FEATURING: Peter Weller, Amiri Bakara, Jello Biafra, David Cronenberg, Allen Ginsberg (footage), Iggy Pop, Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, Gus van Sant, Andy Warhol (footage), John Waters

PLOT:  A portrait of the life of the literary outlaw told through archival footage, rare home

movies, and interviews with friends, admirers and followers.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s subject is weird, but despite the brief avant-garde sequences used as buffers between the praising heads, it’s method isn’t.

COMMENTS:  With his quick wit, cadaverous features, and patrician drawl,  William S. Burroughs projected a mighty persona.  His writings were full of ironic distance, parody and outlandish stream-of-consciousness surrealism, only occasionally punctured by confessional.  The romantic myth that grew up about him—the artist tormented by guilt, addiction, and public ostracism, who strikes back at society by rejecting all forms of authority—was so powerful that it became far more influential than his actual writings.  The subtitle of this documentary—A Man Within—suggests that we may get a peek under that dapper three-piece armor Burroughs wore in public and see the real, naked man underneath.  Yony Leyser’s freshman documentary is partially successful at that task; he gives us unprecedented access to Burroughs’ home movies (showing him as an old man smoking a joint before going out to fire a shotgun) and reminiscences from those closest to him, including several former lovers.  The portrait the emerges is of a man who may have suffered as much from loneliness as from drugs and remorse; the man we see here has difficulty forming relationships with men he’s attracted to, and prefers to seek the companionship of street hustlers and boys too young and foolish to break his heart.  Topics covered, in jumbled order, include Burroughs’ upper class upbringing; his role as godfather of the Beats; his homosexuality and his refusal to join the “gay mainstream;” his lifelong relationship with heroin; his love of snakes and guns; the accidental killing of Joan Vollmer while playing a drunken game of “William Tell”; Naked Lunch and its censorship battles; his troubled and tragic relationship with his son (who drank himself to death in an attempt to emulate and impress dear old dad);  his second role as spiritual godfather, this time to the punk rock movement; and his declining years, when he appears to finally find some peace.  There’s even time for a little bit of Burroughs’ actual writing: his hilariously cynical Thanksgiving wish (“thanks for the American dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through”) and a few excerpts of the author’s delightfully dry readings of his own works.  Still, a neophyte watching this documentary will come away with little sense of Burroughs’ actual literary importance; for example, he’ll still have almost no idea what Naked Lunch was about (although to be fair, the same could be said of someone who’s read the novel several times).  Bolstering the doc’s weird credentials are a series of bizarro bumpers between interviewees: animated wire frame sculptures used to introduce chapters, manipulated and superimposed stock footage, what looks to be a segment from an archival experimental film featuring Brion Gyson’s trippy spinning light “Dream Machine,” and snippets from 70s-80s era punk-surrealist music videos incorporating Burroughs’ image and mystique (one of these, “Rub Out the Word” by Roger Holden, is included as an extra on the DVD).  Sometimes footage is chopped up with Burroughs speaking a few words at a time, then jumping to another part of the monologue, cut-up style.  All in all, these intermediary sequences give the documentary an arty, bohemian feel that’s in complete harmony with its the subject.  Musical accompaniment is provided by Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, and traditional Moroccan Sufi trance music from the Master Musicians of Jajouka.  Have no doubt, this is an encomium and not an exposé or unbiased examination of Burroughs life.  All interviewers are friends and admirers, and no one has an unkind word to say about the master.  (For a man who went out of his way to offend and provoke everyone, it appears Burroughs made remarkably few enemies; or perhaps he just outlived them all).  What may be the central event of Burroughs life—the homicide of Vollmer, a homicide for which the writer was never punished outside of his own head—is almost glossed over.  To make the hagiography complete, Waters officially canonizes Burroughs in the movie’s finale.  It’s more tribute than documentary, and as such will be well-received by fans, worshippers, and those inclined to become fans and worshippers.

William S. Burroughs has links to two Certified Weird movies.  Besides the obvious Naked Lunch connection, his hipness was harnessed when he was chosen to narrate the edited version of Häxan that toured college campuses in the late 60s as Witchcraft Through the Ages.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Beat novelist and poet, junkie, expatriate, homosexual, lousy shot, punk-rock godhead, scenester, weird old man, and more, the subject of Yony Leyser’s very capable documentary ‘William S. Burroughs: A Man Within’ carried multitudes inside him, despite the film’s title.”–Ty Burr, The Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Michael Angarano, Jemaine Clement, Sam Rockwell, Halley Feiffer,Jennifer Coolidge, Hector Jimenez

PLOT:  A pretentious pulp fantasy icon who’s run out of ideas steals a home-schooled teen

writer’s sci-fi epic, “Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years,” and positions it to be his next bestseller; meanwhile, the original author has sold the property to a team of his nerdy peers who are making it into a YouTube-quality adaptation.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Weirder than expected and funnier than its reputation suggests, Gentlemen Broncos falls just short of a general recommendation, and just short of being weird enough to be considered for the List.  You may want to take a flyer on this uneven but sporadically hilarious spoof of sci-fi nerdom, though; the beyond-offbeat tone is sure to alienate many, but if you can connect with it you may come away with a peculiar affection for this messy film, the kind of devotion an owner gives a particularly ugly dog.

COMMENTS: Gentlemen Broncos is a movie with three different tonal layers, which sometimes conflict, but ensure that the movie remains stylistically unpredictable and never gets boring.  The base tone —which might be styled “nerd grotesque”—takes some getting used to; in fact, you’re going to have to work to meet the movie halfway on it. Jared Hess creates a world as seen through the eyes of a frightened adolescent: everyone young Benjamin encounters is uncomfortably strange, every social interaction awkward and fraught with the danger of humiliation. It’s as if every character in the film is some variation of Napoleon Dynamite. His role models include a nightgown-designing mom who supplements her income by selling homemade popcorn balls and a Church-appointed Big Brother with an incontinent albino python and a perpetually stoned expression framed by permed blond ringlets.  His peers are fellow maladjusted home-schooled youths: when he first meets the scheming Tabatha, she fleeces him for half his meal allowance, then cozies up to him by sitting next to him on the bus and letting him give her a squishy hand massage.  Even stranger is Lonnie, the creepiest kid on the block, a no-budget movie mogul whose flamboyant air of artistic superiority could have been hilarious if not for the freakish dental prosthetic he wears that stretches his mouth into a permanent Mr. Sardonicus death mask.  This base layer, a suburban universe inhabited by nothing but oddball losers makes for an uncomfortable, subtly nightmarish viewing experience, in the mold of a gentler and geekier John Waters.  Dr. Ronald Chevalier introduces another dimension to the film. The self-important sci-fi idol and general tool, obsessed with American Indian spirituality and breastfeeding, is shrewdly and purposefully characterized by Jemaine Clement.  He speaks with a carefully affected accent that suggests Ivy League superiority without having any actual geographic significance, and answers his omnipresent blackberry headset with a self-important “Chevalier” that makes you want to smack him.  The scene where he pompously lectures aspiring teen writers on the importance of providing characters with “magical” names is a pinpoint piece of character-assassination comedy.  If the entire movie had been made out of scenes like that, Gentlemen Broncos would be acknowledged as a satirical masterpiece. These two layers—the uncomfortably quirky and the sharply sardonic—exist uneasily together, but the wild cards, and the segments of most interest to fans of the weird, are in the third layer, the dramatizations of the “Yeast Lords” adventure. The saga involves the mysterious properties of yeast (which look like cow patties and allow a Yeast Lord to fly), stolen gonads, clones, cyclopses with ray guns, and flying reindeer mounted with rocket launchers. We see three iterations of the tale scattered throughout the film: Benjamin’s original concept (with a manly Sam Rockwell as the hero) and Chevalier’s plagiarized version (he changes the protagonist into a “tranny” in an Edgar Winter wig, also portrayed by Rockwell, in a weak attempt to hide the story’s origins), as well as the amateur film adaptation by Lonnie, who doctors the script and casts himself as the female lead. Outrageously cheap CGI is used to achieve the flying and pink puke spewing effects, adding another layer of parody to the already tongue-in-cheek proceedings.  There’s brilliantly absurd dialogue throughout: “we’re investigating ways to strengthen the military—your gonad is being used for research,” “take me to your yeast factory!,” and Chevalier’s memorable couplet (from an alien lullaby) “within my breast meat there is a famine/No more sweets in the mammary cannon.” Without the “Yeast Lords” scenes, Gentlemen Broncos would be a highly peculiar mix of overquirkiness and pulp fiction satire; scattering these histrionic playlets throughout turns the movie into something meriting the designation “weird.”

On the strength of Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite and the less-successful but still profitable Nacho Libre, Broncos received a generous $10 million budget and was scheduled for a limited release by Fox Searchlight.  The film was savaged by critics and shunned by audiences; its opening weekend was a disaster, netting just over $100,000 theatrically.  The movie was far too weird for mainstream filmgoers, but it stands to improve its performance on home video and could even develop a small cult following.  Extreme weird movie trivia: Robin Ballard (star of the Certified Weird Elevator Movie) has a bit role in Broncos as a “female assistant.”  Further trivia: the movie is set in a fictional Utah town called “Saltair.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a finely deranged, sillyhearted satire… the aesthetic is followed through to the end by the filmmaker, who’s fixated on whatever weirdness he can devour.”–Brian Orndorf, DVD Talk (Blu-ray)

FEATURING: Ben Gazarra, Ornella Muti

PLOT: Alcoholic skid-row poet Charles Serking (a pseudonym for Charles Bukowski, on

whose stories the film is based) drinks, writes poetry, has bizarre sex with a small harem of loose women, and finally falls in love with a beautiful but self-destructive prostitute.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: Though no movie where a barstool patron calmly inserts a giant safety pin through her cheeks can be said to be unweird, Tales doesn’t go over-the-top in weirdness, and doesn’t compensate with exceptional insight or drama.

COMMENTS: Tales of Ordinary Madness’ greatest asset is the fact that it recreates the feeling of sitting on a bar stool listening to a charming, plastered braggart tell tall tales pulled from a head full of hazy, half-remembered adventures.  The first sequence illustrates the method.  Bleary eyed, brown-bagged bottle in hand, a bored Serking stumbles out of a poetry reading and discovers a runaway nymphette has set up a makeshift bedroom, complete with clothesline hung with her dainties, in an antechamber of the deserted performance hall.  “Are you real?” he asks as a prelude to pedophilic seduction. She answers in the affirmative, but we have our doubts—even though she seemingly leaves him a pair of panties and takes a bus ticket.  That’s not even the most improbable of the soused author’s sexcapades, which include stalking a woman who later claims she likes to be raped, having a beautiful call girl pay him for sex so he will ruin her for her clients, and trying to re-enter the womb with the help of a game, dumpy housewife.  Each vignette has the feeling of something that might have happened, but not quite in the way it’s told to us. When Serking gets his break and is sent to the writer’s big leagues, the paid fellowship gig involves sitting in an office cubicle in a literary assembly line under the sickly green glow of a fluorescent tube.  Throughout the film, we see Serking engaging in some increasingly odd adventure that passes out before it gets too strange. He then wakes up alone, as if he’s sobered up and reality has reset itself.  Besides boozing and womanizing, Serking occasionally writes poetry, although it can turn Sam Spade-ish: “Los Angeles… some call it Lost Angels.  Me, I was just another one of the lost, back where I belonged…” Ben Gazarra goes all-in for the role, and a less committed performance might have wrecked the film.  With a winning smile beneath a ragged beard, he delivers his street poetry in a boozy, bemused baritone that conveys more hard-earned wisdom than is actually contained in the naive romanticism of the script.  Exotic Ornella Muti is more luminous and intoxicating than the glow of a neon beer sign in a dim bar, and the series of increasingly shocking body mutilations she goes through penetrate the heart far more than Serking’s doggerel.  The movie’s principal problem is its unreflecting over-eagerness to buy into the “tragic artist drowns his sorrows in a river of pleasure” mythology.  The portrait is of a young male poet’s fondest fantasy: be fashionably sad, drink all day, bang out a few sentimental lines every now and then, and beautiful women will throw themselves at you.  The layer of grime necessary to cut the glare of the glamor is missing: Gazarra is too healthy, too vital, too clear headed, too able to shrug off the whiskey and get an erection whenever he needs one.  He only vomits once.  But perhaps that’s all part of the movie’s “it really happened, but not quite the way I’m telling it now” stylistics.

Charles Bukowski’s life was also the subject of a more conventional and accessible film, Barfly (1987), with scruffy Mickey Rourke looking more beaten down and low-rent than Gazarra’s relatively presentable portrayal.  More recently, Matt Damon tackled a Bukowskiesque figure in Factotum (2005).  Bukowski himself reportedly did not like Tales, and some critics complain that this reverent work misses out on the writer’s subtlety and undercurrent of irony.  I suspect, to the contrary, that the movie captures the Bukowski project too perfectly.  Like a lesser William S. Burroughs, this is an artist whose literary reputation comes from his tormented persona rather than from his actual writings.  This narcissistic artistic fantasy, where warts are redrawn as beauty marks and paraded as badges of authenticity, makes Bukowski’s personal mythologizing look too transparent.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…somewhere inside its unworkable blend of pretension and pornography, there’s a serious film about art and sexual abandon struggling to get out… concentrates solely on the lurid aspects of Mr. Bukowski’s writing and exaggerates these so greatly that all else is lost.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Natalia.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”– Gene Fowler

DIRECTED BY: Joel Coen

FEATURING: John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, Judy Davis, John Mahoney, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi

PLOT: Barton Fink is a playwright whose first Broadway show, a play about the common man, is a smash success; his agent convinces him to sell while his stock is high and go to Hollywood to quickly make enough money to fund the rest of his writing career.  He arrives in Los Angeles, checks into the eerie art deco Hotel Earle, and is assigned to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery by the Capitol pictures studio head himself.  Suffering from writer’s block, Barton spends his days talking to the insurance salesman who lives in the room next door and seeking writing advice from alcoholic novelist W.P. Mayhew, until deadline day looms and very strange events begin to take center stage.

BACKGROUND:

• At the time, it was widely reported that the Coen brothers wrote the script for Barton Fink while suffering from a mean case of writer’s block trying to complete the screenplay to their third feature film, Miller’s Crossing.  The Coens themselves have since said that this description is an exaggeration, saying merely that their writing progress on the script had slowed and they felt they needed to get some distance from Miller’s Crossing by working on something else for a while.
• Barton Fink was the first and only film to win the Palme D’or, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Cannes film festival; after this unprecedented success, Cannes initiated a rule that no film could win more than two awards.  Back home in the United States, Barton Fink was not even nominated for a Best Picture, Director or Actor Oscar. It did nab a Best Supporting Actor nom for Lerner.
• The character of Barton Fink was inspired by real life playwright Clifford Odets.  W.P. Mayhew was based in part on William Faulkner.  Jack Lipnick shares many characteristics, including a common birthplace, with 1940s MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer.
• Following a definite theme for the year, Judy Davis also played an author’s muse and lover in another surrealistic 1991 movie about a tortured writer, Naked Lunch.
• According to the Coens, the final scene with the pelican diving into the ocean was not planned, but was a happy accident.
• In interviews the Coens have steadfastly disavowed any intentional symbolic or allegorical reading of the final events of the film, saying”what isn’t crystal clear isn’t intended to become crystal clear, and it’s fine to leave it at that” and “the movie is intentionally ambiguous in ways they [critics] may not be used to seeing.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Barton Fink is full of mysterious images that speak beyond the frame.  The most popular and iconic picture is John Goodman wreathed in flame as the hallway of the Earle burns behind him.  Our pick would probably go to the final shot of the film, where a pelican suddenly and unexpectedly plummets into the ocean while a dazed Barton watches a girl on a beach assume the exact pose of a picture on his hotel wall.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A nightmarish, expressionistic, and self-satirizing evocation of

the difficulty of creation, Barton Fink pokes a sharpened stick into the deepest wounds of artistic self-doubt.  A pure mood piece, its amazing ending achieves the remarkable triumph of leaving us with nothing but unanswered questions, while simultaneously feeling complete and whole.

COMMENTS: The most accurate word to describe Barton Fink is “enigmatic.”  It’s a work of many contradictions: it’s an intricately written script about a scriptwriter who can’t write; it mercilessly mocks its hero, and at the same time deeply empathizes with his torment; it’s a movie without an ending, which turns out to be the perfect ending.  Constructed around the idea of writer’s block, it’s one of the most original and inspired movies ever made.

Barton Fink should be understood as an expressionist work, a movie where portraying the mental state of the protagonist is more important than the actual details of the plot.  The script deliberately puts the viewer into a misleading mindset by playing out its first half as a straightforward Hollywood satire, then turns the tables on the audience when one character’s unexplained death seemingly turns the film into a mystery.  And a mystery it is, though not the sort of mystery with a solution that moviegoers intentionally flock to theaters to see.  The mystery here is, for lack of a more precise term, metaphysical.  What happened to Audrey?  Who is Charlie?  What is in the box?  Viewers who demand definite and certain answers to these questions will have to look to their own imaginations.  They will not get help from the Coens’ movie.

The movie does proffer a likely answer to all three of those questions, and that answer is: “something horrible.”  Does it matter what?  Does knowing the exact height and weight of the boogeyman in the closet make it any less scary?  Although the mysterious events of the denouement are sometimes impossible, and always unresolved, they are perfectly externalized reflections of Barton’s mind.  He is mired in a nightmare of his own lack-of-making: he can’t create, he’s consumed with doubts and thinks that he may be a hack, that maybe he only had one story in him and it’s out.  His self-identity as a writer is threatened, and he senses doom coming with his approaching deadline.  He has locked himself inside, as he says, the “life of the mind,” and “there’s no road map for that territory, and exploring it can be painful.”  These words are spoken early in his writing career, and Barton’s being pretentious and grandiose when he preaches about the necessity of pain to the artist, but the suffering he romanticizes will be made less ridiculous when it materializes as a nightmare inside the creepy Hotel Earle.

Approaching Barton Fink as an allegory, while too tempting for many to resist, doesn’t work either, although that won’t stop those who aren’t used to seeing intentional ambiguity in a movie from imposing an unnecessary rationalism on the script.  Broad symbolism is apparent, and important, but it only tells a small part of the tale.  The most obvious symbol is Charlie, Barton’s next door neighbor at the Hotel Earle, who represents “the common man.”  Barton, who pictures himself as the champion of the working stiff and wants to create a “theater of the common man,” is actually a stuffy intellectual who has almost nothing in common with the class he hopes to uplift.  At the triumphant wrap party for his proletarian play “Bare Ruined Choirs,” Barton celebrates only with other people in dressed in tuxes and evening gowns.  He’s initially disdainful of the idea of working for Hollywood, never seeming to consider that it’s the big screen, not the Broadway stage, where common man gets most of his stories.  When a real-life common man barges into his room in the fleshy person of Charlie (a masterful John Goodman) and offers him a drink, Barton feels only a mixture of fight and annoyance.  Eventually he warms up to Charlie, after the insurance salesman pays him a few patronizing compliments, but he’s not interested in listening to this common man.  Three times in their initial conversation Charlie offers to “tell him some stories”; each time Barton interrupts the salesman to continue his lecture on how he’s striving to create stories that will explore the life of average, everyday people just struggling to make it in this world.

Barton’s pompous defense of the common man in theory, coupled with his condescension to the common man who’s sitting on his own bed, is funny and ironic.  It demonstrates dramatically how he’s cut off from his own inspiration.  It also feeds into a viable interpretation of the movie as a parable about the failure of leftist/socialist intellectuals, who theorized about the proletariat more than understood them, to stop the rise of fascism in Germany.  There are several references to World War II and the approaching Holocaust in the film, which begins in 1941 a few weeks before Pearl Harbor.  At the end of the movie, studio mogul Lipnik is drafted to fight the “little yellow bastards.”  Two detectives have names which evoke the Axis powers.  Most tellingly, one character incongruously mutters the phrase, “heil Hitler.”  Barton, the wimpy intellectual, is impotent to stop the madness growing around him.

That interpretation is sustainable and ripe for the plucking, but it hardly addresses the heart of what’s tormenting Barton—that blank piece of paper in his Underwood typewriter staring back at him.  And it almost certainly doesn’t address the heart of what bothers the Coens, either.  If the conflict between Barton and Charlie symbolizes the ascension of the Nazis, then I suspect its equally true that, to the Coens, the rise of fascism itself represents something else, something more personal.

Unlike Barton, the Coens aren’t much interested in the class struggle or in using their art as a political platform; they aren’t enslaved to realism, social or otherwise, and discard it as an unwanted restriction whenever it gets in the way of the story they want to tell.  In fact, the movie could be read more as an aesthetic, rather than a political, indictment of the Finks of the world.  Barton grandstands that his art is important because it’s political and because it helps his fellow man, while avoiding plumbing the painful and messy depths of the human soul.  W.P. Mayhew, the writer Barton originally admires but comes to despise, is equally creatively constipated as the novice; the difference seems to be that the older writer’s alcoholism arises out of a real, rather than a theoretical, torment.

The Coens tightly pack lots of elements into the box that is Barton Fink.  The movie is almost impossibly stuffed full of recurring details to seize upon.  There’s the eerie atmosphere of the Hotel Earle, with its cataleptic elevator operator and ominously deserted hallways.  There’s hints of Barton’s sexual repression, seen in the spermlike paste which leaks off the peeling hotel wallpaper and the way he grimaces when Charlie shows him the naked lady on the underside of his tie.  There’s the broad comic relief of the Hollywood satire, with paunchy movie moguls talking out of both sides of their motormouths.  There are the indications that the Hotel Earle is hell itself.  There’s the fact that the little that we hear of the script Barton finally manages to write in a burst of inspiration, which he calls his best work, seems to repeat the wording of his play almost verbatim.  There’s the mystery of the significance of the picture of the girl reclining by the ocean Barton keeps staring it.  There’s the curious fact that the script inevitably refers to the movies as “pictures,” never by any other word.  There’s the fun of counting the number of times characters say the word “head.”  There’s that mysterious box Charlie gives Barton to hold onto when he leaves town.

“What’s in the box?,” Barton is asked at the end of the film.  Were this any other film, we could trust the hints that we had been given, and say that we know with certainty what’s in that box.  In this movie, we can’t quite be sure.  Like Barton, I don’t know what’s in the box.  Like Barton, I’m not so sure I want to know.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird, it is the kind of movie critics can soak up thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least three espressos arguing their way through… [the Coens] dreamlike realization of their script, though often imagistically striking, deliberately subverts their message and all too often alienates the viewer.”–Richard Schickel, Time (contemporaneous)

“…a middling ability to ape the moods and stylistic mannerisms of Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and David Lynch…  basically a midnight-movie gross-out in Sunday-afternoon art-house clothing.”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

“The surrealistic writer’s block scenes, in which Barton silently watches wallpaper peel and its paste ooze, are particularly memorable–imagine ERASERHEAD in color. Ultimately, however, the look, sound and feel of this macabre comedy fail to support any coherent theme.”–TV Guide

IMDB LINK: Barton Fink (1991)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

At the Movies – Siskel and Ebert’s contemporaneous “two thumbs up” review from their television show

000_Barton Fink – fascinating multimedia presentation of Barton Fink, which draws connections between various motifs in the film and raises more questions than answers

Barton Fink at “You Know, For Kids” – basic information and trivia on the film from a Coen brothers fansite; poke around under the categories “scripts,” “multimedia,” and “reviews” for more Barton Fink goodies

“Barton Fink” – excellent excerpt from “Nietzsche: The Darkness of Life,” the Barton Fink chapter of Jorn K. Bramann’s “Educating Rita and Other Philosophical Movies,” suggesting that the movie reflects the irrational nature of art described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”

Coen Brothers Want John Turturro to Get Old for “Barton Fink” Sequel, “Old Fink” – Adam Rosenberg of MTV reports on the possibility of a Fink II

DVD INFO: Barton Fink took a shamefully long time to arrive on DVD, but in 2003 20th Century corrected the oversight with a one disc edition (buy). Extras are sparse: there are only trailers, a stills gallery, and eight inconsequential deleted scenes (the Coens don’t do commentaries, and in fact appear to be philosophically opposed to them).

An excellent way to acquire the movie is to spend a few dollars more to get the five-disc “The Coen Brothers Movie Collection” set (buy), which also includes Blood Simple, the nearly weird comedy Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and Fargo. All are excellent movies.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Deacon Lowdown.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

FEATURING: Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa, Najwa Nimri

PLOT:  Lucia, a waitress, falls in love with Lorenzo, a young novelist with a secret in his

past; their passionate love story is intertwined with dramatized scenes from Lorenzo’s novel, with it left to the viewer to decide what is “real” and what is “fiction.” 

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Sex and Lucia‘s fractured narrative is more confusing than weird.  It’s meta-narrative conceits call to mind Adaptation, another movie that ultimately felt too much like an intellectual exercise to be extremely weird. Sex and Lucia treats it’s fiction-within-a-fiction structure with more subtlety and ambiguity, though Charlie Kauffman’s screenplay exists on a satirical plane that in the end makes it the more centered and satisfying effort.

COMMENTS:  The best things about Sex and Lucia are sex (important enough to get its own paragraph!) and Lucia (Paz Vega, whose acting is as naked as her body). While counting its plusses, we should also mention the cinematography, done on a digital camera, with the scenes on the Mediterranean isle bleached like a seashell in the sun.  The story is another matter.  Many viewers find it frustrating that Medem riddles his script with narrative wormholes which shuttle the story back in time or to an alternate resolution, then demands the viewer assist in the construction by choosing what is part of the “real” story and what is in Lorenzo’s imagination. The bigger problem may be that none of the possibilities he offers have a tremendous emotional resonance.  The movie is arty and self-conscious throughout, with multiple obviously significant shots of the moon. Symbolism is pervasive and tends to make sense, but adds up to little in the way of genuine insight.  While these difficulties make Sex and Lucia less than it might have been, it’s still beautiful enough to be lightly intoxicating, like a Mediterranean vacation or a one-nighter with a beautiful woman.

The sex scenes, especially those between the gorgeous and unselfconscious Vega and Ulloa, are undoubtedly a major attraction.  The lovers’ exploration of their bodies and sexual tastes during their whirlwind courtship is erotic and tasteful; the scenes are arousing, but are also beautifully constructed to create a sense of true intimacy between the characters.  The sex is front-loaded; after the middle of the film, when a sordid and pornographic but equally erotic fantasy occurs, sex leaves Lucia and Lorenzo’s relationship, replaced by tragedy and arguments.  Medem refused to let the sexier parts of the film be cut for distribution, but the scenes of tumescent male nudity and fellatio are so brief that they are unnecessary and reek of gimmickry; it’s difficult to rationalize the director’s passionate defense of the artistic necessity of erections.  The film may be purchased in either a unrated cut or in an R-rated version; your enjoyment of the movie is unlikely to be affected by which version you choose (I can’t determine if there’s a difference in runtime between the two versions).   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At its best, Sex and Lucia works literally like a dream, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away — the narrative is fractured and oblique, the meaning suppressed. It will infuriate a lot of moviegoers, perhaps especially those looking for a high class dirty movie.”–Phillip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: David Cronenberg

FEATURING:  Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Julian Sands

PLOT:  Bill Lee is a writer/exterminator in New York City whose wife begins mainlining the bug powder he uses to kill roaches, and convinces him to try it as well.  He becomes addicted to the powder, and one night shoots his wife dead while playing “William Tell.”  Lee goes on the lam and lands in Interzone, an exotic free zone reminiscent of Tangier or Casablanca (but which may exist only in his mind), where he begins taking ever more powerful drugs and typing out “reports” partially dictated to him by his living, insectoid typewriter.

BACKGROUND:

• William S. Burroughs’s original novel Naked Lunch was selected as one of the 100 best English language novels written after 1923 by Time magazine.
• The novel was held not to be obscene by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1966.  This was the final obscenity prosecution of a literary work in the United States; there would be no subsequent censorship of the written word (standing alone).
• Several directors had considered filming the novel before David Cronenberg got the project.  Avant-garde director Anthony Balch wanted to adapt it as a musical (with Burroughs’s blessing), and actually got as far as storyboarding the project and getting a commitment from Mick Jagger (who later backed out) to star.  Among others briefly interested in adapting the novel in some form were Terry Southern, John Huston, Frank Zappa, and Terry Gilliam.
• Because the novel was essentially a plotless series of hallucinatory vignettes (what Burroughs called “routines’), David Cronenberg chose to make the movie a thinly veiled tale about Burroughs’s writing of the novel, incorporating only a few of the actual characters and incidents from the book.  Actors in the film portray real-life writers and Burroughs associates Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul and Jane Bowles.
• The episode in the film where Lee accidentally shoots his wife while performing the “William Tell routine” is taken from Burroughs real life: he actually shot his common law wife while performing a similar trick in a Mexican bar.  Burroughs felt tremendous guilt through his life for the accident and has said “I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death.”
• Naked Lunch won seven awards at the Genie Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars), including Best Movie and Best Director.
• Producer Jeremy Thomas has somewhat specialized in bringing weird and unusual fare to the largest possible audience, producing not only Naked Lunch but also Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) and Tideland (2005).
• Following a definite theme for the year, Judy Davis also played an author’s muse and lover in another surrealistic 1991 movie about a tortured writer, Barton Fink.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Clark Nova, Lee’s territorial, talking typewriter, who alternately guides and torments the writer.  He’s a beetle who has somehow evolved a QWERTY keyboard as an organ. When he speaks, he lifts his wings to reveal a sphincter through which he dictates his directives.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  It begins with an exterminator who does his rounds wearing a

Original trailer for Naked Lunch

three piece suit and fedora.  His philosophy is to “exterminate all rational thought.”  His wife steals his insecticide and injects it into her breast to get high, and gets him hooked on the bug power, too.  A pair of cops question him on suspicion of possessing dangerous narcotics, and leave him alone in the interrogation room with a huge talking “caseworker” bug who explains that his wife is an agent of Interzone, Incorporated, and is not even human.  And this is just the setup, before the film turns really weird.

COMMENTS:  Make no mistake: Naked Lunch is clearly David Cronenberg’s movie, not William S. Burroughs’.  The original novel, while well-written in splotches, was more notorious for its obscurity and its stylistic and thematic taboo-breaking than it was celebrated for its literary quality.  And the novel’s ultimate importance comes not from its internal experimentalism (an evolutionary dead end which failed to bear literary progeny), but from the external symbolism that arose when it became a cause celebre in the battle for free speech and free thought in the early 1960s.  Naked Lunch, with its homosexual rape fantasies wrapped in a shroud of lyrical prose, triumphed in court over the censors’ last-ditch attempts to control what Americans could put into their minds.  It became one of those novels that is much more read about than read, and Burroughs—junky, manslaughterer, and wild prose stylist—became the ultimate symbol of the literary outlaw.

Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch isn’t an adaptation of the novel, although it incorporates a few of Burroughs’s “routines.” Instead, it’s about the process of writing the novel, an exaggerated account of the agonizing pangs of pushing a creative work out of the author’s womb.  Abstracted, Cronenberg’s plot is simple: Bill Lee (an obvious stand-in for Burroughs) accidentally shoots his wife, is tormented by the act and falls into a paranoid drug and sex addiction, all the while writing a novel trying to sort out his feelings about the incident.  (Viewers who complained Cronenberg’s plot was incomprehensible had best stay far away from the source novel).

Given that this basically simple story is told through the hallucinatory haze of constant intoxication and paranoia, the incidents that make up the majority of the film are virtually arbitrary, important only insofar as they convey Lee’s internal state of guilt, torment and confusion. There is at least one scene which makes this abundantly clear: Ian Holmes (portraying expatriate author Tom Frost) mentions that he heard Lee murdered his wife, and casually confesses that he is slowly killing his own wife with drugs and witchcraft.  Lee, alarmed, asks him how he can be discussing this, and Frost answers, “This is all happening telepathically, non-consciously.  If you look carefully at my lips, you’ll see I’m actually talking about something else.”  And he is: his lips movements do not match his words.

Within certain parameters, anything can happen inside the story of Naked Lunch: typewriters can speak through their anuses, characters can turn into each other or metamorphose into sexually ravenous centipedes, sexual desire can materialize into an amorphous living blob and be chased out of the room by a maid dressed as a dominatrix.  But there are a few inflexible boundaries in Interzone, the Moroccan fantasyland Lee flees to to complete his “report,” that are built from Lee’s psychological preoccupations:

Lee will always be stoned.  Opiate addiction was the most central fact in Burroughs’s day-to-day existence during the time he was writing Naked Lunch, and it’s Bill’s core reality, as well.  Lee samples a fantastical pharmacopeia of exotic drugs—bug powder, the ground meat of the black centipede, and “Mugwump jism”—whose effects and power to alter reality are unlimited.  He supplements this diet of fictional intoxicants with mahjoun (a Moroccan hashish concoction) and alcohol.  The constant flow of psychotropic substances in his bloodstream provides the explanation for the hallucinatory vignettes, and also indicates the depth of his need to flee reality.

Lee will remain sexually ambivalent. Burroughs was himself a bisexual, and used his writing to nonjudgementally explore his homosexual urges and fantasies to their absurd limits.  Bill Lee is more sexually ambiguous; he seems to be encountering his own repressed homosexuality as the film goes on.  This aspect of the script is not fully explored, but it adds another undercurrent of mystery and ambiguity to Lee’s search for his self through his writing.

Lee will always write.  Cronenberg’s choice to anthropomorphize the typewriters in Naked Lunch was a stroke of genius.  The idea of a writer sitting down in front of a blank page and struggling with himself over what to type on it is inherently uncinematic.  The director solved this problem by having the typewriter talk back, debating with its owner and occasionally pulling him down psychological roads he would rather not trod.  Lee’s relationship with his Clark Nova typewriter is his most intimate bond.

Lee will always feel guilty.  The idea that guilt from the slaying of his wife was the impetus for Burroughs’s writing career is not a unique one; the author frankly stated as much.  Cronenberg keeps the motivation constantly in the background.  Bill’s mind resurrects the dead Joan Lee in Interzone as the living Joan Frost, and Bill once again romances her, and this time tries to rescue her.  Joan figures prominently in the last scene of the film, when Bill is leaving Interzone for Annexia and presumably returning to the normal world, in a conclusion that makes it crystal clear that her death is the central pivot of the movie.

Lee will always receive communiques and dispatches from mysterious creatures.  From the caseworker bug who tells him Joan is an alien agent and must die to the Mugwump that tells him to write a report on the killing (“with all the tasty details”) and provides him his ticket to Interzone to the Clark Nova typewriter who advises him that “homosexuality is the best cover an agent can have,” Bill constantly imagines himself as manipulated by entities which speak to him alone.  The content of the missions and assignments that these insectoid and alien overlords send Lee on are irrelevant.  They exist to explore Burroughs’s preoccupation with the idea of control: the control of the drug over the addict’ of the sexual impulse over the person; and the ego as the censor of the subconscious, the parts of the psyche we would rather not acknowledge but which the artist must explore.

These five elements–intoxication, sex, writing, guilt, and paranoia–form the walls within which the seemingly incoherent and undisciplined drama of Naked Lunch plays out.  Peter Weller’s deadpan performance further grounds us within this psychologically teeming nightmare world.  Fedora tightly screwed on, he strides among these horrors tight-lipped and poker-faced.  He acts like a 1940s private eye; he has the composure to quip about crabs when cops bring him in for questioning on drug possession, and he reacts to the horrific appearance of a hallucinated talking cockroach with the same suave coolness as Sam Spade confronted by a pistol-packing palooka.  His public demeanor is controlled, but when he’s trapped inside his shabby Interzone apartment with the D.T.s and only his typewriter to talk to, his impassive face cracks and his haunted agony bleeds through.

Cronenberg also creates a consistent visual and aural landscape to keep his world from totally spinning out of control.  The film is shot in a rich brown color scheme that subtly suggests a fecal theme.  Interzone is an exotic Arabic creation of the mind, but look very closely to see how the director subliminally blends features of New York City into the landscape to suggest that in reality Lee has never left the city at all.  The soundtrack (available on available on Milan Records), featuring the free-jazz wailing of saxophone legend Ornette Coleman layered over the exotic and sinister orchestration of Howard Shore, is truly a thing of wonder.  The contrast between Coleman’s wildly imaginative and unconstrained phrasings nestled within Shore’s carefully studied and atmospheric harmonies suggest the collaboration between Cronenberg and Burroughs in the film: just as Shore’s score grounds and contains Ornette’s free-form improvisation without destroying or betraying it, Cronenberg’s film world creates a space that can be decorated by Burroughs’ wild spirit.

What Cronenberg ultimately achieves in Naked Lunch is to tap into the iconography of William S. Burroughs.  Burroughs’s greatest creation was not any of his writings, but himself.  This drug-addicted author became the modern romantic archetype of the artist: tortured, but completely free of social convention, a psychic seeker traveling deep into realms of human greatness and depravity and returning with forbidden wisdom.  That the ending provides no real wisdom, but rather leads into a circular paradox, is immaterial.  Like Interzone itself, it’s the illusion that is the reality.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“By the time it reaches a repellent fever pitch…  ’Naked Lunch’ has become too stomach-turning and gone too far over the top to regain its initial aplomb. Yet for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“What ‘Naked Lunch’ jettisons are the narrative signposts that usually anchor Cronenberg’s films. Without them, the movie engrosses or bores on the strength of each sequence, and not all of it fascinates equally. A fever dream told in a chilly, controlled style, it is irrational in a matter-of-fact, deliberate way. Obviously this is not everybody’s cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it’s one clammily compelling movie.”–David Ansen, Newsweek (contemporaneous)

“It’s a movie about a writer’s relationship to his work — and, as such, perhaps one of the most penetrating examinations of a writer’s processes ever made. Certainly it’s one of the strangest and most disturbing… There’s a synergistic overlap here between Cronenberg’s own particular brand of weirdness and Burroughs’s; they’re both twisted in ways that complement each other nicely.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK:  Naked Lunch (1991)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Naked Lunch (1991): The Criterion Collection:  More details on the DVD release, links to two essays on Burroughs and the film, and a discussion board.

“Naked Lunch”: Behind the Scenes:  Contemporaneous Entertainment Weekly article with quotes from Cronenberg and Burroughs

DVD INFO:  The Criterion Collection edition (buy) is the definitive release.  The two-disc set features a new digital transfer, intercut commentaries by director Cronenberg and star Weller, a 45 minute “making of” documentary, an extensive collection of segments from the novel read by Burroughs himself, a collection of stills from the movie, rare pictures of Burroughs from the collection of Allen Ginsberg, trailers, and a small booklet containing essays on the film.

An out-of-print single-disc version of the film for the budget minded can also be found (buy).  Extras are unknown.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Rui.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze

FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Columbus

PLOT:  Adaptation tells two stories: in one, a “New Yorker” journalist (Meryl

Streep) becomes obsessed with the subject of her nonfiction book, a trashy but passionate collector of orchids (Chris Cooper); in the other, a depressed screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) struggles to adapt her book “The Orchid Thief” into a movie, while fending off his chipper and vapid twin brother (also played by Cage), himself an ersatz screenwriter.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Adaptation is a metamovie, the filmed equivalent of metafiction (a literary style where the real subject of the work is not the ostensible plot, but the process of creating of the work itself).  In Adaptation, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) inserts a fictionalized version of himself into the script, writing and rewriting the story as the movie progresses.  Adaptation may appear unusual, and even weird to those who aren’t used to this kind of recursive style, but it’s a purely intellectual exercise about the creative process, and the mysteries presented in the movie have a purely logical explanation when considered in their literary context.

COMMENTS:  Adaptation sports perhaps the smartest script written in this young millennium, a story which twists and turns back upon itself with sly wit and playful intelligence.  (The screenplay was nominated by the Academy for “Best Adapted Screenplay”; maybe it would have won if it had been properly nominated in the “Best Original Screenplay” category).  In addition, the acting by the three principals—toothless and trashy Chris Cooper as the orchid thief, Meryl Streep as a jaded, intellectual journalist drained of passion, and Nick Cage as the twins, Charlie and Donald Kaufman—shows three veterans at the very peak of their games.   All three were nominated for Oscars, and Cooper won for “Best Supporting Actor.”   As good as Cooper was, it’s Cage’s magical performance as the writer paralyzed by artistic ambition and self-doubt, and also as his clueless doppelganger with a maddening Midas touch, that carries the film.  This is easily Cage’s best performance in an uneven career.

Despite the superlative script and performances, Adaptation falls just short of being an unqualified classic.  The problem is that the secondary plot—despite such welcome spectacles as Meryl Streep trying to imitate a dial tone while tripping balls—pales beside the more intriguing internal struggle of poor Charlie Kaufman.  When Streep and Cooper are on screen, we are always anxious to get back to Cage throwing barbs at himself.  Adaptation is geared towards a specialized audience—mainly writers, movie reviewers and other highly creative types—but will also appeal to fanatical film fans and industry insiders and would-be insiders who want to have a good wicked laugh at the cutthroat compromises required to bring a screenplay to life in Hollywood.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an occasionally maddening and sometimes brilliant motion picture that varies between being insightfully sharp and insufferably self-indulgent…  I can’t imagine Adaptation having much mainstream appeal, but, for those who look for something genuinely off-the-wall in a motion picture, this will unquestionably strike a nerve.”  -James Berardinelli, Reel Views