Stan Brakhage | The Extraordinary Child / 1954

escape from stereotype

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Brakhage (scenarist and director) The Extraordinary Child / 1954

 

Unlike his previous two films, in Stan Brakhage’s domestic comedy The Extraordinary Child of 1954 contains no angst-driven or sexually confused young men. The central figure of this Ionesco-like work Mr. (Larry Jordan) has married the Mrs. (Yvonne Fair) nine months earlier and now have a “blessed event” of a child.

    The doctor (Robert Benson) arrives, presumably to help in the birth or perhaps just to check up on the baby, only to discover the baby in the carriage (Walt Newcomb) is a full-grown adult dressed up in a diaper, the Mrs. madly leafing through the bureau drawers presumably to find a clean diaper, and the father, with another friend (Stan Brakhage) playing poker.

     At first, in fact, the father cannot even find his son, and when the mother rolls the child, sitting up in the carriage, the doctor is shocked, but quite disgusted.

 

     Mrs., however, sees quite proud of the wee-one, showing off the baby and her figure simultaneously. The doctor attempts to make a quick get-away, but Mr. and his poker-playing buddy quickly run after him, bringing him back and sitting him down to their table to play poker.

     In the interim, the baby has rocked his carriage into another room where he has tipped over his baby buggy and crawled out onto the floor.

      The mother, realizing the carriage is no longer where she left it begins a search of the rooms and closets for the child, while the men continue their game, accompanied by cigars and whisky, representing behavior that might be perceived as the stereotype of working-class heterosexuals, a scene right of out the end of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, when Stan, Mitch, and others have gathered to play their weekly poker game at the very same moment that the folk from the mental institution have come to cart Blanche DuBois off.*

      The comparison is an apt one, particularly when Mrs. is now so distraught for having lost her baby that she wanders around the room as she were in a mad trance, seeming to call for him almost as she did for the boys at the end of Unglassed Windows.

      The baby has found it’s way under the poker table and as if he were performing in a W. C. Fields film, begins to torture the adults, first by stealing, one by one, three cigars from his father’s left hand as it hangs in space.

        Not only does he smoke the cigars, first puffing on them one by one and then all three together, but he eats them. He returns to plays with the whiskey bottle which totters between his father and his own greedy hands.

        When tired of that he levitates the entire table, the men finally standing in startlement. The baby quickly crawls back into the bedroom from where, when the mother finally having come out of her trance, moves toward it, he tosses out everything he can lay his hands on. All four adults stand outside the bedroom door, which they have now closed for protection, afraid of entering it. When Brakhage turns to look back into the room, the brat has climbed to the small ceiling chandelier where he pulls out a light bulb, sending the room into half-darkness, as the figures stumble around the space gesticulating madly and spinning about as if they have all gone mad.

        The horrified doctor grabs his bag, and makes to escape, while Mr. screws the light bulb back in the ceiling lamp. Once her eyes have become reaccustomed to the light, the mother looks across the room to discover, in horror, a piece of cardboard upon which the child has scrawled a message: “running away from home —baby”

 

     As the doctor gets into his car and pulls out of the space, we see that the tyke is sitting on the bumper, with his holding onto the latch of the car trunk.

     One almost has to ask, “Is this the child, full grown, who his parents years later discover on the bridge in Interim, bringing the car to a screeching halt?” If so, it’s clear that their dear child wanted absolutely nothing to do with stereotype of heterosexual normality he witnessed as a baby of this American couple.

     Newcomb, if you recall, also played the bookish boy in Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection, which might illuminate the state of mind of the character if we see this as his childhood manifestation. It may be ridiculous to do so, particularly given Brakhage’s impending abandonment of most narrative, but it is difficult not to make connections between these early atypical works of his art.

 

*The 1951 film of A Streetcar was still very much in the minds of US film-goers in 1954, when Brakhage’s film was made.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2016

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2016).