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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COMING APART (1969)

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DIRECTED BY: Milton Moses Ginsberg

FEATURING: Rip Torn, Sally Kirkland, Viveca Lindfors

PLOT: A psychiatrist sets himself up in an apartment overlooking the East River where he beds a series of women, all the while heading steadily toward a complete mental breakdown.

Still from "Coming Apart" (1969)


COMMENTS: It’s hard to appreciate just how strange the conceit of Coming Apart must have felt to moviegoers in 1969. Here in the second quarter of the 21st century, when people document their lives frequently and extensively, the sheer strangeness of a man choosing to capture his illicit second life on film just doesn’t come across the same. Viewers at the time were surely perplexed by a film that seemed to be composed entirely a footage taken from a single vantage point. It must have seemed like nothing short of voyeurism, the worst kind of candid camera. Contemporary reviews of the film frequently flail about for the one point of comparison they have at hand: James McBride’s groundbreaking pseudo-documentary David Holzman’s Diary. But while this intentionally self-aware movie has similar vibes, Coming Apart is something very different. Ginsberg crafts a silver screen salute to a man who feels compelled to chronicle his life for a very compelling reason: self-loathing.

Torn’s erstwhile analyst has ditched his career and his pregnant wife, creating a new identity for himself by setting up shop in a Kips Bay love nest. He doesn’t seem at all clear as to why he’s doing this, and for reasons even he can’t begin to unpack, he decides to film everything, making this an early example of the found footage genre. The footage we find is largely his attempts at seduction, successful to varying degrees; but while this is a film with plenty of sex, it’s much more about the manipulations and deceptions that are perpetrated just to get to the act. The wayward Dr. Glaser is an easygoing seducer, but he gets no enjoyment out of it, neither the hunt nor the kill.  He’s like a man grazing at the buffet not because he’s hungry but because there’s food. Anyone approaching Coming Apart looking for sexytimes is likely to end up as disappointed as Glaser.

For anyone who knows Torn primarily from the lacerating deadpan he brings to later projects like Defending Your Life, Men in Black, or “The Larry Sanders Show,” his work here is revelatory. He deploys his gravelly baritone infrequently, communicating largely through the subtlest of expressions. It can feel like he’s hardly acting at all, until a crucial scene late in the movie when he goes nearly catatonic and you realize just how emotive he has been all along. Most of the women opposite him, such as Lois Markle’s aspiring fetish-lover or Lynn Swan’s mercenary young mom, are richly detailed, although they can feel melodramatic by comparison. The characters who avoid sex are the most grounded, like Viveca Lindfors’ ex-mistress who tells Torn to his face that his charms won’t work on her anymore. Standing out among the crowd is Sally Kirkland, whose growing mania is grounded by her shockingly total lack of vanity or guardedness. Her role could easily be viewed as “the crazy broad,” but she earns respect and sympathy by giving nothing less than her all. The idea that Torn’s hidden camera captures these people so authentically justifies the gimmick.

While the filming technique suggests gritty realism, the characters and situations we encounter feel forced, as most of Glaser’s sexual partners bring their own lunacy to the show. Were it not for the bad doctor’s slow-motion breakdown, it might be easy to interpret the film’s message as “women be wack.” It is interesting, though, to see documentary formalism deployed in an experimental manner. In the early hangover following the sexual revolution, Ginsberg’s daring feature has the smarts to get out of the way and let the stories of the shellshocked survivors speak for themselves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… almost every image is half real, half the reverse of reality, which is, I suppose, a legitimate cinematic equivalent of the way one automatically supplements reality with fantasy in conscious experience…  the screenplay, like the film, eventually drifts in a horizontal direction into a kind of foggy confusion.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Joel Heller. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Coming Apart [Blu-ray]

Coming Apart [Blu-ray]

  • Rip Torn (Men in Black) gives one of the great screen performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS (1971)

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Sho O Suteyo, Machi E Deyou

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DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama

FEATURING: Hideaki Sasaki, Masaharu Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi, Fudeko Tanaka

PLOT: An angry, aimless young man drifts along in search of purpose, despairing at society’s shallowness and cruelty.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Terayama’s filmed essay defies traditional elements such as narrative or a consistent point of view. It is, instead, a howl of righteous anger using a cinematic techniques to depict a society in chaos and an individual’s profound isolation.

Still from Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

COMMENTS: A legend that has arisen over the years about philosopher Henry David Thoreau focuses on a single night in 1846 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes, a stance he took to protest government policy on slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the story, his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovered that he had been imprisoned and rushed to visit him. As dramatized by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a despairing Emerson asks, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Thoreau, fueled by his righteous commitment to civil disobedience, replies indignantly, “Waldo! What are you doing out of jail?”

Thoreau would find common cause with Eimei, our guide through this kaleidoscopic tour of 1970-era Japan. Eimei opens the film angry… at us. He’s been standing by as we’ve sat through a couple minutes of a solid black screen, and he has had it. He castigates us for mindlessly tolerating the nothingness like an audience of sheep. Don’t be offended, though. We will soon see that he has much to be angry about. He has little money, no respect for his family, his community is obsessed with sex and lacks any other ambition, and his culture is becoming uncomfortably Americanized and subsumed by rapacious capitalism. By the end of the film, he dabbles in a small-scale dream of his own, only to be attacked and robbed. He ends screaming his hatred for Japan—but no one truly escapes his wrath.

We see the subject of his ire first-hand. Eimei wanders through a series of scenes with an air of disconnection, not because he doesn’t care but because he can find no way in. The local school does nothing but practice soccer, where Eimei lamely offers to tidy up the locker room. Showcasing society’s whacked-out priorities, the coach happily takes him down to the local prostitute for a chill-out deflowering, which does nothing for him at all. His grandmother, knowing she’s about to be kicked out of the house, lies to strangers about her dead family in a bid for sympathy. Eimei’s father, who fought in the war, is a shiftless layabout whose only profession is molesting young women. Most tragic is Eimei’s flighty (and possibly mentally compromised) sister, who initially has an unhealthy attachment to her pet rabbit until her grandmother arranges to have the animal killed, which somehow leads to her terrible assault at the hands of the entire soccer team. It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the film in no way sensationalizes or finds dark humor in the accumulation of miseries. Imagine living in a world where each day brings not just bad news, but a completely different kind of bad news (if you can even picture such a scenario), and you get a sense of the struggle Eimei has just to get up each day.

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is reportedly adapted by Terayama from his own play, which is an extraordinary notion, because the movie feels in no way tied to the stage. Terayama has a vivid and far-ranging approach to visual storytelling. He mixes film stocks, employs surprising framing and shot angles, toys with film tinting and superimposition, and stages scenes with the eye of a Surrealist. He also has a solid appreciation of the power of sound, often staging scenes with repetitive sound effects or scoring transitions with proto-punk anthems to soundtrack Eimei’s oppressive surroundings. Interspersed among the scenes of Eimei’s world are staged interviews, fantasy sequences, and dream-like images of early pioneers of flight. This is one of Terayama’s first films, emerging the same year as his controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and it mixes a newcomer’s urge to play in his new sandbox with an experienced storyteller’s confidence in abstract and nonlinear storytelling.

There are no rallies in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. There are barely even books (although urgent quotes are graffitied across the landscape). That title isn’t a synopsis but a call to action, a demand from Terayama. Look at your world. Why do you tolerate this? Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Given what he shows us, it’s not hard to understand his contempt. If we’re not rallying in the streets, just what are we doing?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a surreal psychedelic experience like no other… Many of the bizarre, dreamlike sequences that act as short interludes or scenes of escapism for the adolescent at the heart of the film elicit the traits of a Jodorowsky film.”–Tom Bielby, Film Bantha

(This movie was nominated for review by Adam. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Capsules

CAPSULE: FRESH KILL (1994)

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DIRECTED BY: Shu Lea Cheang

FEATURING: Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim, Jose Zuniga

PLOT: When their daughter disappears after developing green-glowing hands, her moms begin to suspect a mega-corporation involved in a tainted cat food scandal.

COMMENTS: Claire and Shareen are just trying to get by. Shareen works as a trash picker. Claire waits tables at a trendy sushi joint called “Naga Saki,” whose only perk is the free sushi she brings home to their daughter. Honey, one of those unusual four year olds who prefers raw fish and wasabi to mac n’ cheese, can’t get enough of Naga Saki’s specialty roll, “kissing fish,” a variety with obscenely red lips. When the little girl starts intermittently glowing green—a phenomenon her mothers never directly witness—they take her to various specialists. A pediatrician, a child psychologist, and a fortune-teller all fail to figure out the cause of the “green.” Honey then mysteriously vanishes, as stories about glowing cats begin to take over the news.Fresh Kill innovatively conveys its central mystery through endless streams of information. News reports, radio broadcasts, snippets from talk shows, and commercials regularly interrupt the narrative, adding clues to the overarching plot. Accounts of the real-life debacle with the infamous garbage barge alternate with fictional news items, like the corporate takeover of a major television news station by “GX,” a conglomerate that over the course of the film also buys up pet food products. The GX slogan, “because ‘We Care’” ominously repeats amid stories of a stray hydrogen bomb “harmlessly” dissolving in the ocean and a recall of GX’s recently acquired cat food brand.

Along with the many communication technologies on display—from televisions, to radios, to Web 1.0—the diverse cast speak a variety of languages, often code-switching in the middle of a sentence. Despite an unconventional makeup, family remains the anchor of the narrative, even as it spins off into various directions. While searching for Honey, Claire and Shareen interact with the residents of a neighborhood homeless enclave, their friends, and their own difficult parents. Claire’s mother is the diva-like talk show host of a program on public access who refers to Shareen as “Shirley.” Shareen’s father is a retired cop whose wife left him because he could never be off-duty, and who hasn’t caught on that his daughter isn’t straight. Supporting characters represent such various voices as the queer community, Wall Street, the homeless, computer hackers, immigrants, and environmental activists, contributing to the channel-surfing aesthetic.

The owner of Naga Saki rushes to buy the last of the kissing fish stock, just as her customers, too, begin glowing green. One night,  a friend of the sushi chef/hacker Jiannbin sees the kissing fish glowing, but no one else does, and so they remain skeptical. Eventually, Claire puts two and two together, insisting the contaminated fish must have infected Honey. She convinces Jiannbin to hack into the GX website to see what he can find.

Director Shu Lea Cheang pioneered the use of what we called “new media” back in the ’90s. Primarily known as a visual artist who works with digital technologies, one of her early works comprised a website complete with interactive chat rooms. A similar sense of hypertext and polyphony pervades her first feature film. The messages of corporate news sources contrast with the word on the street. Text scrolls sometimes appear along the bottom of the screen, and -ian intertitles with phrases like “Security = Control” intercept the imagery.

The “green” people’s speech gradually becomes glitched and warped until it’s completely unintelligible. Just as the image modes skip around, the soundtrack features varying styles of music, like a radio set to scan all available channels. A song by Sheila Chandra, who rarely allows her work to be licensed, pairs beautifully with an emotionally charged moment of Claire and Shareen grappling with Honey’s absence.

While the story of a missing kid could easily get dark and depressing, Fresh Kill maintains an ironic sense of black humor. The script consistently plays on the many meanings of the word “green” and its cultural connotations. Everyone gets mocked, from the finance tycoons who speak in corporate buzzwords to people who mindlessly follow the “green” movement by buying into eco-branding.

It’s easy to see why Fresh Kill experienced a resurrection in the 21st century with a 2026 Criterion Collection release. The seeming prescience of its themes demonstrates how these “contemporary agita” were already a part of American cultural discourse thirty years ago. Green may equal “environment,” but Cheang never loses sight of how it also always equals “money.” In the closing scenes, Naga Saki gets re-branded as “Mumbo Gumbo,” now specializing in farm-raised catfish, completely free of toxins!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Unfolding as a hallucinatory montage of Marxist critiques, ecofeminist diatribes, and queer, futuristic, dystopian imagery, the multimedia artist’s 1994 feature-length directorial debut is a prescient work of sci-fi agitprop from the early internet era. Think of it as a Godardian cinematic essay restructured for the MTV, channel-surfing age.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

Fresh Kill (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Fresh Kill (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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