Eraserhead: turn off the sound!

There are many things I love about the internet - and it's all the same stuff that I hate about the internet.

It's like Alice's Restaurant - you can get anything you want - and if there's nothing there, try coming back in a couple of months. It is ever-evolving, a ravenous monster engulfing mostly garbage and crap, but once in a while. . . 

What I don't like about it, since I am such an avid collector of images, is the utter impossibility of finding the provenance of nearly all photographs. Yes, there are various methods to trace the sources, and I've tried them all, but they don't work. These images, pretty much all of them, have been Pinterested and Tumblrd and Flickred and Facebooked and blogged and reblogged so many times, no one knows where they came from.

So I always feel a bit guillty about using them. Only once did I take a post down because someone protested I had used an image that belonged to him, and when that happened I was happy to oblige. 

But now and then. . . 

I was up late, too late as usual. My hours have been as inverted as a dabbling duck in the past few years: I used to wake around 5:30 in the morning, and go to bed by 8:30 or so. Now it's. . . I hate to tell you, but sometimes my husband has to wake me up by bringing me coffee at 9:00 a. m. (a pretty good deal, come to think of it).

So. . . last night. . . or, early in the morning. . . I was nosing around Google images, probably looking for more from the tens of thousands of Harold Lloyd images on the net, and found. . .a couple of weirdies. 

I don't get the first one, I don't. It's some demented-looking guy surrounded by rolls of paper towels. He looks a little like an insane James Mason. Beams radiate from a point on his forehead. The whole thing has the feeling of a nightmare.

Then there's. . . this. He or it has holes for eyes and the look of an embalmed corpse. I don't want to look at it, or him, someone or something from a silent movie that never should have been made.

As always happens on the internet, one thing leads to another as surely as in an incipient affair. And creepiness is magnetically attracted to creepiness. Last night, or morning, in my near-stupor, I stumbled on the David Lynch horror classic Eraserhead on YouTube - the whole thing. It was late enough that I had turned the sound off my computer. It became a silent classic, complete with John Nance as a sort of Twilight Zone Harold Lloyd with his hair perpetually standing on end. 

I had heard things about this movie, how horrific it was, a surreal and almost senseless drama about a man fathering (?) a deformed, screaming "baby" with a head like E. T.'s bastard child, its body all wrapped up in layers of gauze like a bad injury.

But without a sound track, it was - well, it was actually kind of stupid. It couldn't have been less scary, even boring, and the special effects were laughable, even the live chicken dancing around on the main character's plate. 

Alfred Hitchcock, who knew everything about horror and jerking his audience on a string for 2 hours, once said that it was the sound track that made a horror film resonate on a primal level. Think of the stabbing scene from Psycho: without that screeching music and the awful sound of the knife penetrating  flesh, it would be nothing.

Why is this? In the womb, babies are very sensitive to sound. We hear before we see. I can attest to this. Having been pregnant twice, I recall my babies jumping at loud noises (particularly my daughter, the kind of child who used to be called "high-strung" and is now called ADHD, QRSTUV, and any number of other dire disorders. By the way, she's 36 now and just fine.)

Point is, we need sound to anchor us in reality. Think then of the magic of a silent movie. Think of how actors had to make up the deficit, the anchoring we all depend on for a movie to make sense.

How did they do this? At first, kind of badly. Over-gesturing, over-the-top facial expressions (even in dramas - ever seen Birth of a Nation or Intolerance?). Very gradually over the 25 years or so that movies evolved towards sound, acting became more subtle. But it must have also been much more demanding for the actors. 

The switch to sound movies, then, must have been a horrendous jolt, because suddenly the medium had to take an unprecedented leap. The missing element was plugged in, the baby could hear again, and another part of the brain had to be engaged to make sense of it at all.

And you can imagine what the actors went through.

I knit a lot while "watching" TV, and in many cases it's more like I'm listening to the radio. But if the sound were turned off, what I was watching would make no sense at all. It would make very little sense even if I were actually watching it. Dialogue tells us how to feel, where to laugh or cry. For the most part, it tells us everything we need to know. 

So how did actors communicate so well during the silent era? It was a new kind of acting, nothing like stage acting, that would - eerily - disappear forever in less than three decades. Silent film (which until then had been called "film", or rather "pictures") would seem as irrelevant as some inane Marcel Marceau walking-against-the-wind sketch from the Red Skelton Show.

Ah, but now it emerges from the grave. People are sick of Charlie Sheen barking at us and are in the mood for some real acting. This strange twilight medium has begun to tunnel its way into the light. The fragile frames take us to a "there" that no longer exists, and can never be duplicated.

CODA: As always, there are post-blog reflections, but this time they are mighty strange.

This morning I decided to watch at least part of the YouTube video of Eraserhead, which I (mostly) watched last night with the sound turned off. I couldn't find it. The complete video of it that I had watched had been taken down, with one of those intimidating crooked face-things on it. Gone.  I doubt if I will have a chance to watch it again (somehow I don't think it will be shown on Turner Classic Movies), so I will always wonder how much the sound track contributed to its stomach-turning atmosphere. 

One wonders at the timing. I was only given one chance. But creepiness leads to creepiness. Something else will ambush me - soon.

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The ultimate horror film (or, why we love Baby Jane)

This is one of those movies that, when it comes on TV, you tell yourself: no way, I’m not watching this again, or if I do, I’ll bail after a few minutes.
And you come reeling out the other side, just as gobsmacked as you were the first time around – or maybe more, because you always notice new things every time you see it.

Turner Classics is responsible for most of this, because certain movies are always shown in rotation. Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce and Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon seem to come around monthly, along with a lot of those noir-ish (and spell-check, STOP changing this to “nourish” NOW) ‘40s films from Warner Brothers, complete with lavish and somewhat overblown scores by Max Steiner.

In this case, well, yes, it was Bette Davis all right, but not the same Bette Davis who experienced such a melancholy metamorphosis in Now, Voyager (complete with Paul Henreid’s famous dual cigarettes). This one was – oh God, NO – What Ever Happened to Baby Jane!

I first saw this film while sleeping in the den on a pull-out bed when I was a kid. I wasn’t allowed to do this very often, so it was a treat. It meant I could stay up as long as I liked and watch TV, and maybe my older brother Arthur would come in at some point, a little drunk from a piss-up with his high school buddies, and provide a running commentary. I saw great films this way, the original Frankenstein and Dracula, the incomparable On the Waterfront (which I still believe is, Citizen Kane aside, the greatest movie ever made), and – even more macabre than any James Whale creepfest – the Baby Jane movie, which from the first frame provides more howls and shudders than anything else Davis ever did.

I say Davis, because in spite of the fact that Joan Crawford plays Blanche, the “sympathetic” sister in the wheelchair, crippled decades ago when Baby Jane rammed her with her car, Davis just walks off with it. With her ashen face layered with old face powder that has never been washed off, her hideous rotting child-star clothes, her foot-dragging shuffle, slovenly drunkenness and foul temper, it’s Davis we can’t take our eyes off of, can't get enough of.  And why? Reactions. Flickers of reactions like swiftly-moving storm fronts that seem to pass (for some reason) left to right, as if sweeping through her flesh and bones – this is HATE, folks, out-and-out hate for the sister who upstaged her pathetic little career as the mincing, shrieking vaudeville performer Baby Jane. Her role as resentful, foul-mouthed nursemaid is forced on her after the "accident", the event that snapped Blanche’s spinal cord at the same time that it ended her career. 

The point I’m trying to make here is: though we know we should, NOBODY likes Blanche. She is denigrated, harassed, even tortured (especially with her sister's unique luncheon plan of dead budgie and stiffened rat), ruthlessly kicked in a scene of real horror that might just reflect Davis’ true feelings about her, but still and all, we either hate Blanche or are just plain bored with her.

Nobody wants to be Blanche. Nobody wants to be the victim, no matter how virtuous she is (in fact, the more virtuous she is, the more bored we are). I suspect that this picture was proof, once and for all, that Davis’ acting chops so far outstripped Crawford’s that she lived in a separate universe. When someone does something seemingly simple and you think, with a slightly creepy feeling, “how in hell did they do that?”, then you know you are in the realm of genius.

But it’s more than that. She must be snagging something deep inside us somewhere, gleefully yanking it out and celebrating it, throwing it up in the air. This law of identification, if that’s what it is, doesn’t stop with this movie. Not by a long shot. Let me ask you: you’ve seen Gone with the Wind, haven’t you? Well, what’s the matter with you? (Go see it now.) Anyway, how many of us love and admire and identify with Melanie Wilkes, the sweet, brave, unselfish wife who patiently waits while her husband returns from fighting them damn Yankees in the Civil War? How many of us think to ourselves, oh dear, she’s having a baby in a wagon, how will she ever survive?

Piffle! All we care about is Scarlett, trying to manage a fractious horse while wearing a dirty dress and a corset, her alabaster brow furrowed as she faces the first of many mortal challenges in her bitchy, spoiled, overindulged life.

Yes, everyone loves Scarlett, and it’s not just because she’s so supernaturally beautiful, her eyes glittering with the first signs of the bipolar disorder that will eventually derail her life. Everyone loves her because she is duplicitous, greedy, conniving, and just plain bad. Melanie never seems to make a single mistake in her life (oh God, she even forgives that whore!) but is so poisonously good that we just don’t want to bother with her. When I first saw this movie at age thirteen, I was sort of hoping she would die in childbirth so Scarlett could get her claws on Ashley.
So what’s going on here besides superior acting skills and a much meatier part? We like bad people because deep inside ourselves, no matter how far down we push it, we are afraid we are bad: that someone will some day see our awful, unforgiveable secret.

But even worse, we WANT to be bad, bad enough to wield the kind of power these half-mad, scary women do. These harpies, these broom-riding supernatural scream-queens raining down a firestorm of gleeful destruction on all that lies around them.

There’s something a tad sociopathic about them – wait a minute, a tad? That budgie-killing, rat-serving, head-kicking, haranguing Jane (“But you AAAAAARE in the wheelchair, Blanche! You AAAARE!”) rivals Norman Bates in the realm of antisocial personality disorder. Though we fear them and are supposed to disapprove of them, we like sociopathic characters because they pull all the bad out of us and act out all the things we’re not supposed to do.

Though this was the sixth or seventh time I had seen it, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? creeped me out more this time than ever before. I had a new appreciation of Davis’ subtlety. Yes, subtlety – you can read her devious, duplicitous thoughts, her careful plotting and planning of the kind of medieval torture specifically designed to drive her sister to the brink of insanity. The crazed child’s laugh behind the door when Blanche lifts the dome on her ratatouille lunch – the ruthless yanking out of the phone cord – forging her signature, imitating her voice, withholding her fan mail and her food – all these devices are tailor-made for Blanche, ever-escalating until that scene on the beach where she lies so flat and lifeless she resembles a dessicated corpse.

Then, of course, we have the final turnabout confession: Blanche confesses that SHE ran Jane down and somehow snapped her own spine, and yet had the strength to crawl to the gate and – oh, never mind. We accept this absurdity because by then we don’t have much choice. We are held as captive as poor Blanche, manacled to the ceiling with electrical tape over her mouth.

Then comes one of the most incredible lines in film history, delivered in the dulcet tones of a Jane who has rocketed back in time to the charming brat who wowed them all on the vaudeville stage: “You mean. . . all this time we could have been friends!”

It’s only then we realize that not only are we enthralled by Jane – we actually feel compassion for her. We’re somehow on her side. Freaking Jesus, how the hell did THAT happen?

It’s a mystery, as all superb crafting is. Is it just the fact that these are better parts, and that better actresses land them? What if someone else had played Jane: say, Olivia de Havilland? What if Crawford had played her, as was originally planned? Wasn’t she pretty good at Mommy Dearest-style torture herself? But no. It had to be Hurricane Bette or no one. It’s the same dynamic as in the Wizard of Oz, when Margaret Hamilton chews up the scenery and fills the room with brimstone and green smoke as the Wicked Witch, but Billie Burke makes you half sick to your stomach as the quavering, sparkly-gowned Good Witch of Whatever. We must either want the bejeezus scared out of us (which I still don’t understand, because in “normal life” most of us try very hard to avoid anxiety and danger), or we want to be every bad thing, every shameful thing, every heartless hideous inhumanly insane thing we know we shouldn’t be. 

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