Well, with all due respect, sir, I didn’t much dig Paul Fix’s dialogue as Chief Crazy Blanket (“If I’m crazy, you’re crazy”), or the scene where four old squaws and George Kennedy (disguised by a blanket and, naturally, mistaken as a squaw) watch while Sinatra makes out with the chief’s lithe daughter, at the chief’s insistence. “Paleface take-um Injun girl,” indeed, Mr. Blackfeet.
The Doom Generation
(Directed by Gregg Araki; starring James Duval, Rose McGowan; 1995)
Words like “disaffected,” “distanced” and “deadpan” flew from my mind onto my notepad while I was watching The Doom Generation. This is the kind of movie where the filmmaker hopes to shock you with sickening carnage and violent amorality, while at the same time holding himself carefully aloof from it with his style. He would be more honest and probably make a better movie if he got down in the trenches with the rest of us.
There is an attitude in Gregg Araki’s film that I’ve sensed in a lot of work recently: The desire by the filmmaker to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to make a blood-soaked, disgusting, disturbing movie about characters of low intelligence and little personal worth, but he’s not willing to cop to that, and so by giving them smarmy pop-culture references and nihilistic dialogue, and filling the edges of his frame with satirical in-jokes and celebrity walk-ons (Margaret Cho, Heidi Fleiss), he’s keeping himself at arm’s length. Hey, if we’re dumb enough to be offended by his sleazefest, that’s our problem; Araki is, you see, a stylist, who can use concepts like iconography and irony to weasel away from his material.
Note carefully that I do not object to the content of his movie, but to the attitude. Content is neutral until shaped by approach and style. This is a road picture about Amy and Jordan, young druggies who get involved with a drifter named Xavier who challenges their ideas about sex, both gay and straight, while involving them on a blood-soaked cross-country odyssey. The movie opens as the drifter “inadvertently” (Araki’s word, in the press kit) blows off the head of a Korean convenience store owner. The head lands in the hot dog relish and keeps right on screaming. Ho, ho,
It continues as the “enigmatic Xavier” (I am again quoting from the wonderfully revealing press kit) “has such rotten karma that every time they stop the car for fries and Diet Cokes, someone ends up dying in one gruesome way or another.” Wait, there’s more: “As the youthful band of outsiders continue their travels through the wasteland of America, Amy finds herself screwing both Jordan and Xavier, forging a triangle of love, sex, and desperation too pure for this world.”
Now let’s deconstruct that. The correct word is “its,” not “their.” (1) “Band of outsiders” is an insider reference to “A Band Apart,” the name of Quentin Tarantino’s production company, which itself is a pun on the title of a film by Godard. (2) Is it remotely possible that America is a “wasteland” because Amy, Jordan, and Xavier kill someone every time they stop for fries and a soda? That wouldn’t have occurred to this movie. (3) The usage “someone ends up dying” employs the passive voice to avoid saying that the three characters kill them. This is precisely the same construction used by many serial killers and heads of state, who use language to separate themselves from the consequences of their actions.
Finally, (4) the notion that the threesome is “too pure for this world,” which presumably gives them the right to kill store owners and other bystanders, is in its classic form pure fascist twaddle about the ubermensch, or superman, whose moral superiority gives him the right to murder. Araki may not have been thinking of Leopold and Loeb when he made his movie, but I was when I watched it.
Two of the best movies I’ve seen in recent years covered material similar to The Doom Generation. They were Kalifornia and Natural Born Killers. Both were about cross-country odysseys involving young lover/killers. Both dealt thoughtfully with their characters, and the consequences of their actions. Both had a point of view and a moral position. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Terence Malick’s Badlands (1972), and both versions of Gun Crazy also had doomed young lovers on the run. All of these films were honest enough to be about what they were about—to acknowledge their subject matter.
But Gregg Araki has maybe seen too many movies, and is eager to have us know that he is above his subject matter. He’s like the sideshow impresario whose taste is too good to enter his own tent. For him, I recommend several viewings of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a brilliant film that deals with a character very much like Xavier, and is not too shy to deal with him—to see him as he is, and accept the consequences.
Was I unfair to quote so liberally from the press kit? I used it because it praises the film so openly in terms that reveal its underlying dishonesty. Directors may not write their press kits, but they are responsible for them. Further reading from the kit: “The Doom Generation is the Alienated Teen Pic to End All Alienated Teen Pics—and, oh yeah, it’s a comedy and a love story, too.”
Oh, yeah.
Dracula A.D. 1972
(Directed by Alan Gibson; starring Christopher Lee; 1972)
The friendly folks at Hammer Films Ltd., the British specialists in horror flicks, have this thing about tiny glass vials. They’ll use a vial or two in almost every movie they make. Sometimes they have crystal vials, but mostly just your ordinary glass vial.
The vials are handy for storing dehydrated blood from Count Dracula, who left so much blood behind him when he died that, alive, he would have been a godsend to the blood bank, had his blood not been overrun with vampire germs.
Public prejudice against vampires still runs at a fairly high level, unfortunately, and that is why you never hear of a vampire donating his services when an emergency call goes out for a rare blood type. With a bit of organization and a list of rare-blood donors, a competent team of vampires should be able to come back with the necessary plasma in no time. This is not the unsavory prospect it would have been in the eighteenth or nineteenth century; the widespread use of toothpaste among vampires has removed one of the age-old barriers to their acceptance.
In any event, Dracula A.D. 1972 opens with a striking testimonial to the staying power of Dracula’s blood. We remember from Taste the Blood of Dracula, an earlier Hammer endeavor, that when his dried blood is mixed with a little water and taken orally in medicinal amounts, the user becomes infected with the count’s evil spirit. That’s more or less what happens again this time.
A young man who looks curiously like Alex (Stanley Kubrick’s hero in A Clockwork Orange) wants to be a vampire. He hangs around all day in a strange coffeehouse that looks curiously like the milk bar in A Clockwork Orange, and he looks out from under a lowered brow, just like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. He seems to be a symbol of the general decay at Hammer Films, which, having brought the horror film to a peak of perfection and created the first new horror superstar in years (Christopher Lee), now seems willing to follow the artistic leads of violence-come-latelies like Kubrick. Alas.
Anyway, the novice lays hands on some dehydrated Dracula blood, liquefies it during a bizarre ritual in a bombed-out church, and sets into motion a complex chain of forbidden rituals designed to display Stephanie Beacham’s cleavage to the greatest possible advantage. This isn’t a terrific rationale for another horror flick but, given Miss Beacham’s ability to heave, and her bosom to heave with, it will have to do. On leaving the theater, I was given an honorary membership card in the Count Dracula society, and a lapel pin that I inadvertently stuck myself with. And not a vial in sight.