Dick Without a Dictaphone

My second ever interview. I still suck at it, but I’m improving, possibly. Maybe if I get a tape recorder things will go better. For the time being I am trying to record things with my brain, with the aid of scribbled notes. This tends to break the flow, and when I write down my impressions of a conversation with a few scanty quotes from the “subject,” there is a danger of creating the impression, entirely false, that I am the articulate one.

Kirby Dick’s feature documentary OUTRAGE tackles the alluring subject of prominent Republican politicians who are gay, in the closet, and voting against gay rights. Like Clerici in THE CONFORMIST, it seems like a protective strategy, joining the enemy and finding safety within it. The movie explores the subject politically, socially and psychologically, with a very articulate set of commentators. Having just re-watched KD’s previous movie, THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED, I detected a sort of connection — the idea, expressed in TFINYR, that people put their sexuality in a kind of compartment to separate it from the rest of their lives. A previous Dick film (don’t titter, it’s a very fine and Scottish surname), SICK: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST, looked at a character who had very successfully integrated his sexuality with the rest of his life, to the point of turning a very difficult situation into something positive.

So it seemed as if connections are becoming apparent between the various movies in the Dick oeuvre.

“At last!” he laughs. Rather than consciously staking out a territory, the filmmaker feels that “each new film seems to alienate the audience of the previous one.” And the films do cover a lot of ground. The Flanagan film was followed by CHAIN CAMERA, about  kids in racially-diverse LA high school, with the kids themselves given a camera to shoot the film. That was followed by DERRIDA, which is quite a jump. And then SHOWGIRLS: GLITZ & ANGST could be said to occupy a different plane from its precedssor, with 2004′s TWIST OF FAITH heading into fresh territory, exploring the issue of child abuse within the Roman Catholic faith. Dick hasn’t found himself typecast yet, and hasn’t really faced pressure to carry on in one vein, apart from the desire of backers to get something commercial.  Such as? “You know, anything with kids in it. Kids and competitions. I’m not sure if there’s actually been a good film made about that subject, but…”

The top half of a man, interviewed in I AM NOT A FREAK.

As part of my extensive research I’d gotten hold of a very early Dick film, I AM NOT A FREAK, his third work according to the IMDb. I definitely think he’s improved since then. Part of the trouble is that the subject of disability and deformity has become a staple of supposed “science shows” especially here in the UK. These shows don’t contain any science, really, they’re an uncomfortable mix of human interest and freakshow. I AM NOT A FREAK doesn’t wholly escape that trap — I’m not sure if it’s possible to do so. Maybe just acknowledging the trap would be enough. I wondered if there was anything Dick regretted.

“Mainly I wish I’d been a producer on that. Because I didn’t get paid much and I have a feeling it’s made quite a bit of money over the years. Because the subject is kind of evergreen, you know.” The film’s best quality is it’s empathy for its characters, which is a quality it shares with all Dick’s films. “I think I have empathy for all my subjects — except Joan Graves in THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED.” Graves is the ratings board chairperson who denied the film a rating, thereby assuming the role of villain within the film itself. I asked if Dick was surprised at what he found out in the course of making that film. Not really. He’d been aware of the problems within the MPAA for twenty years. Hiring a private investigator to identify the raters, whose identities had been a closely-guarded secret, Dick was able to expose the studios’ ethically dubious stranglehold on the system of film censorship (which you’re not supposed to call censorship) in America.

Because Dick isn’t really on the studios’ radar, he didn’t have any trouble in the aftermath of the film — as an independent he’s not likely to be going cap-in-hand to the studio people who are connected to the MPAA. And once again with OUTRAGE he’s made a film which in some ways confounds the expectations created by his previous work. While TFINYR addressed head-on the MPAA’s discomfort with homosexuality, it had a “strong heterosexual appeal, due to all the clips we were able to use.” But then OUTRAGE, which is all about homosexuality, isn’t necessarily a film with a specific appeal to “the gay audience” — it’s more likely to appeal to an audience of gays and straights and whatevers that wants to see politics dealt with in an intelligent way. One would like to think that audience is large…

OUTRAGE is so articulate and well put-together that I struggled to actually come up with useful questions, but I was intrigued by the figure of Dan Gurley, who was basically forced out of the closet by another of Dick’s interviewee’s, Michael Rogers. I got the impression from the film that Gurley was still a bit upset about this, even though he’s now working for gay rights and seems to have become a far more positive figure as a result of coming out. “Yeah, he’s still angry.” Dick wanted to bring Gurley and Rogers together for a discussion, and nearly managed to organise it, but Rogers’ reputation for ferocity intimidated Gurley and it didn’t quite come off. Nevertheless, the access Dick was able to get to politicians and political commentators was more than sufficient. Many of them had their own first-hand experience of hiding their orientation from the world, and “They want people to know the damage of the closet.” One of the film’s most moving sequences is a montage of same-sex weddings — after an hour of talk about repression and oppression, this has the same freeing impact as the “Can’t Buy Me Love” sequence in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT. As John Lennon cries, “We’re out!”

Of course, people like Charlie Crist and Larry Craig, still officially heterosexual, would never appear in a film like this, but even if they did they would simply deny everything in that robotic and uncomfortable way, so the archive material Dick uses serves the same function admirably.

I wondered what other Republicans think. Do they know these guys are gay? It seems pretty obvious. “I don’t think they care. They kind of have a live and let live attitude about it. From a liberal attitude, you think, ‘Why would you vote against yourself?’ But from a conservative vantage, it’s not about aligning the personal and the political, it’s about keeping them separate.”

This is where the empathy factor is most effective. It’s a fundamentally different film from a Michael Moore agit-prop affair, because it’s all about the impact of the personal and the political. “Personally I feel that politicians should be allowed all the sex they want. It’s a tough job. It’s stressful enough.”

Me: “Yeah, we don’t want a stressed man with his finger on the button.”

Kirby: “Or woman.”

I picture the 1980s Margaret Thatcher, and imagine the sexual energy and finesse of Denis Thatcher being the only thing standing between mankind and doomsday, and simultaneous shudders run up and down my spine. We’re all lucky to be here.

I ask if Kirby Dick has plans for his next film.

“I do. Can’t talk about it. Don’t want the assholes to know I’m looking into it.”

Erotic Intertitle of the Week: Fool Frontal

Even though Theda Bara was a vamp rather than a vampire proper, a picture of her still adorns Denis Gifford’s Pictorial History of Horror Movies, which meant I had to watch it. And indeed I’d always wanted to, lured by that famous pic of a wispily-robed Theda looming over a prone skeleton. As a child, that was probably my prime image of sex. Gifford’s line that silent movie vamps “sucked their men dry, but not of blood,” got my unformed mind working overtime, like a Victorian urchin up a dirty chimney. What did he mean? Had Theda Bara just sucked that man literally bone dry, so that all that remained was his calcium underpinnings? She must be the best vampire ever!

Her most famous movie (one of relatively few Bara vehicles to survive) isn’t the best movie ever, though, and of course she’s just a cold-hearted vixen who ruins men financially and emotionally and then moves on to her next conquest. Did I say “just”? Anyhow, the kohl-smeared seductress looks quite fetching in some shots and downright burly in others, suggesting that she needed a Pabst or Sternberg to style her photographically so she always looked her best. All too often the Theda Bara veneer crumbles away and we’re in no doubt that we ‘re looking at Theodosia Burr Goodman, a nice Jewish girl from Ohio, rather than the anagrammatic incarnation of Arab Death.

The plot is your basic seduction = ruination yarn, with the pleasing twist that the vamp gets away with it. Kipling’s titular poem barks at as from the intertitles, but there’s little doubt we’re meant to relish the depravity, such as it is.

Languid languishing between bouts of anguishing.

Moonstuck

MOON, directed by first-timer Duncan Jones from Nathan Parker’s screenplay based on Jones’s story, is a sci-fi thriller which is too slow to be thrilling and not slow enough to be 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Which it would very much like to be:

Not only have they stolen designer Tony Masters’ hexagonal corridor from 2001, they’ve stolen the font seen everywhere in the Discovery spacecraft. It’s all over MOON, and it strikes me as a terrible miscalculation. I’m all for the odd little homage, but you should never forcibly remind the audience of a better film that the one they’re watching.

Continuing with the minuses, we have Kevin Spacey quite literally phoning in his performance as the HAL-9000-like computer, GERTY-3000. We have a ludicrous reason to be on the moon in the first place: a fusion plant consisting of sorta combine harvester things that somehow extract “the sun’s energy” from the dark side of the moon and can it up as “Helium-3″ to send back to Earth. I imagine everybody on Earth speaking in a squeaky voice.

This slightly impractical solution to global warming comes by way of producer Trudie Styler, the eco-warrier famed for her tendency to fly everywhere by private jet — she must have a carbon footprint the size of Kitten Kong. If you’re capable of believing your lifestyle is doing more harm than good, you’re probably capable of believing in Helium-3.

Derivative design aside, MOON looks handsome on a deceptively low budget, and if you can overlook questions like “Why does a one-man lunar base come equipped with an entire fleet of moon-buggies?” then the plot is fairly compelling and unusual. And if you’re going to do a movie where basically one actor is onscreen the whole time, this film makes a good case for that actor being Sam Rockwell. What a charming fellow.

Now, since the character/s  Sam plays is/are called Sam Bell (to say more would be unfair), you might be forgiven for thinking “Sam (Rockw)ell… Sam (B)ell… I  bet they tailored the part for him.” But I don’t believe this is the case. I think probably the character name called the actor to mind and they had the good sense to grab him. Here’s how I think the character was named in the first place ~

In 2001 Keir Dullea plays the hero, Dave Bowman.

The soul duo Sam & Dave creates a clear word association between the name “Dave” and the name “Sam.”

The London-centric expression “born within the sound of Bow bells” gives us the word “Bow” next to the word “bells.”

This explanation is so ingenious and intricate, I don’t believe the filmmakers consciously devised it. But I think that’s where the name came from nevertheless.