Lost in Time and Lost in Space… and Meaning

I was impressed by a shot in Adam Curtis’s free-form documentary found-footage mash-up IT FELT LIKE A KISS in which Doris Day closes a hotel room door in our face and the room number on it is 2001. Curtis uses this to evoke thoughts about the events of 9:11 and the more innocent-seeming world we dream existed before that act of unscheduled demolition opened the  war on abstract concepts. I became convinced that it might also be possible to draw connections between Kubrick’s film 2001 and the actual events on September 11th of that year. If, as ROOM 237 shows, THE SHINING can be bent this way and that to support an apparently unlimited range of unrelated theories, surely the even more open text of 2001 can act as a lens through which to view events which were still in the almost-unimaginable future when Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke conceived their space odyssey?

Kubrick begins with a desert landscape populated by aggressive cave-dwellers. Al-Qaeda? Racist to conflate arabs and ape-men, but in a way we’re only following the racist logic of much media reporting to see where it leads. 2001 begins with a land that doesn’t need to be bombed back to the stone age because it’s already there. The simians are visited by a shiny rectangular artifact, which we’ll spuriously claim represents the Twin Towers. Gazing at it in awe, they are inspired to discover weapons and kill.

Of course, the connection between apes and the World Trade Center is really made by the DeLaurentiis KING KONG, in which Kong scales one of the towers before leaping to the other, driven by some primal urge (he apparently relates the towers to a geographical feature of Skull Island). Attacked by helicopters, Kong (like the 2001 man-beasts, an uncredited actor in a costume) is shot down. KING KONG is directed by John Guillermin, who had considerable skyscraper experience, having just made THE TOWERING INFERNO. Thus Kubrick’s film, without containing any shots of large-scale destruction, calls to mind the events of 9:11 in a variety of ways in its very first sequence.

In Steve Bell’s newspaper strip in The Guardian, entitled If…, George W Bush was always portrayed as a simian. And IF… is also the title of the film starring Malcolm McDowell which got Little Malcolm the lead role in CLOCKWORK ORANGE. (CLOCKWORK ORANGE can be seen as a black parody of 2001: a barbaric savage is reprogrammed by a higher power. In both cases, the primitive being is shown a film accompanied by German classical music — Moonwatcher the apeman perceives this with his mind’s eye, whereas Malcolm watches it on a traditional screen. The protagonists of both films end up in bed, transformed.)

In a justly famous transition, Kubrick match-cuts from a hurled bone to a spacecraft, cementing the notion of flying vehicles as weapons. Later we will meet spacecraft identified as belonging to Pan-Am Airlines, confirming that spacecraft are just evolved aircraft (and both are just evolved ape-weapons).

Now we meet Space Station V, an orbiting base composed of two wheels, each constructed like a skyscraper swallowing its own tail. Parts of the station are apparently as yet incomplete, exposing red girders. To a Strauss waltz, we watch as a spacecraft flies directly into the station, but rather than causing destruction it is simply swallowed up. Like the twin towers of the World Trade Center, this space base has a restaurant and an unbeatable view. The WTC boasted of its top floor “observatories” and its “Windows on the World” restaurant and “Cellar in the Sky” bar. The SSV actually does feature windows on the world, through which the Earth can be seen, apparently spinning below.

On board, things are seething with international tension — in Kubrick’s vision of the future, Perestroika never happened so the Russians are still the threat. There’s also news of a strange discovery on the moon –

The floodlit excavation sight is almost a dead ringer for New York’s Ground Zero, only with a skyscraper (the monolith) still rising out of it, impossibly. It’s existence causes another flight, this time to Jupiter (and beyond the infinite), which incidentally is one of the dozen places President Bush was flown to after the towers collapsed.

Now we find ourselves on a spacecraft on a secret mission, hijacked by a terrorist which started out disguised as a legitimate passenger on the craft (the shipboard computer). HAL kills the crew members in order to take over the ship, but he does it because “this mission is too important to allow you to jeopardise it.”

Repeated image of a body tumbling through space.

Like the passengers on the hijacked planes, Kubrick’s astronauts can phone home. One receives the message “See you next Wednesday,” a line quoted in every John Landis film. Landis’s career has been marked by fatal aerial catastrophe. His movie SPIES LIKE US deals with a team of idiots deployed by corrupt commanders to distract attention while a war is started. His first movie, SCHLOCK, features numerous parodies of the apemen from 2001.

Like the passengers of United 93, Dave Bowman destroys the hijacker, resulting finally in his own death — but this is played in stylised form, first as a flight through distorted, psychedelic landscapes, then as an accelerated aging process, then with the traditional death-bed. In a white room whose floor is illuminated panels like the sides of a skyscraper.

But at the foot of that death-bed, the monolith appears yet again, and once more we move inexorably towards its smooth surface, repeating yet again the collision with the WTC, an event which killed, among thousands of others, the sister of Marisa Berenson, who starred in Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON. She was also the wife of Anthony Perkins, best known for playing a knife-wielding killer who struck in disguise, and who appeared in Disney’s THE BLACK HOLE, which shares with 2001 a climax in which a passage through a space portal leads to a mysterious spiritual experience.

From the impact with the monolith, something new is born, but the movie is vague about what, exactly, can be expected from it…

In a way this is a thought experiment, to see how many meaningful-seeming coincidences can be drawn between an event and a film which actually preceded it by decades and could not have been influenced by it in any traditional cause-and-effect way. In a way it’s a parody of such academic exercises. It’s also inspired a bit by the fancy footwork in this remarkable piece.

Frock Opera

It’s a really nice effect (I wonder where they stole it from?) — a dark stage, with figures wearing illuminated stripes, forming antic human hieroglyphs, striking poses — then the lights come up — and the clothes are horrible.*

The next stage beyond the “vanity project” is the “delusional narcissism project” — one thinks, with an inward wince, of Guy Ritchie and Madonna’s SWEPT AWAY, the subject of a hilarious Bad Film Night involving Fiona and regular Shadowplayer David Wingrove some time back. I should write about those evenings — in fact, I’m going to.

While Baz Luhrmann’s AUSTRALIA was SO egregiously bad it could not actually be endured (a bad movie that intends to be FUN generally isn’t, whereas a bad movie that thinks it’s deep is likely to be a riot), necessitating the watching of THE MATCH KING to restore mental hygiene and belief in a few of cinema’s possibilities, MAHOGANY proved the Perfect Bad Film — maybe even better than THE OSCAR.

WHAT THIS THING IS –

This Thing is Diana Ross and partner/Svengali Berry Gordy’s folie a deux Delusional Narcissism Project, following one woman’s dream of being a fashion designer and how she eventually found herself as appendage to a male politician. It’s empowering! And anyway, the fashion industry is full of untrustworthy homosexuals, as the movie is shocked — SHOCKED! — to uncover.

It’s helpful for a truly bad film to have touches of quality, to illuminate its dankest depths more clearly — this one has David Watkin on photography, so it looks handsome. Watkin no doubt came along with regular collaborator Tony Richardson, who departed the film at some point in the process, at which point Berry Gordy suddenly discovered a fabulous talent for cinematic image-making, rather like how Diana Ross had already discovered a fabulous talent for designing clothes that stink.

Other good things — the song, which tormented the airwaves of my childhood for what seemed like several years, but which is actually quite nice — and this musical montage, apparently directed by the great Jack Cole (who did the musical numbers in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES), is quite something. This would seem to be Cole’s last gift to the world. And it features some proper clothes by actual designers (uncredited — but Issey Miyake seems like a possibility).

Diana herself is moderately effective in places, in an untutored kind of way… then she has some bizarre, horrible moments of would-be high drama, as when compelled to pose for snaps by psycho gay boyfriend Anthony Perkins while driving at 90mph along a deserted Italian overpass –

Yes, Perkins. In unwise tight jeans, he plays a former combat photographer who launches Diana upon the unsuspecting fashion world and gives her her trademark name: “What else is dark and shiny?” I’m naive enough to have thought his character’s impotence might be some combat-shock residue, but no mere post-traumatic stress could cause any red-blooded male to fail to get it up with Diana in the sack, not in her movie, so a more sinisterly aberrant explanation prevails. It’s all horribly homophobic… yet hysterical. If it were at all effective, it might have offended, but we were too busy crying with laughter. One wonders what Richardson and Watkin made of this side of the film, given their own natural proclivities. One could also wonder what Perkins was thinking, but some things are literally imponderable.

The real climax of the film is this fight, which David Wingrove called “the closetiest thing I’ve ever seen” — peculiar not so much for what it says about Perkins’ character, but what it seems to suggest about the all-man Billy Dee Williams…

Crumbs. Mind you, this is followed by Diana stripping at a crowded party and dripping candle wax over herself — very coyly filmed, but still an eye-opener conceptually. Just what was going on in the Ross-Berry relationship? I don’t want to wonder about that, but the film seems to require it of me.

*And it’s a given that all Hollywood films about fashion will have terrible clothes, even those made in periods when movie clothes were routinely chic and smashing — perhaps, as Hollywood versions of modern art are always faux Dali, and modern music is always faux Gershwin, modern fashions are always unwearable crap. An unwritten rule. So one shouldn’t blame Ross for merely following a time-honoured tradition.

Tin Starlight

It’s been an age-old frustration for many filmmakers that the camera eye can’t replicate all the wonders of the human eye. For instance, when we’re in a dim room, we can still look out the window and see the bright daylit world. Our eyes rarely if ever register the kind of overexposed glare seen so often in films (and often used to striking visual effect). The human iris has an amazing latitude, unmatched by any camera even today.

In THE TIN STAR, Anthony Mann and his collaborators tackle the problem, I think, by shooting interiors open to daylight. I may be wrong and they may be blasting vast amounts of electric light at the problem, but what it looks like to me is a roofless set. Must’ve looked pretty funny if you were there.

It does look a little strange to me onscreen, too. Although this shot, where the set has at least part of a ceiling, creates a more plausible contrast between light and shade. It’s often the way that pushing in the direction of realism results in strange stylisation. However, the technique allows a lot more interplay between indoors and out, dramatically useful in a story where Sheriff Tony Perkins feels the prying eyes of townsfolk watching him at all times…