This one is a doozy

Spent all day yestersday watching the Brett Kavanaugh sideshow, so my head isn’t exactly buzzing with film thoughts just now. Alexander Mackendrick taught a whole class based on the live editing of the Watergate hearings, but I don’t have anything like that.

On Twitter, Laura Ingraham managed to wrench her arm down from a Nazi salute long enough to type that this was “a performance, not a legal seminar.” “Performance,” is an interesting word in this context. My feeling, or one of them (along with nausea, horror, pity, anger) was that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was natural, real, not performing, interacting in a polite and pleasant manner with her questioners (none of whom were actual Republican committee members). Judge Brett Kavanaugh WAS giving a performance, one that certainly contained real emotional responses, but ones that weren’t necessarily what they appeared to be.

Students of acting might study the two Q&As, but I would think Kavanaugh’s weird, shouty, face-pulling performance would be most useful in a “what not to do” context. I kept asking myself if I were an innocent falsely accused, how would I appear? Not like this, I like to think, but who can really say? (I think he’s guilty, obviously, but the thought experiment seemed worthwhile.) Accused of anything, we all tend to feel a little guilty, we all try to ACT like an innocent person, which of course can make our denials less convincing. We might reach for spurious arguments, and I suppose we might even misstate the case against us, or lie about details, in a misguided attempt to cast off suspicion. Kavanaugh definitely did all of the above. It COULD be the response of an innocent but badly flustered man. But then I look at Ford, and I believe her.

The man was clearly on the verge of a complete meltdown, but other than that it was hard to make out what his emotions SIGNIFIED. I think the fury that he led off with was, to some extent, excuse the expression, trumped up. Performative. He’d been told he needed to show defiance and righteous anger so he attempted to produce them by yelling and by stressing every single word in a demented forty-five minute tirade. I think he WAS angry but was straining to SHOW it, to channel the emotion the way an actor might use stage fright or first night nerves and transmute it into the emotion required for the scene. I think, personally, the anger came from an outraged sense of entitlement: how DARE anyone question his right to be SCOTUS (what a horrible acronym. Uglier than POTUS, even.)Marlon Brando said something to the effect that an actor might summon up a genuine emotion but it might still not be suitable if it were expressed in an ugly way. Well, we know what he means now. Kavanaugh’s sniffing, tongue-lolling performance was extremely grotesque. People under strain often are. But what was the tongue literally in the cheek about? Or lolling around his underlip? Dry mouth? The bottled water was right there. Even Olivier at his most salacious would have shied away from Kavanaugh’s attempts to lick the entire underside of his face. It was often accompanied by his voice cracking and him tearing up a little, or sounding like it (no actual tears), and this always happened when he talked about his family. But was this sorrow for his family, self-pity about being humiliated in front of his family, or shame about being caught and exposed? Or all three? The extreme WEIRDNESS of the particular manifestation made me guess at some conflicted feelings or cognitive dissonance — perhaps from guilt.

There was at times a resemblance to the hunchbacked executioner in BLAZING SADDLES (can’t uncover who the actor is*), who seems to be imitating Charles Laughton a bit. Same sense that his tongue is a possessed, writhing intruder worming around trying to escape. Like some tiny voice at the far back of his head were trying to seize control of the vocal equipment, vainly striving to resuscitate a vestigial, long-atrophied relationship between tongue and truth, and blubber a desperate confession.

*Apparently it’s Robert Ridgely, as “Boris.” Thanks to Jez Connolly for the tip-off.

Quote of the Day: Days and Nights in the Forest

“A LUMINOUS AFTERNOON in the black-and-white forest. The monster, played by Boris Karloff, pauses as he hears the sweet notes of a violin. His face lights, he lumbers through the woods, following the sound. He comes to a cosy cottage among the trees, very gingerbread. Inside, the violin is being played by a blind hermit, who is being played by O.P. Heggie. The monster approaches, and pounds on the door.”

~ from Jimmy the Kid, by Donald E. Westlake.

Well, since we just had Otto Preminger Week, seems like a good idea to name-check that other O.P., surname Heggie.

(Actually, Westlake conflates two scenes: the daylight forest above, and the hermit encounter which happens at dusk.)

The parody of the blind hermit scene in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, with an exuberant Gene Hackman in the Heggie role, is so very fine it almost ruins the original. But Mel Brooks clearly loves the James Whale movies he’s satirising, so there’s no real damage done. It may be a difficulty of the parody genre — if the filmmaker doesn’t love what s/he’s mocking, the spoof rarely hits the right notes. If they do love it, the parody won’t have bite. In Brooks’ case he’s not out to destroy the original, he’s just riffing on it, and so we end up with a pleasing comedy version of ’30s Universal horror, rather than any kind of deconstruction of it. Whereas BLAZING SADDLES attacks the ailing western the way Gary Cooper attacks Jack Lord in MAN OF THE WEST, not only delivering a punitive beating, but tearing the pants off it as well.

Euphoria #37: My Name is Jim

 

Kieran Thomson suggests one particular moment from Mel Brooks’ BLAZING SADDLES — and why not? Mel Brooks has given the world an enormous amount of euphoric hysteria during his stay on this planet, and about a third of it can be found in this one film.

At age eleven, Kieran is our youngest euphoric Shadowplayer yet, but he is wise beyond his years, having been the subject of intense scientific experimentation during his development, rather like DOC SAVAGE, MAN OF BRONZE, or Carl Boehm in PEEPING TOM. Kieran’s dad, a mad pharmacist, has wisely kept the child-proof caps on, but has dosed his offspring with many kinds of Psychotropic Cinema (Cocteau and Lon Chaney Snr at age 5), which may produce dizziness, seizures, severe itching, difficulty in breathing, swollen lips, abnormal body movements, profuse sweating or excessive excitement.

And it’s WORKED.

The exact Euphoric Moment cited by Kieran, and included in this clip, is this exchange:

“Are we awake?”

“We’re not sure. Are we… black?”

Weird how the studio refused to let Richard Pryor play Bart here, so Cleavon Little gets a shot at immortality. Either he was considered better box office because of VANISHING POINT, or Pryor just scared the crap out of the suits at Warner Bros.

Gig Young was originally cast as Jim, the Waco Kid, because Brooks naively thought a genuine alcoholic would be more effective. Once he realised that there was nothing funny about Young’s condition (Young subsequently committed suicide after murdering his wife) he offered the part to Gene Wilder, who’s almost as atypical a cowboy star as Cleavon Little.

Wilder deserves special honour for his work in THE PRODUCERS, BONNIE AND CLYDE, and WILLIE WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. The latter is not a great film, but Wilder is monumentally impressive in it. Rather than play the part with a smile and wink to the audience (“I’m a good guy really”), Wilder is satanic and psychopathic throughout. I get a sugar rush of evil just looking at him. No wonder Marilyn Manson homaged this movie in a music vid.

Wilder’s oft-forgotten cameo in BONNIE AND CLYDE features maybe the best, and almost certainly the longest… comic pause… in history, a skill Wilder refined in EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK, where his entire performance is basically one long pause punctuated by short bursts of speech and motion.