"THE PROSPECT OF VENGEANCE IS THE BEST REFRESHMENT"

ON ABULI AND BERNET'S TORPEDO 1936

A big chunk of the last two days has been dedicated to tearing through a couple volumes of Enrique Sanchez Abuli and Jordi Bernet's TORPEDO 1936, which has been such a pleasure in part because of the book's sheer nastiness and pitch black humor. TORPEDO is a Spanish comic, and began publication in 1981, running through the late 90's (I believe-- not 100% on the end of its run). The book takes place in the New York of 1936, following a Sicilian immigrant named Luca Torelli (not to be confused with Rhapsody guitarist Luca Turilli) a.k.a. Torpedo, who has found his calling in the new world as a hired killer.

That's about it. There is not a lot of genesis to his character, or variation to his exploits. Torpedo takes a job, figures out a clever way to kill his target, sometimes kills the guy who hired him, and once in a blue moon gets outwitted. Torpedo is not a hero, nor is he an antihero. He has no hint of a conscience, and has no prospects of redemption. A pure motherfucker. He kills for money, he kills for revenge, and sometimes kills for a punchline. He abuses his partner, Rascal, and takes advantage of women. Sometimes he rapes them. In one episode, he shoots a priest, splashes his face with holy water, and steals the alms box on the way out. In another ("The Tip Off", one of my favorites), Torpedo pretends to spare a target who has renounced his life of crime and is shipping off to fight Franco, then shoots him in the back as he goes toward his train.

The nihilism of the series was intense enough to drive off its original artist, the legendary Alex Toth, after two installments. However, it is my claim that the function of art is not the instruction of ethics, and the real question is what can be gathered from a story with an irredeemable protagonist.

A way into this riddle might be to look examine Torpedo's world, his place in the social order. Torpedo is contracted by all sorts of people, rich and poor, hardened criminals as well as "upright" citizens in a jam, and is thus granted a unique mobility, moving comfortably through all social strata. He also exhibits these chameleon properties in the course of his work, frequently employing disguises-- clown, nun, cop, groom, Santa Claus-- and passing effortlessly in every role (there is a bit of Souvestre and Allain's Fantomas in him).

The unifying factor is that he deals exclusively with people who are at their basest states-- desperation, greed, obsession, vengeance hungry, etc.-- and these conditions permeate through every level of the social body. Torpedo is really an agent of misanthropy and malevolence, a do-er of the dirty work, a genie of secret desire. He may pass himself off as anyone and anything, but in his true form-- killer-- he is repugnant, anathema, loved by no one. Indeed, he is a dangerous figure, not just for his tendencies toward bloodshed. He is evidence of a social undercurrent that undermines the mythology of the social order (ethical, just, evolved, enlightened, Land Of Opportunity) but is necessary for that social order in practice (savage capitalist, commodity reductive).

The brilliance of Jordi Bernet's pulpy style really comes through in these moments where the primal face of the social order is unmasked. He is an expert at conveying the mania that overtakes men on an obsessive kick, and his scenes of stylized violence give way to reveal an ugly brute intensity.

I want to say a few more words about the politics of disguise and substitution, particularly with regard to Torpedo's speech. The killer puns constantly, passing on grounds of his ostensibly bad english. "I've deformed," he tells a prison warden who inquires why he would snitch of the escape plans of his fellow prisoners. "I said I've reformed!" Torpedo's language forms a sort of shadow dialectic, drawing connections between the manners of a social order and the ugly condition beneath the signifier.

It ain't for the weak-in-the-guts, but for those interested in crime books, TORPEDO 1936 is definitely worth a look. It's currently being reprinted by IDW, who have been on a real winning streak with their crime books, also publishing Darwyn Cooke's excellent adaptations of the Donald Westlake's PARKER books (worth examining too to see the influence of Bernet on Cooke, which is clear).

This is some cold blooded shit, folks. Just the way I like it.

AUXILIARY TO "ON DEEP RED"

Other assorted thoughts while writing the previous essay:

1. Interesting that the image of the murder is drawn on the wall of the old house, preserved invincibly beneath the paint. It is difficult to image a realistic circumstance in which this picture could have been drawn on the wall and not seen by somebody else, but of course that isn't really relevant. This seems evident of another tendency which strikes me in DEEP RED, which is that The Truth Must Be Revealed, or perhaps The Truth Must Be Uttered. Haven't quite fleshed this idea out, but started thinking about this theme (a recurrent one in horror films) while watching John Carpenter's third best movie THE FOG a couple of weeks ago. A secret can never lie still. In DEEP RED, Helga Ulmann refers to thoughts of a crime hanging around a place like cobwebs-- it lingers past the presence of the murderer, and rises to the surface of its own accord. In THE FOG, clues literally disgorge themselves from the walls into the public stage. In DEEP RED, it's as if the building inscribes itself with a memory of the crime.

There is something going on here with mouths as well. Mouths do all sorts of spewing and getting bashed in over the course of DEEP RED. Something to do with the fact of uttering, perhaps? Those that know the crime must lost their ability to speak? Both Helga and the killer release liquid from their mouths, what is the parallel there?

2. I realize that there is a kind of scene that I always enjoy, which is when we get to watch a character have an idea and put something together without getting too far inside their heads. The scene with Dr. Giordani in the bathroom is a really good example of this, and really captures the excitement of things clicking in your mind. Other similar sequences of note: Travolta matching his tape to the photographs in De Palma's BLOW OUT. McNulty and Bunk figuring out the trajectory of the bullet in the "fuck" scene during the first season of THE WIRE? Others that come to mind?

"I'M FASCINATED BY THE WHOLE THING IN A MORBID KIND OF WAY"

ON DARIO ARGENTO'S DEEP RED

I want to propose a methodology for looking at horror films, although it certainly need not be strictly confined to that genre alone. The method is this: consider the protagonist, and consider the menace, and imagine that the protagonist is at the center of the whole universe of the film and has somehow called the menace to him, has conjured it despite himself like a repressed dream. Now consider the protagonist at the beginning and the end of the film and the transformation that he has undergone, and often this is what indicates to us what the film is really about. What desire has called this horror, this one and not another? What emerges from him when he faces it, and what is shed to make way?

This is hardly an original approach, and it may not work in every single instance, but for me it certainly helps to crack Dario Argento's giallo masterpiece DEEP RED. A few notes on the film before we get any deeper. The film was made in 1975 and looks like it, which I mean as a compliment. It is often called Argento's best film, and though I do not like everything about it, I do think it is pretty terrific and one of the best giallos I have seen. It is basically a slasher movie, and though it attains transcendent heights that most of its peers do not approach, it adheres pretty close to the slasher premises. Getting your head around it will certainly provide some insight into that subgenre as a whole.

It is also the earliest Argento film to star an actor that I have seen in anything else (for whatever that's worth), the actor in question being David Hemmings a.k.a. Mr. Miserable a.k.a. The White Slacks King a.k.a. Frowny Starks. If I had infinite time, I would compile an epic montage of David Hemmings moping around and looking irritated and being unpleasant to women in movie after movie. I do not have infinite time, so you will have to do the research yourself, but trust me, the evidence is out there.

DEEP RED concerns a serious of imaginatively grisly murders committed by the requisite black-gloved killer. Ol' Black Gloves, you scamp! The whole affair is set in motion when a psychic catches a whiff of murder-mind in her audience and proceeds to publicly flip out. This psychic is of course the first victim to be dispatched, and the act is witnessed by conservatory pianist/perennial gloomboat David Hemmings. The rest of the film concerns his attempts to uncover the original crime while eluding a cleaver to the melon.

The thing unfolds in a surreal, baroque Italian cityscape, captured beautifully by Argento. Despite its miraculous ornamentation, it seems like a fairly miserable place. Figures sit on benches smoking idly, people stand unmoving in the nearly empty bar, the palate is all grays and pale greens and anemic blues and off whites, the characters move and speak with a sort of woodenness amid all their marvelous rooms. Can we blame Mr. Hemmings for being so dour? The absurd dub (I watched the American version) actually works in the film's favor, adding a further level of disembodiment between the characters and the words that come out of their mouths. The photography through most of the film is actually rather stagy; the camera fixes or slowly pans across meticulously composed sets as the characters awkwardly shuffle through them.

And suddenly the rigid composition breaks. It happens at moments of action, of revelation, of violence. Abruptly the camera spins in a frenzy to disorienting angles, the phantasmagoric theme erupts while diegetic sound attains a startling intensity. We must notice the camera during these moments; sometimes we are behind the killer's eyes and sometimes we are floating in the third person. This is not a HALLOWEEN perspective-of-the-killer trick. Rather, in these moments we are coming up against the walls of the stagnant symbolic order and passing over into the furious libidinal economy which churns beneath it like a swirling sewer. Water streams out of an open mouth, steam fills a room-- sudden explosions of elemental force intrude into the pacified civilized domain in discharges of repressed erotic and violent desire (note the steaming pot on the stove in the background of the origin-of-the-crime scene!). The signifier for all of this is, naturally, the "deep red" of the title, the red which surrounds our doomed psychic as she first senses the presence of murder and of the glowing ring of Hemmings' flashlight as he nears the hidden secret and of the blood that spurts over the rococo interiors. A red message glimpsed in a school lavatory: "KILL YOUR MOTHER AND FATHER". It may as well read "DEATH TO THE SYMBOLIC ORDER!"

"I'm the proletariat of the keyboard, and you're the bourgeoise," Hemmings is told by his drunken piano player friend/double Carlos, and this turns out to be the critical statement of the film. Poor, repressed David Hemmings! How isolated is he from the elemental, grounded in his plastic modernist hell filled with soulless set pieces, toying constantly with cigarettes that he never manages to smoke (his ashtrays are empty too)! Contrast this to the mad world of the killer, whose assortment of objects are cathexes of powerful energy. Can we blame him for being drawn to this world of primal violence?

(I will intrude here to say SPOILER ALERT sort of)

Much of the criticism I've seen regarding DEEP RED focuses on gender, which I am not very interested in, as the film's gender politics seem fairly incoherent to me. To that end, however, I will say that it seems relevant that the "original crime" involves the murder of the patriarch. It is this act that banishes Marta from the symbolic order (hetero-bourgeois-materialist) and strands her in its underbelly. Her pancake-makeup look seems kind of like a burlesque of the feminine object, the corpse of the iconic female.

(end spoiler alert)

Escape, David Hemmings! Escape wooden world, escape endless drudgery! Find power! Find desire! Find violence! He does, and by this is animated, and is immersed, at last glimpse, in deep red.

(This trailer is pretty super great, but gives away most of the kills and some of the plot as well, so I'm going to go ahead and SPOILER ALERT it for those who haven't seen the film and are interested in its intrigue as well as its sensual pleasure.)

THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HIP-HOP

I. ONTOLOGY

"Young dictionary make words make sense." - Lil' Wayne

We are accustomed to what I will call a grammar of reason. As the grammar of language directs the combination of words into intelligible sentences, the grammar of reason directs the combination of ideas into more complex forms (we may recall the lessons of our instructors on the composition of an essay-- introduction, thesis, evidence, evidence, summary, conclusion). The ordinary practice of language reifies this grammar of reason, which in turn represents a Master Order, an authority which dictates where it is permissible or polite to draw relation between ideas. Those who cannot adapt to this Order are considered mad.

Hip-hop proposes a language system entirely other, a liberated ontology unconstrained by the traditional grammar of reason in which ideas may be associated by relations forbidden to the logic lexicon of the Master Order.

At an elementary level, this ontology functions on a referential logic, drawing connections along the lines of:

Analogy
("Lyrics is weak like clock radio speakers" -- Genius/GZA)

Metaphor
("Girl you be the bomb/And Bobby be shellshocked" -- RZA)

Allusion
("Walk a road of a great length too long to measure/My Clan make me rhyme like D-Banner under pressure" -- GZA/Genius)

Hip-hop is preoccupied with the intricacies and malleability of language, unfolding then reconstituting and recontextualizing words and phrases to form new meanings. This is expressed in form such as:

Double Entendre
("Recognize the black cat with the nine lives/Get up off me nigga it's bad luck to cross me..." -- Jay-Z)

Homophony
("Young dictionary make words make sense/Then I make cents make dollars..." -- Lil' Wayne")

Paraphrase
("Your firearms too short to box with god..." - Talib Kweli)

Word Deconstruction
("I'm so like a Pip/I'm glad it's night..." -- Andre 3000)

Anagram
("We only increase if everything is peace/Father you see King the police" -- GZA/Genius)

This preoccupation is also expressed on a purely sonic level:

Rhythm
("Drink a Heineken as we go inside the mind again/Never minding men dropping gem/Can he shine again/Most definite/Let this be my last will and testament/For the pessimist/Exercise for the exorcist" -- Method Man)

Texture
("Loaded four-fours on low/Where the cheese at/Fresh of the jet to the 'jects/Where the G's at?" -- T.I.)

Onomatopoeia
("So you act dumb like uuuhh duh/And the drummer boy go pa rum pum pum pum" -- Missy Elliott)

The style and practice of this language system may be characterized as "flow."

This alternate language/reason is not without precedent. Hip-hop's place in the continuum of black oral traditions is widely discussed (more on this in Thesis II); one also finds a resemblance to various styles of Modernist prose, be it the Cubist language of Gertrude Stein or the bugfuck stream-of-consciousness favored by William Burroughs.

However, in the instantaneous line-by-line thought-to-thought context of hip-hop (seen distilled in the mode of the freestyle), this language attains a form uniquely its own. In skilled execution, the effect is surreal and utterly mystical. As the rhyme unfolds, unsuspected parallels emerge, unexpected relationships are revealed; here, a hidden order of things is illuminated, a glimpse of a pattern beyond the veil of reason.

I originally envisioned an illustration to accompany this piece, an adaptation of Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus" decked out in ballybucks and a diamond grill wielding an intimidating ghetto blaster; however, for fear of compromising my pseudo-academic pretensions with such unfettered silliness, I have resisted the impulse. For now.

Thesis II coming soon.

SHOCK CORRIDOR (SAMUEL FULLER, 1963)

The mission of the exploitation film, it seems to me, is to fix upon some aspect of culture and distill from it that kernel of danger and thrill that designates it forbidden territory yet charges it with an almost irresistible allure. These films would eventually become known for their excesses during the golden age of grindhouse cinema in the late 60's and 70's, gleefully channeling the libertinism of the counterculture era (and eventually the grim social vision of its demise), but the roots of the movement can be traced back to the sensationalistic cautionary tales of previous decades.

Samuel Fuller's foundational work predates the exploitation age, but his in morality-plays-cloaked-in-genre-films we find a precedent for what was to come in both style and social vision. Fuller's sensationalism is charged with the anxiety of the post-WWII/early Cold War period, a creeping panic that the social order is unsound and may give way at any moment to savage chaos.

In 1963's Shock Corridor, the chaos agent in question is the dread science of psychology. The premise is this (and if this ain't a hook, I don't know what is): to solve a murder at a mental institution, overambitious reporter Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck) feigns insanity to be committed to said asylum where he can investigate from the inside. If all goes according to plan, he'll crack the case, get the big scoop, win a Pulitzer, and get back to his burlesque dancer girlfriend Cathy (Constance Towers) in no time at all. Of course, things never go according to plan, and Barrett finds his own sanity in question.



From the outset, the film's attitude toward psychology is supremely skeptical. The discipline as practiced by the doctors is essentially a bureaucratic meat grinder, performing ham-handed diagnoses in broad strokes of pseudo-science mumbo jumbo, guiding patients through a series of absurd and grotesque treatments (dance therapy, hydrotherapy, shock treatment).The primary purpose of the asylum seems to be containment; if there is any rehabilitation going on, we do not see it.

The characters regard psychology with similar dismissal. To Barrett, a fine avatar of the 1950's Let-Men-Be-Men American male archetype, psychology is no more than a gimmick, and his interest owes only to it being "what people buy." His girlfriend's position strikes closer to the film's sensationalistic tenor. "A man can't tamper with the mind!" she proclaims. "Their sickness is bound to rub of onto you!" To Cathy, meddling in the workings of the mind is forbidden, unholy; once the dark waters of the consciousness are stirred, they are liable to come spurting out in a geyser of madness, shattering the ever-so-fragile equilibrium of the personality.



In fact, Shock Corridor takes this notion quite seriously. Beneath the surface skepticism toward psychology and psychoanalysis, we find at the film's heart much more powerful belief. We observe the sway of the subconscious over individuals, and in Barrett's investigations even witness the power of psychoanalysis in practice.

Fuller's madmen seem to share a single syndrome: they have become unstuck from the social continuum and are lost within the spheres of their own desire and trauma. The main setpiece of the film is the sterile white hallway of the asylum where the lunatics are allowed to congregate. To the mad, this blank passage becomes a fantasmal space, a nexus of dream, a bare stage upon which the fantasies of maniacs may be enacted, given cinematic flourish by the score and camera work. Here the Communist defector may become a Confederate hero, the bullied black student may become Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, the nuclear scientist may become an innocent child.



Barrett's sleuthing consists of integrating himself into the fantasies of the witnesses and attempting to lead them toward moments of sanity during which they may disclose crucial details about the case. The technique, you may observe, is effectively a variation on the talking cure, and indeed it proves successful. In each case, Barrett guides the patient through their fantasies toward moments of cathartic break, represented by the use of color stock footage (the film is in black and white) depicting far away places and cultures. By leading them through a mosaic of personal, cultural, and racial memory, Barrett reconciles the patients with their worlds and their "true" selves, allowing them to offer testimony before slipping once again into madness.

The film also plumbs the complexities of Barrett's own consciousness as his sanity begins to crack; the doctor's diagnosis of the reporter's ostensibly phony ailment ("a culmination of internal sexual conflicts") may not be so far off. At the heart of Barrett's troubles, I claim, is an anxiety regarding his girlfriend's fidelity. Early on in his lockup, she appears to him in a dream, manifesting as a phantasmal siren, sing-songing to him, "You made me be alone, Johnny. And I have the right to find another Johnny." His crisis is one of potency, and it eventually undermines his sense of agency and ego. (This anxiety also emerges in a humorous moment as Barrett wanders into the ward of Maenad-like nymphomaniacs. "Nymphos!" he exclaims to himself with alarm as he is beset by a ring of buxom beauties. Another golden moment in cinema history.)

The film is an equally marvelous viewing at its surface sensual level, filled to the brim with expressive framing and rich, sonorous noir language ("My yen for you goes up and down like a fever chart" is a particular favorite. That's a pretty slick thing to say to your shorty, by the way, so gents take note).



Anyway, thanks for taking a gander at my new blog. I'm going to try to update here once a week, and I'm thinking the next entry will be a look at Ol' Dirty Bastard's "All In Together Now." Stay tuned.