Christmas Wishes for the Grinch

Whaddya say we all chip in a few bucks and buy our Commander-in-Chief the perfect Yuletide gift. (Any leftover cash can go to John Berger – for shipping and handling of course.) I’m not proposing anything cheap and nasty for Dubya or his family, certainly not a gag gift like an action figure sized replica of Florida’s Old Sparky for the hot-switch happy Pres or like-minded brother Jeb, or an ingenious device that would allow the First Party Animal Twins to pee against a wall when the lines at the barroom ladies room pissing trough is too long. Nope, I say we send Dub something he’ll appreciate and enjoy over the holiday break. My suggestion: a VHS copy of “The Execution of Private Slovik.” Sure it stars Martin Sheen, better known as that president on TV that people actually admire.

But leaving aside the fact that more people have more respect and awe for Martin Sheen’s pretend presidency than George W. Bush’s pretend presidency, I think Slovik is a cinematic treat that Dub can sink his teeth into. First off, he can relate to Slovik, the World War II conscript who went AWOL. And although our President may be at odds with Slovik’s refusal to kill anybody, Dub would surely get off on the scene where the railroaded Private faces a firing squad.

True, I’m going out on a limb here, Assuming that the leader of the free world will identify with a protagonist, then cheer as that protagonist bites the bullet(s). But is that any more odd than a former coke fiend enacting draconian measures against people doing exactly what he did? So I’m sticking with “Slovik” as the perfect gift for Dubya, far more tasteful than a silver plated coke spoon or hip flask.

Sad to say, Bush’s drug disconnect is not the only example of shizoid presidential behavior. The specter of President as sociopath has reared its ugly head. Some of these concerns can be dismissed. It seems Dubya was a sadistic little kid, but many children harbor a sadistic streak that they ultimately outgrow. However, a Governor making fun of a convicted killer pleading for her life is more than a bit disturbing. The current concern for our leader’s mental health stems from Mark Crispin Miller’s “Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder”.

At first I thought the book a good read, but I tended to take Miller’s arguments with a grain of salt, primarily because it was far too tempting to accept that a President who I considered quite vile was indeed insane. But every passing day of exposure to our Commander-in-Chief’s pronouncements, (particularly when he’s off book) lends a creepy credence to Miller’s thesis.

I agree with Miller that we can judge people by what they say, even if they are trying to hide what they really mean. In short, I fully accept the concept that Freudian slips harbor the truth. To Miller, Bush’s speech indicates his real feelings in ways the president is unable to hide (though Bush would surely wish this darkness to remain under wraps):

"He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he's speaking punitively, when he's talking about violence, when he's talking about revenge. When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine... It's only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes."

The notion of the President as a sociopathic loose cannon certainly explains the most tight-assed, locked down administration in recent memory when it comes to “staying on message” and “presenting the its case to the American people”. It’s a scary scenario: An administration lead by Neo-Conservatives, convinced they can transform the Middle East by eliminating a few inconvenience regimes then waving the fruits of capitalism in the faces of the unwashed Wogs, whereupon the Moslem masses will throw away 500 years of Islamic culture and tradition for shiny consumer goods and become just like us.

These arrogant and misguided Conservatives, who I’ll call the Hubris Gang, feed Bush this message constantly, through the medium of Presidential Social Studies and Civics Tutor Condy Rice. And the message dovetails nicely with the Sociopath in Chief’s fantasies of grandeur and violent revenge.

Maybe this scenario is all a bit too pat. And it ignores what I believe is an integral facet of George Bush’s personality – namely his alcoholism. Although he has never admitted his problem, I believe the President is an alcoholic, perhaps in early stages of recovery.

As a recovering alcoholic myself, the briefest way I can characterize the disease is thus: Alcoholics are supremely self-absorbed. Left to their own devices, and if they refuse to do something about their problem, they will crawl up their own assholes to die. Perhaps our president is in recovery. As noted by Katherine Van Wormer in Counterpunch, even alcoholics in recovery display some or all of these charming traits:

* Exaggerated self-importance and pomposity
* Grandiose behavior
* A rigid, judgmental outlook
* Impatience
* Childish behavior
* Irresponsible behavior
* Irrational rationalization
* Projection
* Overreaction

It’s like a children’s game or a skit on Sesame Street: How many of these things can you link to our President? I would add to this list a sense of resentment – resentment that people don’t want you to do whatever you damn well please, resentment that they’ve seen your flaws. When alcoholics stop drinking, their problems and personality flaws do not disappear. They still have to work through all this shit, and hopefully overcome it.

An alcoholic needs sufficient maturity to fully recover, AND friends or family can no longer enable him or her. Sadly, this in not the case with Bush. Apparently, he’s been enabled his entire life. Bailed out for failed business ventures, skating on drunk driving charges, and getting away with insider trading. Hell, he didn’t even have to win an election to become President!

The result is a dangerous child-man with delusions of grandeur, violently resentful of anyone who stands in the way of his perceived birthright. Societies have survived mad aristocrats before. Let’s hope we’re resilient enough to bounce back from this one.
 
¶ 12/20/2002 :: E-mail Pat

 

The Master's Voice

“Greetings my friend…We are all interested in the future – for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives…and remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future!”

Thus spake Criswell, apparently channeling Firesign Theater’s “Department of Redundancy Department”, in his introductory rant to Ed Wood’s low-budget spectacular “Plan 9 From Outer Space.” If Edward Wood Jr. had guessed his future, would he have foreseen the Ed Wood cottage industry that has sprung up in recent years? Would he have divined his place in the firmament as the new messiah?

My guess is no. How could anyone in Wood’s day wrap their brains around the concept of mass marketed camp, where pseudo-celebrity based on sheer awfulness becomes indistinguishable from real celebrity? I don’t think Ed was shooting for mainstream success. He just wanted to make movies. From reading Rudolph Grey’s “The Nightmare of Ecstasy,” my take is that Ed was a starstruck outsider long before he hit Hollywood.

His baby and brainchild was “Glen or Glenda,” a plea for tolerance for transvestites. Viewing that film, with its crazy quilt of radically different styles, and its surreal imagery, it appears the Wood had more in common with no budget art film-makers like Kenneth Anger or Curtis Harrington in his early underground phase rather than Hollywood grindhouse hacks like Eddie Cahn. Unfortunately for Ed, he just wasn’t as good as his aesthetic soulmates in the Anger orbit.

For the record, “Plan 9” is not the worst movie ever made, and Ed Wood is not the worst director of all time (a posthumous title he owes to Harry and Michael Medved’s “Golden Turkey Awards,” a heavy handedly ironic tome that grows increasingly mean spirited and depressing as the reader slogs through it. Michael Medved, of course, has since gone on the make his mark as the poster child for frothing right-wing hysteria – sort of a male Ann Coulter.)

Wood’s movies are only intermittently as awful as their detractors and champions claim. Technically, they’re on a par with the average PRC or Monogram quickie of the same era. It depends on when you ask me, but right now I’d go with Jerry Warren as the world’s worst filmmaker. His scorched earth policy regarding Mexican werewolf and Swedish sci-fi movies resulted in true cinematic abominations.

Basically, Warren would hack together two or three different imports without regard to story or continuity, dub them badly, shoot some camera-nailed-to-the-floor linking footage (e.g. John Carradine spouting pages of dry exposition), and then dump the result on an unsuspecting U.S. market. Jerry Warren clearly didn’t give a shit about what he did, while the inspired (or deluded) Ed Wood clearly did.

In his own syntax-addled way, Ed Wood came close to getting a garbled dream-state on screen. “Plan 9” is inept, but intentionally or not, it follows a childlike dream logic. Witness the almost fetishistic appearance of Vampira, a plotline including funerals at 4:00 am, and the notion of a solarite bomb that will explode particles of sunlight and engulf the universe in a conflagration. “Plan 9” would make an interesting double bill was an example of serious dream cinema, like Michael Powell’s “Tales of Hoffman.”

Tim Burton’s film “Ed Wood” doesn’t go into the details of Ed’s harrowing final days, and it tends to gloss over the sheer perversity of Wood’s company of players. But I like Burton’s affection for this band of misfits, and his respect for what they tried to do. In my experience, Wood’s most vocal detractors tend to know little about the filmmaking process.

When I’ve lectured on film at Full Sail in Orlando, I’ve noticed that the truly sharp students appreciate what low budget auteurs have achieved. The totally clueless expect everything to look like “Star Wars”. Much is made of the garbled grammar of Wood’s screenplays: “We’ve developed a language computer, a machine that breaks down any language to our own.” An easy target for the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crowd, but is that dialog any more fucked up than: "I know how hard it is to put food on your family “ or "Fool me once, shame ... shame on ... you." Long, uncomfortable pause. "Fool me — can't get fooled again!" (A whitehouse remix of: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”)

I confess I feel a kinship with Ed Wood. And not just because the films I’ve worked on have their share of inept moments, and have also fallen prey to truly vicious reviews.

(Another stray observation here: I know a guy who has truly violent, passionate reactions to films he dislikes. I pointed out to him that his invective might be due in part to transference – anger about his personal life, which he is unable to express any other way. Yeah, I know it’s easy-bake psychology on my part, but how else to explain spleen venting shit storms over Jerry Bruckheimer that one would normally reserve for Pol Pot? It is, after all, just a movie. And as Al Adamson once said, “No one has ever set out to make a bad movie.”)

No, my relationship with Ed Wood is almost personal. Let me explain. I made a few films for the great showman Fred Olen Ray. When Fred first came to Hollywood, he looked up Ed Wood in the phone book and hired Ed to write the screenplay for “Beach Blanket Bloodbath”. Sadly, Ed died before he completed his task, though Fred did finally shoot some “Bloodbath” footage in 1985.

So despite what the Oracle of Kevin Bacon says (Akdov Tilmig, incidentally, is one of Ed Wood’s nom de porn), I have two degrees of separation from Ed Wood! Not a brush with greatness perhaps. But certainly an encounter with the outlandish.
 
¶ 12/16/2002 :: E-mail Pat

 

The Sky Is Falling!

The streets were a little icy this morning on my way to work. Perhaps you don’t understand the severity of what I just wrote: THE STREETS WERE A LITTE ICY! For those of you not living in the Carolinas, this is an earth-shattering statement, akin to saying, “ Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond are considering freeing their slaves.” The incredibly harrowing weather situation and “devastating ice accumulation” has been all over the local news, and concerned citizens are reportedly calling 911 because their cable has gone out.

And in these parts, winter weather means just two things: bread and milk. When I first moved here, I thought the locals were joking when they said these two perishables would automatically leap off supermarket shelves with the first breath of snow. But it’s true. The drive to acquire bread and milk in response to an emergency must be ingrained in Carolinian DNA. It’s also a little puzzling. What are these snowed-in blizzard survivors going to do with just these two items? Make French toast? You need to break a few eggs if you plan to subsist on that breakfast favorite, and if you decide instead to resort to cannibalism, why bother with side dishes?

Needless to say, driving into work was a cakewalk. Traffic was light and the icy patches were few. It’s also unnecessary to add that the TV station where I work is quiet as a tomb right now. Many of my Carolina native co-workers have not yet surfaced, blinking like stunned Morlocks as they view the bleak, post-flurry, sleet ravaged landscape. I live in downtown Charlotte, a relatively bustling and lively place, complete with good restaurants and a couple of cool clubs. So it’s unnerving how quickly the place clears out with the first flake of snow, becoming an eerie ghost town.

I half expect coyote howls and tumbleweeds rolling down the main drag. If I seem snide about all this winter weather jazz…it’s because I am. It’s a cheap and guilty pleasure I fall prey to this time of year, making fun of those more Southern than I. When natives ask me if I’m concerned about all this snow and ice, I affect an air of indifference and insouciance, saying, “Well…I’m from Chicago." Then I pause for an unblinking beat or two, letting the full weight of my casually benevolent patronizing attitude sink in. It’s all part of the noblesse oblige that we-who-know-how-to-drive-on-ice-and-snow must show others. This approach does have its drawbacks, however. If I ever get into a power skid and total my car, I’d never live it down.

To be fair, the one or two instances of decent snowfall we get each winter can be a hassle. Tree limbs come down, power goes out, and some people have no heat for a day or two. The temperatures can drop into the high 20's overnight, but we’re mostly talking about conditions that are uncomfortable rather than life threatening. As in baseball, bragging rights about snow is a game of inches. Last year, South Charlotte got 4 to 6 inches of snow, which is about 17 inches less than I’ve had to deal with. (Though I remember the 1967 snowstorm as being kind of fun.)

Despite the relatively light snowfall, driving can be tricky here, primarily because North Carolina’s sole snowplow is difficult to get a hold of. Most likely, it is in Wilmington being used as a cool prop for an episode of “Dawson’s Creek.”

On the plus side, the winter weather conditions give local TV news something useful to cover, even if the updates are presented with all the drama usually associated with political assassinations or the landing of the Martian army’s vanguard. Hysterical weather reporting is still better than “There are six things in your kitchen that can kill you” or “She’s stripping her way through college,” the kind of stuff at which our local TV news excels. But when all is said and done, snow and ice are frozen water, not nuclear fallout. Though we’re in winter’s icy grasp, it’s still time for the Carolinas to get a grip.
 
¶ 12/6/2002 :: E-mail Pat