by Douglas Messerli
Guy Maddin and George Toles (screenplay), Guy Maddin
(director) Brand upon the Brain! /
2006
His 2006 mockumentary Brand upon the Brain! tells the horrific tale of a figure, also
named Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown/Erik Steffen), who after growing up and
abandoning his childhood island-home, Black Notch, is called back 30 years
later by his monstrous, yet still beloved Mother (Gretchen Krich/Cathleen
O’Malley/Susan Corzette) in order to repaint the lighthouse home in which he
was raised. As the older Maddin whitewashes his strange “home,” so he imagines
he is covering over the wretched past; but, in fact, in attempting to paint it
over, he calls it up for himself and his audience, revealing a series of
psychologically tortuous childhood experiences that, in 12 chapters of
fractured flashbacks, serve as almost a catalogue of cinematically conceived
boyhood terrors. Both Mother and Father (Todd Moore/Clayton Corzette), who run
their lighthouse home as a home for orphans within which they also raise their
two children, Guy and Sis (Maya Lawson), are involved in something clearly
sinister. Although Mother is doting and loving—often to the point of a
pederastic-like fondling of her son—she also regularly rages against the two
children and her orphan charges, demanding their complete celibacy and gender
non-differentiation. With the help of a telescope atop the lighthouse from
which she spies on their outdoor activities, while trumpeting her love and rage
through an “aerophone,” a radio/loudspeaker contraption invented by Guy’s
Father.
One day, the
famed serial movie star, detective/harp-playing Wendy Hale shows up on the
otherwise empty island, immediately creating a bond with both Guy and Sis in
order to help her solve the secret to their parents’ nefarious activities and
to explain why the island children have holes bored into the backs of their
heads. Guy falls in love with the beautiful Wendy, while Wendy quickly falls in
love with Sis, determining to disguise herself into her twin detective brother,
Chance, in order to get closer to Sis.
Thus does
Maddin, the director, establishes a near lunatic story involving nearly every
subject forbidden for filmmakers in the decades prior to his film: lesbianism,
homosexuality, pederasty, cannibalism—Savage Tom seeks to serve up the heart of
the poor orphan Neddie (Kellan Larson)—and medical experimentation on children,
the last revealed when Chance discovers that Father is harvesting a “nectar”
from the children which provides his wife and others with a temporarily
restoral of youth, almost as if their sexual essences, blood and sperm might
permit them eternal life.
Everything ends badly as Sis kills Father. Mother like Frankenstein,
restores him to life and formerly victimized orphans return on a rowboat,
killing him yet again. Mother, desperate for nectar, is discovered devouring
little Neddie; Sis and Chance/Wendy, now married as lesbian couple, force
Mother and Savage Tom from the island; and, finally, Guy is sent away in foster
care.
Is it any wonder
that grown-up, Guy, in his attempt to whitewash his horrific past, appears sad
and depressed as he now wanders Black Notch still in search of his fleeting
love? The return of the elderly Mother merely rekindles some of the horror he
has suffered. She dies, furious with her son’s inattention—at the moment of her
death he is distracted by his fantasy of Wendy—and he is left alone, caught
between his memories and a vague future that promises nothing but emptiness.
But the brand
Maddin suggests by his title is also a kind of lens through which he (the
director) has come to see the world, a kind of “product,” the hokey grade-B
horror and adventure stories he has grown up with, helping him—in the most
positive sense—to pervert his vision of bland notions of normality.
In early showings
of this film around the world, Maddin presented the mostly silent images
accompanied by a live orchestra, Foley artists (sound artist, recreating the
film’s sound effects), and an “interlocutor” or narrator (in the released CD,
spoken by the wonderful Isabella Rossellini), a role performed live by various
figures, including Crispin Glover, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, John Ashbery,
and Maddin himself—transforming the whole into a grand theatrical event that
might make an impression on anyone entering the dark territory which the
flickers of Poe, the Frankenstein story, Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hardy Boy
tales, images of Dali and Buñuel, and hundreds of other such work projected
onto our generations’ consciousness, actualizing the film’s unresolved truism:
“everything happens twice.”
Los Angeles,
December 29, 2014
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (December 2014).
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