Black Box (1979)

For those that have seen the film, it might seem completely unbelievable but Andy Warhol’s autistically minimalistic feature Vinyl (1965)—an experimental ‘freeform’ 70-minute black-and-white adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange (1962) featuring Edie Sedgwick in an early speechless role that predates Kubrick’s adaptation and was basically shot from one single camera angle—had a major influence on various New York City filmmakers, not least of all those involved with the mostly overrated No Wave Cinema and Cinema of Transgression movements. Indeed, French-born auteur Eric Mitchell’s debut feature Kidnapped (1978) is more or less a Super-8 remake of Warhol’s film about political terrorism that features a group of scrawny punk deadbeats torturing a businessman and was seemingly also partly inspired by the works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mitchell’s compatriots, Scott B (aka Billingsley) and Beth B, would also take strong influence from Vinyl and cinematically fetishize sadomasochism and torture, among other things that seem fairly banal when compared to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic swansong Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Midwestern art school dropouts who met and married one another in NYC in 1977, Scott and Beth B more or less seem to have dedicated their early filmmaking career to incessantly reworking Warhol’s Vinyl and Mitchell’s Kidnapped, albeit in a somewhat more aesthetically inventive and carefully stylized way, at least up until their first 16mm feature Vortex (1982) before subsequently parting ways both romantically and professionally (while Scott would go on to become a TV hack of sorts, Beth went on to directe quasi-mainstream films like Salvation! (1987) starring Viggo Mortensen and Two Small Bodies (1993) starring Fred Ward and Suzy Amis before her career fizzled out). If their third collaboration Black Box (1979) is in any way indicative of the sort of romantic relationship that Scott and Beth had, I am surely not surprised that they ultimately parted ways after being together for about half a decade. Indeed, the film mainly features bloated hipster she-bitch and proud gutter whore Lydia Lunch (Death Valley 69, Submit to Me Now) gleefully verbally rebuking and physically torturing an unclad blond deadbeat with a Nordic physique, which naturally led me to the assumption that the directors shared a sort of sadomasochistic relationship of the gynocentric sort, but I digress. Undoubtedly, Black Box is a ‘great’ work for Scott and Beth novices as it is quite typical of their work due to its radically repetitive combination of preposterously executed political terrorism, fetishistic yet ultimately fairly softcore S&M/BDSM imagery, halfhearted anti-authoritarian/anti-technocratic message, and near celebration of post-industrial decay and nihilistic libertinism.  If there is anything that I have learned from Black Box or any of the filmmakers' other ‘para-punk’ films, it is that Scott and Beth seem to delight in dehumanization and sexual dysfunction, among various other beaten-to-death motifs that countless other film directors have tackled in a more sophisticated and aesthetically (dis)pleasing way.

 Notably, in his article on the directors featured in the book Film: The Front Line 1983 (1983), Jonathan Rosenbaum mocks the unoriginal, pseudo-rebellious posturing of Scott and Beth and their contemporaries, stating, “In New York, English film theory and SCREEN contributor Stephen Heath is ‘out’ because it is felt that in London he is ‘in’; whether Heath is useful in relation to looking at or thinking about film is clearly felt to be a secondary issue. This helps to explain some of the crudeness and nihilism of New York in relation to non-turf considerations, in which the preoccupations and habits usually thought to dominate lower forms of animal life are made fashionably compatible with liberal-humanist (and even would-be socialist) and intellectual standards of behavior. The basic message: New York is in love with its own rudeness, and new ideas aren’t wanted if the beat belongs to someone else.” Naturally, when I read in Rosenbaum’s same article that Scott and Beth were both art school dropouts, I could not help but laugh to myself, as Black Box seems like the conspicuously crude expression of vain cynics and pedantic posers who seem more interested in superficial attention-seeking and delighting in debasing the viewer for a cheap narcissistic thrill rather than producing truly revolutionary cinematic works that deserve the label ‘avant-garde.’  Indeed, after watching a truly idiosyncratic masterpiece like Teutonic dandy Werner Schroeter's early high-camp epic Eika Katappa (1969) or Frans Zwartjes' Pentimento (1979), it is hard for me to label Black Box an avant-garde film. Still, the short is by no means unpalatable, as it works as a sort of unintentionally mirthful romp that manages to unwittingly mock the filmmakers themselves to the point of self-parody. Indeed, the B's film is a perfect example of the seemingly perennial curse of Warhol and his ‘anti-aesthetic’ filmmaking technique on the NYC avant-garde and experimental filmmaking scene of the late-1970s through early-1980s. 

 Promoted with the decidedly dystopian tagline, “The culmination of many years of research into the breaking point of the human organism,” Black Box attempts to make some sort of inane message about the U.S. government’s ‘occult war’ against its mentally degraded citizenry yet it ultimately seems like a contrived pseudo-snuff film directed by a sadistic woman and masochistic man. The film begins banally enough with the vaguely handsome nameless protagonist/hostage (played by musician Bob Mason, who scored a couple of Scott and Beth’s films, including Black Box) lying on a bed in his dilapidated apartment with his discernibly homely, horny, and high girlfriend while she recollects a fairly senseless dream that she only vaguely seems to remember where she dreamed her beau became a “fish or something.” After the girlfriend describes how he transformed into a pelican and she became an elephant in the same exact dream, she complains that “someone was watching us all the time” and it was “just really weird.” Of course, a blinking literal ‘Big Brother’ sign that can be seen outside the apartment attempts to signify that the film is set in a dystopian world of paranoia and authoritarian surveillance, but the directors fail in their attempt to even vaguely express this emotional tone, thus making the film oftentimes feel like some sort of homemade sci-fi films that was directed by a collective of stoned squatters who just happened to come upon a Super-8 camera. After briefly making out with his girlfriend before becoming hopelessly bored, the protagonist watches Mission Impossible, asks his girlfriend if she wants anything at the store (to which she agitatedly replies, “Go on, get out,” since he rebuffed her sexual advances), and leaves his apartment to go get cigarettes, but almost immediately upon hitting the streets, a dubious dude sporting a leather jacket and black sunglasses puts a revolver under his chin and he soon finds himself being put in the truck of a car and being kidnapped by a couple of ostensibly suavely dressed Baader-Meinhof-esque thugs that work for the government. 

 After being brought to an undisclosed underground location, the protagonist is routinely beaten and tortured while being forced to smile and say “I like it” like some sort of masochistic BDSM fetishist.  To the lead actor's credit, his acting seems more believable than that of average sex slave in the typical S&M fuck flick.  During a brief break from being beaten, the protagonist is told by a fairly fat fellow with a mullet that describes himself as ‘Doctor’ that, “I’ll tell you why we brought you here; to cure you. To free you from error. No one whom we bring to this place, and survives, ever leaves without a complete purity of mind. We’re not interested in the petty crimes you committed [...] the thought is all we care about. We don’t merely destroy our enemies, we modify them.” Indeed, the protagonist is literally beaten into psychological shape and, as the Doctor states in an exaggeratedly sadistic fashion, “Things will happen to you from which you will never recover. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feelings. Everything will be dead inside of you. You will be hollow. We’ll squeeze you empty and we’ll fill you with ourselves.”   Somehow, I suspect that the intention of the filmmakers was to leave the viewer feeling like they are “dead inside,” which Black Box manages to accomplish to a certain degree, albeit in an unintentional way where the directors' seeming soullessness and passive nihilism is channeled onto the viewer.

 While the Doctor breaks the protagonist in with fairly standard torture methods, a fairly fat ‘postmodern femme fatale’ in all black played by Lydia Lunch will ultimately destroy him. While Lunch, who certainly looks like she has never missed lunch, beats the protagonist with a whip while he is hanging upside down, she self-righteously declares to him, “We’re specialists in the application of stress, damaging anatomical and physiological components of body functions, progressively impairing the working of the brain and hastening the collapse of will and morale.” From there, Lunch begins talking about an eponymous torture device called the ‘Black Box,’ which was apparently used against members of the Vietcong during the Vietnam War and was apparently later utilized by authoritarian regimes in Chile, Uruguay, and Iran. While the protagonist agrees to “confess anything” and even pathetically cries, “I will tell you anything you want to hear,” Lunch just mocks the hapless hostage and the world of pain that he is about to be in by repetitively repeating “Black Box” over and over again like a snotty toddler that is begging for attention. For what is six minutes of the film’s twenty minute running time, the protagonist is tortured by Lunch while completely naked inside the titular torture device, which features an obnoxious blinking light and radiates a sort of grating ambient noise that is controlled by the heavyset ‘government dominatrix’ via a small sound mixer. As to what ultimately happens to the protagonist after his various intimate sessions in the black box, it seems to hardly matter as the character is nothing more than an empty vessel that is just as much a depersonalized object to the filmmakers as he is to the character played by Lunch and the handful of other people that torture him during the film. 

 While featuring a sort of superficial anti-authority punk message regarding government-sanctioned torture and brainwashing of the generically Orwellian sort, Black Box feels like it is shot from the perspective of the torturers, which is underscored by the fact that the protagonist seems like nothing more than a useless eater, not to mention the fact that Lydia Lunch ultimately steals the show. Notably, Scott B once stated regarding his and Beth’s intention with the film, “We wanted to confront people…not only in an intellectual way but on a gut level.”  Of course, the short only really achieves the latter and in a way that will probably lead most viewers to assume that the filmmakers might have been better off going ‘all the way’ and directing fully pornographic fuck flicks instead of pretending to be edgy avant-gardists with something edgy and provocative to say. It should be noted that in the documentary Blank City (2010) directed by Celine Danhier, Scott B not only describes his and his (ex)wife’s films as being outmoded, but also says the same thing about the films of his spiritual mentor Richard Kern and the Cinema of Transgression movement, stating, “Richard was willing to go to places that our films didn’t, but now that you look at the kind of films that pass as mainstream films, these films are tame by comparison.” To Scott and Beth B’s credit, their cinematic works are surely more aesthetically pleasing and technically competent than those directed by the likes of Kern, Nick Zedd, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, David Wojnarowicz or any of the other of the filmmakers associated with the obscenely overrated Cinema of Transgression movement, which took the more (pseudo)subversive themes of the No Wave Cinema and executed them in a decidedly dumbed-down fashion that would even make weirdo Warhol blush with Fremdscham. Indeed, for better or worse, Scott and Beth B were at least the sort of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet of the NYC film underground. 

 For those looking for a truly idiosyncratic approach to sadomasochism and political terror, Sapphic Teutonic-Hebraic auteur Ulrike Ottinger’s experimental epic magnum opus Freak Orlando (1981) makes Black Box seem like kindergarten recess. Additionally, the largely unsimulated hermetic sadomasochistic horrors of Pig (1998) co-directed by Nico B. and Christian Death frontman Rozz Williams expose the B’s short for the fleeting softcore dilettante excursion in would-be-excess that it is. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, the B’s subsequent Super-8 features The Offenders (1980) and the Nietzschean The Trap Door (1980) are probably the directors’ greatest works, but they seem to be totally impossible to find, thus I have to say that Black Box is the filmmakers’ most rewarding and worthwhile work to date, though I certainly do not plan to watch it ever again. While it would have never happened in a proudly jaded and left-leaning cement zoo like New York City, Scott and Beth B and their compatriots would most certainly have been better off mimicking the genuinely subversive anti-counterculture cult comedies of underground cinema saint Paul Morrissey than following in the plodding dead-end filmic footsteps of his autistic monetary-motivated producer Warhol. As perfectly personified in Black Box and most of the B’s oeuvre, Morrissey revealed in his (counter)culture critiques disguised as camp comedies that liberalism produces a toilet (pseudo)culture of the innately impotent and superlatively nihilistic sort that is completely devoid of real morals and ideals, not to mention cultural, political, and sexual potency. While I would hardly call myself a Freudian, I think the seemingly endless torture and sadism that is unleashed on a somewhat handsome Nordic-looking fellow in Black Box really reveals where Scott and Beth B’s values (or lack thereof) really lie, as well as the lies in their art, which I would argue is the most intriguing aspect of the film.  As far as I am concerned, I find the fact that the film is actually considered avant-garde cinematic art to be more disturbing and more representative of dystopian times and Western decline than the authoritarian torture it supposedly exposes.  Indeed, thank god there are not currently any contemporary NYC avant-garde filmmakers that I know of that are making films in the sterilely sordid spirit of Black Box and fetishize Guantanamo Bay detention camp or the short life and adventurous times of Trayvon Martin, but then again nothing could be more wretched and repugnant yet simultaneously banal than the the masturbatory audio-visual atrocities of over-privileged half-breed Jewish American princess Lena Dunham.

-Ty E

Loverboy (2003)

While few people, especially the culture-distorting parasites that run the mainstream media and governments, are willing to recognize it in any meaningful way (after all, they are some of the foremost proponents of the dissolution of true white manhood), white Nordic Western European men have become so patently pathetic and emasculated that they allow hip-hop-loving and Muhammadan-idolizing illegal aliens from the third world to not only rape and sexually abuse, but also prostitute and enslave their underage daughters and sisters when they should be hanging these swarthy animals from lampposts in the streets. Notably, one of the main reasons the innately impotent Greater Manchester Police failed to swifty arrest and prosecute the inbred Paki pedophiles that were involved in the gang-raping, drugging, and sexual enslavement of poor white British teens during the so-called ‘Rochdale sex trafficking gang’ scandal despite knowing about it for years was because these cowardly cuckold cops were deathly afraid that they would be labeled “racist” if they brought these rat-like cousin-copulating thugs to justice. Of course, as the made-for-TV Dutch film Loverboy (2003) directed by Lodewijk Crijns (Lap rouge, Met grote blijdschap aka With Great Joy) and penned by arthouse screenwriter turned TV hack Jacqueline Epskamp (who most notably wrote the script for Drift (2001) aka Adrift directed by Michiel van Jaarsveld) demonstrates in a somewhat curious and almost shockingly sanitized way that totally downplays the severity of the situation, scheming Islamo-pimps that con white proletarian girls into becoming servile sex slaves are not just a menace to not-so-jolly England. Featuring decidedly debasing rap and histrionic R&B noise, mind numbingly vulgar MTV-esque pop kitsch aesthetics and editing, superlatively soulless soap opera style romance and melodrama, and an eclectic collection of miscegenation-celebrating lumpenproles from various (and oftentimes indiscernible) racial backgrounds, this conspicuously cheap and equally tasteless film is something I would typically not touch with a ten foot pole, but I appreciate much of director Crijns’ work and wanted to see how he would approach such a taboo multicultural issue. Indeed, in his innately iconoclastic debut feature Jezus is een Palestijn (1999) aka Jesus Is a Palestinian, Crijns made a marvelous mockery of spiritually retarded white xenophiles that become enslaved to trendy Asian religions, as well as other pathetic contemporary European trends like government-sanctioned euthanasia, neo-primitivism, and post-countercultural sexual degeneracy. Additionally, in his most commercially successful feature Alleen maar nette mensen (2012) aka Only Decent People, the auteur revealed the spectacular hypocrisy and closeted racism of Amsterdam’s Jewish liberal bourgeoisie community, as well as the social and sexual chaos of the Dutch city’s blossoming government-subsidized negro population. In Loverboy, Crijns demonstrates in a culturally cringe-inducing fashion how poor white girls that live in so-called ‘multicultural’ ghettos are very susceptible to the perniciously predatory tactics of maliciously misogynistic camel jockeys, who see European women as nothing more than cheap whores who deserve to be used and abused yet at the same time remind them of their own inferiority and racial schizophrenia (indeed, not unlike red-black-and-green ‘back to Africa’ negroes, these Arab untermenschen hate Europeans and European kultur and everything it stands for, yet cannot help but lust after blond women). 

 17-year-old blonde high school girl Denise (Monique van der Werff) is like a lot of poor white girls her age in that she is a fatherless bastard who lives in a virtually totally non-white ghetto in the South Holland capital city of the Hague where the only men are coffee-colored deadbeats and criminals and where many of the girls around her wear towels on their head because their Muslim men seem to have an irrational fear of women and sex. Not surprisingly, every single one of Denise’s friends is either a negro, Arab, or some sort of racially dubious ‘mystery meat,’ but like the protagonist, they are all are brainwashed by the whore pop (pseudo)culture that is propagated by the American Hebrew gatekeepers of Hollywood and MTV. Naturally, the group’s virtual theme song is “Bootylicious” by the yank jigaboo trio Destiny’s Child, though it seems Denise has a special affinity for blonde white sluts with assumedly crusty crotches like Madonna, Britney Spears, and vaguely busty pseudo-Latina Christina Aguilera. As demonstrated by the fact that she regularly stares at music videos featuring generically handsome pop singers embracing seemingly lecherous ladies like an erotically entranced automaton, Denise dreams of finding a tall, dark, and handsome mensch that will swing her off her feet and make her swoon with romantic joy of the rather raunchy negrified sort yet such ostensibly magical men only seem to exist in the fictional music video realm, but luckily fate has serious plans for the protagonist that involve the sort of man that seems like the kind of guy she has always dreamed of. Unbeknownst to Denise, a so-called ‘loverboy’—a superficially and psychopathically charming pimp that tricks unwitting teens into thinking that he is their boyfriend so as to groom them into becoming prostitutes—that looks somewhat like a backup dancer from some sort of deplorable mainstream music video has been fanatically stalking her and keeping track of her every move and he knows exactly what to say to her to lure her in and eventually make her his pussy-peddling infidel slave. 

 Like all loverboys, Michael (played by Dragan Bakema, who is actually of Serbian extraction) is an audaciously arrogant Muslim Arab of Moroccan extraction whose smooth charm betrays his superlatively swarthy appearance and scumbag hip-hop style. When Denise and her collection of multicultural friends get in trouble at a fancy department store for trying on various pieces of clothing that they have no real intention of buying, Michael magically saves the day by appearing out of nowhere, pretending to be the protagonist’s boyfriend by kissing her on the lips and calling her “honey,” and even buying her an expensive dress that she previously would have never dreamed of owning. Needless to say, Denise, who is obsessed with finding a romantic boyfriend that attends to her every need without even having to be asked, is immediately hooked and wastes no time calling Michael immediately after he gives her his phone number under the pretense of being able to reach him if she wants to return the dress that he has bought her. As Denise proudly tells her pregnant sister regarding Michael, “When I saw him, I knew everything would change.” Of course, everything will indeed change for the exceedingly naive protagonist, though she has no clue that it will involve routinely peddling her puss to effeminate middle-aged Arab businessmen and unkempt lowlife slobs that look like they crawled out of a sewer in New Delhi. As an ostensibly flashy dresser that drives a Mercedes Cabrio convertible and can easily gain her entry into fancy high-class parties and movie premieres that are attended by the sort of rich and famous white people that the decidedly dumb blonde would typically never dream of encounter in real-life, Michael initially seems like nothing short of a true dream lover to Denise. In fact, when Michael takes Denise on a romantic houseboat and she asks him, “Have you got anything? I don’t have any condoms,” he acts like quite the sensitive gentleman and pretends he is not just merely interested in her ass, less than sincerely replying, “Such a hurry. A present that’s wrapped so beautifully. I think I should leave it wrapped a bit longer.” Of course, by the next morning, Michael has pounded Denise’s pussy in the houseboat. Naturally, Michael’s next move after defiling her is to turn into a full blown pussy-peddler, but first he makes sure to give her the misleading gift of a cellphone with a new number so that he can always keep track of her. 

 Although he has only known her for a day or two, Michael begins immediately serenading Denise with bullshit lines like, “Nobody can love someone as much as I love you,” which the protagonist believes because she is brainwashed by the antics of pseudo-blonde whores like Madonna and thinks that merely fucking a man will cause him to fall in love with her.  After all, according to MTV and countless Hebraic specialists, love and sex are interchangeable, thus it is no surprise that Denise suffers from such a pathetic delusion, which is only transcended by her anti-reality belief that Arab men make great lovers and that interracial relationships have high success rates.  Ultimately, Michael uses the excuse that he owes 5,000 Euros to a friend and that he might have to leave the country if Denise does not help him by fucking his comrade. Indeed, apparently Michael’s towelhead homey Aziz (Walid Benmbarek) is willing to defer payment for three weeks if Denise allows herself to be debased by him. While Denise initially becomes angry with her loverboy’s extra dubious request, she gives in by the next day after Michael shows up to her school and surprises her with a tacky fake gold necklace that he probably stole from one of his street whores. When Denise arrives at Aziz’s apartment, he turns on ugly Arab noise and begins sweet talking her in Arabic. Notably, after Denise somewhat bitchily informs him that she does not speak Arabic, Aziz absurdly replies, “A shame, it’s the language of love” and then equally absurdly adds, “I respect you a lot.” To add insult to injury, Michael tells Denise he loves her even more than the day just after his best brown bud Aziz buggers her while she is washing the venomous Arab sex juices off her perennially defiled body. From there, Michael brings Denise to fancy movie premieres where she briefly gets to meet Dutch leading man Tygo Gernandt of Aryan Kaganof’s Naar de klote! (1996) aka Wasted! and Pieter Kuijpers’ Van God Los (2003) aka Godforsaken! and naturally the young white lumpenprole falls in love with the glamorous lifestyle, so she becomes less hesitant about selling her relatively fresh teenage gash for cash. Indeed, when Denise makes a couple hundred Euros from an Arab man by simply undressing him, she also falls in love with the easy money, but the glamour and, in turn, interracial pseudo-romance, does not last long when the reality of the rather unsavory situations finally becomes apparent to the protagonist. 

 Despite his fancy fast car and suave ‘thug chic’ clothing, Michael is a deadbeat bum that squats in a small dilapidated apartment in a dirty ghetto with his brother, though he promises Denise that he will soon buy her a lavish apartment in Amsterdam that they both will supposedly live in together. Meanwhile, Denise’s mother attempts to get her to move back home after discovering that her daughter is ‘dating’ a greasy smooth-talking Arab, but Denise hates having to babysit her retarded aunt and is jealous of her pregnant sister, so she would rather live the life of a hooker than return to her worrying family. While Denise initially offers her sensual services to high dollar johns, she soon becomes a low-level gutter streetwalker who learns the tricks of the trade from a negress named Naomi (Monita Mac Intosch). Of course, as a street hooker, Denise is involved in a number of degrading situations, including being buggered by a bearded middle-aged dirtbag in his car while the john’s large dog watches on from the backseat of the car. Meanwhile, in an absurdly improbable plot twist that demonstrates that both the director and screenwriter are fairly naïve when it comes to Arab sexual slave-drivers, psychopath Michael somehow genuinely falls in love with Denise and, to the chagrin of his all the more thuggish towelhead buddies, begins becoming fairly overprotective of her, especially when it comes to the kind of guys she sells her body to. Towards the end of the film, Michael’s pernicious pimp pal Lorenzo (Bulgarian-born actor Philip Rachid) even has to put a knife to his face after he dares to get in a heated argument with him over Denise’s safety. It is only when Michael’s scorned ex-prostitute/ex-slave (Tara Elders of Theo van Gogh’s 06/05 (2004) aka May 6th) randomly shows up out of the blue and completely exposes the Moroccan pimp for who he really is while Denise is selling her adolescent ass that the protagonist finally comes to fully realize that her shit-skinned beau tricked her into degenerating into a gutter gold-digger and that all of his romantic gestures were no more authentic as his supposed identity as a ‘Dutchman.’ After talking to Julia, Denise learns that Michael promised her all the same things as he did to her, including buying her an apartment in Amsterdam. In the end, Denise goes back to live with her family, but Michael will not let her forget him, as he has a friend slice open her face with a razor upon unexpectedly driving by her apartment complex shortly after she leaves him. While Denise is left with a large scar on her face that she will probably have for the rest of her life, at least she does not get acid thrown in her face like so many stupid white European girls that date Arabs and other swarthy untermenschen like naive Brit Katie Piper, who fell victim to a uniquely ugly ex-lover with a dubious racial background, only to get with another shit-skinned fellow and even eventually having a Café au lait colored mongrel baby with him not long after getting a series of reconstructive surgeries.  Of course, one can only assume the protagonist of Loverboy did not learn her lesson and will continue to date mongrel miscreants, but then again, no self-respecting white man would ever have any interest in her due to her less than respectable personal history.

 While Loverboy was somewhat popular in its native land of the Netherlands, it is very doubtful that the film will ever be elsewhere, as it unfortunately features tons of mainstream pop music and clips from music videos that would make the work impossible to release in other countries due to how expensive the music rights would be. Notably, the film features a decidedly aesthetically deplorable montage where the protagonist and her pimp are horsing around in a jacuzzi full of bubbles inter-spliced with scenes from the official music video directed by Swedish director-cum-drummer Jonas Åkerlund (Spun, Horsemen) for the 2000 Madonna song “Music.” Indubitably, despite its virtually unendurable audio-visual vulgarity, this seemingly retarded montage is fairly successful in articulating the sort of moral and psychological damage that is caused to a young girl who was weaned on a steady diet of MTV and kitschy mainstream pop music. Of course, the sad and pathetic reality of the protagonist’s life is in stark contrast to Madonna’s video, which depicts the guido whore as a sort of ‘queen of the night’ and opulent Dionysian diva that wildly parties with friends in a limousine, which is fittingly driven by kosher neo-vaudevillian comedian Sacha Baron Cohen while portraying his rather repugnant wigger rapper alter-ego, Ali G. Aside from the fact that the culture-distorting international tribe that Cohen belongs to is almost solely responsible for defecating out the sort of shockingly mediocre pop music and miscegenation-promoting anti-mores that the protagonist of Crijns’ film mindlessly adopts, the female lead of Loverboy more or less parrots everything that Madonna, who is arguably the most powerful and successful prostitute in all of human history, does in the music video, yet she ultimately leads a tragically debasing life of prostitution where her only reward is mindless hedonism. In a cleverly and darkly cynical way that brings new meaning to the putrid pop singer’s words, the protagonist and her pimp’s relationship is pretty much summed up in Madonna’s song where she almost sinisterly sings, “Music makes the people come together…Music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel” (of course, the latter part of the lyrics should be changed to “Music mix the white woman and Arab pimp”). If anything, Crijns’ film downplays the loverboy phenomenon so as to presumably make it more accessible to brain dead teenage girls that want to see a love story and vicariously experience the deranged fantasy of being fucked by a primitive Arab thug. Perhaps most shockingly, Loverboy dares to make the brown slave master seem somewhat sympathetic by portraying him as a victim of his own backward culture and religion. While watching the film, I was certainly reminded of French Nouvelle Droite theorist Guillaume Faye’s remark in his book Sexe et Dévoiement (2011) aka Sex and Deviance, “Among certain Muslim men one notices a strange mixture of prudishness and sexual obsession which is typical of schizophrenic neurosis. This pathology is even more marked among them than among the Christian Puritans. Statistics on the ethnic origin of rapists and sex criminals in the broad sense would speak for themselves—if they were published honestly.” 

 Unfortunately, Loverboy does not dare to depict the more depraved behavior that these pseudo-macho savage pimps engage in like brutal gang rapes (though it is alluded to that Michael’s friends will “break in” the protagonist if he does not turn her into a whore fast enough), drugging (which includes getting girls hooked on heroin so that they become perennial slaves to their Muslim masters), and even murder, among countless other deplorable things that have absolutely no place in the Occidental world. As also mentioned in Faye's book, “Women […] are legally and socially more ill-treated today in North Africa and the Middle East than under European colonialism,” yet the medieval savagery of the Arab world is now being imported to Western Europe via the ‘soft genocide’ known as multiculturalism, which, as the steadily dying indigenous populations and insidiously expanding melanin-privileged populations, clearly demonstrates, can only end in racial and cultural chaos as most modern Western cities reveal. Of course, MTV and related Zionist propaganda entities will continue to plop out morally bankrupt xenophiliac vomit to guarantee that incoming generations of Europid youth will be too hopelessly jaded, debased, culturally and spiritually retarded, and illiterate to resist their globalist master plan. While important in the sense that it is one of only a handful of films that deals with the tragic and seemingly unfathomable multicultural plague of the sexual enslavement of teenage girls by Arab parasites, Loverboy ultimately reveals one of many very sickening side effects of a much more malefic problem that has to do with the intentional third worldization of Europa by anti-European globalists and their white traitor politician whores. In its somewhat cleverly ironical use of MTV aesthetics and spastic editing, Crijns' work is ultimately not too different from the prosaic pop (pseudo)culture dribble that it negatively portrays, thus its greatest strength is ultimately also its greatest weakness as a work that wallows in the same sort of reckless wantonness and vapid style(lessness) it unwaveringly mocks.  Of course, if Loverboy saved just one single white Dutch girl from falling prey to a misogynistic Moroccan parasite with a serious inferiority complex and racially schizophrenic mindset, it is already infinitely culturally more important than all of the Hollywood films released in 2003 combined, even if it is by no means a decent film.  After all, I doubt anyone could make any sort of legitimate argument that contemporary Hollywood has contributed anything of sincere value to the Occident.

-Ty E

Archangel (1990)

After watching the Canadian auteur filmmaker’s extra bizarre and surprisingly gay and pornographic short The Little White Cloud That Cried (2009)—a kaleidoscopic tribute to compulsively campy homo auteur Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures, Normal Love) featuring trannys sucking cock and engaging in surrealist orgies, among other things—I felt it was about time to reexamine some of the earlier and more gritty works of Guy Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World, Brand Upon the Brain!). Considering Maddin’s debut feature Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988) is unequivocally my favorite film directed by the auteur, I naturally decided to re-watch his second feature Archangel (1990), which I found to be equally as obsessively oneiric as obscenely incoherent and convoluted when I first saw the film about a decade ago. Of course, like most of Maddin's films, which are exploding with countless strikingly and singular images and instances of hyper hermetic humor, the film becomes much more coherent and thoroughly enthralling upon subsequent viewings. Naturally, as a work where the central theme is amnesia, the film is an intentionally confusing work that actually manages to induce amnesia and delirium in the viewer, or as auteur Maddin himself once even stated, “ARCHANGEL is a film literally directed by an amnesiac delirious from the strangeness of directing a film.” Maybe I have developed a high tolerance for cinematic hermeticism as a result of watching one too many Werner Schroeter flicks, but I found absolutely nothing about the film to be inaccessible upon my recent second viewing. Initially imagined as what Maddin once described in the book Kino Delirium: The Films Of Guy Maddin (2000) by Caelum Vatnsdal as “the most irritating pro-war movie since THE GREEN BERETS,” Archangel would ultimately only offend Germans due to its depiction of the Teutonic race as a group of literally bloodthirsty and cannibalistic child-killing ‘Huns’ and bratwurst-fetisizing sodomites (in fact, in one scene in the film, a creepily kraut soldier forces a bratwurst down another kraut soldier's throat whilst buggering him in the bum).  Of course, Maddin’s film does not so much feature Teutophobia as it mocks the sort of patently absurd anti-Germanic sentiment featured in Bolshevik flicks like Alexander Dovzhenko’s classic anti-kraut agitprop piece Arsenal (1929) and largely forgotten Erich von Stroheim vehicles like Allen Holubar's somewhat gruesome D.W. Griffith rip-off The Heart of Humanity (1918) and The Unbeliever (1918) directed by Alan Crosland (who is probably best known today for The Jazz Singer (1927) starring Al Jolson in his iconic blackface performance), Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941) and various films directed by Lewis Milestone (real name Leib Milstein) like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and The North Star (1943) aka Armored Attack. Set during the winter of 1919 at the end of the First World War in ‘Arkhangelsk’ in northwestern Russia in a place where the populous suffers from collective amnesia and is still fighting sinister Huns and poorly dressed Bolsheviks, Maddin’s film is a sort of absurdly dark war-romance hybrid featuring an exceedingly eccentric approach to humor that makes the anti-Aryan satire of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) seem both asinine and philistinic in its commie-symph (meta)political satire. Indeed, if one learns anything while watching Maddin’s film, it is that Westerners, especially North Americans, seem to have collective amnesia when it comes to not only the anti-German sentiment in cinema (which surely still lives on today in ‘Jew porn’ like Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) and David Ayer’s Fury (2014)), but the Great War in general. 

 As one can expect from a Maddin film, Archangel is patently politically incorrect, but due to the director and his co-writer George Toles’ obscenely obsessive idiosyncrasies in terms of themes, humor, and aesthetics, very few people, including highly irritable social justice warriors, would have the gall to criticize the film. On top of making a mockery of the way old school Soviet and Hollywood films mocked Germans, the film is also riddled with the filmmaker’s various dubious fetishes, including half-naked children in compromised situations. Of course, arguably the most offensive aspect of the film is Maddin’s sort of passive-aggressive cynicism when it comes love and death, which are portrayed as things that are no more significant than taking a shit or going to the drug store. Apparently most influenced by the somewhat obscure and certainly strange Pre-Code era flick International House (1933) starring W.C. Fields and featuring Bela Lugosi, which is (in)famous for a scene where scat maestro Cab Calloway sings a song entitled “Reefer Man” in tribute to weed, Maddin's film is nothing if not one of the most absurdly arcane comedies ever made. As described in the film’s very first inter-title regarding the time and place of Archangel, “The Northernmost tip of old Imperial Russia. Winter of 1919. The Great War has been over for three months, but no one has remembered to tell those who remain in Archangel.” Meanwhile, one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles (early Maddin regular turned South Park screenwriter/voice-actor Kyle McCulloch) is an amnesiac who is all melancholy because the woman he loves but can barely remember is dead. Boles is on a ship carrying an urn holding the ashes of his lover Iris and right after saying, “Goodbye Iris,” the ship’s captain grabs the vase and throws it overboard before the protagonist can. It seems the captain thought the urn was a bottle of alcohol, as he is depicted in a previous scene taking a couple bottles of liquor from some passengers and throwing them overboard. Instead of getting mad at the captain for destroying a highly personal ‘ceremony,’ Boles salutes the man, thus setting the sort of madly mirthful yet melancholic tone of the film. 

 After opening ‘The Dirge of Lt. John Boles’ sequence, the film features an intentionally morally outmoded montage on the subject of ‘love’ that degenerates into considerably hilarious anti-German propaganda featuring an elderly Prussian officer with a giant totenkopf hat surrounded in ‘Satanic’ flames, a cannibalistic kraut commando chomping on the throat and drinking the blood of a enemy soldier, a couple German soldiers violently destroying ancient paintings and Christian icons, and an Aryan firing squad liquidating a prepubescent Aryan boy that looks like he would make for a satisfactory member of the Hitler Youth. Indeed, while beginning with shots of cute babies juxtaposed with sappy narration like, “Love—what do we know of love? We know a baby loves with all its tiny heart…and is loved in return by hearts as simple and as pure. We know a growing child thrives on love…and with its generous limbs apportions that love to the rest of the world,” the montage cuts to shots of genocidal German berserkers juxtaposed with lines like, "Then there is pride or self-love—a malignant vanity, insatiable—the pride of the Teuton […]Why should such a belligerent urge ravage all that is lovely and right. One must forgive, but a crime against humanity is a crime against god. One must have the discipline to fight for what is right in the Lord’s eyes. We must restore peace to his earthly garden…For the love of god.” While he barely remembers what country he is from or why he is fighting, Boles is a virtual automaton when it comes to his patriotic soldierly duties, which he will ultimately provide to both the White Russians and a small Russian peasant family. 

 As described in an inter-title, “Chance leads Boles to billet with a family in need.” Indeed, not long after arriving in Archangel, Boles wanders into a random home featuring a Cocteau-esque life-size statue of the Holy Virgin with only eye sitting outside the front door and manages to save the life of a young boy named Geza (David Falkenburg) that has just suffered a seizure by rubbing his body with a horse brush (!) After Boles gets the boy’s entire family to rub down the poor lad, the protagonist recommends to his mother Danchuk (Sarah Neville of Madden’s Careful (1992)) and “cowardly father” Janning (Michael Gottli of Tales from the Gimli Hospital) that they feed their son horse hair because he thinks the boy might have worms. As a reward for reviving her son, Danchuk gives Boles a prosthetic leg which he proudly describes as being, “An almost perfect fit.” When a fairly beauteous nurse-cum-actress named Veronkha (Kathy Marykuca) randomly shows up, Boles mistakes her for his dead beloved Iris and faints. Veronkha was married to a Belgian aviator named Philbin (Ari Cohen of Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments (2007)), but he, not unlike Boles, suffers from amnesia and unwittingly cheated on his wife on their wedding night so she had their marriage annulled. While he forgot the fact he got married on his wedding night, Philbin now thinks everyday is his wedding night (which is described as the, “happiest day of his vague existence”), which greatly pains the terribly lovelorn Veronkha, who complains when he arrives at her home, “Why do you torture me with your presence?” As the film progresses, Boles will not only continue to mistake Veronkha for his dead lover, but the latter will also mistake the former for Philbin. 

 While he is told by Danchuk and her family that Veronkha is not Iris while chunky coward Jannings gives him a sponge bath, Boles becomes convinced that the Russian beauty is his soulmate and states, “Then I’m saved. She’s not dead after all.” When Boles is informed that Veronkha will be performing at a White Russian propaganda play that night, the protagonist declares, “I must look like a prince” and has Danchuk’s entire family dress him up like a literal prince for the big event where he will be ostensibly reunited with Iris. Before leaving, Boles becomes quite disturbed upon seeing Danchuk beating her son Geza’s bare back with a stick after catching him fiddling some war medals, so the protagonist berates the boy’s father Janning by asking him, “Isn’t it the man’s place to discipline a wayward child?” and proceeds to beat the boy himself after asking his mother, “I’m not used to seeing a woman doing a man’s job. Would you mind?” After ruthlessly beating Geza like a rabid dog, Boles tells his mother, “He’s a good lad. You should be proud of him.” As an assumed result of the fact that he is heroic and handsome unlike her much loathed hubby Jannings, Danchuk falls in love with Boles, who seems to reciprocate her feelings to some degree, though she does not compare to Iris or Veronkha. As does oftentimes happen in real-life, the characters in Archangel are hopelessly in love with people they cannot have, with the film’s amnesia theme being arguably symbolic for the forgetfulness of the heart when it comes to love. 

 When Boles arrives at a theater called ‘The Illumination,’ he is happy to see Veronkha playing ‘Mother Russia’ in an absurd agitprop adaptation of the ancient Battle of Wesenberg of 1268, which is notable in that both sides, the Teutonic Knights and a coalition of Russian princes, would later designate themselves as the victors. Rather absurdly, during the performance, an actor complains, “I’m sorry. I refuse to portray a German,” so gentle giant Jannings is recruited to replace him in the role of a “slavering hun” after an announcer calls for “another blonde beast.” During the middle of the performance, Philbin, who still thinks it is his honeymoon, goes up on the stage, repeatedly declares, “We’ll bait the Huns with our guns and watch the Kaiser roll,” and attempts to embrace Veronkha, who violently rejects him. When the announcer requests that a representative of the “Dominion of Canada” come up on the stage, Boles naturally obliges and soon busts Philbin’s face in with a rifle butt after he manhandles Veronkha, who he still believes is Iris. While Boles and Veronkha have a short romantic rendezvous with one another where the former asks the latter, “why did you leave me?,” because he has mistaken her for Iris, the two never meet the audience’s expectation by making love or even making out. After confessing that she kissed him when he passed out earlier in the film, Veronkha hands Boles a large archaic map that Philbin previously gave her and claimed was their marriage certificate. Before leaving his presence, Veronkha encourages Boles to find both her and Iris using the map, which the protagonist most certainly plans to do. 

 After Boles’ somewhat uneventful late night stroll with Veronkha, he walks back to Danchuk’s house like a somnambulist, walks on top the roof, and ultimately falls through a window and injures himself. Needless to say, since she is deeply in love with him, Danchuk immediately comes to Boles’ aid and embraces him while her coward husband cries like a little baby in bed because he knows that his wifey is in love with the heroic Canadian amnesiac. Of course, with the barbaric Bolshevik hordes soon arriving in Archangel, everyone in the town has to put their obsessive heartbreak on hold and prepare to fight to the death. In a rather bizarre and even somewhat crappy scene that one could only find in a Guy Maddin flick, Boles sleeps naked in bed with Geza, who wakes up in the middle of the night after becoming disturbed to find dozens of (animated) spiders crawling on his little unclad body. The next day, Boles tells Geza to protect his grandma aka ‘baba’ from the Bolsheviks and when the boy asks what they look like, the protagonist replies, “Oh, they are terrible creatures. Half-man, half beast. They have great big eyes, great big ears, and great big claws.” When everyone eventually goes to battle against the Bolshevik beasts, many of the soldiers, including a Congolese negro and Orthodox priest, fall asleep. Naturally, Boles ends up mistaking these sleeping warriors for corpses. 

 When a couple Bolsheviks break into Danchuk’s home and attempt to steal her baby, lard ass sissy Jannings barely has time get up after waking up from a deep sleep before having his large gut slit open by a red savage. While succumbing to his fatal wound, Jannings manages to shed his cowardliness and strangles a Bolshevik with his intestines, thus saving his baby from being eaten by a rabid Marxist maniac. Meanwhile, Boles uses the map given to him by Veronkha to find her and while walking around, he finds various soldiers making love in the snow. When Boles eventually finds Veronkha on the battlefield, she seems to have more of a lust for blood than him (as expressed in comments like, “Your face is so bloody. I feel so alive”), but she eventually comes around and falls in love with protagonist. Indeed, after once again marrying Philbin and heading to a place called Aerodrome airport, Veronkha states to her hubby during midflight, “He struck that hateful head of yours in blood, but not enough. You’re still alive.” Out of anger, Philbin strikes his bride and, as detailed in an inter-title, “As a result of the shock, Veronkha joins her two lovers in forgetfulness. Total amnesia. Boles now has his Iris.” Indeed, Veronkha falls for Boles and the two even steal Danchuk’s baby thinking it is their own. Meanwhile, little Geza is killed in battle and his ghost is reunited with his father Janning’s ghost, who informs him that he died a hero and not a coward after strangling a Bolshevik with his own intestines. As ghosts, father and son have finally developed a deep bond in what is indubitably one of the more ‘sweet’ and ‘sentimental’ moments of the film. 

 Upon seeing her hubby Philbin, Veronkha regains her memory and complains to Boles, “My husband. What have you done? You’ve made me a prisoner […] if you ever touch me again, I’ll kill you,” thus leaving the protagonist totally destroyed. After his own heart is broken, Boles breaks Danchuk’s heart by giving her baby back and making it quite clear to her he has no romantic interest in him. After a kraut blows him up with a bomb reading “Gott Strafe Kanada” on the battlefield, Boles nearly dies and states while melodramatically spitting up blood, “My name is John Boles. I’m in Archangel…fighting a war. I’m trying to find the woman I love. IRIS!” Luckily, a Swiss soldier manages to refurbish Boles’ body with some sort of quirky machine, but the protagonist is too late to reunite with Veronkha, who has once again married Philbin and is flying away with him in a plane out of Archangel.  In the end, a gang of gorgeous gals kiss Boles, but he is too forlornly lovelorn to give a damn. 

 In an audio commentary track for a DVD release of Archangel, auteur Guy Maddin describes how the amnesia theme of the film was influenced by his own tendency to forget marriages, promises he made, people that died and other personal things in his life that he probably preferred to forget. As far as aesthetic influences on the theme of amnesia, Maddin names Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the romantic melodrama Random Harvest (1942) starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, and the Henry Green novel Back (1946). Of course, in terms of imagery, the film owes a lot to pseudo-aristocratic Hebrews Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg, with the latter’s ‘evil Hun’ archetype being quite prominent throughout the film. In fact, certain Germans found the film to be highly offensive, or as Maddin recounted in the book Kino Delirium, “The movie had its very first screening in Munich, and there’s some really good anti-German propaganda in there. I remember a couple of blond beasts at the back of the room putting up their hands in a very rigid manner to get my attention, and asking me if I didn’t like Germans very much. I told them ‘No, no. I love Germans!’ It seemed the prudent thing to say. I was waiting for years for a question about the minstrel [in GIMLI HOSPITAL], but instead here I was getting questioned by Aryans who wanted to know if I liked them or not. I had a more ready answer for any angry minstrels out there than I did for the Aryans.” 

 I got the sense while watching the film that, like most of Maddin’s work, Archangel is the expression of a Nordic degenerate who feels completely out of touch with the modern world yet cannot quite truly understand the past ‘Eurocentric’ world in any innate way, hence his propensity for mocking and satirizing film styles and events of the past while simultaneously paying a strange sort of fan-boy tribute to them. Either way, in his own sort of self-loathing and comically idiosyncratic way, Maddin is arguably the most Nordic of the filmmakers today, but then again, there are not really any other filmmakers who make films with titles like Odin's Shield Maiden (2007) or phantasmagoric yet fetishistic pieces of offbeat postmodern Icelandic folklore like Tales from the Gimli Hospital. Aside from his love of von Sternberg and the classics, as well as seeming disillusionment with romance, Maddin shares a lot in common with the great late Swiss auteur Daniel Schmid due to their seemingly innate rejection of the modern world (notably, while he was still living in Germany with his pal Fassbinder, Schmid was one of the only filmmakers who vocally rejected the counterculture movement and other vapid ‘liberation’ movements). Despite Maddin’s seeming love of European culture and tradition, Archangel makes not a single reference to the fact that the so-called Russian revolution, which was started mostly by Jews and other ‘minorities,’ more or less marked the beginning of the end of Old Europa. Indeed, one of the greatest aspects of Maddin’s films is that they demonstrate a certain naivety regarding the modern world and all its ugliness, even if his works reflect a certain cynicism when it comes to issues of romance and interpersonal relations. As a work that sends me to a completely otherworldly cinematic universe and helps me forget about the sad joke that is the contemporary Occidental world, Archangel certainly features the sort of amnesia that I and many other old souls need. Undoubtedly, one of Maddin’s greatest talents is that he is a true master of escapism and nowhere else in his oeuvre is this more apparent than in his second feature. 

-Ty E