Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman began his film career fully formed, his distinctive approach to documentary already firmly established, with Titicut Follies, a probing study of a state hospital for the criminally insane. The Massachusetts government blocked the general public from viewing the film for decades, eventually prompting Wiseman to add what is surely one of the most passive-aggressive legal disclaimers in film history. Given the matter-of-fact brutality depicted throughout the film, the state’s response is hardly surprising; this would not be the first time an institution would regret exposing its inner workings to the director. Stark moments like the tube-feeding of one emaciated patient add a sour undertone to even the most benign sequences, like a birthday party where well-fed guards and inmates eat cake and play games. In a sequence that calls to mind Samuel Fuller’s America-as-madhouse classic Shock Corridor, two men debating America’s involvement in Vietnam are slowly drowned out by another patient’s tuneless rendition of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The titular follies—put on by the hospital staff for the benefit of the patients (and based on how Wiseman films the performance, us as well)—seem downright horrifying in this context, a momentary upending of the power balance that only reinforces the helplessness of the patients. One moment the guards are telling corny jokes and singing; the next, they’re forcing the inmates to strip and march down the hall.

Anyone watching all of this institutionally sanctioned abuse might reasonably ask what sanity is supposed to look like in such a place. Would Jim, the teacher reduced to screaming outbursts by the childish taunts of the guards, seem terribly ill in an environment that accorded him greater dignity? The possibility that it is the hospital that makes the madness and not the reverse is one of the film’s more disturbing questions, posed most forcefully by Vladimir, a paranoid schizophrenic arguing with his doctors that his time in the facility has only worsened his condition (a brief stay for observation has stretched into a year and a half). The doctors greet his arguments with bemused condescension, and one immediately suggests upping the man’s drug dosage to tone down his agitation. The possibility that Vladimir might be right—that sitting naked in a bare cell listening to a delusional inmate rave about obscure papal politics might not be conducive to addressing deep-rooted psychological trauma—is never entertained. In the eyes of the institution, he’s less a human being and more a problem to be solved. Sanity is interchangeable with pliability in this equation, and he will presumably be deemed “better” when he ceases to complain. Tellingly, the only patient in the film to be released leaves in a pine box.

Fixed Bayonets!

A war film reduced to its brute essence, Fixed Bayonets! possesses an almost transcendental rigour and self-discipline. It could just as easily be the work of a punch-drunk Dreyer as cinema’s resident tabloid poet, Samuel Fuller. Set on a snowy mountaintop during the Korean war, the film takes place on a bleached white canvas of snow, a thin painted backdrop adding to the overwhelming sense of artifice. It’s the perfect playground for a budget epic, and Fuller makes the most of it, alternating between lithe long takes and staccato montages in order to evoke the simultaneous terror and tedium of war. Save for the opening and closing blasts of music, the only sounds we hear are the sick crunch-crunch of feet on snow and the stereophonic call of the Korean trumpets. The periodic bursts of shell explosions and gunfire come as a relief from the hideous silence that pervades this unnatural place. Life is such a distant concern here that we might as well be watching two platoons of ghosts fighting over ownership of a cloud.

The stark setting of Fixed Bayonets! drains away all the other trappings of a typical Fuller war film—social commentary, anti-war agitation, autobiographical tangents—leaving only a series of irreducible moral challenges, like bodies uncovered in an empty swamp. The drama plays out in the soul of one Corporal Denno, a man who freezes up and cannot fire when confronted by enemy soldiers. As the leadership of the squad gets picked off one by one, Denno comes closer and closer to command and the inevitable confrontation with his own inability to take ownership of this bloodshed. Fascinatingly, Fuller underlines the man’s bravery where other filmmakers would cop-out and brand him a coward. The corporal may not want to take a life, but he’ll put his own on the line to save a wounded officer from the midst of a minefield. Compare that hair-raising sequence to the penultimate killing scene, when Denno, safely hidden in the bush, shoots an enemy at point-blank range. The Korean man’s body drops into the snow, like a puppet with its strings cut, and the rest of the squad rushes out to applaud Denno’s courage. Confusion flickers across his face. So this is bravery?

Showgirls

The phrase “bad movie” entices me, much like how a piece of shit entices a fly. But it isn’t the allure of awfulness that draws me closer—it is the near limitless possibilities contained behind that ambiguous word, “bad.” When someone dismisses a movie as bad, the judgment seems categorically objective: the movie is an irredeemable failure, absolutely beyond redemption.

But in reality, bad movies are often quite interesting, even rewarding and sometimes well-made cinema. The badness that has incited the audience is often not a matter of technique or style, but morality—the film is bad in the sense that it is perceived as evil, an affront to the viewer’s values. And that brings us to Showgirls, as confident and complete an assault on good taste as has ever come out of the self-deluding whorehouse that is Hollywood.

The plot plays out like a diseased, degenerate version of All About Eve: a desperate young star sets her sights on fame at any cost, moving from naïve innocent to jaded star, only to discover that the climb to fame is merely prelude to a precipitous fall. Except whereas All About Eve focused on the more respectable world of theatre and was thus rewarded with a bucket of Oscars, Showgirls employs a more sordid Las Vegas world as vehicle for its satire on Hollywood and thus earned a comparable assortment of Razzies for its impudence.

Which is unfortunate, because the film possesses a caustic honesty more potent than any tasteful (i.e., neutered), Oscar-winning satire. The film pulses with contempt—for Hollywood and for its audience. A glancing familiarity with the film’s reputation might make it seem like cheap titillation dressed up in big-studio gloss, but sex has rarely seemed so ugly and joyless as it does in this movie, which only shows the act as a means of transaction for money or power. This is brutal subject matter, but I find it hard not to be a little taken by the audacity of director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.

That’s not to say this is an easy film to appreciate, and Elizabeth Berkley’s lead performance might be the biggest stumbling block in this regard. She plays Nomi, the seemingly innocent young wannabe who comes to Las Vegas dreaming of becoming a star but reduced to stripping at a place called Cheetah’s. As the result of a particularly fiery lap dance with Zach, entertainment director at the Stardust (played with an expertly deadpan sleaziness by Kyle MacLachlan), she gets an audition. Cristal, the star of the show (Gina Gershon, who is so commanding at times she threatens to crack open her tight-lipped smile and swallow Berkley whole), takes an interest in the budding starlet and develops a love-hate relationship tinged with lesbian innuendo, which progresses through a series of incomplete seductions and backstabs until Nomi realizes her only chance to become star of the show is to, um, push Cristal down a flight of stairs.

As a character, Nomi can be difficult to take with her lack of anything that might be considered an inner life. This isn't to say she doesn't have secrets (she hides a past as a prostitute that she spends much of the film denying) or a personality of sorts, but she seems capable of only expressing herself through exaggerated gestures, as opposed to inflections of speech or expression: this is not a quiet performance. For an extreme example of this tendency, just look at an early scene between Nomi and her roommate Molly—the only way Nomi seems capable of expressing anger and frustration is by violently (and somewhat comically) stabbing her straw into her soda and then spilling French fries all over the table.

Of course, as a hooker-turned-stripper-turned-showgirl, carnality is Nomi’s key asset, and Berkley obliges by physically throwing herself into the role with all the conviction of someone hurling herself off a cliff. The suicide metaphor is deliberate; Berkley herself might beg to differ, but her career came to this film to die. If the intention of the film is to show how the entertainment industry uses women as if they were interchangeable slabs of meat, then the collapse of Berkley’s career after this film seems to prove its point. This is one of the most troubling things about the entire film: if Berkley had gone on to a successful career, the film might have simply become an inconsequential footnote to a larger story instead of the climax. For Showgirls to succeed, its star had to fail.

More bluntly put, Verhoeven is implicated, and I think he likes it. This may be a satire of the way Hollywood exploits women, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get a discreet, academic dissertation on the subject. Verhoeven rejects any possibility of tastefully telling this story and instead plays up the crassness of the tale; scenes like the over-the-top sex scene in the pool feel like a mockery of the audience’s craving for a little bit of titillation.

Verhoeven meets depravity with depravity, not trusting to any notions of art. For those looking to defend him as an artist, Verhoeven offers the ambivalent subplot of James, a dancer who takes an interest in Nomi. The man is convinced of her talent, even if she lacks knowledge or training, and he tries to convince her to perform in a number he has created specifically for her. She refuses, but he forges ahead and debuts the act at a small club where it is quickly booed off stage. “Bring out the real dancers!” someone shouts. The boorish audience is portrayed with some contempt, but the film also has a disingenuous air of “Well, what did you expect?” After all, given the choice between actual strippers and an arty simulation of same, is it any surprise what most people choose?

But it’s only in the third act that the film really goes after the audience. Those who have been chuckling along derisively at the film will have to contend with the rape of Molly, a spectacularly ugly scene by any standard, which disturbs any attempts to treat the whole film as a glib joke (incidentally, those Showgirls drinking games don’t seem to acknowledge the scene, but I like to imagine it provokes an awkward, guilty silence when it comes up). In a film in which the audience has essentially been egging on the sexual exploitation of the actresses for its own gratification, this rape is Verhoeven’s biggest attack on viewers—he takes the desires of the audience to their greatest extreme and visualizes them, if only to throw those desires back in our faces.

For final proof of this, just consider the scene where Nomi—remade as a fierce avenging angel—seduces Molly’s attacker and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of him. The camera constantly shifts to his perspective, uncomfortably aligning the audience’s viewpoint with that of a rapist and in the process equating the violation of voyeurism with the violation of rape (one could easily milk an entire graduate thesis out of this, assuming it already hasn’t been done). Conceptually, this is almost too obvious, but at this point criticizing the film for a lack of subtlety would be absurd.

(This perspective shot also calls to mind Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, another striking film about a reformed prostitute who enters a strange town, suffers at the hands of its residents, and then leaves after having proven herself superior to the amoral hypocrites running the place. That film begins with an incredible scene of prostitute beating up her pimp, which Fuller films from the pimp’s perspective as the prostitute whacks the side of the camera with her purse. As an assault on the audience, this is comparable to Showgirls, even though Fuller’s overarching vision is ultimately more empathetic than Verhoeven’s scabrous cynicism.)

Nomi’s revenge against the rapist is the sort of victory that seems empowering on the surface, but offers little real change or improvement in this vile system. In fact, she ends right where she began, hitching a ride out of town, heading towards Los Angeles where a larger, crueler whorehouse awaits her. Nomi’s actions start to seem more like futile retaliation against a system stacked against her—cathartic, but of no real consequence.

Is there any hope in the midst of such bleakness? Is Verhoeven nothing more than an embittered misanthrope, taking out his disillusionment with Hollywood upon the docile, unsuspecting audience, which all too readily falls into his trap? "We all gotta be a prostitute sometimes" might be the best summary of the film's worldview, which essentially says that all entertainers, itself included, are whores, and by implication, we the audience are johns. In such a vision, the only character growth possible becomes the self-awareness of acknowledging one’s own debased position in this system. Or perhaps, more optimistically, to simply reject this system entirely—a possibility not entertained by any characters in the film, although I like to think it is at least open to the rest of us.

A film this odious can only be reckoned with in one of two ways. The first approach is to embrace the film as pure camp pleasure, celebrating its every exaggeration and absurdity as signs of intentions gone awry—“a seriousness that fails,” as Susan Sontag writes in “Notes on ‘Camp’”. This approach essentially dismisses everything caustic and upsetting in the film as accidents caused by filmmakers too inept to actually mean any harm. Given the rather deliberate offensiveness of much of the film, it is a generously forgiving audience that can approach Showgirls on these terms—camp is also a “love for human nature,” according to Sontag—but it also takes a bit of willful blindness to not be bothered when someone spits in your face.

Treating the film as a so-bad-it’s-good spectacle might be worth a few laughs, but it’s also a shield from the more unsettling spectacle of Hollywood as a rumbling volcano requiring a steady stream of nubile, scantily clad (but not necessarily virgin) sacrifices. By now we’ve long since reached the point at which everything subversive about the film has been co-opted by the marketplace—which in this case means the release of a special edition DVD including drinking game, shot glasses, and two stripper tassels to pin on a nude poster of Berkley.

No, I prefer a second approach to Showgirls, which is to assume Verhoeven and Eszterhas are making a very deliberate film, no matter how vile and ridiculous it might seem. And I mean it—those drinking games might leave you buzzed, but treating this film as a sincere response to modern culture will have you reeling for days. Even when the dialogue seems offensive and stupid, take it as intentionally offensive and stupid, including that infamously inane dialogue between Nomi and Cristal about how nice it is to have nice tits.

Tempting though it may be to assume that this is merely erotic dialogue gone astray, recall that the bulk of the audience has come to the film expecting to ogle those very same tits. The crass yet banal dialogue makes a mockery of the audience’s own lechery by voicing the very thoughts running through our heads and rendering these thoughts loathsome and insipid. Understandably, audiences don’t much appreciate this treatment, but to suggest this is a failing of the film itself misses the point. Oh, poor monster—why hate the mirror?

White Dog

Since I seem to be in a Samuel Fuller mode these days, I decided the time was ripe to finally watch White Dog, his infamous 1982 film about a German Shepherd trained to attack black people.

The film was shelved by Paramount and left unreleased for ten years for no better reason than the studio was squeamish about how the film’s treatment of racism would be received by audiences. If anything, this cowardice should be seen as evidence of the studio’s lack of esteem for the public’s intelligence, rather than a sign of any particular failing in the film itself. True, White Dog’s treatment of racism is complicated and disturbing, but the film is also unambiguously anti-racist (it feels absurd to have to point this out, but if the film’s intentions were misunderstood once, I don’t doubt that they can be misunderstood again).

After hitting a dog with her car, young actress Julie Sawyer (played by Kristy McNichol) takes in the wounded animal temporarily while looking for the dog’s real owner. However, she grows increasingly attached to the dog, a bond that is finally cemented when it saves her from a rapist who breaks into her apartment one night.

But the viciousness the dog displays in warding off the intruder starts to reveal itself in other circumstances. It runs off after a rabbit one afternoon and disappears for a day, savagely attacking a black man before trotting faithfully back to Julie covered in blood. With no way of knowing the blood is human, she blithely shrugs it off as the result of a fight with another dog and washes it away, baby-talking to the animal as she bathes it (in this age of cute, anthropomorphized movie creatures, it's refreshing to see Fuller exploit the gap between the animal nature of our pets and how we tend to treat them as little humans).

It is only once the dog mauls a fellow actress seemingly without provocation that Julie is forced to admit that the dog is violent, but she still refuses to put it down. She holds to her nagging optimism that the animal can somehow be cured of its attack-dog training, and it is this stubborn hope that leads Julie to an animal trainer named Keys, a black man familiar with the phenomenon of white dogs, who accepts the challenge of trying to cure the German Shepherd’s racist conditioning.

Maybe what made the studio uncomfortable was the way the film examines the disastrous consequences of this optimism, even though Fuller is obviously sympathetic to the determination of these people to cure the dog. Still, as emotional as Fuller’s filmmaking may be, he rarely falls for the lure of cheap sentiment. This is neither pious ode to the struggle against racism nor cynical swipe at good intentions gone bad; the film lies somewhere in the confounding terrain between those two extremes, where idealism has to reckon with the fallout of its failures and violence remains in defiance of all of principles. (Notably, the dog’s final vicious assault is provoked by someone resembling its original trainer, suggesting that violence, once unleashed, can never be fully mastered by anyone.)

Although Fuller approaches this story with his full sense of moral indignation, there is also a sense of uncertainty—even despair—as he questions how to overcome the deep roots of conditioning. When the trainer of the white dog finally appears, we see that it is not some ranting caricature of a bigot, but rather an amiable old man bringing his granddaughters to reclaim their lost pet. Even if Keys can break the dog’s conditioning, what can be done about these people?

By the standards of most Fuller films, this is a rather somber, meditative piece, but the filmmaking displays the force and intelligence of an old master. In one of the film’s most powerful shots, the camera circles around as Julie embraces the dog, focusing first on the calm eyes of the dog and then moving to the tender, caring expression on Julie’s face before circling around to the dog again, now with teeth bared at its prey. The transformation is sudden and shocking, and all the more distressing for how it occurs in a single elegant shot. Even more distressing, however, is the combination of cruelty and tenderness in a single creature, which is what makes the film's dilemma so intractable and its conclusion so wrenching.

As a filmmaker who always prided himself on the “multiracial world” of his films, Fuller placed himself on the progressive edge of American filmmaking, even as his politics seemed to alternately draw the ire of the right or the left. A career spent fermenting against inequalities finds its apotheosis in White Dog's allegory, and Fuller explores the complications of his ideals with unflinching directness and intelligence. The result is a masterpiece, and one of the most unique and unsettling films about racism to ever come out of America.

Pickup on South Street

One of the greatest joys of Samuel Fuller’s films—and incidentally, also for many people one of the greatest challenges in enjoying his work—is the combination of absurd B-movie conventions with the moral conviction the man brings to the telling of his sensational tales. The resulting films are exciting and often eccentric, but also strangely moving because of the sincere passions and honest ideals running through them.

However, there’s certainly no difficulty in enjoying Fuller’s dynamic style, even if you choose to dismiss the content of his films as pulp-movie nonsense. I once tried to initiate a friend into Fuller’s mad oeuvre with Shock Corridor, a feverish tale of a reporter trying to solve a murder in an insane asylum by pretending he is guilty of incest so that he can be committed (supporting characters include a black man who thinks he founded the KKK and tries to incite the other inmates to lynch mob violence). And yet, for all the lurid and sometimes flat-out silly turns of the story, it is still photographed by the great Stanley Cortez, surely one of the greatest black-and-white cinematographers to ever work in Hollywood. Even at its most flagrantly bizarre, it is still a work of incredible visual power. After watching it, my friend, seeming a bit stunned by my enthusiasm for the film, dismissed it as a case of “style over content.”

I can’t really blame him, even though I think he missed the point. It’s easy to fixate on the rough beauty of Fuller’s films and assume that’s all there is to him. It’s a visceral style—quick camera movements sweeping around the action, odd angles that leave the viewer reeling and create the impression that the whole world is a ship heaved up on the rocks, and sweaty, intense close-ups just to remind you that all of this madness is happening to actual human beings. But Fuller is no formalist in love with his images—if that were the case, you would expect there to be more polish and control in the visuals, which is certainly not the case. In fact, as he bragged in an old interview included on the Criterion DVD version of Pickup on South Street, a shot early in the film was even done blind. The cameraman couldn’t fit behind the camera because a wall was in the way, so the whole shot—a tricky one which involved the camera moving while following characters in the background and foreground—had to be done without anyone looking in the camera to make sure everyone was in the frame (they were). This is not the sort of behaviour you would expect of a director who wants only pretty pictures.

No, Fuller is better seen as a moralist. Critics often make much of his early career in the New York tabloid press, banging out muckraking accounts of murders and suicides beneath screaming headlines, as the root of his sensationalistic and decidedly unsubtle storytelling sense. But Fuller is not cynical or calculated when it comes to his stories. He may be over the top, but usually what sends him over is his sense of moral outrage and that perverse tabloid mentality that demands the truth above all else, even the facts.

And maybe that’s a good thing. If Fuller cared just about the facts of a story like Pickup on South Street, it would be a bore of a movie—just another bit of Red-baiting early 1950s B-movie detritus. The film follows the story of Skip McCoy (wonderfully played by an insolent Richard Widmark with his lip perpetually curled upwards), a thrice-jailed pickpocket who swipes the wallet of a woman on the New York subway and ends up in possession of a microfilm containing government secrets being sold to the Communists. Yes—Communists! Microfilm! Spies! The story is so ridiculous I feel a little embarrassed just writing that brief synopsis.

But Fuller’s instinct, while truly tabloid, elevates the story into something affecting—I picture him sitting at a typewriter, chomping absent-mindedly on his cigar, asking himself, Okay, Communists, spies, all that jazz, fine, but what’s the human angle? With that question, he begins sweeping aside the Cold War and abstractions like patriotism as inconvenient nonsense in the way of a good story. One of the key lines in the film (and one that raised the ire of J. Edgar Hoover himself, who personally complained to Fuller about it) comes when the police and Feds try to pressure Skip into admitting he has the microfilm by suggesting it would be treasonous to do anything other than give it to them. With a sneer on his face, Skip spits back at the authorities, “Are you waving the flag at me?” He is beneath politics, so far down society’s ladder that the Cold War is as distant from his life as Russia itself.

He is joined down there in the gutter by several others who share his disinterest in the intricacies of global politics. There is Candy (Jean Peters in a performance that alternately threatens to burst out of her sweater or simply shatter glass), the woman on the subway from whom he steals the film. She seems to live by a thread and subsists on money earned by doing jobs for Joey, an ex-lover who, to her chagrin, turns out to be working for the Communists. And nearest to the heart of the film is Moe (Thelma Ritter), a professional stool pigeon who sells ties on the street and information in the police stations. Together, these characters suggest a discarded world that is aware of its own expendability, all sustained by a moral code that compensates for the indifference of the rest of society towards them.

This code boils down to one simple phrase: “We all gotta eat somehow.” They don’t judge each other’s livelihoods and all they expect in return is not to be judged as well. Moe, in particular, carries the burden of this philosophy. She sells out Skip twice in the film (first to the police, and then to Candy when the woman comes looking for the missing microfilm), but he shrugs it off. She has to earn a living somehow, right? And as she points out when she haggles with the police over the price of her information, the cost of living is going up.

Although it should be noted what is really on her mind is the cost of death, or more precisely, the cost of a cemetery plot and tombstone. With the stubborn pride of the terminally poor, she is determined to buy herself into a nice grave in order to defy the circumstances of her life and prove she was as good as the rich people all along. She knows she can’t afford to live the good life, but she hopes she can at least afford to die the good death. As a depiction of the grind of poverty and old age, there is nothing quite so moving as Moe’s weary, glassy-eyed expression as she stares at her own approaching death and sighs, “I have to go out and make a livin’ so I can die.”

That’s the trick with Fuller. Whenever we approach a B movie, there’s a tendency to feel superior to it. The characters are expected to be flat cartoons, the plot ludicrous, the acting hammy or awkward. We don’t expect there to be anything redeeming about it but superficial qualities—it can be stylish in its own crude way, or amusing in its embarrassing badness. But it’s not supposed to move us, to do anything that might suggest it actually has something to offer us beyond cheap thrills and smug laughs.

But Fuller’s film do contain moments of such rich pathos as Moe’s death—“Look, mister, I’m so tired, you’ll be doing me a big favor if you blow my head off,” she says to Joey, who obliges without hesitation—and moments of such genuine humanity as when Skip claims Moe’s coffin from a barge carrying it to a pauper’s grave. One of the men on the barge asks Skip if he is her relative. When Skip says he isn’t, the man is confused. What would he want with her then? The pickpocket’s response is terse and determined: “I’m going to bury her.”

The turning point of the film comes when Skip realizes that Moe and Candy both stood up for him—that two people actually do give a damn about him. Both women refuse to give up his location to Joey. Moe dies for her troubles and Candy is shot and beaten (which sounds potentially fatal, but Candy spends so much time in this film getting slapped around that it seems to have toughened her up—she’s on her feet by the end of the movie). Patriotism may have failed to move him, but personal loyalty does the trick.

More than just demands for empathy and equality in the world, Fuller’s films also test these values in the audience by forcing us to look past surface impressions to the genuine qualities of the work itself. There are undoubtedly flaws in this film, ranging from the tone-deaf performance of Jean Peters as Candy to the various holes that make the plot seem like a well-worn rag at times (for instance, if Skip’s shack is under police surveillance for most of the film, how can so much shady and downright criminal activity occur there without any police response? Are we to assume they just fell asleep?).

But when Fuller is in peak form, as he is in Pickup on South Street, such concerns become irrelevant; you can just lose yourself in the exhilarating energy of the film, where each frame is propelled by a sense of conviction and purpose and lands like a punch to the gut. Consider this 80 minutes of raw emotion sublimated into images.