A creepy, crawling, and slimy world of night visions, body horror, and psychosis, Eraserhead was the first feature-length film of the American surrealist David Lynch. It is dreamlike, immersive, and lucid even as it remains illogical and murky, willing to dive into its own darkness with pleased, decadent abandon. Like a pudgier version of a young Emil Cioran, Jack Nance plays Henry Spencer as a reclusive, paranoid introvert with serious romantic problems. The seductress-next-door, played by Judith Roberts, informs him one evening that his girlfriend, Mary X, has invited him to dinner with her family. The ensuing dinner is one of the most repulsive, unsettling family dinners imaginable, culminating with…
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Unraveling as a disturbed allegory eluding explanation, a satire of the unstated, a madcap domestic fantasy, Dogtooth is a provocative and peculiar film that pokes fun at the family as a modern, exclusive, deviant microcosm following its own rules and strictures. This modern Greek family, residing in a desolate exurbia of gated properties, is doubtless stranger than those families that come to mind as “typical”. But typical is an appearance, an image or a projection of the family with which Dogtooth begs to differ. If the cinema is the pristine medium of the illusory, then this film is one more illusion approaching what is not illusory—the reality of the family…
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Johnny Guitar is a sham Western, a risible and garish melodrama, and a guise for the boiling, salacious sexual tendencies of its characters, who are not what they appear to be. It is the last of these, as the meatiness and sweat hidden by the unserious platitudes of the genre, that makes Johnny Guitar an adroit film to those willing to look beneath its shiny, Saran-wrap surface. The obvious parallels to McCarthyism, in spite of what many critics have seen as the satirical value of this tidbit, are far less interesting than the meat of the film—for obvious reasons. The existence of contemporary political criticism, embedded within the film itself,…
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“Who among us keeps watch over this strange watchtower to warn the arrival of our new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?” In the placid, breezy fields of the abandoned camps that once housed millions of those soon to be dispatched to the crematoria, the filmmaker Alain Resnais alighted on a novel technique of documentary cinema serving as a precedent for later cinematic depictions of the Holocaust. Contrasting archival footage with tentative, revelatory tracking shots of the camps as they existed in 1956, more than a decade after their liberation, Night and Fog demands that the audience draw the connections between the contemptible past and the sunny…
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Thinking of the staid, halcyon clichés of the American 1950s, I could not help contrasting them with the underbelly of corruption obtaining in the same decade, when illicit activity and human lustfulness were as they have always been, but with more mendacity and concealment papered over by a culture touting its suburban harmony, its kid-friendliness, its tight-knit families and traditionalist values. It is this underbelly that L.A. Confidential, adapted from the novel by James Ellroy, explores and exploits with an impressive cast of characters that are true-to-type while affording varied, endearing portraits of law enforcement and the criminal underworld. The three primary characters—Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), Bud White (Russell Crowe),…
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An eccentric project of a little-known director with a Hollywood credit to his name, Amélie is all lightness and whimsy and enjoys basking in its own playfulness. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who had long wanted to make the film, made sure the balance between its self-mockery and playfulness were just right, so that it pulls off its silliness without seeming arch or preemptive. It tends to humor us as we humor it, inviting us to bask in its knowing but unselfconscious pleasures, like those of walking on a cloudless and sunny beach where gulls caw and drop their occasional feces. An actress whose puckish appearance of a gamine and small, impish features…
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“I had no father, I am like no father; / I have no brother, I am like no brother; / And this word ‘love,’ which graybeards call divine, / Be resident in men like one another / And not in me—I am myself alone.” –Richard, Duke of Gloucester The Duke of Gloucester, the son of the late Richard, Duke of York, gunning for the English crown with the kind of psychopathic ruthlessness making him a fit rival of the other merciless Shakespearean villain—Iago—this Richard of 3HenryVI is more creature than creator, in the terms of Friedrich Nietzsche. By the end of the play, he is murdering the titular king and…
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One of the common but unspoken phenomena to which humans everywhere are susceptible—especially those that have bottomed out after finding that life has very few stable guideposts for the individual—is that of existential despair, which takes as many forms as there are individuals. But while the forms are many, the phenomenon itself is constant; it underlies its various manifestations. It is not strictly universal, since not everyone experiences it—rather than a common malady such as the measles or the flu, it is a kind of despair available to those that have provoked the hidden foundations of their lives, that have been too curious about what lies beneath routine and the…
