Tag Archives: Noah

Caged Heat

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I just watched Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat (1974). It’s supposed to be one of the better women-in-prison exploitation films. Demme, of course, went on to critically acclaimed movies like Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. I never much liked Silence of the Lambs, with its reflexive serial-killer mythologizing and pompous psychobabble, and Philadelphia is, as they say, a complete piece of shit. But I had hopes that Demme’s earlier efforts might be better.

And Caged Heat is, in fact, better than either of those other two movies, though it’s still something of a disappointment. So far I’ve seen three women-in-prison films — Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House, Edward Romero’s Black Mama, White Mama, and Caged Heat – and, of the three, Caged Heat is easily the least interesting.

I can see why it’s generally rated high. There are a bunch of artsy dream sequences in the first third or so of the movie. The villainous matron (Barbara Steele) is granted more of an inner life than seems to be quite the norm — she fairly quivers with repression behind her glasses. There are a couple of tricky moments in which ambient dialogue floats into and out of hearing as the camera pans around the cell blocks, and some conflicts are shot with odd-angled shots, giving the cat-fights a nighmarish patina. In addition, the imprisoned women are for the most part straightforwardly sympathetic. Though there are some fights and intra-prisoner squabbling, everything resolves fairly easily, and none of the prisoners ever attacks anyone who doesn’t deserve it. When Belle kills an elderly prison matron, for example, it’s very clearly an accident. The bad guys are thoroughly bad , the good gals are good, and there’s a happy ending, with the women triumphant.

So, basically, this is well-liked for the same reason Demme’s other movies are well-liked — it’s (relatively) slick film-making with arty touches, and a moral universe which pretends to complexity while actually delivering feel-good bromides and easy victories.

In contrast, Black Mama, White Mama and The Big Dollhouse are both much seedier, and all the better for it. I wrote about Black Mama… before, and it’s a movie that improves upon reflection. Nobody in the film can really be called a good guy — everybody makes unpleasant moral decisions. Of the two stars, Karen (Margeret Markov) whores herself out to the warden for better treatment, while Lee (Pam Grier) abandons her friend to her death at the end. Meanwhile, the rest of the characters are an assortment of thugs and wastrels — though not unattractive ones. Sid Haig as a crime boss gives a brilliant performance; swaggering, ruthless, and hysterical — his enthusiastic debauchery with the two willing (and underage?) daughters of one of his hapless hired hands is an icky hoot. But even the lesbian matrons are surprisingly sympathetic. One of the matrons manages to seem both sexually out of control and vulnerable; the other matron, on the other hand, actually seems tough but fair, and trying to take care of her partner despite her own ambivalent feelings of lust and jealousy. The relationship between the two is clearly twisted, but also tender, and their story seemed so interesting, and the actors did such an excellent job, that I was really sad when they (like everybody else) met their untimely end. (The only person who is completely beyond the pale is the island drug lord, I think — though even he seems to have some kind of human feelings. He tortures one of his women for information, but finally relents when he realizes that she doesn’t in fact know anything. Later, the same woman — who had tearfully proclaimed her loyalty — shows up in a passing shot. She’s back in skimpy uniform, lounging around with the other eye candy, and she looks miserable — nervous, scared, freaked out, and trying to hide it. It’s a very nice touch; I wonder if it was the actor’s doing or the director’s…?)

I don’t think I like Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House quite as much, but it’s pretty great too. Both Pam Grier and Sid Haig give super performances. I think this may have been Grier’s first movie. She plays a lesbian tough who dominates and subjugates (some of) her cell mates, and the alternately vicious/tender patronage relationships she enters into seem eminently believable, in their broad outlines if not in details. She also has a complicated relationship with Haig, who plays the prison’s supplier. He’s obviously got the hots for her, and uses his position to take advantage — he tells her he has a letter from her, but refuses to give it to her until she lets him cop a feel of her breasts through the bars (and then it turns out the letter isn’t even for her!) Later, as part of an escape plan, she offers to have sex with him, enticing him by letting him put his hand in her cunt (“it’s like a vice!” he squeals moments before he assents to her plan despite himself.) When he shows up for the tryst, though, he discovers that she’s been murdered by the junkie she’s alternately abused and taken care of throughout the film…and he seems genuinely stricken. He calls her name repeatedly (Helen) which is especially poignant because he is the only character to use it throughout the entire film. Everybody else, even her cell-mate lover/thrall/murderer, calls her by her last name.

As Grier’s fate indicates, the women prisoners in Doll House are dangerous and untrustworthy. There is camaraderie among them, and they break out by joining forces — but they’re also dangerous and unstable. They’re certainly sympathetic, and they undergo fearsome (and lingeringly depicted) tortures, so we’re on their side. Yet, when they break out, taking the evil warden with them, they’re vengeance is uncomfortably nasty — they tie the warden down and force/encourage Sid Haig’s character to rape her at knife point. Demme, on the other hand, disposes of his baddies by having them conveniently and accidentally shot by their own side. Jack Hill gives his women the moral responsibility for their own revenge, which leaves the audience in a much more uncomfortable place.

Not that Caged Heat is all, or even mostly, bad. There are several excellent performances. Most notable is Rainbeaux Smith, who does vulnerable better than just about anybody. A scene where she’s locked in solitary kicking the walls and yelling at herself for stupidly helping her cell-mate escape is priceless, but her delivery is always smart and thoughtful and convincing. There’s also an off-color stage performance put on by two (possibly lesbian) prisoners in drag which is funny from start to finish, and Juanita Brown’s blustery Maggie is fun to watch.

As I think I mentioned, Caged Heat is often cited as being particularly feminist, presumably because the women win in the end. I’m not sure that that really seems especially feminist to me; the ending seems magical and unlikely, and I don’t really see why it’s revolutionary to pretend that overcoming oppression is easier than it is. But, in either case, all the women in prison films seem pretty pro-feminist — all present women as being oppressed, in all women overcome oppression by bonding together, in all women are presented as tough, courageous, and strong. At the same time, of course, the movies are all about exploiting women — your sympathizing with their oppression at the same time as you are getting off on it, quite literally in, for example, torture scenes, or even group shower scenes, where privacy is invaded both diagetically and literally. It seems like an extreme example of the contradictions of sexploitation in general. On the one hand, it’s about demeaning and exploiting women. But, on the other, it creates narratives which center on women, and acknowledge their lives and emotions and thoughts as important, at least to some degree. For that reason, sexploitation just seems a lot more friendly to women than straight male genre literature (westerns, super-heroes, spies, etc.) in which women are little more than objects to be passed around and exchanged among men, between whom all the real emotional interaction takes place. It’s no surprise, in other words, that these films were shown in places like drive-ins as date movies, in which you’d expect there to be both a male and female audience.

You Ain’t Done Nothin’ Super

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The blogosphere is more or less abuzz with the news that the Siegel family regained some rights to Action Comics #1, and therefore to the character of Superman.

Poking around a little, there seems to be a fair bit of enthusiasm on the Siegels’ behalf; a sense that, after 70 years, they’ve finally been restored their rights. Personally, though, I don’t really see it. The man who created the character is Siegel, and he is dead. His heirs didn’t do diddly — why exactly should they get the rights to the character or to Siegel’s work?

Of course, the folks currently helming DC didn’t create the character, and there’s no reason they should have ownership either. The truth is, having this sort of litigation about a character as entrenched in the popular consciousness as Superman decades and decades after his creation is insane. Or, to put it another way, copyright lasts too, too, too long. At this point whatever injustice has been done is done. Enriching the man’s grandchildren isn’t going to make up for it. Action Comics #1 should be in the public domain; anybody should be able to use that character — which would, coincidentally, and happily, put an end to the endless process of self-cannibalism “powering” the increasingly irrelevant, oddly flatulent wendigo that is DC comics today.

Jack Hill and Rape

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I’m still obsessed with Jack Hill’s movies — most recently I’ve seen “Spider Baby” and “Switchblade Sisters”. Both of these feature what I’ll refer to as conversion rape scenes: you know, boy rapes girl, girl is converted and discovers she likes it. Obviously, this is pretty offensive (Hill acknowledges his own concern about the conversion rape in “Switchblade Sisters.”) Still, I actually think both are, in many ways, fairly thoughtful scenes, and a lot less offensive than the initial description indicates. So here’s me trying to explain why.

The ur-conversion rape, to me, is James Bond’s rape of the improbably named Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. In the movie (and I believe in the book as well), Pussy Galore is a lesbian pilot, very independent and tough, who works for Goldfinger, presumably because he’s paying her a ton. But Bond (Sean Connery, here), is, of course, tougher, and he holds her down and rapes her, which is such a transformative experience that she eschews lesbianism and becomes his ally in the fight for good, betraying Goldfinger. She is so inspired, indeed, that, if I remember correctly, she convinces her entire lesbian posse to go along with her, though what they think of these developments is never very clearly articulated.

Anyway, what’s especially offensive about this whole scenario is the extent to which Ms. Galore is so completely beside the point. The rape and transformation is never about her; in fact, we don’t ever get a sense of her as a character except that she’s tough and independent, and then, suddenly, not so much. She falls for Bond because he’s just so darn overwhelmingly attractive, and she abandons her (never quite stated) lesbianism as if she were doffing a hat. There’s no actual psychological progression attempted; it’s just, insert phallus, hello enlightenment. The whole point of the encounter is, in fact, to annihilate her as a character; in entering her, Bond replaces her will with his own, and she becomes simply his catspaw. It’s the crudest kind of male power fantasy, and one which is more than a little pitiable, suggesting as it does a desire to fuck a mannequin, rather than a real person.

Hill’s variations on the themes are quite a bit different than this. In the horror-comedy Spider Baby, for example, the victim is Aunt Emily (played by Carol Ohmart). Emily is attempting to seize control of the Merrye fortune, currently controlled by her two nieces and one nephew, all of whom suffer from a degenerative hereditary brain disease, accentuated by in-breeding. At the beginning of the movie, Emily is presented as being the antithesis to her drooling, animalistic relatives — she’s buttoned up, proper, and willing to take no nonsense. Yet, there are several moments when she comes undone: first when she’s frightened by her nephew, Ralph; later when she’s confronted with a revolting meal of insects and dead kitten, and suddenly reaches into her purse to violently tear open a snack (attracting Ralph’s interest), and last when she discovers a stash of sexy lingerie in her bedroom, puts it on, and starts to dance in front of a mirror. Ralph discovers her, which precipitates a lengthy chase, at the end of which Ralph leaps upon her and performs the conversion rape in question.

The point here is that, despite her squicky conversion, Emily does not become a different person, or simply a vessel for Ralph’s desires. Instead, Emily’s conversion is about her; as I’ve noted, the movie takes some pains to suggest that beneath her buttoned up demeanor there’s something else going on. She’s also, of course, related to Ralph; the Merrye’s atavistic curse is her curse too. She’s attracted by the degenerate madness — which, indeed, throughout the film is presented as entertaining, charismatic, charming — as good fun, in other words. Moreover, embracing that madness doesn’t make her Ralph’s dupe or pawn. On the contrary, when she discovers Ralph embracing another woman, she becomes vengeful and violent, wounding him badly before (if I remember correctly) she is dragged down into the cellar with the other degenerate Merrye aunts and uncles. Where Galore’s conversion seems like a negation of her self, Emily’s is figured as a release from repression. Despite being different, she’s still herself, bad attitude and all.

The conversion rape in Switchblade Sisters moves even farther away from rote misogyny. The woman here is Maggie, a tough girl who has recently moved into the neighborhood. She’s become friends with Lace, who runs a gang called the Dagger Debs. The Debs are associated with the Daggers, led by Dominic. Maggie takes a letter from Lace (who’s in prison) to Dominic. Dominic is an asshole, which Maggie realizes — but she’s also attracted to him. Dominic figures this out, follows Maggie home, pushes her into her room, and rapes her.

Or does he? It’s pretty unclear what exactly is going on. Maggie never tells him he can have sex with her — but after he tears open her shirt, she tears open his. And she doesn’t put up much resistance…and this is a woman who, throughout the rest of the movie, is able to kick the shit out of practically everybody. After they’re done, Dominic tells her she was asking for it — fighting words for feminists, obviously, but Maggie doesn’t really dispute it. In fact, it seems that Maggie is deeply conflicted about having sex with Dominic; she doesn’t want to betray Lace, and the quasi-rape is a way to have him without doing that. Later in the film, he suggests to her that he might rape her again — and she tells him in no uncertain terms that if he does she’ll kick his ass… suggesting once more that she could have kicked his ass the first time if she wanted to. Certainly, whatever the extent of Maggie’s resistance or lack thereof, the fact that she enjoyed the sexual encounter doesn’t fundamentally change who she is. She never has sex with Dominic again, and she isn’t any less tough or independent — she helps him out and joins his gang, but her primary loyalty is to Lace, not to him.

I guess I just feel like there’s misogyny and there’s misogyny. Jack HIll’s movies have a lot of violence against women, and women are clearly and repeatedly on display for male pleasure. But he also cares about his female characters — they have independent inner lives, they make moral choices, they’re complicated and human and vulnerable and tough. There’s just no comparison with the Bond films — or even, for that matter, with a supposedly girl-power but actually basically empty romp like Charlie’s Angels (a movie I liked quite a bit, by the by).

Not that anyone’s actually reading this, but, on the off chance — anyone know of any books about Hill? I haven’t been able to find one, though I’ve looked in a couple of places. He’s well known enough that I was certain there would be, but maybe not….

Failed Poet’s Revenge!

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I’ve been thinking a bit about poetry comics because of Bill Randall’s musings. Bill seems to be looking for comics that have a poetic feel for language and manage to use images in a way that respect or add to that feel, rather than ignoring it or detracting from it. (I may be doing violence to his argument, but that’s what I’ve taken away at the moment.) From that definition, I’d think that things like Krazy Kat and Peanuts would qualify, and maybe some of Alan Moore’s efforts. Certainly a lot of shoujo would, I think. And definitely the genius that is Edie Fake.

Anyway, in a former life, before I was a failed comics critic, I was a failed poet, so I figured as long as I was thinking about it I’d give the poetry comic thing a go. Below is my effort. To read it right you need to flip the page over halfway through, which obviously doesn’t quite work on the screen…but, I don’t know, you could always print it out or stand on your head if it seems worth it, I suppose….

Black Mama, White Mama

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I know that there are readers out there who occasionally read even my non-comics related posts, and so I thought I’d let both of you know that the grindhouse flick Black Mama, White Mama is really pretty darn good. Pam Grier doesn’t get nearly as much screen time as she should, but overall the acting is really surprisingly good (Sid Haig as a maniacal wannabe cowboy is especially fine), the plot is intricate, clever and even (within limits) plausible.. The film starts off with a exploitative women-in-prison riff, complete with predatory lesbian matrons, shower scenes, and catfights, veers through a women on the run sequence, and ends up with a satisfyingly, seedily bleak vision, in which the only ones who really win are the cops — and no, that’s not a good thing. Jack Hill, who also directed “Coffy”, is in charge here, and, yeah, the more of his movies I see the more impressed I am. Quentin Tarantino worships him, I think, and with good reason — this is really fine pulp. Classic stuff.

Update: Well, and duh, as it turns out Jack Hill did not direct this; Eddie Romero is the man responsible. I know this not because I checked my sources but because…Jack Hill himself commented on my blog! To tell me I’m an idiot! OH MY GOD! I’ll have to make foolish misstatements much more often if I get this kind of payback….

Black Mama, White Mama is still a pretty great movie, though. I’ll have to try to find more Eddie Romero movies now….

AA’

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I’ve been interested in reading more Moto Hagio ever since seeing some of her work in TCJ #269 and reading the great interview with her by Matt Thorn (which is now online here.) I recently managed to get a cheap copy of the out-of-print Thorn-translated Hagio volume A A’, which remains one of the few books of hers in English as far as I can tell.

Anyway, A A’ is pretty fascinating. In form, the book is a series of three related stories, all dealing with a genetically modified red-haired race of humans known as unicorns. In content, it’s a very odd hybrid of adult post-60s sci-fi (think Samuel Delaney, John Varley) and YA fiction. So there are quite sophisticated sexual themes, especially in the last story X + Y, which involves homosexuality and gender-swapping. But where Delaney or Varley would use these themes as an opportunity for more or less prurient explicitness, Hagio’s take veers towards romance rather than sex. In some ways, the closest analogy is probably Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (which, not completely coincidentally, Matt Thorn himself discusses briefly here.)

But again the Le Guin connection isn’t quite right; Le Guin (in Hand and elsewhere) is very interested in world building, in putting together logical societies, and in psychological accuracy. This seems much less important to Hagio, whose characters are limned fairly quickly, and whose worlds are even less specific. In some ways, in fact (and this is the last dropped name, promise), she’s more like Philip K. Dick. Like him, her worlds don’t necessarily hold together all that well — I, at least, got the sense as I was reading her that she was basically making up the parameters as she went along (the description of how Mars is going to be terraformed, using inflatable gels, kites, and maybe dust, are teasingly, intentionally ludicrous.) Her characters are often defined by lacuna, or what isn’t there — the Unicorns as a race are oddly emotionally distant and vulnerable (prone, we learn at various times, to anorexia, clumsiness, and refusing to use first person pronouns.) And all the stories center, in one way or another, on memory loss.

Where PKD uses the spaces in his narrative to show the fragility of reality, though, Hagio is working towards something else. Character, memory, world, and reality are all secondary to, and hinged upon, emotion and, especially, on trauma. The art has a open look (not a lot of blacks or heavy lines, cartoony faces, sketchy backgrounds) and the stories are really series of semi-connected incidents rather than strong singular narratives, but beneath the breezy surface, Hagio is obsessed by pain, and, elliptically by childhood abuse. Perhaps the clearest example of the way in which Hagio simultaneously evades and highlights these issues is the unicorn characters themselves. As I mentioned, the unicorns are all emotionally distant. This is partially explained as just being the way they are; they’re kind of bio-engineered Vulcan computer geeks. At the same time, though, Hagio defines all three by discussions of childhood trauma — and the implication is that the unicorn’s emotional oddness is the result of that trauma, not of their genes. The tension is most clear in 4/4, which is build around the question of whether unicorns in general, and a child-like unicorn named Trill in particular, have emotions. Trill is being experimented on by a scientist/father-figure who seems to love her, contradictorily, because she has no emotions.

Actually, though, I think my favorite of the pieces here is the one where the connections are least explicit. The first and title story of the book, “A, A’”, is about a unicorn named Adelade Lee. Sent to a distant planet to participate in a research project, Adelade is killed in an accident. A clone, prepared for just such an eventuality, is then revived, and sent to the planet as a replacement. The clone, of course, doesn’t remember any of Addy’s friends — nor does she remember Addy’s former lover, Regg. Regg tries to reestablish a connection, but fails. He decides to leave the planet for another research station, where he is killed. Addy decides she did love him after all, and prepares to try to forge a relationship with Regg’s clone, who arrives at the planet as the story ends.

Obviously, with multiple memory losses, twins, and unrequited love up the wazoo, this is one big, gloppy soap opera. But again, lurking just beneath the surface, is a painful, never quite expressed parable about trauma, memory, and the inability to escape the past. The story opens with the cloned Addy being primed with the old Addy’s memories to the time when she first went to the planet for research. She “remembers” in particular, the moment when her pet pony died by falling into a crevice. She cries — but when she wakes up she says she doesn’t remember why. Throughout the rest of the story, Addy is locked in a round of, ostensibly, trying to remember, and, beneath that, trying to forget. Her inability to remember Regg is, narratively, the result of her being a clone; at the same time, though, it is hard not to see it as an unwillingness to remember, an inability to face her past.

The climax of the narrative comes while Regg and Addy are on the surface of the planet together. Addy ( like Pony before her) falls into a crevice, and Regg slides after her. Deep underground, they discover the old Addy’s body, frozen in ice, with a sharpened piece of swordgrass through her head. Diagetically, clearly, this is pretty silly — what’s the chances of both Addy’s falling down the same hole? Psychologically, though, falling down the same hole is exactly how trauma works. Addy has to return to the crevice; the memory she denies is always swallowing her up, and she always ends by standing, affectless, before her own pierced and frozen corpse. She can’t respond to Regg not because she’s not the same person, but because she is still frozen down there, somewhere, by a past she can’t acknowledge or access.

The end of the story is nominally happy — clone Addy and clone Regg will form a bond and make new memories together. But the image of the dead Addy, upside-down, underground (which, from various angles, makes up a shocking double-page spread) seems a lot more real than the fragile, promised love-affair. Indeed, happiness in the story is either in a sun-lit, imagined past (where Regg and Addy loved) or in a sunlit imagined future (where clone Regg and clone-Addy will love). In the present there is only a dimly understood, repeated primal scene of frigidity and despair.

Again, the fact that it’s dimly understood is part of what makes it so great. In the other stories in the volume, Hagio explains more clearly what’s wrong with her two other unicorn characters; their trauma is defined, and therefore can be overcome. But Addy’s trauma is more metaphorical; the death of her pony isn’t really what’s wrong with her; neither is the death of her former self. The sci-fi tropes obscure and misdirect the narrative core of Addy’s character. The story is about self-discovery, and its deceptive darkness comes because it isn’t possible for Addy to know herself. She can’t reclaim her trauma, or deal with it, because it isn’t hers; it’s outside her, and engulfs her. Perhaps she and Regg will find happiness, but one suspects that they may, instead, repeat the cycle of death and forgetting, occasionally changing roles, but with same predetermined end.

Top 10 Things I Used to Hate

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I know I promised no more Alan Moore blogging…but I just remembered this letter I wrote back in 2000 to the Top Ten letter column, back when I was young and foolish and hadn’t figured out that the proper place for random pointless burbling is the Internet. So here we go (“Donut Shop” was, apparently, the name of the letters column.)

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Dear Donut Shop,

I’ve been a fan of Alan Moore’s since his Swamp Thing days, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed the ABC titles. Top 10, unfortunately, is something of an exception. The writing and art are both frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and the characters are engaging. But whenever I put down an issue, I tend to find myself both frustrated and depressed.

The problem I have with the series is that Top 10 portrays the police as heroes. Cops may make mistakes, but civilian charges of bias or misconduct — of shapeism, speciesism, or just general abusiveness — are clearly not supposed to be believable. Smax may beat up gang-members, or drug-users, or drunk thunder-gods, but he is a good sort at heart, and, in any case, even the drunk’s all-knowing father thinks he had it coming. Whatever their faults, the police are the good guys.

Of course, in real life, things are less clear cut. Police in New York and Chicago have shot several unarmed civilians in the past year. In Los Angeles, anti-gang units have been accused of drug-trafficking, fabricating evidence, and torture. And at the recent anti-WTO demonstrations in Washington D.C. and Seattle, police used tear gas on, and apparently even shot at, peaceful demonstrators.

All of this is not to suggest that police are super-villains or that they are “bad” (though, of course, there are bad police, just as there are bad bankers or bad teachers.). Police are just working-class people who, like most working-class people, have an unpleasant job. That job is to promote justice, as defined by the rich whites who, in general, run the country. Practically, this means keeping poor minorities in their place by, for instance, enforcing drug-laws which notoriously target African-American populations, or by intimidating protestors. In recent years, it has also meant filling prisons to bursting with non-violent offenders and, in the tried and true traditions of police states, punishing more and more minor infractions of the law with more and more draconian sentences.

Top 10’s refusal to address the actual position of police in our society is particularly frustrating because the premise of the comic seems ideal for doing so. Linking super-hero titles with police procedurals is really a stroke of genius. As Alan’s story shows, both genres share many traits in common — a belief in the ultimate rightness of law and order primary among them. But, while books like Promethea and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are willing to deal, at least tangentially, with the questions of gender and imperialism raised by their pulp sources, Top 10 , apparently, has nothing to say about justice, except, in issue 8, that on the great grey board, white is winning. This is no doubt true. But it is of little comfort to many of the people in this country and the world, who are not white, and are not winning.
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And no, this never got printed. I actually think now that Top Ten may be my favorite of those ABC titles; I think it’s politics are still suspect, but it had the most engaging plot all the way through, especially since Promethea went so spectacularly off the rails….