Proteus (2003)

As far as pomo homo auteur filmmakers are concerned, probably none is more artistically and politically subversive than Canadian cocksucker John Greyson (Un©ut, Zero Patience), a politically incorrect yet equally degenerate far-left poof whose recent anti-Zionist political activism has given him some rather negative press, especially in the fiercely Philo-Semitic world of filmmaking. Indeed, in a world where fags can marry and one is supposed to accept the act of a man anally penetrating a man as totally normal and even liberating, homosexual ‘culture’, especially in the celluloid world, has become hardly subversive and just as banal as the bourgeois heterosexual world that ass-pounding abberosexuals once felt superior to. A queerly queer veteran who originally emerged in the Toronto film/fag scene in the late 1970s, Greyson has lived long enough to see the ideas he spread like a venereal disease via his poofter political activism to become mainstream and overwhelmingly socially acceptable, yet he has remained an uncompromising filmmaker whose cinema works tend to appeal to the most esoterically-inclined of cinephiles, be they homos, heteros, or otherwise, and his most recent feature-length narrative film, Proteus (2003)—a low-budget (at $500,000.00 despite being an international production with a large international cast) Canadian-South African co-production of postmodern historical revisionism of the audaciously anachronistic sort that was co-written/directed/produced by SA documentary filmmaker Jack Lewis (a man responsible for producing a series of educational documentaries for the Robben Island Museum in the late 1990s)—is no less perniciously provocative and socially deleterious than his early works Urinal (1988) aka Pissoir and Un©ut (1997). A sort of daringly degenerate cross between Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) directed by Héctor Babenco, Querelle (1982) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Jean Genet’s Un chant d'amour (1950) aka A Song of Love, Proteus is loosely based on the racially-charged true story about two South African prisoners on Robben Island (where anti-white terrorist turned Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela spent 18 of the 27 years he was in prison), a gay Dutch sailor and a Capoid Khoi/Bushman Negro, who were both executed in 1735 for the unholy mortal sin of interracial sodomy. Undoubtedly a far-left fag-cist flick of the militantly homosexualist sort that portrays sexual orientation as a more serious source of discrimination than racial differences, Proteus is assuredly incriminating on the director’s part as a sometimes sickening and would-be-salacious but mostly sardonic sub-erotic arthouse flick directed by a man who was clearly heavily enticed by the fervently foul fantasy of a Nordic and a Negroid physically and metaphysically destroying racial and national barriers via blasphemous black-on-white and white-on-black buggery. A patently pretentious piece of race and sex hustling of the curiously carnal and even campy sort, Proteus, despite ostensibly taking place in the18th-century, features ANC era prison guards as leather-fag-like fascists of the sadomasochistic sort, pancake make-up wearing Goth fags wielding electric guitars, gay orgies taking place on the streets of Amsterdam, and snarky 1960s style fag hag stenographers with beehive hairdos arguing over the middle Dutch origins of the word “fuck” and, indeed, Greyson’s digital video work is certainly a piece where the two persecuted poof protagonists fuck, get fucked, fuck each other, and get fucked over by the Dutch-run South African government. 

 Taking its name from the South African flower better known as “King Sugarbush” that was named “Protea Cynaroides” by Swedish botanist Carolus Linneaus in 1735 and was proposed as the National Flower of South Africa in 1964, Proteus uses the flower as a faggy ‘flowery’ allegory for the blossoming and eventual death of the romantic relationship between the two pansy protagonists. Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown) is a rare bilingual black servant fluent in two European languages (Dutch and English) of Khoi Hottentot ancestry (although his father was a Bushman, thus making him still a 100% pure member of the dying Asian-like Negro Capoid race, which Nelson Mandela also symbolically belongs to), thus making him a racial ‘untouchable’ of sorts and a racial enemy of both blacks and whites. Lucky for him, a Scottish botanist named Virgil Niven (Shaun Smyth) of the latent homosexual variety takes Blank in as an assistant and uses him as a model for his homoerotic ‘scientific’ drawings. After receiving ten years of hard labor on Robben Island for the seemingly bogus crime of “assault and insolence on a Dutch citizen,” Blank starts an initially hostile but eventually romantic relationship with a debauched Dutch sailor named Rijkhaart Jacobsz (Neil Sandilands), who has no qualms about committing sodomy, especially when he is on the receiving end, thus volunteering to experience reversed racial subjection. Naturally, Blank’s master Virgil Niven is jealous of his black boy toy’s new fuck buddy friend, but he has his own problems to worry about as a married man who was found guilty of sodomy in absentia, a fate that inevitably led to his ex-lover/assistant’s execution. A crafty and shifty trickster, Mr. Blank lies about the Bushmen words for certain South African flowers to his master Virgil Niven, absurdly replacing the real Bushman flower names with words “cunt” and “fart,” among other linguistic absurdities, thus highlighting the dubious research done by Europeans when recording African history. From Niven, Blank learns that his people, the Hottentot people, belong to one of the three subspecies of man, the “bridge between simian and homo erectus.” Of course, that does not stop Niven from lusting over his subhuman partner, but his bourgeois airs prevent him from acting on his impulses, which offends Mr. Blank, who taunts his sexually mixed-up master with the words “I see the way you look at me...I know what it means.” Being a humble sailor of the colonial proletarian prisoner sort with not even the slightest Dutch Calvinist inclinations, Jacobsz has no problem engaging in jungle fever with tribal twink Blank, but when the two men are caught literally with their pants down and engaging in multicultural mud-packing, they are convicted of sodomy, an uniquely unholy crime that is punished with death by way of execution, which the victim's family is forced to pay. After being tortured, wussy white boy Jacobsz, unlike his brave lover Blank who never gives in under the pressure of torture, cowardly caves in after being tortured via drowning torture device and admits he committed sodomy with a true blue spade. While Jacobsz is convicted of sodomy and sentenced to death, Blank only has to return to Robben Island as he never confessed to engaging in cocksucking, which the Dutch court requires when carrying out an execution. Displaying his true commitment to his cracker lover, Blank ultimately decides to admit to the Dutch court that he is a homo Negro, thus he and Jacobsz are allegorically chained together and dropped in the sea, thus demonstrating director John Greyson’s conspicuous belief that homo-hating transcends racial lines, as cocksuckers of all colors are equally hated by the Dutch court. 

With a blatantly queer colonial queen absurdly stating, “as they say, what’s good for the motherland is good for the colony. Or rather, vice versa,” John Greyson has certainly demonstrated with Proteus that his sardonic sodomite wit has yet to wane over the decades, as colonialism has been entirety deleterious to both the colonizers and the colonized and has been the true root of racial chaos and cultural mongrelization throughout the world. Of course, with South Africa now being in black hands and white South Africans facing very potential genocide as demonstrated by the savage black-on-white murders of white Afrikaner farmers, with Genocide Watch placing South Africa at level 6, “Preparation”, remarking “we have evidence of organized incitement to violence against White people,” race hate in the rainbow nation has reversed in such a remarkably radical manner of the genocidal sort that it makes John Greyson’s criticism of colonial racism in Proteus seem rather trivial and absurdly outmoded. Of course, Greyson's main focus was portraying homosexuals as perennial victims who have it much worse than even blacks, while also portraying male-on-male buggery as something that was believed to only afflict Europeans as depicted in a scene in Proteus where a Dutch lawmaker remarks, “I thought the natives were immune to such unnatural deeds,” as if even the apparently racial colonialists even regarded their own imperial way of life as deracinated and deluded, while seeing the savages as still pure and untainted by the anti-organic phenomenon of colonialism and multiculturalism, which has only gotten all the more apocalyptic since the centuries have past. In fact, it seems that Proteus depicts homosexuality as the only positive import to the dark continent, as if technology, medicine/antibiotics, cities, and civilization are totally negligible things. 

Of course, in its totally negative depiction of the Dutch East India company—the very first multinational corporation—in regard to its exploitation of South Africans, Proteus ultimately has a nonsensical message of globalization = bad yet cosmopolitan cocksucking and international interracial sodomy = good. Featuring a contrived past where everyone seems gay yet also inexplicably anti-gay, Proteus is another great example of John Greyson’s keen ability to cinematically sodomize history in a militant far-left homo manner that, in its intentionally belligerent anachronism and oftentimes disinterest in historical truths, is most importantly about today’s globalized world and not the old colonial world it is set in. As Greyson admitted in an interview for the DVD release of Proteus, the real Claas Blank and Rijkhaart Jacobsz met each other when the former was only 16 years old and would maintain a romantic relation for two decades before they were actually convicted and executed for sodomy, which is quite remarkable considering it was nearly three centuries ago. In a nation where no less than ½ a million rapes are committed a year and child/baby rape (many HIV-infected South Africans believe if they rape a baby, it will cure them of their affliction) is at one of the highest levels in the world yet it also happens to be the first African country to legalize gay marriage, South Africa certainly has more things to worry about than whether the typical Joe Schmo negro tolerates buggery. Featuring the fetishization of quasi-fascist crypto-fag cops, a history lesson in old school European racial theories, the campy homosexualizing of the Dutch aristocracy (the old colonial men in stupid wigs are portrayed as hysterical yet sexually repressed old queens), unintentionally farcical glorification of the so-called “noble savage,” and promotion of homosexual miscegenation, Proteus is a film that is ultimately far more humorous in its homo-centricity than it is genuinely ‘romantic’ and socio-politically potent as a sort of unflattering, if not totally accidental and pathology-driven, deconstruction of the degenerate queer artist and political activist.   Described by co-director John Greyson himself as a “low-budget sodomy epic,” Proteus is a proudly profligate piece of ridiculously risque and pseudo-romantic fag historical revisionism that is sure to offend any self-respecting heterosexual, be they white or black, who has the gall to endure the abberosexual artsy fartsy essence of the film.  Concluding with the 1964 Nelson Mandela quote “some of the things so far told the court are true and some are not true” regarding being sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island, Proteus is ultimately a film with the message that all history is subjective and written by the conquerors. Of course, with “peace keeper” Nelson Mandela on his deathbed and the looming threat of race war against South Africa's white population, one can only wonder the sort of bogus history black leaders will write in the future of ridding themselves of the culture-carrying and producing Caucasian menace.

-Ty E

What's the Matter with Helen?

In his posthumously released memoir Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Business (2013), avant-garde auteur turned camp horror master Curtis Harrington (Queen of Blood, Games) wrote regarding his eloquently exploitative “Grande Dame Guignol” flick What's the Matter With Helen? (1971), “Of all my films, Helen is the one I personally like the best. It comes closest to realizing in all its details what I intended. It deals with the underlying themes of Eros and Thanatos—the will toward life and the will toward death.” Indeed, while his debut feature-length work Night Tide (1961), a singularly atmospheric arthouse horror film, is my personal favorite Harrington flick, it is hard to argue that What's the Matter With Helen? is not the director’s most artistically accomplished and aesthetically eclectic work as a period piece and macabre melodrama of the cruelly campy and culturally cynical sort that the uses the cinematic conventions of Golden Age Hollywood against itself, or as the L.A. Herald Examiner once pegged it, “A musical-horror-melodrama-satire-love story.” Penned by Henry Farrell, who previously worked with Harrington on the TV movie How Awful About Allan (1970) starring Anthony Perkins and who initially came to fame writing the script for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the very first “hagsploitation” aka “Psycho-biddy” aka “Grande Dame Guignol” flick, What’s the Matter With Helen?, like most of the director’s films which all seemed to be cursed, was unfortunately poorly advertised upon its release and relatively ignored, yet it would go on to rightfully develop a loyal cult following. In fact, What's the Matter With Helen? was so haphazardly and ineptly advertised that the official original movie poster of the film featured an image from the shock ending in a scene that Harrington hoped would be “as harrowing and brutal as the shower scene in Psycho,” thus ruining the experience for anyone who went to see it. Of course, I, like virtually everyone else interested in the film, had What's the Matter With Helen? spoiled for me after glancing at the poster, yet Harrington’s mischievous and even misanthropic celluloid exercise in homicidal hag hysteria is luckily a film of highly engrossing entertainment value and exquisite direction with the grand novel distinction of starring two clearly mentally imbalanced washed-up Hollywood Golden Age divas, thus, like good wine, it has only gotten better with age and has seemingly unlimited replay value. Starring an unflatteringly overweight Michelin Man-esque Shelly Winters (The Diary of Anne Frank, Poor Pretty Eddie), who plays a neurotic character going through a nervous breakdown while the actress herself was going through a real-life nervous breakdown, as well as Debbie Reynolds (Singin' in the Rain, The Unsinkable Molly Brown), who was apparently just as condescending to her co-star in real-life as her character is in the film, What's the Matter With Helen? is a film that is just as every bit hysterically hilarious as it is melodramatically macabre about the kind of mentally deranged mothers it takes to produce coldblooded killers of the anti-Oedipal sort. 

 As depicted in a fake 1930s Hearst Metrotone newsreel at the Americana-mocking beginning of What’s the Matter With Helen?, deranged young men Leonard Hill and Wesley Bruckner killed an unlucky young woman named Ellie Banner in a “Leopold and Loeb”-style fashion in Iowa and have both rightfully received life sentences for their dirty deeds. The two boys' mothers, Helen Hill (Shelley Winters) and Adelle Bruckner (Debbie Reynolds), decided it will be best to move away and get away from the bad press and abject social ostracization, especially after the former is cut on the palm with a knife by a vengeful anonymous assailant and receives a death threat from the same said perpetrator via telephone with the unsettling words “I'm the one who cut you.... I wanted to see you bleed.” Changing their names and hoping to live new press/stress free lives, Helen and Adelle head from Iowa to sunny California and open a posh pedophile’s dream, an unsettlingly debauched dance academy for little girls whose dubious parents want to make their daughters into the next Shirley Temple. Fat, morbidly depressed, and particularly passive, Helen merely goes along with her over domineering friend Adelle's madame-like get-rich-quick scheme, but, rather unfortunately, her mental health begins to decline over time. First, Helen, a woman who is deathly afraid of men, is rather angry when Adelle, a woman who does whatever she wants whenever she wants, hires a dandy queen of an elocution teacher named Hamilton Starr (Micheál MacLiammóir) to teach the little girls to have the proper voices for the new innovation of sound films. A shameless schemer and decadent dreamer of the mature MILF persuasion, Adelle also starts a hot and steamy love affair with the father of one of her students, Lincoln Palmer (Dennis Weaver), a rich Southern gentlemen of the seemingly closeted homosexual sort who knows how to treat a lady and behave like an ostensibly real man. With no other friends aside from Adelle, who constantly ignores and patronizes her, Helen gets a couple cute white pet rabbits, but that does not stop her from suffering flashbacks and ultimately hallucinations of her husband’s grizzly death in which he was mangled into a bloody pulp by a farm plow.

 Apparently, Helen’s murderous son witnessed the death of his father via machinery at the mere age of 4, thereupon possibly leading to his mental derangement. Naturally, petty and less than pretty Helen is jealous of Adelle’s new boy toy Lincoln and tries to break them apart, while also brainwashing herself with a steady diet of backwards Christian evangelist radio sermons so as to ease her perennial loneliness and sexual tension (it is hinted that she wants Adelle all for herself). After a mysterious man stops by at her and Adelle's home, Helen pushes him down the stairs and kills him as she suspects he is the same man from Iowa who threatened to butcher her. A nauseating narcissist of the self-obsessed and opportunistic sort who seems to suffer from histrionic personality disorder, Adelle helps Helen dump the mystery man’s body as she does not want the incident to ruin her career. Unfortunately, Adelle does not realize that she could be homicidal Helen’s new victim. After learning of her true identity and that her son is a sadistic killer, Adelle’s boyfriend Lincoln offers to hire the best lawyer in town to appeal for her son's case, but hateful Helen is less than impressed by Mr. Right’s rather generous offer. Finally building up enough gall to confront Adelle about her motives, Helen states to her bust bud, “I am not like you, Adelle. I’m not trying to buy back my son’s love by charming some rich man...,” Helen also lets Adelle know that their sons hate them and that their murderous behavior is a result of this hatred. Helen, who has more guilt than a Catholic cocksucker, visits a church and begs to a certain Sister Alma to forgive her, but she makes a complete and utter fool of herself and has to be dragged out of the church by Adelle. Helen ultimately goes ballistic and slaughters her beloved pet rabbits with a knife and confesses to Adelle that she is responsible for her husband's death as she apparently pushed him in front of a plow. Adelle offers to get Helen help and calls Sister Alma, but the bitch of a bunny butcher stabs her friend in the back both in a figurative and literal manner. In the end, Helen, who has finally taken the ‘dominant’ role in her relationship with Adelle sings “Goody Goody” on the piano in a one-woman/one-cadaver show that Lincoln accidentally walks in on in horror. 

 While the murderous Helen is, quite strangely, a more sympathetic character when compared to old whore Adelle, director Curtis Harrington summed up her character and the ‘moral’ of What's the Matter With Helen? as follows: “It is my portrait of the destructive narrow-mindedness of Christian fundamentalism, as exemplified by the character of Helen, whose hypocritical inability to face the truth of her sexuality brings only tragedy to those around her and madness to herself.” Indeed, What's the Matter With Helen? does not feature a single scene of overt lesbianism as Harrington surely concocted a celluloid work of subtle nuances, semi-inconspicuous camp, and cryptic naughtiness in the old school Hollywood style and in the tradition of the director’s friend James Whale (Frankenstein,The Old Dark House) that will surely be overlooked by most modern viewers. Poking fun at Hollywood ‘Christian’ flicks like Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), the perturbing quasi-pedo phenomenon of Shirley Temple, ungracefully aged Tinstletown divas, and the aesthetic vulgarity of superlatively soulless old school Hollywood musicals, What's the Matter With Helen? is indubitably director Curtis Harrington’s respectful anti-tribute to Sunset Boulevard’s hyper hypocritical films of yesteryear. A film directed by the only filmmaker to start out directing European arthouse inspired films and starring in Kenneth Anger films to making films produced by Roger Corman and multiple major studios to directing episodes of poular TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and Dynasty and working with actors ranging from Gloria Swanson to Helmut Berger, What's the Matter With Helen? is certainly the bitingly sardonic creation of a man with a love-relationship for Hollywood who was far too subversive and artistic for the Hollywood studio system, hence his relatively small oeuvre despite making films for about 60 years. Although I am only someone with a slight interest in the short-lived subgenre, which tends to be especially cherished by momma boy queens, I unquestionably consider What’s the Matter with Helen? to be the greatest and least aged of the hagsploitation flicks. After all, any time I need some therapeutic relief after dealing with a bitchy and needlessly narcissistic old bird of the less than physically fresh sort in real-life, I can just pop in What's the Matter With Helen? and dream of the possibilities. 

-Ty E

Chafed Elbows

As far as films about incest are concerned, especially of the mother-son Oedipal variety, no film takes such an absurdly hilarious and unwaveringly obnoxious approach to the subject than psychopathically sardonic flick Chafed Elbows (1966) directed by Robert Downey, Sr. (Putney Swope, Greaser's Palace). Of course, being mostly comprised of black-and-white 35mm still camera photographs that were developed at the director’s local drugstore and being only 58 minutes in length, Chafed Elbows barely qualifies as a film at all and, in terms of technique and direction, more resembles the sort of amateurish photo collages created by little girls and bored moms that have flooded YouTube, thus making it all the more ingenious in its glaring early-1960s NYC ghetto production values. Made on a dime store budget of around $12,000 (I was actually surprised it cost that much to make), Chafed Elbows would go on to be an underground classic and provide credibility to the American ‘avant-garde’ and cinematic sleaziness and would even share a double bill in 1967 at Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village with cine-magickian Kenneth Anger’s similarly subversive and groundbreaking work Scorpio Rising (1964). Of course, centering around a nervous breakdown-plagued anti-hero who shares carnal knowledge with his mother, gives birth to money, shoots cops, caters potato salad (or at least tries) at bar mitzvahs, and feels that he is entitled to government welfare like any and every self-righteous American deadbeat, Chafed Elbows is from a strikingly different planet than Scorpio Rising as a sort of fiercely fucked Freudian celluloid vaudeville show of the absurdist aberrant-garde sort that must have been a major influence on Downey’s debauched racial kinsmen Harmony Korine, whose debut Gummo (1997) features a similarly spasmodic and idiosyncratic collection of seemingly morally insane and stream-of-consciousness skits, pranks, and uncompromising cultural cynicism. A film that satires America just as much as it is a sordid symptom of it, Chafed Elbows attacks everyone from corrupt cops to crackpot psychoanalysts to kosher Jews, as well as filmmaker Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, and everyone in between. Indeed, if you ever wanted a jovial antidote to everything you hate about the USA, Chafed Elbows is cinematic iconoclasm and kosher camp at its most hopelessly ill-restrained and incendiary, as if it was directed by Woody Allen’s crackhead stepbrother, except actually funny and not whiny nor wimpy. 

 As one learns during the first couple minutes of Chafed Elbows, perverted proletarian protagonist Walter Dinsmore (George Morgan) not only sleeps side-by-side with his mother (played by Downey’s then wife Elsie Downey, who plays ALL the female roles in the film), but also has steamy incestuous sex with her as well. Rather unfortunately, Walter—a rather goofy fellow with a flat affect and not a dime to his name—narrates that he is in the middle of his “annual November breakdown” (although the film, which is in two parts, takes place during his “annual January breakdown”) and all of Greenwich Village will feel his pain and pessimism, whether they want to or not. After going to a doctor, Walter learns he is pregnant and the deranged doc recommends that he, being a man with a mangina, get a hysterectomy, but instead he magically gives birth to 189 ten dollar bills through his knee via cesarean section, which he concludes may be the result of having swallowed a nickel when he was 5 or 6 years old. On his way home from the doctor, Walt walks into a sleazy artist who prices him at $1700.00 and hopes to hang and sell him at a gallery, but it never happens. Not long after, Walter tells his psychoanalyst that his greatest fear is getting his mother pregnant, which is apparently a “common fantasy,” or at least Freud and equally deluded disciples thought. Although there is no doubt that Walter loves his mommy dearest, the hack psychoanalyst also tells her that his sick son “hates women,” which seems to be true as he treats virtually every girl he meets with neurotic disdain, even if he bangs a couple from time to time. Walter also makes his big debut as a cop character in a no-budget art flick destined for the Cannes film festival and has a chat with the lighting man, a patently pretentious would-be-auteur named “Leo Realism” (who claims to be listed in the Yellow Pages under “truth”). In a clear parody of Andy Warhol and his monotonous celluloid turd Sleep (1963), a film featuring a man doing nothing but sleeping for 5 hours, Mr. Realism offers Walter the job of starring in his new arthouse flick “Smoke” where all he has to do is “sit on a park bench for seven hours and puff on a cigarette.” On a lunch break while still in his police uniform, Walter does some slapstick traffic controlling and kills a real cop after he brags about “smashing a junky’s skull in.” On top of screwing his mother, Walter also impregnated his vegetarian cousin Leviticus who self-righteously proclaims she “won’t even eat animal crackers.” After Leviticus proclaims she is knocked up and that he should financially support her, Walter thinks twice and solves his problem by throwing her out a window. Not long after, Walter visits his brother who plans to “beat the system” by starting his own business, an amusement park that he describes as follows: “It is only gonna be open to white people but on the inside, there’s only gonna be black people. I’m going to have rides like Whip the Slave and Lynch a Nigger…lots of black people are going to have jobs and security just ‘cause of me.” Naturally, Walt—a loony loner without a cause—turns his brother down in regard to becoming a partner in his bigot bro’s dream business. 

 During the second part of Chafed Elbows, Walter lets the viewer know, “I kind of like part two. It’s got a “collagic,” dreamy, angelic quality. It’s one of my favorite breakdowns.” Indeed, the second part of the film actually features a scene in color of a tiny racist gook calling Walter a “thankless, sinful, Caucasian, spineless, Anglo-Saxon, mentally retarded, middle-class heterosexual” and blesses him “in the name of the Dow, the Jones and the Industrial.” Undoubtedly blessed, Walter decides to become a poet and immediately gets to work on his acceptance speech for the Pulitzer Prize and eventually recites the poetic line “My miniskirt and I checked into a motel and as we were getting into bed, we spotted an old Negro looking in the window. Miniskirt said not to worry because he was probably a peeping Uncle Tom” to a civil rights buff and dean at the ‘New School.’ The dean gives Walter the esoteric bit of knowledge that “Trotsky was a Mexican” and that “Hitler is a hairdresser and alive in Los Angeles.” After talking to an anti-liberal black street philosopher, Walter decides to do something more “real” and becomes a rock star, but he doesn’t “feel it” and decides to walk among his people, thus attracting the attention of a bunch of horny teenage girl and, of course, his greatest fan, his mother. Not long after, Walter is hired to “dish out potato salad at a bar mitzvah in Mineola, Long Island,” but he is fired by the owner of the catering business after kicking the potato salad out the truck while passing through Jamaica. Job or not, Walter decides to attend the bar mitzvah anyway and starts a hot fling with a crazy Jewish chick named Rhoda Dendron that he finds hiding under a dinner table. After telling Rhoda that she managed to put a pretty good tremor in his ‘tick-a-roo-roo’ and offering her to put a big kiss-a-wang-wang on her ‘ruby nugget,’ Walter rips the goofy gal’s clothes off, throws the owner of the catering business off a roof for momentarily cock-blocking him, and defiles the nice Jewish girl, but, to the little lady's dismay, ultimately succumbs to premature ejaculation. After coming home, Walter is happy to discover his slob of a father has drunk himself to death and proceeds to hit his mother on the head with a hammer and assumes he has killed her, but, quite miraculously, she awakens and states quite eloquently, “You can’t kill real love, Walter. Let that be a lesson to ya.” In an exceedingly happy ending to a rather merrily macabre movie, Walter and his mother get legally “peacefulized,” move into a rent-controlled apartment just outside of Manhattan, and eagerly await their first born child and first welfare check.

If any character in film history has truly achieved the “American dream,” it is indubitably loser’s loser and deadbeat's deadbeat Walter Dinsmore, a man that has the opportunity to indulge in every dream job, including actor, rock star, and money-birther, yet ultimately achieves nothing aside from siring an inbred child and living on the taxpayer’s dime; two uniquely unnatural dreams that only could be realized in the land of the free and home of the brave. What is great about Chafed Elbows is that director Robert Downey, Sr.'s celluloid ‘seething cynicism as celluloid sketch-comedy’ knows no bounds, as he manages to target virtually every segment of the American (and most specifically, early-1960s NYC) populous, including (but certainly not limited too), boorish blue collar workers, pedantic college professors, hypocritical feminists, clannish Orthodox Jews, East Asian megalomaniacs, avant-garde filmmakers, psychoanalysts, monetary motivated practioners of medicine, soulless newscasters, egocentric Guidos, belligerent bull dykes, and various other groups/individuals ripe for mockery. Not unsurprisingly, Downey even goes so far as mocking the film itself in a scene where a character states “The only thing about these low-budget films is that all the action is behind the camera” and Walter Dinsmore (standing in for Downey) replies “Don’t worry about it. This whole thing will blow over in less than an hour” (Chafed Elbows has a 58 min running time) Undoubtedly, at least as far as I am concerned, Downey has a naughty knack for making hatred and cultural pessimism a pleasantly palatable thing and it is with Chafed Elbows that he was able to realize this to the fullest, even if the film is essentially a sardonic slideshow of human sideshows directed by a man that clearly only knew the most fundamental aspects of filmmaking techniques. Once described in a 1967 interview as behing “like a Marx brothers movie that has Lenny Bruce language in it,” Chafed Elbows is pure and unadulterated Hebrew humor (and I mean that in the most 'positive' sense, relatively speaking of course) minus the terminal taint of Hollywood philistinism and cultural Marxist hysteria.  If you ever wonder what must be going on in someone's mind to be a Sigmund Freud or a Wilhelm Reich but without having to dig through all the novelty intellectualism and anti-European sentiment, Chafed Elbows—a sort of healthy median between the crappy commie caricatures of George Grosz and the early films of Harmony Korine—makes for a singularly hilarious view at the Oedipal Hebraic psyche and all of its creepily corrupted corners and crevices.

-Ty E

Bent

 

Once long ago, the now deceased singer of a fascistically iconoclastic yet decidedly degenerate grindcore band with the positively poetic name “Anal Cunt” wrote a song entitled “Hogging Up the Holocaust,” which features the rather insightful lyrics regarding the greedy victim of God's chosenites, “Other people were fucked with too…But all you care about is you…Faggots, gypsies, others too.” Of course, the faggots, as well as their ostensibly female counterparts (who the Nazis did not typically harass), are now undoubtedly only second to the Hebrews in getting a piece of the persecution pie because, in terms of being a political collective with a discernible agenda like their Judaic allies, they are pushy, politically subversive, relative wealthy, love to whine, and hold victimhood as the height of moral superiority, thus it was only natural that they would begin telling their “holocaust story” in celluloid form. In terms of homo holocaust flicks, probably none is ‘greater’ than Bent (1997) directed by gay British theatre director Sean Mathias and based on the blockbuster 1979 play of the same name written by gay Jewish American screenwriter/playwright Martin Sherman, who also acted as one of the film’s producers. Technically a British-Japanese co-production, Bent features an Anglicized National Socialist Germany featuring popular (and rampantly heterosexual) English actor Clive Owen in the lead role as a bourgeois bugger who takes on the false identity of a Jew and wears an ugly yellow star of David in a concentration camp rather than admit to being a homo and wearing a pink triangle as a wide-receiver on the fluff team. Following the tradition of Italian maestro Luchino Visconti in unabashedly portraying Nazis in an absurdly eroticized and fetishized fashion and featuring erratically exaggerated anti-reality melodrama that would even make Fassbinder’s stomach churn in disgust, Bent is surely a penetrating, if not oftentimes plodding, piece of sadomasochistic ‘persecution porn’ that seems more interested in enticing the viewer with salacious sex scenes and bodacious bloody violence than promoting the apparently 'good fight' of the poofer plight. Indeed, it terms of resembling reality and authentic human emotion, Bent is about as historically authoritative in sensitively portraying the horrors of the Second World War as Spielberg’s Schindler’s list (1993) and even Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) and The Berlin Affair (1985), but all the more fetishistic, suavely stylized, and entertainment based. Essentially beginning on the Night of the Long Knives aka Röhm-Putsch—Hitler’s treacherous purge of the Nazi Strasserite ‘left-wingers’ and largely homosexual led Sturmabteilung (SA) that took place between June 30 and July 2, 1934—Bent focuses on a sexually promiscuous and supremely narcissistic sodomite from a wealthy family who finds himself a marked man after having an affair with a blond beast of a brownshirt. Featuring a cameo from Jude Law as a one-eyed SA brownshirt with nonsensical SS insignia, SS men hanging out in and brutally raping and torturing prisoners in a relatively empty cattle car headed to Dachau concentration camp, old rock queen Mick Jagger in radically repulsive hagsploitation-esque drag, and a conspicuously British cast that look like they could be the cast of a Derek Jarman film, Bent, not unlike the TV movie Christopher and His Kind (2011) based on British author Christopher Isherwood’s 1976 memoir of the same name, is a relentlessly culturally and historically retarded and superlatively sordid tale of Teuton buggery after the purge of the big bad butt-darting brownshirts. 

 Max (Clive Owen) is a dandy degenerate gay boi and black sheep from a wealthy German family who, judging by his rather promiscuous sexual behavior, is itching for a poz-cock as he spends a good portion of his time hanging out in Weimar Berlin cabarets and engaging in sodomite orgies. Despite the glaring jealousy of his four-eyed and effortlessly effete dancer boyfriend Rudy Glass (Brian Webber II), Max does not think twice about starting a solely sexual relationship with a handsome blond Nazi brownshirt named Wolfgang Ganz (German-Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but little does he realize that it is the eve of the Night of the Long Knives and his new piece of Aryan Übermensch meat is also the boyfriend of Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst, an ex-bouncer of a gay bar who will be one of Hitler’s homo victims. Naturally, since Ganz is Ernst’s boy toy, the SS comes for him and slits his throat right in front of Max and Rudy at their apartment, so the two make a run for it and go into hiding. Not long after, Max and Rudy discover that their old drag queen friend Greta (Mick Jagger), the star of their favorite gay cabaret is an opportunistic tranny traitor, who sold out Wolfgang Ganz to the SS and put his own friends in jeopardy after being bribed. Greta, who was awarded handsomely by the SS for his treachery and has burned his entire drag queen/cabaret wardrobe in a rather ritualistic fashion as a way to say sayonara to his past life as Berlin's most glamorous queen, gives Max the sound advice to accept the fact that in Nazi Germany, “Queer is out. Queer is dead” and that they should pretend to live their lives as heterosexuals as he has already started to as demonstrated by his new butch suit and name. Uncle Freddie (Ian McKellen) has given him new papers to hide his identity, but the naïve nephew refuses to leave his bitchy boyfriend Rudy behind. In a rather anti-völkisch action scene filmed in a seemingly haunted and phantasmagorical German forest that seems like a horror-like take on the mystical Germanic woods of the National Socialist propaganda flick Ewiger Wald (1936) aka Enchanted Forest, Max and Rudy are caught by the SS and sent on a train headed to Dachau as homosexual criminals. Rather absurdly, Rudy is forced to break his own glasses and is routinely tortured by an SS officer who also sports glasses because the naughty Nazi assumes that his lack of vision is a sure sign that he is a member of the intelligentsia. Max, who keeps telling himself like a scared child that “it isn’t happening” as he sees his boyfriend routinely beaten to a bloody pulp in the cattle car, is forced by the sadistic SS officer to also beat Rudy, who is inevitably killed by being thrown out of the moving train. A traitor to his lover, Max also becomes a traitor to his homosexuality after he is forced by the SS to copulate with the corpse of a 13-year-old girl. For his daring display of heterosexual necrophilia/pedophilia, as well as bribing the SS men, Max is rewarded with the supreme honor of wearing the yellow star of David label as opposed to the dreaded pink triangle because, apparently, being a poof is worse than being a Jew at Dachau concentration camp. 

 Not long after arriving at Dachau, Max begins to fall in love with a less than handsome homo named Horst (Canadian actor Lothaire Bluteau), a mentally tough fluff who wears the pink triangle proudly as an activist of gay Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld who was naturally sent to the concentration camp due to his political commitment to cocksucking. Not unsurprisingly, Horst initially finds Max to be a repulsive character for being a self-loathing sodomite who pretends to be a Jew to save his own skin, but things change over time as the wealthy conman proves his commitment to his new comrade. A homo hustler of the supremely shameless sort, Max bribes the SS men and manages to get Horst a relatively easy job with him pointlessly carrying rocks from one side of a room to another, work designed to break the will and spirit of the prisoners. In a patently ridiculous scene of the quasi-supernatural sort, Max and Horst manage to reach mutual orgasms while standing side-to-side without even looking or touching one another nor themselves, but merely by talking dirty to one another and using their wanton will to power. Eventually, Max and Horst develop debilitating colds, which mark them as dead men as far as the concentration camp guards are concerned. To get medicine for Horst and himself, Max gives a blowjob to an SS officer. After finding out how Max was able to procure the meds, Horst refuses to take the drugs and the same SS officer who his boy toy blew begins to taunt him. Realizing he is about to die, Horst charges the SS man and is shot dead on the spot by a guard, but not before scratching the statuesque face of his seemingly gay Aryan persecutor. With his lover dead, Max finally gets enough courage to accept death like a Third Reich era German soldier would and he commits suicide by grabbing on an electronic fence in a morbidly melodramatic fashion worthy of Elie Wiesel's diluted literary fantasies. 

 A shamelessly sensationalized and even exploitative tale of cocksucker concentration camp blues, Bent expresses the sentimentalized message that it is better to die an open faggot than it is to live as a closet colon-choker. Undoubtedly, considering the sometimes surreal and theatrically stylized setting of the film, as well as the somnambulist-like movement of the characters, Bent resembles more of a Nancy boy nightmare than any sort of serious depiction of kraut fairies being fag-bashed by Hitler’s heroes. Indeed, although penned and produced by a Jewish mensch, I would assume that most Jews (Shabbos Goys like Roger Ebert included!) would consider Bent to be a piece of holocaust heresy that uses kitschy and high-camp tableaux, as well as unwaveringly decadent eroticism and gratuitous ultra-violence to enthrall the viewer in what amounts to loony celluloid libertinism with a sorry shade of senseless sentimentalism, thus overpowering its rather weak and meek pro-homo message. In fact, Bent goes so far as to not only turn sodomite stormtroopers into super sensual sex objects, but also sadomasochistic SS men, one of which literally grabs the testicles of a prisoner in an S&M fashion and another one, arguably the most archetypically handsome and Nordic man in the film, receives head from a man he assumes to be a Jew. In what amounts to a rather insightful scene, protagonist Max remarks to his homo homeboy Horst regarding the sexual persuasion of a Svengali-like SS man, “Of course, he could be queer, but you don’t like to think about that. You don’t want them to be queer,” thus discrediting the absurd idea that all queers are as morally supreme as Hollywood and MTV would lead one to believe. Although probably inadvertent on the director’s part, Bent even hints that if the Sturmabteilung brownshirts, most of whom are portrayed in a reasonably positive light in the film, ruled Nazi Germany, the nation would be a virtual homo heaven on earth. Either way, Bent, like Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), is just one of many reasons why Nazis will live on to be the most potent and fetishized objects of artsy camp cinema. Unfortunately, kraut fag Führer Michael Kühnen, a man inspired by the struggle of slayed gay SA leader Ernst Röhm, died of AIDS before he could see what would have probably been his favorite film, Bent, a virtual romance flick for sodomite Strasserites.

-Ty E

Spring Breakers

 When I discovered that degenerate Judaic auteur and nihilistic neo-vaudevillian Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) was going to direct a relatively mainstream film featuring Hollywood heartthrob James Franco as a wacked out wigger, not to mention whoring out a couple of Disney mini divas, I was admittedly quite excited, especially considering his seemingly artistically contrived, subsequent post-junky features Mister Lonely (2007) and Trash Humpers (2009) were monumental disappointments of the first order that made me more than question the once ambitious and seemingly unstoppable filmmaker’s artistic integrity. As someone who still regards his directorial debut Gummo (1997) as a delightfully debauched kosher carny comedy masterpiece of the intricately goy-hating sort, I did not want to accept that Korine is a one-hit arthouse wonder who put everything he had to give in a single film at the mere age of 24, but it seems that after a decade lost to heroin/methadone addiction and his recent marriage and becoming a father, Korine lost the sort of untamable energy that made him one of the most loved and hated, as well as idiosyncratic and iconoclastic, independent filmmakers of his generation. Unfortunately, it seems that the time he spent directing music videos for hipster bands like Sonic Youth, Cat Power and Will Oldham had a radically negative effect on Korine’s once anarchistic vaudevillian directing style as his latest feature Spring Breakers—a pseudo-farcical look at a cutesy quartet of girls from the culturally and racially mongrelized iPod generation going on the nihilistic and hedonistic ‘rite of passage’ known as spring break—seems like one ceaselessly ugly, fiercely filler-filled, and aesthetically vacant music video banally depicting the sheer and utter worthlessness of a decidedly decadent and wanton yet worthless generation of Americans whose sole aspiration in life is pleasure for pleasure’s sake at any cost and nothing more. If Spring Breakers is another one of Korine’s celluloid pranks/jokes, the joke is certainly not funny anymore as his latest work is, at best, a sub-softcore flick for pathetic men (Korine included, as his much younger wife is one of the stars of the film) who swoon after pedomorphic teenage girls of the totally untalented and racially ambiguous sort and, at worst, a sign that the director has finally grownup and turned into the typical Hollywood Hebrew, who revoltingly slobbers over and cinematically defiles youthful shiksa chicks, especially of the ostensibly innocent and virginal sort, while also pushing all the most deleterious untermensch pseudo-kultur ingredients that reflect the racial, cultural, moral, and spiritual nightmare that is the seemingly apocalyptic, post-European United States of America. Like a vaguely heterosexual post-Finding Forrester (2000) Gus van Sant flick as directed by the ungodly hate child of Paris Hilton, Eminem, Hype Williams, and Howard Stern, Spring Breakers is a banally bacchanalian depiction of the post-counter-culture American dream where a fucked foursome of morally devoid and equally naïve bourgeois gals get a lesson from a loveable white trash wigger in what it takes to rise to the top of the sociopathic and cannibalistic American plutocracy in a film so stupid, artificial, and feckless in its storyline that it could have only been directed by an American Jew of the post-holocaust generation. Described by countless film reviewers as a so called “fever dream,” Spring Breakers features virtually every reason why America is the most infectious metaphysical disease the world has ever known as a putrid piece of phantasmagorical and kaleidoscopic celluloid anti-art, insipid nihilism of the needless and heedless sort, and cutthroat kosher capitalism.  If you ever wonder why medieval-minded towelheads from the Middle East have described America as “Great Satan,” look no further than kosher Korine's totally tedious exercise in girls-gone-recklessly-wanton materialistic excess and pseudo-ecstasy, Spring Breakers.

 The whorishly named Faith (Selena Gomez), Brit (Ashley Benson), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), and Cotty (Rachel Korine) are four childhood friends and rather naïve college students from a small town who hope to “find themselves” via spring break vacation, but the problem is that they do not have the cash to fund their fun. Out of all the girls, Faith, the only one to not have trashy and unnaturally dyed hair, is also the only with any sort of moral compass due to her semi-serious dedication to Christianity, but her friends are a bunch of soulless sinners who take massive bong hits to forget their complete and utter lack of intrinsic values and spirituality. To fund their trip to the sunny and superlatively superficial sunny beaches of Florida, Brit and Candy nonsensically rob a family fast food restaurant with hammers and squirt guns and Cotty drives the getaway girl, thus figuratively making their pact with the devil. Although baby girl-like Faith is disturbed by her criminally-inclined friends’ senseless, if not monetarily fruitful, actions, she agrees to join them on their all-expenses paid spring break vacation in the dirty Southeast. Upon arriving on the sunny beaches of Florida, the frisky foursome immediately begins engaging in degenerate Dionysian spring break partying, which includes flashing and waving their twats and tits in front of random strangers’ faces, partying hard with fetus-like wimpy wiggers snorting lines of coke off flat-chested breasts, taking countless gigantic bong hits and shot gunning cans of beer, and various other forms of ecstasy-striving forms of momentary mental derangement. Unfortunately, the cops show up at one of these parties and busts the four girls, as well as two identical twin wigger gangstas known as the “ATL Twins” (played by quasi-incestuous degenerate skaters Sidney and Thurman Sewell, who also go by the name the ATL twins in real-life and are known to share the same girlfriend) for narcotic possession. Luckily, a superlatively loathsome yet paradoxically likeable white trash named fellow “Alien” (James Franco), the gang leader of the negrophiliac criminal outfit that the ATL twins belong to, takes an instant liking to the girls and bails them out of jail and hopes to make them special femme fatale-like members of his culturally retarded and proudly illiterate crew of spring-breaker-robbing and extraterrestrial dope and arms dealing philistine thugs with patently putrid pomo style. Not unsurprisingly, the only religious member of the curiously cutesy quartet, Faith decides to stick with her faith and bails on her friends and takes a bus home after being surrounded by Alien’s mostly Negroid, gun-stroking, four-wheeler riding, and drug-addled friends, but Brit, Candy, and Cotty take an instant liking to the out-of-this-world gang leader and become honorary half-naked members of his colorful crime ring. A true blue entrepreneur who achieved the American dream by going from rags to riches as the only white boy from an all-black neighborhood and the only member of his family to live to adulthood, Alien is proud to admit while showing the girls around his schlock-ridden and terribly tasteless mansion that: “This is the fuckin' American dream. This is my fuckin' dream, y'all! All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit! I got... I got SHORTS! Every fuckin' color. I got designer T-shirts! I got gold bullets. Motherfuckin' VAM-pires. I got Scarface. On repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y'all! I got Escape!” and, indeed, he lives a sort of Negro-fried postmodern take on the anti-hero of De Palma’s overrated 1983 mob flick, but that all changes when reality smacks him in his ugly gold-plated grill. 

 Although his former protégé and best friend, Alien now has a major beef with a seemingly half-braindead and beefy black gang leader Archie (real-life criminal rapper Gucci Mane), who feels the jaded white boy is steppin’ on his turf and proving to be bad for his black, black market business. In an essentially failed drive-by shooting meant to take out Alien and his girls, archenemy Archie’s associate wounds Cotty in the arm, so she comes to the realization that things are no longer fun and are getting dangerous, so her spring break has reached its dramatic conclusion and she decides to go back home, thus proving that Brit and Candy—the two girls who committed the seemingly insane robbery to get the money to go to spring break in the first place—are the two alpha-chicks among their clique. To show their solidarity with his capitalist cause, Brit and Candy engage in a threesome with Alien in his luxurious pool in a ritualistic manner and not long after they head to Archie’s neon-colored mansion estate for one final showdown for taking over the criminal underground of St. Petersburg. Rather absurdly, Alien is shot dead with a single bullet to the head before he barely makes it onto his negro nemesis’ flamboyant rainbow-colored property, but his two girls Brit and Candy, sporting their signature pink ski masks and bikinis, come in unloading a storm of bullets and killing everyone (no less than ten people) on the big-time crook’s property. While leaving Archie's crib, the two lurid and seemingly loony lethal lasses plant a kiss on the head of Alien’s cadaver, thus thanking their ghetto guru for schooling them in cannibalistic cutthroat capitalism that they will ultimately utilize after graduating from college and entering the corporate world. 

 While Faith proved to be too weak and meek to fully embrace her spring break and Cotty eventually quit when things got dangerous, ballsy yet brainless bitches Brit and Candy proved to be all-American business women and postmodern feminists as the only two of the foursome that could juggle business and pleasure, the two materialistic ingredients post-racial/post-cultural ‘successful’ Americans aspire for. Neither truly an indictment nor parody of Generation Y, Spring Breakers is essentially a cynical joke on the part of auteur Harmony Korine at the expense of a valueless generation of Americans—the very same zeitgeist of youth his film was marketed towards—that his racial kinsmen in heeb Hollywood, MTV, and the mainstream spiritually defiled with their anti-kultur bogus materialism, xenophilia, and unwaveringly glorification of crime and corruption. Of course, considering the film ending up grossing $31.7 million at the worldwide box office against a mere $5 million production budget, Korine is undoubtedly laughing all the way to the bank and has finally established himself as a mainstream Hollywood director to be reckoned with. Not unsurprisingly, Korine went so far as to even whore out his young wife and the mother of his daughter, Rachel Korine, who on top of flashing her little ass and tits, making out with anonymous buff bros, and acting like a tyrannical teen tramp, sings “you're never gonna get this pussy” while grabbing her naughty bits in a terribly tasteless scene in Spring Breakers that proves the director has finally whored himself out to Tinseltown and has taken his spouse and a couple ex-Disney dames along for the pseudo-risqué ride. Featuring James Franco giving a sensitive wiggerfied performance of Britney Spears’ “Everytime” on his angelically white poolside piano, soulless tracks by Skrillex and Nicki Minaj, the most emaciated holocaust survivor-esque looking white niggers in the history of filmmaking, a pseudo-hot hodgepodge of the stupidest scantily clad college kids in American history, and an apocalyptic candy-colored anti-aesthetic that once again proves that Korine is a magnet and worshipper of all that is ugly and stupid in this world like his kin in Hollywood as a people who derive almost spiritual satisfaction from destroying beauty and bringing physical and metaphysical disfigurement to the world, Spring Breakers is vivid proof that the director no longer has jokes/pranks worthy of telling, but has settled for recycling the same old Semitic gags from the Israelite bargain bin. The fact that Korine recently announced he planned to release a remix of Spring Breakers proves all the more that it is nothing more than one big and overly expensive music video of the supremely soulless, racially mongrelized, and culturally retarded sort that does more than enough to conform that what a certain German nationalist party from the early twentieth century said about the director’s people.  Apparently, Korine was partially inspired to write the script for Spring Breakers to makeup for the fact that he missed out on such MTV-addled degeneracy when he was attempting to become a professional skateboarder during his early adult years and it certainly shows as a work that seems like an ADHD-ridden middle-life crisis piece directed by a curious kosher crackhead with an unhealthy fixation for pedomorphic ladies lacking in curves.  Still, I wish Korine well on his unintentional quest to help speed up the decline of Judaic America with his future films and I have a feeling that Spring Breakers is just a small taste of the cultural decay and social malignancy that he will bring to Hollywood in uncoming years.

-Ty E

Looking for Mr. Goodbar

As the onscreen and offscreen lover of both neurotic heeb Woody Allen and Italian stallion Al Pacino, Nordic actress Diane Keaton has certainly shown a penchant for quasi-miscegenation and seemingly mismatched romances with short, swarthy off-white fellows, but none of her real-life nor fiction love affairs compared to the ones featured in the absurdly underrated flick Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) directed by subversive Jewish-American auteur Richard Brooks (Elmer Gantry, In Cold Blood). Based on the 1975 novel of the same name written by Jewess novelist Judith Rossner about the real-life brutal murder of Roseann Quinn, a 28-year-old New York City schoolteacher who led a deleterious double life as a pill-popping bar whore whose wild and wanton behavior led to her grizzly and premature death, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a dark yet sometimes humorous melodrama about an idealistic lapsed Catholic Irish-American girl who, when not teaching deaf Negro children as a brainwashed McLiberal, is screwing random Guidos and middle-aged Judaic fellows she picks up at the bar. A rare (and arguably, unintentional) depiction of the decidedly disastrous effects the so-called “new left” and counter-culture movements had on white Americans that was written and directed from the perspective of members of the chosen amongst god’s chosen, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is, not unsurprisingly, virtually unknown today and has yet to be released on dvd despite featuring such big name actors and actresses like Diane Keaton and Richard Gere. Belonging in good company with other such great culturally pessimistic celluloid works from the 1970s like Joe (1970) directed by John G. Avildsen, Death Wish (1974) directed by Michael Winner, Taxi Driver (1976) directed by Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979), Looking for Mr. Goodbar follows the moral degeneration of an Irish-American chick who, after falling in love with and being defiled by her married Jewish college professor who subsequently dumps her goy gal ass, turns into an alcohol-addled, pill-popping whore who screws sleazy philistine fellows when she is not wasting her life being a bleeding heart liberal who devotes her time to teaching deaf multicultural kids, despite essentially loathing her own family. An exceedingly enthralling, if not oftentimes infuriating, depiction of a naïve girl who essentially has a hole burnt into her soul after too much loony leftist brainwashing in college and being used as a cheap thrill by a Hebraic college professor who sees her nothing more as a sexy yet stupid Shiksa, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is like a well meaning after-school special on the ills of Marcusian madness and the ethno-masochistic and xenophiliac do-gooder white slaves and self-sacrificing nihilists it creates. 

 The psychologically crippling self-loathing of Irish-American Theresa Dunn (Diane Keaton) started at a young age when she developed scoliosis as a young girl and was forced to wear a rather unflattering full-body cast to help straighten her back. The daughter of a hardworking traditional Irish Catholic man (Richard Kiley) who is repelled and angered by his baby girl’s would-be-rebellious leftist politics she was dogmatically indoctrinated with in college, Theresa certainly does not suffer from an Electra complex as she falls in love with a sleazy and self-satisfied Jewish college professor named Martin (Alan Feinstein), who does not think twice about dumping the dumb girl after the school year ends. Naturally, Theresa develops a rather pessimistic and self-loathing outlook on life after the overly intellectual Israelite breaks up with her, but being a victim of a “New Left” education (symbolically taught to her by the Semitic man who literally and figuratively screwed her over), she believes she must fulfill the most holy and righteous of causes by turning poor black deaf children into intellectual heavyweights, even though she treats most of her own biological family members with disdain. An unconsciously suicidal ice queen with no real personal plans for the future aside from slaving away to the public system as a selfless servant of ghetto blacks who see her as a condescending and self-righteous nuisance, Theresa makes sure she will never have a family of her own by nonsensically having a hysterectomy, telling the doctor she wants “no kids.” 

Eventually, Theresa begins living a second life and becomes a regular fixture at local bars and clubs and starts a purely sexual relationship with a dumb wop named Tony (Richard Gere), who enjoys doing pushups while high on speed while wearing nothing more than a leather-fag-esque jockstrap. Theresa also begins dating a nice but nerdy welfare case worker named James (William Atherton), the sort of man she would have married and had kids with were she not so positively sexually depraved and nihilistic. While James falls in love with Theresa and will do anything for her, the McBitch just cannot get enough of rough sex with retarded Guido Tony, who is at least intelligent enough to arrive at the insight, “I don’t believe it…teacher of little kids cruising crummy bars…Jesus Christ, no wonder the country is so screwed up.” Naturally, Tony eventually smacks Theresa around and eventually gets her arrested for drug possession, thus leading to the inevitable end of the debauched pseudo-romantic relationship. While James does everything he can to declare his love and respect for Theresa, the Irish lass cannot help but give away her ass to degenerates at her favorite bar. One night, Theresa picks the wrong guy and it ultimately results in her being brutally raped and slashed to death. Looking to get screwed one more time before midnight on New Year's Eve, Theresa hooks up with a deranged ex-con and closet-case homo named named Gary (Tom Berenger), who has just had a faggy lover’s spat with his gay lover. When Gary fails to “rise to the occasion” after going back to the Irish-American gal’s apartment, he goes on a seemingly pointless rant about how “in my neighborhood, if you didn’t fight you were a fruit…In prison, if you didn’t fight, you spread ass.” Not unsurprisingly, Theresa attempts to throw psychopathic gay boi Gary out of her apartment, but it is only at this point that he is finally able to penetrate her, first with a knife and then with his penis. In the end, Theresa “lived by the dick and died by the dick,” as a result of turning her back on the important lessons she learned being brought up in the Catholic Church. 

 Aside from featuring the cinematic exquisiteness of LeVar Burton of Reading Rainbow fame playing a ghetto thug who literally busts Richard Gere’s balls, Looking for Mr. Goodbar also makes for a striking and stern indictment of the self-absorbed narcissism and nihilistic hedonism of the baby boomer generation, the first generation brought up on television and arguably the most spoiled generation in all of human history. Hopelessly brainwashed by the quasi-Marxist Judaic swill she was infected with in college and defiled by an arrogant and pretentious Jewish professor she clearly had deep yet delusional respect for as opposed to meeting a man of her own racial and cultural persuasion who would have treated her right and she could have started a family with, Theresa, like many people of her generation and subsequent generations of European Americans, is essentially in a state of perennial childhood as a girl who never grew up and accepted responsibility, but instead drowned her misery in cheap beer and untermensch semen. Aside from the fact it features Fellini-esque dream-sequences and avant-garde montages, a film like Looking for Mr. Goodbar could have never been made in contemporary Hollywood due to its no bullshit critique of degenerate counter-culture values and liberal education and I would not be surprised if this film has yet to be released on DVD for these very reasons. The fact that the film was penned and directed by Jews makes the motives behind Looking for Mr. Goodbar seem all the more dubious as a sort of “Annie Hall from Hell” and degenerate Philip Roth inspired melodrama with a tinge of Jud Süß (1940) swooning over a beauteous goy Shiksa who is slowly but surely spiritually, emotionally, and physically defiled by alien politics and men, both of which stunt her ability to grow into a nice Irish Catholic girl and instead lead to her demise as a victim of a self-loathing sodomite, her virtual Jungian animus, who she would have never met had she not developed a propensity for picking up perverts in seedy bars after giving up on real romantic relationships in general. Stating such pseudo-empowerment feminist vomit like, “I’m my own girl. I belong to me,” Theresa ultimately proves her idiotic independence by setting herself up on a slippery slope of soulless sex and mind-numbing drugs, with her last act of intercourse symbolically climaxing in her death. While Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a film that has been known to be quite irksome for leftist and feminist types, it certainly confirms the feminist mantra/bumper sticker, “Well behaved women rarely make history.”

-Ty E