That Obscure Object of Desire

Out of all the great cinematic auteur filmmakers, Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel (Los Olvidados, Belle de Jour)—a virtual one-man-cinematic-revolution—was probably the greatest in terms of sheer longevity, eclecticism, and artistic consistency as a succulently scathingly sardonic morcillismo humorist with an intrinsic flair for the intoxicatingly (yet elegantly) iconoclastic, sensually absurd, playfully pessimistic, and merrily misanthropic. Indeed, whether it be the uniquely unforgettable eye-slicing and juxtaposition of surreal sexual sadism with Richard Wagner's “Liebestod” from his opera Tristan und Isolde in his debut Un Chien Andalou (1929), proto-Aguirre, the Wrath of God action-adventure jungle allegory of Death in the Garden (1956), preternatural depictions of race-hate in the unconventionally humanistic southern gothic The Young One (1960), simultaneously psychotic yet erotic religious allegory of Simon of the Desert (1965), or the plot-free aesthetic anarchy of his perfect penultimate film The Phantom of Liberty (1974), Buñuel—with his big brown bull-sized balls—always produced something strikingly singular that defied classification, expectation, and impressed his contemporaries, including respected figures ranging from a Hemingway-esque Hollywood maverick like John Huston to a melancholic Nordic master like Ingmar Bergman. As far as I am concerned, only Robert Bresson is comparable in terms of being able to manage to churn out subversive modernist masterpieces in the late-period of his career when he was technically already an old fart. In that sense, it was probably not a simple cope when Buñuel once declared, “Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.” In fact, I would argue that Buñuel’s swansong That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) aka Cet obscur objet du désir—a film that is truly like no other aside from sharing some aesthetic/thematic similarities with other Buñuel flicks—is unequivocally one of his greatest masterpieces, which is somewhat ironic when one considers it also one of his most linear and, in turn, accessible. Admittedly, unlike with a lot of Buñuel’s films, I found myself especially enthralled for somewhat personal reasons upon a recent re-watching of this singular cinematic masterpiece for the first in well over a decade, thus confirming to me that the auteur’s films only improve for viewers with age and experience. 

 Undoubtedly, watching a man put pussy on a pedestal is a putrid thing to witness and surely something that revolts both men and women alike, albeit for somewhat different reasons. While both sexes are appalled by the emasculation that comes with such groveling behavior, women are especially disgusted by it as it spells desperation and—arguably, worst of all—a sure-thing as ladies like a chase and are bored by a pathetic bastard that is ready to commit to the figurative monogamal ball and chain. In That Obscure Object of Desire, the viewer watches with oftentimes Fremdscham-inducing delight as an old mustached frog of the rather wealthy sort as portrayed by Spanish leading man Fernando Rey disposes of all self-respect and becomes an emotional wreck over a hot twat Spanish flamenco dancer as portrayed by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina). Concluding in a virtually apocalyptic manner with the violent deaths of both the lovesick hero and his fiercely frigid would-be-beloved in a film set in a world plagued by an increasingly-tedious terrorist insurgency, the film also manages to express Buñuel’s lifelong obsession with linking sex and death, or as the auteur once expressed in his memoir My Last Sigh (1982), “And although I’m not sure why, I also have always felt a secret but constant link between the sexual act and death. I’ve tried to translate this inexplicable feeling into images, as in UN CHIEN ANDALOU when the man caresses the woman’s bare breasts as his face slowly changes into a death mask.” War oftentimes results in death and, as they say, love is a battlefield, but Buñuel does not depict the pangs of lovesickness in a fruity fashion as That Obscure Object of Desire presents it as the most obscenely odious of irrational obsessions; or, the most pleasantly painful path to senseless self-destruction. 

 By mere coincidence, I recently watched That Obscure Object of Desire back-to-back with Marcel L'Herbier’s singularly striking silent avant-garde feature L'Inhumaine (1924) aka The Inhuman Woman—a film that somehow manages to reconcile Expressionism with Art Deco—and could not help but notice the stark contrast between handling the central theme of a lovelorn gent going to great extremes to warm the cold cunt of a seemingly impenetrable ice queen. In L'Herbier’s aesthetic hypnotic flick, a young playboy-cum-Dr. Frankenstein not only fakes his own death to ‘impress’ his rather evil Gorgon-like opera singer love interest, but he also manages to use his pioneering techno-wizardry to bring her back from the dead in what is ultimately a rather unconventionally happy ending that almost (seemingly unintentionally) manages to mock the absurdity that comes with romantic pursuit. Not surprisingly considering the auteur behind it, That Obscure Object of Desire is nowhere near as classically romantic or heart-wrenching in terms of its depiction of the perils of all-consuming love as it is a virtual autist-garde anti-love story where the viewer begins to eventually feel contempt for both the frog protagonist and Spanish cocktease that has completely contaminated his psyche. Indeed, quite unlike L'Inhumaine, the film not only does not provide any sort of solace in the end, sort of like a ruined orgasm during self-immolation, but it is rarely, if ever, romantic, as if one of Buñuel's main objectives with the film was to completely demystify the majesty of love and romantic conquest altogether.  Undoubtedly, if that was his goal, he certainly succeeded as That Obscure Object of Desire is a virtual contra Casablanca (1942) and brazenly brilliant because of it.

 Notably, That Obscure Object of Desire is based on French lesbo-lover Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le pantin (1898) aka The Woman and the Puppet, which was previously adapted no less than four times, with Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman (1935) starring Marlene Dietrich undoubtedly being the greatest and best known of these earlier adaptations (filmmakers Reginald Barker, Jacques de Baroncelli, and Julien Duvivier also adapted the novel). Of course, it goes without saying that Buñuel’s version is easily the most subversive and anarchistic of these adaptations.  It should also be noted that the auteur apparently previously made a failed attempt at tackling the source novel, henceforth revealing his strong commitment to the project. When asked by actor and screenwriter Tomás Pérez Turrent what interested him about Louÿs’s novel, Buñuel replied, “The idea of a man who wants to sleep with a woman and never manages to. In the book, of course, the man ends up sleeping with her. Then she tells him, ‘If you want to see me sleep with another man, come to my house tomorrow.’ The next day he went, and there she was with another man. But I was more interested in the story of an obsession that can never become a reality.” Ultimately, the film is a morbidly merry tale of male masochism and the female sadism the propels it, or as Buñuel explained in regard to what motivates the (anti)heroine’s heinous behavior, “A sadistic feeling. She takes advantage of him, she knows it’s in her best interest to keep him happy, but at the same time she hates him to death, she enjoys tormenting him.” In that sense, the film is a reminder as to why it is never a good idea to let a woman know how you really feel about them, lest you become a pathetic pawn in a grotesque gynocentric game where no gash will be smashed and all hope will be lost. Better yet, the film is also a reminder to all men that, in regard to women, one must: “abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” 

 Obsessing over any one woman, especially those that you’re not even sure you can obtain, is never good and oftentimes a glaring sign of beta-boy bitch behavior yet, as someone that finds very few women attractive, including those that are technically physically attractive (yet have the personalities of gnats), I have personally fallen into this pathetic trap. For example, I somewhat recently started a ‘romance’ with a girl that, despite all the obvious red flags and qualities that I would usually consider major ‘deal-breakers,’ I could not help but be inordinately infatuated with her to the point where I felt as in control as a negro on PCP in a titty bar. Needless to say, as my intellect informed me it would probably be from the very beginning, this erotic excursion was rather brief and cost much more (especially emotionally) than it was ultimately worth, but such is the tragedy of a tyrannical testicular trance. Still, I can thankfully say that, as someone that does not physically resemble a sort of decrepit old Super Mario like the film's protagonist, I have never been in a position that was as sexless or patently pathetic as that of the rich old fart in That Obscure Object of Desire who dedicates his life and tons of his money and energy to attempting to defile a dumb dame that repays him with nothing but sadism, indifference, and heartbreak. Personally, I wanted to slap the shit out of the protagonist, as his superlatively self-deluded campaign for cream of the crop cooch is absolutely sickening to watch in a film that deserves credit for featuring the most irksome depiction of a dude thinking with his dick in cinema history in what is ultimately one frivolous farce of a dis-romance. In short, That Obscure Object of Desire is the renegade anti-romantic-comedy par excellence and a prophetic expression of avant-garde anti-thottery. 

 That Obscure Object of Desire ‘hero’ Mathieu (Fernando Rey)—a wealthy middle-aged widow that is hardly handsome yet seems to think his wealth makes him worthy of a real-life Venus de Milo—demonstrates a special sort of hatred for a young woman at the beginning of the film when he sadistically dumps a bucket of water over her head as she attempts to board the same train he is taking from Seville, Spain to Paris, France. The woman in question is the protagonist's young (ex)girlfriend Conchita (as portrayed by both Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina) and the viewer soon discovers how Mathieu got to hate her so much in a series of flashbacks that are told to a small group of fellow travelers, including a midget psychology professor, in the same train car as him after they bear witness to his water bucket belligerence. As one can except from an old fart attempting to cultivate a clearly one-sided romance with a much younger woman that is way out of his league, Mathieu is at least partly responsible for putting himself in the pathetic position he is in as he was dumb enough to almost immediately offer virtually the entire world to Conchita soon after they initially met at a house where she was working as a friend’s maid.  Of course, Mathieu probably also felt it would not be too hard for a rich prick like himself to obtain a mere maid, but he could not have been more wrong.

Undoubtedly, Conchita’s behavior almost immediately raises a number of glaring red flags, including her patently preposterous claim that she is an 18-year-old virgin despite looking at least decade older and her naturally slutty behavior (among other things, she's a stripper with a loyal following of male friends). Additionally, aside from the fact that her father committed suicide under seemingly dubious circumstances, Conchita’s mother (María Asquerino), who Mathieu almost immediately begins financially supporting, is a somewhat nutty old bitch who, owing to being once-rich, refuses to work, bragging, “I’d rather kiss church steps then sweep doorsteps. My daughter helps me but I don’t want her to work. Because of the bad influences.” Notably, Conchita is similarly worthless as a woman as revealed by the fact that she proudly boasts after admitting she refuses to give her dubious virginity to Mathieu, “I don’t like sewing. I can’t cook.” On top of everything else, Conchita is friends with a group of handsome young twink criminals that rob Mathieu, yet the protagonist seems completely blind to the profound dubiousness of this. In short, aside from being bloated with all sort of personal and emotional baggage, Conchita has nothing to offer aside from her statuesque beauty yet Mathieu just cannot get over her despite not being able to get a little carnal taste of said beauty in a sad scenario that is akin to being friend-zoned by a Maenad. 

 As the film progresses, Mathieu’s patience is increasingly tested as he chases after Conchita while trying in vain to penetrate her main vein as a terrorist insurgency brings chaos to Europe in a backdrop that somewhat parallels the protagonist’s seemingly perennial failed (anti)romance. Although Conchita eventually allows Mathieu to touch her titties, she adamantly refuses to give up her much prized virginity as if it is the only thing she really has to offer (it is!). Eventually, Mathieu gets so fed up with Conchita’s callous cockteasing that he attempts to penetrate her by force, but ultimately fails after spending no less than 15 minutes attempting to takeoff a canvas corset that acts as a virtual chastity belt. On top of everything else, Conchita derives a sort of sadistic glee by cuckolding Mathieu, including sneaking young handsome males into her room, dancing naked for Japanese tourists, and even forcing the protagonist to watch as she fucks a male friend (though she later tries to play off such behavior as a ‘joke’ and claims the male friend was actually a homosexual). Needless to say, Mathieu completely loses it after being so ruthlessly cucked and beats her to a bloody pulp, thus inspiring the heroine to questionably proclaim as blood drips from her face, “Now I know you love me. Mateo, I’m still a virgin.” In the end, after telling his entire savagely sordid story to his rather attentive traveling companions, Mathieu still cannot help but desire Conchita despite the fact she pays him back by dumping a bucket of water onto his head. Luckily, the rancid romance comes to a swift explosive end when the two are killed in a terrorist explosion at a mall shortly after mutually admiring a seamstress that is symbolically mending a bloody nightgown. 

 Although a virtual cipher of a character, the titular twat of That Obscure Object of Desire also happens to be one of the most intensely intriguing love interests of cinema history as a sort of archetypical Madonna–whore creature that embodies qualities of both the naïve virgin and savage slut in the most insufferable ways (hence the incidental brilliance of utilizing two actresses to play one character), as if it was Buñuel’s goal to create the greatest she-beast—a cravenly cruel character-without-character (like so many women) that basks in inducing male anxieties and lovelorn lunacy, sort of like a young child slowly killing a fly—in cinema history. In that sense, it almost comes as a great cathartic relief when the protagonist and his love object are blown up in the end, as if the tension created by their emotionally terroristic disharmonious romance could only conjure up such a cataclysmic scenario. Despite the glaring pulchritude of the two lead female actresses, their beauty is almost completely extinguished in the viewer's mind by the end of the film, as the character embodies some of the most repugnant negative female stereotypes, including jealousy, pettiness, sadism, shallowness, narcissism, histrionics, stupidity, hypocrisy, projection, unreliability, flakiness, and deceptiveness, among other things. While an absurdist masterwork of cinema that is packed with plenty of playful dark humor, the film’s heroine is ultimately scarier than the greatest of female villains of both cinema and television history, including Elsa ‘Rosalie’ Bannister of The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Catherine Tramell of Basic Instinct (1992), Alexandra of Alexandra's Project (2003), and Cersei Lannister of Game of Thrones (2011–2019), among countless other examples.  Undoubtedly, only fellow Mediterranean Marco Ferreri (The Seed of Man, Dillinger Is Dead) has come anywhere near to Buñuel in terms of exquisitely yet brutally depicting the unflattering character of European women in the age of Occidental decline.

 Rather humorously, despite being a wealthy widow that should be worldlier when it comes to the wayward ways of women, the film’s protagonist Mathieu seems like a pussy-novice compared to his lowly servant Martin (André Weber) who declares when asked by his boss about the so-called fairer sex, “I have a friend who loves women very much, but he claims they’re sacks of excrement.” In a humorous misquote of Nietzsche, Martin also declares after examining the room where Mathieu has just brutalized Conchita, “If you go with women, carry a big stick.” In fact, the Nietzsche quote in question is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (1883) and actually reads: “You go to women? Do not forget the whip!” Rather revealingly, it is only when Mathieu uses his figurative whip and beats Conchita does she express any sort of love to the protagonist in what can certainly be read as a classic display of female masochism (though one certainly doubts the sincerity of her rather conveniently timed declaration of love). Either way, there is no doubt that Mathieu was too ‘terminally nice’ to Conchita to the point where the viewer could not help but feel a certain deep-seated disgust for him, especially after multiple viewings of the film. Going back to Nietzsche, he also once wrote, “Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.” Of course, the tragedy of Mathieu’s character is that, not unlike Nietzsche with his supposed great love Lou Andreas-Salomé, he does not really even get to experience any sort of high and thus comes off as the lowest of men despite his wealth and social prestige, thereupon revealing the true innate chaotic destructive power of women. 

 While Nietzsche is probably not the best guy to seek for advice on women, he probably had a point when he wrote, “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution – namely, pregnancy,” hence the proliferation of uniquely unhappy and prematurely-aged spinsters and wine aunts of the sexually used-up sort that now pollute the Occidental world and promote such socially deleterious things as intersectional feminism, xenophilia and third world alien ‘refugees,’ child drag-queens, government-subsidized abortion-on-demand, Holocaustianity, general neo-commie horseshit, and Marvel movies, among various other forms of garbage that appeals to infertile ressentiment-ridden broads that are in total denial that they wasted their lives on the false song of sexual liberation. While one could utilize Freudian psychobabble to argue that Conchita is a symbol of the male libidinal drive and the continual frustration of said drive naturally causes the explosion in the end, That Obscure Object of Desire proves to be a more enriching experience when viewed today as a cautionary tale about putting modern-day post-feminist pussy on a pedestal. Despite the film’s rather unflattering depiction of women, it apparently offended the sensitive sensibilities of gay terrorist extremists in a rare instance of ‘life-imitating-art,’ or as Buñuel—a man that, incidentally, practiced fag-bashing in his youth—explained in his autobiography, “Ironically, a bomb exploded on October 16, 1977, in the Ridge Theatre in San Francisco, where the movie was being shown; and during the confusion that followed, four reels were stolen and the walls covered with graffiti like, ‘This time you’ve gone too far!’ There was some evidence to suggest that the attack was engineered by a group of homosexuals, and although those of this persuasion didn’t much like the film, I’ve never been able to figure out why.” 

 Interestingly, despite concluding his career with a film as radically anti-romantic as That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel—a proud lapsed Catholic atheist and iconoclast that seemed to believe in nothing aside from the power of biting humor aimed at all form of authority (including the commies he once sided with in his youth)—was apparently a strong believer in not only love, but sacrificial love, as indicated by his words, “I would willingly sacrifice my liberty to love. I have already done so . . . I would sacrifice a cause to love, but each situation would have to be considered separately.” Indeed, as British film critic Raymond Durgnat noted in his book Luis Buñuel (1968), “He declared that he would renounce being the person he could be, if that were the cost of being sure of his love. He would think highly of a man who, to please the woman he loved, was willing to betray his principles.” While Buñuel also replied “I don’t know” when asked if he believed in love’s victory over the sordidness of life (or vice versa), he would also state, “I should still ask him not to betray his principles—in fact, I’d insist on it” in regard to the sacrifice of self for love. Of course, Buñuel’s belief in love can be seen in his depiction of l'amour fou in his rarely-seen Emily Brontë adaptation Abismos de passion (1954) aka Wuthering Heights. While it has certainly did little good in the long run for my life, I also believe in the power of love, including ‘mad love,’ which is also why I find the one-sided lovesickness of the protagonist of That Obscure Object of Desire to be so completely infuriating as it is a waste of pure diabolic energy on an unloving dumb dud of a dame that is probably lame in bed and really has nothing to offer outside the aesthetic appeal of a carefully manicured mannequin, hence the ‘object’ of the film’s title.  After all, at least from my experience, love tends to be a carefully cultivated post-coital phenomenon that requires a certain degree of mutually expressed emotional and physical intimacy (and anything less seems to be simple beta-boy infatuation conjured from too much fantasizing about the totally intangible). After recently re-watching That Obscure Object of Desire, I can safely say that Buñuel was onto something when he wrote, “Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.” And, while I find the idea of a woman being able to rape a man somewhat equivocal (and I say that from experience!), Buñuel’s film demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that a woman—even an insufferably stupid woman—can certainly completely ravage a man’s soul and turn him into a pathetic shell of his former self. 

-Ty E

Befrielsesbilleder

While we are constantly beat over the head virtually at birth with tired tales of shoah survivors and victims of Nazi persecution that resemble something out of some bad melodrama (or, worse, a Spielberg movie), we rarely ever hear about the forlorn fates of the other side, especially those that made the less than auspicious decision to fight for Europa against communism via the Third Reich as so many foreign recruits believed they were doing (as the post-WWII enslavement of half of Europe by the Soviet Union demonstrates, that is certainly what they were doing). Indeed, it cannot be a good feeling to be on the losing side in what was probably the most disastrous and nightmarish war in human history while so many criminals and killers on the (so-called) ‘resistance’ side would be regarded as heroes and be free to execute bloodthirsty Judaic eye-for-an-eye vengeance on the ‘guilty’ and—sometimes—not at all guilty. While SS-Oberführer Oskar Dirlewanger probably deserved his (suspected) grisly fate, one has to really question the motives behind the recent craven and inordinately petty harassment of virtually zombified 90+-year-old retirees (John Demjanjuk being probably the most well known example and Bruno Dey the most recent) being persecuted by conspicuously corrupt western courts under the suspicion of being concentration camp guards when they were young and dumb (while, rather notably, Israel is infamous for refusing to extradite its savagely sadistic genocidal mass murderers like Salomon Morel).

While my Dutch grandfather was involved in the resistance and his family even hid teenage Jewesses inside their home, he had cousins in the Waffen-SS and apparently they spent the rest of their lives in exile in Germany after WWII lest they succumb to prosecution and very potential execution in some Nuremberg-esque show trial where Judaic justice reigns. While it was always very clear to me that my grandfather suffered immensely as a result of WWII as the trauma it caused has acted as a virtual inter-generational family curse of sorts, I could not help but wonder about the lives of his black sheep Waffen-SS cousins. Needless to say, not many films exist on the subject of a relatively sympathetic portrayal of the misery of ex-German soldiers in a post-WWII Americanized world aside from a couple notable examples like Belgian master auteur André Delvaux’s surely underrated Een vrouw tussen hond en wolf (1979) aka Woman in a Twilight Garden starring Rutger Hauer as a terminally dejected Flemish (ex)Waffen-SS officer and Danish director Martin Zandvliet’s rather mid-brow Land of Mine (2015). Undoubtedly, Jan Troell's Knut Hamsun biopic Hamsun (1996) does a good job depicting the patent absurdity of how the Norwegian Nobel-Prize-winning writer was robbed and persecuted in his old age by the post-WWII government, but it is not a particularly aesthetically alluring cinematic work like the auteur's previous films. Arguably, the most subversive and certainly most experimental of these films is Danish auteur Lars von Trier’s little-seen fiercely fucked and forsaken celluloid fever dream Befrielsesbilleder (1982) aka Images of a Relief aka Liberation Pictures—an ostensible war film that defies classification yet also undeniably demonstrates the auteur learned a thing or two from Tarkovsky, Bergman, and Dreyer. 

 Although von Trier would eventually discover in 1989 that his biological father was a WWII resistance fighter of German goy extraction by the name of Fritz Michael Hartmann, he believed at the time that he made Befrielsesbilleder that he was Jewish via the pseudo-father he was named after, thereupon making the film, which practically bleeds Wehrmacht blut, seem all the more subversive and insanely idiosyncratic in terms of post-Auschwitz sentiment. After all, von Trier himself portrayed a creepy Jewish artist named Victor Marse in his previous film Orchidégartneren (1977) aka The Orchid Gardener that not only curiously dresses in both Nazi cosplay and drag, but also concludes the film by molesting a little girl pushing a baby doll carriage. Right before discovering he was actually Aryan as opposed to a chosenite, von Trier appeared as a character simply credited as ‘Jew’ in his classic film Europa (1991) in a curious director cameo comparable to Fassbinder’s kosher character in Lili Marleen (1981). As Jack Stevenson noted in his worthwhile text Lars von Trier (2002), von Trier, who grew up in a degenerate hippie nudist far-leftist household, had even contrived a false Jewish identity of sorts as exemplified by the filmmaker’s words, “I am very taken with my Jewish background. Jewishness has something to do with both suffering and historical consciousness which I miss so much in modern art. People have left their roots, their religion behind.” Notably, in Befrielsesbilleder, not only does von Trier conjure pangs of suffering and preternatural historical consciousness, but he also unwittingly gets in contact with his Teutonic roots in both a historical and deeply atavistic fashion as if he had been possessed by the spirit of Hermann Löns after attending a Hans-Jürgen Syberberg film retrospective. Indeed, the Danish auteur that added the German nobiliary particle ‘von’ to his name in tribute to great Judaic filmmakers with phony aristocratic titles like Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg arguably reveals with Befrielsesbilleder that sometimes the Volksgeist can appear deeply on a subconscious artist level as surely no true blue Hebrew has ever directed a film that is even remotely similar both in terms of aesthetic and subject matter, but I digress. 

 Despite the fact that probably virtually no one would suspect so much upon viewing it, Befrielsesbilleder—a sort of mid-length feature at just under 60-minutes in length—was actually made by von Trier as his film school graduate project (for a similar example of an enterprising young auteur, checkout Aryan Kaganof’s aberrant-garde Bataille adaptation The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man (1994)). Of course, to even mention such a perversely poetic cinematic work was created in film school is an unfortunate fact that surely undermines it, but facts are facts and von Trier is—for better or worse—not your typical filmmaker but a born-artist from an Aryan family with a long artistic legacy (in fact, von Trier's communist mother attempted to defend her cuckolding of her kosher husband by telling the filmmaker that she wanted to bless him with “artistic genes”). Aside from revealing an unbelievably mature degree of aesthetic and technical refinement, the film also demonstrates von Trier’s unconventional dedication to the historical documentary record as the auteur dared to dig up unseen documentary footage of resistance fighters tormenting supposed Nazi collaborators in the city of Copenhagen in the wake of the liberation of Denmark in early May 1945. Undoubtedly, in its shockingly seamless combination of vintage documentary footage and almost surreally stylized footage directed by von Trier, the film anticipates the auteur’s later utilization of different sorts of stock footage and film and digital formats in works like NYMPH()MANIAC (2013). Ultimately, the entire film feels if it is set in some purgatorial post-Hitler hell where a limbless human-torso Dirlewanger is being double-penetrated by the devil with a big black razor-sharp dildo for eternity, though the Nazi (anti)hero does curiously ascend to heaven in the end in what is indubitably one of the most shockingly transcendent moments in all of von Trier’s work. 

 Although he has a very Jewish-sounding name, Leo Mendel (Edward Fleming)—a four-eyed nerd that radiates a certain pathological pitifulness and deep-seated despondency—is an officer in the Wehrmacht and his prestigious position has now turned him into a virtual dead man walking as he is caged in a nightmarish POW prison in Copenhagen after the liberation of Copenhagen in May 1945. Like his kraut comrades, Leo plans to blow his brains out and prepares for the big event by writing his lover Esther (Kirsten Olesen) a rather brief ‘goodbye letter’ of sorts that reads: “Darling, Esther.  This frightful war, which brought us together, has now separated us again. It is terrible to write that we shall never meet again. But so it must be. Don’t forget that what you do for love stands above good and evil. Forever yours, Leo.” Unluckily for him, Leo does meet Esther again after he escapes from prison upon failing to successfully commit self-slaughter after his gun malfunctions and gets somewhat of a dark surprise.  Surely, Leo's incapacity to even kill himself really underscores his loser status, though things only get much worse from there. Rather unfortunately, while lurking in the shadows in preparation for reuniting with his lover, Leo gets the sickening shock of a lifetime under already less than ideal circumstances when Esther eventually shows up in the arms of an American buck negro GI in a scene that recalls a similar scenario of interracial romantic disharmony in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s hit film The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978). While the jigaboo liberator kisses and sensually embraces Esther, she pushes him away by complaining “Can we do something else?” while looking clearly dejected as if she is painfully cognizant of the fact that she is nothing more than an involuntary spoil of war and that she probably much preferred being a Nazi slut. 

 While one might initially suspect that Esther would be eternally grateful to see her assumed-dead lover, she is more or less a total bitch in the sort of way a women get when they still love a man but realizes that the relationship is completely doomed. Indeed, after bitching to Leo, “What do you want? You promised, didn’t you?,” Esther momentarily complains about lanterns blowing away and then accuses Leo of being culpable for war crimes, stating, “Everybody’s talking about what you did. The partisan boy you took last week. You ruined his eyes!” Leo seems to believe he is equipped with plausible deniability by coldly retorting “SS—they were from the SS,” but Esther—being an intuitive bitch that knows bullshit when she hears it—replies, “I know you were there. Don’t you see that you have a responsibility too? You’re so brilliant. You don’t care what you see. You can be used. What sort of morality is that? But you store it up. At some time a reaction will come. When will you scream?” Ultimately, Esther provides the answer to her own question the next day by causing Leo to unleash a deathly scream after playing the femme fatale, luring him into an insidious trap, and betraying him in the most cravenly personalized sort of fashion; or, a one-sided sort of Liebestod. 

 While it is hard to tell considering he is a marked man and officer in the most hated military in the world and thus probably not completely mentally sound, Leo has a rather flat affect as if he is an autist of sorts and Esther hints at this by complaining to him, “I could never see my reflection in your eyes.” Indeed, one gets the sense that if Leo was less cold and mechanical and offered more of himself, Esther might not betray him. Leo seems to sense this—or at least the impossibility of satisfying a uniquely unhappy woman—when he remarks “For a woman it’s always something different” after Esther complains, “It’s different now” in regard to their current less than ideal predicament. Undoubtedly, things are different and Leo is so ludicrously low that he can only go up; or so he does after reaching the lowest of lows in terms of abject desperation and infernal isolation. While he should probably know better, especially after seeing Esther with the yank spade stud, Leo agrees to meet her the next day at a secluded place in the woods in what ultimately proves to be an almost quintessentially Teutonic fairy-tale settling where the protagonist actually manages to briefly break out of his seemingly impenetrable shell and embrace life and nature just before he dies. Indeed, while Esther stands with her back to him while dressed like some sort of drag king Gestapo agent, Leo declares with the utmost conviction and sincerity, “Something happened to me yesterday—which disturbed me. All at once I found myself thinking of the world of my childhood. The forests—and the birds. It’s never happened to me before. To have images coming back. When I was a boy I could talk to the birds. When I was a boy I could talk to the birds. And they would answer me.” While Leo attempts his childhood talent for talking to the birds at Esther’s dubious recommendation in what ultimately proves to be a trap, American soldiers and their Danish comrades begin encircling the protagonist. After a soldier ties Leo to a tree, Esther declares “Those eyes. They don’t love. They don’t despise” and then personally blinds him in a brutally primitive fashion by stabbing him in each of his eyes with a sharpened branch in a literal/figurative ‘eye-for-an-eye’ scenario that concludes with the protagonist literally ascending to heaven during sunrise while his treacherous yet nonetheless clearly guilt-ridden beloved sobs in his car. In the end, the film is not just the paradoxically uplifting yet dispiriting story of an autistic Aryan Christ, but also the timeless (yet transcendental) tale of a woman betraying a mensch she loves because he did not make her ‘feel’ the right way at the right time; or, the real perennial war of the sexes. 

 Despite the fact that Befrielsesbilleder is, in many ways, a more aesthetically alluring and arcane cinematic works than many of his later films ranging from the Dogme 95 retard-a-thon The Idiots (1998) to his latest serial killer effort The House That Jack Built (2018), apparently the auteur had a somewhat troll-ish mindset when he conceived of it, or as Jack Stevenson explained, “Von Trier later claimed that many viewers fainted during the 18 June screening at the Film School, ‘because’, as he put it, ‘I quite on purpose gave no release for the excitement which had been built up. … I purposely increased the excitement by setting the characters in extreme situations.’” Of course, anyone that has seen the film’s co-writer and cinematographer Tom Elling’s own directorial efforts like Perfect World (1990) will know that he clearly had a strong aesthetic and technical influence on the overall quality of the film, yet it is still assuredly Trier-ian in its provocatively and preternaturally haunting essence. As with von Trier’s greatest films, the auteur reveals his innate disdain for the Hollywood model by refraining from making insufferable moral judgments against his characters—whether it be the Nazi officer or the Danish whore who betrays him, which says a lot considering he was under the impression that he was an Israelite at the time. Of course, as a man that regards Liliana Cavani’s vaguely esoteric exercise in SS sadomasochism The Night Porter (1974) as one of his favorite films, one should not expect anything less from von Trier.

Naturally, despite depicting a naughty Nazi is a sympathetic light, von Trier was not trying to express any sort of pro-Hitlerite message with the film as revealed by his words, “I have not taken the side of the German officer because he is a Nazi but because he is the loser. … I permit myself to be fascinated by that which has always fascinated people, among other things, death. War is always a good subject.” Not surprisingly in our ultra-PC Zio-authoritarian times, such a rare open-minded mentality would get von Trier in deep trouble during a now-infamous press conference for his film Melancholia (2011) at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival where he joked about how he “understands” and “sympathizes” with Hitler and expressed some negative sentiments regarding Israel and the horrendous Hebraic hack Susanne Bier (After the Wedding, Bird Box). Of course, as a subversive European ‘artiste’ with a deep interest in politics and history, especially WWII, it is only natural that von Trier would try to understand Uncle Adolf and his undeniable influence and the auteur's early films like The Orchid Gardener, Befrielsesbilleder, and Europa certainly proves that.  After all, artists are oftentimes interested in politics because, not unlike art, it gives them the opportunity to create their own world, which is something that, despite his eventual failure and defeat in the end, Hitler fully achieved, hence his special interest in architects like Albert Speer and sculptors like Arno Breker.

 Despite winning the ‘Special Award’ at the European Film School Festival in Munich in 1982 and receiving some positive reviews, Befrielsesbilleder was naturally met with much controversy and attacks, namely due to its unflattering depiction of the Danish resistance, or as Stevenson explained, “Liberation Day in Denmark had really been Judgment Day: passive collaborators and fence-sitters became patriots overnight – old scores were settled and accusations, true and false, were leveled. Five years of pent-up emotions boiled to the surface in a blind frenzy of anger, joy, patriotism and lust for revenge. While today public debate about the sensitive issue of the Occupation in Denmark is wide ranging, in 1982 perception of this complicated time conformed to a much more ‘official’ line: Germans were bad, Danes were good, and the Resistance had been heroic and widespread. Von Trier’s attempts, however perhaps half-formed, to investigate the ambiguous nature of good and evil and guilt and innocence within the sensitive context of the War, was sure to offend many, particularly his elders.” Undoubtedly, aside from the rare exception like the somewhat esoteric Death In June song “C'est Un Rêve,” there are not many similarly fearless examples of European art comparable to von Trier’s film where an artist dares to confront the cold black hypocritical heart that inspired some of the harsher actions of the ‘freedom fighters.’ Of course, as the film hints, not unlike Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun did before it, the outcome of WWII becomes more than a little bit dubious when it involves American negro ‘liberators’ taking native European women as whores and neighbors killing neighbors after the war had already ended. Also, certainly no common sense or humanity was applied when pioneering French film theorist Robert Brasillach—one of the first Western critics to seriously study great Japanese auteur filmmakers like Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi—was executed for his pro-fascist journalism after Charles de Gaulle refused to grant him a pardon. After all, until the Third Reich began losing the war and yanks and Brits invaded the continent, the German occupation of fellow Germanic countries like the Netherlands and Denmark was relatively peaceful. One certainly cannot say the same of the many countries that the United States have occupied since then and Europe has hardly benefited from the Americanization of the continent as its moral and spiritual degeneration, cultural retardation, dwindling populations and perpetual invasion by hostile so-called ‘refugees’ from the global south clearly reveals.  In that sense, it is somewhat of a surprise that a filmmaker as great, revolutionary, and relatively young as von Trier even exists today in modern-day Europe, but then again, he still seems like a childish dilettante compared to his fellow Dane and cinematic hero Carl Theodor Dreyer (surely not coincidentally, Medea (1988), which is based on Dreyer's unused screenplay adaptation of Euripides' classic play, is among von Trier's maturest and most metaphysical works).

 When the great frog film critic André Bazin wrote, “If there is a cinema of cruelty today, Stroheim invented it,” he certainly could not have predicted von Trier or his singular talent for bringing immense poetic pulchritude to such striking cinematic cruelty as is fully apparent in Befrielsesbilleder—a film that is quite probably the auteur’s most underrated cinematic effort to date in the sense that virtually no one has seen it despite the fact that it was directed by one of the most important and iconoclastic filmmakers working today. A film that begs for interpretation due to its hyper hermetic symbolism and ominously oneiric atmosphere, I cannot help but interpret it as a (probably largely unintentional) eulogy for Europa. Indeed, in a scene where a pocket watch burns in a fire while German soldiers—the last defenders of Europe against communism and other innately anti-Occidental alien forces—commit suicide in rather brutal fashions that really highlights the almost otherworldly desperation of their situation, one cannot help but reminded that time has run out and the so-called West is dead, or, at the very least, on its last gasp. Additionally, it goes without saying that the Nuremberg trials—a craven charade that involved the torture and lynching of men like philosopher Alfred Rosenberg for writing philosophy and propagandist Julius Streicher for writing sleazy yellow press propaganda, among other patent absurdities—were, as the late great Francis Parker Yockey noted while working as a lawyer there, a fiendish farce guided by a Judaic sense of justice and, in that sense, it is only fitting that a white European woman commits brutal literal/figurative eye-for-an-eye justice against her lover in von Trier's film.

As General George S. Patton—a truly honorable military man that, rather conveniently, died under beyond dubious circumstances after wisely criticizing America's nonsensical stance on the Soviet Union and support of so-called denazification processes—once wrote regarding the Nuremberg Show Trials, “I am frankly opposed to this war criminal stuff. It is not cricket and is semitic.”  After all, as Nietzsche once wrote, “Sin, as it is at present felt wherever Christianity prevails or has prevailed, is a Jewish feeling and a Jewish invention; and in respect to this background of all Christian morality, Christianity has in fact aimed at ‘Judaizing’ the whole world.”  In short, for better or worse, Befrielsesbilleder—a rather original film with a sometimes primeval paganistic spirit directed by a virtual novice with the flare of a master—deserves a special place in cinema history as a rare expression of a sort of ‘cruel humanism’ and almost transcendental pathos that dares to confront the harsh reality of the post-WWII German plight and go beyond good and evil whilst ironically flirting with Christian symbolism.  Undoubtedly, von Trier would master this approach while tackling the woman question in Antichrist (2009) where feminine irrationalism and betrayal also leads to a nasty time for a dude in the forest.

-Ty E

10 to Midnight

While it can certainly be argued that an immaculate exploitation film is an innately oxymoronic concept, some fucked flicks, not unlike porn sluts or fast food joints, are certainly better than others, even those produced by the fine kosher smut-peddlers of Cannon Films. Indeed, despite my increasingly disillusionment with the value of virtually all forms of trash cinema, I recently saw two exploitation films, Gary Sherman’s Vice Squad (1982) and J. Lee Thompson’s 10 to Midnight (1983), that reminded me that sometimes you need the cinematic equivalent of a big sloppy juicy back-alley blowjob from a cheap worthless whore. While both films involve a deranged white villain that butchers wanton white bitches with a certain penetratingly uncanny tenacity, these sexually unsound murderers have quite different motivations and pathologies. Whereas Vice Squad features the grand delight of featuring Wings Hauser portraying a violently unhinged pimp that mutilates the genitals of mainly gutter-dwelling white whores (but also the occasional bumbling negro male), 10 to Midnight features a terminally pissed-off proto-incel of sorts that uses a knife as a sort of compensatory phallus against beauteous young babes that dared to make a mockery of his irreparably broken masculinity. Needless to say, the latter is easily the better of the two films, which largely has to do with Gene Davis’ performance as the killer and director J. Lee Thompson’s surprisingly competent directing abilities.

While surely a hack of sorts that was responsible for directing such lame franchise sequel films as Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), he also directed some quite notable cinematic works ranging from the WWII epic The Guns of Navarone (1961) to the campy Shirley MacLaine whore show What a Way to Go! (1964). Certainly more importantly, Thompson has demonstrated a talent for horror and thriller cinema with an inordinate sort of pathos and perversity, including the original Cape Fear (1962) starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum, the spiritually incestuous The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), and the slightly underrated canuck slasher flick Happy Birthday to Me (1981), among others. While I am not sure if I would cite 10 to Midnight as the director’s single greatest achievement, it is unequivocally his most tasteless and, in turn, wildly entertaining film and surely a notable accomplishment in that the filmmaker only agree to direct the film the night before shooting began after the original director was apparently let go (notably, Thompson previously worked with lead Bronson on films like St. Ives (1976) and The White Buffalo (1977)). A sort of super sod slasher on steroids that is big on the sensual and sensational in a largely unabashedly morally retarded fashion, the film oftentimes feels like it is set in the same sexually sociopathic universe as William Friedkin’s killer cocksucker classic Cruising (1980) as both are pleasantly politically incorrect flicks featuring gay serial killers that never capitulate to bourgeois bitch taste. Additionally, both films star Eugene M. Davis—the somewhat lesser known (and seemingly gayer) younger brother of actor turned AIDS victim Brad Davis (Midnight Express, Querelle)—and surely benefit from it (notably, lapsed teen idol Leif Garrett also auditioned for the role in 10 to Midnight and luckily he did not get it). 

 While I am not sure if Davis was also sexually abused by both of his parents like his brother Brad apparently was, he certainly does demonstrate a seemingly innate proficiency for portraying patently perverse characters (which probably explains his fairly uneven and rather limited acting career that includes roles ranging from a virtual man-whore in Roger Vadim's obscure Night Games (1980) to Nicolas Winding Refn's somewhat underrated Fear X (2003)). Indeed, whereas Davis portrayed a bitchy leather-clad quasi-tranny hooker in Cruising that surely could never pass for a woman despite how unconventionally ‘pretty’ he is, he’s especially believable as an autistic psychopath that likes making dirty phone calls and killing bitchy cunts that won’t give up their cunt despite the fact that he seems about as straight as a circle. Made long before the LGBT monster shot its viral load on unholywood, the film features what might be described as an ‘ambiguously gay’ serial killer that not only leaves queer porno mags on his toilet but who was also clearly modeled after Richard Speck who infamously gleefully spent his prison years as the tranny whore of a negro cocaine dealer (notably, this was not the first film inspired by the Speck murders as indicated by the curious exploitation flick Naked Massacre (1976) directed by Denis Héroux and starring German arthouse stars Mathieu Carrière and Eva Mattes).  Just like Speck, the killer targets a group of nubile nurses.  Unlike Speck, the killer receives quick and swift justice for his less than gentlemanly crimes.

Despite being a reasonably handsome guy with a muscular body and sculpted physique, the killer is a glaring creep that could not smash a gash if he had a hundred horny ovulating hos begging to be banged standing before him as he lacks a certain organic masculine heterosexual assertiveness, hence his compensatory need to penetrate women with sharp inanimate objects while in the nude. Rather curiously, aside from the female lead, most of the ill-fated chicks that the psychosexual killer kills with his virtual metal prick are hardly likeable ladies, thus adding to his incel cred. Not surprisingly, the film was supposed to feature more homoerotic content, including a scene where the killer is hit on by a flaming fagola and another where Bronson was supposed to wrestle a very naked Gene Davis (also, not surprisingly, Bronson was apparently not up for grappling with an unclad pretty boy). While the film is not quite as hyper homoerotic as A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) as far as 1980s genre cinema goes, there is no doubt that the killer is an involuntary member of the pink team, hence his miserably misguided homo-cidal rage.

 Maybe it is simply because he has a less than aesthetically pleasing Asiatic appearance (he had Lipka Tatar roots), overall lack of martial charisma, and/or hardly intimidating stature/physique, but I have never been particularly fond of Charles Bronson, even if I can superficially appreciate the sentiments of a film like Death Wish (1974).  Since I can’t really back Bronson or the sort of philistine films he is best known for, I found it to the great benefit of 10 to Midnight that his shamelessly corrupt and callous cop character is fairly unlikable one. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the character is so intrinsically unlikable that, in the end, I found myself rooting for the psychotic serial killer in all of his ambiguously gay naked glory. In fact, it even somehow comes as a genuine great shock at the end of the film when Bronson gets so high on his own unhinged self-righteousness that he puts a bullet in the brain of the mad muscular twink when he is not threat after being apprehended shortly after he massacres some nurses à la Richard Speck. In short, 10 to Midnight is a surprisingly sick (not to mention simultaneously gritty yet aesthetically slick) flick that some lame spiritually castrated LGBT film theorist could fairly easily argue has an identifiable anti-sod subtext in a sort of subtly hysterical homo-hating fashion to the point where one might believe it inspired a brief trend of fag-bashing in Kentucky.  As a film drenched in gratuitous violence and nudity—and, quite nicely, combines the two—it is also the sort of the movie that would entice Gaspar Noé, even if it does not go quite as far as Gerald Kargl’s endlessly entrancing serial killer fever dream Angst (1983) in terms of plunging the viewer's mind into the deep dark abyss that is the psyche of a raging renegade aberrosexual. 

 Warren Stacy (Gene Davis) is an undeniably handsome yet strikingly autistic young man that is an abject failure when it comes to the ladies and he knows it, but now he has decided to take revenge against the wanton whores, sidewalk slags, and conniving cum-dumps that will not even give him a meager crumb of pussy. Indeed, pathologically obsessed (as indicated by spastic fragmented flashbacks that are inter-spliced with shots of his very feminine grooming habits) with a bimbo bitch named Betty (June Gilbert) that dared to throw coffee in his face after some sort of failed romantic advance, wayward Warren carries out a revenge plan that involves murdering both the girl and her beau at a local park on a nice sunny day. In what is surely symbolic of his sexual perversion, Warren kills Betty while he is completely naked and—rather fittingly—she also happens to be completely unclad due to being interrupted while in the middle of fucking her boyfriend in a car.  Due to leaving behind no forensic evidence due to being naked (hence his reasoning behind his completely bare butchery) and creating the perfect alibi by talking to some bitchy babes at a movie theater, escaping throw a bathroom window unnoticed to carry out the murders, and then making his way back to the movie theater before the movie ends so the same bitchy babes can testify that he was there that evening, Warren is a fairly clever unhinged chap and that really pisses off hardened cynical cop Leo Kessler (Charles Bronson) who knows a guilty pervert when he sees one.  As a broody old bastard that is clearly approaching retirement, Kessler clearly has little time for bureaucratic bullshit and a whiny weirdo like Warren proves to really get his goat, thus inevitably leading to an intense showdown between the two quite different (yet arguably equally, if dissimilarly, socially obnoxious) loner types.

Indeed, when Warren comes under his radar, Kessler immediately knows that the agile autist is unequivocally guilty but he has to struggle with the annoying complication of working with a young idealistic cop named Paul McAnn (Andrew Stevens)—a handsome yet hopelessly normal young stud—that sincerely believes in law and order and does everything completely by the book as if his life depended on it.  In fact, aside from catching bad dudes and bringing them to justice, Kessler doesn’t really seem to care about anything, including his own unconventionally beautiful student nurse daughter Laurie Kessler (Lisa Eilbacher) who, rather conveniently in terms of the film's plot, is acquainted with Warren’s victims. Needless to say, when his young partner Paul becomes romantically interested in his daughter Laurie, Kessler also does not seem to give a shit about that, but luckily wacko Warren eventually develops an obsessive interest with the police detective’s daughter due to being constantly hounded by him to an almost fetishistic degree, as if the crusty old cop also has his own set of subconscious perversions that he is attempting to compensate for. Needless to say, the film concludes with Warren attempting to butcher Laurie while Kessler and Paul try to save her while simultaneously trying to bring down the ambiguously gay naked killer. Thankfully, despite its flaws, 10 to Midnight is not a film that pussies out in the end and instead closes on a shockingly politically incorrect note that reminds one that a single bullet can do so much more for humanity than a Talmudic Kafkaesque legal bureaucracy where a sort of neo-Sanhedrin reigns that caters to criminals and debases victims. 

 While crazed closet-case Warren Stacy is indubitably a bad dude that indeed deserves the bullet that ruptures his gray matter, I find it hard to not be at least superficially sympathetic to the savagely psychotic little sod as he is not totally delusional as clearly depicted in the film's deplorable dystopian realm of intrinsically irrational gynocentric terror where any dumb cunt with a room temperature IQ feels free to shame and debase any unfortunate male that does something she might find even the slightest bit unfavorable.  In that sense, the film is strangely prophetic for what amounts to a seemingly immaculately polished piece of celluloid trash.  In fact, Warren is certainly more sympathetic than, say, hopelessly hapless hapa incel messiah Elliot Rodger—a spoiled yet seriously self-loathing victim of miscegenation that, on top of being autistic, resented the fact his mom was Asian—who, unlike the film’s protagonist, did not have enough testicular fortitude to even try ask a girl out yet felt he was somehow entitled to premium grade Europid pussy because his white daddy bought him a fancy Bimmer. Undoubtedly, if Warren simply started hanging out at the sort of savage gay clubs featured in Cruising, Jacques Scandelari's New York City Inferno (1978), or Fred Halsted's A Night at Halsted's (1982), all of his problems would be solved as he would have an outlet for his sadistic sexual violence and he would not even have to really deal with dreaded women again outside the dreary dames from his lame office job. In short, Warren is, not unlike many gay serial killers that include John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, among countless others, a pathetic victim of his own self-denial and self-deceptions. Despite being handsome and in good physical shape, Warren inspires horripilant in women because of his intrinsically repugnant personality traits and complete and utter lack of instinctual male heterosexual qualities. Of course, the irony of 10 to Midnight is that, despite the filmmaker’s best intent, Warren is no less repugnant than some of the women he kills, thus underscoring the all-around decidedly dysfunctional nature of the sexes in the post-sexual liberation America where many misguided young people feel completely obligated to embody some shallow (and oftentimes soul-destroying, especially for women) sexual (pseudo)ideal as if pornography and MTV are virtual guides to healthy living. After all, a fiercely fucked freak like Warren would probably feel less inclined to act homicidally as a closeted homo had he grown up in a pre-counterculture environment where there was less pressure on a man to prove his sexual prowess and penetrate as many worthless thots as possible, but I digress. 

 Undoubtedly, one of the most potent aspects of 10 to Midnight is the fact that the killer dispatches his victims whilst completely au naturel, which certainly has a particularly primal quality that transcends the sheer banality of serial killer genre convention. As to why unclad killing is interesting, degenerate Nietzschean anarchist Georges Bataille made the interesting argument in his text Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1957) that, “Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality. Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession and heralds it, will hide; particularly if the erotic art follows, consummating it. Stripping naked is seen in civilizations where the act has full significance if not as a simulacrum of the act of killing, at least as an equivalent shorn of gravity. In antiquity the destitution (or destruction) fundamental to eroticism was felt strongly and justified linking the act of love with sacrifice […] I must emphasize that the female partner in eroticism was seen as the victim, the male as the sacrifice, both during the consummation losing themselves in the continuity established by the first destructive act.” Undoubtedly, the way Bataille describes simple nakedness also makes it seem strangely comparable to the art of bullfighting which, rather fittingly, is an obsession of whacked-out Warren’s to the point where he has learned Spanish in tribute to his (assumedly second) favorite form of ritual slaughter. Indeed, Warren is the sort of guy that would probably jerk-off to Francesco Rosi’s artful documentary The Moment of Truth (1965).  Bullfighting aside, Warren's acts of unclad killing certainly have a ritualistic quality and ultimately betray his reputation as an insufferably uptight autist, as if stark-naked slaughters act as the sole relief he has from a loser life of involuntary celibacy and latent homosexuality.  Needless to say, such a fucked fellow would never stop killing, hence why he grisly end almost seems mandatory, if not overkill.

 Being what is essentially a glorified exploitation film on sleekly stylized sleaze steroids, 10 to Midnight does suffer from its fair share of problems, namely its tasteless tacked-on ‘good guy badge/bad ass vigilante’ ending where Bronson pulls-off a degenerate Death Wish-esque dispatching of the villain so that the audience can feel self-satisfied that the closeted cocksucker killer is as dead as Jeffrey Epstein's infamous libido. Indeed, in the end, deranged broken boy killer Warren—naked and pulsating like a thoroughly aroused cock that is about to blow a load that is so massive that it would impregnate the entire world with visceral hatred for vaginas—goes on a bitchy mocking rant to Bronson boy about how he is going to evade justice by using his mental illness as an excuse, thereupon inspiring the already-quite-infuriated no-bullshit cop to unload copper in his brain. Seeing as that, by the end of the film, Warren has completely transformed into a virtual modern-day Berserker—high on his own visceral hatred and seemingly immune to all attacks via his unclad body—and lost all contact with rationality and reality, it would seem more likely that he would fight to the death instead of allowing himself to be apprehended by his arch-nemesis. After all, his freedom and, in turn, life is over and such an inherently insane and individualistic individual would not fare too well inside any sort of government institution—be it a prison, mental institution, or otherwise. After all, as Bronze Age Pervert—a curiously shadowy and ambiguously gay individual that loves buff unclad bros—wrote in his manifesto Bronze Age Mindset (2018), “A beautiful death at the right time is the only key to understanding a life, its only hidden ‘meaning.’ It is a beautiful death to die after accomplishing a great feat for the glory of one’s city, family and for the gods, but it’s greater still to die in one’s prime, at the height of your powers and at the acme of their discharge. A beautiful death in youth is a great thing, to leave behind a beautiful body, and the best study of this pursuit you find in the novels of Mishima, a real connoisseur.” In short, Warren could have gone out like a sort of crazed killer cracker Mishima but instead he dies pathetically like a low-level negro gang-banger, but of course not many films tend to glorify the deaths of gay serial killers. 

 Notably, the life and death of the film’s first murder victim, Betty (June Gilbert), somewhat parallels that of failed tragic actress Christa Helm who, not unlike the fictional character, left behind a detailed personal love diary of sorts regarding her personal sexual and romantic consequences, hence why some believe she was murdered to cover up certain unsavory facts about sleazy bigwig Hollywood types. Despite dating powerful men like Joe Namath and Warren Beatty, Helm suffered a rather brief and forgettable acting career that included a small debut role in successful porn auteur Gerard Damiano’s non-porn horror turd Legacy of Satan (1974) and tiny cameos on tiresome hit TV shows like Starsky and Hutch and Wonder Woman. Immersed in the darker side of Hollywood, Helm also lived with porn auteur Jonas Middleton (Through the Looking Glass) and even apparently co-wrote the script for his second fuck flick Illusions of a Lady (1974), but quit the production when the filmmaker opted to make it a full-on hardcore film. While all this might seem like barely-related frivolous trivia in relation to 10 to Midnight, it all ultimately adds further context to film’s overall malefic mystique and exceedingly evil essence, as if this virtual glorified exploitation film is really much more as a semi-esoteric expression of the post-counterculture zeitgeist and superlatively sick collective unconscious of Hollywood during that time. Of course, this explains the popularity of actors like Charles Bronson—a symbol of atavistic vengeance against such degeneracy—even if he physically resembled a sort of half-bourgeois Charles Manson. The fact that lead Gene Davis’ brother previously starred in Fassbinder’s S&M sod swansong Querelle (1982)—a film that, despite its certain camp qualities, is imbued with a sort of sexually apocalyptic essence that was clearly influenced by the Todestrieb-inclined spirit of its forsaken auteur—only a year before further confirms the hopelessly collectively necrotizing state of the Occident at that time.

Dubious ancestry aside, Bronson is ultimately a sad symbol of reactionary boomer impotence and nothing more, hence how Hollywood went from churning out films like Cruising and 10 to Midnight to Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Call Me by Your Name (2017) in a mere couple decades as homo-hating is no longer vogue and homos have been homogenized enough to make for sound subject matter in mid-brow films for sentimental grandmothers. In a dying civilization where even a fictional Warren Stacy seems more sympathetic to a real-life Elliot Rodger or Alek Minassian—two misbegotten creatures that, unlike the film character, did not even exhibit a warped masculinity as they are both devoid of masculine qualities altogether—and their impotent perennially blue-balled “Beta Uprising” campaigns, the film is ultimately a delightfully dejecting reminder that things can always get worse and that—no matter the circumstances—there’s few things more patently loathsome than a man that cannot procure pussy of some sort. After all, Warren Stacy might have been a raging closest queen with insane standards, but there are always fat chicks with fat asses! 

-Ty E