Made in Britain

What a great biting irony of history that Great Britain—the fallen empire that declared war against Uncle Adolf’s Aryan utopia after it invaded Poland in 1939 in what would prove to be a distinctly deleterious war that would ultimately lead to the country's decline as a global power—would ultimately be responsible for producing the most degenerate neo-Nazis in the world, skinheads, who seemed to personify everything the real German National Socialist where against as aesthetically repugnant untermenschen who, with their shaved heads and tattoos, more or less resembled concentration camp survivors on steroids. Instead of curtained haircuts, super suave uniforms, and Richard Wagner, the skinheads had shaved heads, the ultimate proletarian ‘uniform’ as partly inspired by Jamaican Negros, and third rate punk rock bands like Skrewdriver. Of course, the skinhead movement was probably the most catastrophic thing to happen to National Socialism since Stalingrad and in the social realist ‘television play’ Tales Out of School: Made in Britain aka Made in Britain (1982) directed by British left-wing filmmaker Alan Clarke (Scum, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire) one gets a small idea of the sort of social misfits that the degenerate skinhead lifestyle appeals to. Starring Tim Roth—a fellow who, despite his big nose and German Jewish surname (notably, the actor’s card-carrying communist father changed the family name from Smith to Roth in the 1940s, “partly through solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, partly because the English were far from welcome in some of the countries to which his job took him”), is not actually a member of the Hebraic tribe—in his debut film role as a scrawny yet tough and primitively intelligent skinhead punk who unwittingly proves the failure of the establishment to deal with the working-class and society in general after causing all sorts of havoc around his town after being placed in an exceedingly ineffective detention unit run by weak bureaucrats, Clarke’s film depicts the archetypical neo-Nazi skinhead as a impulsive nihilist, small-time criminal, and born failure who wages a one-man war in vain against a bloated bureaucratic system that does not even know he exists. Notably, the skinhead antihero is not so much of a National Socialist as he is a disgruntled antisocial teenage tosser that resents the fact that Pakis and other wogs who do not even speak English have successful businesses in his neighborhood while he and most people his age cannot even find an entry-level job. Featuring music by the Scottish punk band The Exploited instead of shitty neo-Nazi punks like Skrewdriver, the cynically titled Made in Britain paints a particularly pathetic portrait of Thatcher era England as an abject failure of a multicultural sewer full of pissed off proles and a disillusioned yet ass-kissing middle-class.  One of the first British films of its kind shot by cinematographer Chris Menges (Ken Loach’s Kes, Stephen Frears’ Bloody Kids) on a Steadicam, Clarke’s film is like a gritty punk take on kitchen sink realism, albeit without any of the juvenile posturing and wankery that one might expect had the film been directed by an actual punk. 

 Trevor (Tim Roth) is a 16-year-old skinhead with a Manson-esque swastika tattooed to his forehead that gets his kicks breaking into cars and going on joy rides, getting high huffing glue, and throwing bricks through store windows, especially at businesses owned by wogs.  As punishment for throwing a brick through a lounge window and hitting its Paki owner Mr. Shahnawaz in the head, Trevor is sent to a place called Hooper Street Residential Assessment Center for six weeks where he will wait to receive his punishment for another charge in regard to theft of cassettes from a department store called Harrods. When the judge at his sentencing reads off his list of previous offenses and remarks, “It’s a long, depressing list. Are you not ashamed of yourself?,” the perennially grinning Trevor gives an affirmative “no.”  Unfortunately for Trevor, his personal social worker Harry Parker (Eric Richard)—the only adult that the antihero seems to respect in any sort of meaningful way—is going on vacation to the Greek island of Corfu, thus leaving the skinhead to feel abandoned and even more prone to criminality. When Trevor is brought to the assessment center to be ‘assessed,’ the social worker in charge, Peter Clive (Bill Stewart), acts discernibly annoyed by the fact that he has to deal with yet another juvenile delinquent, thus reflecting the general attitude of those that run the juvenile justice system.  Somewhat humorously but certainly not surprisingly, Trevor’s roommate is a dopey negro named Errol Duprey (Terry Richards) who remarks in a somewhat shocked fashion upon seeing his new roommate, “You got a swastika on your head,” but does not seem particularly bothered about the white boy’s antipathy towards wogs like himself.  Under the pretense of seeking employment at a work center, Trevor leaves the assessment center and takes Errol to steal a car and huff Evo-Stik glue. While Errol is nodding out in the car after inhaling too much sticky stuff, Trevor goes inside the work center where he ultimately decides to throw a brick through the front window after becoming annoyed with the two-minute-long job search, especially after talking to the intolerably bitchy and passive-aggressive secretary who works there.  From there, Trevor takes Errol to an abandoned indoor pool where he has stored a set of keys and tools for stealing cars and subsequently allows the wog to pick out the next car that they will steal together, though he kicks him out before going on a joy ride. 

 When Trevor gets back to the assessment center, Peter sees him getting out of the stolen car and demands that he take it back.  After facing resistance from the skinhead, pansy pushover Peter ultimately makes a compromise with Trevor that he just get rid of the car instead of taking it back to where he stole it from and when the social worker later asks him what he did with the car, he sarcastically replies, “I gave it to Oxfam. They’re using it to ship wogs back to Zululand.”  When Trevor is denied lunch after he arrives back at the assessment center too late, he becomes ballistic, begins kicking in doors, and assaults the cook (Jim Dunk) whilst screaming “I want my lunch!” like a tyrannical toddler, so Peter and two other men subdue him and lock him in a room where he tediously walks around in circles while practically foaming at the mouth like a rabid animal. After some time has passed, Peter, a care worker named Barry Giller (Sean Chapman), and the assessment center superintendent (Geoffrey Hutchings) come into the room and the latter explains to Trevor how he is being given a “second chance,” but he also lets the skinhead know that his future will probably be one big vicious circle revolving around thieving, prison, and the dole. After the Superintendent concludes his self-righteous spiel and leaves, Trevor gets in an argument with Barry and mocks his liberal mainstream mentality, stating, “I’m more British than you, fuck face! You hate the blacks as much as I do, only you don’t admit it. You hate the blacks more than I do, ‘cause they frighten you. That’s why you lock them up. You lock up anything that frightens you.”  Barry concludes regarding Trevor that “he’s a sod. He’s psychotic” and recommends to Peter that he be transferred to a “secure unit” so that someone else can deal with him. In an attempt to “keep the peace” with Trevor, Peter reluctantly agrees to allow him to drive in a banger racing event, but he also makes the following threat, “If you let me down, I’ll kill you. With help, that is. I’ll get the chef and some of the biggest lads I can find. And Wankers United will bring you down here and, together, collectively, we’ll duff you up.” 

 Needless to say, Trevor is not in the least bit happy when the engine of his car conks out after crashing into another car during the banger racing event and even though Peter offers to help him join a racing team so that he won’t have to bother stealing cars anymore, the self-destructive skinhead makes no reply to his offer and instead decides to steal the hopelessly naive social worker’s keys. Upon getting back to the assessment center, Trevor wakes up Errol and brings him to the file room of the building which he opens with the stolen keys. While reading through Errol’s files, Trevor is delighted to learn that his colored comrade was busted for “racist remarks.” Trevor decides to make his own racist remark by calling Errol a “fuckin’ baboon” when he asks him if he can read and he replies “not very well, no.” To show their disgust with the intrusive system that keeps less than flattering tabs on them, Trevor ceremoniously pisses on his files while Errol defecates on his and the two subsequently steal the assessment center van and head to the city where they throw bricks through the windows of homes in a Paki neighborhood.  Of course, Trevor specifically targets the home of Mr. Shahnawaz who he blames for getting him sent to the assessment center. Rather humorously, nig-nog Errol yells things like “You Paki bastards!” and “black nigger bastards” while throwing rocks throw the windows, thus revealing that Trevor's influence has rubbed off on him. After getting done chucking rocks, Trevor decides to crash the stolen van into some squad cars in front of a police station and poor Errol is knocked unconscious in the process. Trevor flees the car and intentionally leaves his colored comrade behind, thus Errol is soon busted by a cop who hatefully states “you little black bastard” and takes him to jail. After admiring a middleclass mannequin family in a store window and attacking a car in a tunnel while yelling “wanker,” Trevor heads to his social worker pal Harry Parker’s apartment to turn himself in and ultimately burn his final bridge. 

 Naturally, Harry, who is about to go on vacation, is pissed when Trevor shows up at his door, so he calls him a “nerd” and immediately begins berating him.  While in Harry’s apartment, it is obvious that Trevor is jealous of Harry’s children and middleclass lifestyle, which the skinhead has intentionally invaded in a pathetic attempt to intimidate the social worker.  After Trevor arrogantly brags about all of the crimes he has committed over the past day or so, Harry tells him that he is an “asshole” whose “not worth a piss,” thus confirming that the antihero has finally burnt his last bridge and has lost the one person that actually seemed to care about him.  Ultimately, Trevor is sent to a real prison for the first time in his miserable life.  While in a holding cell, Trevor annoys the guards by incessantly pressing the buzzer in his cell room, so two guards eventually come in and the shorter of the two, a rather authoritarian fellow named A.C. Anson (Christopher Fulford), informs the skinhead, after he complains that he is juvenile, that he cannot be kept at an adult prison and that he is not going back to the assessment center but a borstal and when he gets out, he will be sent to real prison where he promises, “we can screw you, and we will. We got ya now.” When Anson threatens to fingerprint Trevor after he gets out of the borstal so that he can connect him to all the car thefts in the local area, the skinhead sarcastically replies, “sounds great!,” thus causing the now fully enraged prison guard to smack him on the kneecap with a baton. While looking discernibly broken and defeated for the first time in the film after taking a brutal blow to the knee, Anson mocks Trevor by remarking “You think you're fucking hard” and then proceeds to tell him that he needs to learn to respect authority and the law like everyone else in society. After Anson and his pal leave, Trevor regains his iconic deranged grin, as if to demonstrate that physical violence has only strengthened his criminality and his unwavering desire to wage war against society. 

 Despite being a small and scrawny pedomorphic weakling (he apparently was 21 at the time of shooting yet looks barely old enough to be a teenager), Tim Roth did a fairly believable job in Made in Britain portraying a self-destructively nihilistic skinhead of the totally toxic sort who, unlike many juvenile delinquents, quite consciously decides to make all the worst decisions in whatever situation he may happen to be in. Of course, Roth’s performance is just a testament to his acting talents, with the actor being the complete opposite of his character as reflected in his remark during the audio commentary track on the Blue Underground DVD release of the film regarding his own personal interactions with skinheads, “I unfortunately went to school with a few of those…and got beaten up by many skinheads during the punk time…horrendous, horrendous people.”  Apparently, Roth's communist father also cried after seeing his son in the film after it debuted on British television, as the sight of his beloved son portraying a violent neo-Nazi thug was just too much for the old philo-Semitic commie to take.  Ironically, after starring in Made in Britain, Roth had skinheads chasing him down the street for his autograph instead of kicking his ass like they apparently did when he was in high school.  In the Blue Underground audio commentary, Roth also explains how the film was apparently a hit with both left-wingers and right-wingers, though some in the latter group were naturally disappointed with how the film portrayed them.

 Despite director Alan Clarke’s obvious intention to not romanticize skinheads or their dead-end lifestyle, antihero Trevor is easily one of the most strangely likeable, if not most likeable, skinheads of cinema history, as a character who, despite his overall vulgar nature, is more tolerable and empathetic than most of the rest of the characters in the film, which certainly seems to reflect the director’s disgust with Britain's social and legal system. Indeed, while Edward Norton’s character in American History X (1998) seems too phony and contrived and Ryan Gosling’s character in The Believer (2001) is just too plain schizophrenically Jewish, Trevor of Made in Britain seems to completely embody the sort of troubled individual of reasonable intelligence and wit who makes the seemingly insane decision to have a swastika tattooed to his forehead. Of course, aside from a murdered wog here and a burned down Paki-owned restaurant there, the skinheads ultimately proved to be not much of a threat to Britain in the long run, especially when compared to the trouble that Pakis and various other sorts of brown-skinned Muslims have brought to their adopted nation, which includes everything from brutal terrorist attacks involving the decapitation of white British soldiers to white sex slavery rings comprised of barely-teenage British girls, not to mention the total ghettoization of all major British cities, especially London, which now has a non-white majority population. Of course, Alan Clarke probably would have never directed a film about white sex slavery or the new color of urban decay as it would have been a conflict of interests for him, but it would certainly be interesting to see a filmmaker direct such works in the gritty in-your-face Clarkeian style just as Gus Van Sant somewhat did with his 2003 Columbine High School Massacre Elephant (which borrowed its name from the 1989 Clarke short of the same name). Apparently, Made in Britain screenwriter David Leland wrote a screenplay for a sequel about Trevor as a middle-aged man, but no one was interested in producing the film and, of course, Clarke died a very long time ago.  Call me crazy, but I would not be surprised if Trevor ended up turning into a dope dealer with mulatto kids as spawned from a relationship he had with a Jamaican hooker.  After all, the skinheads of yesteryear are the chavs and wiggers of today, with the antihero of Made in Britain growing up at a time before Britain had been completely ‘culturally enriched’ by the members of its ex-colonies.

-Ty E

Joanna (1968)

We certainly live in ugly times where ugliness is worshiped and lauded in the most patently of absurd ways as reflected in everything from TV commercials to sporting events. Indeed, in no other era was it considered normal and even ‘romantic’ to see two obese ogre-like bull-dykes with shaved heads getting married, for mainstream music to be comprised of largely sub-literate race-baiting neo-minstrel ‘singers’ who do not even know how to read a single note of music and ramble on about they or their ‘bitch's’ putrid STD-ridden snatches, and for movies to be polluted by physically and mentally grotesque lard ass Heebs that constantly tell the same two or three scat jokes while swooning over some half-braindead shiksa with pseudo-blonde hair, yet I almost think our contemporary times pale in comparison to the complete and utter abject aesthetic vulgarity of the so-called ‘Swinging Sixties,’ especially in regard to ‘Swinging London’ as depicted in the Brit cult flick Joanna (1968) directed by Czech-Saxon actor and pop singer turned filmmaker Michael Sarne. Probably best known for banging busty blonde bombshell Brigitte Bardot and directing the X-rated box-office bomb Myra Breckinridge (1970) featuring Raquel Welch as a tranny, Sarne started his distinctly uneven directing career with the 31-minute ‘anti-travelogue’ Road to Saint Tropez (1966) starring kraut queer Udo Kier as a gigolo-like boy toy who escorts a horny old MILF around a scenic resort spot in what would be the German character actor’s debut film role. With Joanna, Sarne would prove that he was just as good at whoring out dumb blonde females as he was at charming kraut cocksuckers like Herr Kier. Indeed, the star of the film, South African model Geneviève Waïte, was apparently declared persona non grata in her own then-still-white-ruled nation after appearing in Sarne's first feature-length film due to bringing shame to the fatherland by portraying a spoiled rich bitch that has a love affair with a criminally-inclined woman-beating negro from Sierra Leone. Originally supposed to feature Sarne’s somewhat more beautiful and surely more tolerable then-girlfriend Gabriella Licudi (Herostratus, The Last Safari) as the eponymous lead, Joanna is notable for featuring arguably the single most annoying female protagonist in all of cinema history, which is certainly no surprise when one considers that lead actress Waïte has just as high and squeaky a voice as her similarly loud and lecherous daughter Bijou Phillips (James Toback’s Black and White, Larry Clark’s Bully). Sold by Sarne to the studios as a female Alfie (1966) and based on a real-life nymphomaniac/kleptomaniac that the director personally buggered, the film is a sort of satire of Swinging London where an anti-bourgeois Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) is royally fucked by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) in a work that reminds the viewer why a good portion of the degeneracy that exists today in the Occident is a direct result of the counterculture era. I certainly dare someone to watch Joanna and not come to the conclusion that the two-headed monster of women’s liberation and sexual revolution were not two of the most decidedly deleterious plagues to hit the West during the post-WWII era. 

 17-year-old Joanna Sorrin (Geneviève Waïte in her first and thankfully and not surprisingly last lead film role) is the superlatively spoiled daughter of a loving magistrate and she hates her well meaning father despite all the pointless expensive gifts he buys her, so she moves from her home in the country to Swinging London where she can better put to use her twin talents of thievery and lechery under the preposterous pretense of becoming an artist. As soon as the viewer sees Joanna jubilantly jump off her train like a Tourette-addled toddler on a sugar rush upon landing in London, you know she is going to be an insufferable little bratty bitch who makes the titular pixie frog princess woman-child of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001) seem semi-tolerable by comparison. Joanna has such a repugnant character that she even annoys her grandmother, who throws her out of her apartment not long after her arrival after getting tired of her whoring, thievery, and incessant rudeness. When grandmother Sorrin asks Joanna about how her father is doing, she sickly fantasizes about daddy dearest as a corpse with his throat slit. Like so many trust fund brats, Joanna is an aspiring artist and she is taking lessons from a blond Nordic teacher named Hendrik ‘Cas’ Casson (German actor Christian Doermer of Georg Tressler’s Teenage Wolfpack (1956) aka Die Halbstarken and Herbert Vesely’s The Bread of Those Early Years (1962) aka Das Brot der frühen Jahre) who, like virtually all the men the protagonist meets, she inevitably screws. Despite proclaiming, “I just loathe married men. My father’s married,” Joanne’s first boy toy in London is a married man with a fancy sportscar named Bruce (Anthony Ainley of The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971)), who she soon catches with a more beautiful and sophisticated blonde babe named Angela (Jane Bradbury), so she ditches him for ‘artiste’ Cas, who is also banging a negress with a similarly nauseating high-pitched voice named Beryl (Glenna Forster-Jones).  To his credit, Cas is well aware that he is taking advantage of poor young dumb sluts and seems somewhat guilty about it as reflected by his remark, “I get terribly sad sometimes. These girls, they sleep around, going nowhere, meaning nothing. One gets the feeling that all women have achieved by emancipation is the privilege of being laid,” but he has a sort of ‘feminine essence’ about him being an ‘artiste’ and all, thus he provides Joanna with emotional support, even after the two stop being fuck buddies. 

 Probably seeing her as no real threat since she is black and despite the fact that they both end up sharing the same man, Joanna sparks up a friendship with Beryl, whose black buck big brother Gordon French (Calvin Lockhart of John Landis’ Coming to America (1988) and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990)) is a successful yet criminally-inclined long-legged mack daddy that will ultimately become the protagonist’s main love interest after her various rendezvouses with wimpy white boys gets old.  After becoming somewhat irked when Cas confesses that Beryl is better in bed because “she talks less” and that he screws 3-4 different girls a week, Joanna hooks up with a broke ass bro of the hopelessly banal sort named Dominic Endersley (played by the director’s brother David Scheuer of Stuart Cooper’s Overlord (1975)), but that does not last long since she cannot keep her panties on and soon finds herself in bed with a married man whose wife and kids catch them in the act.  Luckily, unlike most men in the film, Dominic has enough sense to give Joanna a good slap across the face upon learning of her sexual indiscretions.  Meanwhile, through Beryl, Joanna meets an exceedingly effete terminally ill aristocrat named Lord Peter Sanderson (Donald Sutherland), who buggers the black birdd and becomes a father figure of sorts to the protagonist, even taking her and her friends on a luxurious vacation to Morocco where he teaches them how to eat couscous and teaches them about the finer things in life. To show her appreciation for his truly aristocratic generosity, Joanna steals Lord Sanderson a compass and a box of cigars. Ultimately, Lord Sanderson reveals to no one else but Joanna that he only has about a year to live because he hopes that it will help her find some meaning in her “uncommitted” and “pointless” life. When Lord Sanderson sponsors an art gallery showing for Cas, whose style is like Jean Cocteau meets counterculture crud, the art teacher ultimately becomes rich and famous. Unfortunately, Lord Sanderson croaks soon after the gallery showing. 

 When Lord Sanderson eventually dies, Joanna, who has already done her fair share of whoring in a very short period of time, decides she will attempt to start a new life by becoming monogamous with a relatively successful man, but unfortunately she picks a negro with a violent temper and mob connections. Indeed, Joanna hooks up with Beryl’s brother Gordon, who she absurdly declares her love to by stating, “I wish you were white…because I think I’m falling in love with you […] you frighten me just a bit. Does that make sense? I think you’re going to die or something…And I don’t want to lose you.” Joanna might be a major moron who does not know her ass from her elbow, but her premonitions regarding her love affair with Gordon are more or less spot on. Gordon owns a night club as a result of Lord Sanderson's patronage, but since the wealthy aristocrat is dead, he now has to receive his funding from more unsavory sources. Needless to say, Joanna immediately moves into Gordon’s flat and the two have fun by engaging in miscegenation and shouting “nigger” at scared old white people. Unfortunately, Gordon has various criminal connections and when a nosy neighbor reports him to the police after seeing him beat up a gangster in their apartment, they receive trouble from the cops, who do not take kindly to seeing an uppity opulent negro with a pretty white girl. When a young white cop comes by the apartment to ask Gordon about the brawl, Gordon rudely refuses to cooperate and even slaps the officer in the face, thus resulting in an entire police squad arriving at the flat to question him about his less than civil behavior. Gordon resents cops, especially white ones, and demands that they address him as “sir” since, as he states in a ridiculously contrived fashion, he has been living and paying taxes in London for eight years. Luckily, since Joanna’s father is a respected Magistrate, Gordon manages to get off without any charges even though he assaulted an officer. Of course, Gordon’s belligerent criminal behavior does not end there. 

 After Gordon is brutally beaten by about half a dozen mob goons, he self-righteously declares, “I’ll get those bastards. I’ll get them one-by-one” and plots his senseless revenge while not considering how it may affect him and his girlfriend's future. Of course, Gordon does not keep his savagery isolated to middle-aged male thugs, as he also beats Joanna for hanging out with Cas, even though he knows they did not have sex. When Joanna asks Gordon why he beat her despite the fact that he knew very well that she did share carnal knowledge with Cas, he replies, “’Cause I am a black bastard and I know what’s best for you,” which ultimately turns the warped white girl on. Shortly after learning that she is pregnant with a mongrel baby, Joanna is approached by two police detectives who say they want to speak with Gordon regarding a murder. Indeed, Gordon got his revenge and crushed one of the crackers who beat him up and now he is a wanted fugitive. After managing to evade the police, Joanna meets with Gordon at a secluded beach house where he sweet talks her like a pimp and tells her things that he knows she wants to hear like how he and she will start a family together in New York City, ultimately reassuring her with the bullshit Snoop Dogg-esque words, “It’s all gonna happen baby, it’s all gonna happen.” Of course, Gordon is soon nabbed by the cops while hiding out in one of Lord Sanderson’s estates in Dublin, Ireland and he is ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison for murder. In the end, Joanna takes a train back to her family home in the country just as she once arrived in a scene that cuts back to an ironic flashback of her father warning her, “Don’t overdo it in London.” To add insult to injury in terms of aesthetic vulgarity, Joanna concludes with a musical number of all the characters in the entire film singing the title song “Joanna” written by American poet turned singer-songwriter Rod McKuen. 

 Notably, in a 2010 interview featured with the BFI Flipside release of Joanna, director Michael Sarne reveals that, no surprisingly, the real-life girl that he used to ‘date’ that inspired the film met a much darker end than the fictional one in the film. Sarne also reveals in the interview that he intended for the film to be much more ironical than it turned out and that he was hardly attempting to glorify Swinging London with the work, though he hoped the film would act as a sort of celluloid time-capsule of its particular era.  Notably, Sarne’s film seems to have inspired a sort of ugly anti-utopian trend of now-obscenely-outmoded Swinging Sixties films about nubile blonde beauties eagerly hooking up with black bucks, as demonstrated by the somewhat bizarre avant-garde black power short Death May Be Your Santa Claus (1969) directed by British Black Panther member Frankie Dymon Jr. (who also opted to use a white South African model for the female lead), as well as the agitprop avant-garde collage piece nEROSubianco (1968) aka Attraction aka The Artful Penetration of Barbara aka Black on White directed by Italian auteur Tinto Brass during his early pre-pornography years. For better or worse, out of all the movies about madly miscegenating 1960s London, Joanna certainly features the most eclectically and eccentrically damning depiction regarding the nihilistic excesses of its ostensibly zany zeitgeist. Unquestionably, for me, watching Sarne’s film was like the cinematic equivalent of suffering the flu or some other illness, as I felt like I was trapped in some sort of disorienting metaphysical hell that totally transcended the physical realm where all my senses were bombarded with a sort of impenetrable feeling of spiritual vulgarity and grotesquery that felt like it would never end, at least until the film had finally concluded. Despite whatever point(s) Sarne might have been trying to make in the film in regard to race relations and the counterculture movement, the only thing I could come away with from the film was that Geneviève Waïte is the most annoying woman in the world and that I feel absolutely blessed that I have only dated mostly reserved and intelligent girls who don’t treat their vaginas like toilets or garbage dumps. Indeed, hidden somewhere in its over-conscious Fellini and French New Wave homage sequences, barf-worthy blue-eyed ballads, pathological fourth wall breaking, and soulless sex and skin scenes is some sort of poignant message about the price of sexual liberation, but it seems to have taken a backseat to the director’s curious obsession with the pseudo-cutesy lead, who one might describe as the ultimate anti-diva and braindead debutante. 

-Ty E

Altered States

With my recent reexamination of the director's darkly humorously heretical yet strangely spiritual alpha-nunsploitation masterpiece The Devils (1971), I decided it was about time that I re-watch English auteur Ken Russell’s most ‘Hollywood’ effort Altered States (1980), which is notable for being both the filmmaker’s first American film, as well his first and only excursion into science fiction. Indeed, a sort of metaphysical and psyche-philosophical horror-sci-fi-cum-romance hybrid that one might describe as Russell’s own equivalent to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1972), the film hardly seems like it could be a typical personal auteur piece for the director upon looking at its troubled production history. Based on the only novel ever written by three-time Academy Award winning screenwriter/playwright Paddy Chayefsky (The Hospital, Network) that was inspired by neuroscientist/psychonaut/philosopher John C. Lilly’s sensory deprivation research conducted in isolation tanks while under the influence of counterculture psychoactive favorites like ketamine and LSD, Altered States was originally slated to be directed by kosher counterculture auteur Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man) and according to director Russell he was Warner Brothers’ 27th choice for director after the previous 26 directors had declined, thus making the work what might be described as the most personalized and idiosyncratic for-hire ‘hack’ piece ever made, as a phantasmagoric Faustian trip that is like a chaotic marriage between a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, the then-trendy prehistoric man flicks of the 1980s like Jean-Jacques Annaud's La guerre du feu (1981) aka Quest for Fire, and the more psychedelic-oriented films of the American avant-garde like Jack Smith’s Normal Love (1963), Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964), Ira Cohen's The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968), James Broughton’s Dreamwood (1971), and Herr Anger's oeuvre. Of course, considering writer Chayevsky, who was apparently barred from the film set after trying to have Russell fired, later had his name taken off of the film and special effects man John Dykstra resigned from his duties, I think it quite obvious who was in control of Altered States, which with its allegorical religious imagery (snakes and all!) and daunting depiction of a deleteriously fanatical madman of the quasi-megalomaniacal sort whose obsessiveness ultimately gets him in serious trouble, is a pure and unadulterated Russellian work to the core, even if it lacks the auteur's characteristic campiness. While critics have described Altered States as everything from a modernist reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to an aberrant adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I think source writer Chayefsky was most accurate when he described the work in an interview as a love story. Indeed, despite its hysterical hodgepodge of largely horrific hallucinatory imagery of the apocalyptic sorts, the film is ultimately the tale of a fanatical scientist with intimacy problems and the woman that is rather reluctantly hopelessly in love with him and will stand by her mensch no matter what, even when he transforms himself into a rather revolting mass of primordial matter and almost kills her, himself, and their friends in the process. A rare special-effects-heavy sci-fi flick that does not seem like it was specially tailored for impotent, virginal, and/or asexual fanboys who prefer seeing imaginary exotic alien planets to real-life pussies, Altered States may bring up quasi-existentialist questions about the origin of mankind, the Book of Revelations, pain and suffering, and the Faustian nature of Occidental man, but these themes are merely more or less window dressings for an idiosyncratic romance featuring the fairer sex at its most strangely empathetic and respectable, which is surely no small accomplishment. 

 Edward Jessup (William Hurt in his very first feature film role) is a Harvard University professor of abnormal psychology that is so obsessed with his work and research in such a deleterious way that he has no personal life and seems to suffer from Asperger syndrome, but luckily he is a tall, blond, handsome, and charming chap who doesn’t seem to have a hard time getting hot tail like most socially retarded academic types do. In between practicing sensory deprivation in a floatation tank with the help of his dorky Jewish pal Arthur Rosenberg (played by real-life Hebraic nerd Bob Balaban) where he hallucinates like a “son of a bitch” and experiences “a lot of religious allegory, mostly out of Revelation,” Edward meets a hot and equally Nordic-looking 24-year-old physical anthropology student working on her doctrinal thesis named Emily (Blair Brown) and they screw the same day that they meet each other, though he suffers hallucinations of  “God. Jesus, crucifixions” during mid-coitus that make it fairly clear that the two will have a somewhat troubled relationship. As Edward explains to Emily after they fuck for the first time, he started hallucinating images of Christ when he was a young child even though his parents were pretentious atheistic scientists and it was only when his father succumbed to a “protracted and painful death from cancer” when he was 16 that he started to stop hallucinating and believing in Christ. From there, Ed warns Emily “what kind of nut” she is getting mixed up with if she decides to keep dating him and she replies that he is a “fascinating bastard,” thus demonstrating her early devotion to him. Since most of the research into alternate states of consciousness is basically “radical-hip stuff, drug-culture apologias,” Edward hopes to prove via his floatation tank trips that “our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking states” and he is more than willing to destroy his mind and body in the process.  When Edward suffers nefarious visions of his father on his death bed and Baphomet on the cross, as well as images of people suffering in hell and various other apocalyptic visions, even that still does not stop him from continuing his dubious studies. Meanwhile, even though she thinks he is an “unmitigated madman” and complains to him, “Even sex is a mystical experience for you. You carry on like a flagellant, which can be very nice…but I sometimes wonder if it’s me that’s being made love to. I feel like I’m being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God,” Emily makes a somewhat strange marriage proposal to Edward, which he accepts, but not before rambling on about administering dimethyltryptamine aka DMT to a schizophrenic girl, thus reflecting his pathological preoccupation with his work.  Indeed, at best, Emily is of secondary concern to Edward, as nothing gets in between him and his research.

 While Edward and Emily ultimately get married in a seemingly immaculate romantic union that produces two cute little girls (one of the Jessup girls is played by Drew Barrymore in her debut film role) , the Asperger-ridden scientist cannot handle devoting himself to a family and thus asks his wife for a divorce even though she is still deeply in love with him. When his friend Arthur finds out about the divorce and states to his friend, “My God, if anybody has it made, you have” in reference to the fact that he has a totally beautiful wife that is completely devoted to him despite his glaring peculiarities, Edward, who rarely expresses any emotions aside from a disturbing mania for his scientific research, coldly replies that if he doesn’t get a divorce, he will “go out of my fucking mind.” As Edward adds while sounding like some drop-out hippie moron who has devoured too much Timothy Leary twaddle, he is determined to search for his “true self” and he is “going to find that fucker,” even if it means hanging out in caves and getting stoned with fossilized third world savages.  Indeed, Edward plans to “find that fucker” by tripping on psychedelic mushrooms with a tribe of ancient Mexican Indians. Before tripping with the old Injuns, the head Indian chief cuts Edward’s palm and mixes his blood with the psychedelic soup. Ultimately, Edward has such a nightmarish trip with the Indians that he hallucinates seeing a large lizard morphing into Emily, among other unsettling visions that might further scare him away from his wife. After the somewhat ominous ordeal, Edward learns that he brutally slaughtered a large lizard while he was tripping, but he is in denial about his actions, complaining to his mestizo translator/tour guide, “And this whole hideous business is just a joke…the Indians have played on me to make the gringo look like a fool!” Despite his intolerable gringo arrogance, the Indians give Edward a tincture from psychedelic mushrooms to take back with him to the United States so that he can trip while in his isolation tank, thereupon heightening the entire experience and potentially throwing him into a truly altered state of consciousness. Around the same time, Edward begins to face major criticism from his comrade Mason Parrish (Charles Haid), who begins secretly telling his estranged wife Emily about his eccentric and increasingly dangerous experiments. When one of Edward’s isolation tank trips results in him being covered in blood and growing a sack inside his throat, the half-deranged scientist concludes, “I obviously regressed to some quasi-simian creature,” but perennial skeptic Mason does not believe it for a second and concludes that his strange friend is losing his sanity and has contracted cancer due to all the drugs he has taken. 

 With his friend Mason adamantly refusing to help him with anymore of his experiments, Edward makes the mistake of going on one of his isolation tank trips all by himself without supervision and in the process he suffers from a form of biological devolution where he degenerates into a hairy feral monkey man. Upon morphing into a true untermensch, Edward almost beats a security guard to death, fights a pack of wild dogs, and eventually ends up in a zoo where he savagely hunts and devours a deer. The next day, a cop arrests Edward after finding him naked near the dead deer that he devoured the previous night. Naturally, Edward is bailed out of prison by his beloved wife Emily and instead of being fearful as a result of his experiences, he describes transforming into a simian as being the “most supremely satisfying night of my life,” which is certainly not the sort of thing a normal man says to his wife. Somewhat preposterously, Edward convinces Mason, Arthur, and his wife Emily to accompany him to his next isolation tank trip where he ultimately transforms into a grotesque globule of primordial matter that somewhat resembles Belial from Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case trilogy. Demonstrating her undying devotion to Edward, Emily risks her life to bring back her husband by pulling him out of a foggy abyss and ultimately preventing him from being lost in some sort of alternate reality as an unconscious and non-physical pile of primordial puke. While Edward rests after almost being lost in oblivion, Emily begins suffering a hysterical episode and complains to Mason, “Of all the goddamn men in this world, why do I have to love this one? I can’t get him out of me. Do you know how many men I tried to fall in love with this past year? But it won’t work no matter who I’m in bed with, I have to imagine it’s him or nothing happens…No matter who I’m eating with or walking with...there’s always this pain because it isn’t him. I’m possessed by him.” The next day, Edward begins to suffer a spontaneous attack of temporary partial devolution and when Emily grabs his hand to help him, she also begins to degenerate into some sort of glowing primordial being of the hardly human sort. Proving ‘love conquers all,’ Edward manages to use mind over matter and saves his wife and himself from transforming into worthless genetic garbage. Upon transforming back into normal humans, Edward says to his beloved for the first time ever, “I love you, Emily,” thus reflecting the fact he has finally accepted his humanity and is determined to devote himself to the one who loves him the most, or as he states before his last transformation, “The final truth of all things is that there is no final truth. Truth is what’s transitory. It’s human life that is real.”  Notably, Altered States ultimately concludes in the best way any aesthetically pleasing film can with a shot of a rather ample sized female derriere.

 While not exactly an immaculate work by any means, Altered States is easily one of the most strikingly romantic sci-fi flicks I have ever seen, which I guess does not say much considering the autistic nature of the genre and the sort of sexless and socially defective people it attracts, but knowing that it is a Ken Russell flick, one can certainly expect that it is the sort of work that features a singular rebel’s love affair with no vomit-inducing cliches. As a fanatical man and filmmaker who was more than a little bit obsessed with his own work and who was married no less than four times during the course of his life, Russell certainly had reason to be attracted to Paddy Chayefsky’s source novel. Indeed, I certainly cannot think of one single girlfriend I ever had that was not jealous of my interests or artistic projects, as if it was another woman competing with them. Of course, Altered States protagonist Edward’s wife Emily is like the ultimate dream woman, as she even stays devoted to him after he divorces her so that he can spend all his time figuratively jerking off in an isolation tank while tripping on Injun shrooms. Like a Salvador Dalí landscape painting come to life as molested by Russell’s curious obsession with Catholic religious iconography, the film attempts to visually depict the living hell of being, especially if you’re a deracinated and emotionally retarded intellectual like the protagonist, in a fashion that romanticizes yet ultimately rejects the obsession with retrogression. Indeed, in his obsession with coming into contact with his primitive side, Edward is no different from the many ethno-masochistic bourgeois whites that listen to rap music and absurdly parrot the sub-literate slang and repugnant mannerisms of poor negroes in a pathetic attempt to feel more in tune with nature and the visceral side of life, as if it will make them feel any more soulless. As for self-loathing intellectuals who take psychedelic drugs in a desperate attempt to have some semblance of human emotion and spirituality, I personally know of one fellow who took one too many trips and was ultimately institutionalized after declaring he was some sort of messiah and attempted to murder his girlfriend with his bare hands. Like the protagonist of Altered States, this certain individual had a complete and utter incapacity for love and empathy, but unlike Edward, he was also apparently more or less sexually impotent, which seems to be common among scientifically-minded individuals. While I could never see the sort of protagonist featured in Russell’s film ever reaching an epiphany about the gift of his humanity, let alone the ability to reciprocate love, even after he is turned into primordial waste, Altered States was an enthralling enough cinematic experience for me to the point where I was able to temporarily suspend my disbelief and consider that human touch and emotional affection might be able to destroy the Asperger-like traits in certain individuals. 

-Ty E