Twin Peaks “Traces to Nowhere” [1990)

Before 9/11.

Before the Oklahoma City bombing.

There was a skeleton key.

Dangling.

Word.  To the wise:

it is not easy to pick this show back up after a long hiatus.

Leaving the Rosetta Stone in the mud…to return knee-deep in crypticism.

Almost makes you want to become an FBI agent.  A special agent.

Because your mind likes puzzles…

Plenty of shows on TV like that now.

It’s the law enforcement arm of the propaganda machine which gives us the sexier James Bond.

Word.  To the wise:

Never Say Never Again is really painful (unbearably so) without John Barry.

Or Monty Norman.

Even Kasparov lost to Deep Blue.

On a rematch.

Maybe.

Barely.

And we’ve discussed the much-vaunted anti-Semitism of Fischer.

Word.  To the wise:

there’s a fish in the percolator.

And so Duwayne Dunham (who?) turns in a masterfully-directed episode of Twin Peaks.

The first real episode (after the lengthy pilot).

Which is to say (viz.)–don’t neglect your studies.

Only you are you.

And you are fighting the greatest enemy in the known world.

The hydra-headed logarithm.

Ask my log.

I thought so.

Sherilyn Fenn is painfully attractive.

Like Martha Vickers in The Big Sleep.

C’est-à-dire, Twin Peaks is the Picasso of television.

A once-in-a-lifetime experience.

That this show was broadcast on a major American TV network (ABC) is a miracle.

It was the Armory Show of 7-Eleven culture.

The priceless amidst a shitstorm of mediocrity.

Sometimes the rag pickers find a gem in our disposable civilization.

At which point we chiffonniers are mandated to return it…to its rightful owners.

You.

America.

America is everywhere.

An amoebic blob phenomenon bleeding porn and missiles.

Hasta la vista!  Hava Nagila!

Git er done.

We all need to return to the beginning.

In matters so complex.

And I wish you sharp swords in slicing through the bollocks.

Sincerely.

 

-PD

 

El ángel exterminador [1962)

Dear friends…it has been awhile.  And I have been stuck inside a nightmare.

A party, but a nightmare all the same.

On this New Year’s Eve when so many rush to their engagements…I have thanks to give…yet it all seems so surreal.

For many of us we battle mental demons.  Usually, we don’t mean demons literally.  And I certainly don’t.

Yet, the world is so strange that we can’t help wondering whether there is something beyond science which is driving certain events.

These sentiments…these questions, are the stuff of El ángel exterminador.  This is not a relaxing film, but it is absolutely essential.

It is a work of art which is irreplaceable in the global canon of creative thought and philosophy.

Luis Buñuel had immense courage to make this film.  And yet, he was an old hand by this point.

His first film (made in collaboration with fellow-Spaniard Salvador Dalí) was 16 minutes which shook the world:  Un Chien Andalou.  That was 1929.  The slicing of the donkey’s eyeball.  Before the stock market crash.  And verily, the cinematic parallel of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps.

Outrageous surrealism.  Think of his collaborator’s La persistència de la memòria.  The same fount of Freudian cess.  From the pool of the taxed mind comes melting clocks…(and in the case of Un Chien Andalou those familiar ants).  We will always see Dalí as ants…as ants on James Joyce’s egg-yolk universe…Humpty Dumpty having represented the fall of man (“…sat on the wall/…had a great fall”).  [Or as Joyce so singularly put it:  bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!]

Luis Buñuel had the mad genius of Joyce.  In 1930, he followed upon his famous 16 minutes with 60 minutes in L’Âge d’Or.

I had the privilege of knowing Buñuel by way of his first two films and (in bookend fashion) two of his last three films:  Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972) and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977) [his final creation].

But none of this could have prepared me for the devastating, scathing critique of Western civilization that is El ángel exterminador.

The genre known as “comedy of manners” becomes a grotesque apocalypse the hands of Buñuel.  In that sense, El ángel exterminador is closest in spirit (or subject matter) to Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie.

But it is very important to note that El ángel exterminador is operating on multiple levels.

Is it a damnation of the rich?  Sure.

Is it a mockery of polite culture?  Of course.

But the lethargy and incapacitation we see in El ángel exterminador are the result of very mannerly people being reduced to complete inaction because routine convention has been circumvented.  We see the short-circuiting of well-meaning people who do not know how to cope with change.

And on that level, this film is universal.  It just so happens that the overly-precious manners of the bourgeoisie serve best the filmmaker’s purpose.

Not to disappoint the more visually-stimulated among you, but there is no swooping angel of death in this film.  There is, however, a tense, suffocating masterpiece which makes Hitchcock gems like Lifeboat and even Rope look like the products of lazy philosophy in comparison.

One last thought…  For those who think that the wonderfully-bizarre Alejandro Jodorowsky appeared out of nowhere, El ángel exterminador sets the record straight.  Buñuel was taking aim at the impotence of religion before Jodorowsky was in short pants.  In this film we see the kernel of imagery (lambs, a smashed cello, bits of debris…) which would make La montaña sagrada the beautifully freakish creation it is.  Both were, incidentally, shot in Mexico.

Though Buñuel (a Spaniard) and Jodorowsky (a Chilean) came from different corners of the Spanish-speaking world, their lives would both include important time spent in Mexico and France.  Jodorowsky is, in some ways, still the future.  But to know the future, we must first know the past.

 

-PD

 

Week-end [1967)

You will not learn much on Wikipedia.  In this case.  It is a common problem.  The length of an entry indicates its importance to the English-speaking world.  You will not get a true sense of what this film is about.  To the English-speaking world, this film is apparently insignificant.

And so we turn to images.  Language has betrayed us.  Our mother tongue.

There we immediately find a better representation.  The Hermès handbag.

Yet still the film remains elusive.

Some might say barbaric.  Others, a film about nothing.

They are both right…and wrong.

It is Mozart who proves them wrong.  I will not give you a Köchel number.  We can’t be experts about everything.

This is not academic writing.  I take my leisure seriously.

Taken out of context, it is the rage of a spurned Hitchcock.

It is the red stub of Blandine Jeanson (c’est-à-dire Emily Brontë).

Perhaps it is the groovy sounds of Jean-Claude Vannier?

As Paul Gégauff plays (?), the man with the shovel shuffles away.  He is our stable element…briefly.

You see the trouble.

Is it barbarism to cradle the contrasting beauty?  Is it nothing to show that everything is something?

Not easy being cheesy…

This is why it is better not to attempt…to explain.

It has been done.  What’s the point?

Each tenured prophet will find his/her own signs.

The important thing is to give the immediate impression.  Do not go for a snack.  Attack the film, but not to analyze.  Attack your own feelings and emotions…and wrest them from oblivion to perhaps live a life of their own.  This is what we do.

From the first words, we cannot start like the rest.

The great folly would be to make Godard into God.  The greater folly to ignore the breathtaking precedence.

In art as war, pity the one to go first…running from the secure positions.

And so we embrace the greatest uncertainty.

The varieties of human experience people…have not visited my corner for census.

Nor Jean-Luc’s…here.  We can celebrate the hulking awkwardness of a master who is perfectly describing chaos.

It is not sloppy.  It is calculated.  But it is a non-terminating number.  An infinite precision.

Balance on one finger and eat banana cream pie.

Perfectly upside-down.

It is not clean and crisp.  Not easily digestible.

We look longingly for personality, but none is found…

And then a film like Week-end…all personality.  Character.  Eccentricity.  Color.  Vigor.

Buried in the footnotes of civilization is a question about civilization itself.

This.

It explains why we never succeeded in life.  Had we done so, it would have been a fluke.

We were not meant to succeed.  Search your heart and then regard the world…

There is an intrinsic disharmony.

Language is a popularity contest…gang-raped by technology.

Thus the survival of mankind depends on code:  poetry.

Poetry does not discard words.  Poetry constantly expands…like entropy.

No one predicted the end.  Google will fail.

When we stop mirroring our mirror.  It is too boring to relate.

Salvation is buried deep.  Takes some digging.

We have forgotten how to be properly disgusted.

-PD