Quote of the Day: Armond White

"Over recent years, film journalism has—perhaps unconsciously—been considered a part of the film industry and expected to be a partner in Hollywood’s commercial system. Look at the increased prevalence of on-television reviewing dedicated to dispensing consumer advice, and of magazine and newspaper features linked only to current releases, or to the Oscar campaign, as if Hollywood’s business was everybody’s business. Critics are no longer respected as individual thinkers, only as adjuncts to advertising. We are not. And we should not be. Criticism needs to be reassessed with this clear understanding: We judge movies because we know movies, and our knowledge is based on learning and experience."

That's an excerpt from film critic Armond White's excellent defense of his trade. Film criticism, he argues, has become advertising for new movies.

His essay, which could as easily apply to art criticism or literary criticism, includes some gems from other film critics, like Pauline Kael, who wrote in 1974:

"Criticism is all that stands between the public and advertising."

And Molly Haskell, who said more recently:

"The Internet is democracy’s revenge on democracy."

This all reminds me of a story art critic Jerry Saltz once told in a review. He'd been chewed out by a gallery owner who couldn't understand why he wasn't more supportive of the art market. Bad reviews, her logic went, were bad for business. But, Saltz fired back, they are good for art, and for the public.

As White writes in his essay, "Commerce, based on fashion and seeming novelty, always prioritizes the idea of newness as a way of favoring the next product and flattering the innocence of eager consumers who, reliably, lack the proverbial skepticism." What good is anything when the biggest recommendation one can make about it is that it is new to the market?

Is Avatar Racist?

Some critics are seeing racist themes in James Cameron's dazzling new movie, Avatar.

The story, which is told more or less in its entirety through the trailers promoting the film, is simple: An alien race makes their home over a deposit of rare ore on a strange planet. Humans coming to mine the ore are looking for a way to displace the aliens. While scientists study the aliens by using hybrid alien-human bodies that humans control via electronic telepathy, mercenaries hired by the mining company prepare to force the aliens to leave. Our hero, a mercenary, gets the opportunity to control one of the alien hybrids. He falls in love with the aliens, their way of life, and one of their princesses. He turns on his mercenary bosses and he and the scientists that control the hybrid alien bodies, or avatars, revolt against the mining company and try to save the aliens from destruction. You can guess how it ends; it's Hollywood, so it really can't end any other way.



So what about this could be racist? It's the same in many movies. A white man comes in and saves a primitive but more "spiritually enlightened" culture from his own people. As David Brooks pointed out in the New York Times recently, the "White Messiah" theme is central to Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai (2003) and Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990), among many other movies.

"It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic," wrote Brooks. "It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades."

So why would Cameron use such a crude, predictable, even offensive plot? The conservative Weekly Standard's John Podhoretz (whose bitterly negative review called Avatar "among the dumbest movies I've ever seen") had a theory:

"The thing is, one would be giving James Cameron too much credit to take Avatar--with its mindless worship of a nature-loving tribe and the tribe's adorable pagan rituals, its hatred of the military and American institutions, and the notion that to be human is just way uncool--at all seriously as a political document. It's more interesting as an example of how deeply rooted these standard-issue counterculture clichés in Hollywood have become by now. Cameron has simply used these familiar bromides as shorthand to give his special-effects spectacular some resonance. He wrote it this way not to be controversial, but quite the opposite: He was making something he thought would be most pleasing to the greatest number of people."

While Podhoretz's review had many of the earmarks of classic conservative cries against Hollywood liberalism ("Don't smear the profit motive!" admonished Ayn Rand in the 50s), he's spot-on about the pandering, after-thought plot.

No one, Podhoretz included, thinks the plot is the point; it's the effects. But let's take a closer look at these "White Messiah" plots.

Ironically, the White Messiah plot is a liberal device. It celebrates marginalized, colonized and "primitive" cultures, pitting them unfavorably against our more technologically and militarily sophisticated culture. They are weaker, but more in touch with the land. In American lore, they are the "Noble Savage," the Native American. They also represent the desire to leave modern society and get back to basics. They represent a respect for the environment even while they revel in a warrior's way of life.

To me, the "White Messiah" plotline is used by writers and directors of a liberal bent, like Cameron, to create a character that their audience (which they assume in America is predominantly white) can relate to instead of trying to create a sympathetic character from whatever colonized group the story focuses on. Through the white interloper, the audience learns about the colonized culture and, along with that interloper, begins to sympathize with them. Now, to highlight the cultural value of the colonized group, the writers have our hero become their champion. He doesn't merely fight for them, he saves them. Or at the very least, he sacrifices everything he can for them, firmly establishing their cultural and spiritual value by becoming one of them--as much as he can.

I don't believe that it is the writers' intention to appear racist. With a limited understanding of a different culture, and the burden of helping the dominant culture relate to the other, Hollywood has chosen to show us these groups through white eyes. It's a condescending cop out.

It reminds me of cultural critic Edward Said's charge that Napoleon's France stormed into Egypt and studied the culture so thoroughly that it owned it, and taught it about itself as a way to control it.

For a nice antidote to the "White Messiah" story, read Graham Greene's 1955 novel The Quiet American. Or see the 2002 film version starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. This nuanced tale effectively predicted the Vietnam War and America's place in it. The story, which was taken in part from Greene's experience as a reporter in Saigon, revolves around a British reporter (Michael Caine in the recent film), an American CIA agent (Brendan Fraser), and a Vietnamese woman in love with both of them (Do Thi Hai Yen). Greene's story criticizes the liberal American temptation to "rescue" Vietnam from both the French colonizers and Northern Communists.

Choice Excerpts From Recent Negative Reviews

From Alexander Zaitchik's review of the movie 2012 on killingthebuddha.com:

"Moments after the entire Indian subcontinent is violently subsumed by water, Emmerich expects us to bunch our fists over the fate of a yappy purse dog. But we don’t. Even the best-trained American audience has by then long transferred its allegiance to the side of apocalypse. It is simply not possible to make it into the second hour of this film and not root for the cosmic clusterfuck to hurry up and finish its business with every last member of the species responsible for Roland Emmerich. Nothing makes a catastrophic polar shift seem overdue like a stylized product placement for Bentley Motors, set against the death of a billion Chinese."

From James Wood's review of Paul Auster's new novel "Invisible" in the New Yorker:

"The classic formulations of postmodernism, by philosophers and theorists like Maurice Blanchot and Ihab Hassan, emphasize the way that contemporary language abuts silence. For Blanchot, as indeed for Beckett, language is always announcing its invalidity. Texts stutter and fragment, shred themselves around a void. Perhaps the strangest element of Auster’s reputation as an American postmodernist is that his language never registers this kind of absence at the level of the sentence. The void is all too speakable in Auster’s work. The pleasing, slightly facile books come out almost every year, as tidy and punctual as postage stamps, and the applauding reviewers line up like eager stamp collectors to get the latest issue. Peter Aaron, the narrator of 'Leviathan,' whose prose is so pressureless, claims that 'I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me.' Not enough silence, alas."

Victor Wong

Victor Wong, an actor who starred in nearly 30 movies including John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, was a renaissance man who only began making movies later in life.

His face, which for the latter half of his life was affected by a form of nerve paralysis, was widely recognizable for its lopsidedness, a trait that may have helped his film career but effectively ended his earlier broadcast television career.

As an obituary from 2001 in the Sacramento News & Review said:

"He was at varying stages a teenage Christian evangelist, a Protestant minister-in-training, a Buddhist, a visual artist, a poet, a Beat Generation luminary, a Merry Prankster, a pioneering photographer and broadcast journalist, a comedian, a successful stage performer, a teacher, a mentor to younger writers and filmmakers, and, in the end, possibly one of the most famous Chinese-American character actors in Hollywood."

He was born in San Francisco, the son of a poet and advisor to Chiang Kai-Shek (then Taiwan's president) in 1927. At one point he wanted to be a Baptist minister. Later, he went to UC Berkeley to study political science and journalism.

Discovering acting in college, he hooked up with the Second City Comedy Troupe and performed with actors like Alan Arkin.

While in Chicago, he went back to religion, enrolling in the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Theology and studying under Paul Tillich, Rheinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber.

He was one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and appeared as the character Arthur Ma in Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur.

In the 50s, he studied art under Mark Rothko at the San Francisco Art Institute, exhibiting his work at his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti's famous San Francisco bookstore, City Lights.

Victor Wong died on September 12, 2001 at his home in Sacramento.

My Favorite Horror Movies

I'm struggling to come up with a common theme in these five films. Some of them are great because they aren't as explicit in what they show. Encounter at Raven's Gate builds tension and doesn't let us down they way War of the Worlds did when it revealed the aliens. But others, like Re-Animator, are so explicit, it's delightful. On the other hand, Prince of Darkness succeeds as a horror movie because it takes itself so seriously. Near Dark takes a tired genre and makes it new with a decidedly un-gothic setting and chracters. Phantasm is an adolescent fantasy done well. Here, just before Halloween, are five of my favorite horror movies:

1. Prince of Darkness (1987, dir. John Carpenter)

Prince of Darkness came out a year after Big Trouble in Little China and featured a couple of the same actors -- Victor Wong and Dennis Dun. The plot was clever: an obscure Catholic order of monks in Los Angeles seeks help from physicists and ancient history scholars when a dark secret that they've guarded for more than two thousand years threatens to leak. Donald Pleasance (who will be familiar to horror fans as Dr. Loomis in 1978's Halloween, also by Carpenter) plays the head priest who goes to Howard Birack (played by Wong), a professor of theoretical physics at a public university. When Birack brings his students and some other professors to study the ancient secret in the church's tombs, bad things start to happen. Look for a cameo by Alice Cooper, playing a demonically possessed homeless man.

2. Re-Animator (1985, dir. Stuart Gordon)

Based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, this gorey horror movie stars Jeffrey Combs, a great character actor who has played at least three species of aliens in the Star Trek franchise. Combs is Herbert West, a medical student who studied under a controversial doctor in Switzerland doing research on...re-animating dead tissue. After a public disgrace involving the death (and failed but near re-animation) of his mentor, he comes to a small town medical school in New England to finish his studies. Not happy being forced to abandon his mentor's research, Herbert West starts doing experiments, and his more conventional roommate, played by Bruce Abbot, is getting worried. This movie is disgusting, offensive, and hilarious.

3. Near Dark (1987, dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

Near Dark, one of the best, most stylish and understated vampire movies ever made, stars much of the cast of the previous year's Aliens. Lance Henriksen is the patriarch of a group of nomadic Southern vampires, with Jenette Goldstein and Bill Paxton as his wife and son. Their younger vampire daughter, Mae, played by Jenny Wright, meets Adrian Pasdar's Caleb in small town Oklahoma one evening. When she can't bring herself to kill him, he reluctantly joins their traveling killing spree. Never is the word "vampire" mentioned in this movie, nor do we really see much in the way of fangs. These vampires are refreshingly unbound by traditional vampire lore and baggage; they are Southern white trash. Despite that characterization, director Kathryn Bigelow (who later did Point Break and Strange Days) gave Near Dark an art film sensibility, as befitted her background -- she studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Whitney Museum.

4. Phantasm (1979, dir. Don Don Coscarelli)

This low-budget classic looked much better than it should have. Special effects like shiny silver flying spheres with retractable blades and drills were apparently thrown like baseballs and then played back in reverse. The story is set in a small town (as so many are). A boy witnesses strange goings on in the local cemetary after his parents die and discovers that the undertaker (played brilliantly by an actor named Angus Scrimm) is re-animating dead people, shrinking them down to half-size, then transporting them to a red planet with higher gravity for slave labor via a portal in the funeral home. Woah.

5. Encounter at Raven's Gate (1988, dir. Rolf de Heer)

This Australian movie is, on the surface, an alien encounter story. What makes it so great (unlike the recent remake of War of the Worlds, which was fantastic up until a certain point) is that we never really see the aliens. Steven Vidler plays an ex-con who comes to work on his brother's farm in the outback. Slowly, this rural community is terrorized by strange incidents. The nature of them -- lights in the sky and power failures, for example -- is the only thing that seprates this tale from a classic ghost story. It's been years since I've seen this, but its creepiness is very memorable.

I'm looking for something great to watch on Halloween. Anyone have any suggestions? Please comment.

Scenes from Movies I Can't Find on Netflix

Black Cat White Cat (Serbian, 1998, dir. Emir Kusturica)



Bleeder (Danish, 1999, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

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Jar City (Icelandic, 2006, dir. Baltasar Kormákur)



Idioterne (Danish, 1999, dir. Lars Von Trier)



Good news: West 32nd Street, a film by Michael Kang about Manhattan's Koreatown staring John Cho (of Harold and Kumar fame) and Grace Park (Battlestar Galactica), is finally coming out on DVD this month.

Obituary: John Hughes

Before today I assumed that any movie John Cusack did prior to 1990 was among writer/director John Hughes' many 80s era teen movies. In fact, Better Off Dead (1985) was wriiten and directed by Savage Steve Holland, who also did One Crazy Summer a year later. The Sure Thing (also 1985) was a Rob Reiner movie, and Say Anything (1989) was written and directed by Cameron Crowe.

So what did John Hughes direct? It's actually only eight movies:

Sixteen Candles (1984)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Weird Science (1985)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)
She's Having a Baby (1988)
Uncle Buck (1989)
Curly Sue (1991)

He wrote far more, including:

Mr. Mom (1983)
Vacation (1983)
European Vacation (1985)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
Some Kind of Wonderful (1987)
The Great Outdoors (1988)
Christmas Vacation (1989)
Home Alone(1990)

He continued to write for Hollywood; his name appeared in the credits for recent drivel like Drillbit Taylor, Maid in Manhattan, and all five Beethoven movies (the ones about the big dog).

Although I've seen enough bits of each to fake it, I've never sat down and watched the entirety of Pretty in Pink or The Breakfast Club -- two of Hughes' most famous movies. As a child of the 80s, I loved Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But looking at his oeuvre, I realize that the sum of it is greater than the individual parts. Making allowances for the teen comedy genre, Ferris Bueller may be the only really good movie Hughes did. None were great. Many resonated strongly with white, middle class and upper-middle class kids who grew up in the 80s.

I was pleased to see a respectfully dissenting view of Hughes' work from New York Magazine's movie critic David Edelstein. "I found it gruesomely unfunny," he wrote of Sixteen Candles. "I often found his films difficult to watch. I didn’t buy the relationships, and I couldn’t get past the self-pity and anger." He was bothered by "Hughes' racist stereotypes" (Sixteen Candles foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong comes to mind here).

Edelstein is as puzzled as the rest of us about what happened to Hughes' career:

"At the height of his success, Hughes got strange, and stories abound of his unpleasantness. (I interviewed him once for a Rolling Stone story I decided not to write and found him neither nasty nor nice—not indifferent, just… neutral.)"

To most of us, he just dropped off the face of the earth, sort of like an 80s moviemaker version of J.D. Salinger. But he was actually more like fellow 80s writer/director Savage Steve Holland, who, after Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer kept working steadily, but did nothing anyone has ever heard of. It's just as sad, really, but at least he made a living.

John Hughes died of a heart attack in Manhattan. He was 59.

Don't Mess With a Good Thing

Amy Heckerling's 1995 movie Clueless = homage.

Baz Lurhmann's 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet = risky updated classic.

The Farrelly Brothers' imminent abomination The Three Stooges with Jim Carey and Benicio del Toro = forgery.

I’d like a plain omelet, no potatoes on the plate. A cup of coffee and a side order of wheat toast.

I’m sorry we don’t have any side orders of toast. I can offer you an English muffin or a coffee roll.

What do you mean you don’t have side orders of toast? You make sandwiches don’t you?

Would you like to talk to the manager?

You’ve got bread. And a toaster of some kind?


I don’t make the rules.

Okay, I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. I’d like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast: no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.

A number two. Chicken salad sand. Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee. Anything else?

Yeah. Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, and give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich and you haven’t broken any rules.

You want me to hold the chicken, huh?

I want you to hold the chicken between your knees.

You see that sign, sir? Yes, you all have to leave. I’m not taking any more of your smartness and sarcasm.

You see this sign?

More Actors I Get Mixed Up

I have trouble telling Tobin Bell from Brion James. Both were in an excellent adaptation of a James Ellroy novel called Brown's Requiem; one (Bell) played a good guy and one (James) played a bad guy. Both tend to play bad guys though. They are veteran character actors who have been working very steadily for years.

They both have high foreheads, long noses, small mouths and sloping chins. Bell is on the left and James is right:



Brion James appeared in an episode of "The Waltons" in 1974 and an episode of "Gunsmoke" in 1975. But I think I know him best as a replicant in Blade Runner (1982).

Though he's about the same age as Brion James, Tobin Bell didn't appear in anything until 1988. He's probably most famous now for his role as the serial killer in the "Saw" movies.

And then there's Simon Baker and Scott Speedman. Like Tobin Bell and Brion James, both these British Colony blond pretty boys have appeared in James Ellroy adaptations. Simon Baker had a small role as a young actor in L.A. Confidential and Scott Speedman starred with Kurt Russell in Dark Blue (2002). I honestly though they were the same person for a while. Speedman is on the left and Baker is right:



Australian Simon Baker, 39, had a nice starring role in George Romero's 2005 zombie series installment Land of the Dead. Other than that, he tends to play romantic foils, as he did in The Devil Wears Prada.

The younger Scott Speedman, 32, was born in England and raised in Canada. Sadly, "Dark Blue" may have been his high point so far, but he's best known for his role in the girly TV show "Felicity."

See also my post on how Harry Hamlin, David Keith, and Robert Wuhl are not the same person.

"I said I wanted to see a plaster of paris bagel and cream cheese paperweight, now cough it up."

Business Cards

"Look at the that off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my god: it's even got a watermark."

Obituary: Heathcliff Andrew Ledger

Celebrity deaths are great news for media, and not just the celebrity paparazzi rags. The only thing wrong with the mysterious death of a young, moderately talented, and fairly good-looking actor is that there isn’t an infinite amount of reportable information. Eventually it dries up and the guy is buried, literally and figuratively.

Gawker has this "examination of 100 recent headlines on Google News, categorized by the angle on the Australian actor's mysterious demise."

“It’s like River Phoenix all over again,” a friend in California texted me. We were joking around about the media circus. Which is a sign of good mental health for the average American: to be cynical and unmoved by the death, or to feel it profoundly?


I was walking around SoHo last week with a co-worker when I asked her if we should check out the Heath Ledger Death Apartment. She looked up the address on Wikipedia with her mobile phone, and we were off.

As we stood in front of 421 Broome Street, gawking at the pile of letters and flowers, I held up my camera-phone for the photo-op. I looked around. The density of the crowd was deceptive. Most of it was police barriers and camera equipment that spilled over into the street. And I wasn't the only one snapping pictures with a camera-phone. The crowd was quiet, and surprisingly respectful. As I was about to mutter something sarcastic to my co-worker, I heard a man, an adult, say something quiet to his companion about what a good actor Ledger was, as if that justified their visit to the site.


So why were we there? The spectacle, we agreed. All respect for the dead aside, this was a modern popular cultural moment. We wanted to see the pile of letters. How, in this day and age, we marveled, could anyone get so attached to an actor that they would write a heart-felt letter to the actor or his family?

We wanted to see the cameras. There were news vans from all the local stations staked out there. We wondered why. Would anyone close to the actor actually show up at the apartment?


If this were a movie, a Maybach with blacked-out windows would pull up with Michelle Williams and son. The window would roll down about an inch, hesitate, and then go down another inch and pause and then go up. The car would sit just long enough for the cameras to turn around before the car sped off. And the crowd that saw it would dissect the movements of the window as if it were an expression on a face, because that’s all they had to go on.


But it is a kind of movie scenario when our media treats actors' lives like performances, and we visited the Heath Ledger Death Apartment as we would have the site of a film shoot.

Rambo By the Numbers

This is the Rambo Kill Chart from L.A. Times writer John Mueller. Click on it to make it bigger. Note the number of sex scenes in each of the four Rambo films. Note the rate at which the killing increases from film to film. And note the fact that Rambo doesn't kill anyone without his shirt on in the latest installment.

"I'm not sure how to respond to this chart: is it good, is it bad?" asks Firstshowing.net's Alex Billington. "Do more deaths in this latest Rambo movie mean it will be better?" I'm not sure either, but more killings may mean safer streets at home.

The chart reminds me of two things. First, the outrageous violence of the 1,000-year-old Icelandic Sagas. The Sagas are the histories of the Norwegian Viking families that settled in Iceland, and they are full of Bible-style so-and-so begat so-and-so, as well as phrases like "And then Thorstein dealt Thorarin his death blow." It's gruesome stuff, and I had always meant to try to create a sort of family tree-like chart showing who killed who along with who sired who.

But this Rambo business also reminds me of the gleeful bloodsport of zombie movies. When Rambo kills 83 people in about 90 minutes, and I see it boiled down into a plain chart, I start wondering -- ironically -- if they all deserved it. Could the "bad guys" all be so bad?

This question never comes up in zombie movies, and in that way, they are the perfect modern American film genre: they are full of guilt-free carnage (not even killing -- they're already dead!). Human beings are distilled down into mindless, soul-less -- even lifeless -- menaces that living human beings must destroy. How like a video game.

Other genres have tried. Commies are soul-less, right? Or crazed drug addicts? But no one has been able to "comfortably" de-humanize the living in film -- not after WWI, WWII, and assorted regional genocides.

I've never seen any of the Rambo movies (nor any of the Rocky movies, for that matter), but I can't imagine a better time to bring the character back. As you can see in the National Threat Advisory on the right column of this blog, we're on orange alert.

Quote of the Day: Gordon Dahl

“In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.”

From the January 7 edition of the New York Times. The quote is from Gordon Dahl, an ecnomist at the University of California, San Diego who worked on a study that came to the conclusion above.

From the Times:

"Professor Dahl and the paper’s other author, Stefano DellaVigna, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, attach precise numbers to their argument: Over the last decade, they say, the showing of violent films in the United States has decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend, or 52,000 a year."

Jacob's Ladder

I saw Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 9 1/2 Weeks and Fatal Attraction) when it came out, in the theater. It was downtown St. Paul in 1990 and I went with a girlfriend and her friend. It was a rough crowd – they yelled and booed at the scenes they didn’t like. The audience was mostly black and, in spite of the racially mixed Brooklyn and Vietnam War setting, they reacted to the movie as if it were annoyingly white.

I loved it. I remember being moved and spooked by it. We rode the bus home from downtown, I remember that.

It's a very strange film. Bruce Joel Rubin's script, which languished unfilmed for years was long hailed as one of Hollywood's best unproduced screenplays until Adrian Lyne decided to film it. Rubin also wrote Ghost.

Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Richard Gere auditioned for the starring role, but the relatively unknown Tim Robbins got it. The female lead, played by Elizabeth Peña, was auditioned for by Julia Roberts, Andie MacDowell and Madonna.

Tim Robbins plays Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran who, after the War, finishes his doctorate in philosophy but can’t work. He’s divorced from his wife and one of their three sons was killed by a car on his bike. Now he’s a postman in Brooklyn and he’s shacked up with Elizabeth Peña, a coworker. He’s having hallucinations that turn out to be the result of an Army experiment with LSD that was designed to make soldiers more fierce. Years later, the after-effects are scary and Singer discovers that his whole battalion is suffering.

My second viewing of the movie, more than 15 years later, is interesting for two reasons. One, the subway scene in the first ten minutes was filmed in the now (and then) abandoned Bergen Street express station on the F line in Brooklyn.

The F line, as many Brooklyn residents know, is designed with an express track that has been unused for decades because the decaying Gowanus Canal overpass can't handle the extra stress. Express service may be restored in the next 6 years, but in the meantime, and for the last 20 or more years, there has been a Bergen Street station directly below the normal operating Bergen Street station that is only used in emergencies. Both opened in 1933.

[From the film: Tim Robbins walks through the Bergen Street Station.]

[Photo of the Bergen Street express station from nycsubway.org/perl/show/Shadow/Devo/Track 7]

I saw it once -- only a glimpse -- when, during construction, the train had to use the express tracks temporarily. My train went by it without stopping. It’s a mess and it’s not fit for use anymore.

The scene in Jacob’s Ladder, in which Tim Robbins is trapped in the Bergen Street station, was filmed in the abandoned express station, according to the DVD notes (and subway historians) “The production team had to put up hundreds of feet of tile and signs in order to make the station look as if it was in working order.”

In the movie, Robbins rides a C train to Bergen Street. It's entirely possible that the C went that way in the 1970s, when the film takes place, but it's on the F and G lines now.

In real life, the upstairs, working part of the Bergen Street station, has giant stainless steel doors at either end which conceal the stairways to the express station below.

The second thing about the movie that caught my attention -- then and now -- was Singer's occasional hallucination of the man with the head that shakes like a rattlesnake's tail.

According to the DVD notes and a New York Times review from 1990, the film's creators were imspired by the artist Frnacis Bacon, among others:

"Mr. Lyne said he watched endless documentary film about Vietnam, read countless chronicles of near-death experiences and visited every major special effects laboratory in the United States seeking an original look for his underworld.

"Finally, they came up with what they thought a more understated, believable vision of hell, inspired among others by the English painter Francis Bacon, the English engraver-poet William Blake and the American photographer Diane Arbus."

George Romero's Dawn of the Dead

"It is a horrible, hauntingly accurate vision of the mindless excesses of a society gone mad," says a gravelly voiceover in the trailer for Dawn of the Dead. Director George Romero made it in 1978, about 10 years after his famous Night of the Living Dead.

It isn't really a sequel; it's more of an ambitious expansion of the concept from the 1968 film. Romero says he got the idea when he toured a shopping mall owned by some friends. The mall had crawl spaces above the stores and civil defense food supplies hidden away.

The film begins with a television station in chaos, trying to report on the worldwide zombie pandemic. Our heroes are four people who get away from Pittsburgh in a TV news helicopter. About a half hour into Dawn of the Dead, the four land on top of a shopping mall to look for supplies. The mall's crawling with the undead.

"What are they doing? Why do they come here?" Francine asks her boyfriend Stephen, the helicopter pilot.

"Some kind of instinct. Memory. What they used to do," Stephen replies. "This was an important place in their lives."

When the two others, cops named Roger and Peter, find the mall's control center, they turn on the Muzak. Next the escalators, then the fountains. We hear comical easy listening tunes while zombies stumble around. Cut to mannequin heads in windows. Which is which?

The message here is mixed: on the one hand, we have shoppers coming to the mall to mill around after death looking much as they did as live shoppers. A sort of critique of consumerism.

On the other hand, our survivors are living the ultimate consumer dream: a shopping spree.

"I need lighter fluid," Roger says to Peter.

"You got it!" Peter yells, as they jump out into the mall's main concourse with their machine guns.

They're ecstatic as they break into Penneys:

"How the hell are we going to get back!?"

"Who the hell cares! Let's go shopping first!" they cry.

We can see already what will be their undoing. It's greed. The horror movie code (especially circa 1978) demands it. This is the code that says promiscuous women must get killed first. That a swagger of over-confidence will be rewarded with decapitation. My god, if the zombies ever do come for us in the real world, more than half of us will know exactly what not to do, just from watching movies.

Another hour in, and the survivors are barricaded in the mall, having destroyed all the zombies inside. During a repose, they hear a clattering at the entrance of the mall.

"They're still here," says Francine.

"They're after us." They know we're still in here," says Stephen, her boyfriend.

"They're after the place," smiles Peter. "They don't know why they're here. Just remember. Remember that they want to be in here."

"What the hell are they?" muses Francine.

"They're us, that's all," answers Peter.

Romero plays the mall for its survivalist haven potential and black comic relief as much for its emerging status as a cultural wasteland.

The shopping spree has soured. Roger slowly dies after being bitten. He comes back to life, and Peter shoots him and buries him in the mall's modest tropical garden.

But life in the mall goes on. They make the mall's skating rink a shooting range, using mannequins for target practice. There's an almost endless cache of weapons and ammo in the mall's gun shop. They dress up in department store duds and make a candlelight dinner in the mall's restaurant. They outfit a fortified part of the mall like a luxury penthouse -- clear acrylic side chairs, an Italian lamp, a Danish stereo system, appliances, televisions tuned to the dwindling broadcasts.

They do everything they can to play at normal life, and it's utterly surreal. A cartoon imitation of real life, but weirder. Certain scenes surprise us: is this person dead? If so, is she a zombie? Or is it a mannequin? Or is one of our survivors just being still? When does the difference no longer matter?

Zizek

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: 'Let's establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true; if it's written in red ink, it's false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: 'Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair -- the only thing you can't get is red ink.'

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, above, in bed, in the movie Zizek! The movie includes the joke above, which Zizek explains in detail in his book about 9/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real!

Of the joke, Zizek writes:

One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedoms one wants -- then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the 'red ink': we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict -- 'war on terror', 'democracy and freedom', 'human rights', and so on -- are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it. In this precise sense, our 'freedoms' themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom.

Name's Dowd. Elwood P.

"My name's Dowd. Elwood P. Let me give you one of my cards. If you should ever want to call me, call me at this number, don't call me at that one. That's the old one. If you happen to lose the card, don't worry, I have plenty more."

Can anyone name the actor and the film?