Snapshots From Last Night: Watching Psychotic Starring Elizabeth Taylor

Last night, a group of us gathered at Keith and Dan’s in Brooklyn, to watch Elizabeth Taylor, in what was the swan song of her career, in a movie that is called (depending on where you find it) Psychotic, The Driver’s Seat or Identikit. Based on a Muriel Spark novella (which Dan informed us was not her best), it tells the story of a schizophrenic woman wandering around Europe, having various psychotic episodes, witnessing coup d’etats in foreign countries, having strange encounters with Andy Warhol, and being chased by Interpole. The movie has the weirdest mix of art-house pretension and camp. Not to mention the 100% over-the-top performance of Elizabeth Taylor, at her zaftig best (and by “best” I mean WTF??). Her clothes alone would warrant her being committed into a mental institution. She is head to toe in crazy colors, stripes with flowers with bright yellow skirts. Her hair cannot be described but I’ll give it a shot. Blue-black, it is teased within an inch of its life, and she is often seen from behind, and the width of her hair, I am not kidding, goes past her shoulders. She looks absolutely insane. Her makeup is out of control. There are a couple of moments when she is still breathtakingly beautiful, those eyes! – but what I was really taken with is that even in the midst of all that balderdash, Taylor is acting the SHIT out of this ridiculous part. Even when it’s inappropriate, even when underplaying would have made her not seem so, well, batshit crazy. Yes, the character is crazy, but seriously, you have to experience how that manifests in Elizabeth Taylor’s hands to see what I am talking about.

Dan had warned me, “You will be forever changed after seeing this movie.”

He’s right, although I cannot yet name the transformation.

It’s one of those movies where you can’t believe what you are seeing, and your brain basically explodes from trying to understand.

Her line readings! She picks up a small knife in an airport shop, fingering the sharp blade, in a vaguely crazy manner, and then calls out, “How much?” It goes to show you how bizarre she read that line that we all burst out laughing in response.

Her best line, said in an angry throwaway manner to a leering gentleman with yellow teeth, “When I diet, I DIET. And when I orgasm, I orgasm. I never mix the two cultures.”

We couldn’t stop saying that line. As a matter of fact, that was the first thing I thought when I woke up this morning, pondering the ineffable truths in that line. Look, when I diet, I diet. And when I orgasm, I orgasm. No need to mix up the two cultures, mkay?

What the hell is Andy Warhol doing in that movie? He plays … a diplomat? An attache with an embassy in a wartorn country? It’s not clear. He and Liz have a strange encounter in an airport when he picks up a book she dropped to give it back to her. Intense vibes of … sheer liquid bullshit … pass between them. It is not clear what is happening but that it is very important to the both of them.

At one point, Taylor, staring up at a ruin, says in a musing tone, “I sense a lack of absence.”

We kept talking about that line. “What the hell is she talking about?” “What is a lack of absence?”

There were a couple of lines when I said, “Oh my God, these people are on so much drugs. That’s the kind of thing a stoned person says that seems deep only when you’re high.”

“I feel homesick for my own loneliness,” mourns Taylor.

Of course you do.

Dan, in setting up the movie for us, told us that we all needed to have two glasses of wine before we started the movie. “We need to be LOOSE” he declared. Well, all righty then, pass the wine. Once we all were loose enough, we started watching.

Oh, and Dan, also, trying to describe where Liz was at this point in her life, said, “She is almost Rabelaisian.”

I am still laughing about that line. ALMOST Rabelaisian? Not quite, but almost??

I love these people.

And you know what? She is. She is almost Rabelaisian. Her breasts are lethal weapons. Occasionally, she strokes them. I suppose at that moment she is NOT dieting, so she is then free to orgasm. That’s my interpretation anyway.

The cinematographer of Psychotic, The Driver’s Seat, Identikit was the Oscar-winning Vittorio Storaro, whose other jobs include, you know, The Conformist, Apocalypse Now, Reds … and damn, this is a fine-looking movie. There’s not one bad shot. It’s all bells and whistles, yes, with a slowly moving camera, strange dreamspace scenes – backlit – You can tell (or I’m guessing) that Storaro was like, “This entire thing is completely bullshit – so I might as well have some fun.” Each shot is a work of art. We all kept laughing about that. Saying, in the middle of some ridiculous scene, “Vittorio … look at what he’s doing here …”

It’s worth it to see – just to watch his work.

And if I’m making this sound like a terrible movie, I haven’t done my job. It’s not terrible. Yes, there is a trainwreck aspect to it (“How much??” barks Taylor), but it’s riveting, as all good trainwrecks could be. You cannot look away. Everyone in the damn thing is totally committed to the LUDICROUS project they are in. Not to mention Elizabeth Taylor, who is behaving as though this is the greatest part she has ever been given. Every moment is over the top, every moment is full of twitches and sighs and bizarre behavior that makes no sense. There’s a moment where a bomb goes off and a car blows up. Chaos ensues. People run, flee, scream. Taylor, in teetery heels and hair so big that it puts her off balance, falls into the street, howling in fear. She writhes about, one of her legs kicking up behind her. She has huge hair, crazy sunglasses, her coat has long vertical stripes of every color known to man – colors that should never be put together in one garment – and she rolls around on the street, her head coming up, mouth wide open in a scream. It’s an astonishingly embarrassing, funny, and crazy moment. The whole thing is bullshit – but here’s the deal: There is something to be said for commitment to something that is bullshit. In a way, that is part of the actor’s job, sad as it is. I’ve been in pieces of SHIT where I have begged friends not to come, warned them that our relationship will be OVER if they buy a ticket … but hey, it’s a living, and I’m up there, committing to the bullshit I am in. So to see Taylor, writhing around, ridiculous, howling to the moon, makes me think: Okay. Now obviously this material is pretty bad (sorry, Miss Spark), but if you play such a moment realistically or subtly, or if you have in the back of your mind somewhere Wow, this is really embarrassing … then you REALLY aren’t doing your job. Elizabeth Taylor acts the CRAP out of that moment, and yes, we all guffawed seeing her … but there was something deeply disturbingly right about it too.

Elizabeth Taylor still has the breathy English-accented energy of her heyday in the 1940s. She’s from another world, another technique. And here she is, in 1974, still doing that, still acting in that old-school MGM way … only it’s in this psychedelic art-house (sort of) movie with a cameo by Andy Warhol. It is so weird to watch.

So yes, Dan, I am somewhat altered after seeing that movie. How could I not be?

Other funny snapshots from last night:

— Keith, as I walked in, “So, how is your fiance?” A joke … which can’t quite be explained yet … but I assure you it was hysterical.

— After we watched the movie, somehow we all got to talking about movies that have basically a sound-effect as a title. Boom!. Phffft. … tick … tick … tick … Now that last one caused some hilarity. Keith went to the computer and reported back to us – “The title is: Ellipses, tick, ellipses, tick, ellipses, tick, ellipses.” Dan said, “Whose bright idea was that.” I was joking about including the ellipses at the start of the title when you talk about it. “So, what are you seeing tonight?” Me: Long pause. “Tick …” Seriously, the title STARTS with a pause, so you had better include it.

— This then led to an internet search of all the movie titles that include ellipses, everyone sitting around making guesses. “Does ‘I, the Jury’ have an ellipses in it?”

— Oh and this was so funny, but I’m not sure if I can describe it. The group of us had broken up into different conversations. I was standing with Keith at the computer, looking at the poster for The Driver’s Seat (the one at the top of this post) – and suddenly there was a pause in all of the conversations, and I could hear Judd say into the silence, to whomever he was talking to, “So it was one of Ron Howard’s earliest directing jobs, and it starred Bette Davis …” I am DYING. I had never met Judd before last night, but he had read my pieces on Skyward (part one and part two ) and wanted to talk to me about them, and there he was, at the party, filling in SOMEONE ELSE about Skyward. I am laughing out loud as I type this. I am determined to get this movie back into circulation. I really feel like it’s working. I am creating buzz. It is now being discussed at a party in Brooklyn, because of me writing about it. It is one of my proudest moments of 2009.

— Here are a couple of choice quotes from Jeremiah, as he watched the movie:
“Oh my God.”
“Holy fucking shit.”
“Oh no.”
“I am so glad I am seeing this movie.”
“I love this movie.”
“Vittorio.”
“Oh my God.”

My sentiments exactly.