KultureDrome

Cosmic Champions

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.