John Waters | The Diane Linkletter Story / 1970

the doctor calls too late

by Douglas Messerli

 

Divine, David Lochary, and Mary Vivian Pearce, and John Waters (mostly ad-libbed dialogue), John Waters (director) The Diane Linkletter Story / 1970

 

Even John Waters admits that the 10-minute short, The Diane Linkletter Story is the worst of all his movies, but describes it as being an accident as he and his actors were trying out a new sound system. The actors simply ad-libbed the dialogue to check out the new synchronized sound.

    In a sort of prologue consisting a seemingly real dialogue between Linkletter and his daughter (at least the voice that sounds like his), Art pleads: “Come back, come back before you’re trapped in a life that daily grows more aimless and unreal.” The credits, written on paper, are lifted between sentences by Divine.

    The film itself has its own looney logic as the Art Linkletter (David Lochary) and his wife Lois (Mary Vivian Pearce) wait up late for their daughter Diane (Divine), trying to imagine where she might be, Lois suggesting that she’s been going “with that crowd again,” Art continuing the train of thought “from that acting school I told you she shouldn’t go.” Lois admits that Diane told her she’s been taking drugs, and soon together they concur that something has changed about their sweet little girl since she been going out with Jim.  “She now hangs out with stringy-haired hippies and is probably on drugs down on the strip.” 

    Lois seems to know more about her daughter’s recent bad habits than Art, who wonders why she hasn’t told him about his daughter’s recent drug activity. Moreover, she can’t control her highs anymore.. Perhaps it’s just all hormonal, Lois vaguely comments. But Art fears “her youth has been stolen by this poison.”

     They agree that they’ve done everything for her, and now Lois suggests they should send her to a doctor like the ones he meets at the club.

     Art is clearly concerned since he’s been talking about these drugs on his show, drugs sold by the mafia and college students. Why can’t the police do anything about it? asks Lois. They have to punish her, declares Art. “We’ve been too liberal.”

      Finally, Diane returns, barely fearing at all to tell them she’s been down on the strip with Jim.

     When they attempt to describe how bad she looks, Diane insists in pure Divine style: “I am what I am and I’m doing my own thing in my time, dammit.”

     “That means nothing to me at all,” Art responds.

     “Who are these people? Is this that Jim?” Lois asks.

     “Jim is a groovy guy.”

      Diane soon makes clear that she’s on LSD this very moment, and Art goes off to call a doctor or the police, or anyone who can help. “Call someone!” Lois pleads.

       Diane soon grows even more distraught by the turn of events. “I don’t need a doctor. Mother, make him stop. It’s my own life. Let me do what I want to do!”

       “You are our child.”

       “I know, but I’m doing my own thing,” she once more insists.

       After much more back and forth argument, Lois intervenes: “Diane are you pregnant?”

       “No, but I wish I was!” Diane runs upstairs, her father shouting after, “And never come back down!”

       In her room Diane proclaims that she hates her parents, while below Lois seems to think that she’s calmed down. Art describes her as a “shocking nut.”

       Diane leaps out the window, and a narrational voice cries out, “So please come back to us. We love you. Call collect.”

 

      Even in an ad-libbed, off-the-cuff piece of fluff, Waters and his cast are better at carrying the true tone of camp humor—the utter seriousness of its sad satire—much better than many a Warhol movie or other such works of the day.

 

Los Angeles, April 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

 

 

Matt Wolf | The Face of AIDS / 2016

the meaning and use of an image

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Wolf (director) The Face of AIDS / 2016 [11 minutes]

 

This short documentary concerns the controversial use by the Benetton company of the famous photograph by Therese Frare of AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed surrounded by his family. Commissioned by Time as part of its series of 100 Photos, featuring what the magazine described as the most influential photographs of all time.

    As one observer noted, there are so many individuals shoving their way into the scene to explain the use of the dying man’s photograph that it is truly impossible to get a perspective on the situation. Everyone is justifying something, while the being behind this terribly haunting image has utterly no voice.

     Former Benetton Creative Director Oliviero Toscani attempts to explain his and the Benetton Company’s intentions in using the photograph in their product advertisement of 1992. Toscani argues that it is a loving picture, and is not a tragic picture at all even if the situation itself is tragic. For him the picture put the situation in front of the viewer’s consciousness, “What am I doing for that problem.”

     AIDS activist Marlene McCarthy, on the other hand, insists that it seemed so evident on what Toscano and Benetton were doing: “On one hand you had this very intimate situation and you had a logo that was about selling. Benetton was a clothing company. It just seemed so evident what he was doing. He was creating sensational iconographical images that people would remember along with the brand Benetton.”

     Kirby’s parents on the other hand insisted they were not looking at the commercial side of it. To them it was an opportunity to make people think about AIDS. And the photographer relates that the family claimed “Benetton’s not using us; we’re using Benetton.” They wanted people to know that he lived and that this was what the devastating disease does to people.

     As a graduate student at the University of Ohio Frare determined to center her photographic project on AIDS. In a nearby small town a young man, David Kirby, had been diagnosed with AIDS creating terror in this small burg. They even burned the ambulance which carried Kirby to the Pater Noster House in Columbus, Ohio which served as a hospice for dying AIDS patients.

    Although this short film doesn’t mention it, Kirby was a gay activist in the 1980s, living in California estranged from his family when he contracted HIV. Contacting his parents, he asked if he might come home to die, his family welcoming him home.

     The head of the Pater Noster hospice believed that it was important to see what AIDS did to people, and allowed Frare into the center with a camera. She had already been taking pictures of a combination caregiver and client at the House, Peta (born Patrick Church), who crossed genders and according to Frare was a rather remarkable person. One day nurses came to get Peta so that he might be with David, and Peta brought along Frare. The photograph stood outside David’s door not wanting to intrude until his mother came out and “told me that the family wanted me to photograph people saying their final goodbyes. I went in and stood quietly in the corner, barely moving, watching and photographing the scene. Afterwards I knew, I absolutely knew, that something truly incredible had unfolded in that room, right in front of me.”

      Earlier, she recalls, she had asked David if he minded her taking pictures, and he, wanting to get the word out about how devastating AIDS was to families and communities agreed to the photos as long as they were not sold for “personal gain.” Frare claims that she never has received any money for the photograph and, at the time, imagined, in any event, that no one would ever see the pictures. In fact, it is estimated that when the pictures appeared in Life magazine as many as one billion people saw the photo. 

    McCarthy recalls the terrible days of the period in which the government would not even say the word AIDS and communities of people started speaking for themselves.. She repeats what so many involved in the gay community repeat. “Suddenly it was like going to a funeral every weekend.” Tom Kalin repeats that the members of ACT UP initially said, “We’re not victims. We’re people with AIDS. And there are political reasons why this disease existed.”

      Toscani insists that when he went to work for Benetton he attempted to get them to see their adds as not just a communication to sell the product but to “do something more.” Indeed Benetton ads invoked a great many problems and issues of the day, including racial equality and the environment. One of the most memorable of their ads was clearly anti-war.

 

     But clearly he also recognized its parallels with religious iconography. The dying boy looked like many Christians’ image of Christ and the positioning of the family obviously calls up the various sacred pietàs.*

      But Toscani also explains that he wanted to shift the image from black-and-white to color in order to make it, as he put it, “more realistic (actually, it seems less realistic and softer as an image from the harsh realism of the black-and-white to me), the point being that Toscano wanted to employ the sensationalism of the situation in relation to his company’s logo.

      When they contacted Frare about using the image, she was ambivalent, but the Kirbys “said let’s do it.”

        If it was provocative argues Toscano, but so is most of great art. The intention was a positive provocation without any of the negative intent he claims.

        Yet the gay community who wanted to now boycott Benetton’s products, as McCarthy reminds us, did not see any message of empowerment; there was nothing coming from that image the way it was used, she argues, to give people a way “to take action in their own world.”

        But Toscani argues that he doesn’t see where AIDS activist were more effective than he was. He had a big company willing to invest money to make people aware of AIDS throughout the world.

        And on some talk shows people begin commenting, in fact, that we should not blame Benetton but the United States government for not taking action. But Kalin argues it did not increase dialogue but became a kind of road block that shut things done, people unable to assimilate the fact that a large company was using this tragedy as a kind of commodity.

        Even Toscano agreed that such controversy also makes economic success. Benetton profits rose after the incident.

        One has to admit that there is something basically crass about using the image of a dying man who had literally starved to death in order to sell clothes. And the linking of social issues of male and female costumes probably did not truly bring about social change.

        Yet one must conclude, at least in this case, that this image and its controversy did in fact raise consciousness about AIDS, whatever that might have meant. And the fact that this film is still discussing those issues 24 years after David Kirby died in that bed, and I am commenting on it even today, 32 years later—at a time when we still have no cure for AIDS and, even worse, a large portion of our population does not even believe in protection from diseases like polio, tuberculosis, and measles that science and documented data have proven effective—is significant. Openly talking about and even representing the effects of a disease are certainly far better than the Reagan administration’s refusal even to acknowledge AIDS existence or perhaps their homophobic insistence that it was attacking only the undesirable queers whom they didn’t feel they needed to worry about. If nothing else, this photograph made it all too clear that this was a beloved man dying of a dread disease in the arms of a suffering family.

        

*For those who have read the earlier volumes of My Queer Cinema will recall, the pietà has long been image associated with gay suffering, most commonly invoked in the 1940-60s, type A films of the “coming out” genre.

Abbas Kiarostami | Copie Conforme (Certified Copy) / 2010

how to copy love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abbas Kiarostami (screenwriter and director) Copie Conforme (Certified Copy) / 2010

 

Perhaps coincidences are simply the mind perceiving links between things that otherwise might not be connected, but I couldn’t help being surprised that after watching Dreyer’s film Gertrud sent to me by Netflix on Saturday, how much of significantly related to my Sunday viewing of another Neflix film, Copie Conforme (Certified Copy) by Abbas Kiarostami.

   Starring the English opera Baritone, William Shimell (with whom Kiarostami worked in directing Don Juan) and the director’s long-time friend, Juliette Binoche Certified Copy concerns an arts and culture writer (Shimell) who, after giving a lecture about his new book, Copie Conforme, meets up with an antiquities dealer who takes him on a drive through the Tuscan landscape, visiting a small village where many working-class Italians come to get married, in part because of a small, sacred tree.

        Shimell’s character, James Miller, argues in his new book that there is no really important difference between an original object of art or a copy, and that neither intrinsically has more value, the copy sometimes being more beloved that even the original which our culture has taught us to see as being better and of more value. The difference between a household object, such as a soup can and its reproduction by an artist such as Warhol is merely the place or context in which it is presented. Even da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is not really an original since it is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the original in this example.

       She (Binoche’s character) is not entirely convinced, but is clearly interested in that author and his ideas. And Miller, himself, seems filled with contradictions, having written his book, he admits, to convince himself. He speaks out for the centrality in human life as being simply pleasure, but as the two encounter the lush Tuscan countryside, he seems only occasionally to notice the beauty of the place, and, at one point, when Binoche reappears from a bathroom, having put on lipstick and a pair of earrings, he seems entirely oblivious. When she takes him into small local museum to show him what was once believed to be a Roman painting but was discovered in the 20th century to be a fake, which, since the museum has still determined to display the work and explain its provenance, represents an instance that might indeed prove his theory, he seems only vaguely interested.

      In fact, he appears to be considerably closed off from the world around him, almost dismissive of the dewy-eyed and brides and grooms around them. While She speaks English, French, and Italian fluently, he speaks almost entirely in English, although we later discover that he does know French.

        The further they go in their travels (he must catch a plane by 9:00 that evening), the two, at first appearing to be footloose strangers, gradually begin to bicker like a married couple. At a small café, when Miller briefly goes outside to take a cell-phone call, the waitress presumes they are a married and, after asking a few questions of Binoche—who plays along with the woman’s apparent misapprehension—begins to philosophize on the state of marriage, arguing that while women simply want love, men must have work to feel meaningful, and therefore, they must be forgiven for their inattention to what is truly most important in the world. Yet, Binoche’s “She” clearly would like to simply have the loving support of his husband rather than his determination to seek fame and a kind of power, later expressing her feelings by showing him a rather kitsch sculpture in the town’s plaza of a man and a woman, she with her head on his shoulder and he with his arm around her, offering up love and protection.

       Many critics have argued for Kiarostami’s borrowing, in this film, from several of the early 1960s films, Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, in particular, but also L’Avventura and later works such as Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. I believe they’re right. But, after the scene I just described above, and after having just seen Gertrud I’d posit that Dreyer’s film is far more central to Certified Copy since the idea that love is more important than anything else is the central theme of both works.

      More importantly, from this moment on things quickly begin to shift. When Miller returns to the table he tells of a moving story of how, when staying in Florence he daily observed a woman with a son, she always walking far ahead of the boy, but stopping every so often to look back to discover his whereabouts. His book first suggested itself to him when the pair one day stood before the copy of Michelangelo’s David in the Palazzo Vecchio (the original had long before been moved into the Galleria dell'Accademia to protect it). In the middle of his tale, he and we simultaneously both realize that the woman and son he is talking about is none other than his table partner; and we have seen her play out the same scene in the streets of Arezzo that very morning. A tear falls from her right eye, as she responds, “I was not well in those days.”

         Even more importantly, when she tells him of the waitress’s mistake about their relationship they even more emphatically play out their relationship as a true couple, arguing about events in the past and numerous other issues. Suddenly the audience can only perceive that they have been a true married couple all along, now living separate lives with long periods between their encounters.

        Most commentators have wondered which of the two realities proffered is the truth (the original) or play-acting (the copy). Of course we can never be sure, and that’s precisely Kiarostami’s point. But I’d bet on the film’s ending being the original as opposed to the copy of their first meetings played out in the earliest scenes. First of all, her 10-year-old son (Adrian Moore), who seems precociously aware of her excitement about seeing Miller almost gives away part of the later plot, by saying he’d like to see the man also, suggesting that he knows Miller is his father.

      Moreover, there is the very fact that these “strangers” immediately seem comfortable with one another, and not at all wary of taking a Sunday drive into the countryside in her car.

      But the fact that gives the truth away is that she has been reserved a front-row seat in the very first scene, sitting next to Miller’s translator and feeling absolutely comfortable to be there, able to whisper about her hungry, acting-up son with the translator while Miller is speaking.

      In this case, the original (the truth about their already being a couple) is preferable to the copy (a play-acted version of starting over again) for when She takes him back to their honeymoon hotel in the same town they have been visiting. Miller finally does give into at least one more moment of pleasure with her, staying on instead of leaving as he originally intended. If the two do have a sexual rendezvous, he perhaps may not even make his plane.

      Of course, Kiarostami has traveled this territory before, particularly in his 1990 film, Close Up where a character pretends to be the director himself, temporarily tricking an entire family. And he has played with this idea as well in his 1997 masterwork, Taste of Cherry, where the suicidal hero is revealed, at film’s end, as performing in the movie which has just told his tale.

      His 2010 film, within this context, does not seem so very “labyrinthine” as many critics dubbed it, as it is a moving comedy-drama about how a couple finds a way back to each other, even if only for a few hours. If, in the future, the central character may find herself, like Gertrud, all alone, living almost as a hermit, she has at least spoken out for the original, the real love, which they once felt for one another.

Los Angeles, November 6, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).