Your cart is currently empty!
Tag: art film
-
The Feel-Good Pandemic
Bunker VisionThe first conspiracy theory I got swept up in had to do with a movie that a few of us caught on television in eighth grade. After the summer of 1968, it felt like big changes were afoot. The movie that captured our imaginations was the story of a pandemic that caused people to feel euphoric. The net effect of people feeling good 24/7 was that Capitalism collapsed.
As fellow classmates expressed their curiosity about this simple explanation for changing the world, the movie seemed to vanish. With the grave seriousness that eighth graders bring to such missions, we collectively decided that the movie was being suppressed. As the years rolled on, I always checked for the title whenever I found anybody selling gray market VHS or DVD titles. It proved to be elusive, even there. Recently somebody at the studio that owns it decided that it was perfect viewing during our current pandemic. What’s So Bad About Feeling Good (1968) is now available on Blu-ray.
The first surprise is to realize that this movie is by a mainstream director. His work included Miracle on 34th Street, The Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races, and Airport. He had enough clout to get New York Mayor John Lindsay to allow filming in City Hall, and various parts of New York that would require a king’s ransom to shoot in today.
The film is a time capsule of the city in 1967. It opens with pans around various neighborhoods with a soundtrack of surly city dwellers shouting angry remarks at each other. It lands in a beatnik loft where people dressed in burlap sacks and hobo costumes wail about the futility of it all. When a toucan visits the loft, their tune changes and they are all suddenly happy. Soon they realize that this happiness is contagious and they set out to share it.
Not everybody is pleased with this state of affairs. Sales of tobacco, tranquilizers and alcohol plummet, and advertising stops scaring people into buying things. When the mayor still doesn’t see the downside, he is reminded that happy people don’t vote. With his own livelihood under threat, he calls in the Feds. Dom DeLuise arrives doing a luridly fey version of J. Edgar Hoover. The beatniks go undercover, distributing infected masks, and doing anything else they can think of to spread the infection. Once the government finds an antidote, the liquor and tobacco lobbies fund its distribution via exhaust smoke from heavy machinery.
By the end of the movie the city is back to its angry self, with a difference. A huge portion of the population was actually immune to the disease, and just got caught up in the tidal wave of niceness. The movie ends with the alpha-beatnik couple breaking the toucan out of the facility where it had been placed for future experiments. Given our recent pandemic’s impact on capitalism, it’s interesting to see that infectious happiness is still considered just as dangerous, if not more so.
-
The Digital Mob
Bunker VisionIt’s a familiar story these days: somebody is killed in broad daylight in front of witnesses. After the lawyers (and judges) perform their machinations, the killer walks. A new round of comments and editorials appear about how there are two justice systems. The digital age has brought with it a paradigm shift in what these two systems are. In the old days it was mostly about having enough money to grease the right palms. Now it is also about winning in the court of public opinion. A relatively unknown person can harness mob fury with an internet connection, a social media account, and a good story. The killer may escape legal consequences only to discover that their life is ruined. Forgiven Children (2020) explores the aftermath of such a case.
The film’s tone is set when four unruly adolescents destroy a roadside shrine. A little girl who seems to have some stake in the shrine is crying across the road, as an older relative tries to comfort her. The destruction is random and thorough. The boys make their way to the side of a lake, where they meet a “friend” who builds crossbows out of chopsticks. The alpha boy grabs the crossbow and aims it at the neck of the boy who built it. A stare-down ensues. The trigger on the crossbow is pulled, and its maker is shot in the neck. He does not die immediately, so questions arise as to why he was allowed to die. One of the boys confesses to the police early on. The high-powered lawyer that the parents have hired gets the boy to change his story, and the killer walks. All of this occurs in the first 20 minutes before the credits roll. For the next 100 minutes we watch the aftermath.
The tone of the film resembles a Patricia Highsmith novel. There is no question of “whodunnit” or why they did it. The celebratory mood of the legal victors is short-lived as the trial-by-public begins. The methods employed by the film to convey the reaction of the digital world heighten the sense of unreality as lives unravel. This starts as the family celebration is interrupted by news reports of angry mobs. Real-life visuals are overlaid with comments typed onto the screen we are watching. As the mob tracks down the killer (egged on by an internet celebrity), the parents lose their jobs and are forced to move. Before long the strain breaks the parents’ marriage. The father departs with a note— left beneath his removed wedding ring—saying that he can’t take it anymore. The victim’s parents push back with a book about the killing’s effect on them. The killer eventually approaches the victim’s parents to apologize, only to discover that their house has been attacked by people taking his side. Both the killer’s house and the victim’s are covered with bloodstains, lurid fliers and hateful graffiti. In the end there are no winners in the public trial. If one is feeling enraged by similar events in real life, this is a good reminder that things are seldom as simple as they appear. Time wounds all heels.
-
TALLY HO!
Bunker VisionA friend who made his name in the world of queer underground theater often quipped that “Film is forever.” When he landed a featured role in a late Paul Morrissey film, he was confident that something he had done would outlast him. That film turned 40 years old last year and has long been out of print. It is trading in the gray market of collector DVDs, so it isn’t officially lost. But the number of lost films is staggering. It is estimated that 90% of silent films, and 50% of sound films made before 1950 are lost. The first forays into film preservation go back to 1935, when the Museum of Modern Art started collecting and preserving important films. Not long after that, MGM tossed much of their back catalog onto a fire in Gone with the Wind because the film stock made for a good cinematic fire. UNESCO designated film as a part of the world’s cultural heritage in 1980. Despite this change in attitude, there are films made since then that are officially lost.
This is especially true with queer cinema. During the early days of the AIDS epidemic, whole collections were destroyed by mortified relatives. Friends and lovers (gay marriage is a very recent development) were often excluded when it came time to settle estates. Families often ignored wills and promised donations to institutions. With the mainstreaming of gayness, historians who might have been depended on to preserve queer culture adhered to an agenda that left out the demimonde. As nature abhors a vacuum, it was just a matter of time until queerness got its due. One of the highest-profile historians to tackle this world is Elizabeth Purchell. She is tracking down pornographic films from the mid-20th century and finding in them a rich portrait of gay life in an otherwise lost era.
She provides the commentary on a newly restored print of What Really Happened to Baby Jane. This film was the product of a group that went by the name The Gay Girls Riding Club. Formed in the late 1950s by a group of gay Hollywood-based professionals, their annual Halloween Ball was the stuff of legend. (There is a jaw-dropping video of their 1986 Halloween ball on YouTube.) Between 1962 and 1972 they made a series of underground film parodies (often compared to the Kuchar Brothers) based on Hollywood movies that were popular in the gay community. Their take on Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was filmed a year after the original, using actual props from the Hollywood version. Because of their Hollywood ties, the cinematography and production values exceeded the usual underground fare. It is also likely that they had bigger budgets than their underground peers. Although some of their films are still considered lost, the five that remain have been given deluxe restorations. These were recently released on the Vinegar Syndrome label, which is also releasing a set of rare Fred Halsted films. (Halsted was the first porn director to be included in the MoMA collection.) Perhaps the era of found films has officially commenced. Giddy-up!
