My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’. It’s a big elephant with floppy ears and a trunk like a fire hose and somebody’s painted on the side of it, in garish pink letters, “this is, y’know, that Werner Herzog film produced by David Lynch that looks more like a David Lynch film than a Werner Herzog film”. If someone would be so kind as to take the elephant outside and pass me my elephant gun, maybe we can have an intelligent conversation.

Oh, don’t worry about the elephant by the way. The blunderbuss is for use on the next jackass who sits up excitedly during the scene where a dwarf in a tux wanders onscreen, and points and says “Look, it’s a dwarf! That’s a David Lynch moment!” I have five words for said jackass: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen.

Granted, ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’ – hereinafter, ‘My Son…’, since even the acronym treatment (‘MSMSWHYD’) is liable to give me RSI – starts out in startlingly non-Herzogian fashion with Detectives Havenhurst (Williem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Pena) shooting the shit in their cruiser as they head over to a murder scene. The deceased is a Mrs Macallam (Grace Zabriskie); the perp is her son, Brad (Michael Shannon). Brad has holed himself up across the road from the murder scene with a couple of hostages. A large chunk of the movie consists of Havenhurst and Vargas trying to open up a dialogue with Brad before the SWAT team open up a different kind of dialogue that involves hot lead. 

In between attempts to appeal to Brad, Havenhurst and Vargas interview his girlfriend Ingrid (a winningly sympathetic Chloe Sevigny) and his erstwhile mentor, theatre director Lee Myers (Udo Kier). Brad’s increasingly fragile mental state is thus revealed in a series of flashbacks – some of which say more about the witnesses than about Brad – which document the months leading up to the murder. The first signs that he’d bummed a ride out of Normal, we learn, were after he returned from Peru. No sooner is this bit of dialogue out than we’re in Herzog territory good and proper, and to all the naysayers I offer this screengrab:

 

Of course, we were in Herzog territory all the time. The desperately self-delusive Brad is a man-child redolent of Bruno S. in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ and ‘Stroszek’. Herzog’s bleak vision of Americana in that latter film may have been upgraded from Wisconsin to San Diego in ‘My Son …’, but the same sense of dislocation, of alien-ness, remains. The dancing chicken at the end of ‘Stroszek’ finds is corollary in the flamingos that turn out to be Brad’s hostages. 

The genius of Michael Shannon’s performance is the glimpse he gives us of the stunningly out-of-kilter way Brad’s mind works. You can easily imagine Brad sitting cross-legged in front of the TV for a Herzog marathon, favouring the crazed, messianic performances of Klaus Kinski in ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’ and fancying himself as America’s equivalent thespian talent. He’s an actor, is our Brad. Or at least he thinks he is. What we see of his rehearsals for Myers’s howlingly pretentious production of the Orestes tragedy is enough to convince otherwise. 

Herzog throws out satirical barbs left, right and centre. ‘My Son …’ is poisoned love letter to a nation’s obsession with fame; a skit on actorly eccentricities (you can almost feel the ghost of Kinski hovering just offscreen); the most deadpan send up of cop movie conventions you’ll ever see; and an exercising in bouncing bizarro ensemble combinations off each and seeing what happens. Case in point? This scene …

 

… where Brad, already way up Bonkers Creek and demonstrably deficient in the paddle department, goes to borrow a sword from his jaw-droppingly racist and homophobic white trash ostrich-farmer uncle (Brad Dourif) while Myers camps in up in the background. Or the dinner table conversation which redefines awkward, where we have Shannon, Zabriski and Sevigny playing the scene as if it were written by Strindberg and directed by Mike Leigh and the two of them were at fisticuffs over how it should be played while their cast tried to do the take under a veil of abject embarrassment. 

Did I mention that ‘My Son …’ is a weird little film? 

Perhaps its weirdest element is its visual aesthetic. While images proliferate that could only have been conjured by Herzog, it looks uglier, muddier and less ecstatically poetic than is to be expected from a Herzog film. It was filmed using lightweight digital cameras, and while a whole generation of directors might have embraced the RED ONE, it pissed Herzog off no end. “An immature camera,” he declared, “created by computer people who do not have a sensibility or understanding for the value of high-precision mechanics which has a 200-year history.” 

Fortunately, the film was created by a man whose understanding and values are at the other end of the spectrum. Oh, and it was produced David Lynch.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Bride of Chucky

Poor old Jesse (Nick Stabile). All he wants to do is skip town with his poor-little-rich-girl sweetheart Jade (Katherine Heigl) and leave behind his trailer park roots. Hell, he’s so hung up on the girl that he even turns down the buxom charms of white trash cougar Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly). But there are obstacles. The chief one being Jade’s uncle and legal guardian Warren Kincaid (John Ritter). And chief is the operative word. The dude’s chief of police. Obstacles two and three are: Norton (Michael Louis Johnson), Kincaid’s deputy who’s been assigned ongoing hassle Jesse duties; and Jesse’s total lack of funds.

Still, Tiffany’s not so miffed at Jesse’s rejection that she can’t offer him $1,000 to drive a couple of dolls from her oddball collection across country, and Jesse eagerly seizes upon the opportunity, finally convincing Jade to run away with him. Only, whaddaya know, there’s another obstacle. See, Tiffany’s been electrocuted in the bath by this point and her soul has transferred into a squat, ugly talking bride doll …

It should come as no surprise between the title and the synopsis above that Tiffany happens to be the former consort of one Charles Lee Ray, a gentleman of psychotic temperament who similarly found his essence trapped in the limited physicality of a plastic doll in Tom Holland’s superlative character drama grubby little slasher ‘Child’s Play’.

The ‘Child’s Play’ franchise limped along for three instalments, winding up with no small degree of contrivance at a military academy, before it received a thorough (and thoroughly unjustified) castigation at the hands of the British press after the gut-wrenchingly horrible killing, in 1993, of two-year-old James Bulger by two boys who were only ten years of age themselves. Just as the tabloids led a witch-hunt against ‘First Blood’ after the Hungerford massacre six years earlier – without any real evidence – so ‘Child’s Play 3’ bore the brunt of tabloid proselytizing and calls for it to be banned.

The seven-year hiatus between ‘Child’s Play 3’ and the revival of the saga with ‘Bride of Chucky’ speaks for itself. Ditto the jettisoning of the ‘Child’s Play’ brand the elevation of Chucky’s name to title-card identifier.

Oh, and there’s also the matter of writer Don Mancini (who has had a creative hand in all the Chucky films to date) re-imagining the whole thing as outright comedy. Sure, Chucky had dealt in pithy one-liners – what stalk ‘n’ slash anti-hero debuting in the 80s didn’t? – but the first three opuses were generally played straight.

Mancini and director Ronnie Yu did us all a favour conceiving of ‘Bride of Chucky’ as a delivery system for bad taste laughs. And they played a blinder in casting Jennifer Tilly. Although Tiffany is consigned to the bride doll’s body less than a third of the way into the film and her performance – like Brad Dourif’s as Chucky – is thereafter voice-over work, her live action turn for those first twenty five minutes is a showstopper. And even afterwards, her verbal sparring with Dourif is priceless.

Stabile and Heigl, however, are bland. Fortunately, Ritter and Johnson as their badge-and-gun wearing nemeses are suitably hissable. Chucky’s targeting of Chief Kincaid gives the film is best visual pun, an homage to 80s horror that is foreshadowed in an enjoyably over-egged evidence room theft sequence early in the film which tips its hat to Jason, Michael and Freddy.

The popularity of ‘Bride of Chucky’ led – inevitably, given the icky final reel hint as to the direction a follow-up might take – to a fifth outing, a few years later: ‘Seed of Chucky’. Then it was all quiet on the killer doll front for almost a decade. But the sneeringly murderous li’l fella’s back next year, though early word suggests (unpromisingly) that it’ll be a DTV release, in ‘Curse of Chucky’. “Chucky’s so Eighties,” someone scornfully, and unwisely, observes after clapping eyes on the doll. That’s as maybe, and his filmography is intermittent at best, but with the Chuckmeister about to embrace his fourth decade as a bona fide genre icon there’s no doubting his durability.

The Wild Blue Yonder

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 58 of 100

There’s a scene in Tim Burton’s ‘Ed Wood’ where the eponymous wannabe director is looking through some reels of stock footage with a cutting room buddy. He speculates that you could make an entire movie using them.

This, apart from a few original scenes which feature Brad Dourif basically ranting to camera, is pretty much what Herzog has done with ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. Except where Ed Wood’s footage is strictly B-movie B-roll, Herzog got his from NASA.

At its most effective, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ juxtaposes scenes of the earth seen from space, scenes of astronauts floating gracefully in zero gravity and scenes of divers exploring far beneath the Antarctic ocean. The depths of space and the depths of the sea cohere aesthetically in a tone poem of wondrous images given added meaning and poignance by Ernst Reijeseger’s strange, haunting and beautifully otherworldly score.

And if that had been the entirety of Herzog’s approach – a wordless poem of visual imagery and music – ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’ might have emerged as one of the oddest and greatest works by a man who has produced more odd and great cinema (the oddness and the greatness often inextricably intermeshed) than most. It could have been considered the concluding part of a loosely connected trilogy following ‘Fata Morgana’ and ‘Lessons of Darkness’.

Like ‘Fata Morgana’, it is an exploration into the uniqueness of the image. Like ‘Lessons of Darkness’, it postulates itself as a science fiction fable documenting the alien qualities of planet Earth as if through the perspective of a visitor from another world.

Only here, Herzog makes this aspect literal. He gives us a wild-looking Brad Dourif as the alien, raging at the folly of mankind. He recounts a story about Roswell, alien spores, a mission to the outer fringes of the galaxy and the discovery and planned colonisation of the Dourif alien’s home planet (the “wild blue yonder” of the title). Which all sounds very ‘X Files’/Arthur C. Clarke/Peter F. Hamilton, except that Herzog clearly doesn’t give a flying fuck about traditional (or even recognisable) sci-fi tropes. The Dourif scenes are so completely random and out of character with the deep space/deep sea footage that it’s tempting to wonder if Herzog had basically sold whomever stumped the budget on the sci-fi angle and then decided, with po-faced solemnity, to completely and utterly take the piss.

It’s a curious film, ‘The Wild Blue Yonder’. It’s quite definitely a Herzog film. Minor Herzog, but still intriguing. Get through the Dourif scenes (he has one or two moments that are moderately entertaining, but his verbiage becomes white noise after a while) and you’ll be rewarded with visuals and music that are genuinely haunting.

The Region 2 DVD I watched features a half-hour documentary, ‘A Requiem in Space’, about Reijeseger’s vision of the music, his collaborative approach with Herzog and the musicians he engaged, which is pretty much worth the rental price on its own. It clarifies some of the ideas behind the film and provides a fuller appreciation for Reijeseger’s ethereal score.

The Exorcist III

In refusing any involvement in ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’, William Peter Blatty’s opinion was “Karras fell down the steps; he’s dead – the story is over”. However, despite Boorman’s sequel doing the equivalent of a particularly eager kamizake pilot at the box office, Warner Bros were still keen on a third film. Blatty prepared a treatment intended, despite their differences over the final cut of ‘The Exorcist’, for Friedkin to direct. Friedkin’s ideas for a sequel diverged from Blatty’s and the project came to nought.

Blatty reworked the treatment into a novel, ‘Legion’. Arguably a more accomplished literary work than ‘The Exorcist’, it’s a measured, challenging and cerebral work that channels Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ in its enquiry into the nature and reality of evil offset by mankind’s facility for redemption. ‘Legion’ was published in 1983. Lieutenant Kinderman and Father Dyer are the principal characters. The novel does not contain any scene of exorcism.

In 1980, Blatty made his debut as director with an adaptation of his earlier novel ‘The Ninth Configuration’, an offbeat but curiously mesmerising story set in a military psychiatric unit. Part parable, part satire, entirely unexpected, ‘The Ninth Configuration’ is a true one-off. Little shown and largely overlooked, it’s a film ripe for rediscovery and reappraisal.

A decade later, with production companies Morgan Creek and Carolco vying for the rights to ‘Legion’, Blatty went with the former (Carolco had suggested script changes Blatty wasn’t happy with) and ‘The Exorcist III’ went before the cameras with Blatty directing for the second (and thus far last) time in his career. It wasn’t to be plain sailing.

With Lee J. Cobb dead and Father O’Malley too busy to reprise his role as Father Dyer, Blatty cast George C. Scott and Ed Flanders respectively. Scott suggests Kinderman rather than impersonating Cobb’s characterisation, but Blatty seems unable to rein him in at times and he hams it up a bit too much in some key scenes where underplaying would have proved more effective. Ed Flanders fares much better, making Dyer his own, but …

SPOILER ALERT

… shuffles off his mortal coil about a third of the way in. Early, slow-moving, dialogue-heavy scenes between Kinderman and Dyer, which seem to have no narrative function, pay off with Dyer’s demise: Blatty gives over enough screen time to the two men’s relationship to make the audience care. Kinderman, already investigating a series of murders which Dyer’s killing seems inextricably linked to, takes things personally …

SPOILERS END

… but when his investigations lead him to a mental hospital, the case takes on a supernatural element. An unidentified amnesiac, known only as Patient X, eerily resembles Father Karras (Jason Miller). When Kinderman quizzes him, his appearance changes to that of a notorious mass murderer, the Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif). He knows things that only Karras could know; things that only Kinderman could know; and things, most chillingly, that only the Gemini Killer could know. Also, he knows all about the string of murders that have ravaged Georgetown. And he knows exactly how the murder was done that’s most upset Kinderman.

Brad Dourif is the ace up Blatty’s sleeve. Next to two scenes of exquisite, squirmy, Hitchcockian tension – one involving the hospital corridors by night (a scene as brilliantly constructed and shocking in its payoff as anything Hitch put his name to), the other taking the old saw of ‘the race against time’ and injecting a palpitating urgency into it – ‘The Exorcist III’ really delivers when Dourif is onscreen. His is a portrait of eloquent, mocking, sardonic, seductive evil that’s worthy of comparison to Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and Anthony Hopkins in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’. Dourif is simply frickin’ magnificent and makes the film buzz with devilish energy.

Shortly after Blatty delivered his final cut, the working title of the film flitting between ‘The Exorcist 1990’, ‘Exorcist: Legion’ and ‘The Exorcist III’, the producers started fretting that here was a film with “exorcist” in the title (Blatty felt that, like the novel, it should simply be titled ‘Legion’*) that didn’t actually feature an exorcism. Against his better judgement, but working on the assumption that if he said no, they’d only bring in some hack to film it anyway, Blatty consented to reshoots including an all-out, effects-driven exorcism scene.

‘The Exorcist III’ would be close on a masterpiece if it weren’t for the exorcism. If only Morgan Creek had taken the long view that they didn’t even need the fucking word in the title. Imagine the poster, iconic enough with a shadowy picture of the steps down which Karras plunged, a tie to the original film already established in the tagline “dare you walk these steps again?” – all they needed was a banner saying “The story of ‘The Exorcist’ continues in … ‘LEGION’.” Job done. Simple as that. But, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s post, this wasn’t to be the last time Morgan Creek made a fundamentally bad decision vis-à-vis the ‘Exorcist’ franchise.

In order to shoehorn the exorcism into the narrative Blatty wrote in a new character, Father Morning (Nicol Williamson). Never mind that Williamson has the kind of gravitas, seriousness and granite-like presence von Sydow evinced in the original, he gets just one scene prior to the exorcism, seemingly turns up out of nowhere to conduct it, and the taunts Patient X subjects him to – visions of snakes slithering over him; the crucified and suffering Karras surrounded by the Gemini Killer’s victims – have no real impact since we learn nothing about Morning. Is he afraid of snakes? Was he a friend of Karras’s? In ‘The Exorcist’ the demon attacks Karras by using his guilt over his mother’s death; he does so to drive Karras out of the room so that an old score can be settled with Merrin. This gives the original film its power. ‘The Exorcist’ is only superficially a film about a young girl who’s possessed. It’s actually about a demon who possesses a young girl in order to destroy two priests.

If the exorcism weakens the film – and with footage excised from Blatty’s original version now lost, there seems little hope of a director’s cut – there are a couple of inconsistencies that niggle. Kinderman describes Karras as “my best friend – I loved the man”, when in fact the two men barely knew each other in the first film and it’s Dyer with whom Kinderman strikes up a friendship. Also, a young black boy murdered early on is described as the son of the woman who figured out that the tape recordings made by Karras of Regan MacNeil speaking in tongues were English being spoken backwards. But in ‘The Exorcist’ the sound engineer who determines this is a caucasian male, not an African-American woman.

However, there are enough moments in ‘The Exorcist III’ that are genuinely shocking, creepy, powerful and thought-provoking to outnumber thoroughly its flaws. In a photo-finish with ‘Dominion’, it’s joint second best entry in the series and so confidently and consummately crafted it’s a shame that Blatty didn’t dabble in directing more often.



*From The Gospel According to Mark: “And Jesus asked him, “What is thy name?” And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”



SOURCES
‘Legion’ by William Peter Blatty (Simon & Schuster, 1983)

‘The Exorcist: Out of the Shadows’ by Bob McCade (Omnibus Press, 1999)