Archie Mayo | The Petrified Forest / 1936 || Dave Powers | The Putrified Forest / 1972 [TV sketch on "The Carol Burnett Show"]

everyone goes to the blue mesa bar-be-que

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Kenyon and Delmar Daves (screenplay, based on the stage play by Robert E. Sherwood), Archie Mayo (director) The Petrified Forest / 1936

Stan Hart, Larry Siegel, and Gail Parent (teleplay), Dave Powers (director) The Putrified Forest / 1972 [TV sketch on “The Carol Burnett Show”]

 

Robert E. Sherwood was one of a number of US playwrights whose every work during a period of time seemed like a major statement of theater, but whose works today are sometimes so outrageous as to be laughable. Even Eugene O’Neill has a few works that fit this category, as well as William Inge, Maxwell Anderson, Clifford Odets, William Saroyan, Paddy Chayefsky, and numerous others (almost all of whom later wrote for film as well) whose works are now remembered more through their movie recreations than from their revivals on stage. But then even in film, where often experienced screenwriters—such as Charles Kenyon and Delmar Daves who recreated this film—worked hard to wipe away their most serious literary blunders, the evidence of their theatrical absurdities remains.

      No one can possibly blame contemporary audiences for simply laughing at the truly bizarre plot contrivances and linguistic bombast of Sherwood’s once popular play (although it lasted only 197 performances on stage) The Petrified Forest. Imagine even thinking up a play which takes place inside Arizona’s The Petrified National Forest, near the Blue Mesa, part of the Painted Desert. The unlikely spot is home to Blue Mesa Bar-Be-Que, the last gasoline station and diner stop before the park itself. There you will find a proto-rightwing militarist, Jason Maple (Porter Hall), his father (Charley Grapewin) who loves to spin tales of his youth when he claims he was shot at by Billy the Kid and knew Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), and Jason’s unhappy daughter, Gabrielle (Bette Davis) who longs to run off the Bourges, France, where her mother, who long ago has left the wilderness where her US Army man took her as a young bride, has returned to her native homeland.

     Gabby (the nickname she hates) reads French poet François Villon and paints when she’s not waiting tables, keeping their business accounts, or trying to shoo off the unwanted attentions of their gas pumper Boze Hertzlinger (Dick Foran).

     If this quartet isn’t ludicrous enough, Sherwood introduces a British-sounding intellectual snob, sometimes poet (Leslie Howard), who having been fired from what sounds like a job of being a gigolo to a wealthy publisher’s wife (the publisher, incidentally, of his only book) has inexplicably determined to go West, or East—it doesn’t matter since he, himself, doesn’t know in which direction he’s headed—on foot without a cent in his pocket. He’s somehow hitchhiked and walked into this godforsaken dusty spot, where, of course he finds someone to quote Villon to and who’s willing to listen to every silly pronouncement about how nature is punishing man (stolen evidently from T.S. Eliot) for his hubris and how many “breeds” of individuals—like all such snobs, he loves gathering people into types—are near extinction, himself included. Alan Squier, the queer man’s name, is what you might describe as a trueblood “cynical romantic,” disappointed about a world that never existed in the first place.

     Gabby, desperate for anyone with an IQ over 60, is fascinated by the newcomer, although totally aware of his ridiculousness. She shows him her secret paintings and immediately falls in love with him, imagining him whisking her off to France to show her everything she’s missed in the metaphorical world of fossilized beings that Sherwood has conjured up for us. Conversely, in Gabby, Squier recognizes the vitality, wonderment, and possibilities he has long ago abandoned, tempted for a moment or so to take her up on her desires, but too exhausted to imagine that he might be much use to her, even ignoring the unspoken element of sex.

      She serves him up a meal and beer while he serves her up all the nonsense she’s long been writing for, coming from someone as queer as she perceives herself to be. Howard has taken on this role, previously on stage, immediately after playing the poof of The Scarlet Pimpernel and just before he would perform as the misogynist Henry Higgins of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion; he performs this role without powdering his nose or growling at womenkind, but nonetheless makes it apparent that he’d be of utterly no use to the high-spirited Gabrielle, just as he probably wasn’t of much value sexually to his publisher’s wife. Sherwood doesn’t seem to even bother himself with anything sexual let alone homosexual, although it’s interesting in the wonderfully satiric version of this movie, whipped up by Carol Burnett’s writers for “Old Old Movies” series, The Putrified Forest, he’s called by the name that everyone if America’s macholand perceives him to be, a “sissy.”

      Back to the movie, the writer introduces yet a few other passersby on this desert deserted dirt road: a wealthy investment banker, Chrisholm (Paul Harvey), his frustrated and at first imperious wife (Genevieve Tobin), and their chauffeur who have just stopped for a fill-up and a moment in the public bathroom to clean themselves off. Since he’s just about ready to continue on his journey, Squier, with help from Gabby, hitches a ride with the driver to the couple’s destination, the hotel of the nearest city. They don’t get far.

      If you haven’t yet reached your limit of incredulity, perhaps if I tell you that the gangster Duke Mantee (Humphrey Bogart) has just escaped from prison and is heading their way with his gang, which should convince you of this work’s absurdity. Not only is he heading “their way,” but he has picked out the Black Mesa Bar-Be-Que as the meeting-up place for his girl and two other guys. Unfortunately, their get-away car has broken down, but fortunately the Chrisholms with the sissy aboard are also heading their way. The Duke and his gang kidnap the car, leaving the wealthy couple and their chauffeur to ponder the situation, while Squier heads back on foot to the diner.

      Before you know it, everyone’s at Rick’s—sorry, wrong movie!—everyone who’s anyone in this part of the country has gotten together at the Black Mesa Bar-Be-Que, most of them under gun point of the Duke and his gang as Squier further pontificates, aligning himself with the gangster as types that are doomed for petrification. Still worried for Gabby’s future, he pulls out a life insurance policy he has been carrying with him, forces Mrs. Chrisholm to witness his signature, and demands Duke kill him before he leaves, having willed the $5,000 policy to Gabrielle.

     The rest of the story really doesn’t matter since it consists simply of further character revelations from figures in whom by this time we’ve lost all interest—although there is a wonderful moment when one of Duke’s gang members, a black man, attempts to make communication as a “bro” with the Chrisholm’s black chauffeur, who hasn’t a clue what the other is saying to him. Duke’s friend tries to explain that he’s been liberated since the Civil War, without the other fully comprehending what he’s saying. That scene alone, in the midst of racist 1936, seems remarkable.

       Duke hears word that his girl and the others have been captured by the police and finally attempts to leave, despite the fact that by this time the police have surrounded the diner and are shooting to kill anyone and everyone in the place. In his hurry to escape, he’s forgotten all about his agreement to kill off Squier, who now stands in the doorway to prevent his exit until Duke finally plugs him just to get out the door, the true outsider of this world finally finding the opportunity to die in Gabrielle arms, the closest he probably has ever gotten to female adoration.

      Gabby, accordingly, will get her chance to see gay Paris. But what this movie has really been about other than that free ticket and a moment of imaginary love is beyond my comprehension. Sure, as Chris Barsanti writes in Slant magazine: “The Petrified Forest seems to have bigger things on its mind, though, than romance and a hostage situation. From the sign in the diner that says, “tipping is un-American, keep your change,” to Gabby’s father’s tin soldier posturing and the grandfather’s endless romanticized Old West spiels to Squier’s long ruminations on being the last of a vanishing race, ‘the intellectuals,’ much of what’s on display here evokes a society on the decline, propping itself up with patriotic guff, fairy tales, and violence.” But in the end, despite its attempt to fluff itself up as play of ideas, the original and its film recreation is nothing but another botched “ship of fools.”

      I liked The Putrified Forest, with Burnett as the desperate Gabby, Harvey Korman as Squier, Steven Lawrence as Duke, and Paul Sand as the Duke’s mad dog killer, Weasel (not in the movie) better. Weasel, desperate to shoot up the place, is calmed down only like a dog by petting his head, which Gabby successfully does, Sand’s tennis shoe tapping in rhythm just like a dog’s tail. When finally, Duke refuses to shoot this satire’s Squier, Gabby herself picks up his gun and does him in, as she and Duke march out the door singing "La Marseillaise," which does sort of turn her former diner in Rick’s Café Américain.

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

Leaf Lieber | Burrow / 2023

extinction or survival

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leaf Lieber (screenwriter and director) Burrow / 2023 [14 minutes]

 

In this sci-fi gay parable, a man named John (Christian Coulson) begins to perceive himself—somewhat as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road—as perhaps the last man standing.

     Yet suddenly, in the cold world of frost and snakes (a bit unbelievable given that most cold-blooded serpents by this time would have surely died), he discovers another nearly frozen survivor, Arian (Marc Crousillat), who was once a ballet dancer and is clearly gay. The two begin cohabiting, with John fighting any desires for sexual contact.

    The two get on well together, John cooking up his mix of hunter’s stew, which includes the snakes he still discovers surviving, along his last remaining can of beans. But they clearly have to move on as hunters if they are going to survive.

      One night in the spotlight of a barbecue fire, Arian not only dances, but teaches his co-survivalist how to himself become a participant in the sexual dance of life.

      There’s a night of deep sighs and problematic co-existence for John as he eventually perceives that he needs to let go of his new-found friend so that he might discover a new world for himself. Snakes eat one another, so the movie proclaims, in order to survive.

       Yet as the time comes when the two must separate, they kiss, which momentarily leads to John's sexual breakdown, in which for a few long seconds it appears he might kill Arian out of a homophobic disgust.

        But finally, John lets go, coming out into a world in which he has no one else to come out to, and in which any remaining gay terror no longer has meaning.

         Arian can only plead that John join him in the adventure of their hunt. 

        This is a metaphoric coming out story, in which two men finally realize their mutual love. But it is also a somewhat frightening tale of survival, perhaps a recognition that all gay men must accept their desires if they are to continue to exist in the hostile climate in which they find themselves. The "war," this short student film from the New York University Tisch School of Arts seems to proclaim, is ongoing, and a full acceptance of gay love may be the only way out.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

 

 

 

Hisayasu Satō | 狩人たちの触覚 (Hunters’ Sense of Touch) / 1995

troubling sexual desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akio Nanki (screenplay), Hisayasu Satō (director) 狩人たちの触覚 (Hunters’ Sense of Touch) / 1995

 

My difficulties with this pinku eiga-like film of 1995 are related to the same problems that I have with William Friedkin’s 1980 rather homophobic conflating of the hunter and hunted (cop and killer) in his film Cruising.

      First of all, I’m not into S&M and bondage, but the presumption that such behavior inevitably leads to murder, castration, and other horrific behavioral patterns is what I can only describe as disgusting. I know that for outsiders such associations must be the first thing that crosses their minds; after all, Jean-Paul Marat’s own writings seem to confirm this. Blood, bodily harm and denigration seem to be at the center of S&M activities. The great poet Guillaume Apollinaire spent a lot of energy on writing deeply compelling tales of the worst kind of sexual horrors imaginable just to bring in some money from a rich sadist.  It is, at least on the surface, what bondage and hard sex appears to be all about: a kind of joy in the sexualized destruction of those themselves suffering sexual self-hatred.

      In this case, Detective Yamada (Naoto Yoshimoto) has been put of the case of the brutal murders of gay men that we quickly perceive are the actions of Ishikawa (Yōji Tanaka), Yamada’s ex-lover of 10 years before.

      The film, accordingly, is not a true detective story in the traditional sense of that word, but a long sensual depiction of their bondage-laden love affair, revealed over the remarkably erotic images that Satō presents us throughout this film.

     Since many of those delights lie outside my own pleasures, I would refer the reader to Perry Ruhland’s quite insightful essay existing on-line at the site, Medium, in an essay titled: “Go Back to the Real You,” which I’ll quote at length:

     

“While most of Satō’s films were made for a heterosexual audience, Hunters’ Sense of Touch is one of Satō’s few films made for the gay pinku production house ENK, and as such, is one of his only examples of out-and-out gay pornography. As a gay man, I may be biased, but I’ve found that Satō’s gay films are consistently his best work. They’re clearly made by a heterosexual director picking up a check, and while he does have an uncanny knack for staging genuine gay eroticism (sex scenes in Hunters’ Sense of Touch, Muscle, and Bondage Ecstasy are among the most erotic things I’ve seen in a movie), he films them at a cold remove, a far cry from the leering camera seen in many of his heterosexual pink films.

     Ironically, it’s this very remove that make his gay films such effective examinations of sexual isolation and need, depicting deeply repressed men drifting from one sexual encounter to another, occasionally finding themselves entangled in bursts of horrific violence.

       In the case of Hunters’ Sense of Touch, the repressed man is masochistic private detective Yamada, and the horrific violence is a string of brutal murders and castrations of submissive gay men. The plot superficially echoes that of William Friedkin’s paranoid homophobic masterpiece Cruising, but while Friedkin’s film is interested in an almost anthropological examination of New York’s leather underground, Hunters’ Sense of Touch is entirely focused on Yamada’s sexual isolation. Thus, no time is wasted in revealing the killer to be none other than the handsome Ishikawa, Yamada’s sadistic ex whose rough touch has occupied his fantasies for the past ten years.

      The narrative amounts to little more than an ambient drone, wherein sleepy investigation and interrogations flow seamlessly into extended sexual liaisons, murder set pieces, and characters’ sudden development of telepathic powers in tandem with their own sexual self-discovery. It’s easy to get caught up on the superficial thinness of the narrative, but to do so would be to miss the point entirely. The inexplicable intrusion of the supernatural into the plot — relayed in a mixture of formally audacious psychedelic sequences and VHS recorded monologues ala Videodrome — serves as the most straightforward example of the film instructing the audience to set aside narrative cohesion and accept the mechanics of the film’s oneiric story as just another texture, no more or less essential to the hypersexed atmosphere as the fuzz of the shot-on-video cinematography or the pink lights dancing across the actors’ eyes.”

      If you leave your prejudices at the door, and perceive Detective Yamada’s and Ishikawa’s former relationship as an agreed upon sexual outlet for their tortured view of their own desires, you might witness this work as an absolutely stunning presentation of troubled sexual longings of the kind intimated in the works of the lesbian vampire movies by Jesús Franco, Harry Kümel, and Walerian Borowczyk or the sublimated gay westerns of the 1970s such as Alberto Mariscal They Call Him Marcado, or, of course, two decades earlier, of Jean Genet; this work, accordingly, is utterly fascinating for what it shows us. Even composer Richard Wagner knew that dying for love could be very sexy.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

 

 

Paul Hasick | Not Alone: A Hallowe’en Romance / 1995

the real thing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Hasick (screenwriter and director) Not Alone: A Hallowe’en Romance / 1995

 

Canadian director Paul Hasick’s 1995, 26-minute short Not Alone: A Hallowe’en Romance engages us in a slightly misleading manner. Given the film’s titular hint that the subject of film has something to do with the day of ghouls and goblins, along with the fascination the leading male, Scott (Michael Donald) has for pumpkins and an odd introductory scene in which he is lying in bed alone when suddenly we hear an invisible voice asking whether he wants some mushroom soup, a bowl of which suddenly appears on the stairway newel post, we are led to suspect that Scott’s gay nighttime visitor may not be the “real thing.”

      Scott, who works as a hospital lab technician now working on urination samples but hoping that he can eventually be involved with AIDS testing, lives with a lesbian roommate, Gwen (Elizabeth Foulds), who’s a painter. And the next morning when the two finally join up to discuss their daily schedules which include plans to attend a protest march for gay bashing that evening, she describes the woman whom with she slept the previous night, but notes that she hadn’t heard Scott bring back the boy with whom he’s apparently had sex, a fact she intuits by his sudden determination, among his daily duties, to take his sheets to the local laundromat.

      Indeed Scott refuses to say much little his late-night date except to recount the mushroom soup event, which occurred evidently after their “perfect” sexual encounter, the stranger’s immediately-after-sex comment cited as a reason why he won’t being seeing his beautiful visitor again. 

       Gwen hints, however, that his reaction is typical. Every male he finds truly attractive immediately becomes further evidence of why he cannot find the someone he is looking for in his search for a long-term relationship. One might suggest that Scott has serious problems with his self-esteem, since he is also quite attractive in a “Teddy-bearish” kind of way. And Gwen hints that his problem in not finding the man of his dreams is because every time such a man shows up he appears to him to be unattainable.

      But clearly Scott’s night-visitor, real or imagined, has become a kind of obsession, as soon after, in brief glimpses we see the stunningly beautiful “ghost” completely naked. At another point we watch the couple engaging in sex, noting the night time visitor’s tattoos which from time to time appears upon the palm of Scott’s hand—another reason we begin to suspect that this “perfect” sex partner was a holiday hallucination.

       As the roommates, Gwen and Scott take to the Toronto streets, stopping for a moment by the famed This Ain’t the Rosedale Library bookstore at its then-location in the Church and Wellesley LGBTQ neighborhood before they reach the laundromat, Gwen posts another of her designed posters for that evening’s event at the bookstore, as they also note a message of hate to “fags” scrawled on a nearby wall.   

     Along their route we gather threads of information about each of them, in particular about how Gwen quite openly seeks out regular sexual partners, while Scott always finds a reason to come home alone or, as we have suggested, can’t believe anyone who might join him for sex could be interested in serious relationship.

       We also witness a phone message conversation in which Scott’s mysterious man of the previous night, Greg (Giovanni Smaldino) so enjoyed the experience that he wonders if he might meet with him again that evening, Scott having told him that he had to work during the day—yet another of Scott’s dodges from the “perfect” men of his life.

       At least now we have the reality of the beauty from the night before confirmed, or do we? In the grocery store Scott becomes so completely enticed by a small-sized pumpkin, literally stroking it’s plump belly and its erect “hat,” which along with a splice in the film of someone feasting on several gourds like Bacchus, we again wonder whether or not the voice of Greg is real or not.

     His non-existence seems to be confirmed when Scott returns home to find Gwen painting, with no suggestion that he’s had a telephone message. He excuses himself to shower, while Gwen begins the meal, the viewers noting that he has indeed purchased the small pumpkin by which he had been so enticed.

       He returns downstairs to find the movie that he planned for after dinner, Pillow Talk, already playing and, more importantly, that they have a guest for dinner, Greg. Gwen has, apparently, intercepted the message, called him back, and invited Scott’s sex partner over for the evening. If at first Scott is totally annoyed by the now very real-life being reentering his everyday reality, as he begins to observe Greg’s demeanor—his seemingly real interest in Scott’s career, his acceptance of him even when he admits that he’s lied about having to work, and finally, when he discovers that Greg also been one of the few attendees at last year’s Hallowe’en evening march—Scott falls in love with the guest of last evening all over again. The romance of the evening, we can now be assured, will not all be a ghostly affair but a night made up of very real flesh and bones.

      As the trio leaves to join others in the anti-hate protest, we observe Gwen grabbing up a carton of eggs, just in case she needs help in responding to the expected bashers. But we recognize her more for being the necessary medium for love. As the characters in Richard Quine’s 1958 romantic fantasy Bell, Book, and Candle about the whirlwind relationship between a witch and regular human being, perhaps love has always something to do with magic.

      Certainly it’s a far better philosophy than what Rock Hudson’s character expressed  presumably about heterosexual relationships in the 1959 film Pillow Talk, which serves as this film’s introductory epigram: “Why does any man destroy himself. Because he thinks he’s getting married!” Finding Greg, Scott seems to discover that he no longer needs to become a ghost to find lasting love.

 

Los Angeles, April 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Todd Haynes | Safe / 1995

in harm’s way

by Douglas Messerli

 

Todd Haynes (screenwriter and director) Safe / 1995

 

After finishing his highly sophisticated and experimental gay work Poison, director Todd Haynes took on a rather odd subject for him in his 1995 Safe, in which actor Julianne Moore first was given to the chance to perform one of her trapped and put-upon housewives. In this case, Moore as Carol White seems to be a perfectly happy well-to-do suburban housewife who is far more interested in the color of her couch than in the well-being of her own life.

    Her friends are as superficial as she is, gossiping about the newest diets and attempting to flaunt what little power they have by convincing their fellow women friends to join them in their newest hobbies.

     But out of nowhere something begins to happen to Carol, little by little, that seems to suggest that she is terribly hypo-allergic to the very environment in which she inhabits. A trip to a shopping mall during which she is trapped in traffic behind a pollution belching vehicle ends in a serious coughing fit. She begins to have headaches, feels continual weakness, has difficulty catching her breath.

     In 1995 the signs were also very much those of thousands of young men and some women who had come down with AIDS. But in Carol’s case it seems to be related to the environment, a sickness that, not so very different from AIDS, doctors have not yet fully come to comprehend.

     At a baby shower she suddenly has difficulty in breathing; getting her hair permed, she suffers an intense nosebleed. And as she begins to explore the chemicals which unknowingly surround her, it becomes clearer to her that the world in which she lives is out to destroy her. In a dry cleaner being fumigated with pesticides, she has a complete physical breakdown.

     Doctors can find nothing wrong with her and suggest psychotherapy. But things seem only to get worse.

      Although AIDS might be Haynes’ metaphor, it is also apparent that her caring and rather kind yet highly competitive, conservative husband, Greg (Xander Berkeley) may be one of the most serious of her allergens. If nothing else, it is hardly a metaphor to say that she is allergic to her current life.

      One doctor attempts to track down her allergies, tracing some of them to a diet she has been exploring with one of her friends. But none of the specialists, mostly male doctors, can find any “real” cause and seem to suggest to Greg—speaking to him, while seeming to ignore her existence in the same room—that her problem is mostly psychological.

      Her “friends” gradually exclude her, and Greg and her their son Rory begin to work around her increasing inability to take part in their lives, further closing her off. Reading material on her own, and taking a lead from one advertised program, Carol gradually perceives that she is no longer able to function in her current life, and seeks out the help of a new-age desert community for people with just such environmental illnesses, Wrenwood.

      There is meets up with a seemingly intelligent and gentle devotee who attempts to put her mind at ease, while introducing her to the community as well as subtly intruding upon her privacy, hinting at possibly guiding her into lesbian sexuality.

      The head of Wrenwood, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), who is openly gay—a purposeful attempt on Haynes’ part to help his primarily gay audiences to find Peter, at first, to be sympathetic—initially sounds quite sane and helpful. And indeed, the community outwardly appears to be one of great eccentricity and openness. But gradually, after hearing a few of Dunning’s lectures, himself evidently suffering from AIDS but believing that good thoughts can heal it, we can begin to perceive the cult-like qualities of Wrenwood and its followers, a kind of self-help fascism that may be worse than those who pretend that such diseases do not even exist. And even here, isolated from the chemical world in which she previously lived—one member of the community would not even allow the taxi in which Carol arrived to enter the confines of the camp—Carol still discovers new lesions appearing on her face. Ultimately, she separates herself even further by moving into an igloo, especially built for one hyper-sensitive individual who has recently died.

      A visit from her husband and son puts everything in even clearer perspective as she casually points out a mansion rising from the hills behind Wrenwood where Dunning lives. And it is evident from that visit that Carol will not be returning to family life any time soon.

      In the final scenes, she has taken the advice of her female friend, repeating over and over to herself in the mirror, “I love you. I really love you.”

      There is no “end” to this movie, no answers provided; and many of his audiences have been confused and unsure of how to define the heroine’s illness, or even if there is a true illness other than a psychological one.

     As Julie Grossman has argued in her essay “The Trouble with Carol,” (Other Voices: A Journal of Cultural Criticism, January 2005) Carol as a victim of male-dominated society is able to take charge of her life somewhat in the manner of Chantal Ackerman’s 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—a work Haynes has acknowledged he had in mind in creating Safe—in the end she merely replaces the standard heteronormative world with the equally debilitating self-help culture which demands that the patient see him or herself as the cause and cure of all illnesses.

      Grossman finds few good signs in the ending of this film, despite the patient’s attempts at self-love. And in his essay of 2014 “Safe: Nowhere to Hide” critic Dennis Lim goes even further in describing the perniciousness of such ideas as preached by the character of Peter Dunning 

     

“As a ‘chemically sensitive person with AIDS,’ Peter has an ‘incredibly vast” perspective, one of his acolytes tells Carol. Where the doctors questioned the existence of her sickness, Wrenwood affirms it and, in so doing, validates her. But it also instills a poisonously mixed message: even if the chemicals are making her sick, the cause lies within. The cure is a regimen of self-improvement that sounds an awful lot like self-blame. ‘The only person who can make you sick is you,’ Peter tells his charges, more or less quoting from The AIDS Book: Creating a Positive Approach, one of several best sellers by New Age empress Louise Hay, who made a fortune in the eighties and nineties stumping for positive thinking as a miracle panacea.”

 

     It appears what we have to recognize at the film’s end is that Carol is perhaps quite ill, but as long as there is no open perspective in which to truly and fully explore her disease (perhaps both physical and psychological) there will be no recognition that there is such a problem or even a search for a possible cure. Much like AIDS, which took several decades for doctors and scientists even to recognize it as a true disease from which not only gay men were suffering before they truly began to seek out and find possible alleviations. There is still no cure from AIDS, no cure for those with sensitive systems triggered by our polluted environments. The new “disease” of our age, not first attacking individuals but the entire planet, the warming of our earth, has still to be recognized as even existing among numerous world leaders and politicians, and will surely eventually kill off millions around the world as others repeat their mantras of everything being a disease of the mind, offer up other simple cure-alls, or simply try to ignore it.

     As Haynes makes clear, there is no safety in a world of ignorance and pretense.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).