Orgy Orgy

Frederic Raphael’s Eyes Wide Open, his memoir of writing (you guessed it) EYES WIDE SHUT for Kubrick is a pretty enjoyable read, even if FR is a bit of a stuffed chemise. On meeting Kubrick he finds it hard to judge how intelligent the man is. This reminded me that John Fowles says the same thing about meeting William Wyler for the film THE COLLECTOR. Literary brains struggling to make sense of guys who think in pictures.

Anyway, at one point, as Freddie is struggling to believably update Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle orgy for the early twenty-first century (still the twentieth, I guess, as they wrote it), Kubrick suggests figuring out exactly who the people are attending this thing.

FR sends SK a document he’s written, purporting to be “an extract from a highly classified FBI report on an association which had begun among certain admirers of the late President Kennedy. These people were said mostly to be rich and hostile to the line taken by the Democratic Party once it had been captured by ‘hicks.’ The fraternity admired JFK’s impudent defiance of public morality, while appearing to conform to it, and adhered to a group whose habits were outwardly conformist and who, at the same time, practiced among themselves a completely hedonistic way of life.”

The document posits sumptuous orgies and diabolical methods of enforcing secrecy by this society, known as “The Free.” None of it’s very convincing, to me, anyway, but it does tie in with the world’s dark imaginings about Jeffrey Epstein and co.

Kubrick called Raphael immediately upon receipt of the document.

SK: Where’d you get this stuff?

FR: About The Free? Where do you think?

SK: This is Classified Material, how’d you get hold of it? I need you to tell me.

FR: You’re kidding.

SK: I don’t think so. Where’d you find this stuff? Did you hack into some FBI computer by chance or what?

FR: Hack in? Are you crazy? I can’t hack into my own work without help. You asked me to give you some background on Ziegler and company. I gave it.

SK: Freddie, I need you to tell me totally honestly where you got this stuff. This is potentially…

FR: Stanley, totally honestly I got it where I get everything: out of my head.

SK: You telling me you made this up? […] How did you do that?

FR: Making things up’s what I do for a living.

As Raphael tells Kubrick elsewhere in the book, “You’re so paranoid you make me feel perfectly normal.”

I like this idea of a paranoid Kubrick, however accurate or otherwise FR’s recollection of their conversations is. Makes me imagine Kubrick awakening one morning and asking himself, “Did I fake the moon landings?” Makes me think he might have enjoyed ROOM 237, even though his brother-in-law Jan Harlan thought it was all a load of rubbish.

The most paranoid Kubrick theory might suggest that he was murdered because EYES WIDE SHUT got too close to the truth, thanks to Raphael’s inadvertently accurate erotic imagination. Although I have also posited the notion, unseriously, that Kubrick faked his own death to escape the bad notices. (Only one outsider we know of saw him dead; he’s buried in the grounds of his house. Much easier to finagle than a lunar mission.)

I find EYES WIDE SHUT rather plodding, always a risk of the “closed narrative” where we follow one character about the whole time, and he’s in every scene. But I like that it’s a Christmas movie, and the Epstein case has given it a whole new lease of life. Though that may start to fade as there don’t seem to be many more horrifying revelations to come from the case, unless I’m speaking too soon.

“Horror Films No Longer Had to Make Sense”

An interesting observation by Stephen R. Bissette when I interviewed him for my Bill Rebane piece — the understanding that seemed to pervade horror movie makers in the early eighties that logic and coherent plotting was obsolete, that it was potentially scarier, and easier, to just throw random shit at the audience, to baffle and disorient them with impossible plot twists and contradictions.

This was so widely understood — whether audiences LIKED it or not, and I think audiences often get cross about this stuff, even if it works on them emotionally — that Bill Rebane, who was hardly at the centre of the horror genre and professed not to be a fan of it, could apply it wholeheartedly to his DEMONS OF LUDLOW, and Stanley Kubrick could impose it on his adaptation (with novelist Diane Johnson) on THE SHINING. (Stephen King’s novels are fairly coherent but he usually depends on the forces of evil, when the story is supernatural, having vaguely-defined and conveniently-expanding powers.) The novel already mingled telepathy, violent psychotic breakdown, and ghosts, which is nearly triple voodoo, but Kubrick inserted the weird time-slip material, deciding that the Overlook shouldn’t blow up, and eventually rejecting the conventional closeup-of-a-bee ending he’d shot where the Overlook manager is somehow an avatar of the hotel — which didn’t make any sense but feels like other horror movies.

And when John Carpenter and Debra Hill realised they couldn’t sell THE FOG as a restrained, spooky ghost story, it was easy enough just to add a few zombie scares that didn’t exactly make sense, and they could be confident this wouldn’t stop the film being commercial.

Does this date back to SUSPIRIA? Who invented the incoherent narrative? It seems to make sense that it would be an Italian, though I wouldn’t put it past the Japanese — but it would be less likely to cross over.

(Afterthought: THE TENANT isn’t logical either — it predates SUSPIRIA — but doesn’t seem like it had the same broad influence.)

In DEEP RED, there’s a murder mystery with an answer that kind of makes sense, though for a moment there the hero has to be quite convinced that the killer was someone who was with him at the time of the first murder, an unbreakable alibi one would have thought. But in SUSPIRIA, randomness rules. The giallo knifings aren’t really motivated by anything in the story, which turns out to be about witchcraft, the first time that the earlier Italian Gothic horror genre infected the giallo — unless I’m missing something.

Argento’s dream illogic is his second-best trait, below his flamboyance — for me, now that he’s lost the wild visual imagination he’s lost everything. His dreams are amazingly banal. Men with knives chase women. And of course, he’s rewriting his dreams to make them about sexy girl victims instead of himself as victim, making them more commercial and more banal. By rendering the situations preposterous, overheated and surreal, he at least frames them in an unusual way.

The abandonment of logic is the second major step in the evolution of horror movie narratives. And the first was an Italian development also: in BLACK SABBATH, Mario Bava presented what seems to be the first horror movie with an unhappy ending –in fact, three of them. Previous horror movies might be a bit tragic — we feel sorry for Larry Talbot each time he perishes, at least until he’s done it once too often — but the ending was always about reestablishing the natural order, as in a Shakespeare tragedy. Mario Bava realised that was making things LESS SCARY, and why would you want that? And without the Breen Office or a similar censor imposing a morally uplifting The End, Finis or Fine, why should you let the viewer off the hook?

Similarly, even in a dark, violent story in which terrible things happen and evil wins, a logical, sequential story is somewhat reassuring. Pull that rug away!

Here’s an image that ties in directly with yesterday’s post…

Of pre-Argento horror movies, DEMENTIA and CARNIVAL OF SOULS feel somewhat “non-Cartesian,” as he would say, but their narrative frameworks put the weird events into some kind of structure that does make sense, even if the precise events we have to watch are somewhat inexplicable. The endings wrap things up neatly rather than exploding them in our faces.

Next question: can we imagine a next stage in the evolution of horror that would make the films generally more terrifying, less reassuring? I can only think of ways of intensifying the insanity, which isn’t a paradigm shift, just a small evolutionary step.

There’s also been the opposite movement towards realism, where you get HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and his more melodramatic cousins.

And the most interesting combined approach might be THE EXORCIST, which tries to make everything seem forcefully real (like HENRY), follows an accepted mythology (like DRACULA), AND has a crazy, why-is-this-happening randomness and a willingness to let plot points be obscure which anticipates Argento and his goofy followers.

If anyone has a great idea for how to transform the medium, let me know!

Catalogue of Cruelty

I picked up secondhand Blu-rays of THE SHINING and PSYCHO and decided to look at the extra features, even though I think they’re basically the same as the unwatched ones I had on my DVDs. Well, I’d watched Vivian Kubrick’s The Making of The Shining. But not with her commentary.

I blame Tom Cruise for getting Vivian “Squirt” Kubrick into Scientology, and I blame Scientology for her now getting into crazy rightwing memes including antisemitic shit. If you want to have The Great Stanley K’s most misanthropic views confirmed, just look at how short a span it took for the progeny of JEW SUSS director Veit Harlan to get back into Nazism — two generations. With a Jewish son/dad in between. [CORRECTION – Stanley married Veit’s niece.]

In her commentary, VK sounds incredibly young, which she was when she made the doc — just finished school — but couldn’t have been when she recorded the VO. So maybe she’s just preternaturally and eternally young and naive. Whatever, she’s gone down a very nasty rabbithole (or into a sinister maze) since then. Her commentary is fairly informative.

Steadicam inventor/operator Garrett Brown’s commentary on the main feature is super-informative — it really illuminates SK’s process, in a sympathetic way. Kubrick (and everyone else) biography John Baxter’s part of it is less so. He starts off by asserting that the rolling credits are an oft-used Kubrick trope — I struggle to think of any mature Kubrick film outside of THE SHINING that uses them.

I *think* Brown may be mistaken when he explains the impossible high-angle shot of Wendy and Danny in the maze. I’d long puzzled over this, and found the explanation in a later SHINING doc not on this disc — Kubrick moved the entire full-scale maze to a plaza in front of a nearby tower block. Brown claims instead that he only moved the centre of the maze, and optically inserted it into a shot of the miniature. This is what a reasonable person might do, but I don’t see strong evidence that Kubrick was entirely reasonable.

Firstly, the model maze Jack’s looking at does not resemble the maze in the aerial shot. Apart from the fact that it’s clearly been rotated 90 degrees, it’s just a different maze. Totally different layout. Which ties in with the geographic tricksiness of the Overlook sets and lends weight to those who see the “bad continuity” as part of a deliberate scheme, its origins and purpose still a total mystery. (It would not have been more work to ensure the model of the maze matched the full-scale one. The map of the maze is completely different also.)

To zoom in on an optically combined model and life-sized maze, Kubrick would have had to optically enlarge the film, with resulting increase of grain (which would already have been amplified by the necessary duping) which I don’t see. The matching of the shadows is perfect — well, Kubrick would certainly have gone to that trouble. But since he had built a full-size maze out of wooden frames and chicken wire and real leaves, moving it to another location would not be hugely expensive or difficult, so I can easily imagine him doing it. Sure, it’s an insane amount of work for one shot, but Stanley’s not the one doing the work. And the shot is worth it.

Seeing Wendy Carlos and her cats was fun, and hearing unused tracks from THE SHINING and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE was illuminating — one piece, “Boulderado”, written in advance of the shoot, intended to convey the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, has a Miklos Rozsa BEN-HUR feel (only on the Moog) wholly out step with the finished film. Delightful.

But my favourite extra was the documentary View from the Overlook — costume designer Milena Canonero says something that genuinely made me see the film anew. Kubrick didn’t want a lot of wear and tear on the costumes, which good designers usually apply to make them look used. She got the sense that he wanted a sort of catalogue model look.

Somehow it’s there. You can’t unsee it. THE SHINING takes place in a leisurewear universe. This mainly feels true of the early scenes, before the Torrences take up residence.

Oh, Vivian Kubrick points out the nasty seventies carpets in the Gold Room (along with her own presence as extra, the girl in black to the left of Jack’s butt, below). Which raises a point. The carpet is still there when Nicholson strolls into a party from the 1920s. And when Wendy sees the party comprised of skeletons. So the room hasn’t reverted to the past, which would be one possible interpretation of what’s going on. THE SHINING projects a kind of time-warp vibe, all but confirmed in the closing shot (top). But here we see the room populated by celebrants of a bygone era, but the room itself is anachronistically late-70s. It ties in with Kubrick staging Alex’s biblical fantasies in CLOCKWORK ORANGE in cheesy Hollywood manner, down to Alex’s centurion speaking in an American accent, “because I thought that’s how he’d imagine it.” So the Midnight and the Stars and You party imports a whole crowd scene of bygone guests and staff, but doesn’t remember to redesign the carpet, because Jack wouldn’t think of that detail.

Or, you know, you can consider it an oversight. At the Overlook.

I might have something to say about PSYCHO’s extras too…