Clearly, the fun never stops in Freckles Comes Home. Actually, this is the funniest scene.
The flick:Freckles Comes Home (Monogram Pictures, 1942) [buy the set]
Current IMDb rating: 5.0 Director: Jean Yarbrough (The Devil Bat, Jack and the Beanstalk, TV's The Abbott and Costello Show) Actors of note:
Johnny Downs (The Crowd, Babes in Toyland)
Gale Storm (It Happened on Fifth Avenue, TV's My Little Margie)
Mantan Moreland (The Palm Beach Story, Spider Baby, the Charlie Chan series)
The gist of it: An impetuous young man, "Freckles" Winslow, returns home from college to tiny Fairfield, IN (pop. 500) to help his gullible friend Danny, who's purchased some real estate with money that wasn't strictly his to invest. To further complicate matters, "Freckles" has also unwittingly convinced a fugitive mobster to hide out in Fairfield. One bad apple soon attracts others to the town who hope to fleece a local banker, and before you know it, there are shootings, stabbings, and robberies galore. Meanwhile, poor "Freckles" has to win back the affection of his girl, who's fallen for one of the gangsters, and ensure that a highway runs through Fairfield. Luckily, a car accident solves everything.
My take: As you can see from that plot summary -- which doesn't even cover half of it -- Freckles Comes Home is quite a busy little picture. Somehow, it still manages to find time for a few totally gratuitous musical numbers and extended comedy sequences in which Mantan Moreland squares off against fellow black menial Laurence Criner. The title implies that the film is a sequel, and the script takes it for granted that we already know and care about most of these characters. As it turns out, the original Freckles was a 1904 novel by Gene Stratton-Porter which has been adapted into a movie at least four times (and also inspired 1992's City Boy), but none of the actors from those films are present in Freckles Comes Home. Instead, this sequel is based on a 1929 novel by Gene's daughter, Jeannette Stratton-Porter, who continued the Freckles saga after her mother died in 1924. I was unfamiliar with any of this, and Freckles Comes Home did not exactly leave me hungry for more.
As the title character, Johnny Downs (who has no freckles that I could see) comes across like a bargain-basement substitute for Jimmy Stewart. The plot twists come fast and furious, but the whole thing seems very contrived, and there is very little sense of what small town life is like.
One of Mantan Moreland's "party records."
Is it funny: Only fitfully. Freckles himself is something of a cipher, and neither pal Danny nor love interest Jane is particularly compelling either. Jane's dad, money-hungry Mr. Potter, is somewhat fun in a Milburn Drysdale kind of way, particularly in a scene in which "Freckles" visits the Potter home with one of the gangsters in tow, only to see the pencil mustache-wearing crook charm the father and the daughter instantly, leaving "Freckles" himself the odd man out.
I'd say the best character in the film is the town's ornery yet totally ineffectual constable, Caleb Weaver, played by the awesomely-named Irving Bacon who appeared as a bit actor insome of Hollywood's greatest classics. Caleb is sort of a proto-Barney Fife, suspicious of everyone and quick to accuse others but never on the right track and not much of a credible threat. He gets what, to me, is the film's funniest line: "Gosh all fishhooks!"
Then we must consider the servile role played in this film by Mantan Moreland, a comedian and actor who was directly influenced by the infamous Stepin Fechit. Moreland is clearly a talented performer with great comic timing and an expressive face he uses to its best advantage. In his highly-recommended book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, historian Donald Bogle credits him with having "the fastest eyes in the West."
But Moreland's style of comic buffoonery has definitely gone out of style in 2013. It had, in fact, fallen out of favor during the actor's own lifetime. His character here -- a hotel porter -- is both slow-witted and dishonest (he buys a fraudulent "gold-divining machine" and then tries to sell it), not to mention cowardly, selfish, and inarticulate. Let's not judge him too harshly, though. Moreland was giving white audiences what they wanted because that's what paid the bills. Incidentally, he had a second career as a stand-up comic catering to the black audience. One of his bits, involving carnal relations with mashed potatoes, has become a classic in some circles.
The poster blatantly gives away the ending of Country Gentlemen, a vehicle for the team of Olsen & Johnson.
The flick: Country Gentlemen (Republic, 1936) [buy the set] Current IMDb rating: 5.2
Director: Ralph Staub (The Mandarin Mystery, Screen Snapshots Series)
Actors of note:
Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (Hellzapoppin')
Joyce Compton (The Best Years of Our Lives, Mildred Pierce)
Prince the Great Dane (Never Give a Sucker an Even Break)
The gist of it: Two fly-by-night swindlers have to go on the lam after they sell some worthless shares in a gold mine. They abandon the city for small town life in the quaint little community of Chesterville, where they start a new scam selling worthless shares in an oil well. Madcap hijinks ensue, as you might guess.
My take: All diligent students of comedy will eventually come across references to Hellzapoppin', a wild and fast-paced 1938 Broadway revue that became a surrealistic 1941 film. With its rapid-fire pacing, kitchen sink approach to humor, and total lack of plot, Hellzapoppin' is often cited as a precursor to Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the center of all this craziness were Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, two very conventional Vaudeville comics who'd been working as a team since about 1914. Country Gentleman is a pre-Hellzapoppin' vehicle for the boys, but it's a much more timid and traditional story about two scoundrels who accidentally find redemption in a small town. Ole even romances a widow with a cute kid. How cornball can you get? This was a cheapie made by Republic Pictures, so every possible expense was spared in the making of this film. Johnson blatantly flubs a line once and corrects himself before the scene continues.
Ole and Chic: Together forever in Las Vegas.
Is it funny: Eh, it depends on your tolerance for creaky Vaudeville humor and the type of gags typically found in children's joke books. I have to admit I laughed out loud when Johnson said, "You wouldn't hit a man with glasses," while holding up two drinking glasses in front of his face.
At the heart of it, Olsen & Johnson are a second-rate act, nowhere near the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy and taking a back seat to the Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello. Olsen is the slightly more serious of the two and comes off like a cross between Bud Abbott and Shemp Howard. Johnson is the chubbier one -- his character is even called "Chubby" in this film -- and he has a slightly zanier personality, somewhere between Joe Besser and Curly Howard. Laughing at your own jokes is supposedly a comedy no-no, but it's absolutely essential to Olsen & Johson's schtick. Their calling card, in fact, is Johnson's high-pitched giggle, which is heard frequently during Country Gentlemen.
Frankly, the best lines in this film go to Joyce Compton as a ditzy blonde secretary with a pet Great Dane she has whimsically named "Fluffy." By the way, I found it strangely poignant to learn that Ole and Chic were buried side by-side in Las Vegas' Palm Mortuary.
Charles Coburn leads the charge as the irascible Colonel Effingham.
Well, it's taken me long enough,but I've finally gotten around to actually watchingthat Mill Creek comedy boxed setI purchased last year from a grocery store bargain bin. I figured that I might as well write about the films here on the blog before they evaporate from my memory forever. I've decided to be conventional and watch the films in the order they appear in the set, so I'm starting with Disc One, Side A. Won't you join me?
The flick:Colonel Effingham's Raid (20th Century Fox, 1946) [buy the set]
Current IMDb rating: 6.1 Director: Irving Pichel (The Most Dangerous Game, Destination Moon)
Actors of note:
Charles Coburn (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Around the World in Eighty Days)
William Eythe (The Ox-Bow Incident)
Joan Bennett (Suspiria, Scarlet Street)
Donald Meek (Stagecoach)
The gist of it:A retired Army colonel (Charles Coburn) returns to his hometown in Virginia to find that the citizens have become apathetic and that the local government is corrupt. He soon jolts the townspeople out of their complancy, first by writing a fiery column in the local newspaper, then by organizing a movement to preserve the city's historic courthouse. In doing so, he inspires a younger relative of his to enlist in the armed services and defend his country overseas.
My take: The most important thing you need to know about Colonel Effingham's Raid is that it was released in January 1946, just five months after V-J Day, but set in the spring of 1940, a year and a half before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In between 1940 and 1946, of course, was America's involvement in World War II. This film is meant to function as both a rousing propaganda piece and a homespun comedy of manners.
More problematic, though, is that this is also a paean to the glory days of the Old South. It's tough for a modern-day Yankee like me to get too terribly nostalgic for the Confederacy. We hear "Dixie" on the soundtrack a few times, and there's a cowardly, bumbling Negro servant in the cast. Plus, Colonel Effingham feels strongly that the town square should be named in tribute to "our glorious Confederate dead" and not after some "carpetbagger" (i.e. Northern) politician. Strangely enough, for a movie about the South, there's a distinct lack of Southern accents in this film. Charles Coburn seems to be the only actual Southerner in the main cast. The young romantic leads are played by actors from Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Miracle: a parallel story
Is it funny: Eventually, yes. Sort of. This film reminds me a bit of Miracle on 34th Street, which is also about an irascible but lovable old codger who fires up the imaginations of the citizenry, frustrates the political establishment, and ultimately brings out the best in a promising young man, all by sticking to his principles and never surrendering. At first, the colonel's behavior struck me as so mild that I didn't understand why the other characters found it so shocking. I mean, what's the big deal about writing a column and having your name appear in the newspaper? Today, everyone seems to want as much media attention as they can get. But once I realized just how old-fashioned and conservative these people were, I began to get a kick out of Effingham's antics.
For me, the sleazy politicians, always plotting and scheming behind closed doors, are what make the movie work. They make great, hissable villains, and it's fun to see them get a very public comeuppance at the end. One running joke which did not work for me, though, was that the filmmakers inserted a loud wolf whistleon the soundtrack every time William Eythe checked out Joan Bennett's legs. It's a dumb gag and breaks the reality of the picture. By the way, you Kids in the Hall fans should not confuse "Effingham" with "effing good ham."
My preliminary attempt at mapping the feature films of the Coen Brothers.
With the imminent releaseof Joel and Ethan Coen's next feature, Inside Llewyn Davis, I thought it was a good time to discuss an aspect of the brothers' career which has thus far escaped critical notice. Taken in total, their films provide a portrait of our nation from one coast to the other. Their America is a skewed, surreal and often dangerous place populated by misfits, outlaws, rebels, big shots, and fiercely independent eccentrics.
While American society becomes more and more homogeneous over time, most Coen films heavily emphasize the local customs, accents, and attitudes of the places where they are set. In a sense, the filmmakers have a vested interested in preserving the so-called "old weird America" before it's obliterated by television, the Internet, and nationwide retail and restaurant chains.
I believe that the brothers are fascinated with American iconography above all other themes and have used their movies to explore various American archetypes which loom large in our collective imagination. It goes without saying that a Coen film will be "weird" to one extent or another, but the particular flavor of "weird" depends on where the film is set and which American subculture is being satirized, venerated, or simply observed in the script.
Marge Gunderson and the Dude may be contemporaries, for example, but they do not lead similar lives and would probably not have much to say to one another if they were seated side-by-side on a long bus trip. Meanwhile, Ed Crane's America is not Norville Barnes' America. Geographically, sure, it's the same place but philosophically, it's not even close.
To better understand the Coen Brothers' attitude toward their homeland (or certain sections of it, anyway), I have organized their films geographically.
THE SOUTHWEST (Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas)
M. Emmet Walsh and Dan Hedaya in the relentless Texas heat of Blood Simple.
Films:Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, True Grit, No Country for Old Men
More than any other region of the country -- even their native Minnesota or their adoptive California -- it is the Great American Southwest where the Coen Brothers have done their most potent myth-making. For them, this is a spooky and merciless place where guns, drugs, and money hold sway and where Revenge is often the law.
Their first feature, Blood Simple, famously begins with a monologue by sleazy private eye Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) who explains life in Texas to us: asking your neighbors for help is useless, he says, because "down here, you're on your own." Visser's cynical speech is accompanied by a series of eerily beautiful but foreboding shots of Texas, all composed as meticulously as a Mark Rothko canvas. We see highways, farmers' fields, oil derricks, and a drive-in theater, but not a human being in sight. This sets up a pattern the Coens will repeat in The Hudsucker Proxy and The Big Lebowski: introduce the place first, minus the people, while an off-screen character narrates, and then let the camera "find" the movie's protagonist after a few minutes. The Texas we see in this movie is a desolate, barren, and hopeless place with plenty of wide open stretches where people can commit horrible crimes without police interference.
A little over two decades later, the Cones returned to the Lone Star State for No Country for Old Men, a downbeat crime drama which makes Blood Simple look like a carefree romp in comparison. Here, the law maintains a token presence, represented by Tommy Lee Jones' grizzled Sheriff Bell, but is ultimately impotent against a new breed of pitiless super-criminals like Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). "The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure," Sheriff Bell wearily tells us.
Raising Arizona: Bounty hunter Leonard Smalls is armed and unafraid.
True Grit and Raising Arizona are rather more optimistic than the Coens' two Texas films. How could they not be? In these movies, at least, the guilty are duly punished and the heroes are (more or less) satisfied at the end. But even here, the protagonists are often at the mercy of violent, ruthless men --Randall "Tex" Cobb's Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona and Josh Brolin's treacherous Tom Cheney in True Grit -- who are motivated solely by greed and who will gladly kill to further their own ends. These men have no permanent home and do not fear the law, so our heroes must face them and defeat them without help. One blogger, by the way, has actually written an article comparing Leonard Smalls and Anton Chigurh. Give it a read, won't you?
And while you're at it, I invite you to compare and contrast the opening scenes from No Country for Old Men and Blood Simple. Though the films were released 24 years apart, the stories in them occur only four years apart. No Country takes place principally in West Texas, along the Mexican border, while Blood Simple is set somewhere in Central Texas. Both films begin with thoughtful, contemplative monologues, but one of our narrators is an honorable man and the other an opportunistic swine. The question to consider here is: are these men being pessimistic or realistic when they describe the Texas they know?
THE SOUTHEAST (Mississippi)
George Clooney and pals seem about to be lynched in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Films:O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Ladykillers
When it comes to covering the American Southeast, also known as the Deep South or the Old South, the Coen Brothers' attitudes are clearly rooted in nostalgia, folklore, and Hollywood romanticism than in any sort of reality. The Coens' South is a quaint, dusty, sepia-toned place where hobos carry bindlestiffs, freshly-baked pies sit cooling on windowsills, and there is nothing more sacred than Sunday service. And music, of course, is everywhere. It's just part of the atmosphere, flowing from every home and generating itself spontaneously in nature.
The Coens have described O Brother as a "hayseed comedy," and term applies just as well to their remake of Ealing Studio's The Ladykillers. Although the former is set during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the latter in the mid-2000s, Mississippi seems not to have changed much in the ensuing seven decades.
In fact, take out the references to rap music (or "hippity hop") and a few other modern-day trappings like convenience stores, and The Ladykillers could take place simultaneously with O Brother. Both films are farces about groups of inept criminals led by motor-mouthed "gentlemen thieves" who never limit themselves to one- or two-word utterances when they could accomplish the same goal with 50 words. Like George Clooney's Ulysses Everett McGill, Tom Hanks' Professor Dorr uses his eccentric vocabulary and serpentine sentence structures to dazzle and disorient those around him. To put it simply, these fellas sure can talk.
As I said earlier, another thread which connects these films is their heavy use of traditional regional music. One group of thieves (in O Brother) actually does form a band along the way, while the other (in The Ladykillers) merely poses as one. It's possible that the Coens made these films simply for the opportunity to use old bluegrass and gospel recordings on the soundtrack. O Brother indeed created a chart-busting, Grammy-winning sensation with its companion album consisting of vintage 78s, field recordings, and songs newly recorded (most notably "Man of Constant Sorrow") in the style of days long past.
Hurt by the film's critical and commercial failure, The Ladykillers soundtrack LP did not manage to do for old-time gospel what O Brother had done for bluegrass. The album is no less astonishing, though, and the music itself manages to raise the stakes of the film's plot. The Ladykillers is a dark comedy in which inept crooks are regularly killed off, but the religious music on the soundtrack constantly reminds us that the characters' actions may have far-reaching consequences in the Next World.
THE EAST COAST (New York, Washington D.C.)
Paul Newman enjoys a Monte Cristo against a backdrop of skyscrapers in The Hudsucker Proxy.
Films:The Hudsucker Proxy, Miller's Crossing [possibly], Burn After Reading, Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coens don't often head out East, but when they do, they tend to include a few common elements: men in well-tailored suits, rapid-fire dialogue peppered with brisk comebacks, copious alcohol consumption, and winner-take-all scenarios in which no quarter is asked or given. After all, it's a jungle out there. If you study the image above, you'll notice a distinct visual change from the Coen films set in the Southwest and Southeast. This being NYC in winter, the temperature has dropped considerably, and the film's color scheme has skewed to a blueish-gray hue in sympathy.
Until Inside Llewyn Davis, which centers around the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, The Hudsucker Proxy was the Coen Brothers' one-and-only true "New York movie." Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese have basically spent their whole careers in the Big Apple, but the Coens visited the place with great hopes in the 1990s, met with financial ruin there, and didn't return for two decades. Now they're giving the place a second chance.
From what I've seen in the trailer, Llewyn Davis is considerably more realistic than the completely fantastical, dreamlike New York of Hudsucker, a highly-stylized screwball comedy which is arguably the only Coen film to employ elements of the supernatural. The magical character of Moses the Clock Man (Bill Cobbs) is very much a precursor to the Stranger, the genial cowboy portrayed by Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski. In a way, Moses and the Stranger are East Coast and West Coast variations on the same role. Both are folksy storytellers who narrate their respective movies and watch over all the other characters like benevolent gods. (Perhaps it's telling of the difference between New York and LA that Moses intervenes when the hero, Norville Barnes, is in real trouble, but the Stranger simply watches from the sidelines.) Just as the Stranger kicks off Lebowski by giving us his personal take on Los Angeles, Moses welcomes us to The Hudsucker Proxy with a speech about the perils and pleasures of New York:
Elsewhere in the Coen filmography, we have a couple of hard-to-categorize outliers. Miller's Crossing is the duo's Prohibition-era gangster film, and it takes place in an undisclosed urban locale referred to only as "the city." I have arbitrarily placed the film in New York due to the presence of both Irish and Jewish gangsters, but the story could just as well be occurring in Chicago, Boston, or Philadelphia. It was shot in New Orleans, but no one in the film has any hint of a Louisiana accent so I have ruled it out as a setting. Wherever it takes place, Miller's Crossing is a handsome film which lends its various mob bosses, thugs, and gun molls a sense of old Hollywood glamour. It is interesting that the film, unlike most crime sagas, mixes urban and pastoral settings. The title location, for instance, is a forest clearing where bodies are dumped and executions carried out. Despite its grim function, the crossing still looks sumptuous and inviting due to the rich cinematography of Barry Sonnenfeld. Burn After Reading, on the other hand, does not portray its setting, Washington D.C., in such a flattering manner. This is a cold-blooded comedy of errors whose inept, unsympathetic characters routinely betray, threaten, and deceive one another. Fittingly, they inhabit what seems to be a godless, indifferent, and comfortless universe. This being our nation's capital, there are a number of massive government buildings which figure into the plot (including CIA headquarters and the Russian embassy), but these are portrayed in an unappetizing manner -- they're imposing rather than impressive -- and they must share screen time with such shabby, work-a-day locations as an unremarkable apartment, a blandly ugly gymnasium, and an uninspiring movie multiplex. There are some more photogenic neighborhoods in Burn After Reading, but these are inhabited by some of the movie's nastiest characters.
THE UPPER MIDWEST (Minnesota)
A storm approaches at the end of A Serious Man.
Films:Fargo, A Serious Man
It took a while for the the Coen Brothers to get back to their Minnesota roots, but when they did, they did so in a big way. Interestingly, Ethan Coen's 1998 short story collection, Gates of Eden, contains a fair amount of commentary on his family's home state. Minnesota, in fact, may be called one of the book's primary motifs. One character, for instance, uncharitably describes Minneapolis as a "strange frozen city where people's breath hovers about them, where fingers tingle and go dead, where spit snaps and freezes before it hits the ground." Another narrator is more forgiving:
The city had not much serious crime. It was dotted with scenic lakes. The people were polite. Many owned boats. In the summer they engaged in water sports; in the winter they skied. The solid northern stock seemed immune to the great miseries and grand passions upon which crime traditionally feeds.
Minnesota is the setting for two of the Coen Brothers' most accomplished and fulfilling works: Fargo and A Serious Man. As anyone who has seen these films can confirm, the characters indeed experience "great miseries and grand passions" and are nowhere near "immune" to these emotions, even though they maintain the outward stoicism for which the region is famous. (An old joke: "Did you hear bout the Norwegian who loved his wife so much he almost told her?")
The perceived nothingness of the state, the utter blankness of Minnesota, is what makes the plots of Fargo and Serious all the more shocking. "A lot can happen in the middle of nowhere" went the tagline for the former. When local police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) arrives at the site of a grisly roadside shooting, she guesses that the suspects are not from Brainerd. She's right, of course, but Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), the hapless car salesman whose kidnapping scheme is the catalyst for the whole movie, actually is from Brainerd. Evil lurks behind the blandest of facades.
The two films work as a diptych: Minnesota in winter, Minnesota in spring. Fargo gives us seemingly endless terrain blanketed in snow, while Serious lets us see what the place looks like after it's thawed out. Ironically, the lack of snow only serves to emphasize the featureless desolation of the land. A Serious Man largely takes place in a newly-built suburban community, and the lack of trees and vegetation gives the place an unsettling starkness. Struggling with the TV antenna on his roof, ineffectual college math prof Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is at least as pitiful as Jerry Lundegaard, who loses his composure while scraping the ice from his car window in a dismal parking lot after a business meeting with his father-in-law doesn't go as he'd hoped. Note how the high camera angle at the beginning emphasizes Jerry's laughable insignificance.
What separates Fargo from A Serious Man is ethnicity. Fargo takes us into the world of "Swedes, Poles, and German Lutherans" (Ethan's words again) which comprise much of the population there. The film's two most-noticed details were the characters' heavy Minnesotan accents (with frequent repetitions of "yah" and "you betcha") and their unflagging, almost superhuman politeness (a tradition dubbed "Minnesota Nice").
The use of dialect was the most controversial aspect of the film upon its initial release, with some critics dismissing the film entirely based on that one aspect of the production. However, a great many more were charmed by the accent and found themselves imitating it after seeing the film. It's tough not to. The accent was certainly exaggerated for the film, a point which irked some native Minnesotans, but I feel it was done with affection. This was how the people of Minnesota must have sounded to Joel and Ethan growing up. Which brings us to that other Coen Brothers film set in their home state...
More bad news for Larry Gopnik in A Serious Man.
A Serious Man is very explicitly about the experience of being Jewish in Minnesota in the 1960s, surrounded by skeptical Midwestern Protestants on all sides. It's a world the Coens obviously knew first-hand, and it comes up again and again in Gates of Eden. Some of the details in this movie, such as the sister who spends all of her time in the bathroom, were first described in Ethan's book. Ethan also wrote with great humor about the drudgery of attending Hebrew school with its glowering, humorless rabbis and arcane lessons.
It's no surprise that A Serious Man is the brothers' most openly religious film. The plot is essentially the Book of Job translated to LBJ-era American suburbia: a decent and devout family man, the previously-mentioned Larry Gopnik, suddenly faces a series of familial, professional, legal, and financial setbacks. Towards the end, just as his fortunes seem to be improving somewhat, a whole new set of problems descend upon him and the film ends on a note of dread, with many of Larry's issues left unresolved.
Many viewers and critics intuited that God is personally and unfairly punishing Larry in this film, but that notion presupposes the very existence of God, which I don't necessarily think is a given in the Coen world. Larry might just be having a string of rotten luck. It's up to the viewer to decide whether or not these events have any theological significance. But what we can safely say is that poor Larry Gopnik is denied the solace afforded to Marge Gunderson at the end of Fargo. She can take comfort in her loving husband and soon-to-be born child, while he can only pray for the best to a God who may or may not be listening and who may not even exist.
THE WEST COAST (California)
The Big Lebowski's Tara Reid at home in the land of fruits and nuts.
Films:The Big Lebowski, Intolerable Cruelty, Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn't There
And now, from the Land of a Thousand Lakes, we travel two-thousand miles westward to the "Land of a Thousand Flakes," as Mad magazine once put it. A mere thousand seems like an awfully low estimate, though, especially from what we see of California in the Coen Brothers' movies. The rest of the country sees the state as a place where America's most shallow, greedy, deluded, and debauched individuals have gathered to take advantage of one another.
The Coens tend to reinforce this idea through their work. Intolerable Cruelty takes place in a number of locations, including Las Vegas, but the film's main action centers around Los Angeles and gives us all the typical targets we'd expect from such a story: conniving lawyers, unfaithful husbands, gold-digging wives, bitter divorce cases, iron-clad prenuptial agreements, ridiculous reality television shows (America's Funniest Divorce Videos), and pets who are treated like spoiled children. In Gates of Eden, Ethan gives us a distinctly Jewish-American spin on the topic as he describes the fate of a Hebrew schoolmate:
For the next several months, Michael was a model student, if somewhat robotic, until his family moved to California, where (it was common knowledge) all meshuggenehs end up.
Of all the characters in the Coen canon, there are two whose lives somewhat mirror those of the brothers themselves. One is Barton Fink (John Turturro) and the other is Bunny Lebowski (Tara Reid). Both Barton and Bunny travel to the Golden State in order to work in the exciting field of motion pictures: he as a writer, she as a starlet. Like the Coens, Barton is a nerdy, socially awkward Jewish writer, while Bunny (the former Fawn Knutsen of Moorhead, MN) is another transplanted Minnesotan*. Unlike Joel and Ethan, however, these two fail to find success in Hollywood.
Having conquered Broadway, Barton is assigned to write a "Wallace Beery wrestling picture" and struggles to complete a first draft while getting embroiled in a gruesome homicide case. His move from New York to Los Angeles, a blatant cash-grab suggested by his unscrupulous agent, seems ill-advised from the start. The actual transition is suggested by an ominous shot of a wave crashing against a rock on the shore of the Pacific Ocean.
Like A Serious Man, Barton Fink can be interpreted as a biblical parable. The dilapidated hotel where Barton lives may be Hell, while his neighbor (John Goodman) and boss (Michael Lerner) make pretty good stand-ins for Satan and God. Like "Hotel California" by the Eagles, Barton Fink makes a case for Los Angeles as a kind of Inferno or Purgatory. Meanwhile, in The Big Lebowski (whose protagonist hates "the fuckin' Eagles"), the only screen work Bunny can get is in a cheaply-produced pornographic film called Logjammin'. The former high school cheerleader winds up a drug-addicted trophy wife who owes a hefty sum of money to the film's Hugh Hefner-esque producer, Jackie Treehorn (Ben Gazzara). To summarize, then, the Coen Brothers do not present Hollywood as a place where people's dreams come true.
Customer service: Minnesota-style vs. California-style
The Big Lebowski is the Coen Brothers' definitive "California movie," and it serves as both a tribute to and parody of the so-called Land of Fruits and Nuts. While fans across the country and around the world have embraced the laid-back lifestyle of the film's hero, the Dude (Jeff Bridges), the film offers a panoramic view of Los Angeles and its surrounding communities. Those with an intimate knowledge of SoCal culture must experience an extra level of enjoyment when they watch this film. With the Dude as our informal tour guide, we travel to stuffy Pasadena, ultra-casual Venice, ritzy and exclusive Malibu, scuzzy Simi Valley, and humble North Hollywood, where a former television writer wheezes his days away in the iron lung which keeps him alive.
Of course, we have an assortment of California kooks on hand, too, many of whom have convinced themselves they they are somehow part of the art world, music world, or movie industry. The Dude's shy, chubby landlord, Marty, gives an interpretive dance recital and (in classic Hollywood fashion) asks his constantly-in-arrears lodger to attend and give him "notes." Then there are the Nihilists (led by Peter Stormare): three washed-up German techno musicians who, in their desperation, have cooked up a ransom scheme which they hope will net them $1 million. (It won't.)
Much higher up in the food chain is Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore), a woman whose inheritance from her mother has allowed her to live the life of a bohemian artist in a stylishly-appointed loft where she drizzles paint onto a giant canvas while dangling nude from a harness. Her dear friend, the fey, giggling Knox Harrington (David Thewlis) is supposedly a "video artist" but seems more apt to be a trust-fund-draining layabout. And we haven't even gotten to the film's most celebrated supporting characters: belligerent Vietnam vet Walter (John Goodman), leering pedophile Jesus Quintana (John Turturro), and perpetually bewildered surfer and bowling prodigy Donny (Steve Buscemi).
Before we leave Lebowski, it's worth pointing out that it was the follow-up to the critical and commercial triumph of Fargo. Since the films had several key cast members in common (Buscemi, Goodman, Stormare, and others), the public might have been expecting a quasi-sequel or continuation. The Coens, however, let us know within the first few minutes of The Big Lebowski that we're not in Brainerd anymore. While Fargo was peopled by impossibly cheerful cashiers, waitresses, parking lot attendants, and even prostitutes, Lebowski gives us California's brand of customer service. Apart from the Dude, the first human being we see in the film is an obviously-bored Ralph's checkout girl (Robin Jones) who glares with disgust at our hero as he writes a $0.69 check for his half and half.
* The Big Lebowski's theme music is "The Man in Me" by Bob Dylan, another Minnesota-born Jew who left his home state and, like Bunny Lebowski, adopted a new name (his real moniker is Robert Zimmerman) and a new persona to go with it.
Northern California noir: Frances McDormand and Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn't There.
We find a very different California in The Man Who Wasn't There, a James M. Cain-inspired noir tale set in 1949 and presented in gorgeous black-and-white. Our protagonist -- you'd be hard pressed to call him a hero -- is Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), an impossibly reserved and tight-lipped barber who lives with his adulterous bookkeeper wife (Frances McDormand) in the quiet suburban community of Santa Rosa. We're a long way from Los Angeles -- a good 427 miles north of the Dude's slovenly bungalow. These aren't the crackpots and showbiz wannabes of the Coens' other California flicks. These are solid, practical-minded folks, much closer in spirit to the characters in Fargo and A Serious Man.
But just as with those films, the sedate setting of The Man Who Wasn't There is no deterrent to "great passions and grand miseries." Just like Jerry Lundegaard and phony millionaire Jeffrey Lebowski before him, Ed Crane tries to raise some cash through a scheme which directly endangers his own wife. In this case, he plans to blackmail Doris' lover (James Gandolfini) and use the proceeds to go in on a dry-cleaning business. This being a Coen film, the plan backfires spectacularly and the plot goes off on unexpected tangents involving Beethoven, UFOs, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Moody and haunting, The Man Who Wasn't There ranks among my very favorite Coen films.
So there you have it folks!
We've managed to cover the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. As the map at the beginning shows, there's still plenty more territory for the boys to cover. They've yet to do a film set in the Great Plains, the Pacific Northwest, New England, or anywhere in the Midwest besides Minnesota. Much of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions remain untouched as well. Still in all, their feature films function as a kind of prism through which we can view this wonderful, terrible country of ours -- distorting some of its features and bringing others into sharper focus.
Men of Steel: Henry Cavill and Christopher Reeve portray Superman, 35 years apart.
"He's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now."
- Commissioner Gordon describing Batman in The Dark Knight
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Mary McGrory is credited with one of the all-time great quotes about sports: "Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become."
History has more than vindicated Ms. McGrory's statement. The ratings for the 2012-2013 television season have just recently been tabulated, and the leader -- by a wide margin -- was NBC's Sunday night NFL telecast. A mere eight years before my own birth, there was no such thing as the Super Bowl. Now it's a de facto Holy Day of Obligation. Football has long since blitzed past baseball to become America's true national pastime, and I think the reason for that has a lot to do with a gradual shift in the collective American psyche over the last few decades.
In short, we've become more cynical, more technical and less optimistic in recent times. In the years since 9/11 especially, we've become a paranoid, anxious nation, thirsty for blood and hungry for flesh. Football is the sport, more than any other, that fuels our aggregate psychosis. It's a dark game for dark times. Baseball, meanwhile, seems fairly musty in comparison. It's not even a contact sport, for crying out loud!
George Carlin famously explained the differences between these two sports better than I ever could, so I think I'll let him do so now.
So what does any of this have to do with Superman? Well, it's like this, citizens: Superman is the baseball of superheroes. He's corny. He's old-fashioned. He's pastoral -- the very term George Carlin used to describe baseball. Though born on the far-off, doomed planet of Krypton, Superman grew up as Clark Kent amid the pastures of Smallville, the isolated cowtown where his adoptive parents, Ma and Pa Kent, raised him with the good Christian values of the Middle West.
Superman's origin story has often been interpreted as a variation on the Nativity with Clark as an all-American version of the Christ child. Even the Kents' first names -- John and Martha -- are reminiscent of Joseph and Mary. Little wonder, then, that Superman has often been portrayed as the ultimate square, a goody-two-shoes as wholesome as a glass of milk and just about as interesting.
Meanwhile, poor Supes has been eclipsed in the minds (if not hearts) of the public by Batman, a fellow DC hero and frequent teammate. Batman's origin is rooted in urban violence: he saw his own parents gunned down by a mugger and ultimately decided to avenge their deaths by becoming a costumed vigilante. The famed "Caped Crusader" has been portrayed in wildly diverse ways and with greatly varying degrees of seriousness since his debut in the fateful year of 1939, but for the last quarter-century or so, Batman has largely been depicted as a deeply troubled, morally conflicted loner who has chosen to fight crime for reasons that are far from healthy.
This is the character America has embraced, and I think his ascendancy mirrors that of professional football. Batman is a flawed, gloomy pseudo-savior for these sick times of ours. No wonder we love him.
Five summers ago, the most lauded of the studio blockbusters was Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. The most ridiculed was Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Is it sacrilege to say that I had more fun at the latter than the former? I emerged from The Dark Knight feeling woozy and a little depressed, like I'd just spent two-plus hours in a tumble dryer, while at least I came out of Crystal Skull feeling like I'd seen the adventure yarn that I'd paid for.
I think the real problem with Spielberg's film is that Indiana Jones was simply the wrong man for the audiences of 2008. It's difficult to imagine him brooding as he stares into a hopeless gray sky. Certainly, Crystal Skull is absurd and cheesy. But what audiences forgot (or ignored) was the fact that absurdity and cheesiness were in the character's DNA from the very beginning of the franchise. After you've found the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, where else is there to go but aliens from outer space?
Fans howled at the improbability of Professor Jones surviving a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator, but is this really any more ridiculous than the melting Nazis of the first film or the invisible bridge of the third?
While the online community was grumbling about how preposterous Crystal Skull was, they were also rhapsodizing about the supposed realism of The Dark Knight. This argument struck me as baffling for several reasons. First, Nolan's film is in no way realistic. It's not even close. Insane, physically impossible events happen throughout the entire running time. This is not mere conjecture on my part, either. It's scientific fact. If Bruce Wayne really put on that rubber bat suit, he'd barely be able to walk around, let alone win any fights. And if he tried that gliding technique with his cape, he'd soon wind up as an omelette on the sidewalks of Gotham City.
But beyond that is a more troubling question: why would we even want a superhero movie to be realistic? Perhaps our imaginations have been defeated or deflated by years of reality television and grim headlines. Figuratively speaking, we have sequestered ourselves in one dismal, little, windowless room while great halls remain cordoned off and unexplored. Kind of sad, really, but understandable and perhaps inevitable.
This is the world Superman now enters in 2013. A football world. A Batman world. The character's latest cinematic reincarnation, Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, faces critics and audiences on June 14, 2013. The presence of Christopher Nolan as a producer suggests that the film will take a darker, grittier, more reality-bound approach to the character. These suspicions are confirmed by the film's trailer, in which Clark Kent/Superman appears to be dour and humorless, his powers as much a burden as a blessing.
For a while in the 1970s and 1980s, Christopher Reeve managed to find a manageable middle ground with the character. His Superman had a sense of humor, certainly, but was not a cartoonish clown or a novelty act. Furthermore, he had a touch of old-fashioned romance but did not sacrifice his masculinity in the process. Best of all, he made it look like being Superman -- while occasionally a trial -- was a hell of a lot of fun. To my mind, Reeve is the only actor to truly understand the character and play the role properly. Every other actor has either been too stiff and serious (Brandon Routh in Superman Returns) or too much of a lightweight to be a credible action hero (Dean Cain in Lois & Clark).
I plan on seeing Man of Steel, but I worry that the character has lost something essential in the process of being remade for the audiences of 2013.
More than anything in the plot or dialogue, I am concerned about the movie's appearance. Superman comes from comics, an entirely visual medium, and has been transplanted to film, a primarily visual medium. A movie, more than anything else, is a Thing To Look At. So what has Zack Snyder provided us to see here? Obviously, in any Superman movie, the main point of visual interest is Superman himself. I was struck by how different Henry Cavill's 2013 uniform was from the one worn by Christopher Reeve in 1978. Here's a color chart breakdown of the two:
A color chart comparing the Superman uniforms of 1978 and 2013. Notice a difference?
Captain Kirk and his bumpy new uniform
The top row represents the Reeves version: cheerful and bold shades of blue, yellow, and red, similar to the hues seen in a four-color comic book. The bottom row represents the updated Cavill version of the famous suit. The colors are grungier and more nebulous now, reflecting perhaps that we live in a less-certain world. Red and blue have been usurped by reddish and blueish.
If you study the picture at the beginning of this article, in addition to the color change, you'll also notice a change in the texture of the material. Whereas Reeve's leotard was smooth and seamless, Cavill's outfit is ridged and porous.
This emphasis on hyper-accurate detail, perhaps an outgrowth of high-definition television and digital theater projection, is not exclusive to Superman. The trend began, I believe, with Spider-Man about a decade ago. Now, every fantasy hero -- including Captain Kirk -- has to wear such an outfit. Again, I am a little wary of this. Screen heroes should, in some sense, be abstract and mysterious. The new fabric makes these characters more plausible, perhaps, but it also takes away some of the fun because it subtly drags them down to the level of practical reality. I have plenty of practical reality all around me. Why do I need more of it in a superhero movie?
At the end of Oliver Stone's biopic Nixon, the disgraced politician -- a pessimist saint if ever there was one -- looks up at a portrait of his one-time rival, John F. Kennedy and says, sadly: "When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are."
Can't we say the same about our movie heroes? Superman is who we want to be (or used to want to be), and Batman is who we are (or fear we are). We used to look to the silver screen to see characters who were impossibly idealized and embodied our fondest hopes and dreams. Now, I suppose, we want to look up there and see at least something of ourselves -- our flawed, fallible selves -- projected on the wall. In a few weeks, we'll see how well Man of Steel accomplishes that.
A few of Korla's two dozen albums. You might notice a recurring visual motif on the LP covers.
"For wisdom is better than rubies, and all things to be desired are not to be compared unto it. We bring you musical gems from near and far, blended into a pattern of glorious harmony, a program based on the universal language of music. It is our pleasure to present to you..."
Korla Pandit spoke not a wordwhen he was on camera. He just wore a bejeweled turban, played the organ... and stared. That was the extent of his act. It was all he needed -- the shimmery tones of his music, the vague evocation of the Far East, and that indelible Mona Lisa countenance with its piercing dark eyes and intriguing half-smile. It was a potent combination which carried him along for nearly half a century. And yet, Korla Pandit never really existed at all. It depends, I suppose, on your definition of "existed." Either way, his story is one of the most implausible and oddly inspiring in the history of popular music.
I first encountered Korla Pandit without any clue to his identity or knowledge of his past. Portraying himself, Korla made a memorable cameo in Tim Burton's 1994 film, Ed Wood. In the scene, notorious director Edward D. Wood, Jr. (Johnny Depp) is holding a wrap party for his 1955 sci-fi/horor anti-epic, Bride of the Monster. The wild celebration, attended by Bela Lugosi and the other oddballs and grotesques who orbited Wood, is held in the meat-packing plant of the film's major backer, wealthy rancher Donald McCoy (Rance Howard). While the carcasses of slaughtered animals hang from hooks all around them, the revelers are treated to a suggestive dance routine performed by Wood himself, costumed as a harem girl. Korla Pandit, immaculately attired in a Nehru jacket and the ever-present turban, accompanies him on the organ with a composition called "Nautch Dance," referring to a seductive style of dance popularized in early-1900s India. As near as I can tell from reading about Ed Wood's life, no such party ever occurred, though Ed did like to surprise and shock people by dressing in drag and dancing wildly in public places and at parties. Still, it's a fun scene with a memorable capper as Ed removes his veil. Here's a clip.
For many years, that was my only encounter with Korla Pandit. "Nautch Dance" did appear on the Ed Wood soundtrack, though it was credited -- along with all the other tracks -- to Howard Shore, who composed the film's score. Many years later, though, I started noticing a particular LP cover which kept turning up on Internet lists of the best, worst, craziest, and "most WTF" album covers of all time. It was this one for a '50s-era Korla Pandit Christmas album:
The infamous Korla Pandit Christmas LP cover.
Something about the image stopped me in my tracks every time I saw it. Who was this odd, androgynous man sitting stiffly behind a keyboard and wearing the kind of suit a businessman would be buried in? Why did he seem to be wearing eye shadow and lipstick? And, most of all, why did he look so familiar? A quick Google search answered a few of my questions. He was, indeed, the mysterious organist from Ed Wood. Burton's film was made a mere four years before the musician died of a myocardial infarction at 77. His main claim to fame was starring in a Los Angeles-based 15-minute television show, Korla Pandit's Adventures in Music, in the late '40s and early '50s at the very dawn of the television age. He then made a series of short films which were nationally syndicated and thus made him famous across America. After that followed a series of albums and another local Los Angeles show. He remained a television fixture throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Then, after his career slowed down in the 1970s, he shifted to making public appearances and giving private lessons. He continued working steadily as a performer until the end of his life. To give you an idea of what Korla was like in his 1950s glory days, here's a clip from one of his TV shows. Supposedly, he made roughly 900 episodes like it. If something like this were to air on TV today, it would seem almost avant garde, like some weird experimental parody from Adult Swim.
Korla's story ended in 1998 in Petaluma, CA, but it began in St. Louis, Missouri in 1921, where one John Roland Redd was born, one of seven children of an African-American couple. Growing up black in Missouri in the 1920s and 1930s was exactly as uncomfortable as you might guess it would be. Instead of letting racial politics define his life, however, Redd chose to sidestep the issue altogether by completely remaking his image. In his late teens (after a brief apprenticeship at an Idaho radio station), he made his way to Los Angeles, the city which has perhaps eclipsed even New York as the reinvention capital of the world, and it was there he first donned a turban (an affectation he'd seen in a movie called Midnight Shadow) and began performing under the assumed name, Juan Rolando. As you can see, that first alias was a mere variation on his own real name. However, once he married Disney artist Beryl June DeBeeson in 1944, the complete repackaging of John Roland Redd really began. He and his wife devised the persona of "Korla Pandit," complete with a totally fictitious back story which declared that he was born in New Dehli to a Brahmin priest and a French opera singer. None of it was true, of course, but since when did "truth" and "show business" ever have anything to do with one another? Pandit kept up the ethnic charade for the next half century. The actual facts of his life were not revealed until a 2001 article in Los Angeles magazine.
The story of John Roland Redd a.k.a. Korla Pandit is unlike any I've encountered in popular culture. He presented an abstracted yet alluring version of India without even a semblance of authenticity. Korla represented the Far East as viewed through the eyes of the West. That speech comparing rubies to wisdom, for instance, comes not from anything in the Hindu religion but is a paraphrase of Proverbs 8:11 from the Old Testament. Even more obviously, the electric organ is not remotely Indian in nature. From what I can determine, the instrument was largely developed and popularized in the United States. However, the eerie and unearthly tones Pandit/Redd was able to conjure from it seemed to transport listeners to an exotic world of mystery, some indefinable place far away. That was the real magic behind what he did.
I'll leave you with one more clip of Korla Pandit. Here, he plays "Miserlou," a traditional Greek tune which you'll probably recognize as the theme from Pulp Fiction (where it was played by surf rock guitarist Dick Dale):
The Torrance Family Portrait by smalltownhero (source)
The head-scratchingly bizarre documentaryRoom 237 brought renewed attention and scrutiny to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), a loose adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling 1977 novel of the same name. For nearly 40 years, Kubrick's controversial horror movie has inspired an inordinate amount of speculation among viewers and critics, and the documentary seeks to provide several possible readings or interpretations of the film.
Among the theories floated by interviewees: it's about the Holocaust, it's about the genocide of Native Americans, it's about the faking of the Apollo 11 moon landing, etc. Like most of Kubrick's works, The Shining is chock-full of odd and arcane details that may or may not be clues to the film's true meaning or intent. Room 237 helpfully points out many of these, and the interview subjects use these tidbits to support their respective cases, almost like lawyers submitting pieces of evidence in a trial. This makes the viewer the judge and jury.
One recurring theme in Room 237 is that new details are liable to pop out at you every time you watch The Shining. Freeze the frame at any given moment, say the interviewees, and study the image. There's bound to be something out of the ordinary there. And, sure enough, I found this to be true when I revisited my favorite scene in the film: the one in which a terrified Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) defends herself with a baseball bat as her husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson), now completely psychotic, follows her up a flight of stairs at the far end of the hotel's vast, airy Colorado Lounge.
There are a lot of great things about this scene, not the least of which is that it manages to work simultaneously as horror, as family drama, and as pitch-black dark comedy. (Few lines in cinema make me laugh as hard as Jack's reading of "Wendy... darling... lightof my life!") Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall are both mesmerizing here, employing radically different acting techniques. Famous in Hollywood lore are the stories of how unequally Kubrick behaved toward these two actors during the making of The Shining. The director treated Nicholson like an old pal while sternly berating Duvall in front of the crew and scoffing at her complaints. Stanley did this supposedly to coax the desired performances from his actors. This is eerily reminiscent of the making of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1940), in which director/star Welles apparently treated his co-star, Dorothy Comingore, quite cruelly because she was playing a woman who was dominated by her husband and who wound up as a broken-down drunk after leaving him. Unfortunately, Comingore's own tragic life mirrored that of her character too closely, and she died of alcoholism at 58.
Some of Kubrick's on-set behavior is captured in the well-known BBC documentary, The Making of "The Shining," directed by Kubrick's daughter Vivian. Indeed, Jack prowls around the set like he owns the place, while poor Shelley looks like a kid whose parents never picked her up from summer camp. Regardless of whether you approve of Kubrick's professional ethics, his techniques seem to have paid off here. Shelley's character, Wendy Torrance, is very childlike and innocent throughout the film, and over the course of The Shining, her husband Jack erodes what's left her of self-confidence and tries to bully her into submission, first through condescension ("Wendy, let me explain something to you..."), then through profane outbursts, and finally through physical violence.
What we are witnessing here is the steady and terrifying dissolution of an already-shaky marriage. Wendy at first seems ill-equipped to handle this. She is the most gentle and naive of the Torrance family, much more of a child than her own son, the intense and withdrawn Danny. With her wide eyes and beanpole physique, Wendy is almost asexual. Even her outfits look like adult-sized versions of things a kid would wear: shapeless pinafores and turtlenecks that keep her covered from her neck to her ankles. (Little wonder, then, that her husband all but salivates at the sight of a naked woman in the infamous "room 237" scene.)
Wendy Torrance, eternal optimist.
From the moment we meet her, when she is unsuccessfully trying to convince her son how great the Overlook Hotel is going to be, Wendy Torrance is a woman in deep denial. She tries to maintain an optimistic outlook at all times despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
In virtually every scene she's in, Wendy tries to minimize her problems by understating them. The staircase scene is the moment when that strategy stops working for her, forcing her to resort to violence with the bat. But even here, she makes an attempt at downplaying the situation, even taking some of the blame herself: "I'm very confused. I just need a chance to think things over."
But here, too, is where Jack's menace, which has been building for some time now, finally becomes too out-of-control to ignore. Once your husband has said, "I'm gonna bash your brains in," it's a safe bet that your marriage is beyond repair. Wendy's utter vulnerability makes her husband's brutishness all the more shocking, but "vulnerable" does not mean "defenseless." In this scene, she manages to knock her husband down the stairs. Later, she has the presence of mind to lock her unconscious husband in the Overlook's vault-like storage room and, when even that fails, slashes his hand with a kitchen knife as he uses an ax to enter the bathroom where she has barricaded herself.
While I was watching this infamous scene and thinking about all of these things, I started noticing a strange yet undeniable visual motif. While Wendy is on the staircase, Kubrick films her from angles in which there is bright light behind her, making it almost appear as if she is glowing. First, the light comes from the giant windows of the Colorado Lounge, which are reminiscent of the large stained-glass windows in churches and cathedrals. Then, when Wendy is further up the stairs, a lighting fixture on the ceiling behind her suffuses the scene with a warm glow. Meanwhile, Jack advances on her threateningly, but smiles all the while and even taunts her like a schoolyard bully, repeating her name in silly voices: "Weeenddeeeeee... Weeeenndddeeee..."
Devil or angel? Sinner or saint? Jack makes the "devil sign" and Wendy Torrance has a halo in The Shining
I could not help but notice that when Jack Nicholson delivers the famous "darling" line, he very briefly makes the sign of the horns, an offensive hand gesture sometimes associated with Satanism and the occult. Nicholson, let's not forget, played the earthly embodiment of Satan a mere seven years later in The Witches of Eastwick and famously referred to himself therein as a "horny little devil." At the time, having Jack Nicholson play the Devil struck many critics as type-casting. Meanwhile, look at that light fixture behind Shelley Duvall. Kubrick consistently composes the frame so that the chandelier is directly over her head, making it look like a halo. That's when I realized that the Torrances could be seen as a kind of grotesque parody of the Holy Family: Jack as Joseph, Wendy as the Virgin Mary, and Danny as Jesus.
Mary, Jesus, and Joseph
Jesus and Mary, of course, get all the affection and attention from our world's roughly 2 billion Christians. They have statues, paintings, songs, and numerous Holy Days of Obligation in their honor. Poor old Joseph—my namesake, incidentally—seems to have gotten the fuzzy end of the lollipop in this arrangement. His young virginal wife was impregnated by the Holy Spirit and would forever after be known for her sexual purity. Despite popular belief, the term "immaculate conception" does not refer to the virgin birth of Christ; instead, it is Catholic dogma that Mary, from the moment of her own conception, was untouched by original sin. She alone among mortals got a lifetime free pass from God, and in return, she remained sexually untouched. Growing up Catholic, I could not help but wonder what effect this must have had on Joseph, a mortal man who must have had the same sexual desires as any man but who was forever doomed to a life of chastity.
Others have wondered about this, too. In his massively controversial 1985 film Hail Mary, director Jean Luc Godard updated the story of Christ's virgin birth to modern times and gave us a sexually frustrated Joseph who eventually comes to accept his fate. "I never touch you. I stay," he tells his wife. Much more fun than Godard's film, though, is "A Bad Kid," a triumphantly tasteless short story from 1999 by UK satirist Michael Kelly. Kelley's story takes the form of a monologue by Joseph and is written in the voice of a crude, working-class Britisher who loathes and resents his literally holier-than-thou son and wife and who doesn't hesitate to express these feelings through physical violence. Throughout the story, Joseph's tone is remarkably reminiscent of Jack Torrance. Jack, too, has abused his son physically on at least one occasion. Here's a representative excerpt from Kelly's story in which Joseph describes his relationship with Jesus:
In all the times I had cause to thrash my stepson during his childhood, adolescence and young manhood, he almost never stood up to me, the jessy. I suppose in fairness if he had done I would have put him in hospital, but the way he just stood there passively, as he did now, looking so bloody meek and mild and saying, "I forgive you," the superior little sod, used to enrage me even more.
"I'll teach you to forgive me, you little bastard!" I yelled, and leathered him some more.
Later, Joseph speaks ruefully about his wife:
God, she gets on my wick at times. Sitting on her arse all day smiling and being tranquil and radiant and full of grace, and glowing a bit. I've never liked to talk about this much, but she definitely glows. Does your wife glow? No, I didn't think so. Mine does. No, you can't notice it so much in daylight, but at night you can read a book by it. Come to think of it, he never needs a candle when he gets up for a piss either. What a fucking family.
In this story, as in many paintings and mosaics, Jesus and Mary give off a kind of visible glow... a shining, if you will. As I pointed out earlier, Wendy herself seems to "glow" or "shine" during the staircase sequence. That's one detail Shining-ologists never seem to give much attention: the title. Is it possible that the extrasensory perception in King's story is called "shining" because of some religious significance? The gift of "shining" is reminiscent of the so-called "telekinesis" in King's first full-length novel, Carrie, which is likewise fraught with religious symbolism and a specifically Christian horror of sex.
Room 237: Result of Jack's sexual frustration?
Now let us consider Jack and Wendy Torrance as Colorado's answer to Joseph and Mary. Like the famed Biblical couple, Jack and Wendy travel a great distance to an inn, The Overlook, where the inkeeper (Mr. Ullman, played by Barry Nelson) gives them modest accommodations. Since the Overlook is closed between Halloween and May Day, why is there no room at this inn? Because the other rooms are occupied by the ghosts of the hotel's past. Like Mary and Joseph, Wendy and Jack have a sexless relationship. The occasional chaste kiss—and never on the lips—is as much physical affection as we'll ever see from them. If the Torrances never have sex, how was Danny ever conceived? The aforementioned "room 237" scene may well be brought about by Jack's sexual frustration. Of course, like Joseph, Jack is not allowed to experience sexual pleasure even in a fantasy. The gorgeous woman he encounters in that room turns into a decomposing hag in short order, and Jack flees in terror.
Interestingly, in one of the film's ugliest lines, Jack complains about Wendy to the spectral and possibly imaginary bartender, Lloyd (Joe Turkel): "Just a little problem with the old sperm bank upstairs." Equating Wendy to a sperm bank tells us that Jack sees her as little more than a receptacle for the male seed, which is pretty much how God used Mary. Some observers think of Joseph as being cuckolded by God in this respect. The sign of the horns we saw Jack using earlier is, by some accounts, Italian in origin and meant to signify the proverbial cuckold's horns. A man whose wife is unfaithful wears horns that everyone but he can see. The Torrances' son may have been conceived through methods other than normal human reproduction.
This brings us to young Danny Torrance, the story's stand-in for Christ. Though his physical body is eminently human, Danny is possessed of a great supernatural power even he cannot comprehend. His mysterious summoning of the Overlook's handyman, Dick Halloran (Scatman Crothers), is akin to Christ being visited by the Three Kings, who were led to Bethlehem by a star. Elsewhere in the film, Jack encounters the ghostly Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) who is keenly aware of Danny's power and tries to convince Jack to kill him. This is analogous to the story of King Herod the Great, who in the Book of Matthew (Matthew 2:1-4, 7, 16) orders his soldiers to kill all male children two and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding neighborhoods because he has heard from his astrologers that the King of the Jews had been born there.
I cannot say whether Stephen King or Stanley Kubrick ever meant The Shining to mirror the story of the Nativity or depict the Holy Family in any way. However, this famous narrative is so deeply hard-wired into our minds through decades of repetition and cultural indoctrination that it may seep into our fiction whether we want it to or not. One of the great gifts of Room 237 is a belief expressed by one of the interviewees to the effect that alternate meanings may be found in works "regardless of author intent."
