced by victimization. Hell no, not in this film. (A quarter-hour in and she’s dragging a body into her apartment bathtub and using a Wüsthof hacksaw for some creative resizing.) No, she’s mute because she’s an ice cold bitch who doesn’t have time for you or any other man. Clearly this isn’t a proto Thelma & Louise. It’s not even a Lady Taxi Driver, with or without a soundtrack by Prince. (You know, the guy who made female orgasms in “Automatic” sound like Hell’s maternity ward?) Though Travis Bickle has less personal stock in cleaning up the streets, Zoë’s Thana only earns the designation “antihero” for about ten minutes before Ferrara attacks her credibility as a crusader in that, even in excepting the two rapists and maybe even the pimp, none of Thana’s victims actually deserve what’s coming to them. At least not in a retributive, cause-effect way, as the film’s most famous scene finds Thana cooly picking off an encircled gang of thugs that could’ve perhaps been rapists, but we’ll never know because of her preemptive extermination. This is Thelma and Ms. Hyde.

(An obligatory post-Brokeheart Mountain Oscar aside: 1976’s Network might retroactively serve us well as a more “respectable” early rallying cry on behalf of crusty old virility were it not for the fact that it was written from the defensive position of a Jewish, New York intellectual and his formidable ivory tower eight-syllabled words. So, naturally, it lost Best Picture to Rocky. Annie Hall came back swinging the following year against Star Wars, but by the time The Deer Hunter KO-ed Coming Home the year after that, the writing was clearly on the wall. The two-barreled reaffirmation of the male, however reborn with newfound sensitivity, as the pillar of the nuclear family unit in Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People explains itself.)

I could go through the film’s scenes one-by-one and examine their iconography, but… c’mon. It’s not like this insight is only available to the privileged few who are sensitive or female (impossible to be both in Ferrara’s world) enough to see it…

Ms. 45 is great not because of its level of insight but because of Ferrara’s candor and how committed he is to presenting his uncensored bad faith in the imbalance of sexual power as he saw it. (Poor, aboveground Brian De Palma was never allowed the same level of relative anonymity to admit that Dressed to Kill was born, more or less, from the same set of sour nuts.) The signposts to his machismic discontent hardly need unpacking.

Let’s see, the bustling workplace is winnowed down to the garment district, a racket in which the woman department store buyer calls the shots and even (apparently) straight designer Svengalis have to fake gay to command any respect. Hello, economic impotence!

(Speaking of economic neutering, after one of Thana(topsis)’s deadlier nights, a radio news announcer switches from her victims to the city’s impending sanitation strike, bringing up the moment the city almost drowned in its own trash and shit.)

Thana’s nosy landlord is Studio 54 refuse incarnate. Ms. 54?

When Thana and her garment room workmates all go out for lunch, they get schmoozed by a fashion photographer who looks more like Cousin Larry.

He’s hardly dressing any of them down. He’s a horny gnat. And what does the Alpha Female (whose ready position with a knife towards the end of the film is too good to spoil here) do to him?

She reads him the riot act.

Thana allows him to take her to his studio, where she doesn’t even step out of the elevator. Just locks and loads.

Funny, the last time I saw a photographer’s paper backdrop so mistreated, the only thing being spilled was Candy Darling’s dignity, as well as Candy herself.

Yet another case of the SWM claiming the rhetoric and strategies of the previously disenfranchised as his own to demonstrate his status as a minority, I guess. Personally, I’m more receptive when the argument comes in the form of a sweet-natured, Bowser-esque greaser throwback…

… who catcalls women from the corner but whose got a heart as taut and perky as the ass in his skin-tight high-water jeans, which even he can’t keep his hands off of (though the gait suggests he’s just in a perpetual state of readjustment).

By far the most attractive character in the entire film, Ducktail’s completely unjust death at the losing end of Thana’s .45 (immortalized in the final montage of the seminal “greatest hits of post-Sputnik horror movies” Terror in the Aisles) reveals Ferrara’s hand… delivering an open-handed slap in the face to every uppity woman who ever told him to buzz off. And if his kiss off were music, it’d probably sound like the corny sleaze groove at the climactic Halloween party, confidently aggressive but still confused about exactly what it’s saying. Or, rather, what instrument it’s playing.

A final note on cats and dogs. Of course one represents pussy and the other represents leg-humping masculinity. The pathetic cuckold Thana picks up in the singles bar explains that, upon catching his wife cheating on him with another woman (as to why he’s not immediately turned on by the discovery, I guess it’s a case of “you had to be there”), he turned around and strangled her cat. Thana later tries to kill her landlady’s all-yapping, all-sleuthing pooch but (in the film’s final twist of irony apparently meant to give Thana a tinge of humanity) ultimately can’t. I have to admit that this entire blog entry (written in conjunction with the Ferrara blogpile) probably wouldn’t have ever been written if my friend Steve hadn’t royally fucked up last week while in New York. While strolling in Central Park and talking to his father on his cell, Steve claims he spotted Abel Ferrara walking his poodle. (!) If he hadn’t been a dipshit and asked his father to hold while he preserved the moment on his borrowed digital camera, I would’ve just posted that delicious image here and called it art. Instead, I have to just take a guess and approximate the now-becalmed, domestic Abel taking his dog out for a little promenade.

What’s in the purse? Don’t ask.

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There is no doubt in my mind as to what the best show that has ever been or ever will be on television, and that show is Bob Ross’s tour de force, one man variety revue The Joy of Painting, named as such, I surmise, because Bob realized just how strongly he resembled the grizzly dude in the charcoal drawings of the original 1972 printing of The Joy of Sex. Only Bob didn’t subtitle his show A Gourmet Guide to Phthalo Blue.

I used to tear pavement in a mad rush to get home from school on Mondays so that I could be settled in front of the TV with enough time for my heart rate to go down. (I can’t remember the exact timetables anymore, but let’s just say that the final bell would ring at 1:50 in the afternoon and Joy would come on at 2:00.) I intended to let Bob’s vocal cords gently lash the tension out of my-neck-my-back muscles for the full duration of the show. Which isn’t to say that the effect wasn’t the same even if I’d missed the first few minutes. It’s only to say that, well, The Joy of Sex doesn’t just start its preface shouting “orgasm, orgasm!” The art of demonstrating painting is a delicate, scientifically proven, publicly funded formula, and you can’t just rush such things. It takes twenty-three minutes, no less.

Which is probably why the show wasn’t subtitled A Gourmet Guide to Art, either. See, the legion of art snobs who had nothing but sneering contempt for Bob’s four seasons approach to painting missed the point entirely, and rushed to defend a medium that wasn’t even the craft in question. Bob Ross, a man who painted on canvas with (my God!) two-inch wall-painting brushes, was not an art superstar, he was a television superstar. His contribution to pop culture wasn’t the cumulative collection of canvases he left behind (though I could be wrong and maybe some curator with a slumming sense of humor once assembled a Bob Ross exhibit) but his rapport with his audience, using a direct medium to directly address receptive dilettante pupils and blissed out zoners alike. He chose the path Fred Rogers and Julia Child travelled before him but stripped away the extemporaneousness of actually being expected to apply the content of his show in any way further than carrying his benign, good-vibing positivity torch. Rogers was always showing you how you can show everyone in your neighborhood how much of a pussy you are, and Julia Child’s foggy mooing was diluted by the fact that she seemed to really expect you to, y’know, actually cook later that evening.

The first of three or four verbal cues that Bob would use to wrap up each show (like a masseuse or hypnotist gradually bringing you back to consciousness on a graduated incline) was “hope this gives you some ideas for things you can try out at home… I’m sure you can come up with much better ideas, this is just to start your imagination… I’d love to see what you come up with, so, if you have time, drop me a line… send me some pictures of what you come up with.” I can recall him actually flashing up viewer submissions two, maybe three times en toto, so I don’t think I’m off base in suggesting that most Bob Ross fans understood, as I do, that his legacy is more mysterious than DIY gurudom. He was a quiet renegade in a medium that now frequently cashes in on viewers living their vicarious dreams in contests like American Idol, a show which skates a thin, votefortheworst mentality in which the contestants must be impressive, but not so impressive that those text messaging at home can’t secretly fantasize themselves, under the right circumstances, holding their own against the competition. Bob Ross is the patron saint of acknowledging the line between appreciating an art form (i.e. a remarkably detailed, well defined TV persona) and actually being able to accomplish artistry. For every tired sneer of “those who can’t actually create, criticize,” there for the grace of us all goes the enduring cult of Bob Ross, a man who couldn’t even criticize a happy little fly for landing in his shit.

I don’t know why I didn’t record more episodes while I still could. I guess I figured that, since my PBS affiliate was continuing to run old episodes even after his death, it would be on the air forever, like old episodes of Sesame Street featuring Teeny Little Super Guy and the pinball playground-funk hit “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12.” Well nowadays Elmo pops and locks with Cirque de Soleil and Bob Ross reruns haven’t graced Minneapolis’s Channel 2 in years. All I’m left with is a few valence chunks of episodes that appear on VHS tapes labeled “can be taped over” between episodes of The X-Files, which my sister dutifully recorded every episode of before later buying every DVD box. Just about the longest segment I could even locate to post here appears on the last few minutes of a taped USA broadcast of The Shining. You don’t get to see the finished product (though, if memory serves, all he did was paint banks of snow along the horizon line so that the reflected trees looked like a pond), but you do get a solid eleven minutes of Bob Ross’s humble mumble.

Allow me to draw attention to just a couple one-liners; Bob Ross’s pith houses ancient wisdom.

“… when you’re at home and you have time, and don’t have a mean old director to come out and yell at you…”

Bob wasn’t just the beacon of sen-joo-al (as Clown Ministry Guy puts it, “a great word that often gets misused because it means ‘of the senses’”) complacency. There is a darksided element, an open-secret gravity to The Joy of Painting that surfaces every time Bob zealously “beats the devil out” of his two-inch brushes, and even informs the show’s set design — the complete black hole yin to Bess Motta’s gleaming-white wang. (I was hardly surprised when, within days of posting this video on YouTube, I got a request from someone who wanted me to hook them up with the original tape I got the clip from for a project he was working on related to Bob’s “middle-age crisis.”) I think I became fully aware of the fact that Bob understands the price of his ethos in my junior year of college. I was enrolled in a poetry writing class and my professor was a wiry-haired, tense powder keg of passive-agressive confusion like I’ve never seen. The tug-of-war between his outrageous power trips and his need to play “the sensitive new male” had left him jittery and neurotic. By that, I mean he’d stop in the middle of a sentence if you so much as whispered something to the kid sitting next to you. By that, I mean he’d sometimes stop three, four times before he’d finish a sentence. That’s how tightly his neck was twisted. On the second day of class, the first day having been completely devoted to poring over the reams of classroom rules and demonstrating “this isn’t coffee klatch, I mean business,” he wheeled in a television set wrapped in cellophane and pushed “play” on the VCR, upon which point the sound of Bob Ross’s voice hummed out from behind the cellophane like a mellow kazoo. I can’t remember now, but I think his point was that visuals are important, but a poet’s voice can paint without them…? What I learned at that moment, though, was that my teacher’s psychoanalyst had very likely prescribed, in lieu of fluffly little pills, a steady regiment of Bob Ross screenings for my psycho teacher’s nerves. And, because even that was evidently not working, I realized that there must be some secret hostility lurking behind each of Bob’s digressive swipes at his shadowy “mean old” director. In a general sense, the director’s function as a nemesis for Bob coincides with his crusade against negative energy. And sometimes, you’ve just got to let the mean old director call his petty, quibbling, hostile shots.

“It’s easy to put paint on the canvas, it’s a son of a gun to take it off.”

So true. You can’t undo what’s been done. Well, actually you can, it just involves a liberal douse of paint thinner. But still, a lesson for us all. And did you ever hear Julia Child addressing the fact that you can’t uncollapse a souffle?

But I’m sure you at home can find much better examples of Bob Ross’s philosophy in each reference to “happy little trees” and “three hairs and some air.” If you do, drop me a line. Send me some pictures. Til then, happy painting and God bless my friend.

Clowns | No Comments »

Awhile ago, I told someone that I practically never remember my dreams within even an hour of having them. I guess that was a lie. Last night I dreamed that I was in the John Carpenter remake of The Thing somehow, and that it was a fairly short dream, mostly Wilford Brimley. I think it went a little something like this.

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Tonight the Oscars will award Robert Altman’s career with an Honorary Oscar. While it’s nice to see him join the company of other extremely deserving recent winners like Michelangelo Antonioni, Chuck Jones and Blake Edwards, the honor can’t help but carry with it a whiff of irony. Each win (and there will undoubtedly be at least three) for the most irritating, shrill knock-off of the Altman template, Paul Haggis’s Crash, will put a lot of sting into the fact that Altman hasn’t yet won a “real” Oscar, and neither of his nominations for Best Picture (Nashville and Gosford Park) have even been anywhere near as close to winning the trophy as Haggis’s million-slur baby.

I’ve written about Altman a few times at Slant, and I am loathe to say that I didn’t get the chance to actually re-watch any of his films in the last few weeks in preparation for his honor. I was considering writing a little bit about one of my most cherished cinephile memories of the last few years: the handful of then-unavailable-on-home-video films at an extensive Altman retrospective at Minneapolis’s Oak Street Cinema, which included one or two I wrote about on earlier incarnations of my movie journals, and additionally my first viewings of The Long Goodbye, Brewster McCloud and 3 Women. But, as you can clearly see on that link (at least until this Thursday), irony strikes once again as the struggling Oak Street has apparently been reduced to booking whatever second-run mainstream movies they can snare from whichever distributors to whom they aren’t currently in major debt. This weekend they’ve booked… Crash.

I’m sure you understand my predicament, approaching an Altman blogpile with the resignation of “too little, too late.” Still, as I scanned through DVDs looking for an appropriate screencap or two, I was reminded of just how often, among many other recurring actors, Shelley Duvall appears in Altman’s ’70s films. And how odd it is that she never again appeared in an Altman film following Popeye. Rumor has it that Altman reacted to Duvall’s stint getting systematically dismantled by Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining by grunting, I suppose with resignation, “she’s a different actress.” But, for a period, she seemed like Altman’s secret favorite. She first appeared in 1970’s Brewster McCloud (which I don’t have handy to screencap), rescued from behind a cosmetics’ counter in a Houston mall by Altman, and then again as one of Julie Christie’s prize honeys in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).

But it wasn’t until ’74’s Thieves Like Us (which still sits unwatched on my DVD shelf) that the extent of Altman’s respect for her bizarre photogeniety really picked up traction. She’s coquettish.

She’s earthy and weatherbeaten. (And, as I’d forgotten, a dead ringer for Nashville’s Ronee Blakely. Why did he never cast them as sisters?)

She’s sexy in a rough-hewn, Bertolucci way.

She’s implosive and tense.

And, ultimately, she’s devastating.

When it came to Nashville (1975), I didn’t know what to think of it when I first saw it. For starters, the pan and scan VHS did Altman’s panoramic mélange no favors, and I couldn’t particularly see why it was that some people (specifically Shelley Duvall, who was about the only actor I was strongly familiar with at that early point) seemed so marginalized and peripheral. The more times I saw it, eventually leading up to my first viewing in its correct aspect ratio on DVD (a viewing that launched the film up to the number one spot on my list of all-time favorite films back when I’d still rank such things), the more I understood exactly how Altman was using L.A. Joan: the talentless, scenester flip-side of Barbara Harris’s sun-fried runaway-cum-secret superstar Albuquerque.

Also, I was probably put off by the fact that, back in those pre-teen years, I struggled with hair that wanted to do what L.A. Joan needed a wig to accomplish.

If there was any lingering doubt that Altman had a very special place in his fickle heart for Duvall, the proof was in Buffalo Bill and the Indians‘ pudding. Sure, it was an even smaller role than she had in Nashville, but the role was as the First Lady!

She introduces a piece of music that would bring Buffalo Bill’s bourgeoisie and Sitting Bull’s rebel together. It’s because she introduces it that we understand its importance.

Duvall’s greatest role and maybe even her greatest performance (I hesitate because I have to grudgingly admit that Kubrick’s domestic abuse really did bring something special out of Duvall) came in 1977’s 3 Women, a movie I already wrote about at length at Slant, though I have to caution that it’s not at all one of my most insightful reviews. Disappointing, actually, but maybe there’s something to Matthew Wilder’s theory that some films are too close to be able to criticize lucidly. He writes: “I am tempted to say that this degree of love for the film should disqualify me from evaluating its merits objectively; for me, it’s not so much a movie as it is a living thing.” Anyway, Duvall’s performance as Millie in the first hour-plus-change walks an incredibly difficult line, having to convey a sense of social isolation…

… that she won’t even let herself be fully cognizant of, lest her pretense towards cosmopolitanism crash down around her along with any shred of self-esteem she can still retain. But she also has to offer something attractive to Sissy Spacek’s Pinky.

It’s Altman’s creepiest film, and Duvall’s way with firearms…

… is only matched by the startling fury she unleashes upon Pinky when she feels her psychological-classist status being usurped by the upstart.

But her anger is understandable, as it’s the first indication that she’s really truly aware of her own tragic social reality. I’m sure we’ve all had a Millie in our lives. I remember this one girl in high school. She wasn’t anywhere near as pretty (even in Duvall’s goofy, macademia nut-head way), but her saving grace was that she was too dense to realize that not all the attention she received from other classmates was inherently positive feedback. She processed sarcasm and direct insults as the sort of teasing that meant you were popular. She was also a little bit sexually regressed. One time she brought a pan of homemade brownies to our church youth breakfast club (every Friday morning at Denny’s, where I’d try yet again to order a strawberry-banana medley only to have the waitress come back and tell me they were out of bananas) and only offered them to the girls at our table. Not that I’d have eaten them, but still… Like, “what are you, eight years old?”

For 3 Women, Duvall won the Best Actress award at Cannes, and later won the same citation from the L.A. Film Critics’ Association. I can only hope she wore her L.A. Joan wig to accept the award.

Olive Oyl.

I don’t know what would’ve led to Altman expressing any concern over Duvall’s difference as an actress, unless he was really so territorial about his Houston catch that he thought any outside influence would end up “tainting” her “essence.” But even if that were the case, there’s no accounting for why he would ever be displeased with Duvall’s Oyl, easily one of the most perfect matches of actor with character in all cinematic history. For starters, Popeye represented the first (and still only) example of Duvall attempting to act with her body. Some of her awkward choreographed moments actually come off stunningly balletic.

In fact, the about face between Shelley Duvall in the ’70s (which also includes her underrated, underseen performance in Joan Micklin Silver’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair) and Shelley Duvall in Popeye/The Shining is as amplified as the gulf between Faye Dunaway before Network (The Thomas Crown Affair) and Faye Dunaway after (Mommie Dearest).

Also, she looks good in red.

As an addendum, and to bring the spotlight back to Altman again, there’s been a little bit of conversation at various Oscar-centric forums over what song the orchestra should play to bring Altman out on stage for his (hopefully cantankerous as hell) acceptance speech. Obviously “I’m Easy” would be an… um, easy choice, as it represents the only Oscar yet won by an Altman film. Others presume “Suicide is Painless” would probably be unavoidable, as it’s the closest to a standard he’s connected with. (Even if it’s ubiquity comes from the television show.) I wouldn’t mind hearing one of Annie Ross’s tunes from Short Cuts (or even her daughter’s cello practicing the “Berceuse” from Stravinsky’s Firebird). For a man of Altman’s stature, they really ought to give him something grand like the trumpet processional from A Wedding.

But I think I’d like it best of Shelley Duvall’s Paul Thomas Anderson-revived “He Needs Me” emanated from the Kodak orchestra pit. That or Robin Williams’ still-neglected companion piece from Harry Nilsson, the incredibly sweet Swee’Pea’s Lullabye. I think even someone as crusty as Robert Altman might feel a tear come to his eye at the sound of either song.

Inside the Actor's Steez | 1 Comment »

Needs no introduction. If she does, or if you have no love for her concept of “performance” (that is to say: no concept at all), then go tell it on the mountain over those “tense” “implosive” “performances” in this year’s Oscar line-up and go bore someone else extolling the virtues of your dream cast, invariably a collection of indie hell penis-owners with such incredible range that they manage to look ridiculous in both David Mamet ACTioneer knockoffs and P.T. Anderson equal-opportunity date knockoffs. (This year’s Truman Capote loses on all counts.)

Edith Massey has neither range nor much virtue, and she looks more ridiculous than almost anyone ever captured on film. But that’s the point. She was never destined for Oscars, not even during an era in which Cassavetes performers received nominations and, in the case of Ben Gazzara, mounted (unsuccessful but still very serious) campaigns on behalf of even more absurdly non-Tradition of Quality candidates like Holly Goodlawn in Trash. (Do you think people like Susan Tyrell, Barbara Harris and Sylvia Miles would even get a second look from the Academy nowadays?) But her presence in John Waters’ films has a sheer veracity that can’t be quantified. I admire Waters for his tenacity, submitting Edie to more retakes than Kubrick put Shelly Duvall through on the set of The Shining just so that she would get through a take without… um, I guess breaking character.

Bakers’ dozen greatest moments:

13. (from Desperate Living) — “I hope you didn’t leave no pecker tracks on my gown… There is a noticeable odor zone somewhere on your body.”
12. (from Desperate Living) — “You filthy muffdivers will pay for this.”

J. Hoberman, in Midnight Movies, is hardly off the mark when he reasons that Edie, while memorable as always, is all wrong for the role of Mortville’s despotic Queen Carlotta, a role even Mink Stole probably would’ve been better suited for (despite her perfectly serviceable turn as the crusty, fallen rich bitch Peggy). Her incessant, impatient refrain to her personal couch valets “come awn, come awn” and her raucous evil cackle work from a phonetic angle, and her corpulence as she rolls atop her bed eating marshmallows, pizza and cheetoes looks the part. But never for a second do you see Edie, even coming into a spectacular financial windfall, daring to call anyone trash. She only has love for humanity. However, I don’t think she’d ever be above a creative slur, given the opportunity. Muffdiver stands in for many.

11. (from Polyester) — “How awe cur-ront!… God… damn these designers.”

I couldn’t quite lop off Divine’s hungover belch from the beginning of this clip, but I’m not sure I’d want to even if I could. Polyester might be Divine’s Sirk-Wyman vehicle, but that doesn’t mean Divine exactly tones it down here. To open with his malt-liquor gas allows the essential Divinian blowsiness give way to Edie’s pliant geniality. Edie’s function in early John Waters isn’t unlike Ricki Lake’s later on. The shock value in most John Waters movies is frequently sort of quaint, and the saccharine undertone to both Edie and Ricki’s performances brings that aspect out, but their obliviousness works both ways. Edie’s nouveau riche debutante Cuddles (referred to by Divine’s mother as “retarded,” a label as yet unused for Edie in Waters films) is Divine’s savior in crisis, but her single-minded pursuit of confirming her new class status takes precedence always. Her obliviousness hysterically transfers to the dressing room, where she tries to squeeze into a sheer size 8 spaghetti-strap gown. It’s like trying to put the electric toothbrush back into the toothpaste tube.

10. (from Love Letter to Edie) — “I worked all morning on this goddamned porch so that you could go out with a bunch of Prince Charmings.”

You can see and hear that Edie’s spent most of her life in first gear with the snow chains attached, being jerked down the expressway by a souped-up tow truck. But you don’t ever see that actually happening during a Waters’ film. It’s the prelude, sure, but whatever indignities Edie reenacts for Waters’ films are recontextualized as an adult playground-cum-improvisational exercise. In Waters’ films, she’s escaping. In this so-called “love letter,” she gets to tell her (apparently) real tale as a fairy tale. I guess if your disappointments and shortcomings have been catalogued in a director’s filmography as a parade of humorous grotesqueries, it’s only natural that your actual life experience would come off more believable in chiffon and a tiara.

09. “Punk act” (taken from interview with John Waters)
09. “Punks, Get Off the Grass” (early ’80s recording)

We’ll call this a tie. Maybe the most subversive thing she did was to attempt a career as a punk rocker, completely indifferent to the notion that punk vocalists typically exhude more flagrant emotive exhibitionism than your average American Idol contestant. Did she have facist regimes to topple? Nope, she just had the old Female Trouble outfit handy, stuck a plastic spider on her cheek and recorded a song that sounds like your parents attempting a pickup garage band, trying to throw together a song in time for the July 4th sociable. Or that 8 Mile episode of The Simpsons. Only Edie is actually amusing. Unlike that episode of The Simpsons. Which was maybe the worst thing that ever appeared on television.

08. (from Polyester) — “Happiness is a picnic in the woods… Oh, Francine I’ve got ants in my pants!”
07. (from Pink Flamingos) — “Augh! A turd, oh a turd!”

Now this is range. Normally, when you watch an Edith Massey performance, you sort of feel like heaving a sigh of relief that she remembers the names of the characters and doesn’t, for instance, exclaim “Oh Divine/Glen, I’ve got ants in my pants!” But the amplification of the varied moods within these paired lines of dialogue demonstrate a surprising versatility. Happiness is Edie delivering the line “Look, Tab for our diets!” and not for a second registering it as a cheap reference to Polyester’s casting coup Tab Hunter. Happiness is Edie thinking Divine would be overjoyed that she brought plastic cups to go along with the liter of Tab. Happiness is the tenor of that first “Augh!” from the Pink Flamingos outburst (about the only line I could even find from the film that didn’t involve those blasted eggs), which sounds sort of like if you were to feed Claudia Furschtien’s gremlin-esque Yorkshire Terrier Sophie into a meat grinder.

06. (from Female Trouble) — “Remember my offer, it still stands. If you get tired of being a hairy krishner, you come live with me and be a lesbian.”

Of all the lines of dialogue collected here, this one probably owes the most to John Waters’ screenwriting gifts. Aunt Ida’s intense psychological campaign to turn her own son into a homosexual (because “the life of the heterosexual is a sick and boring life”) pays off when she makes an appeal to Divine’s newly airport-rightous daughter Taffy. Of course, half the punchline is Edie’s inability to enunciate “Hare Krishna,” adding to an already delicious punchline. If Taffy had been a Mormon, would she have called her a muffdiver?

05. (from Polyester) — “Ello-hay? Old-hay on-yay.”

A polyglot! Will the wonders of Edie never cease?

04. (from Desperate Living) — “Don’t bother with the head, the V of my crotch is what needs the attention!”
03. (from Polyester) — “She’s straight from the gutter, a fille de joie.”

Again, range. Versatility. A rubber template just waiting for Waters’ hours of direction and retakes. In the first clip, she’s got an astonishing come-hither (come-further?) pillow patter. In the latter, her delicate sensibilities have to span languages to convey her shock. A third language added to her repertoire. Fourth if you count the language of love.

02. (from John Waters’ commentary for Polyester) — “Edie would get airsick.”

I’m probably breeching etiquette in choosing (and so highly on the list) a quote from John Waters here, but I can’t think of a more ridiculously amusing commentary track tidbit than this one. Edie was more than a Waters starlet. She was also a primary muse.

01. (from Female Trouble)

Because words fail when it comes to Edie.

As an aside, I took a few other clips from the audio interviews off of The John Waters Scrapbook DVD for your amusment.

• Edie on her teeth. (Getting old and ugly?)
• Edie on her widespread appeal.
• Edie on her celebrity dream date.

Bob Barker? Couldn’t you just see her all giddy on The Price is Right?

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