A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 3: Oh yeah, that's a really good one...

I was lost in a cinematic un-wilderness of my own creation, so I threw myself into senseless social networking in order to run away from the painful notion that I was not really a horror fan anymore.

And then someone brought about the added notion that perhaps I wasn't even a movie fan at all.

It wasn't intentional on the other person's part. It was merely a simple question that led me to this state: "Surely, you've seen The Last Detail?"

For those out there who have never seen The Last Detail, it is an Oscar-nominated 1973 film directed by Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid, in which two MPs show a naval prisoner one last good time before they escort him to prison for what they consider to be an unfair sentence.

And no, I have never actually seen it. Never more than twenty minutes or so of it, and actually, what I had seen was the ending of the film when I ran into on cable by mistake. "What's this? Oh, it's Jack Nicholson with a properly folded Gilligan hat. Must be The Last Detail." I knew of the film. I just had not seen it all the way through.

But what I said to this person was, "Oh, yeah, that's a really good one. Nicholson... Quaid... Great film!"

What I was not prepared for was their followup, which began, "Well, you know that scene where they...," at which point I blanked out, because I knew then I had committed myself to a series of nods, grunts, more mutterings of "oh yeah," and the eventual admittance that "it had really been a long time since I had seen it, so I really don't remember the details of The Last Detail that well." I then sell the wimpy pun on the title with a self-amused chuckle, and then we start to riff on further puns on the word "detail" or of a naval variety, and the moment gets lost in the haze of mid-afternoon buffoonery. I crawled out of the wreckage of poor conversation once more, but this time, there was scarring. Luckily, though, there was also a form of resolution at hand.

We have all performed this little act -- pretending to have seen something we haven't -- whether you wish to admit it or not. Ofttimes it is used to keep the conversation moving, such as when one does not wish to keep talking to that person any longer than one has to, or especially in party situations when someone has just been introduced to you, and you'd much rather move on to the cute girl over there rather than keep speaking to the boring movie ponce directly in front of you. (And, ofttimes, I am that boring movie ponce... but we all reside on both sides of this fence.) And many times, it is just used to keep the peace: "Sure, I've seen that!" Assimilation, conformity, or just getting through another spirit-crushing workday... call if what you will. But we all have done it at some time or another. No harm, no foul. Little white lies to keep the small talk small.

And experience in this area should have better prepared me for the follow-up that seems to arrive about six times out of ten, that bit with the scene in question. Despite knowing this query will arrive at some point more often than not, you think I could have a better answer in reserve than, "Oh, yeah, well, er, um, yeah... isn't that the bit where they... (throw in whatever scene you might happen to know is in the film)?"

The actual bit with The Last Detail wouldn't have bothered me so much if it hadn't come so quickly on the heels of three other inquiries (from at least two other sources in addition to the fellow above) as to whether I had seen a particular film or not. Save the Tiger, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and A Guide for the Married Man had all whacked me full in the face in the months previous to this question, and I was already smarting pretty badly. I've never gotten near seeing Save the Tiger, despite the fact that I love Jack Lemmon and it is one of his pair of Oscar-winning performances. For years, I saw a copy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz sitting on the shelf at Video City, and just couldn't get past what I perceived to be an annoyingly pretentious title. I just passed by the cover time and again, thinking about renting it because back then Richard Dreyfuss was still interesting to watch, and then choosing something more along the lines of Hell Night or Graduation Day instead, solely because they were horror movies and there might be a good chance that I could see tits in one of those.

And A Guide for the Married Man? I ran into it on cable all the time, and I had considered watching it because of Walter Matthau, but seeing just a couple of minutes triggers my "Sixties Defense": an automatically triggered, impenetrable shield that drops down about me anytime I am confronted by what appears to be cheesiness from the '60s and early '70s. Beehive hairdos, too much fringe, gorillas on motorcycles, a preponderance of non-ironic hippie behavior, extended go-go or cocktail party sequences, pornstar-style mustaches, shag carpeting, lapels that are far too wide, Ali McGraw... these are all triggers for my Sixties Defense, though there are many more items that can do it. (I suppose it needs a better name, since that same mood -- and Ali McGraw -- also spills over the '70s.)

It's odd that this arose in me, especially given that I was born in 1964, and the last time I checked, I lived through both of those decades. Clearly, this defense mode developed out of a need to blind myself to the times in which I was raised. Perhaps it was also a side effect extending from my parents' divorce and my general unhappiness. And such a defense mode really doesn't make sense when you consider that there are so many films from those decades that I love very much. But, when you examine the films, it becomes obvious. Most of the ones I do love from that time don't take place in those times. Westerns, science fiction, historical epics; if any details from the times in which they were created slipped in, I seem to have been able to chalk it up to casual sloppiness. Hardly any films from that era outside of the aforementioned genres, though, that took place at the time of their making, show up on my "love" list, except maybe Dog Day Afternoon and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

There are always exceptions to any self-imposed rule. We are all hypocrites on some level here and there. Horror movies, though, were different. I loved so many of the '70s horror films, and yes, they tended to be more modern, but the beauty was that the defense was built right into them. It didn't matter what people wore or how they did their hair or how their apartments were decorated or how many hippies showed up... they would all most likely die within the framework of the film. Perfect. Even though my love for horror began with Hammer, Universal and AIP, once I began to grow up a bit and was able to watch them, the '70s suddenly became a more interesting decade to me, but only through the horror lens.

Then again, personal evolution has always been what I am about, and it has been my major theme since I moved to California. It had been dawning on me for a while that perhaps it was time to put away some of the pastimes of childhood -- the monsters, the aliens, the gore -- for a little while, at least, and evolve just a tad more in the cinema department. And the negative obsessions as well. It was time to put away the "Sixties Defense" and finally confront all of the films from my youth that I have spent most of my life avoiding, which has only resulted in creating ego-shattering moments like the one involving The Last Detail.

My life has been filled with small attempts at expanding my horizons. Why not make a major one, and finally research all of these filmmakers from the '60s and '70s, people within the framework of my lifetime, that I have largely dismissed? Sure, I have never shied away from a Truffaut, Godard or Kurosawa film -- I have always quite liked foreign films of any type, just to make myself believe even for a moment that I was more cultured than I actually am. It's for the same reason you occasionally hit a museum and stare at paintings that you have no hope of ever understanding, at least not without a little research and practice. Despite being fully aware of your intellectual limitations, you still convince yourself of your artistic sensitivity.

As an example, I own and have read an entire biography on Rainier Werner Fassbinder, the German director who fiercely burned through the '70s like no other (or so I read), and yet I have only seen one of his films. Why have I not followed up on this? If I found his life interesting enough to read about for a whole week, why would I not seek out his films, even though they are all so readily available for rental? Why have I always had this block on pursuing avenues where I could actually learn something about quality filmmaking, and instead crawl back into my comfortable hole full of familiar demons, killers and monsters? As I said, I make small attempts at breaking out and expanding my view. Why can't I make the transition stick?

People tend to think of me as a bona fide movie nut, but sometimes, I am more sure of the nutty part and not so much on the supposed realm of my expertise. So, am I a poser?

It is a daunting question, and a hard one for people to actually ask of themselves. Who wants to expose themselves to ridicule purposefully? Isn't life hard enough to get through? Isn't dealing with other people, even your friends, family and neighbors, already enough of a mindfuck than to openly invite everyone to see that you might not be what you have served yourself up to be all along?

And isn't this what we all do on the internet now anyway?

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 4...)

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2: When 8 Films Turn Out to Actually Make You Die of Boredom

Earlier this year, while already consumed with crawling along on the paths of numerous subsets of film obsession -- such as watching every movie in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (still ongoing throughout my life) -- I took it upon myself to start watching all of the films released in the annual 8 Films to Die For festival, three years worth up to then and all of them easily obtainable on DVD. I had lined up all 24 DVDs in my Netflix queue, and the future held the promise of a few solid, blood-bedecked weeks of what seemed at first glance like good, gory bloodletting. 

Somewhere about seven films into the list, I realized that there was little here for which "to die," unless it was out of sheer ennui. You see, I entered into this latest round of compulsion still believing that I was a horror fan.

Let me qualify that statement. While my motto throughout my life has been "any film, any time," the twin poles of my movie obsession have been horror and science-fiction, even better when the twain did meet, as in The Thing (either version). Sure, I liked films in all genres, but it didn't take much more than the swiftest glance at my personal collection and the preponderance of horror and sci-fi titles within it to know where my heart truly lies. I will not use the past tense here, as the proposal is still largely true: my heart still lies with those monsters and aliens and the glory of nature gone amok, and I freely admit that I always, without exception, root against mankind (the center of all actual villainy) in all films of this stripe. These feelings have held unswervingly true throughout my life.

I will lay to rest here the recent revisiting of the rumors (from a pair of those old "acquaintances" I mentioned in Part 1) that I was anyway involved in the creation of the notorious "gore" tapes that flitted about our high school in the early 1980s, causing people to dash the eyes from out of their faces, sending innocent children to the sanitarium for the remainder of their youth, and bringing peace without honor. I would love to admit that I was involved in compiling those crudely transferred collections of graphic horror movie scenes (and I wish I still had a copy), but our family didn't even own a second VCR (ask your parents) until deep into my senior year of school. The closest I got was hanging out with the real culprits from time to time, once even popping by when they were finishing a tape. It was certainly true that I had seen all of the same films from which they had culled their teenaged notoriety, but, it wasn't me acting in that particular capacity as a horror propagandist, though I wish I could take credit for upsetting the (meager) masses in said manner.

However, I was around for this, and it is not for nothing that my friends bestowed upon me the nickname of "The Boogieman." I was, then as now, an obsessive sort, and I was clearly possessed of something which caused me to forge an alliance with films of a more disturbed nature. Truthfully, though, I always leaned towards the more surreal and political of these films, and less towards the merely violent, and once I discovered Lynch and Cronenberg (who are actually filmmakers working at cross measures much of the time, but somehow occupying enough similar territory to make me pair them in my mind)... well, once I met them, my interest in the more generic realm of undying serial killers and their pathetic ilk pretty much waned forever.

And this is how I have spent the last 25 years of horror fandom. I buy the toys, put up the posters, and consider myself a devotee, but the pickings have been truly slim, if not almost entirely devoid of quality of late, despite the fact that there are more horror films available now than ever before. With the flood of releases comes even more dross washing up on a shore already shockingly polluted with the corpses of unimpressive, would-be franchises. I have always considered myself happy if I find at least three or four films per year that I even halfway like, and the fact that I have stuck around this long into the "aughts" still maintaining this posture proves my resistance to change (though massive change is exactly what I have attempted to enact in my personal life since I left my home four-plus years ago).

For me, a form of the proof lies in my fairly vast DVD collection, numbering just over 1500 titles at the present moment. I can't wait to leap at films that I even slightly liked in some measure and add them to my library. So, if you want proof of my wearying of the recent history of the horror genre, what doesn't make it onto my shelves at home is a fairly good measure of my displeasure. Look for horror films in this decade alone, and you will find relatively few: The Descent, Let the Right One In, High Tension, Cabin Fever, Ginger Snaps, about a half dozen J-horror titles... and that's it. (And the pickings are actually even worse for the '90s in my collection.) This might point to a resurgence in quality in the last few years, but that is a debate for another time and place.

In fact, this really does not prove anything about the quality available in any decade, since it really comes down to personal taste and opinion. What it actually does prove is that, when compared with the large amounts of horror films I have considered worthwhile and accumulated from the 1920s forward in my collection, it is clear that my interest in the genre has truly waned by this point. Even a series that was considered as groundbreaking as Saw (a ridiculous notion at this point in the already worn-out series) left me cold from the start. I began to appreciate the effort more on a second viewing, and I have always understood the mechanism behind it, but my lack of a need to see people tortured mercilessly (or at least without a real fighting chance) left that new sub-genre in the dust for me from point one. It is not surprising to me that our country is so willing to entertain at least the discussion of what actually constitutes torture, when we are so willing to accept it as entertainment at a level even farther below the normal gladiatorial means by which many in our society mentally masturbate.

So, clearly, given the current choices and atmosphere, I have become largely immune to the current "charms" of a genre which I once purported to love. Bringing us back to the recent past of just about six months ago, where I was musing on whether to continue renting the films in the 8 Films to Die For series. I had bolted through about a half dozen in a week, during which I only discovered one, Mulberry St., which proved even halfway interesting to me. Worst of all was receiving a major dose of the generic quality that has overtaken supposedly "edgy" filmmaking. When everything takes on the pose of being "edgy" or "extreme," without any discernible variation from product to product, then it merely begins to look like everything else. It loses its edge, and becomes the mainstream. And so it can go with any movie genre in which one immerses oneself: there is the chance that repeated overexposure dulls ones reactions to it. Much like porn, where some practitioners have to seek ever more bizarre or socially unacceptable avenues to maintain that "edge."

I yelled out, "Why do I keep renting these boring pieces of shit?!" This frightened my dogs far more than even a split second of any six of these films had, and out of a knee-jerk reaction, I deleted about fifty horror and science-fiction films of recent vintage I had lined up on my Netflix queue. I knew I was bound to add them back in eventually, but it seemed like a strong stance at the moment. I was caped in anger and proud of myself for finally shaking off this compulsion, even as I was wrestling with every atom of my being out of a sense of betrayal to my lifelong standards.

And then I ended up not watching a single film for about two weeks, exactly the point in time when I began to immerse myself in Twitter and Facebook again.

And then my mood got even worse...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 3...)

A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 1: I've Been Here, I've Been Working on Something, and There Is No Problem

The title above holds the answers to the questions most often asked of me over the past couple of months, during which time it seems I have taken some form of hiatus, purposeful or otherwise, from the Cinema 4 Pylon: "Where have you been?" "What the hell are you up to? You haven't been writing lately." "What's the problem now? Are you in another one of your funks?" Emails, phone calls, up close and personal... this is what I have heard, and not just from the usual suspects.

It's funny how you can write and write and write your ass off, and only a couple of committed, caring friends (and the odd stranger or two) will comment here and there, and you will begin to feel as if you were just another voice lost in the uncaring wilderness of the internet.

But, take an uncharacteristic amount of time away from something that people have locked you into their minds as being the sum of your being, and they begin to notice. Lately, I have received batches of concerned emails relating to this topic, along with a few comments on old posts to which I didn't bother to respond, and even Twitter messages from people with whom I am only lightly acquainted who have at least wondered where all the movie review tweets have gone.

This is all very nice, and I appreciate that some people have noticed my disappearance from the online world. But, here's what I thought was the truth: as of early September, I had grown sick of the internet.

After a few short months of testing, I came to believe that Twitter was essentially useless as a real communication tool, and rather just the latest and possibly worst form of networking pollution -- chiefly mindless blather trying to out-shriek the rest of the chiefly mindless blather, much of it scrubbed of context and therefore lacking any real impact. Facebook had become unmanageable to me once I reconnected with dozens of people from the past that I never really knew anyway. A precious few are grand old friends with whom I am glad to refresh our acquaintance, but then they throw their friends from the old days at you, and they don't realize (and often get hurt when they find out) that you really have no wish to know those other "old friends" anymore. Largely, this is because you never liked them in the first place (and most likely, they never liked you either). Worst of all, for weeks I dreaded opening my email accounts for fear of actually having to communicate with anyone. And when I did answer, I found, because I had not been paying very close attention to the run of things on the internet, that it would most likely would have been better had I not ever replied to anything at all. I had taken myself out of the loop, and even considering playing the slightest bit of catch-up had become both loathsome and monumentally difficult for me.

And so, for the most part, I disappeared online. A couple of email replies here and there kept the dread going; a mere handful of tweets throughout September and October showed that I was fighting whatever this creeping malaise happened to be. There were even brief moments where I tried to push back at it, and announced boldly m return to online life. (Well, if you can call saying anything in the cavernous depths of either Twitter or Facebook saying being truly bold -- which neither action is.) And while it is fun to think that perhaps this mood is merely just another syndrome amongst the thousands either identified or created to help us inch our way through the modern world -- let's throw a charming acronym or a smartly dressed abbreviation at it! -- the fact is that my attention has been diverted, and interacting online with the electronic world of faceless others has simply not been shown to be important enough to wash away the impression that I have disappeared.

But I have been around, and I have been busy, quite busy. Indeed, I have been quite deeply engaged for two to three months now. While I have been writing to some small degree, that activity has not been on anything to which this website directly relates, and it has not been the center of my attention. Writing is still the most important thing to me, and will prove to be the ultimate beneficiary of what I have been up to over the last two months. In fact, you could call my efforts "research" to the largest degree, or rather, a preparatory indulgence. What I have been doing will likely seem idiotic to some and markedly obsessive to all, but those who have similar addictions to the world of the cinema, those who feel lost within their own personal realms, and even anyone even the tiniest bit OCD will fully understand. (Yea, modern syndromes!)

To fully impart the madness into which I locked myself through the lateness of summer, though, I should divulge what led me to this point...

(To be continued in A Preparatory Indulgence, Pt. 2...)