WR: Mysteries of the Organism

Out of all the messianic psychoanalysts with godlike complexes, Freudian-Marxist Wilhelm Reich – a funny fellow who genuinely believed “not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency,” that National Socialism was the result of sexual repression (as if Joseph Goebbels was not a big enough man whore), and that “orgone” (aka orgasm) energy was a ‘cosmic energy’ which uneducated laymen described as ‘God’ – takes the kosher cake for being the biggest crackpot of the pseudo-scientific psychoanalytic movement, so it is no surprised that, unlike Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, the salacious soul-doctor is relatively unknown today and rarely acknowledged in academia, which is at least in part due to the embarrassingly dogmatic nature of his sex-obsessed ideas and his perverse and ultimately pathetic personal life. By the 1930s, Reich had become a bad joke of sorts among his fellow psychoanalysts, not least of all due to his ‘hands on’ approach with nude patients (a number of whom become submissive sex partners and would perform illegal abortions with at least one ending in the individual's death, all at the good doctor's command) so, on top of wanting to escape from the Hebrew-hostile National Socialists, the quaint quack moved to the United States in 1939 and was eventually convicted of mail fraud in 1956 for illegally shipping ‘orgone accumulators’ and related schizoid literature after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of such dubious pseudo-scientific materials, thus he was imprisoned and died shamefully of a heart attack not long after. In Serbian auteur filmmaker Dušan Makavejev’s (Man is Not a Bird, Montenegro) Reichian film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) aka W.R. - Misterije organizma – a delightfully deranged dichotomous cinematic work that is half documentary and half sardonic/surrealist fantasy flick – a naively noble but ultimately laughable attempt is made to rehabilitate Wilhelm Reich and his work and satirize the ‘impure communism’ of corrupt comrade Joseph Stalin in an exceedingly eccentric and sexually excessive manner that makes for an undeniably enthralling aesthetic and thematic experience, even if you're the sort of individual who concurs with the sentiment, "Better Dead Than Red." Banned in Makavejev's homeland of what was then Yugoslavia for its apparently blasphemous portrayal of bolshevism and sexuality, and inevitably resulting in the director’s exile from the country for nearly two decades, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism is a startlingly subversive cinematic work more in the spirit of unhinged anti-Occidental anarchism than an intellectually competent cry for so-called ‘pure communism’ – the argument made by all Marxist fanboys when one mentions that some 100+ million people died during the twentieth century due to Marxist regimes – thus making it a movie that makes the unintentional argument that artists do not always make for great political minds or at least that is what one can only conclude after someone makes the more than dubious argument that, "Only Revolution Ends War!"

Beginning with the quote, “This film is, in part, a personal response to the life and teachings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)…Studying orgasmic reflex, as Sigmund Freud’s first assistant, Reich discovered life energy, revealing the deep roots of fear of freedom, fear of truth, and fear of love in contemporary humans. All his life, Reich fought against pornography in sex and politics. He believed in work-democracy, in an organic society based on liberated work and love,” W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism sets up a sentimental idealist tone that is ultimately at odds with the satirically titillating and sometimes tragicomedic absurdism that shines throughout the work, at least as far as the fictional fantasy component of the film is concerned. Featuring narration of what sounds like the words of a wanton witch doctor with the pseudo-scientific psychobabble of a quote, “Cancer is the hysteria of cells condemned to death. Cancer and fascism are closely related. Fascism is the frenzy of sexual cripples. The swastika owes its magnetism to being a symbol of two bodies locked in genital embrace. It all stems from a longing from love…,” W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism establishes early on that Reich – a man whose own daughter argued that his lifelong obsession with sex was the result of being molested as a child – stressed sex over science and sex over love. Reich oddly believed that communism and ‘free love’ were intrinsically compatible and Makavejev's W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism makes the patently absurd argument that communism failed in Eastern Europe because the Soviets abandoned this perverse Trotskyite principle of psychological enslavement via sexual obsession (a strategy also used by Hollywood). Featuring cameos from counter-culture figures ranging from hideous Hebrew Tuli Kupferberg as a psychotic soldier who parades around his gun as a pseudo-phallic device while antagonistically annoying Wall Street businessmen in a scene that attempts to argue that ‘sexual frustration and violence’ are interconnected, as well as Warhol Superstar/tranny Jackie Curtis as an example of Reich’s ideas on aberrant sexuality, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism makes it clear that atheistic left-wing Ashkenazis and cynical, sexually ambiguous drug addicts should be the real heroes of Bolshevism and not heroic war heroes who did their own fair of orgone energy transferring raping German girls at the conclusion (and for some time afterward) of the Second World War.

 Undoubtedly, the fictional narrative-driven segment of W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism has aged the most gracefully, because otherwise this determinedly degenerate démodé celluloid work would be nothing more than an inanely idealistic left-wing equivalent to a Mondo Cane documentary without it, hence why the director's subsequent effort, Sweet Movie (1974) – a more narrative-based and comedic work – has aged more gracefully. The strikingly sardonic segment of W.R. Mysteries of the Organism focuses on a young and beautiful Yugoslavian madam of Marxism named Milena (Milena Dravić) who falls from Bolshevik grace after becoming enamored with a nefarious and narcissistic Stalinist ice skater named Vladimir Ilyich (Ivica Vidović) whose personal fame has led him to feel superior to the people of the workers' revolution. Hopelessly tainted by Western capitalism as a corrupt Superstar and cult of personality in the spirit of Stalin (old Soviet propaganda films about the ‘man of steel’ are inter-spliced in the film) who is not a lover of the people, but merely a man possessed by sacrilegious self-love that reaches it zenith when he decapitates the star-crossed woman who loves him via the blade of his ice skate. Indeed, once Milena had to do more for ‘love’ than merely spread her legs and spout manic Marxist dribble, the commie dream went down the drain faster than comrade Trotsky did after having a ice-pick driven through the back of his head, or as her decapitated head states quit eloquently, “Cosmic rays streamed through our coupled bodies. We pulsated to the vibrations of the universe. But he couldn’t bear it. He had to go one step further. Vladimir is a man of noble impetuousness…a man of great ambition…and immense energy. He’s romantic, ascetic, a genuine Red Fascist. Comrades…even now I’m not ashamed of my communist past.”

Indeed, what better way for a committed commie to discredit a piece of unflattering history than by describing it as ‘Red Fascism,’ or an individual like Uncle Joe as a ‘Red Fascist’ as such is the case in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism; a quite kooky and obscenely outlandish  anti-Stalinist communist propaganda flick of the peculiar ‘Red Reichian’ persuasion that, due to its rather absurd ‘objective’ and ‘message,’ one must respect auteur Dušan Makavejev for his sheer audacity because had he made this film only a couple decades before, he would surely have ended up in a Gulag for being one of those “rootless cosmopolitan” types. As one of the female narrators states early on in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, Reich’s Maine-based research center ‘Orgonon’ did not exactly have the best reputation as apparently, “Rumor called it a secret Jewish organization that was masturbating patients in Orgone accumulators, experimenting on children kept in cages, and plotting to introduce work-democracy.” Of course, as the historical record shows, all these rumors, including rampant sexual abuse at the so-called Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC) that was even vouched for by Reich’s unfortunate son Peter’s autobiography Book of Dreams (1973), were more or less true and in many cases far worse than the rumors would lead one to believe. By the end of his life, Reich’s mental health had declined so far that UFOs were waging war against the planet earth and mankind and he personally was engaged in a "full-scale interplanetary battle" with these evil extraterrestrials via his trusty ‘Cloudbuster’ (an ‘invention’ Reich said could cause rain by manipulating ‘orgasmic energy’ in the atmosphere). Of course, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism – with its experiments in ‘cock casting’ (a mold is made of a porn director/producer named Jim ‘Debbie Does Dallas’ Buckley’s erect penis to ‘prove’ the artist’s sexual contact with a famous man), candid talks with tragic tranny Warhol Superstars like Jack Curtis (who died of a heroin overdose at the age of 38), underground magazine editors for Screw magazine ‘working in the nude,’ a hack artist named Betty Dodson whose only aesthetic inspiration is masturbation and who sincerely believed, “When it comes to sex, all women are gay,” and uniquely ugly ‘performance artist’ Tuli Kupferberg of the foully farcical hippie degenerate band The Fugs running around in neo-Vaudevillian manner as if he knows what it means to be a soldier as a passive wilted flower child – does not exactly make for the most logical, nor politically or scientifically sound argument for a ‘free love’ boner-based Bolshevik revolution. After all, people who spend their times fucking all day don’t tend to get much work done and those sexually repressive communist dictatorships of the past sure had their fair share of genocidal famines, so I doubt a group of 'dumpster-diving' hippies would be much better.

-Ty E

Sweet Movie

Very possibly the most visually and thematically subversive and politically iconoclastic and esoteric “avant-garde black comedy” ever made, Sweet Movie (1974) directed by Serbian auteur Dušan Makavejev (Montenegro, The Coca−Cola Kid) is undoubtedly one of those rare aberrant arthouse films that appeals to both patently pretentious cinephiles of the extreme left who regard Marixst auteur Jean-Luc Godard as their cinematic savior, as well as depraved and socio-politically unconscious exploitation film burnouts who regard Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) as their 'Citizen Kane' and Jap scat as their closest thing to spirituality, and are just looking to feel even the slightest bit of activity in their irrevocably intemperate and innately impure souls, thus making this self-described sugar-coated piece of sordid Serb-concocted cinema an ideally idiosyncratic celluloid feast, albeit one that might cause you to ‘do the technicolor yawn.’ The first film Makavejev directed after being exiled from his now-defunct multicultural nation of Yugoslavia for his similarly cinematically seditious work W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) – a film about the lurid and loony link between Marxism and subversive sexuality featuring pro-incest/anti-fascist Jewish Marxist/psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich as its central subject – Sweet Movie is a Canadian production that was partially funded by the National Film Board of Canada and is a part ‘anti-communist, communist’ cinematic manifesto and part rabid renegade attack against anti-revolutionary sexual repression of Western capitalism and its cuckold cousin, contemporary communism. Sweet Movie is indubitably a cinematic work with a metaphysical message most directly directed to the populous of Makavejev’s homeland and other Soviet satellite states, yet is so aesthetically audacious, sickly salacious, and cleverly crafted that one need not be a downtrodden Slav slave of the degenerate commie dystopia realm to enjoy it. A marvelously mad piece of classic yet morally corrupted celluloid montage centering on two stories about two different but inevitably equally warped women – a virginal model with a glowing golden pussy who is despoiled by a diverse collection of capitalist pigs around the materialistic globalized Occidental world and a female pedophile ship captain with a sick obsession with sex, candy, and communism – Sweet Movie is a delightful and deranged piece of dichotomous cinema that reminds the viewer how the two big business c’s (capitalism and communism) have literally and figuratively fucked the world to the point where the other two big biological c's (cocks and cunts) have been so perverted, misused, and abused that everyone seems to have forgotten to use them in the traditional way by uniting them. In short, Sweet Movie is probably the only film ever made that can be simultaneously appreciated by fetishistic scat fiends, fascist libertines, cosmopolitan commies into coprophilia and racial cuckoldry, and stoic fans of cinema and/or twentieth century world history.

Miss Monde 1984/Miss Canada (Carole Laure) seems like a lucky gal, at least upon her initial appearance in Sweet Movie as a 'sweet' lady who has a radiant rosebud and a holy hymen that is still intact, thus allowing her to beat a wild Negress, Miss Congo (a woman who wears bananas as a skirt) and a barbarous and butch Miss Yugoslavia in a super satirical "most virgin" contest – a patently perverse pageant of pussy parading that is symbolic of the sexually impotent and fiercely fetishistic capitalist West's absurd obsession with the preposterous 'virginal whore' archetype – where each contestant's cunt its meticulously examined in a sterile, sexless Annie Sprinkle-sideshow-style 'Public Cervix Announcement' by Dr. Mittlefinger; a, “brilliant master of deep insights and even deeper insights.” As a prize, Miss Monde, a virginal yet more than willing sacrifice to capitalism, is married to a mad megalomaniac and milk industry tycoon with a masochistic mommy complex named Mr. Kapital (John Vernon) – a man with a golden cock who does not know the difference between Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, but respects the man all the same for starting the Russian Revolution of 1917 – but on the night of the ritualistic deflowering, the undefiled beauty queen is repelled by her new husband’s nasty affinity for wacky ‘water sports,’ thus leading to the premature severing of the relationship between the two ill-fated lovebirds that almost gets the beauteous bride killed via drowning by her bastard ex-beau’s puritanical mother. Meanwhile, commie captain Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal) sails her degenerate boat filled with candy and featuring a jigaboo-like Karl Marx figurehead around the dams of Amsterdam as she attempts to recruit young men and little boys for her sexually subversive sugarite/Trotskyite revolution. In a display of anachronistic absurdity, Planeta manages to attract a sugar-sex-obsessed sadomasochistic sailor (Pierre Clémenti) from the failed Battleship Potemkin of 1905 who proceeds to mount the captain into orgasmic oblivion, but Miss Monde is not as lucky. Taken away by her ex-husband’s monstrously muscular Mandingo bodyguard (played by real-life bodybuilder Roy Callender) and carried up a gigantic milk bottle advertisement by the bodacious black buck in a sardonic scene in anti-tribute to King Kong (1933) that will probably prove to be totally traumatizing for contemporary white liberals, Miss Monde verbally assaults her kindly kidnapper by spouting nonsensical/contradictory slurs like, “Hitler, Dirty Jew” and “fascist pig” (he prefers being called a “Neanderthal”), so he sexually degrades her and ships her in a red suitcase that eventually lands in the Eiffel Tower, where she is his masterfully manhandled by a flamboyant Mexican singer/actor named 'El Macho' (Sami Frey; a boy toy of Brigitte Bardot during the 1960s) who has no problem asserting his manhood despite his questionably queer Cockette-esque persona. Unfortunately, a couple of prudish Italian catholic nuns see Miss Monde mounted via her meat-curtain by the mighty Mexican with mascara, thus sparking a stake of sensual shock that eventually leads her to ending up at Viennese Aktionist Otto Muehl's hysterical sex commune where the accursed beauty witnesses infantile shit-eating and vile fetishistic projectile vomiting, but she manages to develop a particular fondness for one of the member's flaccid members. Planeta also falls in love; first with the hitchhiking sailor and then with a couple little boys, but ends up killing them all in the end, thus leading to another failed commie revolution, albeit this time of the pinko pussy sort, where mania for Marx merely leads to physical and intellectual masturbation and eventually mindless murder and mayhem. Like all idealistic political revolutions rooted in impossible dreams far away from real-life, Planeta lured them in with starry-eyed sweet talk (this time with literal candy and a cushy and charismatic comrade cunt), but as the great gay Sturmabteilung (SA) brownshirt leader Ernst Röhm – a wildly wanton man who literally wallowed in the scatological colors he once wore – once self-prophetically stated not long before he himself was sacrificed under the dubious pretense of being a treacherous sodomite during the 1934 Night of the Long Knives (Hitler's political purge), “All revolutions devour their own children.” Miss Monde on the other hand, eventually turns into literal salacious sweetness as a model whose bare-skinned body is covered in liquid chocolate for a smutty and sensual yet sweet and sugary advertisement, thereupon marking the triumph of capitalism over the individual via sexual subjugation, displacement, and abstraction; the wretched root of the phenomenon of aberrant fetishism that seems to have become the norm in the Western world.

If one learns anything of value from Sweet Movie, it is that postmodern utopian boat bolshevism, as well as its less avant-garde blends, turns women into fetishistic and fratricidal killers of men and boys and that the sort of sanitized ‘sexual freedom’ offered by capitalism results in foul fetishism, including (but surely not limited to) urolagnia (a perverse pleasure for piss), emetophilia (sexual arousal via vomiting), paraphilic infantilism (grown men who get off to retrogressing to a baby state), scatophilia (a sexual fondness for feces), aquaphilia (wanton for water), exhibitionism, vampirism, wet and messy fetish (WAM) aka sploshing, miscegenation, and pedophilia, which has only spread all the more in the increasingly globalized, technocratic world with the fall of the Soviet Union and the homogenizing of the third world via Americanization/Hollywoodization since the release of Makavejev’s film almost four decades ago. Convicted pedophile Otto Muehl – who oddly received the Iron Cross for bravery in fighting in the National Socialist army during the Second World War before his decided degeneration and dedication to Aktionism, and who disliked Sweet Movie, stating, “It was all prescribed” – and his primitive commune of shit-eating, infantile man-babies and fetishistic regurgitators symbolize the height of human devolution via a mostly materialistic weltanschauung comprised of communism, anti-nationalism and ethno-masochism, and the soulless and superficial capitalistic promise of 'sexual liberation.' Interestingly, close-ups of Judeo-Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s (real name Lev Davidovich Bronshtein) ugly rat-like mug is featured throughout Sweet Movie, especially during boat scenes of Planeta and her patriots of pomo pinko perversity.  On top of being a stern proponent of the worldwide ‘permanent revolution,’ Trotsky was also a Freudian who advocated the sexualization of children at a young age so as to make them early lifelong slaves of their own sensuality, hence why aristocratic English writer Aldous Huxley (who was certainly ‘in the know’ when it came to world affairs) included a sexually promiscuous girl named ‘Polly Trotsky’ in his popular dystopian sci-fi novel Brave New World (1931) as the novelist saw the future as a bleak one where humans had the sexual discipline of chimpanzees and could not think past their own impulsive needs for personal gratification at the cost of intelligence, knowledge, and kultur, among other things, thus making Anna Planeta the sugary Trotskyite of Makavejev's bodacious bent world of internationalized wantonness and askew erotic instincts propelled by innately anti-organic sociopolitical systems of cultural chaos.  Indeed, at best, the cinematic beauty of Sweet Movie is unwaveringly bittersweet, but I guess one cannot ask for better in a world where groups of grown men find sexual solace in swimming in their own shit and retrogressing into an infantile state, a subculture of severely sick sodomites known as 'Bugchasers' actively pursue being buggered ('bareback' style) by 'Giftgivers' (aka HIV-positive poofs) so as to oftentimes become, like far-left French philosopher Michel Foucault, sadomasochistic spreaders of the diseases themselves as a potential 'poz-cock' killer, and post-menopausal women known as 'cougars' devote their lives to sexually preying on young men that could be their grandsons.

-Ty E

Lifeforce

Until rather recently and in part due to its questionable reputation, I had never seen Tobe Hooper’s science fiction horror epic Lifeforce (1985). Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for this is due to the fact that, aside from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and its silly yet sardonic sequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986), I have always considered Hooper a hack and Hollywood hooker (with Spielberg being his one-time pimp) of horror especially considering that he has yet to direct a decent film for the genre in nearly three decades, not to mention the fact that he sold his soul to the celluloid devil himself, Steven Spielberg. Of course, a great film is a great film no matter who directed it nor whether the film was a commercial failure that lost a celluloid battle at the box-office with retard Ron Howard’s empty elderly-ploitation flick Cocoon (1985). Indeed, I was so shocked by how enthralling my initial viewing of Lifeforce was that I actually watched it again the next day – a compulsive childhood habit that I broke with long ago, even with films I like – and, to my amazement, the film was still just as potent with its big-budget killer, albeit accidental, kitsch of the curiously charming and infectious celluloid space vampire sort, thus making a sort of "2001: A Space Odyssey of horror." Based on British ‘New Existentialist’ novelist/philosopher Colin Wilson’s novel The Space Vampires (1976) – an unconventional sci-fi/horror hybrid inspired by the supposed phenomenon of ‘psychic vampirism’ about a group of ill-fated astronauts who make the mistake of investigating a beauteous castle-like alien spaceship full of vampiric extraterrestrials who can take human form, thus inadvertedly exposing the hostile yet erotically hypnotic beings to planet earth where they take the bodies of human beings – and a screenplay written by Dan O'Bannon (Alien, The Return of the Living Dead) and Don Jakoby, Lifeforce is a rare epic of science fiction that actually contains an erotic component in the form of a female vamp from outerspace played by French model/actress Mathilda May (Naked Tango, The Tit and the Moon) who is totally au naturel for the majority of the film, hence her lethally lecherous life-draining properties. Originally planned to be titled The Space Vampires instead of the lifeless “Lifeforce” (Cannon Films felt the original title sounded too much like the low-budget exploitations they were known to release), the cinematic work was the first film in a three picture (Invaders from Mars, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) deal that Hooper had with Cannon Films that would ultimately signal in the beginning of the end of his prestigious Hollywood horror filmmaking career, but at least he proved before his fall that someone could actually direct a film featuring aliens, vampires, and zombies that appeals to people other than those who spend their lifesavings on getting autographs from faded stars at fanboy horror conventions.

You might as well be cursed when you’re a member of a space shuttle named Churchill, or at least such is the case for the astronauts of a spaceship named after Great Britain’s most famous bloated drunkard. After discovering a 150-mile long spaceship, members of the Churchill investigate and find a dead army of mummified bat-like creatures and three nude Europid humanoids – a beautiful woman (Mathilda May) and two twink males (Chris Jagger; Mick's brother, and Bill Malin) – seemingly in a comatose state suspended vertically in something that looks like a glass coffin. Clearly not something they should just leave behind in space, the crew takes the three sensual somnambulist-like creatures back to earth, but on the way, mission control loses contact with the shuttle, which is badly burnt when it finally reaches the home planet with the three aliens being the only things that remain. The exotic extraterrestrial beings are taken to the European Space Research Centre in London and in no time the fem-alien has sucked the “life force” out of a gulky security guard and eventually escapes from the seemingly secure building, thereupon wrecking havoc upon the British city. It is revealed that the three aliens are from an ancient and highly aggressive race of shape-shifting space vampires who prefer draining the “spirit” of the person as opposed to mere hemoglobin like your typical Eastern European bloodsucker. It turns out that one man, redneck Texan Colonel Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), did survive the Churchill spacecraft via an escape pod. Naturally, Carlsen is flown to London where he reveals how the “life force” of his crew was drained over time. Under hypnosis, it is also revealed that Carlsen has a special psychic link to the venomous space vamp, thus allowing him to have some metaphysical insight into finding the soul-sucking succubus. Carlsen hooks up with SAS Col. Colin Caine (Peter Firth) and they travel to a psychiatric hospital in Yorkshire, but the out-of-this-world femme fatale has only deceived them and the American astronaut is instead treated to an unwanted kiss from Patrick Stewart (playing a hospital manager who has been put under a spell by the aberrant alien). While flying back to London, the succubus (contained inside Star Trek Stewart’s body) inevitably escapes from her humble host. Meanwhile, the two male aliens have escaped the Space Research Centre by shape-shifting into the soldiers that were guarding them and they penetrate the city, causing what Morrissey might call ‘Panic in London’ by turning its perturbed populous into zombies who further spread the disease by trying to drain the life of other humans. It is revealed that the male aliens are merely the ‘worker bees’ of the female alien as they deliver all the life force to her, which she transfers to a spaceship in earth’s orbit. The queen bitch alien is eventually found on a church altar delivering the human energy to her spaceship. While Caine fights off the male aliens, Carlsen struggles to ‘penetrate’ the evil alieness and fight mind over cock and balls to save
mankind.

Since the release of Lifeforce, Cannon Films (and its parent company The Cannon Group Inc.) has gone out of business and Tobe Hooper’s filmmaking career has plummeted to the point where he has resorted to remaking exploitation films like The Toolbox Murders (1978) that are inferior to his own breakthrough horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) released around the same time. While Hooper’s greatest financial success as a filmmaker was undoubtedly Poltergeist (1982), co-writer/producer Steven Spielberg’s celebrity and ‘E.T.’ imprints can be seen all over the film thus eclipsing the horror director’s notoriety and earning Mr. Shoah of show biz all the glory. According to Hebraic midget Zelda Rubinstein, Spielberg was the 'de facto director' of Poltergeist, in part, due to the claim that Hooper was high on the set, or as the actress stated, “allowed some unacceptable chemical agents into his work.” As Spielberg in a maniacal fit of Aspergers induced narcissism candidly stated of Hooper himself while working with him, "Tobe isn't... a take-charge sort of guy. If a question was asked and an answer wasn't immediately forthcoming, I'd jump in and say what we could do. Tobe would nod agreement, and that become the process of collaboration." Indeed, being a cuckold of S.Spielberg is probably not the most prestigious way to be remembered as a filmmaker, but I will always remember Hooper as the man who created the only two decent TCM films, as well as the one fellow who directed the single redeemable vampire-alien-zombie horror-sci-fi hybrid, even if Lifeforce is the cinematic equivalent of reading one of H.P. Lovecraft’s less wonderful Weird Tales while sitting on the balcony of an expensive vacation resort at night while under “unacceptable chemical agents.” 

-Ty E

Angel

 

Greece is not exactly known for its film industry, especially of the ostensibly homicidal homoerotic sort, so when Angel (1982) aka Angelos directed by Giorgos Katakouzinos (Apousies, Zoe) – a fierce fag flick featuring a Hellenic homo Norman Bates of sorts who has no qualms about sporting a dress in public – was released, it was quite a big deal and strangely one of the country’s biggest commercial successes, being “seen by almost one Greek in twenty” (according to American DVD distributor Water Bearer Films), and was played at a number of Gay Film Festivals and even swept the awards at the Salonika Film Festival and was also well received at Cannes, but not everyone was happy, especially due to its less than flattering portrayal of proletarian Greek gaydom. Described by Raymond Murray in Images in the Dark: An Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Film and Video (1994) as being, “From the ‘Tis a pity he’s a homosexual’ school of filmmaking,” as if William Friedkin had time in between directing mostly 2nd-rate thrillers to teach Greeks the proper way to portray perplexed poofs, Angel is the sort of somber and seedy sort of harrowingly hysterical melodrama that has the potential to drive certain viewers to suicide, especially those whose fathers rather be dead than have a debauched son who downs dicks and/or plays wide receiver on the pink team. Sometimes seen as the Greek equivalent of German New Cinema master of melodrama Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s highly personal auteur piece In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) aka In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden – a painfully penetrating film inspired by the director’s lover’s suicide – Angel is no more of a merry, but certainly an equally metaphysically malignant work, albeit an innately inferior one. Like In a Year of 13 Moons, Angel centers around a lonely, low-spirited lad from an irreparably broken background who finds himself cross-dressing (although the character of Katakouzinos' film does not go as far as mutilating his meat) so as to please his sadistic love interest, only to discover that love does not always conquer all, especially when the callous corruption of the soul is involved. For those that even wondered why the slasher sodomite of William Friedkin’s homo-hated homicidal homo work Cruising (1980) was driven to drive more than just his phallus into fellow members of the flaming fag club, Angel might offer some memorable, if not mostly miserable and melancholy, answers. 

 Athenian aberrosexual Angel (Michalis Maniatis) leads a rather pathetic and increasingly perturbing life and his only source of solace – being buggered by ugly bum-like bozos in public parks in the dark – is a totally illegal one, so naturally the young Mediterranean man is best friends with misery and even misanthropy, even if his blank stare hides his most dark and daunting thoughts. Having a belligerent bindle boozer for a father (Vasilis Tsaglos), a hardworking masochist for a mother (Katerina Helmy) who guts chickens for a living, a retarded sister with cerebral palsy, and an ex-prostitute grandmother who nostalgically remembers the good old days when, “our daughters spread their legs for a cup of olive oil,” Angel has a lot more problems than just being a hapless homo who hopelessly longs to find a fatherly Mr. Right as poverty is especially unkind to the pathologically perverse poofter. Things only get all the more dreadful for exceedingly effeminate Angel when he is drafted into the Greek army; a place where patent pansies do not fare well. When Angel finally meets and starts a relationship with a macho, mustachioed sailor who could have easily been a character in fag frog novelist Jean Genet’s novel Querelle of Brest (1947) named Mikhalis (Dionysis Xanthos) who acts as a hunky husband to the bashful gay boy, things start looking up for the fairy fellow. Determined to make Angel his 24/7 bitch boy, martially manipulative Mikhalis makes his sensitive sweetheart dress in frisky female drag and sell his body as a flaming tranny flesh peddler. Needless to say, Angel has a bit of trouble juggling his damning and daunting dual career as a secret sodomite soldier and a chick with a dick who reluctantly turns tricks for the depraved dudes into dudes with dicks. When Angel is busted giving a blowjob while working his naughty night job, his contradictory life as a poorly paid cocksucker and military man is finally exposed, thereupon leading to his inevitable expulsion from the army, and hostility and heartbreak from his family at home. While Angel is less than happy when an unpleasant policeman tells him, “I spit on you…A soldier and a fag,” his depression and degradation reaches an all time low when his deadbeat drunk of a dad hysterically cries, “My son is a fag!...How can I face the neighbors?!” and “I’ll kill myself.” Indeed, while Angel’s dad is certainly an alcoholic asshole, he is also a man of his words because not only does he beat his own head into a bloody pulp, but he also commits self-slaughter by passionate penetrating his own large gut with a pair of scissors in front of his wife, disabled daughter, and sack-less sacrilegious son. Needless to say, life as he knows it becomes less and less fun for the fragile flamer Angel and he starts to get stranger and stranger to the point of total debasement and deadly derangement. 

 Near the conclusion of Angel, Angel – who was ruthlessly raped the night before by an eco-unfriendly garbageman who delights in anally traumatizing young twinks – wakes to find himself with his mascara smeared and his wig gone, surrounded by mountains of trash in a junkyard. Like many of the characters featured in Angel, the poofer protagonist – due to his devastating upbringing and undignified lot in life – is ultimately no more valuable than the garbage dump he eventually ends up in or so the film insinuates, hence why it seems that the majority of (mostly gay) reviewers of the strikingly sullied cinematic work regard it as, ‘homophobic.’ More than a tragic, albeit trashy, film about the protagonist’s sexual persuasion, Angel is a film about a totally degenerated nation where public fudge-packing is the least of its more overwhelming problems, which are more likely the result of some less than humble but certainly horny Turk raping their great-great-great-great-great grandmother, especially considering that Greek kultur was at its height when it was all too common for elder men to bugger young boys in a manner that would give Oscar Wilde joy, albeit with one of the men (like Angel of the film) taking on the role of the passive partner. Of course, with the legalization of male prostitution in Greece in 2006, men like Angel no longer have to worry about being busted by the police for literally busting their asses. If Angel and the legalization of salaried streetwalking are any real indication of Greece’s seemingly metaphysically greasy soul, it is no wonder that ‘far-right’ nationalist political parties like Golden Dawn, which currently has 18 seats in the Hellenic Parliament, are growing quite popular in the EU’s most impoverished nation.  Call me crazy, but I do not think a country is on the road to success when men are better at passively bending over while wearing a dress than they are at climbing walls in boot camp.

-Ty E

Orpheus

Jean Cocteau – the flaming French King of high camp, and full-time poet and sometimes filmmaker – once wrote, “Buñuel’s masterpiece Un Chien Andalou proves that cinema is a wonderful and dangerous weapon in a poet’s hands,” which is certainly a quote that applies to all artists, but especially his celluloid masterpiece Orpheus (1950) aka Orphée; a suave surrealist retelling of the classic Greek myth of Orpheus set in post-WWII France (and partially in the actual ruins of the war) and the second entry in the masterfully mystifying auteur’s black-and-white yet considerably colorful Orphic Trilogy (following The Blood of a Poet (1930) and preceding Testament of Orpheus (1960)). Utilizing the strikingly surrealist special effects and elegant camera tricks he pioneered with his first film The Blood of a Poet (1930) aka Le Sang d'un Poète and further fine-tuned for his highly reflective cinematic swansong Testament of Orpheus (1960) aka Le Testament d'Orphée, Orpheus manages to bring relative narrative coherence, albeit of the charmingly campy (but never schlocky) and casually carnal sort, to carefully constructed transcendental images that make for the most delightful of daydreams. Speaking of Orpheus in particular, Cocteau wrote, “Beauty hates ideas. It is sufficient to itself. A work is beautiful as a person is beautiful. The beauty I mean (the beauty of Piero della Francesca, Uccello and Vermeer), causes an erection of the soul. An erection is unarguable. Few people are capable of having one: most, as in the famous drawing by Forain, consider that ‘it is much better to talk.’” And, indeed those suited for metaphysical arousal via aesthetics know that Cocteau’s inventively idiosyncratic images, especially in regard Orpheus, also know that the auteur poet’s visuals speak louder than the character’s words. One of the French artists least affected by the tragic chaos of the Second World War, Cocteau – a personal friend of Nazi sculptor Arno Breker and Conservative Revolutionary ‘proto-nazi’ novelist Ernst Jünger (who often socialized with the poet when he was stationed in Paris as an administrative position as a German army captain), as well as the likes of Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel – still managed to implement reminders of the Occidental apocalypse via authentic ruined buildings (representing an apocalyptic sort of industrial hell) destroyed in the war, genuine radio recordings from the French resistance, and leather-clad servants of death on motorcycle who echo back memories of the Gestapo in Orpheus; a film where a middle-aged poet must reinvent himself by accepting sweet death in voluptuous hourglass, femme fatale form of fetishistic forlornness and fecund fury. A world of abject aesthetic decay where books with blank pages without words are considered the height of cultural vogue, Orpheus features a provocative story that is, unfortunately, even more relevant today about a once-important poet who must literally go to hell and back to save his life, wife, and artistry from the charms of death. 

 Starring Cocteau’s real-life beefy blond beau boy Jean Marais in the title character “Orpheus” in a perfect performance which he responded to critics’ praise of by stating, “The film plays my parts for me,” Orpheus is as aesthetically rapturous and solacing as cinematic works come despite the film’s sometimes gloom and doom yet always gorgeous subject manner. According to Cocteau himself, "Orpheus has three major themes: 1. The successive death through which a poet must pass before he becomes…changed into himself at last by eternity. 2. The theme of immortality. 3. Mirrors: we watch ourselves grow old in mirrors. They bring us closer to death." Of course, Orpheus also features a handsomely assembled hodgepodge of Orphic and modern themes that are so seamlessly synchronized that one need not be familiar with the film’s ancient source material to embrace it for eternity. In the beginning of the film, we meet protagonist Orpheus – an aging poet who feels he is past his prime and whose all-consuming pessimism is only all the more inflamed by his friend’s frank statement that he stopped writing at age 20 when he no longer had anything to say – who feels quite out of place in the company of youthful wordsmiths while lounging at the Café des Poètes, especially the young and popular dilettante lyricist Jacques Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe); a pretentious prick of (non)poetry whose wordless work “Nudisme” ('nudism') of naked pages is all the rage in post-WWII Paris.  Orpheus is now so positively passe that even police men respect him, which certainly puts him out of sway with the youth, who are more subversive than ever before, as iconoclastically destroying the aesthetic and political systems of yesteryear is now the trend of the day and apparently no one does it better than charismatic conman Cégeste.  To his dismay, Orpheus' young rival, who is more than a bit inebriated, arrives at the café in grandiose style in a seemingly sinister Rolls-Royce with a Gothic “Princess” (María Casares) in all black and pompously snorts like a pig at the elder poet elder, but the pretentious poetaster’s glamour, fame, and fortune has run out because his ghastly gal (who funds Cégeste's unwritten, written works) instigates a brawl that concludes with his death via Satanic SS-like phantoms in black leather on motorcycles. No real princess at all, Cégeste’s macabre muse is really lady death and cons Orpheus into leaving with her in the beauteous Grim Reaper’s Rolls-Royce on the pretense of witnessing the finish of Cégeste (who Orpheus believes is only injured and believes they are going to a hospital) and is transferred through a daunting dimension of negative-color skies and nonsensical noise on the radio. Orpheus is taken to a dilapidated Chateau and is quite enraged and perturbed by lady death, but soon he becomes totally entranced by her audacious aristocratic charms despite being married to a woman named Eurydice (Marie Déa). Likewise, Death’s chauffeur Heurtebise (François Périer) falls hopefully in love with Eurydice, who is eventually killed by the fatal female’s ghastly Gestapo goons. Split by his love for death and the death of his bewitching blonde wife, Orpheus ultimately decides to jump through a mirror (with help from Heurtebise and some special gloves) to save his slain spouse from the Underworld; a poet purgatory where even death is put on trial. A strikingly sacrificial she-Satan, lady death is mature enough to admit, “I don’t have the right to love anyone…yet I love.” If one learns anything from Orpheus, it is that even death is fueled by passion and a poet’s passion is perpetuated by death. 

 In regard to a verbal summary of Orpheus given by a less than arduously analytical radio host made, Cocteau wrote, “But when a serious and attentive man (who I do not know personally) takes the trouble to recall a plot and, in several stages, with an almost childlike elegance, tries to draw a simple and easy-to-read storyline out this very complex plot, without abandoning either his personal viewpoint, or precision, I can only refrain from criticizing him. To do so would be as inappropriate as those critics who hastily condemn a work that is the product of thirty years of research.” Indeed, Orpheus can be interpreted in many ways by many people, but only to Cocteau himself did this poetically phantasmagorical cinematic work have the truest meaning, hence his written words, “Orphée is a realistic film; or, to be more precise, observing Goethe’s distinction between reality and truth, a film in which I express a truth peculiar to myself.” Admittedly, Orpheus was a film that changed my life, or at least the way I look at the artistic medium of film and what it is capable of, when I first saw it a decade ago or so. Since then, if I have come to the realization of what my favorite filmmakers, including auteur directors ranging from F.W. Murnau to R.W. Fassbinder, have in common (aside from being queer krauts) it is that they are all poets, thus underscoring the character of Orpheus’ seemingly contradictory that a poet’s job is, “to write without writing.” That being said, few poets “wrote without writing” (although he was a penetrating master of pen as well) better than Cocteau’s himself with Orpheus being arguably his finest moment as a poet who made better films than the majority of self-described filmmakers. 

-Ty E

Bewildered Youth

 

Undoubtedly, Post-World War European art, especially from defeated nations like Germany, Austria, and Italy, oftentimes depicted a people who had degenerated to such a curious level that certain artists' work, both in theme and aesthetic, created pieces that barely resembled the kind of work that had previously been created and filmmakers were certainly not exempt from this rule. Out of all of the European films I have seen, probably no other film more exemplifies this peculiar and perturbing problem than Bewildered Youth (1957) aka Anders als du und ich directed by ex-Nazi auteur Viet Harlan (Opfergang, Kolberg), Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ favorite filmmaker and the man who directed the infamous National Socialist melodrama Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss. Charged with so-called ‘crimes against humanity’ in 1949 for his part in directing Jew Süss – a work oftentimes considered a superlatively sinister and cacodemonic piece of mayhem-inspiring melodramatic cinema – Harlan was essentially blacklisted in the filmmaking world for his artistic involvement with the Third Reich, but he would direct nine more films between 1950 and 1958 before his death in 1964, with Bewildered Youth; a black-and-white film that caused more controversy in Germany upon its release than Jew Süss, at least before 1945. Using a homosexual emancipation activist named Hans Giese as a ‘scientific adviser’ for the film, Anders als du und ich was originally intended as a quasi-pro-gay film designed to change public opinion about paragraph §175 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalized homosexual acts between consenting men and was not entirely revoked until 1994 after German reunification, but the original cut of the film was banned and it would go through various different and dramatically conflicting cuts with very different messages because the FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle; a German movie rating system equivalent to the MPAA) believed Harlan's vision would "foster perversion" and promote "decadent weaklings." Harlan – who decided to tackle the subject of male-on-male buggery in a brazen attempt to rehabilitate his filmmaking career – made his intentions very clear with the film when he sent a letter to the production company regarding the original script by Felix Lützkendorf entitled Eltern klagen an (Parents Accuse) that the film is based on, stating: “I think what's missing in the script is the fact that there are two types of homosexuals - namely those who have been handicapped by nature, and those who criminally violate nature. The latter act based either on innate immorality or for material gain, or because of damnable weakness. The former, however, deserve our complete sympathy. If we want to be a magnanimous people, we must regard their lives as tragic, and the film must not condemn or persecute them based on any narrow-minded viewpoints. We may prosecute them only in the instances when they seduce youngsters whose nature is basically normal.” After various scenes were cut, scenes shot, and various voices redubbed, the film was released under the title Anders als du und ich (§175) aka Different from You and Me (§175), but in Austria, the original more ‘pro-gay’ cut played under the original title The Third Sex aka Das dritte Geschlecht. A dubbed cut of the film more in the spirit of the uncut original Austrian version was also released under the titles Bewildered Youth and The Third Sex in the United States in 1958. Essentially a kraut queer equivalent to the popular teen rebellion flick Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) minus the warm Warnercolor kaleidoscopic colors and CinemaScope frames, Bewildered Youth is an unintentionally entertaining and flaky footnote from history that reminds one how the Teutonic Fatherland’s Übermensch campaign and societal inhibitions sank after losing the Second World War. 

 17-year-old Klaus Teichmann (Christian Wolff), an excellent student in school, comes from a traditional bourgeois family that has the most pressing concern over their son, so when he befriends an extremely effete fellow named Manfred (Guenther Theil) – the bastard son of a poor single mother who is not exactly the most studious pupil in school, his overprotective family begins to worry. After all, less than manly Manfred loves art and even has one of his girly man poems published in the school newspaper, so naturally trouble starts to stir in suburbia when the Dorian Grayish boy brings Klaus to the exotic house of a middle-aged queen queer and antique dealer named Dr. Boris Winkler (Friedrich Joloff); a super suave sodomite with an unhealthy interest in innocent adolescent boys. A ridiculously refined and cultivated man whose home is a virtual museum of artistic treasures and aesthetic pleasures, uniquely urbane Winkler, a wanton wanker, has unlimited resources when it comes to luring in young boys to add to his personal collection. A man who probably modeled his surely striking life of gay Conservative Revolutionary poet Stefan George – a German guru sage who headed literary circles whose members included philosopher/psychologist Ludwig Klages and would-be-Hitler-assassin Claus von Stauffenberg – Winkler impresses the teenage twinks with his dignified knowledge, masterful manners, proto-Kraftwerk electronic avant-garde music sessions, and ostensibly homoerotic indoor Greek wrestling matches between nearly naked men that would certainly tickle the tummy of Yukio Mishima, but Klaus Teichmann’s parents are less than impressed with their son’s pseudo-fatherly friend, so after talking to a psychologist who recommends that they save their son from turning into a salacious sodomite, a war of morals begins. Klaus’ concerned father Werner (Paul Dahlke) grounds his son, but the rebellious teen escapes through a window. When Werner realizes this, he wanders through the wanton world of abberosexuality, including Winkler’s house and a degenerate club featuring a drag show, thereupon leading the concerned father to a feel for filth that he cannot stand. Clearly a spiritually castrated cuckold not unlike James Dean’s character’s father in Rebel Without a Cause, wobbly wuss Werner (undoubtedly, the direct source of his son's lack of masculinity) is upstaged by his wily wife Christa (Paula Wessely) who has the decisive full-proof plan to recurit the Teichmann family housemaid Gerda (Ingrid Stenn) to seduce her son, thus actively recruiting Klaus to heterosexuality. Of course, mother knows best as beauteous Gerda makes a man out of Klaus, but heated homo Boris Winkler, being an effeminate queen who won’t dare allow for one of his beautiful boys to be put under the spell of the female enemy, gets Christa in trouble with the law for her part in conspiring with the housemaid in what is nothing short of middleclass fleshpeddling, but such is the world of Bewildered Youth.

 Although tame by today’s standards, Bewildered Youth is nothing short of a remarkable, if not ridiculous, revolutionary work for its time and certainly a film that, at least artistically speaking, managed to rehabilitate auteur Veit Harlan to some extent as a filmic artist who is just as competent at directing debauched high-camp National Socialist melodramas as he was at directing aesthetically and thematically provocative teen rebellion flicks, especially when compared to Hollywood films of that time like The Wild One (1953) and even later works like Splendor in the Grass (1961), thus signifying Germany's social decay after the conclusion of the Second World War. A work that depicts the good, the bad, and flamingly faggy of the homosexual underground (when it was still somewhat in the underground), Bewildered Youth features a message that is, at least in part, not all the different from raging rump ranger Rosa von Praunheim’s gritty celluloid manifesto It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971), because like the less than genteel gay German New Cinema auteur filmmaker’s seedy PSA of politically potent poofer-dom, Harlan’s strangely sound swansong argues against the dangers of narcissistic rich gay men, who with their unlimited funds and cultivated art collections, merely derive a strong superficial satisfaction from buying young boys in a manner no more meaningful than their need acquire worthless knickknacks. Harlan certainly did his job as a filmmaker as it also hard for the viewer to deny the charms of Boris Winkler – a dapperly dressed man of immaculate manners and endless knowledge who is no less suave than Satan himself – because he is easily the most interesting and multifaceted character in Bewildered Youth, so much so that the viewer would like to see him get away with his dastardly deeds, even if he ruined a couple of lives in the process, which he apparently does in the original cut of the film until German censors stepped in, thus denying the film near melodramatic perfection of the majestically absurd lapsed National Socialist sort. Although I found his claim to be a bit dubious upon first hearing it, absurdist Aryan auteur/renegade Renaissance man Christoph Schlingensief (who directed the 1988 film Mutters Maske; a fiercely facetious freeform remark of Harlan’s 1944 melodrama Opfergang) may have been on to something when he stated that German New Cinema master of melodrama Rainer Werner Fassbinder was more influenced by the films of Veit Harlan than the Hollywood melodramas of Danish-German auteur Douglas Sirk, as both kraut auteurs were versatile filmmakers who, on top of being accused of anti-semitism for their portrayals of money-grubbing, Shiksa-seducing capitalist Jews and adapting to the changing times, cinematically depicted – for better or worse – an uncompromising celluloid window of the psyche of the German collective that, unlike the majority of Teutonic filmmakers, has stood the test of the time. After all, who else but Veit Harlan has managed to go from a race-mixing Jew lover (his first wife was the Judaic actress/cabaret singer Dora Gerson), to being the hottest filmmaker of the Third Reich and Joseph Goebbels’ most prized auteur, to being accused of communist sympathies for Verrat an Deutschland aka Der Fall Dr. Sorge (1954), to creating the first important homosexual-themed film of the post-WWII era. That being said, aside from his sexual proclivities, somehow I think Harlan and Dr. Boris Winkler have a lot in common. 

-Ty E

Nárcisz és Psyché

If someone were to take up the ambitious yet seemingly futile task of synthesizing the major ideas of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Oswald Spengler’s two-volume tome The Decline of the West (1918-1923) and attempt to direct a highly experimental cinematic epic about the fall of the European aristocracy in the form of a libertine love story vaguely in the spirit of Gone with the Wind (1939), it might resemble Nárcisz és Psyché (1980) aka Narcissus and Psyche directed by Hungarian auteur Gábor Bódy (Amerikai Anzix aka American Postcard, Kutya éji dala aka The Dog's Night Song) and starring German heartthrob Udo Kier (Blood for Dracula, My Own Private Idaho) in what is probably the single greatest performance of his career as an actor; a sentiment he apparently shares despite having appeared in over 200+ films. The single largest-scale Hungarian production of its era, Narcissus and Psyche was released in three versions; an original 210 minute two part cut, a 136 minute cut for international distribution and a 270 minute three part epic made for television, the last of which I was luckily able to view. Described by director Bódy as, “a story of present times, and even though the characters are wearing costumes from the past, the epoch they are a witness to exists outside the limits of history,” Narcissus and Psyche is a forlorn fantasy film and quasi-psychedelic period piece of sorts that simultaneously chronicles the tragedy of an exceedingly passionate yet perversely plagued love affair that was ‘never meant to be’ between two lovers who never age and the dramatically changing sociopolitical climate of Europe, most specifically the Hapsburg Empire/Hungary over a 130 year period, thus concluding during the rise of National Socialism. Based on a collection of poetry entitled Psyché (1972) written by Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres but also centering on biographical anecdotes from the author’s life, as well as an almost entirely fictional account of the ‘romantic’ relationship between German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Russian-born psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé (male protagonist "Narcissus" being based on Nietzsche and female protagonist "Psyche" based on Andreas-Salomé), Narcissus and Psyche also makes for a dolorous tribute to great European cultural producers and wordsmiths of the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century or as auteur Gábor Bódy stated, “I tried to make this story a myth, a myth of antagonism born of our European culture, according to which men and women can only find their physical and intellectual liberty at the expense of others. And in spite of 35 years of socialism, my generation is still living in this antagonism.” A most morose yet magical cinematic saga of sordid sensuality, spiritual and somatic sickness, social strife, syphilis, and striking surrealism about the perfectly contradictory odd couple – a downright debauched mixed blood countess and a (would be) morally noble, poetic genius of a peasant – Narcissus and Psyche is one of those rare aesthetically astonishing works one cannot believe even exist upon seeing it and may very well be the most underrated and under seen film epic ever made, or at the very least, the one that every single one of the millions of female Udo Kier have always dreamed of, but will never see.

Born in the year 1795 to a mother who was a gypsy girl’s bastard child turned countess (after having been adopted by a count) and a Hungarian nobleman, countess Psyche aka Erzsébet Mária Lónyay (played by Patricia Adriani), came from a family whose nobility was recognized by the Habsburg Monarchy, but not their rank. When Psyche was only three years old, her mother started a relationship with the famous gypsy violinist János Bihari and decided to run away to a Romani settlement, taking her daughter with her where she would spend the rest of her childhood, thus missing out on the advantages of being an aristocrat. After her mother died, Psyche was raised by the violinist’s poor relatives and other kindhearted local yokels, which would lead her to meeting her one true love "Narcissus" aka László Tóth Ungvárnémeti (played by Udo Kier with bleached blond hair); the inordinately intelligent yet increasingly megalomaniacal poet son of a pastor. As it becomes quite apparent from the beginning of Narcissus and Psyche, Psyche – whose maternal ancestral origins were the product of bestial lust as opposed to love – is an accursed wanton wild child who does what she wants whenever she wants, including maliciously offending the manners of the patently pretentious and anally retentive aristocrats of her class, including randomly sitting on a lad’s lap and forcing him to partake in coitus with her, but not before he states to her quite disparagingly, "I am a swordsman, horseman, I do not want a vampire to drain my strength," in a feeble attempt to deny her carnal charms. A patently perverse yet pure of spirit poetess of both wayward words and actions, Psyche is especially perturbed by the fact that perennial narcissist Narcissus – a classicist poet and walking anachronism who tries to uphold noble ideas from antiquity who believes, "only in the aesthetic and historic authority of the Greek-Latin gods," and wants to do something great and noteworthy with his life to compensate up for his humble beginnings – will not have intimate sex with the carnal countess because of his supposed love and respect for her, or so he says. One gets the feeling that Narcissus thinks to himself, "Tis Pity She's a Whore," but ironically, the physical and eventual psychological ruin from a literal whore; a fleshpeddler who reminded him of Psyche.

 When Narcissus receives a bad case of the “French disease” (syphilis) from a prostitute (many believe that Nietzsche’s descent into madness was the result of receiving the same STD from a hooker), Psyche’s man’s cock is semi-permanently blocked, at least until they can find a cure, which the perverted poetess (Narcissus is annoyed by the “sensual” and “soiled” nature of her poems) will gladly pay for. Of course, Psyche has physical problems of her own because she was raped by her own brother-in-law and impregnated, which the quasi-incestuous rapist was quite agitated by, so he punched the expecting mother of his pesky would-be-progeny in the stomach, thereupon inducing a miscarriage and internal bleeding that does not cease until Narcissus brings his true love to a seemingly sinister doctor who keeps creepy deformed fetuses in formaldehyde sitting out for all his patients to see. Always the opportunist looking to advance his place in society, Narcissus converts from Calvinism to Catholicism so he can receive a scholarship from the Archbishop of Eger to study in Budapest where he trades professions, going from a poet to a scientist, thus pushing his poetess further away. Out of desperation, Psyche hooks up with a wealthy and eccentric nobleman/freemason named Maximilian Freiherr von Zedlitz (György Cserhalmi) – a man modeled after German philosopher Immanuel Kant – who wants to marry her and reminds her of the father she has much contempt for, so naturally the lascivious lady goes back to being sexually promiscuous with some political revolutionaries and even becomes pregnant with one of their babies (the father being unknown), but the baby is eventually disposed of by her uncle so as not to ruin the family’s already wavering reputation.

As Narcissus’ syphilis worsens, so does his megalomania, which is only all the more compounded when he is forced to sell his poetic masterpiece “Narcissist “– a classical and highly reflective work – which, to his utter and devastating dismay is eventually adapted into a superlatively sleazy, sexually degenerate, and curiously campy Vaudevillian play (performed at a place where Teutonic Neuer Deutscher Film 'diva of death' Ingrid Caven does a performance similar to her solos in Daniel Schmid’s 1974 high-camp masterpiece La Paloma). Unable to sire children due to the rotting of his reproductive system via syphilis, Narcissus accepts his life of loneliness and Psyche decides to marry and have children with the mundane yet reliable and respectable Maximilian Freiherr von Zedlitz. Destitute and dying from the STD that ultimately severed any hope of a marriage and kids with his beloved, Narcissus requests that Psyche make love to him before he perishes into eternity, which she obliges, thus ending an unfulfilled love affair that was doomed due to circumstance and human stupidity. Of her man, Psyche confesses, “My great love…was terribly egoistic. Just as egoistic as the hero of his poetic tragedy, Narcissus, who was ill of mortals…self-loving…No one else could have written it…but him.” In a positively plodding and mostly miserable marriage with a fellow that is jealous of a dead man, Psyche dies in a questionable manner that is no less of a travesty than that of her dear Narcissus; the king of narcissists who like virtually all people suffering from his vehemently vainglorious mental affliction, had a deep-seated self-loathing that made him unable to get close to others, including the lady he loved for over a century, yet could never consummate with, hence, his deleterious need to tell her, “Your being a whore doesn’t matter…because you were born a whore.” Although they never aged a single day over the course of over a century, once the possibility of fulfilling their love for one another is extinguished, they finally succumb to metaphysical heartbreak and eventual death.

 A keenly kaleidoscopic depiction of a generally colorless period(s) in history, at least cinematically speaking, Narcissus and Psyche is a film that manages to do the seemingly impossible by bringing idiosyncratic poetry and intrigue to a culturally and socially declining period in history as a sort of Slavic Victorian gothic epic that makes Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) seem like a soullessly constructed work of epic banality, and I say that as a fan of both cinematic works. A film featuring literal flying pigs, Narcissus and Psyche is a work that makes it seem like anything is possible, at least when it comes to the now seemingly dying art of cinema and the civilization that created it. A work depicting the literal fall of empires (more specifically, The Habsburg Monarchy) and the decided death of a civilization, Narcissus and Psyche makes it quite clear by the end that money is now king. On top of temporarily moving to the United States to get away from the havoc and horrors of the Great War, Psyche comes to the realization that her aristocratic roots are worth nil when a rich America, which inherited much more money than any nobleman she knows, sees it as an absurd proposition for him to be a title of nobility as it no longer has any value, thus also accentuating the absurdity of Narcissus’ needless and heedless campaign for superficial greatness. As modern America has proven, you can be a crack-addicted illiterate felon or an overweight and barbaric meathead idiot, but if you can bastardize the English language to a simple beat without melody or tackle people hard enough, you can be a famous millionaire. That being said, I think it is safe to say that class and kultur died on the battlefields of both World Wars with directors like Gábor Bódy being the last remnants of a once-great kultur before technocratic postmodernism and globalization reared their ugly universalizing and homogenizing heads. Oddly, after about five years of completing Narcissus and Psyche, director Gábor Bódy died under dubious circumstances in what the authorities of his homeland Hungry, then a Soviet satellite, said was a suicide, but, despite pleas from his wife that he was murdered, no official investigation was conducted, thus making him a victim of communist criminality.  Although Narcissus and Psyche hints at the fact National Socialism – a political ideology motivated by the need to eradicate cultural decay, cosmopolitanism, and societal degeneration – put the final nail in the coffin of Occidental civilization, Uncle Adolf surely was not responsible for the grim cultural ethnic graveyard that is contemporary Eastern Europe; a place that both ironically sired yet slayed Gábor Bódy, one of its great cinematic artists.

-Ty E