Le Silence de la Mer

If there is any specific sort of film that I can do without seeing for the rest of my life, it is any kind of Nazi and/or holocaust themed that was film directed by a 100% kosher Jew, as I cannot think of a single one that I do not find to be phony, pseudo-moralistic, grossly historically inaccurate, insipidly stupid and/or chronically clichéd, at least until relatively recently when I saw Le Silence De La Mer (1949) aka The Silence of the Sea directed by Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle Rouge). Indeed, as a result of my relative disappointment with his Jean Cocteau adaptation Les Enfants Terribles (1950)—a film that would have surely benefited from being directed by its singularly idiosyncratic surrealist source writer—I have never been that big of a Melville fan, at least until more recently when I realized that the auteur had contributed much more to cinema history than simply a masturbatory affection for old school American film noir. After all, simply the mere idea of an auteur that is famous for Americancentric frog noir adapting Cocteau was totally preposterous to me and I ultimately found Les Enfants Terribles to be like a sort of unintentional parody of the poet-cum-cinemagician, though I have learned to appreciate the film more over the years. Eventually after watching his nihilistic neo-noir Le Samouraï (1967)—a film that is seemingly infinitely superior to perennial hipster Jim Jarmusch's negrofied neo-Beat homage Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)—I came to appreciate Melville slightly more and decided to dig further into his oeuvre. While I still consider the director’s classics like L'armée des ombres (1969) aka Army Of Shadows—a film that is, not without good reason, regarded by some critics as the auteur’s most personal film—to be overrated, I cannot praise enough Melville’s particularly preternatural and equally poetic debut Le Silence De La Mer. 

 In his entry on Melville in the invaluable two-volume tome Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (1980) edited by Richard Roud, Tom Milne stated in regard to the film that it was, “An entirely outlaw production, since Melville had no union, no authorization to buy film stock, and no rights to Vercors’ novel, LE SILENCE DE LA MER was an act of defiance in more ways than one, and not least because Vercors’ story was, as Melville remarked, essentially anti-cinematographic.” Based on the 1942 book of the same name by Jean Bruller (who published clandestinely under the pseudonymous ‘Vercors’)—a somewhat experimental piece of literary defiance famous for promoting a ‘mental resistance’ against the krauts during the Vichy era—the film was not only Melville’s debut feature, but also the first of a number of cinematic works that the auteur would direct about the French Resistance, which he only relatively recently had been demobbed from thus making it a rather personal work for the auteur. Indeed, unlike shoah showmen like Spielberg and Edward Zwick, Melville—an Alsatian Jew born Jean-Pierre Grumbach who adopted the nom de guerre Melville after the American author Herman Melville upon joining the French Resistance—actually fought the Nazis, lost a brother and various comrades in the war, and had very personal reasons to make a ‘anti-Nazi’ oriented film. Of course, what makes Le Silence De La Mer especially intriguing is that the central figure is a rather sympathetic aristocratic Wehrmacht officer that defies stereotypes and is ultimately more internally destroyed by the Third Reich than the conquered French people that he tries in vain to establish a relationship with after being billeted in their home. Indeed, a rather romantic and absurdly idealistic artistic type, the German officer is a proud Francophile of the sorts that dreams of a long awaited marriage between Germany and France and thus is naturally completely internally obliterated when he realizes that his comrades plan to turn the country into a complete cultural wasteland. 

 Featuring a fittingly German Expressionist-like aesthetic of warmly gloomy shadows and iconic chiaroscuro shots, including the somewhat misleadingly yet nonetheless potent introduction of the German officer making his initial appearance in the film like some sort of ethereally elegant young Teutonic Dracula, the film even has a strangely gothic and even unheimlich essence that certainly makes it standout in Melville’s oeuvre simply on an purely aesthetic level. Interestingly, if the Nazi officer is a ‘monster,’ he is ultimately more sympathetic and likeable than the proudly defiant French male hero and his niece. The deceptively simple story of an elderly intellectual and his niece using the absurdly passive-aggressive tactic of refusing to say a single word to a German officer that rents a room in their home as a form of ‘resistance,’ Le Silence De La Mer is also a film that does not do much to help French stereotypes in regard to arrogance and cowardice yet somehow it manages to give the French a certain understated dignity. Incidentally, according to Melville, Soviet-Jewish writer and propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg—a dubious dude responsible for siring the official holocaust narrative during WWII and inciting the mass murder of Germans with agitprop leaflets featuring remarks like, “There is nothing as beautiful as a German corpse. Kill the Germans! – your old mother begs you, kill the Germans! – your child pleads. Germans are not humans, they are wild beasts”—felt that Vercors’ novel was, “a work of provocation, certainly written by a Nazi to support the Gestapo’s insidious propaganda campaign.” Surely, it is no big surprise that a seemingly sociopathic semite like Ehrenburg would believe such a thing as it does the opposite of his wartime propaganda by humanizing the Teuton and presenting an almost absurdly unconventional relationship between a kindly kraut conqueror and a bitterly defeated frog. 

Despite its less than realist stylization and almost gratingly minimalist mise-en-scène, Le Silence De La Mer is a film that is largely inspired by historical fact and even has some covert ‘realist’ attributes. For instance, the film was actually shot on location at Vercors’ real home where the writer’s real-life interaction with an unconventional German officer took place, or as Melville explained in Melville on Melville (1971) edited by Rui Nogueira as to why he shot it there, “Because it was there that Vercors imagined this story on the basis of reality. A German officer who limped and played tennis as therapy for his leg had actually lived in his house. No rapport grew up between them, but Vercors had noticed that this officer was rather unusual, for his room was not only full of books that bore witness to his exceptional culture also contained a bust of Pascal instead of Hitler’s portrait. Starting from there, Vercors had translated the story into poetic terms. Thus his wife became his niece, for instance, to permit the introduction of a sublime love them.” Indeed, the film certainly does features one of the coldest and most hermetic yet nonetheless potent (anti)love subplots in cinema history, but I digress. Also of note is that the German officer was apparently at least partly inspired by German writer Ernst Jünger who not only served as an army captain in German-occupied Paris, but also, like Melville, was a personal friend of poet and cine-magician Jean Cocteau. Additionally, Jünger and Melville had similar political persuasions as both men were ‘right-wing anarchist’ types that stayed true to a sort of extreme individualism despite their obvious nostalgia for wartime experiences. Undoubtedly, the experimental doc La guerre d'un seul homme (1982) aka One Man's War directed by Argentinean Jew Edgardo Cozarinsky makes for a great double feature with Le Silence De La Mer as it juxtaposes excerpts from Jünger’s Paris WWII diaries with Vichy propaganda from the same era, thereupon bringing more complexity to the figure of the conflicted cultivated kraut officer.

To underscore the historical importance of Vercors’ source novel, Le Silence De La Mer begins with a nameless/faceless resistance fighter opening a suitcase that contains resistance material hidden beneath clothes, including the literary work in question, which is revealed to be written in tribute to “assassinated poet” Saint-Pol-Roux (aka Paul-Pierre Roux). In what ultimately proves to be a rather blunt yet respectably honest disclaimer from Melville, the film also opens with an inter-title that reads, “This film has no pretension of solving the problem of Franco-German relations, for they cannot be solved while the barbarous Nazi crimes, committed with the complicity of the German people, remain fresh in men’s minds.” Of course, after watching the film, one gets the impression that France and Germany shares an indelibly apocalyptic relationship that will remain forever forsaken. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Hitler declared on June, 25 1942 following news of France agreeing armistice terms that it was , “[The] most glorious victory of all time,” especially considering France’s seemingly perennial history of aggression against Germany. Needless to say, for the French, to be conquered and occupied by their ostensible inferiors came with much shame and resentment, which is pretty clear in Melville’s film.  Luckily for the French, Hitler was no Napoleon.

Notably, the film begins with a nameless French uncle (played by Melville's wartime comrade Jean-Marie Robain)—an elderly four-eyed intellectual type that seems to spend most of his time on his ass pondering the deeper meanings of life—stating in regard to the seemingly suicidal absconding of an aristocratic German lieutenant, Werner von Ebrennac (Swiss actor Howard Vernon), from his home, “And so, he had left. And so, he submitted, like the others, like all the others of that miserable nation, and I tried to etch into my mind the events of these lest six months: Our evenings, his words, his revolt. Yet not even he, of all men, had the courage to resist his master’s order. His arrival was preceded by a major military deployment.” For the rest of the film, the uncle recounts how he and his niece (lesbian Rothschild Jewess Nicole Stéphane) spent the last half a year or so ignoring a cultivated and kind, albeit somewhat insanely idealistic, German officer that was renting a room in their humble abode. While it was somewhat easy for the uncle to stay silent, his niece clearly develops a mutual affection and true forbidden love for the German officer that eventually reaches a climax in a most anticlimactic way.   A rather (anti)romantic cinematic where the sexual, social, and metapolitical ideals of a German romantic are crushed in a ruthless manner not unlike that of a half-frozen Iron Cross-adorned corpse of a German soldier being run over by a Soviet T-35 tank on the Eastern Front, Le Silence de la Mer is indubitably a anti-Nazi film yet somehow the viewer finds themselves condemned to suffer the internal misery of a quite cultivated kraut.  Of course, considering the heavy influence of France and its culture on German Conservative literary figures like Stefan George and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (the latter of whom notably killed himself), the figure of the German lieutenant becomes all the more tragically nuanced.  Indeed, the unrequited love subplot in the film is so intensely anti-climatic that it apparently greatly pained queer French Nobel Prize-winning French writer André Gide, or as Melville once explained himself, “I realized that poetry in the cinema is dangerous the day André Gide saw my film. After all, Gide was a man well qualified to understand a story like LE SILENCE DE LA MER, but he was terribly bothered by the girl's attitude. At the screening, it was obvious that he wanted them to rush into each other's arms. Of course, he was already very much in decline when he put himself out to come and see my film. The cinematic side of it passed completely over his head. He couldn't even remember having read the book, which was odd because, for a long time, it was thought in London that Gide had written it, and as a matter of fact, there are things in Vercors's work that are pure Gide. The influence is unmistakable. After the screening, the only thing he could find to say to me was: ‘I think the girl was a fool. She deserved to be spanked.’”

As a sensitive musical composer that once blew off a beauteous blonde bombshell because it disturbed him that she took pleasure in tearing off the wings and limbs of a bug because it bit her, Werner von Ebrennac is the preternaturally poetic sort of individual that has enough wild optimism to succumb to the utopianism of truly believing that the conquering of France by the Third Reich will eventually lead to the “…most beautiful marriage in the world.” As an artistic type, Werner seems somewhat absurd sporting a German officer uniform despite the fact that it looks rather good on him. In fact, the young German lieutenant eventually goes to great pains to not be caught dead in his uniform by the French man and his niece, though that does not stop them from refusing to say a single word to him. As his narration reveals, the French uncle is absolutely obsessed with Werner and carefully studies his every move and word. For example, if Werner farted, the Frenchman would probably reluctantly write an intensely intimate piece of stream-of-conscious poetry about it and how it greatly impacted his day. As for the Frenchman’s niece, it is revealed by the end of the film that she is an ice queen of sorts that has been hiding painfully strong romantic longing for Werner, who seems to completely reciprocate her feelings as revealed by his constant smiling at her and somewhat curious vocal denouncing of German women.  In fact, when the French girl finally gets the gall to look at Werner, he is so deeply affected that he is literally blinded by the light of her penetrating gaze.  As the Frenchman narrates in regard to Werner, “Each day, the same survey of the room, the same pleasure. His eyes rested on my niece’s face in profile, as always, stern and impassive, and when he finally looked away, I was certain I saw a kind of smiling approval.” Undoubtedly, Werner and the niece’s aborted-before-it-ever-started love affair is symbolic of the German lieutenant’s romantic pan-European utopian dream about a grand cultural marriage between France and Germany where the literary prowess of the former is combined with the musical domination of the latter. 

 Not unlike many German aristocrats of his time, Werner is a Francophile and wastes no time in expressing to his silently hostile two-person audience his great appreciation for French kultur, especially French literature, or as he enthusiastically states, “Balzac, Baudelaire, Corneille, Descartes, Fenelon, Gautier, Hugo. What a list. And I’m only up to H. Not to mention Molière, Racine, Rabelais, Pascal, Stendhal, Voltaire, Montaigne, nor any of the others. For England, Shakespeare immediately comes to mind. For Italy, Dante. For Spain, Cervantes. For us, Goethe. But to find others, you have to think about it. But when they say ‘France,’ who comes to mind? Immediately leap forth Molière, Racine, Hugo, Voltaire, Rabelais and who else? Names jostle like a crowd outside a theater, each trying to enter first. But for music, it’s my country. Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart. Which name comes to mind first? And we warred against each other. But it will be the last war. We’ll never fight again. We will marry. Yes, we will. It will be the most beautiful marriage in the world.” Rather romantic statements like these make Werner the perfect candidate for tragedy when he comes to the quite brutal realization that his National Socialist comrades are not exactly frog-friendly and instead see the French as an old perennial enemy that needs to be completely crushed with extreme prejudice. While Werner has many great things to say about France and its culture, he is somewhat less charitable when it comes to the nation's politicians, or as he explains in regard to his somewhat love-hate relationship with the country as a whole, “I’ve always loved France. I was a child during the last war, so my opinion then doesn’t count. Since then, I’ve always loved it, but from afar, like a faraway princess…because of my father. Because of my father. He was a great patriot bitterly wounded by our defeat…and yet, he loved France. He loved Briand. He believed in the Weimar Republic and Briand. He was enthusiastic. He said, ‘He’ll unite us like man and wife.’ He thought the sun would finally rise on Europe, but Briand was defeated and my father realized France was still led by your cruel bourgeoisie, industrialists like de Wendel, Henry Bordeaux, your old Marshal Foch. He told me, ‘You must never enter France except in boots and a helmet.’ He was on his deathbed, so I swore. When war broke out, I’d visited all of Europe except France.” 

As if the Frenchman and his niece are his therapists, Werner acts completely vulnerable around the two and confesses to them not only his hopes and dreams, but also his internal pains and greatest fears, as if he feels totally obligated to offend no one and unequivocally prove that he is indeed also human like the people of the nation his nation conquered. In what is arguably one of the film’s various allusions to Melville’s comrade Cocteau, Werner even compares himself to titular ‘hero’ of La Belle et la Bête in what seems to be his cryptic way of flirting with the niece. While Werner is initially quite optimistic about the NS occupation of France and how it might lead to a Franco-German empire featuring an aristocracy of Übermensch artists, that all changes when he hooks up with some Nazi comrades. Indeed, as depicted in a flashback scene, Werner is not only told about Treblinka and gas chambers by a comrade in the SS, but the same chap also stoically states in regard to the French question, “We have the opportunity to destroy France and we will do so. Not only its might, but also its spirit. This is where the biggest danger lies. That’s our mission. Don’t kid yourself, my friend. We will be smiling. We will proceed with mercy. But we will turn France into a cowering dog.” In fact, Werner is even mocked for his love of a France, as another Nazi states to him, “You’re blinded by your love of France. That’s dangerous. But we will cure Europe of this pestilence. We will utterly destroy this poison.”

Of course, considering the Nazi's words and how Werner is momentarily blinded by her mere gaze, the niece can see symbolic of France (notably, as if influenced by Melville's film, Louis Malle would include a Jewess heroine that is literally named ‘France’ in his masterful WWII flick Lacombe, Lucien (1974)).  Needless to say, Werner cannot help but report his dejecting experiences to the Frenchman and his niece and he even practically suffers a nervous breakdown while shrieking with a sort of foreboding doom and gloom, “There is no hope! No hope! No hope! Nothing, no OHS. Not only your modern writers, your Péguys, your Prousts, your Bergsons, but all the others! All these, all of them! They’ll extinguish the flame completely. Europe will no longer be illuminated by their light. ‘Nevemore.’” Arguably, the biggest disappointment for Werner comes in the form of a longtime friend that he describes as “sensitive and romantic” but who eventually became infected with a sort of almost demonic Nazi fanaticism, or as he explains,“He was the most rabid, veering from rage to laughter. He glared at me and said, ‘The serpent must be drained of its venom.’ He said, ‘Do you realize what you’re doing?’ I looked at him – looked deep into his blue eyes – and he was sincere. That’s the horror of it! They’ll do whatever they say – methodically and relentlessly. I know the determination of those devils.”  At this point, Werner has became anti-German, or, more accurately, anti-Nazi, though he is more intent on self-destruction than rebellion.

After giving an eerie defeatist monologue about his great disillusionment with the Third Reich, Werner reveals to the Frenchman and his niece that he plans to leave the next day as he is decided to go on a suicide mission “To Hell” as he has requested to go fight on the Eastern Front where a miserably cold death is highly probable. After saying his final farewell, the niece finally breaks her silence and softly says goodbye while on the verge of tears, or as her uncle narrates, “To hear it, you’d have to be listening for it, but I heard it and so did Werner von Ebrennac.” As for the Frenchman, he is disappointed that Werner has not decided to pull a Claus von Stauffenberg like so many of his aristocratic background and rebel against the Nazi machine. The next day just before leaving the Frenchman’s house for good, Werner finds an open book with the following words, “It is a noble thing for a soldier to disobey a criminal order.” After reading the text, Werner looks up and discovers that the Frenchman is staring right at him in what is ultimately a particularly passive-aggressive attempt by the old man to goad the German lieutenant into rebelling. After Werner leaves for good, the Frenchman states while he and his niece eat soup, “It seemed very cold outside,”  as if to foretell the German lieutenant's grim future.  Of course, if Le Silence De La Mer was a Hollywood movie, it would conclude with Werner fucking the French niece and successful leading a German Resistance movement against the Third Reich, hence the intricately anti-Hollywood essence of the film.

For those that have studied German literature and history, it is not hard to see why it is believed by various film scholars like Ginette Vincendeau that the character of Werner von Ebrennac was at least partly based on Ernst Jünger, who became totally disillusioned with the Third Reich.  In fact, as a result of the Third Reich, Jünger even lost his elder son Ernst Jr., who was killed near Carrara, Italy in battle after being forced to join a penal unit due to anti-Nazi sentiments he made (notably, his younger son Alexander, a physician, committed suicide in 1993). Interestingly, as if embarrassed by his previous nationalistic tendencies, Jünger, who lived in self-imposed exile after WWII, heavily revised his most internationally famous book, Storm of Steel (1920) aka In Stahlgewittern—a memoir of his WWI experiences—and excised the more nationalistic elements from it. While Jünger arguably wrote some of his greatest novels after World War II, some critics, like the magical Baron Julius Evola, argued that he suffered from a sort of spiritual and aesthetic deterioration as a result of his somewhat tragic experiences during WWII. Indeed, as Evola, who was such a big fan of Jünger’s early work that he translated it into Italian, explained in his ‘intellectual autobiography’ The Path of Cinnabar (1963), “On the other hand, over the years Jünger has come to distance himself from the book I had introduced to the Italian public, and has abandoned his original views. While the most recent writing of Jünger has significantly contributed towards his fame as a writer and man of letters, on a spiritual level it reflects a lapse: both for its merely literary and aesthetic nature, and because it betrays the influence of ideas of a different, and often antithetical sort from the ones that inform The Worker and other early books of Jünger. It is as if the spiritual drive that Jünger had derived from his life in the trenches of the First World War, and applied on an intellectual level, had gradually run out. Besides, not only did Jünger play no significant role during the Second World War, but it also appears that, when in service in occupied France, he got in touch with those members of the Wehrmacht who in 1944 attempted to murder Hitler. Jünger, therefore, should be numbered among those individuals who first subscribed to 'Conservative Revolutionary' ideas but were later, in a way, traumatized by the National Socialist experience, to the point of being led to embrace the kind of sluggishly liberal and humanistic ideas which conformed to the dominant attempt 'to democratically reform' their country; individuals who have proven incapable of distinguishing the positive side of past ideas from the negative, and of remaining true to the former. Alas, this incapability to discern is, in a way, typical of contemporary Germany (the land of the ‘economic miracle’).” While it would have been artistically unfortunate if he had chosen such a fate, it would have arguably been more fitting in regard to his legacy if Jünger had pulled a Werner von Ebrennac and tested his fate on the Eastern Front instead of staying in Paris and hanging out with Cocteau and Picasso, but I digress. 

While none of Jünger’s novels have really been cinematically adapted unless you count Cozarinsky’s experimental doc One Man’s War or the rather goofy and hardly faithful short Die Ungenierten kommen - What happened to Magdalena Jung? (1983) directed by the late great iconoclastic auteur Christoph Schlingensief, Melville’s film is vaguely Jüngerian and, more importantly, it does act as a fine antidote to the platitude-driven antiwar sentiments of the German writer’s frog-blooded nemesis Erich Maria Remarque’s obscenely overrated novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)—a sort of anti-Storm of Steel that was used by Americans as anti-German propaganda—and especially the pre-Code 1930 film of the same name directed by kraut-hating heeb Lewis Milestone. Unlike the idiotically emotionally manipulative Milestone movie, Melville’s film manages to be antiwar without being insipidly pacifistic and experimentally nonlinear and relatively unpredictable instead of banally linear and painfully predictable. Indeed, despite his love of American culture and Hollywood, Le Silence De La Mer is as anti-Hollywood as films come, at least aesthetically. 

Despite his later reputation for neo-noir films with very heavy American influences, Melville’s debut feature had a crucial aesthetic influence on one of the greatest anti-Hollywood auteur filmmakers of all-time. Indeed, the French master auteur Robert Bresson, who previously cast Melville in a small acting role in his second feature Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), would not fully develop his signature auteur style until his third feature Journal d'un curé de campagne (1945) aka Diary of a Country Priest, which clearly borrowed much from Le Silence De La Mer. In fact, Melville himself was convinced of this and even once complained, “I sometimes read […] ‘Melville is being Bressonian.’ I’m sorry, but it’s Bresson who has always been Melvillian […] DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST is LE SILENCE DE LA MER! Some of the shots are identical […] As a matter of fact, Bresson did not deny it when André Bazin put it to him one day, that he had been influenced by me. All this has been forgotten since.” In fact, Bazin wrote in his classic text What is Cinema?: Volume I (1967), “The technique of Bresson’s direction cannot adequately be judged except at the level of his aesthetic intention. Inadequately as we may have so far described the latter, it may yet be that the highly astonishing paradox of the film is now a little more evident. Actually the distinction of having set text over against image for the first time goes to Melville in his SILENCE DE LA MER. It is noteworthy that his reason was likewise a desire for fidelity. However, the structure of Vercors’ book was of itself unusual. In his JOURNAL Bresson has done more than justify Melville’s experiment and shown how well warranted it was. He has carried it to its final conclusions.”

Indeed, Le Silence De La Mer is one of the rare examples in European art history where a Jew had a crucial revolutionary influence on art as opposed to simply parroting and aping the style of Aryan European artists, which becomes all the more strange when one considers Melville’s fetish for American trash.  Indeed, Melville would later become more of what Ludwig Wittgenstein describe as a ‘reproductive artist,’ but his debut feature demonstrates a sort of Aryan artistic pioneering comparable to Carl Theodor Dreyer.  In fact, France is rare in cinema history in that it produced a number of Jewish and part-Jewish cinematic pioneers, including Jean Epstein and Abel Gance (like Truffaut, the latter was the bastard son of a Jewish professional).  Of course, as Wittgenstein also once wrote in regard to the unoriginal nature of Judaic artists, “It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass that has grown in the soil of another's mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren't pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may [...] It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand someone else's work better than he understands it himself.”  Melville would certainly demonstrate he understood American film noir better than the people that actually directed the original films, but with Le Silence De La Mer he at least managed to draw his own ‘blade of grass.’

Despite being based on a famous anti-Nazi French resistance novel and directed by a Jew, Le Silence De La Mer can surely be interpreted as a piece of revolutionary pan-European cinema that promotes the uniting of Europa in a real cultural sense and not in the current globalist neo-bolshevik/Sorosian anti-European neo-liberal EU sense. Indeed, while watching the film and listening to Werner von Ebrennac’s romantic monologue about a great marriage between Germany and France, I could not help but reminded of the Napoleon quote, “I wanted to prepare the fusion of the great interests of Europe, as I had accomplished that of the parties. I concerned myself little with the passing rancor of the peoples, for I was sure that the results would lead them irresistibly back to me. Europe would in this way have become in truth a united nation, and every one would have been, not matter where he traveled, in the same Fatherland. This fusion will accomplish itself sooner or later through the pressure of the facts; the impulse has been given which, since my downfall and the disappearance of my system, will make the restoration of balance possible in Europe only by merger and fusion of the great nations.”

Undoubtedly, one of the greatest mistakes of Third Reich was its shallow Nordic/Teutonic supremacism and discrimination of other Europeans, even if France arguably got what was coming to it as it had a long history of waging war against Deutschland and ultimately became a decadent hellhole that persecuted Germany after WWI. Although a fan of Uncle Adolf and his Dozen Year Reich, Euro-American revolutionary Francis Parker Yockey—a man that, according to his FBI records, had an astonishing genius IQ of 170—would have certainly agreed with many of Werner von Ebrennac’s sentiments as demonstrated by his neo-Spengerlian magnum opus Imperium (1948) where he argued, “Thus it is, that both for material and spiritual reasons, nationalism of the 19th century type is dead. It is dead spiritually for the reason that Europe has reach in its Cultural development the stage of Imperium. Even if there were no such frightful outer threat as exists, this would still govern. But, in addition, the basis of the power of every one of the old Western nations has been destroyed. No single one has sufficient resources, spiritual or material, to engage in world-politics independently. Their only choice is to be vassals collectively, or to form a unity of Culture-State-Nation-Race-People. This creates automatically an economic-political-military unit.” Of course the Europa of today is a dystopian anti-Imperium of ethnocide and racial suicide that is ruled by culture-distorters, traitors, and perverts that flood the continent with hostile (and oftentimes rape-happy) low IQ racial aliens from the Global South, and promote every form of sexual degeneracy and social dysfunction while outlawing certain healthy nationalistic tendencies.  Surely, even the commie and anarchistic members of the French Resistance would not approve of the singularly degenerate frogland of today.

 Despite what one might may think of the Third Reich, it is hard to deny that Yockey was right when he argued that, “From 1940 to 1944, nearly all Europe was united, and the eventuation of the Second World War showed to the entire world the unity of Europe, for all Europe was defeated, despite the tricky attempt to make some parts of the West feel ‘victorious.’” Indeed, while the UK and France might have played their roles in successfully destroying Germany during WWII, it cost them everything as they lost their empires and their spirits and are today only a pathetic necrotizing shell of what they once were and are being fed on be virtually every type of brown maggot from around the world. Likewise, while Charles de Gaulle might have defeated his Nazi foes and went on to rule France for over two decades, by the late-1960s even he was seen as a sort of Nazi by the degenerate Americanized younger generation—the dreaded frog boomers—who would go on to transform the nation into the crime-and-terrorism-ridden multiculti nightmare that it is today. Despite Melville’s film’s message of Nazi cultural colonization, it is hard to imagine that France would be in a more culturally retarded, artistically autistic, spiritual sick, infertile, decrepit, and seemingly pre-apocalyptic state as it is today had Germany won the war, but of course most Frenchmen (and Europeans in general) lack the intellectual honesty, integrity, and courage to even consider such an idea, especially since the Third Reich has become a virtual scapegoat for the rest of Europe.  It is also probably no coincidence that the most powerful and successful pornographer in France today is a kosher chap named Greg Lansky that is infamous for his ‘Blacked’ videos where negroes defile white girls.  Somehow, it seems quite symbolic that, in a country where virtually all rapes are committed by Arabs and Africans, a Hebraic pornographer would get rich off my making grotesque interracial fuck flicks.

Notably, Vercors’ source novel has been adapted at least two other times, including a 1980 BBC English-language TV version and a French-Belgian TV movie version entitled Le Silence de la Mer (2004) directed by Pierre Boutron, with the latter rather cheaply focusing on the doomed romantic subplot between the German lieutenant and French niece. To understand the grand cinematic majesty of Melville’s adaptation one just need to compare it to the 2004 version, which has about as much aesthetic value as a MiniDV home-movie of WWII historical reenactors. Although he would admit in interviews that he would have directed a totally different type of film had he created it later in his career, Melville seems to have been proud of his first film as demonstrated by remarks like, “LE SILENCE DE LA MER is the work of professional, even if well-known professionals of the time—who have completely disappeared since—described the film as ‘amateur stuff.’”  Aside from considering it nearly immaculate in terms of its construction, I also regard Le Silence de la Mer as Melville's greatest film.  Indeed, after recently watch Melville's other WWII/Resistance-themed films like Léon Morin, Priest (1961) and Army of Shadows (1969), I cannot help but feel that the auteur reached his peak in terms of political messages and aesthetic innovation with his very first flick.  Additionally, despite being the work of a French Jew that lost a brother in WWII, I cannot think of another film that features a more nuanced and sympathetic ‘Nazi soldier,’ but I guess that is what one should expect from a right-wing Israelite that once stated in an interview on television, “I have friends who were once SS.”  Of course, Sam Fuller, who also fought in WWII, also depicted Germans in a somewhat more sympathetic manner in The Big Red One (1980) than most Jewish filmmakers.

If there is any body part that is most memorably focused on in Le Silence de la Mer, it is unquestionably eyes, namely those of Adolf Hitler (in portrait form) and lead actress Nicole Stéphane. What I found especially interesting about this is the strikingly similarities between Uncle Adolf and the Hebrewess' eyes. While I am bored with conspiracy theories, I cannot help but be reminded that Stéphane was a Rothschild (her real name was Baroness Nicole de Rothschild) and some people believe that Hitler was a Rothschild bastard. In fact, the speculation about Hitler's dubious heritage was first brought forward in The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (1972), which is not exactly conspiracy trash as it is based on a Office of Strategic Services (pre-CIA) prepared by German-American psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer during World War II.  While I find Stéphane to be annoyingly unattractive, not least of all because her Sapphic sensibility is always apparent, she demonstrates a sort of understated sensitivity that I think lifelong cinephile Hitler could have appreciated; whether he is actually related to her or not.

Accordingly to Melville himself, Le Silence de la Mer was made completely independently without unions and he agreed to burn the print of the film if it was rejected by a single member of a jury of ex-Resistance fighters selected by source writer Vercors, who was initially against the adapting of the novel despite allowing the then-novice auteur to use his home as the main location for the film. Luckily, the jury apparently loved the film, though it would be two years before it was actually released (indeed, the auteur started production on the film on August 11, 1947 in a shoot that would last 27 days). Considering its source novel, auteur, and the year it was shot, one could certainly argue that Le Silence de la Mer is the French World War II film par excellence. I certainly cannot think of a superior French WWII flick and I say that as someone that appreciates classics like Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Malle's Lacombe, Lucien (1974). Notably, Nietzsche once wrote, “History belongs to the living man in three respects: it belongs to him so far as he is active and striving, so far as he preserves and admires, and so far as he suffers and is in need of liberation.” Undoubtedly, Nietzsche's words certainly correspond to Melville and his lifelong relation to WWII, with his films undoubtedly providing him a certain liberation from suffering (which he seemed to hide quite well). Going back to Nietzsche once more, I think the greatest complement I can pay Le Silence de la Mer is that it succeeds in the Nietzschean historical sense as it fulfills the advice of the Teutonic philsopher that, “If you want to strive for and promote the culture of a people, then strive for and promote this higher unity and work to annihilate modern pseudo-culture in favor of a true culture; dare to devote some thought to the problem of restoring the health of a people which has been impaired by history, to how it may recover its instincts and therewith its integrity.”

-Ty E

Cop

Undoubtedly, it is a sick yet rather fitting irony that mainstream Hollywood movie like, say, John Wick (2014), are oftentimes advertised with the line “From the Producers of…,” as if producers are the true auteurs and were not oftentimes behind destroying films and/or taking them away from their directors.  As cinema history has demonstrated, producers are rarely artistic people.  Sure, there are important historical film figures like D.W. Griffith, Alexander Korda and Stanley Kubrick that both produced and directed, but they typically did this as a means to maintain artistic control of their films and not simply because they were opportunistic producers that used their clout as a means to later establish a film directing career. Indeed, it is no coincidence that very few producers would go onto to become directors, though many have surely tried, including figures ranging from Bernd Eichinger to Richard D. Zanuck’s widow Lili Fini Zanuck to Denise Di Novi, but probably none of these individuals are quite as interesting and neglected as Kubrick’s early career producer James B. Harris. Indeed, as been mentioned by many people writing about the producer turned director, Kubrick once remarked to Harris, who collaborated with him on such classics as Paths of Glory (1957) and Lolita (1962), in late 1962 that, “You’ll never know complete satisfaction until you’ve tried your hand at directing,” which he ultimately accomplished only a couple years later with his little-seen Anglo-American Melvillian Cold War thriller The Bedford Incident (1965) starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier. While Harris arguably achieved his greatest and certainly his most idiosyncratic artistic success with his second feature Some Call It Loving (1973) aka Sleeping Beauty—a sort of similarly esoteric counterpart to his former partner Kubrick’s somewhat uneven swansong Eyes Wide Shut (1999)—Harris’ fourth feature Cop (1988) probably best epitomizes his talents and signature traits as a filmmaker that perfected pulp during an era when the true grit of such tasteful trash had certainly fallen out of vogue. 

 Based on the dark crime novel Blood on the Moon (1984) by James Ellroy—the first book in the writer's Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy—the film is a gleefully politically incorrect 1980s noir-ish crime-drama that acts as a sort of wonderfully venomous antidote to the fun, sun, and flashy neon multiculturalism of Miami Vice. Grittier and all-around superior to Curtis Hanson’s much better known Ellroy adaptation L.A. Confidential (1997), the film also arguably has a secondary auteur in the form of James Woods, who not only played the eponymous lead but also acted as its co-producer (notably, the actor also starred in Harris’ previous film Fast-Walking (1982) in a vaguely similar role). Of course, considering Woods’ relatively recent virtual blacklisting from Hollywood due to his right-wing political views and battles with liberals, communists, and antifa losers on Twitter, Cop—a film with a titular LAPD detective that is among the most radically ‘reactionary’ and culturally pessimistic police officers in cinema history—features, in many ways, the actor in what is arguably the most fitting and fully realized role of his entire rather singular career.  In short, it feels like Woods was born to play the lead.  Indeed, as much as I love William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), it seems like Michael Bay’s Bad Boys (1995) when compared to the uncompromising cynicism and misanthropy of Harris’ film. Like an all the more morally dubious thinking man’s Death Wish (1974) featuring an 1980s West Coast take on the completely cracked cop-driven cultural cynicism of The French Connection (1971), albeit with more respect for cops, the film makes nods to various crime sub-genres while also subtly commenting on said sub-genres without seeming even remotely pretentious or overly intellectual.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that Cop is a cop's cop film, so long as the cop is not an uptight by-the-book type.

Notably, at the very beginning of his 3 out of 4 star review of the film, Roger Ebert—a man whose girth was only transcended by his tendency to get preposterously offended by films like some uppity queen—argued, “Anyone without a history of watching James Woods in the movies might easily misread COP. They might think this is simply a violent, sick, contrived exploitation picture, and that would certainly be an accurate description of its surfaces. But Woods operates in this movie almost as if he were writing his own footnotes. He uses his personality, his voice and his quirky sense of humor to undermine the material and comment on it, until COP becomes an essay on this whole genre of movie. And then, with the movie’s startling last shot, Woods slams shut the book.” Luckily for viewers, especially of the less than intellectually gifted sort, the film is certainly no academic study, let alone any sort of serious art film, yet it does bring a certain unrivaled refinement to cultural pessimism and social decay; ingredients that any real-life cop is all too familiar with. Probably unlike a large majority of viewers, I have a certain personal familiarity with police officers to distinguish the difference between tawdry Tinseltown buffoonery and a certain psychological realism and nuance of character that makes the film believable enough to those familiar with real-life men in blue. While films based on the works of real-life cop turned novelist Joseph Wambaugh like The New Centurions (1972) and The Onion Field (1979) also starring Woods, demonstrate a certain matter-of-fact respect for the law enforcement trade, Cop almost achieves a sort of almost metaphysical understanding of the sort of dispirited spirit that comes with spending many years cavorting with coke-addled hookers and dodging bullets from crack-addled renegade negro thugs. Indeed, in its no-holds-barred approach to depicting a Hollywood inhabited by corrupt cocksucking cops, quasi-autistic artsy fartsy serial killers, and low-rent crooks, the film is as anti-Hollywood as 1980s films come and in the tradition of the great nihilistic works of classic film noir. 

 Although it might seem like a peculiar theme for a neo-noir featuring a policeman as an antihero, one of the most potent central themes of Cop is that it takes a rather brutal approach to depicting the perils of Princess Syndrome (PS) and female entitlement and how these things have created a world of exceedingly unhappy women that sometimes grow up to be hookers or, even worse, feminists, due to the high expectations that society instilled in them as impressionable little girls. Indeed, the titular propagandist is so disgusted with the way that society lies to children about the reality of the world that, to the chagrin of his wife, he excitedly tells his daughter brutal police stories each night before bed as an entertaining way to expose her to the harsh realities of the world. In fact, he notably sums up his rather pessimistic worldview to his unsympathetic wife as follows, “Let me tell you something you should get through your head. They’re all little girls, Jen. Every one of them. Every one of those pathetic souls who eventually does herself in is a little girl. Every neurotic who lies on a couch…and pays some asshole shrink good money to listen to her bullshit is a little girl. Every hooker out hustling her ass for a pimp…who winds up with a dyke, a habit, or wasted by some psychopath, is a little girl. All these little girls have one thing in common. You know what that is? Disillusionment. And it always comes from the same thing, expectations. The greatest woman-killer of all time. A terminal disease that starts way back when they’re all just little girls. When they’re being fed all the bullshit…about being entitled to happiness like it’s a birthright. That’s what you don’t understand…when to stop perpetrating the myths that ruin their lives. Innocence kills, Jen. Believe me. It kills. I see it every fucking day of my life.”

 While the antihero is a reasonably violent man that regularly kills criminals and cheats on his wife, the film reveals that he is completely right when it comes to female disillusionment. While the antihero is a sort of ruthless realist-cum-pessimist that can smell bullshit a mile away, it is, somewhat ironically, a romantic poet that is depicted as an unhinged lunatic and pathological serial killer in what can be possibly interpreted as director Harris' (possibly unconscious) view of ‘artiste’ types. In other words, in the world of Cop, only irrational women and psychopaths are crazy enough to believe that there is still romance and beauty in the world. Needless to say, the film also reveals that there is a very fine line between cops and criminals and that there is no such thing as heroes; just guys that are hard and tough enough to take out the subhuman trash.  Indeed, James Wood’s unforgettable eponymous character is less a hero than a rabid social watchdog that has developed a decidedly dehumanizing talent for hunting down sick and criminal minds.  Indeed, if the antihero were not a cop, he would probably be some sort of hit man or organized crime leader.

You immediately know that Cop is not a movie for leftists, ethno-masochists, and pussies because the opening credits is juxtaposed with a laughably idiotic 911 call from some unseen gangster negro that bitches to the operator, “I should be home, like, watching THE FLINTSTONES, or some shit,” and then nonchalantly confesses his criminal trade while reporting a murder, stating, “I was gonna hit this place in Hollywood until I seen what was inside. Heavy shit went down in there, man. Like something out of a Peckinpah movie. You better send some cops right away to Aloha Regency, Apartment B.” The scenario that the nameless/faceless negro is talking about is less like something out of a Peckinpah movie than something out of Tobe Hopper’s classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), as the grisly scene in question involves a female corpse hanging upside from a ceiling like a gutted cow carcass.  The film's antihero, LAPD detective Sgt. Lloyd Hopkins (James Woods), is the first people to arrive at the crime scene and he almost immediately comes to the conclusion that the victim was killed by some sort of art fag serial killer due a piece of poetry he soon finds addressed to her that reads, “You grieved me more than all the rest.” As Hopkins soon discovers while looking around her apartment, the victim was a feminist journalist named Julia Niemeyer that owned feminist polemics with absurd titles like Rage in the Womb.  Notably, Hopkins spends a great deal of time at the crime scene before contacting his police department, as if he needs to personally meditate on the madness of the murder by himself without any distractions, especially not the stupid theories of other cops. All these clues will ultimately lead Hopkins to hot babes that he fucks or wants to fuck, as the antihero is certainly a man that likes to both work hard and play hard, though it seems he actually prefers the former as ‘workaholic’ would be too bland and generic of a description for the fanatically enterprising antihero. Unlike the killer, who is some warped male feminist type, Hopkins really cares about women, or as his much despised Christian boss Captain Fred Gaffney (Raymond J. Barry)—an uptight asshole and bozo bureaucrat that prides himself on playing by the rules—complains to him, “Everyone knows you have a wild hair up your ass about murdered women.” In short, Hopkins, who is a great cop that is not beneath fighting dirty, makes it his personal mission to catch the serial killer and he more or less destroys his entire life in the process, but such is the price of such uncompromising fanaticism. 

Aside from his quite predatory desire to catch the killer, Hopkins does not seem all that worried about completely ruining his life because his personal life is pretty much in shambles. Indeed, after his wife Jen (Jan McGill) catches him telling their prepubescent daughter Penny about a personal police story about a “queen who did full drag” and “ripped off about $5,000 in cash and a shitload of pharmaceutical speed and heavyweight downers…in less than a month,” the two get in a heated verbal dispute where the antihero discusses the deleterious effects of telling fairy tales like ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ to little girls and how it can only end in bitter disillusionment. When his wife tells him, “Lloyd, I think you’re a very sick man…in need of some real help,” Hopkins, who seems to have nil sexual desire for his wife despite his overall virility, skips bed to go on a stakeout with his best friend ‘Dutch’ (Charles Durning).  Hopkins is such good buds with Dutch—a fat, white-haired, and somewhat unintentionally goofy yet smart and loyal chap that is nearing retirement—that he hooks him up with hot hookers to hump, as the two have a natural intuitive bond despite being somewhat of opposites in terms of character.  Indeed, quite unlike Dutch, Hopkins sometimes has a problem with self-control and tact, among other things, hence their natural chemistry as partners.

Needless to say, Hopkins is more than a little bit upset when his wife steals their daughter and runs off to some unknown location in San Francisco, or as she describes in a quite condescending letter that she leaves for him, “I know that you and I have not communicated for a long, long time and I’m not sure that we can again, as our values are completely different. You’re a deeply disturbed person and I cannot allow you to pass your disturbance on to Penny. I’m withholding our address in San Francisco…until I am certain you will not try to do anything rash.” Clearly no longer in love with his frigid and seemingly perennially bitchy wife and not one to waste a good opportunity, Hopkins almost immediately starts an extramarital excursion after his spouse absconds to Sod Francisco. The sort of cop that cannot help but dwell in the gutter, Hopkins gets involved with a beauteous blonde 35-year-old failed actress turned hooker named Joanie Pratt (Randi Brooks)—a character that acts as a slightly more exciting spin on the ‘whore with a heart of gold’ trope—that is connected to Niemeyer murder. As she describes to Hopkins, Joanie is responsible for setting up scam-like “floating swingers’ parties” where rich swinger pay $200 a party to fuck and buy drugs and Niemeyer was attending these parties as an investigative journalist with the intent of researching for a book on the seedy scene. Luckily for Hopkins, Joanie is so happy to help that she practically begs for the antihero to fuck her, which he quickly does from the comfort of her kitchen counter. Rather unfortunately, it is not long before the serial killer violently mutilates and murders Joanie just to fuck with Hopkins.  Indeed, unbeknownst to Hopkins, the killer is monitoring him at the same time the antihero is trying to uncover the puzzle of his identity.

While far from a cucked out male feminist that loathes members of his own sex, Hopkins—an all-around tenacious alpha-male that knows how to get a woman's attention—has no problem enticing a painfully introverted male-hating feminist bookstore owner named Kathleen McCarthy (Lesley Ann Warren). Although Hopkins initially goes to see Kathleen about the book Rage in the Womb since she is the only local seller in town and she instantly acts quite combative with him and accuses him of trying to infiltrate her seemingly imaginary gynocentric movement since he is a member of law enforcement, the protagonist only needs a couple minutes to put her at ease and entice her to softly state, “I’d like to help any way I can. Really.” As for the book Hopkins is interested in, Kathleen states, “RAGE IN THE WOMB is an angry book. It’s a polemic…a broadside against many things, violence perpetuated on women in specific. I think I sold my last copy a month ago. I don’t think I’ve ever sold a copy to a man. Actually…I don’t think I…I’ve had a single man in his 30s in here…Never.”

Adopting rather solitary feminist lifestyle after being gang-raped in high school, Kathleen—a clearly quite broken woman that seems to be afraid of making real human connections, especially with men—certainly intrigues Hopkins with her tragic past, though it is not until much later in the film that the antihero realizes that the killer is actually a warped male feminist that also happens to be a secret admirer of the mousy book dealer. Indeed, as it turns out in what ultimately proves to be an all-too-convenient coincidence, Kathleen, Hopkins, and the killer all went to the same exact high school. In between sending her flowers and poems, the killer kills woman out of a warped and deluded belief that they are the sort of chicks that abandoned her after she was raped. In high school, Kathleen led a court of female poets and these girls supposedly betrayed her after she was gang-raped, which the serial killer apparently personally witnessed, hence his pathological need for revenge against both males and especially females. For 15 pathetic years, the killer has been worshiping Kathleen from afar because, as he eventually confesses in a creepy soft-spoken fashion, “She’s not like all the rest.” Unlike the killer, Hopkins wastes no time in attempting to get into Kathleen’s panties and almost does so the first night they are together, though the antihero rudely leaves her hanging while she takes a warm bath and smokes dope lest she “tense up” during coitus due to her post-rape anxiety issues.  Indeed, somewhat absurdly, Hopkins absconds from Kathleen's home and thus loses his opportunity at premium grade misandrist meat curtain after he discovers a lead in the case involving a corrupt street cop and homo hustler that were part of her class. 

As Hopkins eventually uncovers in a less than legal fashion, a corrupt street cop named Deputy Sheriff Delbert "Whitey" Haines (Charles Haid) and a poof prostitute named Lawrence 'Birdman' Henderson (Dennis Stewart), who were pals in high school, were two of the men responsible for gang-raping Kathleen in high school. Unfortunately, both men are killed before they can be brought to justice, as the serial killer conveniently murders Birdman and Hopkins is forced to kill Whitey after he dares to pull a shotgun on him after being confronted about his crimes. Of course, at this point, Hopkins is positive that the serial killer is someone that attended Kathleen’s high school, but the feminist book peddler refuses to cooperate with him due to not only leaving her high and dry sexually, but also because he broke into her apartment while hunting for clues relating to her high school experiences. With the support of Dutch, Kathleen eventually agrees to look at old yearbook photos of various guys she went to high school with against a cross-reference of suspects, though she refuses to acknowledge any of them as potential suspects even though a dapper chap named ‘Robert Franco’ that is listed as a “Poet Laureate” clearly catches her eyes.  Seeing as Kathleen suffers the delusion that she loves her longtime secret admirer and is unwilling to believe he is a serial killer, she naturally does not want Hopkins to hound him.

 Not long after she leaves the interrogation room, Kathleen is caught by Hopkins talking to Franco on a payphone as she is attempting to warn her assumed secret admirer of the crooked cop’s obsession with him. When Franco states to Hopkins, “Let her go, Hopkins. She’s not like all the rest” after the protagonist grabs the phone and then proposes a “reunion” at their ex-high school, Kathleen gets the shock of a lifetime when she finally realizes that he secret admirer is indeed the killer. When Kathleen asks Hopkins if he plans to kill Franco, the corrupt cop, who has just been suspended due to his underhanded policing techniques, replies in a suavely sarcastic fashion, “I don’t know. Maybe this time you’ll get to send him the flowers.” As for the reunion, Franco demonstrates a prowess for martial arts and killing gangsters, but he ultimately foolishly runs out of bullets for his MAC-10 machine pistol and thus is forced to suffer the grand indignity of having to ‘surrender’ to his hunter. Although Franco prepares to turn himself in by snidely remarking, “Aren’t you going to read me my rights? Cuff me? Take me into custody? What’s it to you, Hopkins? You’re a cop. You’ve got to take me in,” Hopkins is not the sort of fellow that likes to play games and reminds him that he is not a ‘by-the-books’ kind of cop by declaring, “Well there's some good news and there's some bad news. The good news is, you're right, I'm a cop and I have to take you in. The bad news is I've been suspended and I don't give a fuck!” just before unloading three shotgun rounds into the killer, thus bringing an inordinately satisfyingly fucked conclusion to one satisfying fucked film. 

While I am not even sure it was a totally conscious decision on auteur Harris’ part, I would argue that the greatest theme depicted is Cop is the timeless dichotomy between the extroverted alpha-male type and the introverted beta-male and how the latter is ultimately the more loathsome, repugnant, and pathetic of the two classic archetypal figures. Additionally, the film also similarly demonstrates that the masculine ‘misogynist’ ultimately loves and cares more about women than the feminist ‘nice guy’ archetype. Of course, the film is also features a less than favorable depiction of queers, as the second most loathsome character in the entire film aside from the serial killer is a closet cocksucker cop that has S&M leather-fag gear lying around his apartment. Undoubtedly, compared to Cop, director Harris’ subsequent film and celluloid swansong Boiling Point (1993)—a mostly banal effort in politically correct casting the stars Wesley Snipes as an inordinately stoic colored super cop that takes down blond white sociopaths portrayed by Dennis Hopper and a very young and super Aryan-looking Viggo Mortensen—seems like a sad and pathetic artistic compromise meant to appeal the insipid cultural marxist socio-political agenda of Hollywood (notably, Harris has revealed in various interviews that the studio took the film away from him and butchered it). In fact, I do not think it would be a stretch to conclude that Harris directed Boiling Point simply due to its potential mainstream appeal because, as he admitted in a 2017 interview at MUBI in regard to his early success with Kubrick, “I think it ruined me. I was determined to produce projects of social importance. That’s why you see large gaps in my filmography. There’s a decade between SOME CALL IT LOVING and FAST-WALKING. I could have had a larger body of work, but I didn’t listen to any of the agents who sent mainstream projects my way or offered to put attractive deals together with their hot clients.” Of course, coincidentally, there is just as larger gaps in between films when it comes to Harris’ buddy Kubrick’s career. 

Undoubtedly, if there is any underlying philosophy behind Cop, it is probably best summed up by German literary maestro Ernst Jünger words, “Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.”  Indeed, the film's protagonist has stoically accepted the world is an ever-degenerating shithole full of societal decay and misery yet he manages to squeeze in a couple ecstatic fuck sessions with rather ravishing bimbos in between kicking ass and taking names.  In fact, I would argue that the titular antihero portrayed by James Woods is a sort of primitive blue collar equivalent to Jünger figure of the ‘Anarch,’ which is a sort of metaphysical ideal figure of a sovereign individual in the Teutonic ‘conservative’ sense. As Jünger argued in his novel Eumeswil (1977), “The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly,” which is probably a good way to describe the antihero's own preternatural thinking. Clearly, the film’s protagonist has little concern for the law, which he constantly breaks to ironically bust lawbreakers, but instead completing his job and sticking to his own distinct moral code, thus he would probably understand Jünger’s words, “I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it,” as he would probably be gunning down criminals 24/7 if he did not have some superficial legal guideline that he liberally followed.  Likewise, “I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in,” attests to the character's need for renegade justice in the face of injustice. Additionally, Woods’ character certainly lives by the words, “The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file.” 

While his wife and various other characters accuse him of being ‘sick’ due to his rather culturally pessimistic Weltanschauung, the titular antihero of Cop is nothing if not someone that has cultivated an appropriate attitude to a sick and savage urban jungle, or as the late great Colombian ‘reactionary’ writer Nicolás Gómez Dávila once profoundly argued, “Adaptation to the modern world requires sclerosis of sensibility and degradation of character.” After all, one would have to be exceptionally sick and/or emotionally catatonic to be unresponsive to a world that is increasingly morally necrotic, racially and culturally apocalyptic, increasingly sub-literate, and mostly aesthetically bankrupt. While the film’s protagonist sees little good in society, he would not be such an effective cop were it not for his low expectations for humanity in general because, as Dávila rather rightly argued, “Optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle.”

The only real complaint I have about Cop is that it is not quite as dark and subversive as James Ellroy’s source novel Blood on the Moon (1984), which is somewhat curious when one considers that Tom Hanks of all people confessed in an October 13,2017 New York Times interview that he would be interested in playing the novel’s lead Lloyd Hopkins on the stage or screen. For example, the protagonist is more overtly degenerate in the novel, which was apparently initially rejected by 17 different publishers, as demonstrated by the following hilarious multicultural blowjob excerpt, “He found a Negro prostitute at the corner of Western and Adams who was willing to do the deed for ten dollars, and they drove to a side street and parked. Lloyd screamed when he came, frightening the hooker, who bolted out of the car before she could collect her money.” As much as I am disgusted at the thought of fellatio involving an assumedly STD-ridden street negress, this brief excerpt reveals the hardcore essence of the novel which, for obvious reasons, Harris was not fully able to cinematically disseminate. Not surprisingly, Harris was largely enticed to adapt the novel because of its less than politically correct tone, or as he explained in an interview with Nick Pinkerton at Film Comment, “I love the character of the cop who pushes the envelope, that could get suspended any time, works on his own, is so obsessed with successfully getting the criminal […] And I liked the scenes. Some books you read and you don’t see anything you feel you can dramatize effectively. This book had real scenes—like the moment where the cop tells a crime scene bedtime story to his kid. We got a really young kid, so that it would seem outrageous for her to be hearing these stories about breaking and entering and murder. That’s what attracted me to the material, the potential of scenes, the arguments with the wife, Lesley’s character calling him a ‘police person.’ I wanted to make fun of all of that Women’s Lib shit that was so hot at the time.” As for what Ellroy thought of the film, he apparently was not initially happy with it but as Harris explained in the same interview, “We made the picture for very little. We got everyone to cooperate, to work for reasonable salaries. It was Ellroy’s first film, and I don’t think he knew how to handle it when he first saw it. He said he didn’t care for the film when he first saw it. But later he said everybody told him that the picture was terrific, and he went back and reevaluated it and said he liked it now, in fact I think he took the film on a tour to England, through several cities, and he screened the film as an example of a good adaptation. As it turned out, we had a good relationship, and I ended up acquiring THE BLACK DAHLIA from him as well.”

As far as I am concerned, Harris is a seemingly mostly unartistic yet highly intuitive and street smart individual that has managed to direct three great underrated films that almost manage to elevate pulp to the level of poetry.  If Harris learned anything from his buddy Kubrick, it was finding the right source material to adapt. Of course, Harris' choice of material also demonstrates he was more subversive and morally dubious than Kubrick, which is arguably his greatest strength as a filmmaker.  Indeed, whereas Kubrick seemed coldly disgusted and pessimistic about humanity (notably, the director-producer team once planned to adopt the lost Jim Thompson novella Lunatic at Large), Harris seems to have wallowed in the grit, grime, and slime of humanity as demonstrated by the mirthfully mad essences of Fast-Walking and Cop.  In fact, only in Some Call It Loving, which is undoubtedly both the director's most personal and perverse film, does Harris reveal a certain foreboding dejection and melancholy.  A sort of never fully developed master of brutally honest cinematic art for proles, Harris' rather simple and unpretentious films arguably demonstrate that Dávila was right when he wrote, “Poetry has died, asphyxiated by metaphors.”

As to the value of so-called ‘corrupt cops,’ German-American sage H.L. Mencken arguably said it best when he wrote in 1931, “The curse of the cops, speaking professionally, is the sensitiveness of the district attorney's office to political and other pressure. Every day they see perfectly good cases fall to pieces in the courtroom. As a result of their most arduous labors, sometimes at the risk of their lives, go for naught, and they are naturally upset and full of woe. Not infrequently they beat up a prisoner because they fear that he will be able to escape any other punishment. They know that he is guilty, but they also know that he has a sharp lawyer, so they fan him while they have him. This fanning — or massaging, as they call it — is greatly dreaded by criminals.”  Aside from misguided liberal morons and certain types of sociopaths, serial killers, and serial killer fetishists, I think most people would agree with the titular antihero's final actions at the quite literally explosive conclusion of Harris' film.  In a morally inverted world with an alien-owned mainstream media that incessantly transforms negro thugs into Christlike martyrs and constantly demonizes police officers as sort of pathologically genocidal neo-Gestapo demons, Cop is almost as refreshing as waking up to a sloppy wet blowjob, which is certainly something that Lloyd Hopkins could appreciate.

-Ty E