THE JO-TEL …believes some of what Nathaniel and John say, but believes England is still our sovreign

A couple days ago I had an epiphany regarding VHS tapes. It occurred at the Concord Rasputin when I purchased the following five VHS tapes for $2 each:

- The 39 Steps (dir. Hitchcock; 1935)
- The Empire Strikes Back (non-”special” edition, 1981)
- The General (dir. Keaton; 1933)
- Arachnophobia (dir. Marshal; 1990)
- The Adventures of Robin Hood (st. Erron Flynn; 1938)

It made me wonder why I’ve been so obsessed with getting movies on DVD? I mean, for your favorites, sure, but for all those more peripheral movies that you would never have purchased on DVD, VHS is a great option. Especially with stuff like The 39 Steps– which is awesome, but not 40 dollars awesome … CRITERION!

Because I am now married to Patsy, it was obvious that the first of the above movies that I was going to watch was Arachnophobia– which I was fine with because for some reason I have this childhood memory of Arachnophobia being totally awesome. My best guess is that this was the result of the well-known phenomena at Blockbuster in the early nineties whereby if Blockbuster didn’t purchase enough of a certain new release it became very difficult to find in stock on Friday or Saturday night– and as soon as you arrived at the store you and your brother would run quickly in the alphabetical direction of the movie only to, of course, find it all out– the movie’s box lacking the coveted laminated Blockbuster box sitting as a golden buffer between it and the white, slightly slanted shelf. Then you’d look at the stack of recently returned movies. Always to no available. Then you would follow the re-stock guy around the store, craning your neck to view all the titles in his sloppily arrange stocking cart. Then, when that failed, you would inevitably– and heartbreakingly– notice that a pudgy suburban dad with Sperry’s, no socks, and a little league dad of the year t-shirt had the movie you wanted along with several others tucked under his arm while he searched for more– his kids running up to him periodically with a new movie that he would dutifully tuck under his arm. What could he possibly want MORE movies for! He didn’t even know what he had, did he!?

[the case study continues…]

This was how it was for Arachnophobia, I believe. So that once we actually rented it, it would have been a slight to our of our emotional barometers to not thoroughly enjoy it. But, having just watched it again, I can assure you, Arachnophobia is pretty sucky. It is my conclusion that the genesis of Arachnophobia was likely as follows:

Meeting of Corporate Heads #1

Corporate Head #1: Okay, here’s what hot right now: snakes, spiders, and spontaneous human combustion? What do you guys think?
Corporate Head #2: Well the last one’s out: people don’t little four syllable words, they make them feel dumb.
Corporate Head #1: How about snakes?
Corporate Head #2: I don’t know. Wild Things just came out. [It didn’t. –Ed.] So unless we had Kevin Bacon star….
Corporate Head #1: Okay, spiders it is.

Meeting of the Corporate Heads #2 (with creatives)

Creative #1: So, the new movie, Arachnophobia–

Corporate Head #1 turns angrily to Head #2

Corporate Head #2 (to Head #1): You didn’t say anything about six syllable words!

–we have a few lines of development. First, here are all the ways we can shows spiders creeping up on people:

turns on slide show.

shows spiders coming up out of sink
[…]

Meeting of Corporate Heads #3

Creative #1: Okay, we gots tons of great shots of spiders creeping up on people. Now we just need to graft on the human story.
Corporate Heads #1 and #2 (twiddling thumbs): ….
Creative #2 (on his head in yoga pose): Smart young city doctor moves his family to the country for safety reasons. Starts to move in on incompetent, aging local doctor. Gets blamed for deaths actually resulting from spider bites. Needs to get to the bottom of whole spider thing to save his reputation (shifts into downward dog) and his family.

Also, I’d like to comment on the prefatory segment of Arachnophobia. Basically, I feel like ever since The Exorcist, movies about the intrusion of evil stuff into typically non-evil communities almost always start with a dark intro section were a scientist or archeologist discovers the evil item or thing and then thinks “oh weird, look, a little funny thing” and then sets it aside or maybe gives it someone else and then the thing ends up violently killing its holder and then finding its way back into the stream of commerce so that it can make its way to Smalltown U.S.A. where Jim Hendrickson just wants to make a new life for himself and his family. (Hellraiser and Gremlins both pop immediately to mind.) Pretty much the best thing about Arachnophobia is the box’s cover, portrayed below, which is a good example on the late 80s, early 90’s style classic cover that left things to your imagination.

Now-a-days, Goodman and Daniels would be airbrushed above the scene. Goodman would probably be shooting a nail gun at a digital spider that looked nothing like the real prop spiders in the movie. [FN1] (Which remains me, did you know that the back of the current DVD for the 1982 version of Little Shop of Horrors shows Audry II as a DIGITAL man-eating plant! As if they thought that new audiences wouldn’t want to buy it because it only had a amazing looking PUPPET plant, instead of a fake looking digital plant! Just wait till they find out it has SINGING in it.)

The next night we watched The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn in the titular role. It was directed in part by Michael Curtis, who also directed Casablanca. The other connection to that great movie is Claude Reins, an awesome actor of that period who played to corrupt French prefect of police in Casablanca, which was also director by Curtis. (It is hard to believe that, as I type this, some of you have not seen Casablanca. If you have not, please see it within the next three days or I will come to you house and kill you.) In Robin Hood, Reins plays the evil usurper Price John, portraying him with likeable smarm (note: this is not a word, but should be).

I loved the movie. It was one of the very early color movies, so the makers seems to take joy in the possibilities of color: the green of the forest standing out against the red wine pouring out of the barrels during the banquet scene; the strikingly blood-red sky looming over one of the thwarted executions. It made me realize that modern movies take color for granted. I think now that we’ve had our pioneers of crushed grey color—Fincher (Seven, at al.), Nolan (Memento, Insomnia)– it might be time to revel in the filmic powers of color again.

Also, great physical action sequences unmarred by kinetic editing [FN2]. New films use kinetic cutting to quickly capitalize on star-power and marketing. But that sadly overused tactic does not deliver the awe of straight-forward camera-work. It had its place as an innovation (see this Criterion editor’s frighteningly sincere excuse for including Armageddon in the series), but ever since the French new wave, film as art has been about pushing against certain traditions and boundaries. To that extent, cutting-edge directors should eschew kinetic action cutting because it has been co-opted by Hollywood directors drawn to its cost-cutting value and its facile, crowd-pleasing allure (I’m looking at you Greengrass…). More wide angel action shots should be employed, less cuts to mare the viewers thoughtful gaze– in general more room for the audience to think and absorb the scene.

New movies wield actor likes expensive props. (I dare anyone to remember a single thing Russell Crowe said in Gladiator.) When you see Errol Flynn, though, doing his own stunts, scampering up the face of rocks, laughing with supercilious levity at his enemies– all in one long cut– you see less an actor, you see a personality taking on a role, a personality dressed in a role. I think, even aside from the blight of kinetic editing, most movies today are too impersonal for these type of moments to occur. In general, I feel like most art of recent years suffocates all manifestations of the personality of the artist, instead of reveling and appreciating.

Maybe Cat Power, the musician, is an analogous exception. Indeed, Cat Power’s youthfully damaged persona (freaking out on stage, generally looking fucked up and vulnerable) combined with her playful hotness cast a yearnful (not a word) hue on her earlier work that is simply not present in her Big Band, auto-racing glove wearing, anti-dep pill fueled tours and albums. And that’s okay—it’s okay that her allure was driven by her personality.

As a writer I believe that I have always suffered from a deficiently interesting personality, a lack of novel inspirations, a paucity of notable life experiences. The quality of my output belies the vapidity of my muses. This is the inverse of Cat Power phenomenon. For instance, Red Hill Mining Town was an intricately toiled over novella that lacked any real reason to exist except for my will to make it exist. It was a reverie of my artistic loves (both literally and figuratively). As for my verse, its lack of inspiration has taken two paths. In college, I wrote complicated poems that wove together abstruse literary references. Most people that read them knew there was a lot going on, but no one could really figure them out. But again, they were more about the act of writing a poem than about the creation of an actual poem from an inspired moment. Looking inside for that moment, I found (in addition to suburban homogeneity) only my love for the art of others. After college, during my burgeoning lawyer phase, my poems shifted into a more playfully nonsensical tone– poetry existing as solace, as fulfilling a need to turn my back on logical thought. The watershed—or nadir, depending on your perspective—of these types of poems was the utterly undistributed Hinterladnt collection, which features a made up language. Here is “Hinterladnt Mrnt” as an example.

Yosupp hungnag aster lang too
Distrupt nargral fingstrum lum
Stopgun vikerul niceup loo
Angyip insignottle fisser dum

Insrup aster lung riok fing
Vishant gimmal K lost git
Opulasz distergimmelund king
Banst lilkjaf gasterrung lit

This is just the extreme example, the rest of my collections use actual words and diction, but the general point of these poems was to avoid all self-analytical sentimentalism and to replace it with structured nonsense in the hope that the innocuity (not a word) of the nonsense would not push the reader away like self-conscious lamenting might. And ultimately that these playful word games would reveal themselves to be the fermented membrane of greater thoughts.

But overall I consider myself a failure as a writer for the main reason that I have failed to positively effect people. As much as writers insist that their motivation is to please themselves and no one else, the reality is that, behind that dissimulation, is the unavoidable desire to leave a mark, to embed yourself in the consciousness of someone else. To embed yourself. Formal art is a way for the hidden personality to embed its product in others. But there is a hybrid: the Cat Power/Errol Flynn mold. Neither of those two possesses/possessed remarkable artistic talents, but both embedded their art in others through a combination of personality and art. I feel that as my own formal writing declines as my desire to fit this mold increases. That is one reason why I have come to love this shitty little blog. The ability to reach 100 or so close friends a day, to carve a personality for myself and then reveal it post by post, and ultimately the chance to make a positive impression– or more importantly (and redundantly) a memorable impression. I just somehow want to be someone striking, I want to successfully flout the rules of conduct, I want to laugh and poke fun from places that no one has laughed or poked fun before. Okay, that sounds ridiculous, but it’s not that hard—it just takes a carefree, unegotistical forcefulness of personality. If you are worried about tarnishing traditional notions of personality, you’re going to be screwed. The laughing heights are reserved for those willing to heal the toes they step on with the laughs meted out from on high.

And it is a good time to spring for these heights. That most of my friends are atheists means that most of you will understand me when I say that our species doesn’t need us to procreate. And you will also understand me when I say that, as a result, it is us that our species now desperately needs. It is whatever unique emotions, laughs, images that we can plant in the public conscious—or even in the consciousness of a few friends—that our species needs. Which is of course to say, we are not the means anymore, we are the ends– and that makes all the difference!

-Shark

_____________

FN1: The development of the cover for Stand By Man is a great example:

1986:

2004:

FN2: Kinetic editing is the style of quick-cut filming that Bruckheimer champions. It is defined by the ability to make it seem like lots of action is happening very quickly and thrives on the ability to monopolize the viewer’s attention so that they don’t have to think and wonder what is actually occurring in the action scene. To convey the precise nature of a scene and still make it exciting to watch is more difficult and, thankfully for the studios, unnecessary considering today’s audiences. A great comparative example is Gladiator and Spartacus. Note how, in the latter, the movements of men in the field are always patent, resulting in a more cerebral, enlightening experience. Note how the former resembles a piece of human poop.