This is the way insecure teenage boys sometimes talk in a group, as a way of creating solidarity, masking fears of inadequacy, and forming a collective personality that is stupider than any individual member of it. The way you attain status in the group is by using violence to defend it against outsiders. People raised on these principles run a risk of starring in videotapes of police brutality.
I liked the older superheroes better. The ones that stood out from a crowd, had their own opinions, were not afraid of ridicule, and symbolized a future of truth and justice. Superman represented democratic values. Today’s kids are learning from the Turtles that the world is a sinkhole of radioactive waste, that it’s more reassuring to huddle together in sewers than take your chances competing at street level, and that individuality is dangerous. Cowabunga.
The Tenant
(Directed by Roman Polanski; starring Roman Polanski, Shelley Winters, Melvyn Douglas; 1976)
Roman Polanski’s The Tenant was the official French entry at Cannes last May, and in the riot to get into the press screening one man was thrown through a glass door and two more found themselves in the potted palms. It’s a wonder nobody was killed in the rush to get out. The Tenant is not merely bad, it’s an embarrassment. If it didn’t have the Polanski trademark, we’d probably have to drive miles and miles and sit in a damp basement to see it.
Like Last Tango in Paris, it involves the apartment shortage in Paris. An earnest and shy young man (Polanski, very earnest and shy) applies for the apartment of a young woman who attempted suicide and is in the hospital. The woman dies and Polanski gets the apartment. It’s in a tall, gloomy building inhabited by hateful, spiteful people who are always spying on each other. And it has a haunted bathroom; every time Polanski looks in through the bathroom window (which he does quite frequently), there’s someone standing there motionless, looking straight back at him.
Polanski throws a modest little housewarming party, and all hell breaks loose. Every other tenant in the building complains about the noise. Indeed, every time Polanski moves a chair, shifts a cabinet, plays the radio, or even coughs, the people upstairs and downstairs start banging on the walls for quiet (it’s here that the movie most closely approaches a horror story).
Polanski eventually decides that the building itself is malevolent, and the people in it are out to get him. He is wrong; actually, all they want is a little quiet. But Polanski is paranoid, and that’s the movie’s basic problem. If he thought he were paranoid but the people really were after him, then there’d be some nice fun in the tradition of no more than perhaps six dozen movies already this year. But because he really is paranoid, and we know he is, the movie’s just a study of his downward spiral.
And what a spiral. He becomes convinced that the other tenants are trying to turn him into the woman who committed suicide. He puts on her clothes and makeup, and buys shoes and a wig. He convinces himself, at times, that he is the dead woman. In an ending that must rank among the most ridiculous ever fashioned for an allegedly reputable movie, he dresses in drag, hurls himself from the same window the former tenant used, fails to kill himself, climbs back upstairs, and throws himself out again.
There is then an ironic ending that will come as a complete surprise to anyone who has missed every episode of Night Gallery or the CBS Mystery Theater. It turns out that—but never mind, never mind. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an audience talk back to the ending of a horror film. The Tenant might have made a decent little twenty-minute sketch for one of those British horror anthology films in which Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price pick up a little loose change. As a film by Polanski, it’s unspeakably disappointing.
The Thing with Two Heads
(Directed by Lee Frost; starring Ray Milland, Roosevelt Grier; 1972)
What a heck of a thing to happen to a guy. He’s a black man, convicted of murder and unable to persuade anyone of his innocence. He’s sentenced to the electric chair (apparently because the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction doesn’t include American International Pictures). He’s willing to do anything to get another chance at life, so he volunteers for a weird medical experiment. The next thing he knows, he has Ray Milland’s head parked alongside his left ear. This leads us to a philosophical point: Is it better to be alive with Ray Milland’s head plugged into your neck, or to be dead?
Most of us would probably take Ray Milland, I guess. It’s not often you get to meet a real movie star. But Roosevelt Grier, who plays the escaped convict, doesn’t have such an easy choice.
The problem is that Ray Milland is an evil scientist who dreamed up the head transplant in order to ditch his old body because he was having a lot of trouble with arthritis. His sinister plan is to wait until his head grows on—and then cut Roosevelt Grier’s head off! Not only that, but Milland is a racist with a line of lousy cracks about watermelon for dessert.
Some days you just can’t win. It’s bad enough to try to work with a veteran actor breathing down your back—but in your ear?
The most incredible thing in The Thing with Two Heads is not the head transplant, however, but what happens next. Within hours after Milland’s head has been screwed on, the two-headed escapee is on a motorcycle and being chased by no less than fourteen police cars. Every one of them is destroyed during the chase, a process that takes so long that seven, or even five, squad cars might have been enough.
The publicity for the movie warns against the possibility of “apoplectic strokes, cerebral hemorrhages, cardiac seizures, or fainting spells” during the movie, but they’re just trying to make themselves look good.
A Thousand Acres
(Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse; starring Jason Robards, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, Jennifer Jason Leigh; 1997)
A Thousand Acres is an ungainly, undigested assembly of “women’s issues” milling about within a half-baked retread of King Lear. The film is so unfocused that at the end of its very long 104 minutes I was unable to say who I was supposed to like and who I was supposed to hate—although I could name several characters for whom I had no feelings at all.
The movie is set on the thousand-acre Cook farm in Iowa, where the weathered and wise old patriarch Larry (Jason Robards) is the most powerful farmer for miles around. Then he announces he has decided to retire, and to divide his farm into three parts, giving shares to each of his daughters.
That’s fine with Rose (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Ginny (Jessica Lange), who are married farm women—but Larry’s youngest and most favored daughter, Caroline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a lawyer, questions the wisdom of the plan. Larry instantly disowns her and later slams a door in her face, and as the other two daughters and their husbands begin running the farm, we figure it’s only a matter of time until old Larry is out there in a raging storm, cursing the heavens.
We are correct, but A Thousand Acres wants only to borrow plot elements of King Lear, not to face up to its essentials. We are denied even the old man’s heartbreaking deathbed scene—that goes to one of the daughters, after her second bout with breast cancer. The movie repeats the currently fashionable pattern in which men are bad and fathers are the most evil of all; there is not a single positive male character in the movie, unless you count the preacher who says grace before the church supper.
The husbands of the two older daughters, indeed, are written so thinly that when one of them (Kevin Anderson) kills himself, we’re not sure why (until it’s belatedly explained) and don’t much care, and when the other (Keith Carradine) goes off to Texas to work on a hog farm, his wife scarcely seems to notice he’s gone. Along the way, in a development so badly handled it seems to belong in another movie, Caroline gets married in Des Moines and lets her sisters find out about it only through a wedding announcement in the local weekly; as nearly as I can recall, we never meet her husband, nor is he ever referred to again.