Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, from 1992, considers a world in which The Third Reich won the Second World War. There are a number of books that take on the same subject, not least of all, The Man in the High Castle. In Phil Dick’s book the United States is split down the middle. The West is under Japanese rule, and the East is Nazi territory. The main character comes to realize that these divisions are a false consciousness. We are all living a surreal existence, blindly accepting of symbolic authoritarian suggestions, but in reality we have not lost the war. We take on face value that the rules by which we are governed are ascribed to the hateful ideologies of our enemies, when they are only a convenient smoke screen our own government has contrived to secretly carry out its repressive policies. Fatherland is far less cerebral. The Nazi victors guard a terrible secret. In the years that followed German victory the brutal reality of the Holocaust has been totally repressed by the Nazi Government. The world has no idea about the atrocities Germany committed during the war. It is guarded as a State Secret. Most of the documents have been carefully destroyed. Only a hand full of Hitler’s innermost circle knows the truth, and they are starting to die off under suspicious circumstances. The story begins innocently enough: a drowning is caught by a dogged SS officer who begins to have serious doubts about the official explanation of suicide. All it takes is some little thing like that, some unexpected event that comes out of nowhere, to fell the empire. The cover-ups come one after another, cover-ups to cover-up the cover-ups in quickening succession, and before you know it the conspirators come unglued, indisputable facts emerge, and the game is up. Even under the best conditions there’s no way to stop it, but with this COCKSUCKING Administration all you had were a bunch of mindless zombies. The top political advisor groped around his office in a daze of anger and confusion, and usually ended up cowering in a corner, shades drawn, wearing sunglasses in the dark. If you walked in on him unannounced he would cover his face with one arm, and should the unwelcome interloper turn on the light in the room by mistake, the CRYPTO-FASCIST-CORPSFUCKER-ZOMBIE swiped at the air and hissed loudly. The top Right-Wing strategist was incapable of any expression other than the most cynical parody of human behavior, and even with the best of circumstances, that usually amounted to no more than a blank, hungry, bloodthirsty stare as he clawed and scraped along the wall of his office to turn the light back off before anyone could see the nasty pile of gore heaped on his desk. There was no way he could conceal his political intentions. It wasn’t so much that he had what Mark Shields famously called a single-minded “pathological hatred” of “democratic government.” Like any other undead corpse, it was more like the ROTTEN STINKIN’ BASTARD was totally unconscious that there existed any such thing as human feeling, or law, or anything like that. It was the zombie version of the Wild West. The undead men in the Administration all walked around with shit stained pants and the women were all whores! As Executive Producer and Creator of the revisionist Western Deadwood, David Milch pointed out that “reason” was in the neighborhood of 17th on his list of motivating psychological factors, and if it were up to him it would have been even lower on the list. But you can’t get lower than a bunch of zombies who’ve all shit themselves and are running the United States of America. Milch defends the use of gutter language in Deadwood in symbiotic accord with fancy talk as the importance of maintaining civilized speech in the absence of law in the territories, coupled with the crudeness that was the undeniable reality of the situation, but there’s no excuse for the CRYPTO-FASCISTS. The difference is that the Bushevic SHITPANTS bullied and swore for absolutely no discernable reason. The Chief Strategist simply couldn’t help himself, the zombie growled and moaned “fuck” this, and yelled “shit” that, and every sentence was filled with words like “cunt,” and riddled with “piss” and “cock” till it was impossible to figure out what the hell anybody in the Administration was talking about except as a general rule the hatred of every living thing on the face of the entire planet. How do you suppose this slimy UNDEAD CREEP could hide any kind of secret at all? There’s no F-ing way a mindless animal like the Chief Strategist could keep anything the scope of a conspiracy the size of this one Hush-Hush. In Fatherland all it took was one moral citizen to bring down the Third Reich. How on Earth can the current CHRIPTO-FASCIST Administration suppress the truth about their real intentions when they’re too dead to the world to understand how illegal their administration is? How long can the Radical-Right-Wing operate freely without any real-world repercussions? Milch points out how monkeys beat their chest so they don't have to fight all the time. The Bushevik Administration obviously worked under the same premise. But the quesion remained: At what point did the zombies at the top of the FLESHEATER Administration food chain have to finally fess up? That was the major question faced by the beleaguered Senators on The Hill: What, if any, were the legal repercussions of ZOMBIE CHEST BEATING?
John Polidori’s villainous vampire, Lord Ruthven, was the basic archetype for the BLOODSUCKER administration as a whole, the lousy COCKSUCKERS! But Darth Cheney in particular took the cake. He was furnished with every one of the SCUMBAG’s most outlandish evil attributes. Totally distracted, he didn’t speak to you as much as he made statements, and if you were stupid enough to answer, you invariably ended up talking to the back of his head. The Democrats were hushed when he entered the room, like some forgotten tropical parasite wrapped around their spines after an eternity of dormant sleep had just awakened and constricted with fear. “Those who felt this sensation of awe,” Polidori wrote of Ruthven, “Could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead gray eyes, which, fixing upon the object’s face did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inner workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass.” Ruthven was: “A man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other examples of his observation of other objects, than a tacit acceptance of their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact.” And exactly the same could be said for Darth Cheney. They even shared the same caprice of cruelty. Polidori’s vampire is a man of misbegotten means who the needy constantly beg for alms, but he goes out of his way to scorn and embarrass those with the best intentions, or the most earnest need for the money, while he lavishes his gold coins on the most odious unrepentant common criminals. No subtlety of interiority got in the way of nastiness. Like Ruthven, the Vice President was dead to affection, and, to borrow a couple more phrases from Polidori, as “unconscious to pain,” as he was to “objects around him,” and nothing but gore and murder raged in his SICK COCKSUCKER brain when he entered the House Speaker’s chamber like some rabid automaton. For a moment they just looked at each other, then Nancy Pelosi’s white hand was finally mechanically extended to him. You could see the SCUMBAG shake with wild maniac frenzy as he reached his arms out and grabbed the Congresswoman by the throat! But that wasn’t nearly the worst part. No, the worst part was the mocking shriek let out by the House Speaker. “He grabbed me, he grabbed at me, and tore at me, he tore at my clothes!” she sarcastically screamed, just like the shocked and hysterical Barbara who has just seen her brother eaten alive by zombies in George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead (1968). Then she went as still as the Vice President, like someone had mistakenly pulled the plug on both of them. That’s when the Senate Majority Leader came into the picture, like some kind’a PINKO-COMMIE-FAIRY, dressed in little girl drag, the FREAK hummed some Tubeway Army song under his breath. Darth Cheney lunged for Pelosi again, his hands clutching her thin neck in a looped deadly embrace that always ended with her crying, “He grabbed me, he grabbed at me, and tore at me, he tore at my clothes,” and, after a short pause, start right up again from the beginning, like the busted electronic mind behind the whole GOD DAMN thing got hopelessly stuck and could only repeat the same IDEOTIC fragmented sequence over and over again. “Can you see her little eyes?” the Majority Leader sang more loudly then and fixed his wig. “Can you see her little hands? Don’t you think she looks just like me? Can you hear her little scream? Can you hear her little cry? Don’t you think she sounds just like me?”
Remember little Anthony from the 1961 Twilight Zone, “It’s A Good Life”? The original episode has a small town in a mid-Western fly-by state tormented by the whims of a six-year-old kid. The child is as cute and all-American as they come, and even though he was born with incredible superpowers, he still acts like any other boy his age. When we see him for the first time he is sitting in a puddle of mud in his overalls, proudly showing off his latest invention — a three-headed gofer. He can rearrange other living beings and people into horrifying never-before-witnessed deformities and mutations just by willing it to happen. He can mix and match human and animal limbs and appendages to create any atrocity he wishes, but the kid is emotionally unstable. He is not always in such a happy-go-lucky creative mood. Anthony has an even darker side. The next thing he likes best is to make those things he likes worst disappear forever, and kids at that age can come up with some pretty bizarre idiosyncratic criteria for lashing out. Even more than those folks who annoy him, which is just about everyone, for some reason Anthony particularly dislikes electricity, automobiles, barking dogs, and singing songs. Needless to say, he has already wished almost all those things that have anything resembling those characteristics well out of existence. Everyone is death scared of him. As far as they know, he has already banished the rest of the world into oblivion. The town, itself, is a toothy relic, just about entirely decimated. The wind whistles through the chalk-dry ribs of ruined barns, and the dusty landscape is littered with the bone-like hulks of broken down industrial farm equipment. Those who have not been mutilated or have not already magically vanished into the ether, the lucky ones that live among the skulls and tumbleweed of their former existance, silently hope that it is somehow possible for the monster to realize the error of his ways before it’s too late. They are hardworking people who maintain their convictions no matter what. Faith is all they have. It is the only thing that has got them through hard times before. If the boy stays happy, they inwardly pray, the same act of divine power that spawned the monster might intervene on their behalf, and maybe all the terrible things that plague them will finally stop happening. It’s a foolish prayer, but their friends and their land are all destroyed. They hope it is only a stage in the boy’s development, and desperately hold onto the idea that it is still possible to turn him into a good son. So what do they do? They fawn and scrape around him, complement him no matter how heinous the crime against nature, or humanity, mostly because they are mortified by what the insane maniac might do next. But what if no one ever stopped little Anthony? What if he grew up? I wish it was an idle question, but it’s not. Our culture produces many such monsters. Not that the Decider is a product of the heartland. He is just another semi-retarded super rich kid out-of-control. They don’t have super-human powers. They can’t will physical deformities onto their enemies or mix and match them in new and never before seen humanoid grotesques, nor can they wish those they don’t like away, along with everything else they don’t like, into the “cornfield” — although they are born into positions of power and they can and do have their enemies ruined and murdered. On “It’s a Good Life” everyone had to always tell Anthony, “That’s a real good thing you done, a real good thing you done.” And that is exactly how the cabinet had to answer the President. No matter what The Decider did his senior advisors had to say, “That’s a real good thing you done, Dubya, a real good thing.” However preposterous the Decider’s mandate, they said it for fear of severe retribution. But this time when the chorus of cabinet members chimed, “It’s a real good thing you done,” although it came out right on queue as always, The Decider couldn’t help but notice there wasn’t any sympathy and remorse mixed up with the fear and paranoia in their voices. Anthony’s parents, who were just as petrified of the little horror as everyone else, still managed to address their child with real feeling no matter how grave the circumstances. Dubya couldn’t help think it was the least the cabinet could do, so he pounded his fist on the desk, to get their attention. He wanted them to say it again. “Only this time,” The Decider demanded, “Say it with some REAL heart!”
June 01, 2008 06:53 PM
Night after night these exotic beauties would come to War Secretary Robert Gates. They’d both go at it in some public place. Last time it was in a shallow shopping-mall fountain pool. There was never any full-blown penetration. He pulled her pants off her skinny suntan ass, licked her tiny tits, and fingered her bald pussy. Sometimes the hook-ups were with total strangers. Sometimes he recognized them. There was an ex-girlfriend who really knew how to get it off. They’d go at it hot-and-heavy the way they used to, but at the last minute his unit would malfunction. Everything else about him was pretty normal. Gates was neither too dumb nor too smart, neither an athletic cripple nor an outstanding physical achiever, neither burdened by an over-active interiority nor without psychology altogether; the perfect mouthpiece for the most fascist government in the history of the United States of America; master of everything but his own dreams, Gates started losing sleep. What bothered him most was that these women who were having intercourse with him in his dreams were somehow telepathically projecting their desires onto him. Every time he encountered one of them he recognized outside of his dream-state he felt at a distinct disadvantage. “Did she know what they had done together the night before,” he wondered. “Did she know he was impotent? Did all of them know about his male sexual dysfunction? Is that why they came to him at night? Was it a conspiracy to torment him in his own sleep?” Other things started to go wrong — little things, nothing to worry about at first. His legs would lock up mid-step, his fingers would cramp like some stricken bug, he would lose power in his limbs at exactly the moment he needed them most, they would start twitching at the most inopportune moment, and, in the midst of his romantic seduction, his DAMNED crotch began to emit a strange embarrassing whirring noise like gears grinding to a halt. The Cold-War Right Wing paranoid nightmare was that everyone EXCEPT the protagonist was turning into some kind of alien inhuman monster — everyone BUT the protagonist. Conservative war hawks weren’t supposed to grow an eleventh hour conscience, they weren’t supposed to start worrying the monster was actually already inside them, but that was exactly the fear that came over Gates at the moment of penetration. He started to worry if the torment these sexually liberated women visited upon him wasn’t his own mind playing tricks on him, inventing these frustrated erotic interludes in order to reveal something, something buried in his memory, something about himself he had long ago repressed. Over the next few nights the encounters started heating up. Even though he couldn’t satisfy even one of these ladies, the beauties came to him now two-three-four at a time. Gates grew desperate with his own inadequacy and decided to lay a trap for them. If he could only expose them, maybe he could somehow save his own fragile male ego. The War Secretary carefully laid the bait where he knew they would find it, and heeding the advice of his boss Darth Cheney, furtively hid himself, in anticipation of their nightly arrival, in the dark “shadows”. It took a while for the first one to spot it. Gates sat perfectly still and said: “Go on now, tell your FUCKING friends.” He said it quietly, under his breath, he didn’t want to waste the trap on just one of them. At first he only saw her hourglass silhouette as she came in from the light. Gates couldn’t believe how fantastic she looked. “Man,” he sucked his breath in, “How FREEKIN’ gorgeous is that!” He couldn’t get over her silky hair, big round eyes, small mouth, and little perfect teeth. The blinding white light behind her made her pert round breasts, smoothly rounded pelvis, and rounded mound of pleasure amply visible through the translucent pattern of her flower dress. As he tightened his grip on his foam gun, Gates almost lost his nerve. He wanted to yell out: “Put down the shiny bauble!” It was like an obsession with them, it was like they couldn’t think straight when they were around the glittering crystal. “Put down the shiny bauble,” he wanted to say, “And step aside,” but it was useless. The beautiful creatures with their peacock feathers and golden painted sexual organs were now stepping out of the light in numbers he could not have possibly imagined. They passed the jewel around modeling it on their necks, breasts, fingers and ears for each other, oblivious to the grinding gyroscope noises Gates’s seized foam pump was making. He tried to muffle the sound, desperately hoping the beautiful women wouldn’t notice there was something seriously wrong with his pump, like maybe his little spray gun was jammed. Man, how he wished the dream would end right then and there before all these fantastic exotic women realized he was some kind of Right Wing android-replicant-robot-FREAK. Synthetic sweat poured from his brow as his limbs began to spaz out, knocked things over, and in general caused a major commotion. Gates was understandably mortified by his lack of self-control. After an excruciatingly long time flailing about behind a curtain, one of the beautiful creatures put down the sparkling gem, came over, gave his pathetic ass a once over and, quoting a Bank of America advertisement, said: “Do we let the sun shine wherever it wants; do we let the wind blow in any direction it pleases; do we let rivers flow freely? No! This is America. We put them to work!” Another one came over to him and said: "Scientists have invented a flavor that makes room temperature soda taste like it's freezing cold!" Together they both said: "We are fembots!" So there you have it. It wasn't just him. The beautiful women were robots, too. Everyone in his dream was a GODDAM robot! And they all lived happily ever after in a New World Order where perpetual wars are waged to ensure that petroleum-based replacement parts, like foam pumps and plastic tits, remaine always and forever plentiful.
“What happened?” Dubya wanted to know.
“What happened?” Darth Cheney asked.
“Well, LIFE happened!” I told them. But, maybe what I really meant was that part of life no party likes better than the Christo-fascists — death. Maybe what I should have said was: “DEATH happened.”
Some more good press! One of my favorite people and artists in the whole entire world gave me a mention in Artforum’s Best of 2007 (if you don’t already have one you might need to get a user name and password to sign on to the website—it’s free and easy). There’s also a little plug in the LA Weekly to promote their Weekly Annual Biennial exhibition, titled “Some Paintings”, curated by Doug Harvey. And I even got a little mention in Holly Myers' feature in the LA Weekly on Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber, "Art Utopia".
Radio call-in psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger told every young sensitive woman who called into her show for advice they were dirty whores for shacking up with their boyfriends out of wedlock. She liked nothing better than shoving her puritanical new-born Christian ideals down the throat of some troubled girl. “Isn’t it obvious,” she wondered, “I’m trying to save these girls from doom. Don’t they understand that men STINK. Their clothes STINK, their breath STINKS, their hands STINK, their balls STINK, their hairy assholes STINK.” Unable to curtail her meandering line of thinking she blurted out, “Don’t you realize everything about men STINKS?” Dr. Laura didn’t know what came over her. It was right out of Valerie Solanas S.C.U.M. Manifesto, only the doctor pulled up short of actually advocating the total annihilation of the male population called for by the Society for Cutting Up Men. When asked why she shot Andy Warhol Solanas told authorities she hadn’t intended to do it originally, she set out to kill another guy, “but he wasn’t home.” Then added: “As if you need a reason to shoot a man.” Dr. Laura knew she could become a real bitch on air sometimes, especially when she got a girl on the line that had slept with a man when she didn’t want to, or hadn’t slept with a man when she did want to, but quoting passages from Solanas’ screed was excessive even for her. She just couldn’t stop herself, and without realizing it she found herself riding a regular listener from her bully pulpit: “Sex is not part of a relationship: on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time. The female can easily — far more easily than she may think — condition away her sex drive, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks out constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape. The lecherous male excites the lustful female; he has to — when the female transcends her body, rises above animalism, the male, whose ego consists of his cock, will disappear.” Dr. Laura’s producer became concerned she was flipping out right in the middle of the show and peeked into the broadcast booth to see what was going on. What he saw surprised him. It was like the radio psychologist was trying to physically stop herself from uttering the words, only she couldn’t. The words kept coming out of her mouth no matter what she did to try and stop it up. “Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction.” She really got going on this one simpering caller all the while vainly attempting to clamp her own jaw shut by pressing her hands into her cheeks as hard as she could. “The male is a biological accident: the y (male) gene is an incomplete x (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.” Dr. Laura seemed to relax a bit and toned down her rhetoric. “Not all men are bad, though” she thought out loud, “There are some good ones like…” Her secretary came in and announced, “Tom Delay.” Thinking the intern was feeding her examples, Dr. Laura said, “No. There are good men, like…” “The Decider-in-Chief,” the secretary said. “No, a good man, like, like…” “Darth Cheney,” the secretary said. “No, no, no!” the psychologist screamed. “Those are NOT good men!” Dr. Laura knew full well they were scumbags. She was screwing all three of them. The secretary realized the misunderstanding and clarified, “They are on the phone, Ms. Schlessinger.” The doctor groaned. She was sick of being passed around by the three of them like the trashy slut she knew she was. Lately it was nothing but twosomes, threesomes, and anal sex. There was hardly a moment when she didn't have one cock in her mouth and one up her ass. And she hated herself for it. The producer, who listened from the control room, braced himself. He could hear in her raised voice she was flaring up again, and got down on his knees to pray to baby Jesus, but it wasn't enough. All her life she had hated women Dr. Laura realized when it was really men who were to blame. “How many young girls had she told it was their fault?” she thought back. “Millions.” There was no time to waste. She needed to take action to turn around the mess she’d made of all those young, impressionable, feminine minds. Sure, girls need to be responsible, but not by blaming themselves for what men do. There was only one choice left. She would lead the SCUM revolution! “The sick, irrational men,” she shouted into her microphone, “Those who attempt to defend themselves against their disgustingness, when they see SCUM barreling down on them, will cling in terror to Big Mama with her Big Bouncy Boobies, but Boobies won't protect them against SCUM; Big Mama will be clinging to Big Daddy, who will be in the corner shitting in his forceful, dynamic pants. Men who are rational, however, won't kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise.” Dr. Laura knew just how to get the ball rolling. She left all three of her lovers on hold, the perverted creeps could go to hell for all she cared, grabbed her handbag, and walked out of the radio station without saying good-bye to anyone. The first order of business was buying a semi-cab. She wanted one with hot pink flames painted on the hood. It was going to be like Thelma and Louise (1991) only with a happy ending. The trick was to start small. She could see it now. Every time an emergency or law enforcement vehicle would come barreling down the street with it’s lights flashing and sirens wailing she would pull the bill of her trucker cap down low over her mirrored Ray-Bans, park her 18-wheeler monster big rig in the middle of the road and dare them to try and get around her.
Of all the myriad possible intellectual embarrassments the Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek dreamed he was thrust into an adventure on the classic hegemonic American TV show Mission Impossible (1966-1973). In all fairness the show had one of the coolest theme songs, at least as good as the musical intro to Hawaii-Five-O and Rockford Files, and given the US ADD bubble-gum culture of sublime stupidity, the missions were remarkably complicated. Žižek wore the clean-shaven silver-haired mask of Mr. Phelps over his black beard, and whenever he went out — to the corner grocer’s for beer, or the gas station for an energy drink — he was enthusiastically greeted with the applause of Cold War veterans and nerdy kids that had watched every episode so many times they knew every line by heart. One of the signatures of the show was the ever more idiosyncratic and implausible scenario that introduced us to the facts of the case. Phelps had gone up in a Ferris-Wheel gondola, had test-driven a speedboat, visited penny-arcades, gone to countless secluded spots in parks, and was a well known denizen of unpopulated tourist vistas. Later episodes started with a vignette to introduced the villain before the Impossible Mission Force’s assignment was revealed. Mr. Phelps was the IMF contact (the brain that planned the strategy and chose the secret operatives with the necessary skill-set to pull it off), but the directions he received for his next assignment pick-up were so convoluted they totally exasperated him. “Doesn’t Washington have more important things to do than come up with this stuff?” he wondered. Phelps was supposed to navigate an active set from David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), somehow manage to stay off screen during the filming of one of the more schizophrenic episodes that involved the heroine, and find the package containing the tape and photographs on the Honeymooner’s era soundstage used for the surreal scenes with the family of bunny rabbits. Lynch is great with contemporary beauty, the problem is the last few movies totally blend together. Phelps not only had to navigate Inland Empire, he somehow had to keep it separated in his memory from Mullholand Dr., and Lost Highway. He was sure he was screwed, but as it turned out, the package was set out on the couch where he didn’t have to go digging around for it in the dark. Phelps looked around the room to make sure no giant bunny rabbits were eavesdropping and started the tape player. A noticeable twitch came over his face when the familiar voice revealed the true nature of the assignment: A cabal of despotic fascists were attempting to take over the US, and it was his mission to make sure they did not succeed. Two familiar headshots looked up at him when he emptied the content of the manila folder on the coffee table: The President’s and Vice President’s. The self-destructing tape ended with the same pledge as always — to disavow any knowledge and destroy all evidence of any member of the team who was captured — but Phelps, Žižek cheerfully recalled behind his sweaty rubber mask, was like a real American cowboy and never gave up on his operatives. He returned to his stylish modern apartment to mull the problem over: how to turn the despots against each other and bring down the corrupt American administration. Phelps would need super-agents for what he had in mind. He pulled out his gold embossed leather folder and flipped through the glossies. Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard were dead. Forget them. Norman O. Brown had name dropped the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno when he quoted the line: “The wretched consciousness shrinks in the face of it’s own annihilation.” Anyone who was brave enough to make that reference was on his team, even if Brown took a dim view of "the death drive", a Freudian principal Mr. Phelps believed was crucial to the success of the mission. He struggled with which of the original cast members he should employ. Cinnamon Carter, Barney Collier, and Willy Armitage were shoe-ins. Whether he should go with Rollin Hand, played by Martin Landau, or The Great Paris, played by Leonard Nimoy was a little harder. Phelps decided to come back to it later and make the sixth member of the team another guest-star. He liked Julie from Return of The Living Dead 3 (1996). Curt is the boyfriend who brings her back to life with a military drug after a freak accident breaks her neck. The teen sweethearts are celebrating after having broken into his dad’s army base and discovering the US is secretly training an army of zombies to become the next super weapon, virtually indestructible because they are already dead. There was a scene in which the ID card Curt has stolen from his dad doesn’t work on the first swipe and Julie licks the information strip to get the door open. Phelps was sure it was a great example of his academic idea of the “real real” — a moment in a horror movie that hits you in the gut because the artifice of the flick is broken by a baldly sensual interruption. There are a few other moments in the movie that are as equally visceral as a girl’s saliva, but what he liked most about Julie was that she is a zombie with feelings, she inflicts hideous mutilations on herself to avoid eating her lover, and ultimately sacrifices herself for him. Julie is a zombie with a sympathetic consciousness, someone Phelps considered pretty normal by today’s standards. He believed she could easily infiltrate the Bushevick Administration’s council of corpse-fuckers, and provide a desirable antidote to their outrageous extravagances of inhumanity just by showing a little humility, some plain old self-doubt about whether the fact that she could kill both viciously and efficiently, and in fact liked the taste of raw human entrails very much, made it the correct course of action in absolutely every case. Besides, if they didn’t agree with her she could always eat them! It was a virtually foolproof plan. Barney was showing everyone the special toilet bowl he designed for the mission, while Mr. Phelps explained his theory behind the plan: “And here I came to think of the toilets in America, France and Germany. They make up a semiotic triangle that correlates exactly to Levi Strauss’ triangle, so we also have an excrement triangle. Now the German toilets are built in a way that the excrement falls on a flat surface in the back and is flushed through a hole in the front. This way you are directly confronted with excrement — and you can see whether you have worms, etc. This is a German ritual. The French toilets have the opposite system: the hole is bigger at the back so excrement can fall directly into the hole and vanishes immediately. The American variant is a kind of correlative of Levi Strauss’ cooked food, combining the elements: the excrement remains, but it floats in the water. I had a look at some books on the topic and came to the conclusion that every nation believes their system makes most sense. But clearly, a complex system is at work here. And if I am to carry on… here is the right answer for Lyotard and all those who say the end of ideology, period. Yes, but as soon as you flush the toilet, you’re right in the middle of ideology.” Afterwards no one really knew what to say. Phelps talked about Chaucer’s and Rabeleis’ obsession with scatology in literature and the central importance for it in the theology of Luther’s Protestant Reformation, but the agents were no less confused about how exactly Phelps’ planned to take down the administration with a simple toilet bowl. As excited as Phelps was about the Julie zombie, it was more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else. Cinnamon Carter was a real woman. Sensing an opertune pause, the silver fox swooped in on Ms. Carter, played by the sexy Barbara Bain who would later inflame the adolescent loins of pointy headed geeks in Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999. Žižek closed his eyes behind the Phelps mask and breathed in her perfume. He had saved the best part of his research for her. “Friends from Vienna told me,” he furtively whispered into her ear, “that in avant-garde student circles the pubic haircut was strictly codified. There is the triangle, the New-Age hippy way, where everything grows profusely, the yuppie way, where only a small strip may be visible, and the punk style with pubic hair clean-shaven and rings hanging in the clitoris, etc.” Mr. Phelps a.k.a. the masked Žižek was pressing Cinnamon to divulge her preferred way of grooming her own pubic region when her old beaux Landau came to her rescue and rudely interrupted their conversation. It was then the Slovenian cultural critic realized the tragic flaw in his plan: he should have definitely hired Paris instead.
The dirty old man dreamed he woke up in a GODDAMN fairytale. Keith Richards was passed out next to him with his pants down at his ankles. The French fag Jean Cocteau could have decorated the place. That’s how creepy it was. There were recliners that looked like giant cats, sculptures and light fixtures it turned out were actually real people, and in this particular kingdom the servants, horses, and the décor in general had a distinct red theme. Everything was painted red. It was like Salvador Dali’s fake description of his meeting with Harpo Marx: “I met Harpo for the first time in his garden. He was naked, crowned with roses, and in the center of a veritable forest of harps (he was surrounded by at least five hundred harps). He was caressing, like a new Leda, a dazzling white swan, and feeding it a statue of the Venus de Milo made of cheese, which he grated against the strings of the nearest harp. An almost springlike breeze drew a curious murmur from the harp forest.” Only, it wasn’t the regular kind of fantasy where Catherine Denueve is the beautiful princess who must disguise herself as the scullion, Donkey Skin, to escape her lecherous father. There wasn’t a fancy old castle, no handsome prince, no donkey that shit jewels, and no fairy godmother who was probably more famous for her role as the Countess Bathory in the movie Daughter’s of Darkness (1971). Bukowski peeled his eyelids apart and looked around the place. It was a disaster. There was nothing but empty beer bottles and cans, empty wine and liquor bottles, and ashtrays piled high with spent butts. He sat up and squinted out the window. He had a bad hangover and the light made him sick. As far as he could figure out he was in a trailer park. Where it was, he wasn’t sure, and to make things worse, he woke up as the FUCKING Decider-in-Crook. He felt sore, but he thought, “You can choose between Nixon, Humphrey or Christ and be fucked anyway you turn.” The important thing was it didn’t change his opinion of William Faulkner or Bill Burroughs. They were still both lousy writers. Everything about the surreal kingdom was a bit off. The Decider had to drop a loaf. He tried to lift himself off the shag carpet. His suit was rumpled. He felt for his inside pocket and found what he was looking for, knocked back the rest of the fifth he stashed there, and made his way to the back room where he figured the John was. There were plenty of fairies and angels in the apartment, but they didn’t exactly have wings. More like crack whores who would suck your cock for five bucks. The king was a dwarf, played by Hervé Villechaize who is probably best known as Tattoo on Fantasy Island, Queen Doris of the Sixth Dimension was a real witch, and the extremely sexy and nubile princess walked around half naked the whole time. In one room a bunch of Catholic schoolgirls sat around Iggy Pop. It was quiet. The girls giggled and sighed wide-eyed when the wiry monkey blew his nose into his hands and ate his own snot. The bedposts weren’t stags, and the blanket wasn’t made of moss. No fir-lined magic chariot waited to save these young urchins. The Decider opened the door to the room across the way and as he fell inside he tried to make it look purposeful, like he was some kind of brilliant comedian, and it was a pratfall. It smelled like pot, ass, and sperm, funky, sweaty, and rancid, like a Skull and Bones after-party. The naked boys all looked shiny and brand new the way rich kids did. The President raised himself up on his haunches and tried to ignore the goings-on. One of them grabbed his junk. He played it off and simply said, “Later, baby,” as he backed his way out. It wasn’t his kind of scene. No way. There was a ruckus in the hallway when he finally turned around and got his back to the wall to steady himself. Condi Rice had ripped the wig of the long-lashed Tammy Faye Bakker, and they were going after each other. They tore each other’s dresses so their tits were hanging out. Their makeup was running and their nylons were ripped. The Decider edged along the wall until he got passed them. He had the wet shits. Getting to the can as fast as he could was the only thing on his mind. There were a couple of guys already in there. One of them was foaming up the other’s pubes with shaving cream. The Decider didn’t care. He dropped his drawers, planted his ass firmly on the porcelain goddess, and let loose. After he squeezed it all out he looked up and these two one-eyed monsters were staring at him. “Fuck off,” he said, and flushed. COCKS! Back in the living room, the Decider patted his jacket, found the other fifth in his back pocket, drained it, and tossed the bottle on the floor. He was ready to leave. The whole place swayed so much he felt seasick. He was making his way for the front door of the trailer when he noticed a woman kind of leaning against the far wall. She had her legs open but seemed rather dazed. He stumbled over and gave her a closer look. It was Condi. Her ass was as wide as a bus stop bench. The butt-man came out of him. He had always had a big crush on her, and dropped his pants and shorts. She looked real, real good. As he went in he stroked his wood in anticipation, and put the thing in, the little he had. Condi was cooing “Oooh,” about how good it felt, and the Decider was really getting going, when something RAMMED in between his butt cheeks. “What the HELL!” the President shouted and reached behind to pull the thing out. When he turned around he realized he was holding Darth Cheney’s flaccid undersized thing in his hand. “What do you think you’re doing?” he says to the Vice President. As Bukowski writes in one of his short pieces the other guy answers: “Listen, friend, this whole game is just one big deck of cards. If you want to get in the game you have to take whatever comes up in the shuffle.”
Osama bin Laden dreamed that the evil Count Zarth Arn from Starcrash (1979) was the reincarnation of Rummy. The Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe was about to destroy the Count by crashing a floating city into his claw-shaped space fortress. If the forces of good prevailed, it would spell doom for his plans of total galactic domination. Count Zarth Arn searched his memory and tried to figure out where everything went wrong. Since he was the reincarnation of the Bushevik Secretary of Defense, it naturally struck him that ever since the United States of America won The War on Terror by capturing the hearts and minds of people the world over after his failed administration all those many centuries ago things had gone badly for the dark side. This victory by his enemies was simply the final blow to the radical right wing, following a long chain of defeats that began all the way back in the 21st century when the democratically led peace dividend had prevailed once and for all over war profiteering on the planet Earth, and his forefathers were expelled into outer space. If he could only turn back time, he thought, perhaps he could change the course of history and save himself. The nefarious Count’s diabolical scientists had already made much headway where time-travel was concerned, and without delay they put together a beta-version for him to inspect. His villainous henchman, the green skinned Thor, would make the first trip, and if it was successful Zarth Arn could set his newly hatched plan to work. After disguising Thor to fool the earthlings they sent him on his way. He saluted the count with a stiff arm held forward at an upward angle and got in the pod. Zarth Arn paced back and forth in his long cape awaiting word from his trusty sidekick. As the Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe’s floating armada approached he prayed to his dark forces for the success of the mission before Stella Star and Prince Simon, played by David Hasselhoff, could overtake his space fortress. Moments later the time machine lit up like a Christmas tree and when they opened the hatch to look inside they found a holographic recording of Thor. “Fuck yeh, bring it on!” was all he needed to say. Count Zarth Arn’s plan was simple. He rubbed his black-gloved hands together in anticipation. He would send back a small commando unit with a shipment of ray guns and light sabers. His soldiers could train Al-Qaeda members and Taliban fighters how to use the space age weapons, and then, surely, they could turn The War on Terror around. Positive reports came back daily. The Terrorists were winning! The Bushevic Administration had cart-blanch. Every single one of their Neocon policies was green-lighted. If they wanted more money for the war Congress rubber-stamped it no questions asked. If they wanted to round people up indiscriminately and torture them, no problem. If they wanted to spy on U.S. citizens, make big business impervious to the law, or otherwise spank our Constitution, the Supreme Court bent over and said, “Thank you sir, may I have another.” The Decider-in-Chief couldn’t have been happier. Osama couldn’t have been happier. Count Zarth Arn was proudly informed by a lieutenant that they were popping Champaign to celebrate the victory of the dark side back on 21st century Earth. He looked out the giant portal of his command center for signs of the approaching armada of good guys. There were already clear indications that it was dwindling. As it came nearer large chunks of the floating city would start glowing and disappear. Hardly anything was left. Zarth Arn’s plan was working! “Adios, Stella Star,” he said and laughed maniacally. “Asta la bye-bye, Prince Simon and the Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe. Mission accomplished!” he declared before his delirious legions of black guard. “Nothing can stop us now. We will rule the galaxy!” Just then, the time machine lit back up again, and as the cheering men turned to see what was up Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters jumped out and opened fire on them with their laser guns. They activated their light sabers, and screamed “Jehad on the space demon!” It had never occurred to Zarth Arn that they could come back through the time portal, but there they were, pouring out of the machine two and three at a time. Before he knew it his space fortress was crawling with angry zip gun wielding Islamic invaders. They vaporized his soldiers left and right. It was a bloodbath. Finally, Osama himself stepped through the open hatch of the time machine. Count Zarth Arn’s men lay pulverized around him. There was no escape. His back was pressed against a massive steel beam in the center of the room. Osama parted the gauntlet of ray guns trained on the Count’s chest, and admired the vast command center of the space fortress. “We have awaited patiently your reincarnation,” he said as he turned back to the Count. “We knew you would come back and not abandon us as did your democratic predecessors. We knew you would eventually deliver to Allah this greatest of all victories!” Zarth Arn squirmed. “Why is it,” he wondered to himself, “Every one of my master-plans just makes things worse?” As Osama took some menacing practice swings the acid green blade of his light saber arced closer and closer to Zarth Arn’s head. The Count wished everything could be like it was before. His last words were: “Where are you now, Stella Star?”
The Divider-in-Chief dreamed he was in a new reality television show. It was a cross between The Surreal Life and Big Brother. At first the entire inner-circle of his Administration was on the show. Everyone he brought up with him from Texas. Everything was great. They all got on really well together. They had pillow fights, played Twister. Only the rules of the show were that every week one person from his cabal was voted off the show. Tom DeLay went first. Rummy was voted off next. One by one every member of his cabinet was sent packing. Sometimes it was because of scandal. Other times it was like rats escaping from a sinking ship. Even Karl Rove had to go. The catch was that every time one of his Neocon radical rightwing cronies was voted off the show they were replaced by somebody new. Ron Jeremy filled in for DeLay. Rummy was replaced by Flavor Flav; Rove by Vanilla Ice; Condi by Omarosa; Darth Cheney by Gary Coleman, etc. By the tenth episode the producers were actually striking the West Wing set. The Divider was sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office when the walls came down around him. Set designers pushed his desk off the stage, grabbed the phone out of his hands, rolled up the rug designed by his wife, and began to pimp the place out with purple velvet couches and all manner of gaudy furnishings and fresh décor. Before he knew it the Divider-in-Chief was sitting in the middle of a space age party pad. Mirrored balls were put up where chandeliers once swung, and they hung erotic black-light posters in place of patriotic paintings. They wanted him to change out of his dark blue suit and red tie combo into something more hip, but he refused. Everyone else was having a really great time. Pillow fights were now held in the nude, and the new group task was a game of Naked Twister. The Divider’s world came apart with the thud of a giant blue-ribbon Halloween pumpkin hitting the ground. None of the other household contestants liked Dubya. He refused to participate in their games. During the episode they played strip poker, he claimed executive privilege. The rest of the cast thought he was snotty. When struggling Vietnam Vets felt their post-combat sickness coming on they called it “breaking out”. When they felt themselves coming apart again, they would say, “I’m breaking out.” That’s the way the Divider-in-Chief felt, except it had nothing to do with military service. For him it was about his alcohol and drug addiction. Surrounded by all these party hounds, Dubya felt it all coming back. He was a dry-drunk about to “break out”. Almost everyone wanted to vote him off the show. He needed some dirt on them quickly, so The Divider ordered the NSA to tap the phones of the house. The illegal surveillance indicated that the other contestants alternately referred to him behind his back as either "King George" or "Screaming Mad George" because he was always so out of sorts. Ron and Flavor Flav were both angling for the six foot one inch tall Danish goddess Brigitte Nielsen. Dubya didn’t have many friends, except Omarosa. For a while anyway he could hide under her skirt. She was the proverbial bitch on high heels. Between shoots the Divider tried to petition the producers to allow him to reclassify the other contestants as enemies of the state. He figured if he could have them all designated as terrorists, maybe he could actually win the game. It was a last ditch effort. Everything hung on their decision. The Divider tried to keep a low profile on the show while the producers argued his point back and forth. Flavor Flav and Brigitte became quite the number, which ultimately created a heck of a spin-off. Dubya and Omarosa were really hanging on by a thread. Every time the producers would come up with a new and ever more debauched activity, the President could count on Omarosa to pull out her Bible and start praying. The Democratic Congress loved it. Senators made impassioned speeches decrying the role of the President on the reality show. Dubya had stacked the Supreme Court. He waited for their decision on whether or not cable television compelled him to take part in the unholy goings on. He declared, “I will not surrender!” The rest of the cast looked at him like he was crazy. They figured if he just got laid he would be okay. The Divider vowed the last couple of episodes would take place on Gitmo if the rest of the house didn’t clean up its act, so the other guys asked the ladies to draw straws. They looked at the men like they were nuts. No one wanted to go to bed with the Divider. He was a total creep. Not one of them wanted to lay the man. “Would you believe that a hundred black-ops have surrounded the place?” he asked the rest of the crew, like agent 86 always did on the show Get Smart. They said, “No.” “Would you believe one black-op and a watch dog?” The rest of the household figured they’d tried their best to make friends. They didn’t know what to do next. Dubya had one emergency line left. He called his old friend Pat Robertson. “What should I do?” he asked the right wing sage. “Liberal judges are a greater threat to our way of life than terrorists!” was what he got back. The Divider wasn’t quite sure how it applied to his situation. He pulled Ron Jeremy aside and asked him, “What do you think of liberal judges?” Dubya asked everyone else the same question and everyone gave him the same thumbs up sign. The FBI and the Justice Department reported back that he was in a hive of degenerates. They had lengthy files on everyone on the show. CIA officials claimed Ron Jeremy had the biggest dick on the face of the planet. Pentagon officials gave testimony that Flavor Flav had a bigger organ. The Divider didn’t know what to do. They were headed for another vote on who would get expelled from the show. Dubya looked around. He really was surrounded by criminals and pornographers. “Beat ‘em or join ‘em,” he said to himself, but Omarosa was insisting on taking no prisoners. The President was confused whether she had replaced Condi or Darth Cheney and tried to placate her. She was his only hope and she abandoned him like all the rest. Gary Coleman couldn’t wait for the vote. Flavor Flav brandished his super-sized 24-carot gold clock necklace and pointed at the time. “So long sucker,” they said. The rest of the contestants filled out the ballet unanimously. And without the slightest hesitation or ceremony the Divider-in-Chief was expelled from the show, replaced by a screaming chimp the cast all named George.
“Kittens are coming out of everywhere,” Darth Cheney told his therapist, “drains, cracks, you name it. The floor, walls and ceiling are covered with little cute furry creatures, millions of them. No matter where I look I see them. They are on all the furniture, on anything that doesn’t move. There are more kittens, puppy dogs and bunny rabbits outside, and they are coming in waves. As far as I can see the world outside my compound is swarming with them, and there isn’t anything I can do to stop it. Nothing I order the military to do can arrest the advance of the little furry creatures. They are getting into my personal quarters. The Air Force carpet-bombs my cul-de-sac. I order the Special Forces to destroy every last one of them with flamethrowers. I try chemical weapons, have GI’s spray them with anthrax, but it doesn’t work. The place is reduced to a fiery ruin. It is like everywhere I look something good is trying to get out from behind it, like there is something good in everything no matter how bad it is that just wants to get out. The generals tell me it is a stalemate. They have thrown every advanced and not-so-advanced weapon system they have in the Pentagon arsenal at the cute little furry pets. The senior officers suggest a change in policy. ‘Maybe it would go better, Mr. Vice President,’ they propose, ‘if you tried to befriend the kittens.’ The regular army is not working, they point out. ‘What you need is an army of hippies,’ they tell him, ‘with flowers in their hair, incense, colorful clothing, and giant soap bubbles.’ The dream always goes the same way. I point out to the generals there is one option they have not yet considered. 'Am I the only morally strong man left on earth?’ I wonder. ‘Is there no one else who understands that killing these household pets is the only way to save the world from our enemies?’ I address my military advisors face to face in my collapsing den. ‘Can’t you understand these kittens and puppy dogs are working for our enemies?’ I demand. ‘Were we attacked by cute furry animals on 9/11?’ I ask, ‘No, we were not! But are they now in league with our enemies?’ I toss them a copy of the unbiased Central Intelligence Agency report commissioned by the White House on why puppy dogs and other adorable animals are a threat to our way of life. ‘This is the face of terrorism,’ I say, but they nervously hem and haw. ‘If we want to preserve our freedom, we must kill every last kitten on earth!’ I say. Anyone with half a brain in their head would understand that the fuzzy little creatures have been infiltrated by the axis of evil. ‘What are we waiting for?’ I ask. ‘Do you want the whole world to turn into one gigantor litter box?’ I press them. ‘There’s only one appropriate response to these heathen forces. Nuke ‘em, and do it now!’ I demand. The chain of command is followed. B-52 war birds take off with missiles armed. Satellites are given the coordinates of my house. Silos are given the launch sequence. The whole place goes up in a ball of flame, but I’m still knocking singed puppy dogs and kittens off my desk. The only difference is the loud thunderclap of the explosion scared the little creatures, and now they are mewling and barking, nipping at my heels and sleeves. With a frightening certainty, I realize I’m the only one left to stave off all this infernal goodness. I push my generals aside, raise my twelve-gage shotgun to my shoulder, and starts squeezing the trigger vigilante-style. ‘If you want something done right,’ I say, firing one cartridge after another, ‘you have to do it yourself!’ Buckshot is flying. Fur is flying. I pump my twelve-gage into the cuddly little creatures until my gun is smoking hot, and I’m too tired to pump anymore, but it’s not working, for every one I’ve shot ten more have taken its place. I can hear the generals laughing and singing behind my back, and when I wheel around to stare them down, they’ve all taken off their uniforms and are happily dancing naked among all the bunny rabbits, kittens, and puppy dogs, wearing wizard’s hats and playing flutes and tambourines. ‘Don’t be such a downer,’ the generals chant in a mindless chorus, cuddling the little furry creatures in their arms. That’s usually when I've had enough, and I say, ‘To hell with you,’ and open fire on them, blowing great big beautiful red gouts of meat and blood out of their faces, necks, and chests, sending my top military advisors flying backwards into the sea of soft fur behind them. After the nuclear Armageddon, the little creatures have started to mutate. There are three-headed kittens, and six legged puppy dogs with fangs. They close in around me, and as they lunge at me I feel vindicated. ‘Look,’ I say, going down, ‘I was right all along,’ but it's kind of sad because there’s no one left to hear me, just little misshapen animals licking their whiskers and paws as far as I can see.”
August 15, 2007 02:24 PM
There has been some good press on the recent paintings. The San Francisco Chronical article by Kenneth Baker is the latest. Michael Ned Holte has updated his site with a number of new articles. His Artforum piece is among them. And Doug Harvey’s LA Weekly review is also available.
Hard to say whether the light within darkness of the black-box theatre, and cinema, or the experience of sitting in front of a television or computer monitor in an unlit room has come to represent the interiority of unconscious space, or whether there is some kind of intuitive understanding that our dreams are an island of light in a vast ocean of nothingness. The nightmare of British director Neil Marshal’s The Descent (2006) ends in the deepest recesses of our mind. The scariest dreams are the ones where you suddenly become conscious of dreaming, the moment when you want to get off the ride, but you can’t. Mario Bava’s Kill Baby, Kill (1968) has one of the best such scenarios. Italian directors from that period were obsessed with style. Elio Petri’s 10th Victim (1968) is a futuristic fashion bonanza. But Petri was also concerned with social issues. Bava’s movies, on the other hand, fully make style their content. Danger: Diabolic (1968) takes its queue from the slick lines of comic book illustration. Blood and Black Lace from 1964 actually takes place in a fashion house, but Planet of the Vampires from the next year might take the cake simply because there’s pretty much nothing redeeming about the story. Who needs a plot? The movie seems like it was solely made as a vehicle for constructivist costumes and the incredibly saturated colors and lighting effects that are, in fact, dazzling. More than any other movie Bava directed the madcap Dr. Goldfoot & The Girl Bombs (1966) starring Vincent Price and Fabian draws out the cartooniness of his style. The bumbling villain is only outdone by the fumbling intelligence agents. Bava's version blows away the original and the effort isn't hurt by lines by the mad scientist Dr. Goldfoot like: "An exact reproduction and programmed for love and destruction." Even Bava’s macabre movies have a slick visual finish that owes a lot to the illustrator's desire to make the line their own. There is maybe one exception to his almost instantly recognizable visual signature style — a scene from Kill Baby, Kill. The hero of our story finds himself in a 19th-century Transylvanian town haunted by the ghost of a seven-year-old girl who is intent on killing any poor fool who stays overnight, as well as all the denizens who have not already run for the hills. We see him from behind opening a door inside an obligatory foreboding mansion, running across the large room, and passing through the large wooden door on the other end. The sequence is repeated several times, to indicate our hero is trapped in the continuum of the witch's spell. It is almost a French New Wave era deconstruction, equating that moment when you realize you can’t get off the ride and you are almost definitely going to die with literally being eternally stuck in a film loop. Patrick McGrath, the author of “exquisite horror,” so it says on the cover of his 1989 breakthrough novel The Grotesque is particularly talented at conveying the terror of being wide-awake in one's own nightmare. The novel is about the suffering of the lord of a manor at the hands of his family and household staff that are sick of caring for the deaf and dumb invalid-vegetable of a patriarch they consider nothing but an annoying burden and inconvenient impediment to their own happiness and freedom. What they don’t know is that the lord trapped inside his atrophied body is actually totally conscious and lucid. The painful story is narrated entirely from his point of view. McGrath's Spider (2002) conveys the same sense of helpless lucidity. David Cronenberg, who obviously got an advance copy of the manuscript from the author, liked the novel so much he directed the movie by the same title and actually released it the same year it was published. The reader is trapped inside what Nietzsche called “the workshop of the mind”, except the owner of the mind in question isn’t quite right in the head. It’s a great send up to the modern Russian literary tradition of the unfaithful and untrustworthy narrator, exemplified in such forward thinking stories as Nicolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”, among others. Throughout the movie Spider lurks broodingly over every scene, sometimes even mouthing lines both after and before the characters have delivered them. Only in the last scene do you finally realize you’ve been stuck inside a deranged homicidal mind the whole time and his internal dementia has all the while been your own conscious reality. It’s important to understand that the Russian’s invented this trope at a time when they were being led to their graves by a bunch of power mad lunatics. There’s little doubt that Cronenberg’s attraction to the idea of a narrator whose authorial authority is seriously flawed came at a time when the powerbrokers in our own country were starting to show visible signs of coming completely unglued. The other most common moment of real fear in nightmares is the theme Marshal takes on in The Descent: that chilling moment when you think you’ve wrenched yourself back into consciousness only to realize you’re still stuck in a dream that’s gone from bad to worse. Wes Craven tried to drive the dream within the dream into the ground by turning it into a kind of assembly line charade in the Nightmare on Elm Street cycle. We can thank him for all the po-mo crap that came afterwards, like the Scary Movie franchise. But Marshal knows an inexhaustible human fear when he has experienced one. The young director’s first outing four years earlier was Dog Soldiers (2002), a more straight up horror show. Unbeknownst to an affable troop of British soldiers, they’ve been sent deep into the forest as bait for Black Ops to capture what they believe is a the perfect killing machine. It has haunted these woods for years. Marshal easily updates the werewolf story with some decent effects and mostly by just giving his characters some breathing room. Their interaction is what really makes the movie happen. At the beginning of the story they’re sitting around chewing the fat and shooting the bull about what scares them the most and the captain who’s seen some serious action tells them an anecdote about a guy he knew on his last tour of duty in Iraq who got a portrait of Satan, horns and all, tattooed on his derriere as a talisman to protect himself from danger. There was a huge explosion, recalled the captain, and when they went out into the smoky field to search for any signs of life the only thing that was recognizable amidst the arc of bloody carnage that ringed the black crater was this hunk of human ass with the devil’s face on it! It’s a lesson Darth Cheney, and the Bushevic Crime Family should keep in mind as they retreat back into fenced in compounds guarded by private armies that would make any rabid Columbian Drug Lord or despotic dictator froth with envy. It’s always sort of endearing when progressive lefty geeks turn their attention to the dark side. It’s a mixed up intellectual endeavor when it doesn’t turn pathological. “Black Blade”, the song Michael Moorcock & Blue Öyster Cult wrote together for 1980’s Cultösaurus Erectus says it all: “There's death from the beginning to the end of time / And I'm The Cosmic Champion and I hold a mystic sign / And the whole world's dying and the burden’s mine / And the black sword keeps on killing 'til the end of time.” (Thrones does a great cover on Day Late, Dollar Short, along with one of Rush’s “Oracle” off 2120). But when the Neocon Christo-fascists try to cloak themselves in powerful mythological archetypes there’s never any irony whatsoever, only cruel ugly policy. They never seem to realize that they are not the good guys in this or any other reality, that it is they who desire to harness the primal powers to perform their treachery, and it’s against them The Cosmic Champion must forever wield his sword. The Descent (tag-lined: “Chicks with Picks”) is far less overtly political than Marshal’s first movie. There’s not much to the plot. Several kick-ass ladies go caving. As with the director’s debut effort, much of the story has to do with the rapport between the actors who are thrust into dire circumstances. It turns out the cave they are in has never been explored before. The collapse of the tunnel behind them forces them to keep moving forward, deeper and deeper underground. The psychological extensions of that alone, would have made for a heck of a film, but Marshal is intent on taking it all the way. A number of reviewers have commented on both the psychosexual analogy of the tight crevices, claustrophobic tunnels and bottomless pits to a giant vagina (the cast and director even joke about it), and the dark underworld labyrinth with its clammy stones and subterranean streams as a metaphor for the unconscious. What happens when all this is put into hyper-drive? Sanity is unhinged. Dreams have a way of starting in a somewhat believable, unthreatening way and then following the logic of the narrative scenario to fantastic extremes, so, you guessed it, that’s exactly what Marshal does. One minute the woman are sitting around in their cabin, drinking beer, smoking pot and laughing it up, and the next thing you know they are trapped deep underground with no way out… and they are not alone! They have entered into a hive of fearsome, bloodthirsty humanoid underground dwellers and the gore starts flying. All civility is lost. It is survival of the meanest, and it’s always surprising to find out what people have inside them. In the near-final scenes the dominant among the survivors have been transformed into fearsome Amazonian warrior skull-crushers, wielding bones, torches, and (of course) their pick-axes, and howling primal screams as they try to hack and hew their way to freedom. As with Spider, it is the dream within a dream ending of the movie that makes you reflect back on the whole experience as a nightmare. We are living at a time when it is very possible the proverbial train has left the station and our leaders no longer know how to operate the brakes (Constitutionally or economically). This is not the kind of ride you can get off of, although you might think you have.
No one can match Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic vision of our civilization’s total demise in 2006’s The Road. The world has been entirely destroyed beyond all recognition and comprehension. The story takes place after the fantastic Armageddon. Exactly what happened is unclear. Everything must have gone wrong all at once: economic collapse; a world hopelessly at war; environmental disaster; nuclear Holocaust; you name it, it must have all happened in one great unforgiving and devastating storm. US literature has never been closer to the minimalism and extreme bareness of late Sam Beckett. Humanity is reduced to little more than the cadaverous, grimy, bulky weight that is the dying shell of the human spirit. McCarthy has understood the simple fact that where survival is concerned the end most closely resembles the beginning. The truest thing McCarthy ever heard was that we humans are monkeys in pearl necklaces. Dorothy Parker was once supposedly challenged by some snide, upper crust snob to put the word “horticulture” into a sentence. She reportedly retorted: “You can lead a whore-ta-culture, but you can’t make her think!” McCarthy’s is a hyperrealist’s world, cruel and amoral. There isn’t much mercy in his world-view, but 1985’s Blood Meridian might be one of his most ruthless contributions. The book reads like an old Quentin Tarantino movie — except set in a lawless Wild West. Someone gets brutally scalped or otherwise gored to death on practically every page. Blood Meridian makes Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) look like a family picnic. The Road is basically the intimate story of a father and son trying desperately to stay alive after the only world they know has gone to hell. Everything is reduced to the cold hard facts of life: them against the world. There are a couple of classic Atomic Age allegories of the breakdown of society where good folks are set against each other. They were generally law and order propaganda intended to remind us that our culture was the only thing that saved us from mob rule. McCarthy is a student of human nature. He’s never placed much serious stock in moral ideals. What McCarthy’s interested in is what his fellow humans are capable of when their existence is seriously threatened. And a recurring theme of The Road is that devastating environmental conditions reduce us to cannibals. Anthony Burgess is best known for A Clockwork Orange. Some folks dismiss his earlier efforts, but his follow up to A Clockwork Orange was The Wanting Seed (1962). The novel is a complicated rebuke of ideological political cycles. Has anyone noticed that all of a sudden out of the blue during what is a widely acknowledged crisis in our nation the presidential election season was moved up by an entire year? Although more than half the national civil population is in favor of impeachment, the topic has been moved off the table in disproportionate part due to the unprecedented shift in the political schedule. Burgess takes the subject to cannibalistic ends. As the story opens up, we are introduced to a totalitarian version of a liberal government: all government officials are by law homosexual; police officers are recognized by their bright red lipstick drag; and it is forbidden for heterosexuals to procreate. An obvious crisis ensues. A Military regime is instated to deal with the calamity. The homosexual government can’t feed their citizens. Simulated wars are contrived in order to deal with the problem of starvation by creating a food source out of the fallen soldiers. Of course, no matter what the ideology the public servants remain the same. Soon enough cannibalism proves too controversial. And the cycle begins anew. Bar the rare exception, movies have shied away from the subject. The Japanese director Toshiyasu Sato’s Spatter: Naked Blood (1995) took the theme to the unprecedented highs of auto-cannibalism. Three girls are given an experimental painkilling drug that results in bizarre self-mutilation. One of the experimental subjects, for example, eats herself alive. The most faithful contributions to the subject where probably made by 70s and 80s Italians. Jay Slater’s Eaten Alive! (2002) is without a doubt the most complete account of these cannibal and zombie movies. Where zombies are concerned, nothing the Italians did ever came close to George Romero. Not that the cannibal movies are so great. It’s just that nobody else got into it so much as the Italians. The movies most commonly sighted are: Umberto Lenzi’s Man from Deep River (1972); Ruggero Deotato’s Jungle Holocaust (1977); his Cannibal Holocaust (1980); Lenzi’s Eaten Alive! (1980); and, finally, Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981). They are a peculiar bunch of films if for no other reason than their incredible amount of crossbreeding. Identical footage, stock imagery of the cruelty of jungle wildlife and staged footage of savage rituals is shared throughout, and so are the same actors, especially his lead man Ivan Rassimov, Mark Kerman, who was always in a completely different role, and Me Me Lai, who gets an awful boob-job somewhere between Deep River and Jungle Holocaust. Lenzi is hit or miss. He’s a classic Italian B-movie director right up there with Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Argento is a hands down master, but, if there’s any doubt about Fulci, his 1983 Conquest might change some minds. Lenzi and his acolytes were the prime movers behind these cannibal movies, but the director illuminated a great many depraved subjects over his long career, and showed an uncanny insight into the most violent psyche, among the more notable of his contributions was the criminal mind in Almost Human (1974). These flicks are essentially about sex and violence. Not surprisingly one of the best movies in the long running Emmanuel soft-porn franchise was Aristide Massaccesi'sEmmanuel and The Last Cannibals (1977). When Lenzi took the theme up again a few years later the bar of primal lust and gore was raised pretty high. Deotato’s Jungle Holocaust was basically a story of one man’s survival in the vicious, primordial jungle. Lenzi’s movies all had a very different theme. He wanted to contrast primitive man against modern space-age man. In his movies the balance of nature is tipped by the intervention of our world. In Deep River a desire to exploit natural resources leads us deep into the jungle, our irrepressible greed and wanton exploitation is what brings all our deepest fears of the rain forest alive. These movies don’t address cannibalism literally. Naked, black wigged man-eaters abound, but these stories deal with the theme of cannibalism metaphorically. The lost tribes in these stories are supposed by outsiders to no longer exist. Eaten Alive! is a notable exception. It’s the story of a Jim Jones type cult that has taken up camp deep inside the South American rain forest, only it’s the Italian version, so the charismatic leader is portrayed less as an Elvis-like urban counter-intelligence agent gone awry, than as a perverted Roman demigod whose rituals include a fearsome golden dildo. But Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox is a pale comparison to Deotato’s Cannibal Holocaust of a year earlier. There is no better example of the student surpassing the master. If Lenzi wanted to call our modern way of life into question, Deotato’s movie is a far more vicious indictment of the vanity and greed of our civilization. A team of modern day documentary journalists go into the deep jungle and kill, destroy, and rape everything they encounter in order to juice their latest sensationalist film, until they anger the stone-age natives so much so that their bubble of superiority is irrevocably burst and they get the comeuppance due to them. The question is always clear in these movies: who is the real savage? And the answer is always the same: all our space age culture and civilization aside, we are.
