Criterion Recollection: Erosion, Explosion, Implosion

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a noted chair connoisseur and fiction author. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Uncanny Eye Candy: Spine #640, Koyaanisqatsi (1983)


by MARK BRENDLE

Last winter, Criterion released another of my favorite (set of) movies, the "Qatsi Trilogy" by the genius ex-monk Godfrey Reggio. Koyaanisqatsi, the first and best known of the trilogy, still makes its way through pop culture, both by direct reference in homages and parodies and by the innumerable pillaging of its technique by advertisers and filmmakers.

Despite its ubiquity, Koyaanisqatsi is often remembered and noted for its engrossing visuals, camera trickery and the outstanding score by contemporary composer Philip Glass. But the soul of Koyaanisqatsi, and the trilogy as a whole, lies in the message of the film, sometimes subtle, sometimes over-the-top, but always the same: industrial civilization and our obsession with technology and "progress" are destroying the world and us along with it.

The method by which Reggio as well as Glass and cinematographer Ron Fricke (both equal collaborators) unfold this picture of a world turned upside down by rampant acceleration of technocratic hegemony startles audiences even today. Koyaanisqatsi takes footage of everyday scenes and transforms them into amazing spectacles of beauty and horror. This transformation opens up a perspective of modern (1980s) life and pulls back the casual veneer of the quotidian, exposing the violence and sadness underlying the routine dehumanization that structures contemporary society.

The efficacy of these images comes from Reggio's avoidance of language in his narrative. The name Koyaanisqatsi was added only after the film was complete, as releasing an untitled film seemed untenable. He chose the word for two reasons: one, because it was completely unknown (an irony of the film's success, of course, is that the word is now well known and serves as a shortcut to confronting the languageless object it represents, precisely what Reggio wanted to prevent). Two, the word comes from a dying language, Hopi, a language representing the worldview of a traditional society, one apart from and destroyed by the world Reggio criticizes.

The General's Fiction: A Military Internment of Literature — No. 2

Note: Today, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria. He last joined us to explain how Christopher Hitchens should burn in hell, how we can help Andrew Breitbart get there and how killing Bin Laden was the last spasm in the American fever dream.


Pavane For A Dead Country: Mark Brendle's Radio Fragments
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

You probably know the holiday blues, if not personally, then at least by reputation. And you probably know them more acutely when the celebrations end, when there's no one left to lie to—winter without the trappings. Wallace Stevens wrote, "The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us," and in the twilight of an economically corroded and spiritually bereft America, it is more vital than ever that artists shine a light. Mark Brendle, an Oregon-based writer and colleague here at Et Tu, Mr. Destructo, has published a new book of poetry, Radio Fragments.

Radio Fragments consists of a few dozen prose poems beneath a lovely illustrated cover, depicting a cordon of riot cops forming a human abatis, as a ribbon of radio waves bends and curls between them. How is Radio Fragments? It is superb, because as an author, Brendle gets the stakes. This poetry is neither for the aloof liberal who sets great store in a few clean tweaks, nor the reactionary clinging to his long-dead liturgy. Radio Fragments is sad, strong, crystalline, beautiful, like the thick ice atop a dark lake. This is poetry for people who, in Andrea Dworkin's words, "Don't find compromise unacceptable—[they] find it incomprehensible."

The book's strength comes from its unity of vision—a dire one. In one of the book's final poems, "An Elegy For Cinna The Poet," the speaker plainly doubts the ability of any creative work to puncture the violence and anomie that has come to dominate our lives: "What are words to the angry mob, or anyone else for that matter? The patricians have been fighting with each other over their toys again." The poet is ignored, Caesar gets whacked by his equally loathsome usurpers, and "atomized, dissonant voices howl in the marketplace." As Brendle writes in another poem, "The equivalence of words brands us with proper nouns like Charlemagne, Babylon, Gilgamesh, Constantinople, Prospero." Let any dissidents bay; they've always been ignored in time for the next collapse. What change could a poet possibly effect?

Criterion Recollection: Phantom History

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Phantom India, The Eclipse Series (1969)

by MARK BRENDLE

Phantom India is such a fitting title for Louis Malle's most personal work. The film not only focuses on India's underclasses, a near invisible people, hidden from western view by the pretense of India's elite, but the documentary form proves a phantom as well, mixing self-awareness, humility and outrage into an organic whole that even today jars us from our expectations. This seven-part miniseries, running over six hours, explores India during the late 1960s, before its unbridled industrialization exploded in full force.

Westerners hailed India as an exotic jewel, a land of sensuous pleasures, of vibrant colors, robust vitality and spirituality. India became an ideal, a sentimental notion of otherness to which westerners could retreat when they tired of their own mechanistic society. Take for example, the Powell-Pressburger masterpiece Black Narcissus, which used this idea-model of India to great effect. Malle shatters this image with an honest foray into the lives of Indians and a comprehensive overview of India's sociopolitical conditions in the late 1960s. This film captures a fragile and lost part of India’s history, between the era of colonial imperialism and the modern era of outsourced labor force, when the tides of westernization were on the horizon, but had yet to crash.

Criterion Recollection: Jesus the Ripper

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


The Messiah and Murder: Spine #132, The Ruling Class (1972)

by MARK BRENDLE

Using a schizophrenic Earl who's cured of his messianic complex by choosing instead to believe that he's Jack the Ripper, Peter Medak's Buñuelesque The Ruling Class levies harsh social commentaries against established power hierarchies like the British aristocracy and the Christian church. Medak's adaptation of Peter Barnes' exceptional, darkly comic and surreal play can be read as a delicious skewering of class antagonism and a well-meaning but trite expose on the hypocrisy of power, but its true meaning lies in the necessary existence of the extremes of both The Christ and The Ripper.

Medak and Barnes implicate the structure of power in this schizophrenic split right away, introducing us to Jack's predecessor, Ralph, the 13th Earl of Gurney. After delivering a speech on the noble heritage of England, he returns to his bedroom to perform autoerotic asphyxiation in a tutu. The tutu might strike modern audiences as a cliché of crazy, but as Ralph prepares his ritual, one that he has obviously performed for some time, he speaks about how, for a judge, who has the power of life and death, all of life's other experiences fail to produce satisfaction. To experience a high close to that of sending men to the gallows, he must engage in bizarre and dangerous behavior. The ritual goes wrong; Ralph kicks over the stool and hangs himself, finally achieving full identification with the victims of his justice.

Criterion Recollection: Provocateur, Pauper, Prisoner

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Repression and Rebellion: Spine #533, Crumb (1994)

by MARK BRENDLE

Terry Zwigoff's Crumb offers everything one could hope for in a documentary: interesting subject matter, intimate access, multiple, conflicting perspectives, great music and a host of unanswered questions that leave a viewer thinking about the film for days, weeks or even years after watching.

Crumb presents a fairly bleak portrait of a family struggling to maintain even the thin veneer of sanity while pursuing invisible demons in the form of art, spirituality and isolated reflection. Because of the relatively dark psychological subject matter and the unflinching portrayal of "bizarre" characters on the margins of society, Crumb developed a reputation as depressing. Especially with only one viewing, Crumb can overwhelm an audience, but beneath the surface tension, it exposes a fundamentally optimistic message, one of rebellion in the face of overwhelming odds, of individuality prided over conformity and of a trio of brothers who emerged out of the stifling repression of an abusive 1950s family, fearlessly seeking the truth about themselves and their place in the world.

Robert Crumb, seemingly the protagonist of this documentary, leads us through the byzantine and strange world of his art, libido and family. R. Crumb's celebrity provides a sort of keystone for viewers, allowing them a familiar foothold with such popular works as the once-ubiquitous "Keep on Truckin’" comic, or the hatchet-job adult film of Fritz the Cat. However, early into the film, as Robert Crumb speaks to a crowd of college students, we quickly realize that celebrity and popularity hold little interest for him, and that his most well-known works are also those which he most vigorously despises. Instead of veering into a navel-gazing "my REAL art is…" diatribe, we engage the essence of R. Crumb's art, both from his own, shockingly self-aware perspective, as well as those of art critics, feminists, former and current lovers, friends and foes.

Even that barely skims the surface of this film. The heart of this movie resides in the relationship between, and personalities of, the three Crumb brothers: Robert, Charles and Maxon. Each of the Crumb brothers, in his own way, lives an ostracized, tortured life. Each of the brothers sought a device with which he could cope with the intense trauma of their upbringing, as well as the social marginalization they had experienced since their school days. The core of this trauma is an intense repression of fundamental sexuality, brought about by the tyranny and abuse of their father. Only by rebelling against this repression could they begin to function in society. Or, in the case of Charles Crumb, the oldest brother who apparently bore the brunt of their fathers' abuse, the inability to break free from this internalized rule-of-the-father determined the tragic course of his entire life.

Criterion Recollection: Silent Bob Strikes Out

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Pretentious Farts from a Stupid Dick: Spine #75, Chasing Amy (1997)

by MARK BRENDLE

Watching the Criterion logo fade into this waste of celluloid brings a single, artificial tear to my eye, much like when Jason Lee's character Banky poignantly asks Ben Affleck's Holden MacNeil, "Girl?" Criterion introduced Chasing Amy into its collection early on, in the laserdisc days, and I see its inclusion in the same light as Armageddon and The Rock: a movie that exemplifies its genre, even if it lacks individual merit in spades.

It would be hard to count the number of times Kevin Smith has justified his filmmaking by explaining in his Comic Book Guy voice that he just makes "dick-and-fart joke movies" and that taking them seriously misses the point. If only this were true. The problem with Smith's filmmaking, evident in Chasing Amy, is that he actually does think his movies are more than dick and fart jokes; he makes a point of forcing his juvenile ideas of morality, social commentary and intelligent dialogue into his already jumbled and mismanaged work. That he also utilizes an excessive amount of dick-and-fart filler to offset the pretentious emptiness of his dialogue and plot proves only that he has the faintest glimmer of awareness that his movies suck and, as such, need sufficient cushion to repel critical barbs.

I won't dwell on the whys or hows of Clerks' success, but its unlikely acceptance into the usually hermetic world of filmmaking launched Smith's career and developed a cult following that has maintained its adamant support all the way down the steep trajectory of his oeuvre. After the abysmal failure of Mallrats, Chasing Amy almost did not get made at all. But low budgets and independent productions can be positive aspects of a film. One of Smith's stated influences, Richard Linklater's Slacker, proves that a movie does not require a big production to be good. It does, however, require some kind of unique insight and respectful self-awareness, the lack of which can only produce pretentiousness, something that seems as much an integral part of Smith's "Askewniverse" as hockey, skeeball and inside jokes.

Ostensibly, Chasing Amy tells the story of Ben Affleck's giant face, complete with goatee (or, as Smith angrily points out on the commentary track, a "van Dyke"), mugging the camera for a consistent two hours, under the laughably allusive name Holden MacNeil, while one of the women Smith somehow convinced to touch his penis, Joey Lauren Adams, rambles incoherently in her trebled screech about gays and lesbians, much to the chagrin of homosexuals everywhere. Adams' Alyssa is the comfortable sort of movie lesbian: she's blonde, good-looking, politically null and evidently just a little bit of pitched-woo away from not actually being a lesbian.

Criterion Recollection: A Funny Thing About 'The Vanishing'

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


The Sociopathy of Everyday Life: Spine #133, The Vanishing (1988)

by MARK BRENDLE

George Sluizer's The Vanishing (Spoorloos) masquerades as a mystery-thriller in order to expose the structure of the genre itself. This suspenseful film actually contains many comic moments; in fact, it's founded on a subtle, dark irony that revels in pulling the curtain of suspense back to reveal the mundane reality of a terrible crime. In addition to exploring the motivations of a thriller, The Vanishing uses its examination of a sociopathic kidnapper, Raymond, and an obsessive selfish husband, Rex, to obliquely tackle the question of solipsism — the inability to truly share one's experience of life with another person.

Although The Vanishing fits in the "missing woman" category of suspense thrillers (see Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes), it self-consciously toys with audience expectations so subtly that the viewer easily can get caught up in the very devices the movie works to undermine. A married couple, Rex and Saskia, go on vacation, and Saskia disappears. The rest of the movie focuses on Rex's increasingly obsessive attempt to find out what happened to her. The fairly simplistic plot structure betrays both Sluizer's skillful manipulation of genre norms as self-parody as well as his keen psychological insight.

Early in the film, when their car runs out of gas in a dark tunnel, and Rex leaves Saskia alone to find a gas station, one expects her to be abducted. Sluizer includes all of the essential elements of the dangerous situation: solitude, darkness, feminine vulnerability, alien surroundings and anxiety-inducing music. Nothing happens.

When Raymond, the kidnapper, finally takes Saskia, he does so in broad daylight, in a crowded public place, in clear sight of Rex. What Sluizer cuts through here isn't the naïve misconception that only dark alleys are dangerous, but rather an audience's expectation that the terrible event will happen in a suitable mise-en-scene. The Vanishing's efficacy springs from Sluizer's refusal to bend to genre expectations. On top of this, he allows his film a self-reflexive irony, so that this refusal can be read not only as an avoidance of clichéd devices, but as a statement on the devices themselves — an opposite tactic than the standard thriller, which tries to support our suspension of disbelief by utilizing the same old tricks "better."

Criterion Recollection: A Kurosawa Crime Drama

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


A Question of Air Conditioning: Spine #24, High and Low (1963)

by MARK BRENDLE

Thanks to the success of films like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, many western viewers associate Akira Kurosawa with sword-wielding Samurai riding through feudal Japan. However, one of his finest films is a thoroughly gripping modern drama called High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku, which directly translates as "Heaven and Hell"). Though very loosely based on Ed McBain's King's Ransom, the film bears Kurosawa's inimitable auteur stamp: his ability to take a run-of-the-mill police procedural and transmute it into an existential, socially aware exploration of injustice.

Toshiro Mifune heads up a wonderful cast as Kingo Gondo, an executive director at National Shoes, who, despite having a name better suited for an uncomfortably large marital aid, leads us through the very serious social dilemmas of the film. However, one of Kurosawa's mottos, "a good movie should also be enjoyable to watch," comes to fruition in High and Low, which follows its own theme of amalgamated binaries as both an artistic triumph and a genuine entertainment. In addition to being a dense and heady indictment of social conditions across the world, the film functions on a basic level as an extremely watchable suspense-thriller.

High and Low explores dichotomies: heaven and hell, high and low, rich and poor, good and evil, law and crime. The film itself can be split into two separate sections; the first hour consists of a tight, claustrophobic chamber drama — almost exclusively in a single location, Gondo's living room — shot in long takes. The second section blows up into the police procedural, where the viewer is taken on a tour of "hell": the slums, ghettos and underworld of postwar Japan. The ethical crux of the film occupies the gap between these dichotomies, and at every turn Kurosawa asks how it is that these disparities can exist, and what are the consequences for human beings caught at either pole.

Ransom stories may seem cliché now, but High and Low is extremely clever in its presentation and structure: the fundamental nature of ransom acts as an objective correlative for the dangers of capitalism. In the world of ransom, money and life are interchangeable; we place a fixed, though arbitrary, price on a human being. Because Gondo leads a rich lifestyle and surrounds himself with cutthroat business partners, the line between money and life already blurs in his perspective. Kurosawa and his co-writers pepper the dialogue with zero-sum choices between life and money. Gondo's assistant Kawanishi embodies the modern businessman; he operates without any kind of moral compass, using his own professional success as the only measure of his actions. He says to Gondo, "If you pay [the ransom] it's suicide," and later rationalizes a betrayal to other executives with, "I had to protect myself." The complete conflation between money and life defines these businessmen. Gondo tells Kawanishi that he is "inhuman," and it is this lack of humanity that separates the other businessmen from Gondo, who is held up as an exemplary businessman — an ethical capitalist.

Criterion Recollection: a Close Reading

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


In Bourgeois Hell—Between Discreet and Discrete: Spine #102: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

by MARK BRENDLE

Luis Buñuel’s satire of modern capitalist life, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, operates on several levels. It is satiric social commentary but also a picaresque farce and an absurd comedy of errors. These levels bind together around the core of the bourgeois consumer-capitalist lifestyle, exploring both desire and the bourgeois subject's inability to satiate it at any meaningful level. For him, desire is always just missed — postponed, interrupted, or otherwise barred — but always with the promise of future satiety. This manipulation of desire acts as the engine maintaining the semi-perpetual state of late capitalism.

This Tantalus-like arrangement is fitting, for Buñuel sees bourgeois existence as a kind of hell, similar to Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, except instead of being other people, Buñuel’s hell is the gaze of other people. The concept of the gaze, of being observed, suggests the key word of film’s title, "Discreet." Discretion serves at least a two-fold purpose for Buñuel’s hapless protagonists: it removes their acting upon their desires from the gaze of the observer and allows them to take their place within the prescribed symbolic order. This double-life represents the cornerstone of consumer-capitalist existence: compartmentalization. The film could just as easily be named The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Because the looming fears and momentous events of bourgeois existence are often so quotidian and discrete from others' experience, it seems only too fitting to look at this film with an intense focus. The following is a thorough, scene-by-scene analysis of the film and how it exposes the truths of bourgeois existence.


The film's protagonists, to use the word loosely, are six upper-class bourgeoisie, three men and three women. One of the men, Rafael, serves as an ambassador to Miranda; the others are French businessmen. The two businessmen, Francois Thevenot and Henri Senechal, are married to two of the women, Simone and Alice, respectively. Simone’s sister Florence completes the sextet. However, characterization is not so important. These six people represent an entire class and as such are vague, symbolic and nearly interchangeable. Only the ambassador's specific role gives him any differentiation, and as will be shown later, this differentiation plagues him throughout the film.

Criterion Recollection: 9/08/10

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


Gimme Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll and Shelter: Spine #99, Gimme Shelter (1970)

by MARK BRENDLE

Gimme Shelter frequently carries the label "the Anti-Woodstock." Many viewers and critics claim it documents the exact moment that the peaceful, innocent 1960s came to an end. Those simplistic interpretations of a complex documentary miss the point entirely. What Gimme Shelter accomplishes isn't the depiction of a turning point at all. Rather, it reveals the hidden underside of the entire hippie movement and shows that beneath the love-all, carefree surface, there was always an extreme violent tension. The dynamics at work at the Rolling Stones' Altamont concert are so complicated that multiple viewings of this movie are crucial in order to begin to sort out the apparent chaos and understand exactly what was going on.

Gimme Shelter is the cinema verité (or direct cinema, if you want to nitpick) rock documentary extraordinaire by the famous Maysles brothers, Albert and David, along with collaborator Charlotte Zwerin, about the Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour and its disastrous culmination in the poorly planned free concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California that led to several deaths, the most remarkable of which was the stabbing of an (armed) African-American by a member of the Hells Angels.

The film's structure consists of three main parts: live footage of the Rolling Stones' performances during the tour, documentary footage of the process and happenings of the concert, and finally the most interesting piece, footage of the Rolling Stones watching the other two parts of the film in an editing bay, with their initial reactions to the material. This meta-layer of the documentary provides a whole different tone to the film than if it were omitted. However, like all aspects of direct cinema, it provides at best only a partial glimpse into reality.

It's no news that observing something changes it, but this simple fact renders the entire idea of direct cinema and documentary filmmaking in general a kind of imaginary concept. Sticking a camera in someone's face is a surefire way to modify their behavior. If the directors' goal is to capture truth on film, he works against his own interests the minute he pulls out a camera. But what's really important to understand is that people are always acting as if a camera is rolling. Jacques Lacan's concept of the Other (with a big "O") is the arbitrary, third-party gaze of the social-symbolic system. It is for this abstract entity that people "perform" their daily lives. So documentary film isn't just one step removed from reality, it's two: it's people pretending to be a certain way, different from the way they normally pretend to be.

Criterion Recollection: 8/25/10

Note: We, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? are proud to present Criterion Recollection, an analysis of the popular Criterion Collection of historic and unique achievements in film. Your guide is Mark Brendle, a former media critic for BarnesandNoble.com and a short-fiction writer. Brendle lives in the Pacific Northwest in a small post-recycled yurt adjacent to America's largest family-owned retail video and book store, Art Trough. When not writing or staring purposefully at culture, Brendle works as a fair-trade coffee beanist. You can follow him on Twitter.


The Subconscious Thought Monster: Spine #92, Fiend Without a Face (1958)

by MARK BRENDLE

The Criterion Collection is generally known for distributing high-quality transfers of high-art world cinema. Or as a guidebook for pretentious movie nerds everywhere on what to watch in order to be cool (Godard). Or as the masters of the fetishization of cinema, delivering the best physical packages for home media in the business: lavish digipaks, beautiful cover art and thick booklet inserts packed with production stills, essays and insider information on each movie. So, if that’s the case, and Criterion hosts such seminal movies as Seven Samurai, The 400 Blows, The Seventh Seal and Armageddon, why would I start this column with a critique of a 1950s B horror movie? The answer is that I intend to subvert Criterion’s standing as the leading distributor of important cinema. Actually, it’s because like most 1950s horror movies, it contains at least a fragment of social commentary (maybe even criticism?), some of it very subtle, some not so much.

If you listen to the ridiculously banal audio commentary on the DVD by producer Richard Gordon (topped only perhaps by fellow B-movie producer Jack Harris’ commentary on The Blob) you might come away with the knowledge that Fiend Without a Face was one in a long line of cheap monster movies that happened to grab the audience’s attention because of the (then) unique design of the monster. Looking at it now it might remind you of H.R. Giger’s design for the Facegrabber in Alien, sans overt sexual neuroses. But despite Gordon’s insistence that the most interesting thing about the movie is the monster’s design, something deeper stirs underneath the surface of this rather simplistic tale of an experiment gone awry.

First, a quick outline of the plot for those who haven’t seen it: In a small town next to a United States military base on the American-Canadian border, people suddenly start dying. At first the citizens of the town blame the radiation from the military base’s atomic power plant, then a psycho killer, but later all involved, including the supposed-to-be-dashing lead man, a Major from the base played by Marshall Thompson, realize it is the work of invisible monsters generated from the thoughts of a mad scientist. These monsters kill their victims by attaching themselves around the neck with their spinal-cord tail and sucking out the person’s brain through two Dracula fangs on tendrils. (Giger, I’m looking at you here.) When the monsters sabotage the atomic power plant, the plant goes haywire and begins producing more energy. This renders the monsters visible, at which point they are brought down by everyday household bullets. Finally, our hero goes to the power plant and destroys it, cutting off the monsters’ source of atomic energy and killing them.