#notallbirds

I wrote this last year, an editor rightly said "...eh...this needs work." And then I forgot to do that. Then 2015 happened so here it is, a year later, still undisciplined, but ok, I think. 

In October we watch horror movies and hope to be scared. The other 11 months of the year, horror movies are broiling cauldrons of rich, delicious subtext, which is almost as fun as wanting to cover your eyes for fear of what's under the hero's bed or the backseat of his Lincoln Continental. Lately we haven't even had to try to find meaning hiding in the signals coming from our televisions as they play DVDs or re-run movies we thought we had a pretty good handle on. The meaning crawls out like Samara Morgan or The Tingler. It finds us. This may be because the conversations we're having as a nation are increasingly hard to understand because for the first time, we've all been taking part. Discussions of basic human rights have been totally democratized. This means everyone can now talk about the fact that their government is torturing people and realize that voting is indeed an incredibly important right we need to exercise. It also means that when a woman goes on Facebook to share a story about being harassed on the street by a terrifying stranger looking for solidarity, to remind people sexism still goes more or less completely unpunished, or maybe just to vent, there are one or two men who comment on it in less than helpful ways. 

Olivia Collette wrote a chilling article on the dangers of getting home at night when you're a woman, something most men don't even attempt to understand because they feel they don't have to or lack empathy. When a friend of mine reposted the article on her Facebook page, a guy commented on it: "It's gotten to the point where you can't even have a conversation with a woman without her telling you she has a boyfriend." #notallmen as the twitter saying goes. As smarter people than I have pointed out, this is just a different kind of misogyny, and smacks of entitlement the same way catcalling someone on the street does. I mean well, thus, I don't deserve your suspicion. I'm not like other guys. This isn't what a rapist looks like. You should know to let me into your life and assume I won't put you in an uncomfortable situation. It's like being mad at defensive driving. Persecution complexes rarely help anyone see an issue clearly, and along with full-throated pleas to be respected as human beings, the preponderance of slut-shaming and the unbridled vitriol women experience everyday online, in movies, in print, on tv and in person from sexist manchildren, the waters get muddier everyday. 

Olivia's brutal piece and the reaction I saw it receive online kept returning to me as I revisited Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" before Halloween this year. In college I read Camille Paglia's excellent analysis and was taken with her relating Melanie Daniels' ordeal to the domestication of single, free-spirited women in the 60s, but I don't know that I really gripped how pervasive that particular idea was until this viewing. Back then I was too enamored of Hitch as a stylist to do much reading, fondness leftover from my childhood when the film was just an exceptionally wonky horror movie. I started watching the film looking for Paglia's anti-liberation reading, but quickly saw something else that took over. "The Birds," like the casually diseased menace of its title, had been waiting. Biding its time until our culture's hysterical mishandling of our culture's disastrous misunderstanding of sexual violence came to a fever pitch. In every piece of dialogue about the attacks there's a hugely obvious analog in social media. I felt like someone had rewritten a movie I'd seen 75 times. 

Tippi Hedren's Melanie Daniels starts as one of the most fun characters in cinema history. She's spoiled rich, which means she has no real responsibilities, and this isn't a problem until her love interest makes her check her privilege. We meet her as she decides, on a lark, to pretend she works at a pet shop. Then, for the sake of an elaborate prank on a slightly stuffy white collar stud, drives two birds something like two hours up the coast to his house in Bodega Bay as a stealth gift. She then charters a boat, rides across the bay, breaks into his house, leaves the birds, and flees. Fantastic. Utterly marvelous. What keeps Daniels sense of fun from seeming at all fatuous is her voluptuous purpose. It's the look on her face when she realizes just how much more work she has to do for the punchline. Fun is that important to her. And the only reason she can do this is because she's not attached to a man. Settling down with Rod Taylor's Mitch Brenner means giving up her freedom, but also that look on her face. The more she stays with Mitch, the less freedom she has to be who she wants to be. She does not embrace marriage, she has to be led into it, catatonic and out of her wits. 

Daniels' trouble starts with an attack. On her return trip from the Brenner house on her rented boat, she is attacked by a single bird.  Deke Carter (Lonny Chapman), the manager of the diner they go to clean her wounds, worries that he'll be sued. Her pain is secondary. It's a warning for Daniels, with her furs and gloves, to go back where she came from.  Women with personalities this big won't last here. She'll be told this very explicitly later by a mother who believes the trouble somehow lies in Daniels herself. Her only ally is the schoolteacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette, who, with the incremental hoisting of one eyebrow, steals every scene she's in), who's let the torch she carries for Mitch keep her tethered to white picket fences in another way. She may never settle down and have kids of her own, but she's stuck with a dozen of them every weekday. She gets one look at Daniels and knows the fight to stay sane in Bodega Bay is going to get harder. If Daniels is here for Mitch, she's not leaving without him. Pleshette communicates continents of disdain for this unchained woman in a few looks and pauses. Her tacit shaming will cool when she realizes the real problem isn't Daniels, but by then it's too late. 

Daniels is attacked again and she has children and Hayworth as witnesses, but no one but "nice guy" Mitch believes her. The police do nothing. The scene at the diner, the one owned by litigation-phobe Deke Carter, where Daniels tries to tell her father about the attack happens every day on twitter, instagram and Facebook. Daniels, on the phone, having a private conversation, is interrupted by a self-proclaimed bird expert who calls her story bullshit. It’s here that our world and the world of the movie crash into each other. “Is there a difference between crows and blackbirds?” Daniels asks her father. “There is very definitely a difference, miss.” says Mrs. Bundy, a woman who came in to get change but can’t help but join in. I think of Joyce Carol Oates responding to the video of the woman being harassed for 10 hours on the streets of New York. “Isn't harassment of women walking alone in urban areas--(as men do freely & without incident)--a matter of neighborhoods? In NYC, certainly. Would be very surprised if women walking alone were harassed in affluent midtown NYC (Fifth Ave., Park Ave.), Washington Square Park etc.” Not all birds. 

“They’re different, daddy” Melanie says absentmindedly. “Birds are not aggressive creatures, miss. They bring beauty into the world. It is mankind, rather…who insists on making life difficult on this planet.” 

The drunken derelict in the corner leaps in next. “It’s the end of the world!” is his refrain, followed by a smattering of scripture. Nothing we can do, just embrace our problems. A waitress quotes the bible back at him, temporarily silencing him. A sea captain ambles over and joins the conversation just as a high-strung mother asks everyone to lower their voices. “They’re scaring the children.” 

Mrs. Bundy comes at Daniels with more scientific reasoning as a defeated looking man in a suit saunters up to the bar and before taking a healthy sip of scotch says “Kill ‘em all, get rid of ‘em, messy animals.” I can't remember the amount of times I’ve said to anyone who will listen that most men are like dangerous animals let out of the zoo to harm anyone they encounter. Olivia’s article mentions that there was a spate of sexual assaults in Montreal cabs. The police responded by telling women not to get in cabs alone anymore. It’s often hard not to view my fellow man as a dangerous species that has wondered down from the hills to take whatever it wants. 

Sam the cook comes out next and asks what the fuss is. Mrs. Bundy and the uptight mother answer before anyone else can. It’s not their story, so they don’t get the facts right. The man in the suit tells another horrific anecdote, adding to the feeling that everyone is now just reading stories on a Facebook thread, retroactively giving the conversation an air of “How awful…oh well. What's Taye Diggs up to?”

And then of course, they attack a minute later. No one believes Melanie Daniels until it's too late. Her ordeal is far from over. After being caught in the disaster outside, she and Mitch seek shelter once more in Deke’s diner. Huddled in the corner are several waitresses and patrons, all of them female, including the mother from before. They all give Melanie quietly disgusted and horrified looks and Mrs. Bundy has turned her back. The mother’s the only one who voices what they’re clearly all thinking. “Why are they doing this? They said when you got here the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil. Evil!” The last word is a desperate shriek that I don’t think anyone who sees "The Birds" ever forgets. The birds are no longer the problem. It’s the woman with the loose morals who invited this kind of behavior by standing out. The mother wants to blame someone other than the culprit, as we so often do. Easier to find a soft root cause than accept it as a catastrophe that needs a huge solution. Why pull together and make an effort when you can blame one person and look out for yourself? Paglia in Time Magazine: “Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness.” Daniels has brought San Francisco with her to Bodega Bay, which is sort of hilarious because with every passing year that’s meant more than it could have in ’63. 

Daniels’ ordeal is far from over. She and Mitch go next to Annie Hayworth’s house. She’s been savagely murdered by the birds and lays spreadeagled, undignified, outside her front door. Her assailants are perched over her body on the gutters of her house. Mitch grabs a rock to throw at the birds, but Melanie stops him. What if they attack again? Don’t make a scene. Leave with your life. Man’s first reaction is violent resignation. No reasoning with an inhuman attacker, better to just lash out. “Kill ‘em all” like the man in the suit says. Mitch brings his family, his mother (Jessica Tandy) and little sister (Veronica Cartwright), and Melanie into his house and boards up the doors and windows. The house Melanie strode into so easily before the birds started attacking is fortified to repel an invading army. 

Despite their best efforts the birds get in. The curiosity that brought Melanie to Bodega Bay to begin with sends her up to the attic to check out a strange sound. She is overcome and the door won't open behind her. If what happens next isn't rape, Hitchcock didn't want anyone to know it. It's the most uncomfortable scene in the movie. You realize exactly what happened to Annie Hayworth, another San Francisco transplant adrift in small town America, before Mitch and Melanie discovered her. Paglia once more: "young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature." That's an insanely bleak way of looking at it, but Hitch clearly agrees. Daniels crime is her desire for a man. 

The birds throw her into unwanted domestic complacency by showing that what's outside that house is so much worse than overbearing Ivy League knowitall Mitch Brenner. But that doesn't make him right for her. Her fate ultimately lies in a warning Annie Hayworth gave her about Mitch's mother. "[she's] afraid of any woman who'd give Mitch the only thing Lydia can give him…love." When Melanie is carted off at the end of the film in the backseat of the Brenner's car, she rests on Lydia Brenner's lap, doomed to become Mitch's mother. Giving up is presented as the safest option, but safety, like so much else, is a lie. Melanie's independence has been superseded and she's still alive, but the avian landscape ahead of them suggests that the future is bleak regardless of any decision she may have made. 

"The Birds" presents a horrific dichotomy that gets aired every day on social media. "She'd date me if I was an asshole like the guys she usually spends time with." Vs. "This bitch was asking for it." One or the other. I'm not to blame. I. Me. Them. It separates us. Men aren't willing to take a long view of the situation. I'm guilty of despair as much as anyone, but braver, smarter people don't believe in the bleak bottom line. As awful as men and women can be towards each other, there is no opinion that can't be gently reversed, even if it takes generations. Mania seizes people and we embrace what's easy, but that's a dead-end. Evolution means asking for directions. The only hope is exploring and embracing the in between we all seem to forget exists (not without cause, mind you). 

Take the lovebirds that Melanie carts with her to give as a gift to the Brenners. When they leave Mitch's sister Cathy insists on bringing them in the getaway car. "They haven't hurt anyone." Are they the exception? Or is there hope the other birds may calm, too? Not all birds, it seems. A better example can be found when Melanie asks Annie why she, a Suzanne Pleshette character, would be in a place like Bodega Bay, she has a noble answer about teaching, and an honest one about Mitch Brenner.  "I wanted to be near Mitch. It was over, and I knew it, but I wanted to be near him, anyway. You see, I still like him a hell of a lot. That's rare, I think. I don't want to lose his friendship... ever." That's how you have a conversation about men and women. She's realistic about her feelings and her expectations for her future with the man she wants. Annie Hayworth doesn't make much more than eyes at Mitch, despite what are clearly overwhelming feelings. If every man planning to catcall a woman had even half of Annie Hayworth's restraint, maybe, MAYBE women wouldn't need to come up with ways to get home without feeling like they were being spied on by dangerous predators. And if men could acting like dangerous predators or shabby misanthropes without swinging over into the boyish caricature of Mitch Brenner, women might not be terrified to be caught in conversation with them. The world looks a hell of a lot like "The Birds" right now. Let's fix that. 

I think it would be fun to run the whole fucking world

There is almost nothing left to say about Martin Scorsese but lord knows we're all trying. Read a sampling of positive reviews of The Wolf of Wall Street and it becomes apparent very quickly that some of our best and brightest are having a heck of a time articulating why they liked it. We had a good year, hell, a great year, for film, but there's a difference in degrees between the purity of our cinematic experience. Let's turn to that other great capitalist Grimm fairy tale Breaking Bad, and equate Cinema to meth for a moment. Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who always adds a little of the blue-eyed immediacy of her late husband Michael Powell to the proceedings, invented a kind of American cinema that essentially crushed up and snorted The French and Czech New Waves, Hitchcock, technicolor Hollywood musicals, Sub-saharan African & Middle-Eastern movies, Silent film, Italian Neo-Realism, German Expressionism and the political European cinema that flourished in and around 1968. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, After Hours, The Color of Money and finally Goodfellas turned the 'American dream' and the experiences of immigrants, veterans and criminals into heart-attacks of diced genre tropes and smashed symbolism. The point was getting from the top to the bottom, missing and winding up back at the bottom. The journey consisted of any and every trick Scorsese and Schoonmaker were capable of trying, the speed getting faster and faster and faster until it can't possibly keep it up. Tellingly, he slowed way down after Goodfellas. Casino and Age of Innocence brim with similarly manic, passionate energy, but they're far more subdued. The heat and anger is below the surface where we can't always get at it. The way we think of the great man talking is a mile a minute because for years that was how he and his movies spoke. He'd learn to slow down and narrate his own story in a series of autobiographical essay films and prove to us that he hadn't strictly been making it up as he went. He had to slow down and take a breath. After all, how could cinema go much faster than Goodfellas?

Everyone tried to find out. It's almost impossible to name directors who don't owe him something, who didn't try to be him at some point. American Hustle, a smart, funny movie with, I would argue, a distinct voice is still basically a feature length adaptation of the famous Copacabana tracking shot from Goodfellas. Without his approach to soundtracks, his insane editing rhythms, meant to mimic the experience of addiction and intoxication, his use of cinema history as the real, ever-present backdrop of each of his stories, most major American filmmakers would never have had anywhere to take or foment their ideas. Looking at this year alone, it's less important to determine whether Spike Lee, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Andrew Bujalski, Paolo Sorrentino, James Gray, The Coen Brothers, Ari Folman, Noah Baumbach, Rob Zombie, Richard Linklater, Gore Verbinski, Paul Greengrass, JC Chandor, Johnny To, Neill Blomkamp, Jeff Nichols, Derek Cianfrance, James Ponsoldt, Alfonso Cuaron or David Lowery owe a stylistic or technical debt to Scorsese and more prudent to say that if Scorsese had never made his films or done what he has for film preservation, production and distribution, who would have their eyes cast in the direction of their movies? The presence of three film directors in the cast of Wolf speaks volumes about his influence. He set the stage in a lot of ways, even if he didn't do it alone. I'm glad as anything that he has because when you have a landscape shaped by the above directors, it becomes all too clear what Scorsese still brings to the table as an artist. If some of the smartest critics in the world have a hard time saying something distinct about his newest work it's because all year we've been given a steady diet of cinema ranging from 30-80% purity. The Wolf of Wall Street is 96% pure blue meth, Heisenberg levels. If it's tough to articulate why it's so good, it's because we're all still very fucked up. 

There are a few keys to Scorsese and Schoonmaker's success. Leonardo DiCaprio doing the best work of his career, for one. That movie star charisma is put to the ultimate test as he's seen doing everything from tossing dwarves to snorting cocaine off of multiple prostitutes to punching women in the stomach. It's, ironically enough, a complete go-for-broke performance requiring not just that he undergo physical humiliation but abandon all sense of himself, right down to his motor skills in the already infamous Lemmons scene in which he suffers indignities more closely associated with Daffy Duck or Homer Simpson than a heartthrob Oscar nominee. DiCaprio proves himself both one of the most attractive leading men and one of the most gifted physical comedians alive in this film. In order to not walk out of the theatre (and many did when I saw it), you had better be thoroughly intoxicated by his presence and he pulls out all the stops. Wolf is fittingly Scorsese's most frenzied film since The Departed but far more is allowed to transpire during the quieter moments. DiCaprio has an added challenge at his feet in that he has to do all the groundwork that he split with Matt Damon in The Departed (a lot of info and personality dumped in our lap in a very short amount of time), but luckily this means we get more opportunity to know and like him, as well as understand his circumstances when the film grants us a reprieve from the whirlwind rise to power at the heart of the story. Slowing down also means really thinking about what exactly DiCaprio's antihero, Jordan Belfort, is actually doing to himself and others. He gets divorced in the quiet moments, he misjudges people in the quiet moments, he tries and fails to explain himself, to justify his actions when he doesn't even believe what he's saying. When the drugs wear off, when the party stops for longer than a second ("Three years later he killed himself. Anyway..."), Belfort realizes how hollow life is. Consequently when the film slows down, something awesome happens. We start to miss the momentum of the drug-fueled orgies that Belfort orchestrates. We miss the chaos and debauchery. We miss the lies as much as he does, because it's rendered in the most seductive terms. It may be Goodfellas or The Departed multiplied by a few dozen, as far as the speed and the violent, bacchanalian highs (or lows, I guess) are concerned, but there's another reason it works. 

When Scorsese made Hugo in 2011 he used modern, shiny CGI-heavy grammar to pay homage to the birth of cinema and storytelling at 24 frames per second. He went to the future to write a loveletter to the past. Rewind a bit to Shutter Island, where he used the language of horror films from 1958-2008 to remake his favourite black-and-white horror films. He remade Bedlam and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari using colours he borrowed from The Horror of Dracula and craft familiar to fans of Wolf Creek, Zodiac and The Strangers. The result was heady brew less concerned with selling its nonsensical story than in celebrating 80 years of horror. The Wolf of Wall Street walks down that same staircase in RKO studios where Cat People was filmed, back when it was the Magnificent Ambersons staircase. I like to think that Wolf was a response to Citizen Kane being knocked off the Sight & Sound best films of all time top spot, because Orson Welles' fingerprints have been planted all over the joint. This is, to me, the secret to the film's success. Scorsese occasionally apes some of Welles' off-kilter compositions and maybe he borrows some of his editing tricks but I was too close to the screen and too sucked in to really pay attention. What I do know is there's a beautiful crib from Ambersons when Kyle Chandler's FBI agent enters DiCaprio's house for the first time. Scorsese may still be a student but damn if he doesn't act like a professor when he wants to. As in the Copa sequence, here's the whole film in four shots. DiCaprio stands at the top of the stairs, a dutch tilt bridging the distance between himself and the FBI agents who've come for him. A close-up of an incriminating note, paper the cause of his downfall, a reverse shot of DiCaprio, completely alone, leaning on the bannister. Then the dutch tilt again as the agents ascend the stairs, obliterating the distance between DiCaprio and Chandler, the rich and the working class. His ivory tower is an illusion, penetrated, a staircase climbed in mere seconds.

Belfort himself is a mix of Charles Foster Kane as a young man (the glee, the twinkle in his eye "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper") and Professor Charles Rankin from The Stranger. Scorsese and DiCaprio fuse the two men, tearing the guts out from under Welles' dashboard and hotwiring the narrative engine. Like Kane, Belfort's corrupted by privelege and boundaries he can too easily cross. Like Rankin, he arrives with his ambition and we don't get much of a backstory to explain away his actions. We're not meant to necessarily approve of Kane, but we are supposed to like him until nearly the bitter end. We slowly learn to hate and pity him because everyone else does. Rankin, by contrast, is revealed to be the villain fairly early on and the only reason we want him alive is because he's interesting and poor Loretta Young, the character we identify with, is smitten (and yes, that does make us Loretta Young once Belfort's first wife exits the film). We don't ever see their humanity laid bare because our perspective is limited. What we see is what everyone around them sees. We can see Rankin from Young's perspective and get a good idea as to why she could have fallen for the man that Edward G. Robinson's Mr. Wilson sees as pure evil. Kane, meanwhile, is the ultimate exercise in perspective. We only get him as others see him and think they know him. Welles shoots himself perpetually observed; Kane never gets a POV shot because we're never meant to know him. Scorsese has crossbred the 'best' films of all time. In Vertigo, the film that knocked Kane out of the number 1 spot, the film is all told from the perspective of Jimmy Stewart's P.I. Scotty, until finally he leaves the room and we're left with alone with Madeleine, the object of his desire, obsession and scrutiny as she looks into a mirror and we fianlly see her as she sees herself, as Scotty wants to see her. Scorsese does the same thing, but he does it to his Charles Foster Kane/Henry Rankin stand-in. We look into the mirror with Belfort, but more importantly we look out at the world with him and see what he sees. If we couldn't, we wouldn't follow him. 

Kane is filmed like a monolith. Belfort gets those moments but the key to his success and his taking the audience with him are the reverse shots where he stand behind Belfort seeing what he sees. How do you say no to success when it's hundred eyes are staring at you, hanging on your every word. The film puts us behind the podium and looks out into the crowd that Welles didn't have the money to fill out with extras. We realize why, in those moments, he couldn't say no, he couldn't stop swindling, getting high, and ruining lives. Gods must rarely feel as high as Belfort and his maniac crew did at the height of their powers. They could buy anything and did because it made their reign more real than the last purchase. Scorsese puts the money, the drugs and the sex at our fingertips. I know I didn't want the fun to stop and I'm a fucking communist. 

I believed in all of it. Just as there's nothing Belfort can't buy, there's nothing Scorsese will spare us, no corridor he won't venture down for the sake of find some new thrilling piece of language. The best innovation, and the most organic outgrowth of his body of work: drugs, alcohol and women will combine, time will all but stop like one of Kathryn Bigelow's exploded microseconds in The Hurt Locker, and the blues that Scorsese has gone out of his way to become associated with, specifically the refrain from that shot of aural whiskey Howlin' Wolf's (who else?) "Smokestack Lightnin'" will echo like it's being played from the inside of a tornado. (Digression: Like Belfort, Wolf was as famous for his appetites as he was for his career and had a habit of letting his performances get out of hand. Scorsese does treat these men as hard-living rockstars and this film is a much better movie about what it must have been like recording hits for Chess Records than the movie Cadillac Records). I've been replaying those moments in my head every ten minutes since I left the theatre. A plane full of brokers having sex with a veritable armada of prostitutes aboard a private jet, sudden turbulence and like that the air is thick with cocaine and nude bodies careening into each other in the slowest slow-motion you can imagine. Until this moment in time such a feat could not have been carried out to this effect and it feels like nothing short of a curtain pull on a new age of art. One can argue cinema was meant for greater things but I hasten to remind you that Vertigo is about a man who won't let death get in the way of sexual obsession and Citizen Kane follows roughly the same trajectory as The Wolf of Wall Street, a rags-to-riches tale of a man discovering he has no time to cultivate a soul, leaving billions of dollars, useless possessions and defeated women in his wake. Perhaps there are nobler pursuits than getting us to identify with the worst people on earth for three hours, but nobody cooked purer cinema this year. Scorsese, like we happy addicts who gladly consume his product year after year after year, always tries to say something new and I'll be goddamned if he hasn't done it. 

The Blood of the '68 Comeback Special

When we screened Dr. Glas at the Totally Illegal Film Festival, the 'judges' were torn about whether its title character was in the right and where ace director Mai Zetterling stood on the issue of his guilt. It was a debate that raged for a half hour or so until The Long Day's Dying shut us up. David Cairns, lucky so-and-so, reviewed it as part of our joint unearthing of the wonders and horrors of the ill-fated 1968 Cannes, and reminds me why the project seemed like such a good idea to begin with. He's able to draw some beautiful conclusions about '68's dominant filmic language and direction (motions I second wholeheartedly) and gets at the beautiful oddness of Zetterling's camera. She was no cut-rate Bergman, he's quick to point out, but she did have her predecessors. What struck me upon first viewing was that it didn't seem to belong in 1968, but David grounds it and points out that boldness doesn't necessarily excuse a few trends wrapped in florid (if seductive) grammar. She was ahead of her time, but only just, and she puts as many feet in the recent, unfashionable past as the future. And so David once again proves once again that when our alien overlords finally arrive and start cracking the whip, we'll need that gigantic brain of his to help keep the human race alive.

Oh, and dig this Saul Bass-inspired poster. It gives the film the impression of being the first of Brian De Palma's pervy Hitchcock plagiarisms, instead of a richly nuanced but bleak and nightmarish look at sexual abuse. The film really is fascinating and worth the time it might take to track it down. No other film at Cannes that year could possibly have ignited the same amount of furious debate. There's sexual abuse of the same stripe in Petulia, but Lester's very clear who the enemy is. If George C. Scott had decided to off Richard Chamberlain that'd put the films on equal footing. You really must see it so we can talk more! Well...go on! What on earth are you waiting for?