If Mynona hadn’t existed, somebody would have had to invent him. And they did.

For more than 2,000 years leading up to Mynona (AKA Salomo Friedlaender, 1871-1946), since Moses and his tablets broke the bond between God (or the gods) and the world, leaving us only the Word, Western thought was on a collision course with…itself. Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, carefully studied by Mynona, was the ultimate attempt at damage control. He presented an intellectual system that accepted the mind’s divorce from phenomena (nature, to put it less technically) even as it built bridges among other minds via universal a priori concepts. Among them were certain capacities of the imagination. Indeed imagination was the only thing that could rescue objective reality from the status of an illusion. The independent truth of the world couldn’t be proven, but it could be intuited and expressed. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, poets and artists, as ministers of intuition and expression, had glorious and heroic work to do, and they took it on with gusto. For them, exploring the contours of feeling and translating their discoveries into language was like coming to a vast banquet. 

But they discovered, again and again, they had bitten off more than they could chew.

By the time Mynona got to the table, the food was fairly picked over yet edible, even exotic, but heartburn was on the way. Described as a philosopher by day and a literary absurdist by night, the prolific, self-invented Mynona, which is a reversal of anonym, produced a handful of serious philosophical works (as Friedlaender) and a ream of so-called grotesques (under his pen name). These were fantastic or ludicrous stories, of which the novella “The Creator” is probably the most prominent. Prominent is an overstatement because the volume of the same title, published by the Wakefield Press, is the only collection of the author’s writing available in English. It contains just two items, the novella and one of the grotesques, “The Wearisome Wedding Night.”  In spite of the waves of translation from German, in the 1920s, 50s, 70s, and 2000s, only a handful of his stories had previously appeared, in a few anthologies.

With their debt to Poe and E. T. A. Hoffman, the stories are certainly weird enough and sufficiently overwrought. At least the Dadaists and Surrealists who praised them thought so. But by the time Mynona wrote “The Creator” in 1920, the great age of poetic enfranchisement was past. Schiller’s, and Goethe’s confidence in the poet’s capacity to unite inner and outer reality, and even Hölderlin’s desperate reach for transcendent realms had left in their wake the goblins of the unconscious and the stark imperative of the will.  This was the Janus face of the modern imagination. Mynona literalized the relation. 

“You are a closet, a big closet, with intricate Elizabethan locks made of brass. 

“The inside is lined with baize so that nothing can be heard, a place where Mozart rehearsals are held.” 

Who talks that way?  I never know what to expect from telephone imagist, Barbara Steele.  Over the hiss and crackle of our weak connection, she might predict my future or cast some witchy spell — minus any noticeable segue, she once declared, “Flying at night, Danielle, is like being a sperm again.”

As Charles Manson (Steve Railsback) is being led from the courtroom for the last time at the end of the 1976 miniseries Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (George DiCenzo) tells him, “Everyone’s already forgotten about you, Charlie.”

Well, not exactly, in part thanks to that miniseries. In the 45 years since members of the Manson Family brutally slaughtered seven people on the nights of August 8th and 9th, 1969, Charles Manson has spawned more books, articles, films, TV specials, underground comics and t-shirts than any other criminal in history, with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler. Manson has become a one-man industry, which is pretty amazing for a supposed “mass murderer” never convicted of killing anyone.  He’s been mythologized, fetishized, exploited, and commercialized to a point at which Manson himself barely exists anymore, as a number of the films below prove. The public is hungry for anything with the name “Manson” attached to it, and the media is happy to oblige (which is part of the reason Manson is no longer allowed to give TV interviews). From the moment he and members of his family (Tex Watson, Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, etc.) were charged with the Tate/LaBianca murders, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon. Films with a Mansonian angle (Deathmaster, I Drink your Blood) were rushed into production. Films that were nearly finished at the time of the trial were given a quick rewrite to include a messianic hippie character. Some didn’t go that far, merely changing the poster art, the tagline, or the title to cash in on the Tate/LaBianca killings. And the trial wasn’t even over yet before the first quickie exploitation cheapie based specifically and directly on the case was rushed into theaters. It both does and doesn’t make sense that Hollywood would want to capitalize on the case, given it was their own who were killed, and those who weren’t were paranoid they’d be next. But there you go. Guess the story was just too freaky to leave alone, what with cute hippie chick killers, beautiful and glamorous movie star victims, a desert compound, orgies, drugs, a messiah, a rock’nroll connection, and an apocalyptic scheme.

Dark Passage is as uneven as the streets of San Francisco. A hallucinatory series of vignettes, it induces a disorientating unsteadiness, like vertigo. The largely faceless hero, whose character is almost as much a tabula rasa as his visage, encounters a handful of malicious predators and an equal number of selfless benefactors. The only thing he never encounters is indifference; no one ever just ignores him and lets him alone. When he hides in the apartment of a woman he has just met, the first person to come and knock on the door is his arch nemesis, the woman who framed him for murder. Even a guy who passes in the street and asks for a light peers at him with undue interest, demanding, “Say, don’t I know you?”

Dark Passage might be the most stylized, fantastical version of this type of noir city: a claustrophobic dreamscape where nothing is random, accidental or insignificant. Anyone who lives in a large city knows that crowds and close quarters make people shut each other out; the freedom from scrutiny is one advantage that draws people to urban life. Yet Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) just can’t escape notice. Delmer Daves’s film, with a script by David Goodis (from his own novel), is unusual in that it creates this paranoiac mood within a real city rather than a hermetic studio set. Perhaps only in San Francisco, where Hitchcock would achieve a similar effect in Vertigo, could an actual metropolis look so much like the inside of someone’s mind.

Falsely imprisoned for killing his wife, Vincent Parry escapes from San Quentin curled up inside a barrel. First we see his fingers hooked over the rim; then we see, from his point of view, the world spinning in the barrel’s mouth as he rolls down a hill. The first-person or subjective camera used off and on throughout the first half of the film serves the purpose of keeping Parry’s face unseen, and creates an uncomfortably trapped feeling for the viewer. Daves works hard to avoid the plodding quality to which the subjective camera was prone: he throws in lots of zipping pans and fast action, as when it feels like YOU, the audience, are pummeling the nosy jerk in a convertible who picks up Parry and then asks too many questions. Mainly, though, the gimmick serves as usual to prove how different human vision is from the camera’s eye.

But the artificiality of the style suits the bizarre twists of the story, which proceeds with dreamlike illogic. The first big twist to swallow is Parry’s rescue by Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), a stranger who formed a conviction of his innocence at his trial (because his case resembled that of her father, who was wrongfully imprisoned for killing his wife) and who conveniently manages to find and pick him up. Irene is a guardian angel with 200 G’s, who calmly accepts Parry’s explanations of three murders he looks guilty of but really didn’t commit. She doesn’t bat an eye when he tells her that the real murderer, Madge Rapf (Agnes Moorhead) fell out of a high window while he was alone in a room with her. “That’s not all you called to tell me, is it?” Irene prompts him, as if he’d just told her he had a dentist appointment.

Valerie Solanas was thirty when she arrived in Greenwich Village in 1966. She’d been a teenage runaway and a drifter for some time, and she was quite damaged by the time she appeared. She grew up in New Jersey, where, according to a sister, their bartender father regularly molested her. Later, when her mother and a despised stepfather couldn’t handle her rebelliousness, they sent her to live with her grandfather who, she said, tried to beat it out of her. She ran away at fifteen and would profess a hatred of men for the rest of her life. Over the next few years she had a married sailor’s child who was taken away from her for adoption, but she still managed to graduate high school and do well at the University of Maryland, earning honors in psychology. After adding a year of grad school at the University of Minnesota she hit the road again, a hobohemian tomboy waif who panhandled and hooked her way to Berkeley.

Throughout his long and storied career, Boris Karloff played any number of mad scientists whose diabolical experiments (and the inevitable string of murders they required) were aimed at gaining  some form of wicked personal glory. He wanted his own unstoppable zombie army, say, or the means to destroy those critics who had laughed at him and called his ideas “insane,” or he just wanted to rule the world.  

But around 1940 he starred in a cluster of films in which his mad scientist character wasn’t mad at all, but was only trying to do what he could to benefit all mankind. Unfortunately these sane and noble doctors more often than not found they were working in a mad world, and were destroyed for their efforts. They make for rare instances in which the King of Horror plays a sympathetic role and it is the world around him (and all those stupid meddling fools he’s trying to help) that are the real kings of horror.

In the first of these films, 1939’s The Man They Couldn’t Hang, Karloff plays a medical researcher  who devises a new form of anesthesia. By covering the body in ice cubes, see, and using a mechanical heart to pump cold liquid through the veins, it’s possible to reduce the body’s functions to nil—essentially killing the patient—while still being able to revive the patient at some later point without any tissue damage. This would mean a great leap forward for surgery. Operating on a living body, he explains, is a bit like trying to fix a car engine while it’s still running. But if you shut the engine off, you can take it apart, fix what needs fixing, put it back together and have it running as good as new. Same with working on an ostensibly dead patient—a surgeon can take his time, do a careful job, and not have to worry about racing the clock.

Unfortunately his first human trial of the technique (with an eager and willing assistant as the experimental subject) is interrupted when his meddling nurse (also the subject’s fiancee) runs to the cops to report that the doctor is murdering someone.  

Well, the experiment is ruined and Karloff is put on trial, convicted by a stupid lawyer and stupider judge and jury, and sentenced to hang.    

Following his execution Karloff is revived using his new technique. Instead of using that evidence to prove the validity of his theory to the world (or even using this second chance to further his research), he goes into hiding and turns his old house into a giant mousetrap which he then uses to exact revenge against all those who convicted him. Which I guess is what you get.

In April 1964, Lenny Bruce managed to get himself busted for obscenity twice in one week, and in one location: the Cafe Au Go Go, Howard and Ella Solomon’s new coffeehouse in the basement at 152 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. He got the Solomons busted as well. Getting arrested was almost routine for Bruce by 1964. He’d been doing it regularly since 1961. His comedy had made him effectively an enemy of the state.

It had to have been around 1959, half way through my college life. The Penn humor mag (do such things still exist?) had invited Jean Shepherd and Shel Silverstein to talk. I don’t know why I was part of this, I wasn’t an editor at the mag, though they had an office two doors down from the student newspaper and I was good friends with at least one of the editors.

Shepherd and Silverstein must have come to Philly by train. I remember a few of us driving them to 30th St. Station, I guess to return to NY on the PRR, though the memory feels like we were doing something else.

Who was driving? Anyway, Silverstein (not known yet for his best work, mostly for cartoons in Playboy, etc.) was holding onto the lowered window in the back seat and yelling “Slow down, oh shit,” mildly terrified by our erratically rapid automotive pace along Market St.

Shepherd probably said nothing. Earlier (or later?), sitting on a sofa in someone’s living room, he looked regal and removed and said nothing much then, either. That was his style off-air. He put-up-with.

Nearly seventy years after his death, Adolf Hitler has become a one-man nedia empire bigger than Oprah Winfrey, inspiring countless books, articles, analyses, TV shows,  feature films, documentaries, comedies, toys, cartoon references, and songs. One would have to imagine that Hitler wouldn’t find this at all surprising. He might have been surprised, however, to see the first feature drama to take a serious look at his rise to power released while he was still alive.   

Directed by John Farrow (Tarzan Escapes, The Big Clock) and released by Paramount in 1944, The Hitler Gang remains one of the most fascinating films made about Hitler for several reasons. Opening at the close of WWI with a blind and bedridden Hitler in an army hospital following a gas attack, the film immediately (via two army doctors) establishes him as a paranoid with a persecution complex. Within five minutes we see where the famous Charlie Chaplin mustache came from, and watch as he becomes a military snitch in order to support a coup to overthrow the new republic.  Five minutes in and we already have a clear and unsavory portrait of who Hitler is and how he operates. From that point on the film, at an equally brisk clip, follows Hitler’s rise (with a blend of charisma, deception, blackmail and blunt force) through the ranks of both the ragtag NSDAP and the German political scene at large. Along the way we’re introduced to Hess, Himmler, Goering and Goebbels. We see how Nazi ideology was formed, the Beer Hall Putsch, his stretch in prison, how he finally grabbed supreme power, all the highlights. The pace of the film slows only briefly at the halfway point to take an uncomfortable look at Hitler’s unwholesome sexual obsession with his niece, and how members of his inner circle tricked him into killing her in order to get his mind back on the business at hand. 

The first thing that fascinated me about the film given when it was made was how historically accurate it was. Although ultimately it may operate like one, this is by no means a traditional propaganda film, and certainly bears no resemblance to the other anti-Hitler films of the time. There is no exaggeration, no overt editorializing, no myths or outright lies (though some events and back room discussions—as well as the fate of Hitler’s niece—are still the object of some debate among historians). Only at the very end does the stentorian voiceover appear to announce that Hitler is a very bad man who must be destroyed. Prior to that, it’s merely an historical drama and the audience is left to make up its own mind based on the story.  No, it’s not a sympathetic portrait — the film makes it perfectly clear that Hitler was an insane, delusional, and dangerous man. But Scarface, Little Ceaser, and Public Enemy weren’t intended to be sympathetic portraits either. Not in so many words, anyway.  

That’s the other fascinating thing about  Farrow’s film. Any resemblance between The Hitler Gang and the gangster films of a decade earlier is wholly intentional. The title itself tells us that. Hitler is Scarface, an unbalanced nobody with dreams of glory who uses his personal charisma to surround himself with conniving thugs and snatches power by whatever means are handy. (And along the way he also fosters an unhealthy obsession for a younger female relative). Farrow plays this out beautifully, even filming a number of scenes that directly echoed the gangster classics. He must have been very grateful that the historical record played into his hands so well. The only thing the record didn’t offer him was the requisite comeuppance at the end, though he would have had it had he waited a few months. As things stand the film was forced to close with the tide of the war turned in Europe and Allied forces closing in on Berlin, with a Hitler who was (like any proper cinematic gangster) clearly doomed, but still defiant.   

Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938) is a film filled with miraculously perfect comic line readings, and many of them are delivered by Charlie Ruggles as the oft-befuddled Major Horace Applegate, who enters the film over a low (not apple) gate, trying to correct Katharine Hepburn’s Susan Vance as to the time. “Pardon me, the time is 8:10,” he insists, and then he gets stuck astride the gate for a moment. He is wearing a goatee and a Tyrolean hat with a small feather and his light checkered coat clashes dramatically with his dark checkered vest. This is a farce, and so Ruggles’s character even dresses funny, and this is fun but unnecessary, for Ruggles’s stage-trained timing is more than enough to get laughs. When Susan asks who he is, The Major gets confused and dithers, “I’m 8:10,” but quickly corrects himself and announces his own name with a flourish.

The Major is the ultimate Charlie Ruggles performance because it gathers in all of his best bits, the way he lingers over his fussy catchphrase, “Oh my, my, my,” the way his voice breaks like an adolescent for comic effect, and the way he gets all caught up in a verbal ball of yarn and then has to somehow disentangle himself. At dinner, he tries to draw out Cary Grant’s distracted professor David, to no avail, and the funny thing about The Major is that he’s so pedantic yet so suggestible. After observing Susan and David rushing all over the place during dinner, he rises to face his hostess Mrs. Elizabeth Carlton-Random (May Robson) and asks, “Shall we run?” They gallop out the door, and once outside, Ruggles’s timing and emphasis is at its height as he does leopard mating cries and mistakes a real leopard cry for his hostess’s attempt at replicating one. “That’s fine, Elizabeth,” he says (he almost sings the line), before catching sight of the leopard and then hurrying Mrs. Random back into the house. 

He was born in 1886, and yes, Ruggles was his real name, a name that promised comic delights to come (his brother Wesley went on to be a very fine comic film director). In his youth, his mother was shot and killed by a burglar. After that bereavement, Ruggles tried to please his father by studying to become a doctor, but he eventually went on the stage and had success in Battling Butler, which was later made into a silent film by Buster Keaton, and Queen High, which was made into a film in 1930 with Ruggles repeating his role as T. Boggs Johns opposite blustery Frank Morgan (Ruggles would often be paired in tandem with another flustered character actor, usually Roland Young or Edward Everett Horton). In Queen High, Ruggles is a serious, rather pained presence amid the musical comedy, and his big number, “I Love the Girls in My Own Peculiar Way,” details his love of murdering women! (he does sometimes visually resemble Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux).

On trial for murder after a series of bombings, Ravachol attempted to give the following speech, not to deny his guilt, but to accept and explain it. According to contemporary accounts, he was cut off after a few words, and the speech was never delivered. He was guillotined shortly afterwards.

You can go back as far as you like through recorded history, and one thing will make itself obvious. No matter what era, what society you’re talking about on what continent, no matter how wise and just the leadership, no matter how robust the economy, no matter how good-looking the populace, there will always be one person, man or woman, who will take a look around with a slight sneer, put his hands on his hips and say “Y’know, this really sucks.”

Sigmund Freud explained quite neatly why such ornery bastards exist in his 1929 thought experiment, Civilization and Its Discontents.

Civilization, he argues, is by nature both an external and internal control mechanism—an overarching super-ego that lays down rules to restrain fundamental, natural human impulses toward lust, aggression, and greed, and punishments for those who don’t play the game. If you want to take advantage of civilization’s benefits—a ready supply of food and water, police protection, 24-hour Greek diners, and the like—then you must follow the rules. If you don’t, you will be removed from civilization one way or another (imprisonment, exile, execution). Over time (and in theory) the threat of punishment becomes internalized and everyone lives together in peace and harmony as a matter of course.