Interviewer:FLAPPERHOUSE has described itself as “Dragging the future back through the past, like a rotting donkey on a grand piano.”
FLAPPERHOUSE: Chien! Andalusia! We are un!
Interviewer:Precisely. And by “the past,” more specifically you mean circa the 1920′s?
FLAPPERHOUSE:Yes and no. Mostly yes. We do think the future should have much more futurism. But with much less fascism. We’d also like to see more surrealism, expressionism, dadaism, psychological horror, and, of course, modernism.
Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names– I’m not going to tell you their names– but if I did, I don’t think you’d sleep so well.
Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack)
“He is morbidly afraid of giving away any of his secrets,” says Eyes Wide Shut co-writer Frederic Raphael of Stanley Kubrick, “the best of which may be that he has none.” Raphael and I agree that Kubrick was a genius, and the Best Director despite never winning “Best Director,” though I’d add that Kubrick’s most genius gift was his ability to create the illusion– nay, the unshakable certainty— that his films contain galaxy-sized rabbit holes teeming with secret meanings, hidden agendas, conspiracy revelations, occult mysteries, coded confessions, esoteric symbolism, and arcane wisdom.
As the recent documentary Room 237shows, viewers have concocted all kinds of elaborate speculations as to what Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining is really about, from the Holocaust to the genocide of American Indians to Kubrick’s alleged fakery of the Apollo 11 moon landing.* It’s doubtful any of said speculations would’ve been inspired solely by readings of Stephen King’s original novel; similarly, no one ever would’ve dropped Kubrick’s name into their moon-landing conspiracy theories if 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t feel so uncannily like a space travelogue. Kubrick’s legendary fastidiousness and reclusiveness may have added fuel to this fire of overzealous theorizing, but there wouldn’t have been any sparks to begin with if he didn’t fill every frame of his films with authentic, palpable mystique.
*One night in college, I watched The Shining on repeat for like 10 hours to write a paper for some class with the word “Narrative” in its name. The result was 12 pages on the film’s parallels to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
How deliciously appropriate, then, that Kubrick’s final work was an endlessly fascinating, immensely analyzable, Illuminati-laced joint called Eyes Wide Shut.
NSFW VIDEO… BOOBS AND BUTTS EVERYWHERE!
Simply search “Eyes Wide Shut” on YouTube and your results include “The Hidden Messages In Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut,” “Eyes Wide Shut Unveiled, Decoded & Explained,” “Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Illuminati Symbology,” “Eyes Wide Shut – a steganalysis,” and “Kubrick & The Illuminati–” and that’s just Page 1. Of course, when the centerpiece of your movie involves a ritualistic orgy with super-rich folks in masks and robes listening to backwards Latin chanting, you’re begging the conspiracy junkies to watch it frame-by-frame and leap to their own paranoid conclusions. Which, if I may add my own wild conjecture, may have been Kubrick’s intention all along, his own trollish way of singing “The Walrus was Paul!“
Eyes Wide Shut (an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novel Dream Story) is the tale of Bill Harford (Tom Cruise), an Upper West Side doctor who spirals into a surreal psychosexual odyssey after his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) confesses fantasizing about another man– an odyssey that eventually leads him to the aforementioned orgy. According to Frederic Raphael, the idea of the orgy being organized by a clandestine association of wealthy amoralists was his own purely fictional creation. Funny thing is, when he faxed the idea to Kubrick in the form of a classified FBI report, the director actually got a little paranoid himself:
FR: Get the material I faxed you?
SK: That’s the thing. Where’d you get this stuff?
FR: … Where do you think?
SK: This is classified material, how’d you get hold of it? I need you to tell me.
FR: You’re kidding.
SK: I don’t think so. Where’d you find this stuff? Did you hack into some FBI computer by chance, or what?
FR: Hack in? Are you crazy? I can’t hack into my own work without help. You asked me to give you some background on Ziegler and company. I gave it.
SK: Freddie, I need you to tell me totally honestly where you got this stuff. This is potentially…
FR: Stanley, totally, honestly, I got it where I get everything: out of my head.
SK: You’re telling me you made this up?
FR: But only because it’s true. You asked for it, I did it. I enjoyed it, as a matter of fact.
SK: It has no basis in fact?
FR: Stanley, I made it up, okay?
SK: How did you do that?
FR: Making things up is what I do for a living. It’s pretty well all I do. I write fiction. I make things up. I look at the world and… I make things up on the strength of what I see and hear, and guess. I do not mend fuses or water-ski or have a pension scheme. I made it up. It was fun; much more than fun…
SK: Okay as long as we’re not… on potentially dangerous ground here. It’s pretty convincing, you know that?
FR: Nice of you to say so. Think of it as an example of what I do when I’m free to play by myself. An apple for the teacher.
SK: And it didn’t come from anywhere that might be… you know… embarrassing?
FR: Look, it came out of my head, fully formed. How embarrassing is that? I made the whole damn thing up. It was not a big problem.
SK: How long did it take you?
FR: Maybe an hour, but I’m never going to tell you that.
from Frederic Raphael’s Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir Of Stanley Kubrick
Yet even though the whole Illuminati angle sprung from Raphael’s imagination (unless Frederic Raphael IS a member of the Illuminati spreading disinformation!), that doesn’t mean Eyes Wide Shut isn’t one of the most subversive films of 1999. There’s plenty of legitimate evidence that the film is thick with overtones echoing the oppression of the masses by sinister, ultra-powerful elites. Its messages are just a bit more subtle than those in SUBVERSIVE!!!! 1999 movies like Fight Club or The Matrix, a bit harder to notice amid all those sexy, naked women.
Then again, Kubrick’s depiction of sexy, naked women in Eyes Wide Shut is awfully subversive too. 1999 was a breakthrough year for unsimulated sex in non-pornographic films, thanks to Leos Carax’s Pola X and Catherine Breillat’s Romance. It’s hard to tell for sure if those couples are truly copulating in Kubrick’s climactic orgy (even when they aren’t shielded behind digitally-inserted bystanders), but it’s still pretty hardcore stuff for a big-studio Cruise/Kidman summer multiplex vehicle. (Link EXTREMELY NSFW.)
The subversive use of sexy, naked women doesn’t stop there. While a lot of the sexy, naked women are here for erotica’s sake, Kubrick features others to provoke more complicated responses. We see sexy, naked women in settings that are clinical (receiving breast exams in a doctor’s office), macabre (a hooker unconscious after an overdose, and later dead at the morgue), and borderline incriminating (15 year-old Leelee Sobieski, though not technically naked, struts around scantily clad for all her screen time).
All of which serves to tease and intensify the Sick Desperation of Dr. Bill. Like many straight white males of 1999 movies (Fight Club‘s narrator, American Beauty‘s Lester Burnham, Being John Malkovich‘s Craig Schwartz), Dr. Bill’s Sick Desperation involves a struggle against feelings of jealousy, sexual frustration, and emasculation. The more he tries to transgress the sexual boundaries of his marriage as a means of avenging himself against Alice’s fantasy, the more he fails, the more he’s taunted by strange flesh he can never possess. And to add insult to blueballs, Dr. Bill doesn’t even get the cathartic release of a good Sick Desperate Laugh; he merely gets to hear the Sick Desperate Laughter of Alice as she dreams of cuckolding and humiliating her husband.
Dr. Bill finally achieves closure by learning some valuable secrets, but not the kind of secrets he thought he wanted, the kind that get naughty in Masonic Long Island mansions in the abysses of night. Because, despite all the occult symbology and class warfare that may or may not exist in this movie, it’s ultimately about marriage. It hasto be about marriage. It’s right out there in the open. Kubrick’s simply making a film about marriage in a mythical way, where the mundane concerns of mere mortals get caught up in the epic, dizzying dream logic of the gods.
Once again, Frederic Raphael: “…like a man stirring in his sleep, S.K. almost faces the mundane American reality which says that a couple like [Bill and Alice] would ‘get a divorce.’ Yet he has become enough of a European for the marital myth to have leeched onto him. (We are probably the two most long-serving husbands in the movies.) He cannot quite see that the durable myth is pretty well autonomous, and its plot, however elasticated, largely determined: Oedipus and Jocasta will never be able to avert trouble by spending more quality time with the kids…”
The lesson, I suppose, being that love and marriage can survive much more easily when partners are honest and unashamed of their primal desires. Only when deceit and transgression come in to play is love seriously in peril. And even if the world is truly haunted by shadowy, amoral cabals, then you can always take solace in some good make-up sex.
We’re not your classic heroes… we’re the other guys.
The Shoveller (William H. Macy), Mystery Men
Having spent the past year revisiting the movies of 1999, my heavily-biased belief that 1999 was cinema’s most exciting year to date has only grown stronger. Alas, not all the movies I’ve watched for this series possessed enough Sick Desperation in Their Laughs to crack my Top 40. But some of those also-rans still deserve a quick mention, honorable or otherwise:
But I’m A Cheerleader (directed by Jamie Babbit)
The main goal of But I’m A Cheerleader is to ridicule those “ex-gay” ministries that foolishly try to turn gay people straight. The film also has a pretty sweet love story between Megan (Natasha Lyonne), a high school cheerleader coming to terms with her sexuality, and Graham (Clea Duvall), an out-and-proud rebel. These parts of the movie are awesome, and totally 1999. Problem is, this movie should cut like a chainsaw, and instead it merely bops like a wiffle-bat. It kept making me fantasize about how much harder this premise would’ve hit had it been handled by John Waters. But perhaps even more troubling is its depiction of gay men. While lesbians Megan and Graham feel like living, breathing people, pretty much all the guys in this movie are reduced to prancing, cock-hungry sissies. It’s cool to play with stereotypes, yet when it comes to gay men, But I’m ACheerleader seems to content to simply reinforce certain stereotypes– which essentially cancels out most of its mind-opening, tolerance-preaching intentions.
Sleepy Hollow (directed by Tim Burton)
Sleepy Hollow is frequently creepy, occasionally funny, and always gorgeous as heavenly hell. It may also contain the precise turning point in Tim Burton’s career, the point where he went from gothy maverick to tired hack. Sleepy Hollow starts promisingly yet ends in somewhat uninspired fashion– much like a career that began with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, and Edward Scissorhands, but since Sleepy Hollow, has offered forgettable remakes like Planet Of The Apes, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, Dark Shadows…
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (directed by Jay Roach)
1999 also saw a turning point in Mike Myers’ career. In his earlier, funnier movies (Wayne’s World, So I Married An Axe Murderer, Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery), he definitely utilized catchphrases, call-backs, and gag-milking even more than the average SNL player. Yet there was usually a great humility in his humor. Then the first Austin Powers became a sleeper hit that demanded a sequel, and suddenly it seemed as if Myers’ humility vanished, replaced with a conviction that audiences really wanted to see every single silly idea that popped into his head. No doubt The Spy Who Shagged Me has some hefty belly-laughs. But it also has an unhealthy number of sequences that go on so long they’d make Seth MacFarlane check his watch, and they foreshadow the caravan of lackluster vehicles Myers would unleash in the ’00s (Goldmember, The Cat In The Hat, The Love Guru).
Catherine Zeta-Jones dips beneath the lasers in Entrapment
I haven’t seen Entrapment since 1999, and all I remember about it is Catherine Zeta-Jones’ butt. Adam from Workaholics knows what I’m talkin about; dude wrote a song about it:
American Pie (directed by Paul & Chris Weitz)
American Pie gave us so much: John Cho popularizing the word ‘MILF,’ Jason Biggs boning an apple pie, Shannon Elizabeth going topless, Alyson Hannigan getting freaky. But I’m not sure American Pie gave us enough of that Sick Desperation in Our Laughter. Maybe it would have if it had raised the raunchy-comedy bar set one year earlier by There’s Something About Mary. Only American Pie didn’t exactly raise that bar, it just kind of limboed underneath the bar and nudged it with its boner.
Tumbleweeds (directed by Gavin O’Connor)
It’s a moving story of the relationship between a flighty, freewheeling, single mother (Janet McTeer) and her coming-of-age daughter (Kimberly J. Brown), it’s just not very 1999. Though there are flashes of Sick Desperation in McTeer’s outstanding performance.
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace(directed by George Lucas)
Without a doubt the most disappointing movie I’ll ever see three times in a theater. I kept going back, assuming my initial disappointment stemmed from setting my fanboy standards impossibly high, and that eventually I’d grow to love Episode I as much I loved Episodes IV, V, & VI. Alas, just like everyone else not named George Lucas, I have only grown to dislike this movie more over the years– except for the pod race and the Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan/Darth Maul lightsaber battle, which still kick ass.
Mystery Men (directed by Kinka Usher)
It seems so 1999 in theory: a subversive superhero riff starring Ben Stiller, William H. Macy, Hank Azaria, Paul Reubens, Janeane Garofalo, Geoffrey Rush, Eddie Izzard, Greg Kinnear, and Tom Waits, to name a few. Unfortunately, the script could’ve used a punch-up or two; the jokes’ hit-to-miss ratio is far lower than this premise and cast deserved. Macy’s line at the end of this scene was one of the few that made me laugh out loud:
Go (directed by Doug Liman)
“OK, I know ripping off Pulp Fiction got old like two years ago, but what if we did, like, a Pulp Fiction thing but with, like, ecstasy, and Vegas, and Amway?”
“YES! But we also need a scene in a diner where a drug dealer has one of those Tarantino monologues about that comic strip Family Circus, ’cause I was in a diner this morning and I’d just done a couple bumps and I was reading the paper and I saw Family Circus and I thought to myself, ‘Why hasn’t Tarantino written a monologue about Family Circus yet?”
And the nominees for Most Oscar-Hungry Picture of 1999 are…
Leaving the theater after seeing Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock, I was convinced it would get like 12 Oscar nominations. Not because I thought it was that great a movie, but because this star-studded, lefty-friendly, semi-musical, Depression-era historical drama seemed like it was shovel-feeding the Academy exactly the kind of stuff they love to heap awards upon. I was way off on that prediction, but the rest of the 1999 Oscar-darlings weren’t that hard to foresee– like Lasse Hallström’s adaptation of John Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules, a weighty-but-not-too-dark period drama with a lefty-friendly capital-M Message about the necessity of abortion. And while I’ve got mad respect for Michael Mann’s The Insider, I have to admit that this ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama with a lefty-friendly David-vs.-Corporate-Goliath agenda was fishing hardcore for Oscar gold.
I wouldn’t say I have mad respect for Sam Mendes’ American Beauty; it’s more like reserved respect. Its Oscar-hunger is shameless (especially in Annette Bening’s performance), and it leans awfully hard on its lefty-friendly suburban ennui. Still, it’s funnier and sweeter and more haunting than most of its detractors give it credit for. There are at least 25 movies from 1999 that I would’ve voted for “Best Picture” above American Beauty, but its victory doesn’t offend me nearly as much as, say, Crash‘s victory did.
Yet the award for Most Oscar-Hungry Picture of 1999 has to go to Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile. It was as if Darabont was so sore about The Shawshank Redemption losing to Forrest Gump five years earlier that he tried to make the most snub-proof Oscar-bait he could imagine. So he did another prison drama based on a Stephen King story, only this time it would star Oscar-magnet TOM FREAKING HANKS. And it would be anti-racism AND anti-death penalty. And there’d be magic, but with religious overtones, yet not so Jesusy as to alienate non-Christians. And finally, it would be three EPIC hours long. Of course, all this calculation came to naught, and The Green Mile couldn’t generate enough buzz to outfox American Beauty. But for what it’s worth, Mr. Darabont, your film is the winner of The Sick Desperation In Your Laugh Award for Most Oscar-Hungry Picture of 1999 in a goddamn landslide.
I think that dread I’ve been feeling the past couple days can be best explained by this scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in which I am Shelley Duvall, the typewritten pages are what I imagine season 4 of Community will be like based on all the crestfallen buzz, and I guess Jack Nicholson is NBC?
Most of the crimes in Frank Bill’s Crimes In Southern Indiana are crimes of passion, though even the premeditated crimes tend to go awry and lead to more crimes of passion. All seven deadly sins are accounted for, if you count meth addiction as a form of gluttony. Villains outnumber heroes by a wide margin, and many of the heroes are heroic simply by default.
A number of these short stories are simply pistol-whipping pulp, or blood-spattered snapshots of the American nightmare. And more often than not, these vicious vignettes are intensely gripping. Yet a few stories dig in deeper, richer soil. “The Penance Of Scoot McCutchen” has one of the book’s most sympathetic characters coping with his wife’s deteriorating health, and his own crushing guilt. An unfortunate mishap in “The Accident” leads to a surreal and unforgettable descent into madness. “The Old Mechanic” starts out looking like a one-dimensional portrait of an abusive husband, but soon explores the complications of redemption and forgiveness.
Crimes In Southern Indiana will probably remind you of Cormac McCarthy’s bleak hellscapes, or less comedic versions of the Coen Brothers’ darker tales, or Breaking Bad‘s tweaked-out brutality. However, the book’s portrayal of Southern Indiana also reminds me of Stephen King’s Southwestern Maine- if only all the references to supernatural forces had been edited out. In Frank Bill’s world, humans are monsters just because– which is usually way more terrifying.
After weeks of hearing my lady’s enthusiastic recommendations of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy, I finally started it last week, and at every reading opportunity I’ve had since then I’ve torn through the first book like a genetically-engineered wolf-person tearing through a poverty-stricken teenager. The book is mighty-fine pulp: cynical but not hopeless; mercilessly violent yet deeply compassionate; lean but not scrawny.
The biggest question I had throughout the book was, “This book’s supposed to be class warfare, right?” Which is not necessarily a criticism. Normally I wouldn’t condone fanning the flames of class warfare, but in a sense, most satire is class warfare, and satire is always necessary. The Hunger Games is a vicious, occasionally comic satire of the ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots, and like some of its ancestors (1984, Idiocracy), it often feels frighteningly inevitable. Since it was written and published well before “class warfare” became a hot topic again, you can’t really criticize it for bandwagon-hopping or shameless zeitgeist-mining. The book’s disdain for the cruelty that festers in widening class-gaps is timeless; it was only a matter of time before its scorn became relevant again, when, say, a billionaire mayor bullied Occupy Wall Street protesters from their tents instead of, you know, maybe passing a few more laws that might actually help the unfairly impoverished and punish the unfairly wealthy.
Popular Fiction 