Ingmar Bergman | Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf) / 1968

bitten by a snake

by Douglas Messerli

Ingmar Bergman (screenwriter and director) Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf) / 1968 

Directly after his experimental, highly artificed, and self-conscious masterpiece of 1966, Persona, director Ingmar Bergman, with greater self-confidence, determined to further explore the mental angst of his characters, many of whom had previously been forced to suffer what has been described as a “night journey,” a series of psychological tests that can exorcise their inner demons or end, as in in the case of Johan Borg (Max von Sydow), in insanity and death.

     Except this time round, Bergman, clearly no longer felt limited to the kind of psychological realism of works such as The Wild Strawberries or even the allegorical pantomime of a film such as The Seventh Seal, but felt confident enough to link his work to Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965), while referencing the early monster films such as Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. The work’s structure and some of its tropes, moreover, draw on Mozart’s The Magic Flute, an opera that would continue to fascinate Bergman throughout his life, leading eventually to a 1974 filming of the work.

     With such a broad range of influences, it is no surprise that many critics have described the various symbols and images of Hour of the Wolf as simply failing to “coalesce into a coherent pattern” (Dennis DeNitto in World Film Directors). Yet, I argue, it is this very rich overlay of associations and structures from film and opera history that transforms Hour in the Wolf much like Persona, from a work of psychological realism into metaphoric depiction of what it is like to gradually go insane as a being falls into ever-deepening fears and doubts.

     The plot of this film hardly matters with his wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), Borg (Max van Sydow) arrives at the small island of Baltrum (Bergman’s favorite location to play our psychological crises) where the artist seeks rest. But even more than previously, Borg is approached, like Tanino in Mozart’s fable, by strange and inexplicable beings which he can only describe as demons—a Bird-Man, insects, meat-eaters, a schoolmaster—all of whom terrify him and keep him up at night in horror.

      His strong and supportive wife determines that she can save him, reading his hidden diary (sometimes directly in front of the camera) to reveal the horrors Johan is facing. Among the revelations in his “dagbok” is a former love affair with a woman, Vernoica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin).

      In the final scene of the film, after having lost her husband to insanity, Alma, again addressing the camera, speaks: “Is it true that a woman who lives a long time with a man eventually winds up being like that man? I mean to say, if I had loved him much less, and not bothered so of everything about him, could I have protected him better?”

     The question is crucial to understanding the film, for, in her determined love, Alma, staying up through the night to lead him back into morning light (the same pattern of Mozart’s opera), she herself soon encounters these dark beasts. Approached by a Baron von Merkens (Erland Josephson), they are invited to his nearby castle, where the couple endures a surreal-like dinner party. After dinner, the baron’s wife (Gertrud Fridh) invites the couple into her bedroom, revealing a portrait of Veronica by Borg himself, stating “It has become like part of my solitary life. I love her.” The terrified Borg and Alma leave the castle, with Alma confessing her fear that she may lose her husband to the demons.

      During a following long night, Borg admits to his youthful obsession with Veronica and his childhood punishment, where he was locked in a cabinet by his parents who had convinced him also lived a small man who fed on children’s toes. 

     The most frightening revelation of the night, however, played through a dramatically startling montage of images, is about the day he has returned home to report that he had been bitten by a snake. As Borg fishes, we see a young boy, dressed only in scanty swimming trunks, lying in the sun on a nearby rock, clearly flaunting his body at the man. The boy moves somewhat closer, finally moving to the very rock from which Borg is casting his fishing rod. The tension mounts, culminating in Borg’s murder of and drowning of the young child!

      We cannot know whether this confession represents another haunting “demon” of Borg’s of his imagination or a real event in his life, but we do comprehend that the incident, real or imagined, demonstrates his sexual confusion: obviously he has killed the child because of his own sexual attraction to him. If the boy can be perceived as the snake, attempting to lure Borg into sexual activity, the dark forces within the grown man, those of the evil Queen of the Night, rush forward to destroy the snake, just how Mozart’s The Magic Flute—a puppet version of which has been performed in the baron’s castle—commences. Borg is clearly a Tonino, a man who must be further tested in order to make his Panina (Alma) his true wife.

      As one of the baron’s guest again invites them to the castle, mentioning that Veronica Volger will be among the invited guests, Borg produces a pistol, supposedly to protect them from what he describes as “small animals,” and when Alma tries to dissuade him from his clear obsession, he shoots her, racing off to the castle.

 

      At the castle, Borg not only meets the “Bird-Man” (Mozart’s Papageno obviously), but all the other demons of his dream. His face is painted—lipstick, eyeliner, face powder—as if he were suddenly a figure in drag, before he enters a room where the seemingly dead Veronica lies under what appears to be a winding-sheet. When Borg lifts it, he discovers the beautiful Veronica very much alive beneath, but laughing, as he suddenly realizes all of the demonic figures of the castle are watching. Borg’s breakdown is nearly inevitable; he cannot consummate the sexual act, his homosexual proclivities coming once more to the foreground: “I thank you, the limit has been finally transgressed,” he shouts, as the demons attempt to devour him, he racing into the underbrush. He has failed the tests.

      Although Alma has survived the shooting, and witnesses his final attack, she can no longer help him as Borg disappears into the woods (the same direction, incidentally, we see Giulietta heading at the end of Fellini’s film), a world into which Alma can never enter. “Is it true that a woman who lives a long time with a man eventually winds up being like that man?” The question is the answer.

      Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf is less a story of a couple, one of whom is suffering from psychological angst, than it is an opera itself, a wonderfully overwrought series of overlying images and references to world literature about the inability of a human mind to accept the monsters he perceives within himself.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2013).

  

Nick Borenstein | Sweater / 2019

a little kindness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Borenstein (screenwriter and director) Sweater / 2019 [5 minutes]

 

This silly short is basically a dance piece that swings on the kitchen door of a gay breakfast appointment that Corey (Nick Borenstein) evidently has with someone he’s connected with through Grindr or some such site. For the occasion Corey is wearing his quite lovely new puce sweater, but is still a little unsure of it, as he asks the diner at the next table if he likes his sweater.

     The diner, who looks to be quite the slob, removes his ear bud, responding that he likes it as he quickly ducks again under his headphones. A few minutes later the mystery man arrives, asking if the waiting young man is Corey. When Corey shakes his head yes, the mean Grindr bitch takes a second a look, lifts his nose into the air and says, “I’m sorry, no!” quickly spinning around and leaving, putting Corey into a rather deep funk.

      Now walking down the street, his beautiful new sweater tied around his waist, Corey is asked by a young straight couple if he might take their picture. Obviously young lovers, focused on themselves, they drop a pizza box with some slices spilling out as he pulls the camera from them. He takes a picture and moves on to a coffee house, where he’s told that the special coffee he’s ordered is $9.00. Shocked by the price, Corey begins by counting out his change. But in this case the nice waiter, probably having no patience for the slow count, tells Corey it’s on the house.

 

    This simple act of kindness results in the remainder of short film turning into a rather pleasant dance number (Borenstein at the lead) as Corey and a chorus of 12 other dancers perform a rather spirited piece choreographed by Tiana Hester.

      The imaginary dance over, Corey’s handed his coffee and asks if the waiter night ever want to grab a drink sometime. He’s flattered by Corey’s offer but explains he has a girlfriend. But he also comments: “Cool sweater, though” truly making Corey’s day despite its bad start. Having put his sweater by around his neck, Corey struts off into temporary happiness, even without a friend.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Nick Borenstein | Pete Can't Play Basketball / 2020

sitting it out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Borenstein (screenwriter and director) Pete Can't Play Basketball / 2020 [8 minutes]

 

Although this short film played in the LGBTQ circuit, I almost passed on reviewing it. And even as I sit down to write about it, I still have absolutely no idea what the film is attempting to express. The title says it all.

     Poor Pete (Nick Borenstein), a hard worker in an office job is refused a promotion not because of the quality of his work, which female his boss admits is stellar, but that he can’t contribute to the off-hour’s effort of the fellow workers’ basketball team.

     Pete recalls that as a child, he could play the game, but now as an adult has no ability. He nonetheless decides to sign up for the new team the office is creating for a new season, much to the jeers of his fellow workers, none of whom Pete likes. Like so many office workers throughout the country, they are nearly all sports crazy, women and men alike.

      Pete attempts to practice a few dribbles and hoop shots. Most of them even miss the area of the hoop, but one, the very last, finally goes in, to be witnessed at that very moment by a fellow office worker.

      Suddenly Pete is asked to dine with the other workers, and they look forward to the first practice scrimmage and the choice of the final 12 players. Pete does okay on the dribble. But when it comes to shooting into the hoop, he misses it by miles, and once again becomes the laughing stock of his fellow workers. Carl (Dru Johnston) steps in behind him and puts the ball right where it should fall. He’s the hero, invited out to dinner with his colleagues.

      But Carl stays behind with the dejected Pete, admitting that he has no intention of joining the basketball team. He too hates his fellow workers. So Pete has found a new friend.

       Perhaps that’s important, since Pete appears to possibly be gay, although nothing in this film is spoken about his or any else’s sexuality, and there is absolutely no indication that he might be gay except for slight tonal qualities of his voice (which we all know and have been told are absolutely unreliable). Pete has no affectations, and not one scene in the movie truly points to his gay sexuality. If you do research on-line you might discover that the writer, director, and major actor Borenstein is gay, and that he has done other films such as Sweater (which I review in the 2018-2019 volume) which is quite obviously gay and includes a wonderful dance sequence. But those sources, of course, lie outside the current film.

     Of course, there are many gay men who profess no interest in sports; I am one of them. But that doesn’t necessarily spell out that you are a member of the LGBTQ community. Carl, for example, seems quite straight.

 

Los Angeles, August 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Roman Polanski | Rosemary's Baby / 1968

happy house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roman Polanski (screenwriter, based on the novel by Ira Levin, and director) Rosemary’s Baby / 1968

 

I saw Polanski’s horror-genre film, Rosemary’s Baby when it was first released in 1968, and then again in 1970, I believe, with my husband Howard, in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa at the Paramount Theater (no longer in existence), during which a real bat soared over the screen. Yesterday, seeing the film on DVD after all these years, Howard and I both concurred that it seemed to be a different movie from the one of our memories.

     I remember Rosemary’s Baby as a horrifyingly tense work about great evil, in which a young innocent woman, Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is introduced to a satanic coven, with whom apparently her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), has joined to better his career, determining to impregnate is wife with a child that will become Satan himself.

     Given the hundreds of movies that have made through the years (The Omen [1976] and the more recent The House of the Devil [2009] being just two examples), Howard and I wondered at the fact that, although Christ was born into the human world just once, Satan must apparently be reborn again and again, a product of depraved Satanic worshipers and accidental dates (such as the one in this movie, June 28, 1966 or 666) and lunar eclipses. And that very question, perhaps, forced me to recognize just how formulaic aspects of this movie were.

     Similarly, what appeared in my memories as a very dark movie, was closer to what Renata Adler described it upon its premiere: “The movie—although it is pleasant—doesn’t seem to work on any of its dark or powerful terms.” While early reviews, moreover, often compared Polanski’s directing style to Alfred Hitchcock’s, this time round both Howard and I perceived Polanski’s more leisurely, at times almost limpid, pacing as a far cry from master’s always taut and pre-determined approach. Frankly, this works for Rosemary’s Baby precisely for the opposite reasons than one might suspect.

 

     For, although the plot—closely following the story of Levin’s popular horror tale—seems to be nearly entirely focused on the evil surrounding Rosemary as she slowly comes to perceive what is happening to her through her own suddenly strange dreams (particularly her impregnation in a Satanic ritual), in her food cravings (Farrow actually ate raw liver to lend credulity to the part), through the pains of her early pregnancy, and through the warnings of her friends such as Hutch (Maurice Evans) and several party-going women acquaintances, the style of Polanski’s work is actually presented more as a comedy. Two scenes—Rosemary’s phone booth attempt to call her previous Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) to make an appointment, and a scene where, completely disoriented, she walks into incoming mid-town traffic—create tensions worthy of the horror genre. But the rest of the film puts all of Rosemary’s growing fears into a kind of loony perspective. For the real stars of this film are not the somewhat sleazy Guy nor even the utterly terrified Rosemary, but the somewhat doughty neighbors, Minnie Castevet (the hilarious Ruth Gordon, who won an Academy Award for this role) and her husband Roman, a.k.a. Steven Marcato (Sidney Blackmer), son of a famed murderer who once lived in the same apartment house. These busybody neighbors of the Woodhouse’s, she dressed in an outrageous 1960s flowered fabrics and he in slightly outdated tweeds topped by bow-ties and cravats, irresistibly intrude upon the young couple, bringing them mousses, herbs, and advice, changing doctors for young pregnant woman, and generally causing havoc for the would-be lovers.

      It is their bizarre extravagances, more than anything else, that begin to unhinge the clearly susceptible Rosemary, and signify her gradual transformation from her basically realist, slightly religious (she was raised Catholic) perspective to a slightly absurd inner certainty that her neighbors and husband are attempting to take her child and sacrifice it to Satan himself.

     Carefully, Polanski stacks the deck in favor of her obsessions by killing off (through suicide) a young woman living with the Castevet’s, the sudden blindness of an actor which allows Rosemary’s husband to take on the dramatic role, the horrific nightmare I already described, and the sudden illness of her friend Hutch (whom Guy describes as a “professional crepe-hanger”) who leaves Rosemary two volumes of works on witchcraft that mentions the “tannis root” (the “Devil’s Pepper”) with which the neighbors have plied her. Along with those “intentional coincidences,” Polanski slides his camera through the vast rooms and spaces of the luxury apartment building (the exteriors being those of the grand west side New York Dakota Condominium) like a suspicious snake, while focusing on minute objects such as the necklace of tannis given to Rosemary, and the expected placement of a large chifforobe by the previous tenant against a closet—presumably in an attempt to keep the neighbors out! These and numerous other “clues” seem to give credence to Rosemary’s fears.

      But we have equal evidence that they her troubles may be delusional. When she visits her previous doctor, for example, he calls her current doctor, Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy) and Rosemary’s husband, apparently worried about her mental health. And even though, after the child’s birth, her husband lies to her about the baby’s survival, it may, after all, be only a way to protect her and the child. For, even though Rosemary, at first sight of the baby, is convinced they have done something to it, Polanski stubbornly keeps the camera out of the cradle (producer William Castle has insisted they show the possible devil-child) as Rosemary’s maternal instincts kick in, with the Castevets and their equally ridiculous friends approvingly looking on.

     As in Polanski’s Repulsion, in the end we are not quite certain whether Rosemary has been justifiably terrified or simply delusional, having temporarily, at least, gone mad. And we are never sure whether the film is a kind of dark comedy—somewhat like the 1963 play by Ronald Alexander Nobody Loves an Albatross (starring Robert Preston as a con man) in which Guy has, we are told several times, appeared as an actor—or a dense epic, such as the religious-irreligious (depending upon your point of view) drama such as John Osborne’s 1961 Luther, in which Guy, apparently, has also acted.

     Each viewer may draw his or her own conclusions about what is the truth, but there can never be, the way it is filmed, one definitive answer. Although clearly drawn to such subject matter from the very beginning his career, Polish director Polanski would soon after suffer evils that were even more satanically-grounded in the “Helter-Skelter” murders of his wife Sharon Tate and others by the Manson cult; and the creators of that song, the Beatles, would lose one of their own members, John Lennon, as a shooting victim outside the very building, the Dakota, that stood-in in this film for the fictional Bramford—a building which Hutch, at one point, sarcastically describes as “Happy House.” The real satanic horrors, one might argue, lay outside the frame of this film rather than within its more ambivalent boundaries.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2013).

Tom E. Brown | Don't Run, Johnny / 1997

spoof or spook

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom E. Brown (screenwriter and director) Don't Run, Johnny / 1997

 

Tom E. Brown’s 1997 short of 7.08 minutes is a comedic film about a very serious subject, AIDS. Appropriating the style and techniques of Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda, Brown’s film features host Sonny Goff who giggles with dark glee over the call which every gay man fears receiving: the news that he is HIV positive.

 

    When Johnny hears the news he begins to run endlessly nowhere and everywhere, trying to simply out race his very body infected with the disease. But he soon runs into strange doctors who predict contradictory results and proscribe hard-to-obtain and difficult-to-afford medications that make him attempt to whip up his own recipes. Johnny realizes that one of the first parts of your body you lose when you become HIV infected is your mind.

      Suddenly, no one will any longer touch him, and he feels “weird” in a way that he cannot even describe, despairing and depressed. Until suddenly he realizes that nearly everyone he encounters is weird, from the boys down at steel mills, the friendly grocer, Officer Bob posting a road sign, or a young boy with a wooden mallet. The world is full of freaks.

       Certainly, one appreciates those films on AIDS that also can recognize the importance of laughter that appears along with sorrow in films such as from Albert J. Bressan, Jr.’s Buddies (1985) to Nik Sheehan’s documentary No Sad Songs of the same year, particularly, as in this case, it is the director himself whom the film is featuring (the final credits, which include numerous individuals doing various activities that have nothing at all to do with film itself, including an enema boy and a bug handlers, ends with a reversal of the standard legal advisory: “The persons and events depicted in this motion picture are not fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons and events is completely intentional.”) Yet, in both its rather sophomoric use of sources and its meaningless conclusions I can only suggest this film is not as funny as it is inane, despite its apparent success in the gay film circuits.

        And don’t tell me that something new might not be expressed about AIDS in the late 1990s when lives were being extended at the same time that life-saving drugs were being held from those who might need it most by their outrageous prices and unavailability—concerns which, in fact, Brown would explore in later films.

 

Los Angeles, August 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

 

David Ottenhouse | Close To / 1997

dangerous love

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Ottenhouse (screenwriter and director) Close To / 1997

 

Added to the 10-part series of L'@mour est à réinventer, presented on French television in 1996, was David Ottenhouse’s short Close To.* This powerfully odd short has almost no little dialogue given the fact that one of its figures (Alexis Arquette**) evidently cannot speak and expresses himself only in grunts and other noises, while the other (Steve Wood) is a quiet shy man who says little to the waitress in the cafe where he is drinking his coffee. (Since, other than the waitress, there are only two unnamed figures in this work, I shall designate them as A and W, a sort of hot fizzle of root beer).

     The affable and handsome W is sipping on his coffee when the somewhat odd-looking A stumbles into the café and, at the cash register, grunts and points to the wall, the waitress discerning his gestures to mean a hamburger. As she turns away, he quickly pockets a piece of pastry from a small basket near the register. He seems almost pleased with his petty thievery until he turns and realizes that a customer has observed his actions. There is a moment of doubt about whether his acts will be reported as he turns away from W but then turns his gaze toward him again almost as a challenge. But a slight grin of W’s thin lips reassures him, and he also appears to like what he sees in the man’s face since he walks forward to him extending his hand which the other gently grasps, not as in a traditional handshake but in a gesture we might describe as holding his hand, almost as a lover might. It is a subtle difference that happens quickly but is important in the explanation of the events that follow.

     A moment later W stands, tosses some change on the table, and walks out to the street. He lights a cigarette and begins to walk off, A moving to the door of the luncheonette and, after pausing in the doorway, suddenly beginning to follow as W turns into a New York City subway entrance and begins a descent several floors below, signifying that this station is a connecting link in the system with trains meeting up her on various levels. The descent is important since it embraces 84 seconds of the 9-minute film, and by the time W arrives at the lower level the ordinary reality of the street gives way the surreality of what might can only be described as something close to an S&M public sexual encounter.

 

    For the moment after W reaches the tracks staring off into the distance to see if he can glimpse a train, he feels a hand on his shoulder and, in turning back, discovers he is facing A. In the next second A has moved into W’s chest with W raising up his shirt to allow A suck his nipple. In the next minute they have moved up against the subway wall as A goes down on W to perform an almost violent act of fellatio. Almost the rest of the film consists of the intense blow job A gives W while at the same time twice attempting to pull his billfold from his back pocket—in both cases W, sensing the motion, swats his hand away—and at another point pulling a knife out of his jeans ready to use it on his lover presumably when W finally ejaculates into his mouth.

     Ottenhouse underlines these acts and their intent by alternating real-time action with slow motion and momentary stops in which the figures are bathed in white light, creating a far more vivid sexual encounter that a simple “quickie” in the subway would otherwise entail. This also contributes a sense of the transitions between the real-time pleasure W takes in being sucked off and the peripheral role A plays as a threat to his physical being while, at the same moment, revealing how W continues to control the other while simultaneously experiencing the ecstasy of sexual release. Both men are aware of their joy in the act while comprehending the dangers of what they are doing: the possibility that they will be seen by observers, arrested by police, robbed, or even killed. It is precisely the kind of thrill some men and women get in having sex in the time of AIDS without protection—the danger fortifying the exaltation. 

    The moment W ejaculates, he grabs A’s left hand wrapped around the knife and holds it tightly in place as he bends down to kiss his forehead. A moment later he kicks the now almost naked A away from him and runs off, jumping to a waiting subway just as the doors close.

     The film ends with W standing against the subway window in seemingly sad contemplation of what has just happened, looks of sweet regret and slight disgust for both his and A’s actions alternately registering on his face. Yet we can be almost certain that in the future he will describe this strange event as the best blowjob he has ever received in his life.

      

*Ottenhouse’s film appears on the USA DVD collation of the Love Reinvented films along with a film Cherish by Australian director Stephen Jones from 1998.

**As readers of these pages will perceive, Arquette is a name that appears numerous times in  my discussions of LGBTQ films. One of the several brothers and sisters of the famous acting progeny of Cliff Arquette (who is known by the stage name of Charley Weaver), Alexis appeared in 68 films and numerous television features and series from 1989-2014. Long featured as an androgynous figure in several of his roles, in 2004 he underwent hormone therapy and ultimately sex reassignment surgery. In 1987 Arquette discovered that he was HIV positive, and in 2016 she died of the disease.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

Paul Thomas Anderson | Boogie Nights / 1997

 a real film

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Thomas Anderson (screenwriter and director) Boogie Nights / 1997

 

You might say that Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights was for the nineties decade what Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is for our current times; both represent similar time periods: although Boogie Nights begins in 1977, it moves into the excesses of the mid 1980s, the period just a few years before that covered by Wolf. Both films contain numerous scenes of nudity, sex, drugs, and violence. And the goal of the characters in both films is ultimately to get rich. Despite this, however, the porn industry at the center of Anderson’s film seems a far more pleasant place to be than the outskirts of Wall Street portrayed in Scorsese’s extravaganza. And I’d far more like to meet up with the rather naïve but charming Eddie Adams (a likeable Mark Wahlberg) than the over-the-top con-man Jordan Belfort of the Scorsese film. While Belfort seems to be acting out his massive orgies with a sense of deficiency, at least Eddie has the real tools: a very large cock.

  

     Perhaps it’s simply that the porn world—despite its cutthroat ethics and tendency to destroy its own—is far less destructive and far more in touch with the “real” world than the financial shams created by the latter. The goal of filmmaker Jack Horner (lovingly played by Burt Reynolds) is to take his smut to a new level, to make what he describes as a “real film.” In short, even though he knows he is only producing a trashy vision of experience, his desire is to create art. Horner’s world is filled with wacky dreamers: a would-be mother in Maggie/”Amber Waves” (Julianne Moore), a cowboy-loving would-be entrepreneur in Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), a would-be monogamous husband in “Little” Bill Thompson (William H. Macy), a serious actor in Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), and a successful gay lover in the case of Scotty J. (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is not so secretly enamored of Eddie. Only Eddie, transformed into porn star Dirk Diggler, seems to have no “real” dreams; he simply has a gift that demands being employed.

 

      Yet, while Scorsese’s characters seem, time and again, awarded for their greed, Anderson’s more loveable figures are almost all severely punished just for having participated in the filmmaking of love. It somehow seems unfair that Maggie cannot win custody of her child because she is seen as an unfit mother, that Buck cannot get a loan, for the same reason, to open his stereo shop, that Scotty J. is rejected for attempting to declare his love, and “Little” Bill is in love a nymphomaniac who fucks everyone in sight. Even Jack Horner is defeated by the shift in the porn world from film to video and, in the end, must shift from his James Bond-like imitations to what has now become a porn standard, movies about a roaming automobile that picks up unsuspecting boys off the street to have sex with its occupant—in the gay version the blind-folded boy being led to believe he’s being sucked off by a woman when it is actually a male—Rollergirl (Heather Graham) who oddly enough, never removes her roller skates. The sad sequence in which we see them in action results in the accidental pick-up of a boy she knew from high school, who brutally mocks his former classmate until they are forced to beat him and toss him out.      

      In the end, however, Anderson’s film is far more forgiving of its “sinners” than is Scorsese’s more orgiastic porn flick. For Boggie Night is a true satire, almost a snap-shot of a long ago age of excess with a bit of nostalgia thrown in. And, at film’s close, if some of its characters have been destroyed by their dreams, others go on in ludicrous belief, or, at least, in a suspension of disbelief—including Eddie, who addicted to cocaine and methamphetamine is briefly forced into prostitution before making up with Jack. By film’s end, in 1985, Eddie is back on the job, hoping he might be able to get an erection and successfully perform in the new work before him. At last we get a quick view of the man behind the curtain—the long limp cock which everybody else has already ogled.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2014; revised January 23, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2014).