I’ll be there. I’m curling my hair. In honor of my dead boyfriend. And the cast/crew/writers/composers of this production, not to mention Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, without whom none of this would have happened.
All Rita Hayworth has to do is take off her glove …
… and men are hers forever. Women too, I reckon.
Even with all the explicit sex stuff in films today, there’s very little that can compete with her erotically slow and deliberate “disrobing” in the “Put the Blame on Mame” number in Gilda (1946). The whole thing is sheer sex, her curves, her movements, her knowing smile, her posture, her dress-shape. It’s also sexy that her hair is free and tousled, not “done”. She’s wild. She looks it. Her bouncy free hair is what MAKES her first appearance in Gilda (along with the varying expressions/tones: watch in the clip below how she goes from achingly beautiful/sweet/fresh, to cool and knowing and a little bit hard a second later). That first moment, the “reveal” of Gilda, is the most famous shot of Rita Hayworth ever. People who haven’t even seen Gilda probably recognize it. It’s breath-taking in the most literal sense. You need a second to recover.
And most people don’t recover. Ever. Put a fork in the menfolk. The jig is up.
I love how the title of this movie describes absolutely what you will see in the film itself.
It would be like giving Star Wars the title A Bunch of Space Ships Flying Around and Shooting At Each Other. Or calling HalloweenBabysitter Terrified and Hiding in Closets. Because what you see in the film is … a girl (Marianne Faithfull) riding on a motorcycle. Endlessly. Passing over European borders and back. Zooming on the Autobahn. Careening over bridges. All while wearing a skin-tight black leather jumpsuit with nothing on underneath. (She looks phenomenal. Sex Personified.)
Border guards leeringly feel her up as they check her passport. She doesn’t care. In fact, she looks forward to seeing that guard again when she comes by a second time and is disappointed when it’s an older guy not interested in her. Bummer. She’s on her way to see her lover, the guy who gave her the motorcycle (as a wedding present – for her marriage to another guy – oops). Her lover, Daniel (Alain Delon – more on him in a second), is a cranky intellectual and we know that he is a cranky intellectual because he wears jaunty scarves around his neck and smokes a pipe. Daniel gives lectures to his all-male class, starting discussions with “what is Free Love, gentlemen?” He is a domineering lover, “taking” her wherever he feels like it. It appears that he took her virginity, although the scene is shot in such a “psychedelic” way you can’t really be sure, the screen going to neon swirling shapes where you can’t really see what’s going on. When the film opens, she’s a newlywed, married to a dweeby German math teacher, yearning so much for her lover (whom she met at around the same time she met her now-husband) that she crawls out of bed, puts on her black-leather jumpsuit, and heads off on her motorcycle into the fog. She’s been married for two months. Not a good sign.
As she rides, flashbacks bombard her (which is pretty dangerous, considering). We see her working in a bookshop with her Dad, meeting Daniel who comes in looking for a first-edition Swedenborg (honestly), and he stares at her with his burning eyes and takes her on a crazy ride on his motorcycle. The icy streets don’t stop him. He’s Evil Kneivel! As she drives in the present day, she laughs and cries and shouts things into the air as she careens through little Swiss towns. She’s quite a sight. She stops at a small bar filled with German men. She does shots of vodka and begins to disintegrate emotionally. At one point, she unzips her leather suit, and her glorious breasts pop out into plain view. Is it a dream? Is it a fantasy? A wish-fulfillment? What the hell is happening??
Let’s talk about the dream-sequence that opens the movie: The whole screen goes swirly spirally red, with random photos of crows, moving in and out, forward and back, to look “scary”, and leering clown-faces piling up on top of one another. What is a dream-sequence without a terrifying clown? In the dream Daniel sits in an armchair surrounded by bright red and laughs maniacally. Then everything switches to a surreal circus setting: Dweeby husband plays a cello in the middle of the ring, and all of the children point and laugh. Then out comes Daniel, in a white tux, white top hat, brandishing a whip. The “girl” enters the ring standing on a white horse, and starts to ride in a circle, all as Daniel whips her, again and again, until her black leather jumpsuit rips off and there she is, naked in front of the crowd. She wakes up gasping from this dream. It’s hilarious.
Directed, written and shot by the great Jack Cardiff, the thing LOOKS awesome. He shoots that motorcycle as though it is a Greek God (as indeed it is in the context of the “story”.) It’s powerful, it represents freedom, it represents sex. Speaking of which: She grinds her crotch into the vibrating machine as she zips along and has an orgasm, which may be hot and “out there” and all that but it is also almost as dangerous as texting and driving. Sheila’s PSA: Don’t have an orgasm, kids, when you’re flying along the Autobahn at 120 mph. Wait until you get home!
Imagine seeing the film while tripping on some hallucinogen in 1968. You can then understand every incoherent choice made.
And she is a sight to behold on that bike, man.
Also, my God:
The opening credits (I looked on Youtube and couldn’t find them! There is something listed as the “opening credits” but it’s an animated version, not at all what’s in the film itself) are fantastic. I found this still image of them:
David Lynch clearly used them as inspiration for the opening credits to Lost Highway.
Girl on a Motorcycle is filled with a lot of random crying and hysterical laughter. Emotions are erratic for no reason. Or the reason the emotions are so erratic is quite clear: DRUGS. The film is mostly made up of gorgeous helicopter shots or long shots from across rivers/mountains – of the solitary motorcycle girl zooming through towns, fields, cities, valleys, dales. Any time there is a sex scene, the screen goes psychedelic/swirly-red-spirals/dream-sequence. Free Love is cuh-ray-zee!!
I especially enjoyed her constant voiceover which narrates not only her life events (“I decided to get married” “Oh, Daniel, why can’t I quit you…”) but also what is happening right at that moment (“I need to get gas.” “I need a drink.”) Then we see her getting gas, getting a drink. Thank goodness for the voiceover, otherwise I would have had no idea what was going on.
Girl on a Motorcycle is a time-capsule of the tail-end of an era burning itself out. The back cover of my DVD copy calls it “Europe’s answer to Easy Rider” which makes me think Europe needs to step up its game a little bit. It feels more like Psych-Out, the psychedelic trippy hippies-gone-bad film starring Jack Nicholson, Dean Stockwell, and Susan Strasberg, all the drugs and sex and music and “flower-power”. Girl on a Motorcycle is more of a personal story, without the social relevance (so to speak) of Psych-Out but it has the same interest in the zeitgeist, the mood of the moment, the brand new freedoms, but the ancient emotions (around sex, around marriage, around intimacy) still present. Everything has a druggy trippy feel to it. Nobody can focus on anything for more than two seconds.
Alain Delon doesn’t have much to do besides look smoldering but honestly, along with Paul Newman, he is one of the most purely beautiful men to ever grace the silver screen. His beauty is heart-stopping. Camille Paglia, in her book Sexual Personae, wrote about how famous iconic figures (in art, in pop-culture) always bring a fluid androgyny to the table. Delon is androgynous and complex and sometimes eerily blank: he was both beautiful-golden-boy desired by all because DUH look at him, and ice-cold-opaque-killer.
Delon in “Le Samourai”
Beauty like Delon’s is desirable, yes, it makes everyone, male and female, want him, but it is also distancing, at the same time. One is drawn towards it, moth to the flame, but moths are burnt up by flames, torched by their own desire. Hitchcock understood the off-putting nature of extraordinary beauty and understood the subtextual hostility/resentment that audiences (who are not beautiful) sometimes feel towards the movie stars on the screen. Therefore, he put Cary Grant through hell. Repeatedly. It’s cathartic. Delon’s beauty is a fact of nature, and it must be acknowledged. (My friend Mitchell observed that Angelina Jolie is best in the roles that acknowledge her off-the-charts looks. He said, “I’m sorry, but if she walks into a room and men DON’T fall off their chairs, I don’t buy it.” There’s a lot of truth in that. One of the reasons Maleficent was so awesome was because every second, every shot, was a celebration of her extraordinary face, her ferocious persona. It was a fairy-tale but, at least in that respect, it dealt with reality.) Delon had beauty like that. He doesn’t have a particularly warm beauty, it’s wrapped up in itself: regular people stare, but they don’t want to come too close. It would be like Michelangelo’s David strolling through Trader Joe’s. What would you DO? Delon looks both pure and sinister. (See him as the killer in Le Samourai, one of my favorite performances of all time).
Girl on a Motorcycle is undeniably silly and makes no sense whatsoever but there is also great pleasure in watching these two powerful of-the-moment sexual personae – Faithfull and Delon – riding a motorcycle together, shot by Cardiff.
My brother Brendan is an amazing person, a great father to Cashel and Emmett, and partner to Melody, a supportive and beautiful man. I am so proud of him. We all are. His latest gig is a Story Editor/Writer on the writing staff of Survivor’s Remorse. He’s a jack-of-all-trades. His first love was music and he’s had various bands, and still writes songs all the time.
Brendan lived in New York for years (Cashel was born here) before moving out to Los Angeles. His song “Good Bye New York” expresses his love for the city, his good-bye to it on a personal level, but it’s also an angry anthem. Positive. Mournful. A re-assertion of purpose, rage, and love. You don’t have to tell New Yorkers to “never forget.”
French actress Mélanie Laurent, who was so unforgettable in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (I wrote a post about her acting here, which should be all the proof you need that Quentin Tarantino is a GREAT “actor’s director”), and other films (I loved her nearly-mute turn in The Beginners) is also a director. Breathe is her second feature. Based on a YA novel, Breathe is one of those “manic girl friendships gone south” stories, but Laurent’s style (and the performances of these two young actresses) is simple and sensitive. On one level, this is a very scary film emotionally. But Laurent keeps her cool about it. She doesn’t ratchet up dread or anything. This is about emotions, and about the treachery that sometimes goes down between teenage girls. I highly recommend it.
I admit that this one took me by surprise. I haven’t loved one of his movies in years. And I was a huge fan at the get-go. But The Visit is so good! Yes, super-scary. But also extremely funny. I loved it.
Goodnight Mommy is almost unbearably creepy with some visceral elements that many audience members will find offensive and/or brutally awful/unforgettable. Pick your poison. It’s a masterful portrayal of identity, dizzying doubling, and terror. It’s also almost entirely silent. It opens this week.
Austrian co-directors/writers Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz have been in and around the film industry for decades in various capacities. This is their first film as directors. It’s incredibly confident. And actually fun, despite that grim brutal plot-line.
I sat down with the both of them recently (accompanied by a translator, should we need one, although we ended up communicating fine) at the publicists’ office and interviewed them about Goodnight Mommy. They were gregarious and a ton of fun.
If you like horror films (psychological as well as physical), you won’t want to miss Goodnight Mommy.
Corporate America
— Amazon
— Work culture
— CEO as possible sociopath
New York Times public editor’s function as independent reactor/ombudsman
The structure of German U-Boats
— claustrophobia
— gross smells
— the sinking of said U-boats
——-scratches found on interior walls
The Lusitania (off-shoot of above topic)
— everything about the ship. The captain. The passengers.
— what the event meant
— Documentary footage of Lusitania setting sail (amazing)
— Woodrow Wilson
—— neutrality campaign/League of Nations
WWI (off-shoot of above topic)
— Re-cap of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination (Exhibit A presented of Rebecca West’s description of FF’s trip to Sarajevo)
The various faces made by Allison, caught by my camera, as she leapt (or cannonballed) off the diving board. We described the various faces as:
— maniac in an old-fashioned Victorian lunatic asylum
— a terrified soon-to-be-murdered person as an axe-wielding killer comes at her
— We kept zooming in on her face on the photos and laughing until tears streamed down our faces.
Sociopaths. (This topic will repeat)
They are:
— charming
— disarming
H.H. Holmes
— his “murder castle” in Chicago
— the forensics of that time
— the upcoming book/movie (Scorsese?)
— Wikipedia article read out loud and discussed
——- The difference between a regular murderer and a sadist
Death/Grief
Bachelor in Paradise
— gender politics
— dating rules (woman as aggressor/woman too eager or into it = BAD)
— thick ludicrous eyelashes
The pros/cons of suburban life
The high school reunion I missed/weekend in R.I.
— classmate tazed outside the reunion for being drunk and disorderly (friend said later: “I could smell his skin burning.”)
— pile of iPhones on the sidewalk
— Visiting the gun shop
— My old friend Glenda
which led to …
Being stalked
— lack of recourse for stalk-ee
— Delusional men who won’t take No for an answer
How much we love the sounds of nature
— cicadas
— wind
— trees
Tycoons/robber barons/capitalists of Industrial Revolution
— Vanderbilt
— Rockefeller
— Carnegie
— J.P. Morgan (and his wretched emasculating father)
——– We watched the History Channel’s Men Who Made America series: amazing.
— Paused it to talk about Maury Klein, my great college professor and the best class I took in college: The Industrial Revolution. Told Allison all about it. Then we started up the show again, and in 10 minutes time, there was Maury Klein onscreen as an expert.
— Titan, by Ron Chernow, which we read together. Now we want to read The House of Morgan.
The qualities of really successful people
— innovation/risk
— not giving up
— imagination
Which then led, naturally, to:
Sociopaths/Narcissists
Serial Killers
Creepy psycho children a la We Need to Talk about Kevin
The danger to dogs in Malibu from coyotes who leap fences into backyards
— Similar danger to dogs in NYC who have gone missing when tied up outside grocery stores or whatever, possibly kidnapped to be put into a dog-fighting ring.
Our awesome skin and how proud we are of our awesome skin and how good we take care of our mutually awesome skin
— her mud mask and whether or not I should give it a shot
Pools vs. Ocean. What do we think?
The sucky design of the garden hose
Our various family members and how they all are doing.
How much we like Sandra Bullock
Nicola Tesla.
— We spent quite a bit of time casting the fictional movie about the rivalry between Edison and Tesla.
— Possible actors to play Tesla: Joaquin Phoenix. Tom Hardy as Edison? Tesla looks vaguely like Orlando Bloom but could Bloom pull it off? We discussed with desperate seriousness as though this were an actual job we had.
Rosemary Kennedy
— lobotomy
— Joe’s lying – the whole tragic situation
— John-John’s body language in a photo in People magazine, leaning towards Rosemary inclusively. We both stared at the photo. Stricken.
——– John John’s death.
——– The Seinfeld episode about John John.
Taylor Swift/Miley: Yes? No?
— the importance of what teen girls like
— how ahead of the curve teen girls often are
— they lead the way towards what’s cool or what’s next and what do they get for their prescience? Scorn and derision. See: Elvis Presley. So I’m all for anything that teen girls love without reservation. I’m for anything that gives teen girls a fun fantasy life, and pleasant dreams, and something to strive for.
— also I just love Miley.
How much we hate it when people are assholes during complicated highway merges.
The following conversation is not about anyone we know. It’s based on a picture of someone (whom we do not know) playing a banjo. That’s it. Once we started we couldn’t stop:
“He drinks artisanal beer.”
“He makes his own almond milk.”
“He’s a feminist.”
“He works in a co-op.”
AC/DC.
— our love thereof
— which led to a conversation about Def Leppard.
— side swerve to Stone Temple Pilots
— Judas Priest was mentioned in there somewhere too, as was Nirvana
— we reminisced about Yaz
— and then U2
— all roads lead back to AC/DC. The highway to hell.
On a Facebook thread the other day, Straight Outta Compton (which I loved) was being discussed and a guy showed up and said he didn’t like hip hop, he said he had a “visceral reaction” to “the bling.”
But bling was (and always has been) a symbol of triumph/reveling in success/a signifier.
Carl Perkins’ parents were sharecroppers. He sometimes worked from morning till night. He’d go to school, and would pick cotton before school and pick cotton after school. Poverty. And then – like with so many of these guys, then and now – he went from poverty to having money in a very VERY short period of time.
“Bling” is an upraised middle finger to the poverty in your past, a triumphant statement along the lines of “getta load-a what I just did, all by my damn SELF.” Of course you would want your wealth to be seen by all. What would be the point otherwise?
Elvis never wore blue jeans (unless when appearing in movies – and if you are familiar with Elvis, it always looks a little weird.) because when he grew up, strapped to his mother’s back as she picked cotton in some muddy field, blue jeans meant you were poor. He wouldn’t let the people around him wear jeans, either, and hazed poor backup-singer Larry Strickland (and husband to Naomi Judd? Maybe they’re on the rocks now, but whatever) when he showed up in Vegas for a rehearsal wearing overalls. Elvis could be bossy (like, who are you to tell other people what to wear?) but the pain/shame of being poor and HAVING to wear denim left a scar. The second he made money he began to buy rings, and suits (from Lansky’s on Beale Street, a place he would visit just months before he became famous – at least regionally, and stare inside longingly, face pressed to the glass), and more cars than he could drive (for himself and for others). Of course the consumption was obsessive. He grew up not having enough to eat.
All these guys – Carl Perkins, Sam Phillips – and all the blues artists who inspired them – dressed to the NINES the second they got a paycheck and would buy an entire head-to-toe pink suit and a bright red felt fedora, or an entire electric blue suit, or glittery rings and watches. Attention-getting. As Dave Marsh observed in his Elvis book (and it could apply to all these guys): what Elvis wanted, more than anything, was to be an “unignorable man.” This is what unremitting poverty does to a person, the shame it activates, and sometimes the determination. Bling is a message. Bling is a warning.
This monologue has been brought to you by the vision of the shining spats on the guys in the clip below, and the outfits, and Carl Perkins’ shirt, and the DONE hairdos. Look at that FLASH. Three years before Perkins still had day jobs picking cotton. Imagine what you would do with money if that was your trajectory. Imagine what all that flash really means.
It doesn’t just mean that you have “made it.” It means that you have made it OUT.
