Great Zilches of History
Film is light. There are times, though, when that light may take on a Stygian cast, burning with a flamme noire severity, a weird and otherworldly keenness. Or it may burn lurid and loud — especially if it’s a very old film, acting like a séance that summons the unruly dead. The darkness in cinema best typified by that form we call film noir is in its essence an extension of the peculiarly American darkness of Edgar Allan Poe.
Early, nitrate-based film stock, with its twinkling mineral core, gives Poe’s crepuscular light its time to shine and thereby illuminate the world. No longer held in the solitary confinement of a page of reproduced text or an image, frozen, rendered in paint or ink. Poe’s singularly tormented vision is finally written alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts; into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational thing from one’s mind. A Black & White image flipped into negative makes black fire, or black sunlight such as illumines Nosferatu’s Transylvanian forests, through which a box-like carriage rattles at Mack Sennett speed. But with the slightest underexposure, a little dupey degradation of the print, or even a little imagination (such collaboration is not discouraged), this liquid blackness will spread everywhere and anywhere, the most luminous pestilence known to creation. Be it in the laughing nightmare of Fleischer cartoons of old (Out of the Inkwell, indeed) or John Alton’s vision of the night, we are left to wonder: is daylight burning out the corner of a building, or is it the blackness of the building which is eating into the sky?
As with many such questions, film permits us no easy answer. We are simply to watch as the characters smudge. As their shadows pulsate and flicker, emanate out beyond themselves. But if Poe represents the loss of control over one’s existence and the ensuing panic, then cinema, consciously or not, takes existential dread as a given.
God, a vague and unseen deity, died at the moment cinema was born, replaced by a new celestial order. Saints and prophets made poor film characters, giving off the feeling of having stepped out of a stained glass window, flat, Day-Glo icons moving uncomfortably through three-dimensional space. Movies rather rejoiced in dirt and rags, texture and imperfection, so that the most lackluster clown easily outperformed all the icon messiahs. At 45 minutes, Fernand Zecca’s The Life and Passion of Christ (1903) is one of the earliest feature films, but compared to the same filmmaker’s less ambitious, more playful shorts, it’s a beautiful snooze. A different execution climaxes his Story of a Crime (1901), in which we get to see, by brutal jump cut, a guillotine decapitation before our very eyes. This, as Maxim Gorky prophesied, is what the public wants. Or maybe the events of 1901, cinematic and otherwise, allow “the public” to define itself in ways heretofore unthinkable. The year brings Victoria Regina’s propitious death. And with her passing, Edgar Allan Poe’s pronunciamento on celebrity, “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque,“ comes to new and anarchic fruition as an incendiary schnook, one of history’s finest.
When he shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901, the currents of fear and vengeance unleashed by Leon Czolgosz would carry him on a journey from reflexive beatings at the hands of police and a post-Victorian mob — ladies in bustles shedding all restraint, transformed from well-honed symbols of middle-class decorum into yowling banshees, screaming “GIVE HIM TO US!” — straight to the electric chair, from whence his corpse would be taken for additional punishment, a process where ghoulish prison authorities at Auburn separated the head from the body, and then poured sulfuric acid on what remained, before secreting the sorry residue of America’s lost anarchist son into an unmarked grave.
Despite attempts to erase Czoglosz from history, a visual document survives, oozing with pathos and bitter recrimination. It is impossible, looking into those eyes, not to feel unnerved and, yes, sympathetic with him — his desperate act, after all, was as critical a part of America’s greed-engorged industrial fantasia as the near daily spectacle of peaceful strikers, his friends among them, being slaughtered in the name of profit.
If you like, the last photograph of Leon Czolgosz is a parable whose moral lesson has been swallowed by America’s collective madness. As when Poe’s fictive victim finds himself entombed alive behind a madman’s avenging masonry in The Cask of Amontillado. Whatever ethical aptitude we possess simply freezes, horror boring itself into the same hidden domain where rogue impulses boil, potentially releasing our repressed insurrections.
Motion pictures have presented similar threats to authority — from their misspent childhood years in late-Victorian fairgrounds to their grimy adolescence in Edwardian nickelodeon parlors. The inmates, emboldened under the spell of Klieg lights, were not only running the asylum, but re-shaping the world in its image, and the blunt instruments of church and state proved impotent against the anarchy of this freshly liberated ghetto. More profoundly than any other of cinema’s shady genres, it is film noir that embodies Edgar Allan Poe, Leon Czolgosz, and their respective relationships to our nation’s skittering, self-immolating rage.
Look at Cyril Endfield's Try and Get Me! (1950) — the last movie he would make in the United States before other ladies in bustles (or, more properly, the institutional shade of those who once bedeviled Czolgosz) chased him onto the Blacklist, then across the Atlantic — gives us two American saps for the price of one: a chronically underemployed veteran (Frank Lovejoy), lost amid post-war, petit bourgeois prosperity, and his opposite number: a swaggering crook (Lloyd Bridges) with all the charm of a fourth-rate aluminum siding hustler. The two meet. A spree of small-time stick-ups ensues. The fast money brings faster ambition, and ideas above their station (the kidnapping and ransom of the son of a local moneybags that can only go sideways) that soon look like destiny.
Try and Get Me! was adapted by Jo Pagano from his 1947 novel, The Condemned. It was inspired by the 1933 kidnapping and murder of California department store heir Brooke Hart and the subsequent lynching of the two men responsible. But while Pagano's novel focuses largely upon media's responsibility for stoking, and then unleashing the public's inner lunacy, Endfield's film never entirely leaves behind his two American losers, strung up with the blessing of at least one duly elected governor.
The censors were on to something, even if they could never fully articulate what precise blasphemies were being committed.
Take Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for instance, which isn’t pure noir but is pure Poe: what would the surgical excision of an influence look like? Granted, the noir genre seems an unlikely Poe derivative, but what of Laura — fatalism, romance and necro-fantasy (with Lydecker as Usher)? DOA is the kind of concept Poe might have dreamed up; one of the great noir scribes, Cornell Woolrich is channeling Poe through an all-thumbs pulp sensibility. And how hard would it be to cast Val Lewton as the horror noir hybrid, with premature burials, ancestral disease, lunatics taking over bedlam? Jean Epstein, who adapted The Fall of the House of Usher in 1928, complained that Baudelaire’s translations fundamentally mistook Poe’s innocence for ghastliness.
The dead in Poe, writes Epstein, are “only slightly dead.”
To the extent that Epstein was correct, the whimsy that Poe bequeaths to cinema finds itself absorbed in almost material terms — not as sensibility but as a texture whose particular nap or weave is never granted names. In Mesmeric Revelations a voluntary subject is quite near physical death and under the ministrations of his mesmerist, answering precise questions about the nature of God. Before dying, he says God is “ultimate or unparticled” matter: “What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought,’ is this matter in motion”. The same unnamable textures apparently survive on television, a case of Poe resonating inside our minds, a collective consciousness replaced by cathode rays.
Deep within the 18 hours of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, there is a moment that, on its incandescent surface, could have been lifted weightless from the great post-war dream of material deliverance; as if the zeitgeist of the mid 20th century had somehow got lost and ended up in this one: Daytime, the top on the convertible is down, the radio tuned, The Paris Sisters singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky. Within this tapestry of an early Phil Spector production — his trademark reverb eternally evocative of Romance and Death (two conditions Spector knows well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris could be a siren sound from the American Beyond, or a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt. We don’t know. We’ll never know.
In this oneiric echo chamber, Poe smiles down upon American blondness, muscle cars soaked in sunlight, candy for eye and ear; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion and immortality.
If Lynch’s Return means going back home, then home is that Lemon Popsicle/Strawberry Milkshake species of innocence proffered by America’s music industry between 1957 and 1964. The horror genre always has to have some component of innocence to devastate, be it the existential kind which inspires the malevolence everyone paid the price of a ticket to have vicarious transit with; or the mere victimisation of the unsuspecting. Either way, there was no other period in American popular culture when innocence, of any variety, was so lavishly examined, toyed with, killed. The free floating chord that opens The Everly Brothers song, All I Have To Do is Dream, remains a lamentation in sound: the sudden recrudescence of Poe’s beating, tell-tale heart. Adoring such guilt-free teenage odes to sleep, death and sexual desire, David Lynch finds a muse in Amanda Seyfried. Specifically her visionary eyes melting Phil Spector’s dark edifice of sugar in a deathless, Sternbergian close-up — iridescent search lights, ever more urgently scanning the sky above, waiting for the sun to swallow her whole. We can only bear witness, and internalize this shimmering ingenue, this angel in a red convertible, trading places with Old Sol; as if whatever she just snorted has entered our system through hers. But in that ephemeral instant she achieves oneness with all things; the transcendence of stardom — true, temporal stardom — shorn of fame and the imperatives of show-business. Twin Peaks: The Return has an anti-gravitational center in Becky — if a multi-dimensional mind fuck that unravels in the opposite of ‘real time’ and re-directs consciousness itself can be said to possess a center at all — which finds its equal just two years later.
After all, is there a more indelible notion in contemporary mainstream cinema than Margot Robbie, the no-longer-doomed Sharon Tate of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood as she watches herself (and watches others watching her) on the big screen? Like Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral, hearing all who knew him lie about his innate goodness, she enjoys a thrill that few on this earth have ever known; indulging herself so guilelessly that any half-baked charge of narcissism shrivels to nullity before it escapes a single throat; Tarantino dangles before us the impossible promise that Sharon Tate Will Never Die, granting her (and us) a gaudy, wondrous L.A. to cavort in.
Thus do we find ourselves in Tarantino’s vision of paradise, complete with loyal pit bulls and flame throwers for those who violate its bonds — where it’s 1969 forever, and movie stars still matter. Eternally murdered, and once doomed to perpetual remembrance, Sharon Tate’s new life under Tarantino’s direction is one of forever re-living the thrilling milestones of her own career; innocently sidestepping fate and driving headlong into the Hollywood Hills. Tarantino has achieved something utterly transcendent: an essential glimpse into the vanishing cultural phenomenon of movie stardom itself, filled with a profound and abiding love for this rarest of human conditions, (which condition, mortality, immortality?) which floods every inch of his vision. Even his grotesques — the slack-jawed, gormless filth of the Manson Family, readily suggestive of the more Identitarian cultists on the contemporary lookout for ‘Lookism’, knives unsheathed — are downright mythic. It is hard to imagine a more principled intention than Tarantino’s take on the sordid legend of Helter Skelter, and his rescue of Sharon Tate from the hands of a cruel, unfeeling collective memory. By film's end, the presence of Tate, safe from all harm, is both generically perfect and in the hands of angels; every one of them a blond resident of LA County, sincere and unknowable as desert light.
And yet, at almost the same hour, American cinema gave us evidence of an impending rupture that threatens the delicate membrane insulating the mythic Tate from her murderers; an ominous reminder of the gathering storm ahead. For transcendence took another route in 2019 when the mad catharsis of a deeply disturbed schnook in hideous clown makeup transformed him into an equally disturbed icon, lying unconscious atop a smashed police car. More emaciated than the Bible’s Nazarene, he rises from the dead as Nihilism’s glittering superstar, a murderous demigod of failure and inchoate class resentment, ready for his terrible fifteen minutes of closeup.
Stephen Sondheim wrote Send in the Clowns because the actress for whom it was written, Glynis Johns, couldn’t sing. Not to say that she was utterly without talent, of course. She just didn’t have much in the way of range or vocal firepower. “A lovely, sweet, bell-like voice”, he called it, that was nevertheless “breathy, and short-winded.” So the song that all but accidentally became, perhaps, his most enduring was deliberately composed in short phrases which enabled the singer, literally any singer in the world, to meet its demands with more authority than they could bring to the average show-stopper – the ease of its melody contrasting sharply with the compositional gymnastics evident in the rest of A Little Night Music’s score. For a songwriter of his stature, this was an incredibly democratic thing for him to do.
Send in the Clowns is a song of regret, and not one that those below a certain age are wisely advised to attempt; its structural simplicity notwithstanding. The wrong singer can, rightly or wrongly, seem to mock the thing, render it without the delicacy of emotional balance it requires. But coming from the right voice — Frank Sinatra, for example; one of the first to record it — it is a near majestic reflection on the end of love, free of bitterness and self-pity (a miracle in itself). Unfortunately, however, its ubiquity in the nearly five decades since its composition has cast it, helplessly, into that graveyard of popular culture, the Great American Songbook, where only a truly arresting rendition, one the ears cannot deny, could bring it back into life.
Admittedly it is the context in which Sondheim’s song is used in Joker (2019) which causes it to resonate in a wholly unexpected manner and not, strictly, the quality of its performance. As one of a trio of drunken Wall Street scumbags – princes of Capital (or at least servants to same); the residue of Wharton carrying on like they’re the cast of A Clockwork Orange as they enter a subway car and with all the impunity, real or imagined, of their class, begin to fuck with the passengers; finally zeroing in on poor Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), sitting there in full makeup after getting the heave-ho from his gig as a professional clown, all for dropping a .38 in front of a ward full of sick kids; sitting there laughing uproariously, uncontrollably, through an aggregation of despair that seemingly no one, least of all he, could begin to penetrate — Ben Warheit delivers Sondheim’s chestnut in the most literal sense of that word; carrying every line of it down the long subway car to its target; word by word, step by step, wielding the song not simply as a taunt (though it is surely that), but as something far more devastating before the three of them administer a savage beating to this wanton failure of a man.
The employment of music that is, on its face, contrary to the putative spirit of a scene or an image has been a regular occurrence in film since the 1960s. Its origins can be traced, with some precision, to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, with its Tab Hunter Fan Club biker gang decking themselves out in all their leather and chains finery to the strains of Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet. It was, on reflection, inspired — if somewhat less ironic than Anger had perhaps intended. Since then the technique has invariably been utilized for the purposes of either a cheap laugh, a cheaper irony or, sometimes, both (Singin’ in the Rain appearing in the course of a pivotal rape scene in Clockwork Orange doing yeoman’s service in this regard and, more than anything, contributing to that film’s everlasting moral dubiousness).
What is startling about Send in the Clowns, as it surfaces in this film, is that it is not in the least bit ironic, or funny, or even counter-textual. As the life of Arthur Fleck and that of the cesspool of a New York he lives in is about to change forever, Sondheim’s song is at once menacing and deeply haunting. It is as if this upper-class trash, in the last minute of his time on earth, were serenading this loser, telling him, ‘This is your life, peasant. You are this song: the unwanted shadow of regret; of everything that remains when love vanishes from existence.’ The sheer judgement of the moment is so merciless, such an existential death sentence, that Arthur pulling his piece just like Charles Bronson would, and blasting one, two, then three of them becomes as inescapable in its physical logic as one of Newton’s laws of motion; except this time that which has been down is about to go way up.
For it is here, when the victim strikes back, that something more than late 20th century American catharsis offered by the Death Wish franchise’s urban vigilante fantasia, or even Martin Scorsese’s more critically digestible chronicles of existential revenge (Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy) takes place. A fundamental disruption in the order of the film’s universe follows hard on the heels of this desperate act, and both Hollywood traditions are at once abandoned, like corpses left to rot in sanitary isolation, for an ironic deadpan that flirts with lending morality to the specter of mass violence.
Joaquin Phoenix’s richly deserved Oscar notwithstanding, there exists no known aesthetic enclave or canonical order that can fully comprehend the nihilism of Joker; discarding, as it does, the cinematic models which instantly informed the film’s almost terminally blinkered public reception.
Arthur Fleck’s execution of his tormentors has more obvious, and no doubt deliberate, parallels in the 1984 case of Bernhard Goetz, the man New York tabloids (always licking their depraved chops for the opportunity) dubbed The Subway Vigilante after shooting four fellow passengers, all Black, one a screwdriver wielding would-be mugger — that is, if you believe Goetz (not generally advisable). After being taken into custody, Goetz was catapulted to a species of fame and infamy that, particularly in New York, was very much of its time yet in some respects heralded, weirdly, our now-prevailing paradigm of 21st century media stardom.
by Daniel Riccuito and Tom Sutpen
Special thanks to David Cairns and Jennifer Matsui