Thursday, February 26, 2004
WHY KENNY EVERETT’S WORLD’S WORST RECORD ALBUM IS ONE OF THE BEST AND ONE OF THE WORST RECORDS EVER MADE
“I don’t like Labour because they want to bring everyone down to their level instead of raising everyone to the level of the beautiful people. It takes a businessman to run this country.”
(Kenny Everett, Daily Mail interview, August 1974)
“There really were some stinking fucking records made in the ‘60s, weren’t there?”
(Kenny Everett to his Capital Radio producer, circa 1977)
The latter remark apparently prompted Everett’s producer to suggest doing a whole programme of this nature – inviting listeners to send in especially bad records, which Everett would then play. The World’s Worst Record Show ended up running for three years. In 1978 a listeners’ poll of the “Bottom 30” records ever made was solicited, and the resulting Top 20 was compiled – in chronological order – on the above album, released on K-Tel in the same year on their one-off “Yuk!” subsidiary, specially printed on violent turquoise and salmon vinyl with the legend emblazoned on the bottom of the front cover: “Cringe along with us to some of the most tasteless sounds around! Pain can be fun!”
Why is this detestable? Perhaps because the record which occasioned Everett’s original remark was “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan and Dean – a brilliant record – but also of course because of the ghastly underlying premise of Music Put In The Stocks To Have Rotten Tomatoes Thrown At It. To patronise, ridicule and laugh at what were at worst misguided or incompetent records, and what were at best genuinely good records, because there’s nothing that pleases a Tory ruling culture more than laughing at what is, in many instances, the grief of the lower orders. Thus the direct leyline to Channel 4’s three-hour telethons of laughing at “bad” pop – always such compilations are assembled by middle-class Media Studies 2:1 graduates resident in SW7 or SW4 or E1 – or similar laughter gained more indirectly through “sales based” Top 50 artists, or records (and all such exercises in the latter are doomed to failure due to the implacable immobility of what we might call The Gary Glitter Question).
One can easily imagine Everett scoffing at Brian Wilson’s Smile, for instance, or maybe even Dizzee Rascal, if he’d lived that long (although he would probably simply have snorted “this isn’t MUSIC!” at the latter and retreated to his – at a wild guess – David Gray records). Everett thought humour could assuage any idiocy. “Let’s bomb Russia” at the Tory election rally in 1983 (following which debacle he was seldom to be seen on TV or heard on radio outside the Capital catchment area)? Why you fools, I was being IRONIC and SUBVERSIVE! Maggie didn’t fucking know who I was, anyway. I’m not really interested in politics, folks…but have a look at some of the stills from that performance; observe Ted Rogers and Bob Monkhouse cackling heartily at the thought of Michael Foot’s stick being kicked away.
(Observe too, incidentally, that no matter how many rancid carrots Michael Howard decides to shove under your nose – we’re now the BBC’s friend! Poor people won’t have to pay tax anymore! – that they will all magically fade under an avalanche of benign excuses in the hopefully unlikely event that the Tories win the next election; and remember, next time you’re poring through the “wisdom” of AA Gill or Minette Marrin in the Sunday Times, or even next time you happen to be walking down Old Brompton Road of a Sunday lunchtime, that THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS, THEY ARE NOT ON YOUR SIDE, THEY FUNDAMENTALLY HATE YOU AND WISH YOU NOT TO EXIST. Even the old “High Tory” squires-should-be-nice-to-their-serfs philosophy was preferable to this kind of ruthless vote-catching cynicism)
And, even though my own circumstances have changed dramatically and for the better of late, I still feel extremely touchy about the issue of death being a laughing matter. So many of the songs on the World’s Worst Record Album are about death, or bereavement, or uncertainty; and while I do not claim that every one of these 20 songs is a masterpiece, neither is any of them a catastrophic dud; at worst they are dull. At best they are quite phenomenal.
Let’s go through the tracks:
SIDE ONE
1. Jimmy Cross – I Want My Baby Back
This is one of these records which turns out to be almost great by default. Composed by the otherwise smoother-than-smooth arranger pro Perry Botkin Jr as a parody of death discs in general and “Leader Of The Pack” in particular, it inevitably makes a mockery of the genuine grief which seeps through the Shangri-Las’ otherwise artful-looking construct, dragging it down to Stan Freberg level (“Well I wasn’t about to slam on the brakes ‘cause I didn’t have none to start with”), fatal car crash included (“and over there was my baby/And over THERE was my baby/And WAY OVER THERE was my baby!”).
Yet its own inadvertent grief likewise makes itself apparent, no more so than in the song’s climax, where Cross tearfully admits that, after several months of grieving, he can’t make it without his “baby.” So he decides to make the ultimate sacrifice (sound effect of spade on gravel against howling winds: “Gee, baby, I DIG you so much.” Clank as spade hits coffin lid. “Hot dang! PAYDIRT!”). He prises open her coffin, climbs in (on top of her?) and shuts the lid again. “I’ve got my baby back!” he cheerfully warbles, muffled, as the song fades.
Note the tragedy underlying the camp – someone so bereaved, so fucked up by the premature death of his Other, that he prefers to die buried with her than to continue trying to reapproach the world. No wonder Everett’s listeners voted this “bottom” of the poll – there is great danger in voicing, or even seeming to agree with, such common thoughts, or ambitions.
2. Zarah Leander – Wunderbar
You can imagine what drew Everett to this, can’t you? Some grotesque 25-stone, 95-year-old German Hylda Baker soundalike booming her way through this interpretation of Cole Porter down the bierkeller? Let’s laugh at the silly old bat.
Except that some people are more to be pitied than laughed at, and if Everett had bothered to find out anything more about Zarah Leander, he would have uncovered a rather tragic story. For Leander, though Swedish, was infamous as the foremost diva of the Third Reich. Although not a fan of Nazism, she did not explicitly denounce it either, and, worse, seemed happy to participate in a number of morale-boosting German war films as a kind of Nuremberg equivalent to Vera Lynn – this despite an initially promising film career which had included prominent rôles in several of Douglas Sirk’s early films.
She couldn’t persist with the pretence. In 1943 Goering offered her some property in East Prussia, the Nazis already having confiscated some of her other properties and businesses. Leander politely turned down the offer and returned to Sweden where she concentrated on her business interests there. After the war, however, she was ostracised and pilloried, labelled as a Nazi collaborator, and for over a decade found it virtually impossible to work anywhere.
Eventually, in the late ‘50s, older and infinitely wiser, she endeavoured to reinvent herself as an elder stateswoman of light opera and popular song with some success; her rendition of “Wunderbar,” which is actually quite jolly in a square-bashing kind of way, dates from around this period. She died in 1981, aged 74.
3. The Legendary Stardust Cowboy – Paralysed
And this is beyond question one of the GREAT singles of the rock era; Lonnie Donegan’s 200 mph lupine howl on “Gamblin’ Man” taken to its extreme conclusion as Norman wails ecstatically (almost presaging Dylan, vocally) over his monochordal guitar, occasional bugle and a truly frightening freeform drum barrage halfway through (played apparently by the young T-Bone Burnett). Records like this provided much needed succour in the aesthetic drought of 1985. And the Cowboy continues to perform today, unrepentant about the lack of a second chord. Quite right too.
4. Pat Campbell – The Deal
As I said, not every song on this album is a classic. Some are beyond redemption by anyone’s standards. And I am loath to say much about “The Deal” as it actually did penetrate the UK Top 40 (#31 in November 1969) and is therefore going to be discussed as part of my upcoming 1969 article. Suffice to say that it’s an extremely maudlin tale about a man whose wife is about to give birth (“and I caught myself a little chuckle and thought – hey, it might be an old girl!”), but then complications set in and only one of them can live. Dejected, our hero goes off to the hospital chapel and asks God to spare both wife and child and take him instead. So He does. Mr Campbell was part of the ‘50s Irish harmony group the 4 Ramblers, together with a young Val Doonican, and at the time of this recording (and its parent album, Just A Quiet Conversation, which I am in no rush to hear) was a Radio Luxembourg DJ. He subsequently compered C&W programmes for Radio 2 from the ‘70s onwards. Pretty well irredeemable in this context, but it has a strange effect in the company of an extremely death-fixated 1969 singles chart.
5. Nervous Norvus – Transfusion
Born Jimmy Drake in 1912, he didn’t amount to a hill of beans until this inadvertently surreal 1956 hit which splices – well, let’s be honest, plonks in the middle – car-crash effects with a tale of autoerotic dissatisfaction; kind of Woody Guthrie does Wiseblood’s “Motorslug.” More of Mr Drake’s rather sad story can be found in the sleevenotes to the new Ace Records compilation The Golden Age of American Rock ‘N’ Roll: Special Novelty Edition, which also includes his follow-up “Ape Call” as well as the aforementioned “I Want My Baby Back.”
6. Jess Conrad – This Pullover
“When I’m lonely, I simply wrap it all around me/It feels like I’m holding you oh so tight.” The first of three entries from the hapless actor acting at being a teen idol (Jack Good: “You can’t sing, but you look the part” – a model for the template of British employment practices), this advances the theory of wool as sex substitute to quite a disorientating effect. To deepen the enigma, the percussion track appears to be supplied by someone being spanked.
7. Mel and Dave – Spinning Wheel
A JA cover of the Blood, Sweat and Tears tune, produced by Lee Perry in 1970. Therefore much of what occurs in this record is deliberate, including the atonal vocals, the Leon Thomas-esque melisma of Dave Barker, the vulnerability of Melanie Jonas, and that cowbell being thwacked in the foreground (cf. the lapping waves in the Congos’ “Row Fisherman Row”). As with Ornette, Perry’s music demands new ways of listening, new perspectives. It is NOT an out-of-tune crap cover version; and, as Byron Lee fans will know (Barry Biggs’ “Sideshow” – one of the eeriest and loneliest records to penetrate the UK Top 3 this side of “Johnny Remember Me” and that side of “Ghost Town”), JA reinterpretations of pop standards are some of the most unworldly sounds this world can offer.
8. Dickie Lee – Laurie
“Strange things happen in this world,” sings the Memphis-born C&W balladeer Lee. He meets the titular heroine at a party, walks her home, lends her his sweater as she is cold, kisses her goodnight. Then he doubles back to retrieve said sweater, only to be told by her distressed dad that she died a year ago today – on her birthday. “Strange forces” pull him to the graveyard, whereupon he duly discovers his sweater lying across Laurie’s grave.
Far from being naff or mawkish, this is a rather touching supernatural teen ballad, and the soprano backing vocalist suggests that Joe Meek must have given this a listen. A protagonist who wants an Other so badly that he is ready to mentally rescue her from the grave – not that far away from Jimmy Cross, really.
9. Mrs Miller – A Lover’s Concerto
Somewhere in my archives is a tape of Mrs Miller’s only album. A deluded middle-aged lady who imagined herself as a pop-opera singer, this run-through/running-over of the Toys’ Tchaikovsky bastardisation is probably no less grievous than the original running-over of poor Piotr Illych. Neither offensive nor remarkable – as I said, just deluded, and a bit of a waste of anyone’s time.
10. Ferlin Husky – The Drunken Driver
Quite a well-respected C&W veteran – aged 77, he’s still at it today – this 1954 hit was indeed peculiar in its bleakness. Another morbid tale, this time of two abandoned kids wandering on a state highway who are run down and killed by their drunken dad. The problem here is that the lyrics appear to have been composed by William McGonagall (“This awful accident occurred on the 20th day of May/And caused two dear little children to be sleeping beneath the clay”) and Husky himself sounds somewhat distressed – note the mumbled “Why, daddy” which is abruptly cut off by the producer, as if his life support system had been terminated. A confused and confusing record, and maybe not that far away from Robert Johnson.
SIDE TWO
1. Jess Conrad – Why Am I Living?
“You’re on your own in this world until you die,” muses Conrad mournfully on this obliquely upbeat, Karl Denver-ish number which could at the most elasticated of stretches be considered a forerunner to the Streets’ “Stay Positive.” Surreal, even, in that Conrad’s existential despair is echoed by the most bizarre backing vocals I can recall: “Ya-na-na-yip-yip/Ya-na-na-shang-dang/Shungalungadingbat/Klink klunk kloough” (if you think I’m kidding, go and listen to it for yourself). Such strangeness in the dilapidation of post-skiffle, pre-Beatles Britpop.
2. The Trashmen – Surfin’ Bird
And again, why exactly is this a “bad” record? A US top three smash, the template for the entire career of the B52s, brilliant nonsense in the true Little Richard/Milton Subotnick tradition, the breakdown to freeform vocal gurgling in the middle, the desperate “babababababa” human bassline…bizarre (or not) that in the midst of post-punk this could still be considered “rubbish.” Then again, as with the Labour Party, Everett probably wished that punk had never happened.
3. Steve Bent – I’m Going To Spain
Whereas this is simply a well-meaning failure. Mr Bent was a contestant on New Faces in 1974 and as a result got a recording contract with Bradley’s Records (top act: the Goodies) although doesn’t seem to have done anything beyond this one single. Written and sung by Bent himself, it describes in an ungainly fashion how he’s decided to chuck it all in and go off to Spain on the basis that “Cousin Norman had a real fine time last year.” “Cousin Norman” was a 1971 hit for the Marmalade, and that wasn’t the only postmodern reference in the song. “The factory floor presented me/With some tapes of Elton John” (cue “Rocket Man” dying guitar fall). The problem is that Bent’s vocal is ludicrously speeded up, almost to 78 rpm level; the production is drenched in long-outdated phasing; and the attempt to bridge the gap between Gilbert O’Sullivan and David Bowie falls short of its own ambition, summed up in the mordant final verse wherein his mother “Wrapped me up some sandwiches/And I hate them/Yes I hate the cheese and pickle.” Subsequently covered by the Fall on their Infotainment Scan album.
4. Duncan Johnson – The Big Architect
“He’s the big architect in the sky” sing the choir – yes, it’s yet another sermon about God, delivered in a truly nauseating “Balham – Gateway To The South” style by the then moderately well-known Radio 1 Canadian expat DJ. Note the excruciating final “verse”: - “For man was to be no robot/He was to be given a mind free to make its own decisions,” i.e. not Commie pinko nasty socialist Tony Benn who closed down all the pirate stations. Did anyone at Spark Records, or anyone else, seriously think that this record had any commercial prospects? (have you heard “Summertime” as “sung” by Tommy Vance?) Mr Johnson wisely eased out of the business soon thereafter to become an advertising executive.
5. Jess Conrad – Cherry Pie
A cover of a 1956 US hit for Skip and Flip, this ode to cunnilingus is nevertheless another bizarre Conrad side. “I didn’t put in a thumb/I didn’t pull out a plum” sobs our boy Jess. The lyrics otherwise attain a state of minimalist perfection which would have shamed Mishima.
6. Eamonn Andrews – The Shifting Whispering Sands
This song in its original version by Rusty Draper is actually one of my favourites from the pre-rock ‘50s; a spooky Western ghost story which spans two sides of a 78. A gold prospector stumbles across a deserted town (“the crazy lopsided water tanks”) with the skeletons of burros and cattle. Resting, he learns “the secret of the shifting, whispering sands.”
Unfortunately such a tale was ill-suited to the boisterous tones of Eamonn “This Is Your Life” Andrews who cheerfully makes his way through the tale of death and destruction (when he intones “heavy and oppressive” no one’s voice has ever sounded so heavy or oppressive) as though it were a GM Vauxhall Conference third-place play-off. Also, on this album we only get to hear Part 1, so the “secret” is not explained to us (Part 2 reveals that the protagonist, although having wandered for weeks in the desert and run out of food and water, nevertheless makes it back to civilisation and recounts the gruesome tale of the wandering miner and his cattle which led to this desolate landscape). Nevertheless, it still made the UK Top 20 in early 1956.
7. Tub Thumper – Kick Out The Jams
A far superior mix to the version which appeared on last year’s Velvet Tinmine compilation, this is a truly berserk record, its MC5-quoting Glam four-to-the-floor drumbeat stomp submerged by a barrage of sound-effects – cheering crowds, police sirens, machine guns, and pealing church bells. Extraordinary stuff – but who was responsible? The composer credits reveal Randall and Jarrett – surely not our Keith?
8. Adolph Babel – My Feet Keep Tapping
Actually the unfortunate Mr Babel (whose composer credit is hilariously printed on the label as “A Barbell”) was the lyricist, not the singer – the voices you hear are those of Jack and Mary Kimmel, regulars on the song-poem circuit. Yes, this was another of these send in $400 and we’ll set your lyrics, however bad, to music, as per last year’s excellent American Song-Poem Anthology (on which the Kimmels also appear in various guises). The lyrics are indeed woeful, and the foottapping seems to be being done to another, completely inaudible song altogether (“Never too soon, never too late” about two seconds before the arrhythmic tapping comes in too late). But, you know, aren’t there more pernicious things in this world to hate? Why make fun of the poor bastard?
9. Skip Jackson – The Greatest Star Of All
A tribute to Elvis by a not overly enthusiastic Antipodean C&W singer, but lyrically rather more pungent than the genuinely odious “I Remember Elvis Presley” by the Dutchman Danny Mirror, a #4 UK hit in October 1977. “Just one more great record to make it all complete…” but the song has the honesty to admit that that never happened.
10. Raphael – Going Out Of My Head
The song of course is so strong you’d have to be a real lunkhead to fuck it up. But, once more, you can see exactly what dim bulbs went off in Everett’s head – “oh it’s a funny Spaniard trying to sing OUR music!” No it’s not – Raphael, or Rafael Martos to give him his real name, is Madrid’s own Cliff Richard/Johnny Hallyday, with a career virtually as long. Indeed, my mum still has a copy of the Live At The Talk Of The Town album (United Artists, 1970) from which this performance is extracted, and which I wholly recommend if you can find it. Well, OK, the vibrato is slightly over-modulated, but his confused voice actually captures the song’s inherent desperation/addiction pretty accurately, and when he switches to Spanish for the song’s second half, the power is fairly astonishing.
Have I made a good record out of a “bad” one? I hope so. Anything to get out of the continuing slavery to the Bloody Canon, with undiluted and agonisingly heartfelt laughter at anyone who dares not to fit in with it. If Everett really wanted to assemble a proper World’s Worst Record Album, here is a suggested alternative 20.
1. Hughie Green – Stand Up And Be Counted
This actually just missed the cut for Everett’s Top 20, but it is unquestionably the worst and most evil single ever released, unless you know of some obscure 78 recordings of the Horst Wessel Song Live At The Beer Hall Putsch. If anyone truly wants to know what the ‘70s were like in Britain, then all they have to do is track down and watch Peter Dickinson’s still excoriating (made for children!) serial The Changes, and then watch Hughie Green, on Opportunity Knocks in December 1976 – recorded in the same studios in the same week as the Pistols on Grundy – complete with full orchestra and full complement of Army, Navy and RAF troops, delivering his stern sermon against socialism and European integration with no irony whatsoever. Amazingly, Philips Records picked up on this and released it as a single. One supposes that we should be grateful that it was never a hit. Its finale was subsequently sampled for the intro to Genesis P-Orridge and Richard Norris’ Jack The Tab compilation (King Tubby’s “Psyche Out”) – “For God’s sake, Britain – WAKE UP!” – the cry of the reactionary finally turned into subversion.
2. Sex Pistols – Anarchy In The UK
Not that this, “Stand Up And Be Counted”’s polar opposite, was appreciably better as a record. The song is taken far too slowly, plods where it should be exploding, and the Brian May/Chris Spedding/whoever-played-them guitar solos provide a more tangible link to 1975 than anything punk would subsequently deny.
3. John Lennon – Imagine
Of course you can take it to mean whatever you want to mean. Which is how Errol Brown could sing “Imagine no possessions” at the 1987 Tory election rally and NOT GET THE COMMUNISM IN SUGAR COATING provided for us by the secretly Tory-voting ex-Beatle.
4. Stone Roses – She Bangs The Drums
They. Were. Not. That. Great. 7 out of 10 in the NME was generous.
5. Missy Elliott – Pass The Dutch
I couldn’t resist.
6. Queen – Radio Ga Ga
But it’s an ATTACK on capitalism, it’s IRONY. Why else do you think they played Sun City at the same time?
7. Duran Duran – Is There Something I Should Know
Number one: how DID they end up the “good guys”? Number two: Simon LePaunch putting his hand on his right hip and wagging his left little finger whilst attempting to sashay backwards while singing the line “You’re about as easy as a NUCLEAR WAR” on the Oxford Road Show, introduced by a breathless Peter Powell (“Classic new Durannie track…” ad absurdum turdum).
8. Robbie Williams – Let Me Entertain You
Because he pretends, unentertainingly. If he could just own up to being an unashamed capitalist like Tom Jones, it wouldn’t make me like his records more, but it might just help me understand them a little better.
9. The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony
“You’re a slave to money/Then you di-hie.” A more protracted and pompous summation of what Jess Conrad did far more quickly and tidily on “Why Am I Living?” And yet, you know, in those first three or four singles they really did have something – we saw them opening up for (and demolishing) Chapterhouse at the Town and Country Club in early 1992, and you could almost “believe” in them.
10. Simply Red – We’re In This Together
Pompous even by latter-day Pimply Dead standards, the FA adopted this as the official 1996 World Cup anthem. The unofficial one – “Three Lions” – proved somewhat more popular, not to say twenty trillion times more hummable.
11. Beatles – Ballad Of John And Yoko
I mean, like we care how bad your lives are, that you’re down to your last £50,000 (exactly how much would that have been by 1969 standards?), that you had to go to rehab and are arguing with your managers? Is that what pop is about?
12. Cliff Richard – The Millennium Prayer
Well, I mean, could you have resisted? As grotesque a folly as Jimmy Corkhill’s Millennium Arch Y’Know Like.
13. Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello – God Give Me Strength
Possibly the worst song Bacharach has ever helped write, “Heartlight” included. EC’s endless labyrinthine clauses paired with his never-more-strained/never-less-bearable voice ruin whatever meagre hope this song might once have promised.
14. Judge Dread – Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus
Jane and Serge, oh yes. Brian Molko on the new Trash Palace album, even, yes. But Judge Dread? He cops off with “a fan.” Who when undressing herself turns out to be a bloke. Hur hur fucking hurrrrrrgh. Makes one wonder whether Pitman isn’t really just a Judge Dread for the noughties. Listen, I’ve sat through Judge Dread’s Greatest Hits. You haven’t missed anything. Really you haven’t.
15. Jim Davidson – White Christmas
Guess which of his many famous comedy accents he uses for this rendition of the old seasonal chestnut? 1980, by the way - #52 in the charts. So SOMEBODY was buying this (remembering of course that 1980 really was just the hangover from the crappy 1970s).
16. Deacon Blue – Dignity
The only good thing about the band formerly known as Chewy Raccoon was the spoof on them performed in an episode of Rab C Nesbitt, wherein they were depicted as stuck-up rich bastards. And I do believe that our Rab sunk their boat.
17. Strawbs – Part Of The Union
Because they MEANT it. Because they really are Tory Conference-soundtracking fuckwits.
18. Primal Scream featuring Kate Moss – Some Velvet Morning
“Why, Daddy? Wh…?”
19. Cast – Alright
FUCKING SWINGING BLUE JEANS, THE! FUCKING FRANK ROGERS AND THE SCOTTY DOGS! FUCKING ARRAY IT’S GERRY MARSDEN AND THEM TWO BLOKES OUT THE SWINGING BLUE JEANS LIKE! FUCKING TWO POINTS IF YOU SAID IT WAS OPEN BRACKETS COMMA CLOSE BRACKETS YOU SEE DIGNIFIED DON GRAHAM ARCHIVE! FUCKING GRINNING LIKE RAT-STARVED EAGER BEAVER SEA SCOUTS! FUCKING FEED THEM THROUGH THE GRINDERSWITCH AND CRUSH THEIR BERATED BONES TO BLACKBERRY BUSHES IN BASINGSTOKE! FUCKING OATH OF LOYALTY TATTER IT UP IN THE SMOULDERING REMNANTS OF RICHARD DESMOND’S FUCKING RISER!
20. Peter Andre – Mysterious Girl
Something about those who are ignorant of history being doomed to repeat its mistakes...
“I don’t like Labour because they want to bring everyone down to their level instead of raising everyone to the level of the beautiful people. It takes a businessman to run this country.”
(Kenny Everett, Daily Mail interview, August 1974)
“There really were some stinking fucking records made in the ‘60s, weren’t there?”
(Kenny Everett to his Capital Radio producer, circa 1977)
The latter remark apparently prompted Everett’s producer to suggest doing a whole programme of this nature – inviting listeners to send in especially bad records, which Everett would then play. The World’s Worst Record Show ended up running for three years. In 1978 a listeners’ poll of the “Bottom 30” records ever made was solicited, and the resulting Top 20 was compiled – in chronological order – on the above album, released on K-Tel in the same year on their one-off “Yuk!” subsidiary, specially printed on violent turquoise and salmon vinyl with the legend emblazoned on the bottom of the front cover: “Cringe along with us to some of the most tasteless sounds around! Pain can be fun!”
Why is this detestable? Perhaps because the record which occasioned Everett’s original remark was “Dead Man’s Curve” by Jan and Dean – a brilliant record – but also of course because of the ghastly underlying premise of Music Put In The Stocks To Have Rotten Tomatoes Thrown At It. To patronise, ridicule and laugh at what were at worst misguided or incompetent records, and what were at best genuinely good records, because there’s nothing that pleases a Tory ruling culture more than laughing at what is, in many instances, the grief of the lower orders. Thus the direct leyline to Channel 4’s three-hour telethons of laughing at “bad” pop – always such compilations are assembled by middle-class Media Studies 2:1 graduates resident in SW7 or SW4 or E1 – or similar laughter gained more indirectly through “sales based” Top 50 artists, or records (and all such exercises in the latter are doomed to failure due to the implacable immobility of what we might call The Gary Glitter Question).
One can easily imagine Everett scoffing at Brian Wilson’s Smile, for instance, or maybe even Dizzee Rascal, if he’d lived that long (although he would probably simply have snorted “this isn’t MUSIC!” at the latter and retreated to his – at a wild guess – David Gray records). Everett thought humour could assuage any idiocy. “Let’s bomb Russia” at the Tory election rally in 1983 (following which debacle he was seldom to be seen on TV or heard on radio outside the Capital catchment area)? Why you fools, I was being IRONIC and SUBVERSIVE! Maggie didn’t fucking know who I was, anyway. I’m not really interested in politics, folks…but have a look at some of the stills from that performance; observe Ted Rogers and Bob Monkhouse cackling heartily at the thought of Michael Foot’s stick being kicked away.
(Observe too, incidentally, that no matter how many rancid carrots Michael Howard decides to shove under your nose – we’re now the BBC’s friend! Poor people won’t have to pay tax anymore! – that they will all magically fade under an avalanche of benign excuses in the hopefully unlikely event that the Tories win the next election; and remember, next time you’re poring through the “wisdom” of AA Gill or Minette Marrin in the Sunday Times, or even next time you happen to be walking down Old Brompton Road of a Sunday lunchtime, that THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS, THEY ARE NOT ON YOUR SIDE, THEY FUNDAMENTALLY HATE YOU AND WISH YOU NOT TO EXIST. Even the old “High Tory” squires-should-be-nice-to-their-serfs philosophy was preferable to this kind of ruthless vote-catching cynicism)
And, even though my own circumstances have changed dramatically and for the better of late, I still feel extremely touchy about the issue of death being a laughing matter. So many of the songs on the World’s Worst Record Album are about death, or bereavement, or uncertainty; and while I do not claim that every one of these 20 songs is a masterpiece, neither is any of them a catastrophic dud; at worst they are dull. At best they are quite phenomenal.
Let’s go through the tracks:
SIDE ONE
1. Jimmy Cross – I Want My Baby Back
This is one of these records which turns out to be almost great by default. Composed by the otherwise smoother-than-smooth arranger pro Perry Botkin Jr as a parody of death discs in general and “Leader Of The Pack” in particular, it inevitably makes a mockery of the genuine grief which seeps through the Shangri-Las’ otherwise artful-looking construct, dragging it down to Stan Freberg level (“Well I wasn’t about to slam on the brakes ‘cause I didn’t have none to start with”), fatal car crash included (“and over there was my baby/And over THERE was my baby/And WAY OVER THERE was my baby!”).
Yet its own inadvertent grief likewise makes itself apparent, no more so than in the song’s climax, where Cross tearfully admits that, after several months of grieving, he can’t make it without his “baby.” So he decides to make the ultimate sacrifice (sound effect of spade on gravel against howling winds: “Gee, baby, I DIG you so much.” Clank as spade hits coffin lid. “Hot dang! PAYDIRT!”). He prises open her coffin, climbs in (on top of her?) and shuts the lid again. “I’ve got my baby back!” he cheerfully warbles, muffled, as the song fades.
Note the tragedy underlying the camp – someone so bereaved, so fucked up by the premature death of his Other, that he prefers to die buried with her than to continue trying to reapproach the world. No wonder Everett’s listeners voted this “bottom” of the poll – there is great danger in voicing, or even seeming to agree with, such common thoughts, or ambitions.
2. Zarah Leander – Wunderbar
You can imagine what drew Everett to this, can’t you? Some grotesque 25-stone, 95-year-old German Hylda Baker soundalike booming her way through this interpretation of Cole Porter down the bierkeller? Let’s laugh at the silly old bat.
Except that some people are more to be pitied than laughed at, and if Everett had bothered to find out anything more about Zarah Leander, he would have uncovered a rather tragic story. For Leander, though Swedish, was infamous as the foremost diva of the Third Reich. Although not a fan of Nazism, she did not explicitly denounce it either, and, worse, seemed happy to participate in a number of morale-boosting German war films as a kind of Nuremberg equivalent to Vera Lynn – this despite an initially promising film career which had included prominent rôles in several of Douglas Sirk’s early films.
She couldn’t persist with the pretence. In 1943 Goering offered her some property in East Prussia, the Nazis already having confiscated some of her other properties and businesses. Leander politely turned down the offer and returned to Sweden where she concentrated on her business interests there. After the war, however, she was ostracised and pilloried, labelled as a Nazi collaborator, and for over a decade found it virtually impossible to work anywhere.
Eventually, in the late ‘50s, older and infinitely wiser, she endeavoured to reinvent herself as an elder stateswoman of light opera and popular song with some success; her rendition of “Wunderbar,” which is actually quite jolly in a square-bashing kind of way, dates from around this period. She died in 1981, aged 74.
3. The Legendary Stardust Cowboy – Paralysed
And this is beyond question one of the GREAT singles of the rock era; Lonnie Donegan’s 200 mph lupine howl on “Gamblin’ Man” taken to its extreme conclusion as Norman wails ecstatically (almost presaging Dylan, vocally) over his monochordal guitar, occasional bugle and a truly frightening freeform drum barrage halfway through (played apparently by the young T-Bone Burnett). Records like this provided much needed succour in the aesthetic drought of 1985. And the Cowboy continues to perform today, unrepentant about the lack of a second chord. Quite right too.
4. Pat Campbell – The Deal
As I said, not every song on this album is a classic. Some are beyond redemption by anyone’s standards. And I am loath to say much about “The Deal” as it actually did penetrate the UK Top 40 (#31 in November 1969) and is therefore going to be discussed as part of my upcoming 1969 article. Suffice to say that it’s an extremely maudlin tale about a man whose wife is about to give birth (“and I caught myself a little chuckle and thought – hey, it might be an old girl!”), but then complications set in and only one of them can live. Dejected, our hero goes off to the hospital chapel and asks God to spare both wife and child and take him instead. So He does. Mr Campbell was part of the ‘50s Irish harmony group the 4 Ramblers, together with a young Val Doonican, and at the time of this recording (and its parent album, Just A Quiet Conversation, which I am in no rush to hear) was a Radio Luxembourg DJ. He subsequently compered C&W programmes for Radio 2 from the ‘70s onwards. Pretty well irredeemable in this context, but it has a strange effect in the company of an extremely death-fixated 1969 singles chart.
5. Nervous Norvus – Transfusion
Born Jimmy Drake in 1912, he didn’t amount to a hill of beans until this inadvertently surreal 1956 hit which splices – well, let’s be honest, plonks in the middle – car-crash effects with a tale of autoerotic dissatisfaction; kind of Woody Guthrie does Wiseblood’s “Motorslug.” More of Mr Drake’s rather sad story can be found in the sleevenotes to the new Ace Records compilation The Golden Age of American Rock ‘N’ Roll: Special Novelty Edition, which also includes his follow-up “Ape Call” as well as the aforementioned “I Want My Baby Back.”
6. Jess Conrad – This Pullover
“When I’m lonely, I simply wrap it all around me/It feels like I’m holding you oh so tight.” The first of three entries from the hapless actor acting at being a teen idol (Jack Good: “You can’t sing, but you look the part” – a model for the template of British employment practices), this advances the theory of wool as sex substitute to quite a disorientating effect. To deepen the enigma, the percussion track appears to be supplied by someone being spanked.
7. Mel and Dave – Spinning Wheel
A JA cover of the Blood, Sweat and Tears tune, produced by Lee Perry in 1970. Therefore much of what occurs in this record is deliberate, including the atonal vocals, the Leon Thomas-esque melisma of Dave Barker, the vulnerability of Melanie Jonas, and that cowbell being thwacked in the foreground (cf. the lapping waves in the Congos’ “Row Fisherman Row”). As with Ornette, Perry’s music demands new ways of listening, new perspectives. It is NOT an out-of-tune crap cover version; and, as Byron Lee fans will know (Barry Biggs’ “Sideshow” – one of the eeriest and loneliest records to penetrate the UK Top 3 this side of “Johnny Remember Me” and that side of “Ghost Town”), JA reinterpretations of pop standards are some of the most unworldly sounds this world can offer.
8. Dickie Lee – Laurie
“Strange things happen in this world,” sings the Memphis-born C&W balladeer Lee. He meets the titular heroine at a party, walks her home, lends her his sweater as she is cold, kisses her goodnight. Then he doubles back to retrieve said sweater, only to be told by her distressed dad that she died a year ago today – on her birthday. “Strange forces” pull him to the graveyard, whereupon he duly discovers his sweater lying across Laurie’s grave.
Far from being naff or mawkish, this is a rather touching supernatural teen ballad, and the soprano backing vocalist suggests that Joe Meek must have given this a listen. A protagonist who wants an Other so badly that he is ready to mentally rescue her from the grave – not that far away from Jimmy Cross, really.
9. Mrs Miller – A Lover’s Concerto
Somewhere in my archives is a tape of Mrs Miller’s only album. A deluded middle-aged lady who imagined herself as a pop-opera singer, this run-through/running-over of the Toys’ Tchaikovsky bastardisation is probably no less grievous than the original running-over of poor Piotr Illych. Neither offensive nor remarkable – as I said, just deluded, and a bit of a waste of anyone’s time.
10. Ferlin Husky – The Drunken Driver
Quite a well-respected C&W veteran – aged 77, he’s still at it today – this 1954 hit was indeed peculiar in its bleakness. Another morbid tale, this time of two abandoned kids wandering on a state highway who are run down and killed by their drunken dad. The problem here is that the lyrics appear to have been composed by William McGonagall (“This awful accident occurred on the 20th day of May/And caused two dear little children to be sleeping beneath the clay”) and Husky himself sounds somewhat distressed – note the mumbled “Why, daddy” which is abruptly cut off by the producer, as if his life support system had been terminated. A confused and confusing record, and maybe not that far away from Robert Johnson.
SIDE TWO
1. Jess Conrad – Why Am I Living?
“You’re on your own in this world until you die,” muses Conrad mournfully on this obliquely upbeat, Karl Denver-ish number which could at the most elasticated of stretches be considered a forerunner to the Streets’ “Stay Positive.” Surreal, even, in that Conrad’s existential despair is echoed by the most bizarre backing vocals I can recall: “Ya-na-na-yip-yip/Ya-na-na-shang-dang/Shungalungadingbat/Klink klunk kloough” (if you think I’m kidding, go and listen to it for yourself). Such strangeness in the dilapidation of post-skiffle, pre-Beatles Britpop.
2. The Trashmen – Surfin’ Bird
And again, why exactly is this a “bad” record? A US top three smash, the template for the entire career of the B52s, brilliant nonsense in the true Little Richard/Milton Subotnick tradition, the breakdown to freeform vocal gurgling in the middle, the desperate “babababababa” human bassline…bizarre (or not) that in the midst of post-punk this could still be considered “rubbish.” Then again, as with the Labour Party, Everett probably wished that punk had never happened.
3. Steve Bent – I’m Going To Spain
Whereas this is simply a well-meaning failure. Mr Bent was a contestant on New Faces in 1974 and as a result got a recording contract with Bradley’s Records (top act: the Goodies) although doesn’t seem to have done anything beyond this one single. Written and sung by Bent himself, it describes in an ungainly fashion how he’s decided to chuck it all in and go off to Spain on the basis that “Cousin Norman had a real fine time last year.” “Cousin Norman” was a 1971 hit for the Marmalade, and that wasn’t the only postmodern reference in the song. “The factory floor presented me/With some tapes of Elton John” (cue “Rocket Man” dying guitar fall). The problem is that Bent’s vocal is ludicrously speeded up, almost to 78 rpm level; the production is drenched in long-outdated phasing; and the attempt to bridge the gap between Gilbert O’Sullivan and David Bowie falls short of its own ambition, summed up in the mordant final verse wherein his mother “Wrapped me up some sandwiches/And I hate them/Yes I hate the cheese and pickle.” Subsequently covered by the Fall on their Infotainment Scan album.
4. Duncan Johnson – The Big Architect
“He’s the big architect in the sky” sing the choir – yes, it’s yet another sermon about God, delivered in a truly nauseating “Balham – Gateway To The South” style by the then moderately well-known Radio 1 Canadian expat DJ. Note the excruciating final “verse”: - “For man was to be no robot/He was to be given a mind free to make its own decisions,” i.e. not Commie pinko nasty socialist Tony Benn who closed down all the pirate stations. Did anyone at Spark Records, or anyone else, seriously think that this record had any commercial prospects? (have you heard “Summertime” as “sung” by Tommy Vance?) Mr Johnson wisely eased out of the business soon thereafter to become an advertising executive.
5. Jess Conrad – Cherry Pie
A cover of a 1956 US hit for Skip and Flip, this ode to cunnilingus is nevertheless another bizarre Conrad side. “I didn’t put in a thumb/I didn’t pull out a plum” sobs our boy Jess. The lyrics otherwise attain a state of minimalist perfection which would have shamed Mishima.
6. Eamonn Andrews – The Shifting Whispering Sands
This song in its original version by Rusty Draper is actually one of my favourites from the pre-rock ‘50s; a spooky Western ghost story which spans two sides of a 78. A gold prospector stumbles across a deserted town (“the crazy lopsided water tanks”) with the skeletons of burros and cattle. Resting, he learns “the secret of the shifting, whispering sands.”
Unfortunately such a tale was ill-suited to the boisterous tones of Eamonn “This Is Your Life” Andrews who cheerfully makes his way through the tale of death and destruction (when he intones “heavy and oppressive” no one’s voice has ever sounded so heavy or oppressive) as though it were a GM Vauxhall Conference third-place play-off. Also, on this album we only get to hear Part 1, so the “secret” is not explained to us (Part 2 reveals that the protagonist, although having wandered for weeks in the desert and run out of food and water, nevertheless makes it back to civilisation and recounts the gruesome tale of the wandering miner and his cattle which led to this desolate landscape). Nevertheless, it still made the UK Top 20 in early 1956.
7. Tub Thumper – Kick Out The Jams
A far superior mix to the version which appeared on last year’s Velvet Tinmine compilation, this is a truly berserk record, its MC5-quoting Glam four-to-the-floor drumbeat stomp submerged by a barrage of sound-effects – cheering crowds, police sirens, machine guns, and pealing church bells. Extraordinary stuff – but who was responsible? The composer credits reveal Randall and Jarrett – surely not our Keith?
8. Adolph Babel – My Feet Keep Tapping
Actually the unfortunate Mr Babel (whose composer credit is hilariously printed on the label as “A Barbell”) was the lyricist, not the singer – the voices you hear are those of Jack and Mary Kimmel, regulars on the song-poem circuit. Yes, this was another of these send in $400 and we’ll set your lyrics, however bad, to music, as per last year’s excellent American Song-Poem Anthology (on which the Kimmels also appear in various guises). The lyrics are indeed woeful, and the foottapping seems to be being done to another, completely inaudible song altogether (“Never too soon, never too late” about two seconds before the arrhythmic tapping comes in too late). But, you know, aren’t there more pernicious things in this world to hate? Why make fun of the poor bastard?
9. Skip Jackson – The Greatest Star Of All
A tribute to Elvis by a not overly enthusiastic Antipodean C&W singer, but lyrically rather more pungent than the genuinely odious “I Remember Elvis Presley” by the Dutchman Danny Mirror, a #4 UK hit in October 1977. “Just one more great record to make it all complete…” but the song has the honesty to admit that that never happened.
10. Raphael – Going Out Of My Head
The song of course is so strong you’d have to be a real lunkhead to fuck it up. But, once more, you can see exactly what dim bulbs went off in Everett’s head – “oh it’s a funny Spaniard trying to sing OUR music!” No it’s not – Raphael, or Rafael Martos to give him his real name, is Madrid’s own Cliff Richard/Johnny Hallyday, with a career virtually as long. Indeed, my mum still has a copy of the Live At The Talk Of The Town album (United Artists, 1970) from which this performance is extracted, and which I wholly recommend if you can find it. Well, OK, the vibrato is slightly over-modulated, but his confused voice actually captures the song’s inherent desperation/addiction pretty accurately, and when he switches to Spanish for the song’s second half, the power is fairly astonishing.
Have I made a good record out of a “bad” one? I hope so. Anything to get out of the continuing slavery to the Bloody Canon, with undiluted and agonisingly heartfelt laughter at anyone who dares not to fit in with it. If Everett really wanted to assemble a proper World’s Worst Record Album, here is a suggested alternative 20.
1. Hughie Green – Stand Up And Be Counted
This actually just missed the cut for Everett’s Top 20, but it is unquestionably the worst and most evil single ever released, unless you know of some obscure 78 recordings of the Horst Wessel Song Live At The Beer Hall Putsch. If anyone truly wants to know what the ‘70s were like in Britain, then all they have to do is track down and watch Peter Dickinson’s still excoriating (made for children!) serial The Changes, and then watch Hughie Green, on Opportunity Knocks in December 1976 – recorded in the same studios in the same week as the Pistols on Grundy – complete with full orchestra and full complement of Army, Navy and RAF troops, delivering his stern sermon against socialism and European integration with no irony whatsoever. Amazingly, Philips Records picked up on this and released it as a single. One supposes that we should be grateful that it was never a hit. Its finale was subsequently sampled for the intro to Genesis P-Orridge and Richard Norris’ Jack The Tab compilation (King Tubby’s “Psyche Out”) – “For God’s sake, Britain – WAKE UP!” – the cry of the reactionary finally turned into subversion.
2. Sex Pistols – Anarchy In The UK
Not that this, “Stand Up And Be Counted”’s polar opposite, was appreciably better as a record. The song is taken far too slowly, plods where it should be exploding, and the Brian May/Chris Spedding/whoever-played-them guitar solos provide a more tangible link to 1975 than anything punk would subsequently deny.
3. John Lennon – Imagine
Of course you can take it to mean whatever you want to mean. Which is how Errol Brown could sing “Imagine no possessions” at the 1987 Tory election rally and NOT GET THE COMMUNISM IN SUGAR COATING provided for us by the secretly Tory-voting ex-Beatle.
4. Stone Roses – She Bangs The Drums
They. Were. Not. That. Great. 7 out of 10 in the NME was generous.
5. Missy Elliott – Pass The Dutch
I couldn’t resist.
6. Queen – Radio Ga Ga
But it’s an ATTACK on capitalism, it’s IRONY. Why else do you think they played Sun City at the same time?
7. Duran Duran – Is There Something I Should Know
Number one: how DID they end up the “good guys”? Number two: Simon LePaunch putting his hand on his right hip and wagging his left little finger whilst attempting to sashay backwards while singing the line “You’re about as easy as a NUCLEAR WAR” on the Oxford Road Show, introduced by a breathless Peter Powell (“Classic new Durannie track…” ad absurdum turdum).
8. Robbie Williams – Let Me Entertain You
Because he pretends, unentertainingly. If he could just own up to being an unashamed capitalist like Tom Jones, it wouldn’t make me like his records more, but it might just help me understand them a little better.
9. The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony
“You’re a slave to money/Then you di-hie.” A more protracted and pompous summation of what Jess Conrad did far more quickly and tidily on “Why Am I Living?” And yet, you know, in those first three or four singles they really did have something – we saw them opening up for (and demolishing) Chapterhouse at the Town and Country Club in early 1992, and you could almost “believe” in them.
10. Simply Red – We’re In This Together
Pompous even by latter-day Pimply Dead standards, the FA adopted this as the official 1996 World Cup anthem. The unofficial one – “Three Lions” – proved somewhat more popular, not to say twenty trillion times more hummable.
11. Beatles – Ballad Of John And Yoko
I mean, like we care how bad your lives are, that you’re down to your last £50,000 (exactly how much would that have been by 1969 standards?), that you had to go to rehab and are arguing with your managers? Is that what pop is about?
12. Cliff Richard – The Millennium Prayer
Well, I mean, could you have resisted? As grotesque a folly as Jimmy Corkhill’s Millennium Arch Y’Know Like.
13. Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello – God Give Me Strength
Possibly the worst song Bacharach has ever helped write, “Heartlight” included. EC’s endless labyrinthine clauses paired with his never-more-strained/never-less-bearable voice ruin whatever meagre hope this song might once have promised.
14. Judge Dread – Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus
Jane and Serge, oh yes. Brian Molko on the new Trash Palace album, even, yes. But Judge Dread? He cops off with “a fan.” Who when undressing herself turns out to be a bloke. Hur hur fucking hurrrrrrgh. Makes one wonder whether Pitman isn’t really just a Judge Dread for the noughties. Listen, I’ve sat through Judge Dread’s Greatest Hits. You haven’t missed anything. Really you haven’t.
15. Jim Davidson – White Christmas
Guess which of his many famous comedy accents he uses for this rendition of the old seasonal chestnut? 1980, by the way - #52 in the charts. So SOMEBODY was buying this (remembering of course that 1980 really was just the hangover from the crappy 1970s).
16. Deacon Blue – Dignity
The only good thing about the band formerly known as Chewy Raccoon was the spoof on them performed in an episode of Rab C Nesbitt, wherein they were depicted as stuck-up rich bastards. And I do believe that our Rab sunk their boat.
17. Strawbs – Part Of The Union
Because they MEANT it. Because they really are Tory Conference-soundtracking fuckwits.
18. Primal Scream featuring Kate Moss – Some Velvet Morning
“Why, Daddy? Wh…?”
19. Cast – Alright
FUCKING SWINGING BLUE JEANS, THE! FUCKING FRANK ROGERS AND THE SCOTTY DOGS! FUCKING ARRAY IT’S GERRY MARSDEN AND THEM TWO BLOKES OUT THE SWINGING BLUE JEANS LIKE! FUCKING TWO POINTS IF YOU SAID IT WAS OPEN BRACKETS COMMA CLOSE BRACKETS YOU SEE DIGNIFIED DON GRAHAM ARCHIVE! FUCKING GRINNING LIKE RAT-STARVED EAGER BEAVER SEA SCOUTS! FUCKING FEED THEM THROUGH THE GRINDERSWITCH AND CRUSH THEIR BERATED BONES TO BLACKBERRY BUSHES IN BASINGSTOKE! FUCKING OATH OF LOYALTY TATTER IT UP IN THE SMOULDERING REMNANTS OF RICHARD DESMOND’S FUCKING RISER!
20. Peter Andre – Mysterious Girl
Something about those who are ignorant of history being doomed to repeat its mistakes...
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
DOGVILLE
great
small
?
There may not be that much time left, so it’s imperative to get everything in order, some kind of order, whatever order, however ordered. Orders are orders after all, as both Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers knew. On any stage it’s vital to know exactly where one stands.
So I have watched the 178 minutes of Dogville and thought about it for considerably more minutes. At this moment I think it to be the greatest achievement in cinema, as well as the film which may ultimately destroy cinema, or at least leave its rubble behind for others to reconstruct.
The reasons for this can be itemised and sectioned as follows:
Dogville plays like the first film ever made. The significance of calling father and son Thomas Edison cannot be overstated – the film feels as though the real Thomas Edison had proceeded to beat the Lumiere brothers to inventing the art, or at least the show, of the moving picture. Thus the entire film is played on the extended stage, lit alternatively by stark black or starker white light, with houses only suggested by chalk marks and offstage sound effects of doors opening, keys turning and dogs barking. We, as an audience (as opposed to an extended Wyndham Lewis first person), are invited into the darkness and encouraged to make our own way towards visualising the reality which Lars von Trier is attempting to communicate to us. It’s exactly as if a travelling group of Victorian actors have quickly knocked up a make-do-and-mend stage on which this entertainment will be enacted, as if no one quite knows yet how to make a film (think of Miles’ instructions to John McLaughlin while recording In A Silent Way – “Play like you don’t know how to play the guitar”). It recreates the electric excitement which must have flowed through the veins of everyone alive and active at the dawn of cinema. The rules haven’t been set down yet.
This can also be interpreted as starting again – although if you stay for the closing credits (and to understand this film, you must) you will discover precisely why von Trier’s stage is so deliberately empty.
Because what are we visualising in this portrait of what we take to be a small Depression-era Rocky Mountain community? Do we still instinctively imagine the warm, cosy Waltons template?
It is a tribute to von Trier’s maturing as a filmmaker that we soon forget that we are looking at a bare-ish, chalk-marked stage.
Yet it is also important to remember that this is not merely filmed theatre. The zoom-ins and camera dips – particularly whenever Nicole Kidman’s Grace reacts to yet another insult or humiliation – could not have been achieved by stage means alone. Though distantly influenced by Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle – stretch a point for Grace as Azdak, the shyster who ends up the judge – and perhaps indirectly by some of Peter Brook’s enterprises, by the film’s end – maybe the most apocalyptic end of any film – you are sorely and starkly reminded that this is, and can only ever be, a work of the cinema.
Dogville is a parable about the tragedy of socialism. Grace is sent to test the proportion of selflessness to arrogance of the inhabitants of the village (in his last act of humanity, Tom Edison Jr. whimpers at the Mission House gathering: “I asked you to forgive her, and all you have done is defend yourselves” – just as the nuclear snow begins to fall) or their proportion of humanity to self-defence. She offers herself at the service of the village as “payment” for their protection of her, as she is on the run from gangsters. As their enclosed world is repeatedly intruded upon by the same bumbling sheriff quietly disclosing more information about her, their “community” is inevitably ruptured by capitalistic self-protection. Quite apart from having nothing for her to do when she first arrives, they soon impose more work duties upon her, and more hostilely. Apart from a brief and blissful initial spell where the community miraculously works together and coalesces – acting as a unit – the citizens soon realise that the worker will do any work, is willing to work longer for less pay, and start to patronise her before slowly destroying her. After all, she is a captive in a buyer’s market – they are buying her services, and she is in no position to negotiate terms and conditions, as she can be shopped to the police at any time (for the gangsters from whom she is fleeing have circulated stories about her being responsible for a series of bank robberies). Thus is she imprisoned in the capitalist machine, more or less from the 4th of July (dependence day!), and once imprisoned she is free to be humiliated, bartered with, regularly raped and treated worse than Moses, the dog in sound and chalk only.
Nor can she expect to keep any of the consumerist trinkets which the community decides she is allowed to have – she can buy the seven figurines (the seven deadly sins) but they can be taken away from her and destroyed at the slightest excuse. When the three women visit her to demolish her figurines it is as if the bailiffs have paid a visit; shift ever so slightly out of synch with what we demand from you, and we’ll take everything away from you.
For why is she imprisoned? Because she is running away from the community’s concept of original sin – note the crucial importance of the apple throughout the film; as her escape is faked, she is filmed through the transparent tarpaulin of the truck, lying surrounded by apples – it is as if she is already in her coffin, the maggots in the apples about to break out and eat her. She has committed an unspecified crime and therefore cannot be fully allowed to restart as a new and more human being – the town can’t really afford it (there is repeated talk of “financial perspective” and “business perspective” as pretexts for not letting her go).
So the citizens feel it is nothing other than their due bargain to obtain sexual relief from her, against her will. Ironically it is her fellow city-deserter Chuck who is the first to violate her – frightened by the mirror of his previous life which he sees in her, he has to deny her choice or independence, insists that harvesting is indivisible from carnality.
So she can effectively be brutally raped in broad daylight (the houses only being imagined) while the rest of the town blithely and blindly goes about its business.
Or it may be that Grace is the manifestation of what we demand from a film star. In this scenario, the townfolk are merely the audience, exercising their whims, wanting her to suffer, insisting that she be subjected to the most utter humiliation, sexual or otherwise. We imagine how everyone in the town would fuck her and beat her, and our darkest dreams are made manifest. Suffer just like Mildred Pierce did! Or like Judy did!
On that Judy aside, note the comment early on in the film, when things are still going well, and she is described as variously bringing heart, sight, brains, etc., to various of the citizens. Thus the Good Witch ends up being indistinguishable from the Wicked Witch, at least in wicked eyes. And is Moses indistinguishable from Toto?
Because either way I, as a spectator, am being asked how I want to acknowledge and perceive an actress on the screen; thus do I become an active participant in the film.
Does Dogville offer the least sentimental view of children in cinema? What does young Jason want other than to get off on Grace putting him over her knee and spanking him, knowing that he has the power, by virtue of his youth, to aid in her destruction? Of course he wants Grace to fuck him, and this Lolita in reverse is quite astounding when one considers the usual polite burial of puberty onset sexuality presented to us in cinema – consider, for instance, the unspoken stimulation that Jamie Bell’s Billy Elliot and Julie Walters’ dance teacher are giving each other; that whole “I Love To Boogie” routine is virtually a rehearsal in foreplay, reminding us that 14-year-old boys are usually more interested in losing their virginity to their teachers than to their classmates.
But Dogville also offers the most brutal and unforgiving view of children, in view of what ultimately happens to all the children in the film.
Of which, more later.
Dogville is a parable about the tragedy of fascism. Because Grace covets these figurines – the same figurines, we are told, at which she would have laughed just a few weeks earlier. So she is hardly free of capitalist desires. Although these may simply be acquired as a means of identity, as evidence that there is some bond, however untenable, between her and the community. Faced with this level of disruption, the supposedly socialist community are quick to turn fascist, if only to keep themselves alive.
But to finish this explanation of why Dogville is a parable about the tragedy of fascism, the film also has to end.
And think about how the film begins. No fanfare or overture; over an antiquated-looking “U” certificate we are baldly told in white type that this is “the film of Dogville as told in nine chapters and a prologue.” The most undramatically dramatic opening titles since Citizen Kane? But, given how it ends, also the most ironic and misleading opening titles in cinema?
Think also about the role of John Hurt’s narrator. Who exactly is this narrator? Is he the older Tom Edison Jr, making this “reality” into a fiction? Is he the voice inside our head, trying to make sense of what we are seeing?
On a very elemental level Hurt’s narration works on an Edwardian slideshow basis – come and see these moving figures, hear me tell what story there is to tell.
But, as the final shot of the stage implies, Hurt could well be the voice of the dog.
A dog’s daydream.
Everything on one stage is not unprecedented in film. Although Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit had full-scale, proper sets. And Coppola’s One From The Heart was a deliberately opulent world in itself which ended up bankrupting Zoetrope Studios for real.
There is also, and inescapably, Welles’ The Trial, filmed in what would one day be the Musee D’Orsay; made to look vast with minimal design, compensated for by the maximal presence of Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau and Welles himself, hastily depping for an indisposed Jackie Gleason. All they are doing is helping Joseph K to his death with less fuss and bother.
What was that about a dog’s daydream?
Or Citizen Kane as the final event in the dying mind of Charles Foster Kane, demanding that he make some sense of his life?
There is, of course, more inescapable than any of these, The Prisoner:
Of Grace’s climactic speech we hear not a word; it is drowned out by Edison’s voiceover. In the final episode of The Prisoner, Number 6’s climactic speech is drowned out by the cheers and chants of “Aye, aye, aye” of his audience. Kenneth Griffith’s judge stares at him with what may well be either contempt or awe, reminding us of how close quarters the two qualities inhabit.
That penultimate episode of The Prisoner – “Once Upon A Time” – a fairy story which, in true Grimm Brothers tradition, can only end in death. A ballet for three – two speakers and a third silent observer (if we do not choose to make it a quartet with the addition of the viewer) – performed mainly in a semi-derelict studio with chalk marks to represent stages in Number 6’s life, and otherwise the accoutrements of a nursery – the seesaw, the enlarged cot –
Because this is of course The Village. This cage is all The Village has ever been. One retired spy, captured and drugged until he spills the beans.
An episode which we now know was performed and directed with the partial help of Orson Welles, utilising some of the dialogue which Welles and McGoohan, as Ahab and Starbuck, had worked out a decade previously when in Welles’ stage production Moby Dick Rehearsed.
It remains the most terrifying 60 minutes of television ever made.
Why does Grace change?
“Sometimes they [the doctor and the patient] change places.”
“If the doctor has his own problems.”
“I do.”
The episode where Grace attempts to escape under cover of apples and finds herself back where she started can be interpreted as an amalgam of the plotlines of the Prisoner episodes “The Chimes Of Big Ben” and “Many Happy Returns.”
But “Once Upon A Time” was also influenced directly by Beckett’s Endgame – up to the present, many repertory companies perform both as a double bill.
The tradition of the mummery players of the 14th and 15th centuries (why do you think McGoohan called his production company Everyman Films?) with its resolute, stoic morality has also to be taken into account when watching Dogville.
And Beckett reappears in Dogville – most obviously with the barren tree, which even when laden with fruit still looks bare, straight out of Godot.
But the terrible red light through the window which provides Endgame with its electricity also materialises here when Grace pulls back the large curtain drapes of Ben Gazzara’s blind old lecher Mr McKay.
It is only an awesome view because Grace says so and it suits Mr McKay to agree.
It is better than admitting the possibility that there is nothing out there but this terrible redness – the red light which will reappear horribly at the film’s end.
In terms of rape, consider Grace’s provoking of Mr McKay until he confesses his blindness.
In terms of rape, consider that there are no excuses for rape.
Consider also why Ben Gazzara. He speaks in detail of what he could see when he could still see. His travels – or did he get it all out of books? Is that what made him blind?
Consider the role of the light of day, and how the ultimate light comes at the dead of night, or in the cool, cool cool of the evening.
Consider that it’s a shame that Jimmy Stewart wasn’t still alive to play Mr McKay, for this is George Bailey, the Good Man who read about places all his life and never went to any of them.
Consider Philip Baker Hall’s matter-of-fatal-fact doctor, Thomas Edison Senior, as Mr Potter.
Consider the relationship of the roles of Jimmy Stewart and Ben Gazzara in Anatomy Of A Murder. Jimmy’s attorney’s just trying to do his job, even if that job is revealing Gazzara’s killer to be a slimy old ham.
Consider that, for a blind man, whenever Gazzara’s Mr McKay is onscreen you can never take your eyes off his eyes. They seem to fill the screen.
Consider just how fucking important John Cassavetes really was.
Exactly how socialistic was this community before Grace came? Not very. “We only shovel the snow off our own paths” – “Sshh!” Chuck already bored shitless by Tom Jr’s “lectures” – “but you’ll pester me until I say yes.”
But is this out of complete necessity?
Who is the worst villain in Dogville? Thomas Edison Junior, of course, Grace’s one true lover, and the only person in town with whom she doesn’t, can’t, do it.
Has there been quite as mechanical a representation of love as Tom Jr and Grace’s “love affair”? (when Grace first intimates that she loves him too, Tom Jr responds “That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?”)
On one vaguely elemental level, it’s as if the people in this town, in this film, are learning to talk. Grace’s dialogue always sounds as if she’s just about done learning English; slightly stilted, if willing to learn. But then they all come across like that.
As if they were Martians, newly landed on a decimated Earth, trying to make sense of the coded language left behind (cf. Bowie’s “Subterraneans”).
As if they were silent movie actors coming to terms with the onset of the talkie (cf. Singin’ In The Rain).
As if they were starting again.
As if Tom Edison Jr really were just one of the real Thomas Edison’s patented machines.
Because he has no capacity to love. He shows no evidence of understanding the concept of love. He can write endlessly about it (even if the only actual lines he has written are listed near the top of this article) or at least wants to write endlessly about it but he understands nothing of it when faced with it.
As a result he is the biggest bastard in the film because he is supposed to know better.
As a result he is the biggest bastard in the film because he made her come.
Because when faced with committing himself to a proper human relationship he sacrifices it as ruthlessly as Michael Corleone slamming the door in Diane Keaton’s face. The business has to come first.
He is the biggest bastard in the film because he invented her.
He is the stupidest bastard in the film because he knew immediately that inventing her would ultimately kill him and everything else.
Because he invented her.
Dogville is a parable about what happens when a neurotic virgin has too much time to daydream. He falls asleep on a park bench and she materialises. He makes her exist to test his theories of socialism in practice.
Dogville may ultimately be a warning about what may happen when someone chooses writing over life.
But more about that later.
Consider that Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk could be construed as a dream, or a nightmare, that Christine McVie has one night. Lindsey’s guitar nagging away at the end of “Over And Over,” virtually willing her to shut up so his craziness can take over. She then dreams of a tripolar world populated by a neurotic involuntary celibate (“That’s All For Everyone”), a visionary beyond rational description (every time Stevie opens her mouth) and an altered version of herself. The brass band of the title track fades out (the Chilean stadium massacres?) and McVie wakes up. “We’ll never forget tonight” she reassures herself/us. But those drums are Lindsey’s Kleenex boxes, and what’s that weird electronic whooshing going on around her? The ghost ends up infiltrating the machine.
Or ends up having been the machine all along.
Because Tusk was not what they were supposed to do!
Because Grace ends up taking over the dream. She falls asleep after Tom Jr has decided to reject her, and Dogville ends up the dreamt.
Because you think you have it all sussed out. The community will suffocate her one way or another in the end, and she has to get out of it somehow. Though Tom Jr, by not burning the card Udo Kier gives him at the film’s beginning, by utilising it to bring the outside world back into Dogville, ends up doing it for her. Selfless as only he could never be.
At times you worry that if the players wander too far to the edge of the set, they will fall off the edge of the world.
The Flat Earth Society continues to prosper.
And then there is James Caan.
Who appears at the eleventh hour (or in the ninth chapter) just when he’s needed, or summoned. Because this film has to end somehow.
You momentarily worry that the film will end up deconstructing itself too far (cf. the end of Blazing Saddles). Alarm bells sound when Tom Jr starts talking about turning the story of Dogville and Grace into a book.
Instead of which it turns, sneering, to face you.
Nicole Kidman and James Caan in the car are:
THE FRONT ROW OF THE AUDIENCE!
Debating how the picture should end (cf. Lanark’s conversation with the author in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark). What do YOU want to happen to these people, this rotten town, if rotten a town it is?
The star demanding of the scriptwriter that he give her a good and worthy ending. But what is worth worth?
Because she has all the power now, and she knows it, just like Number 6 slamming the cage door on Number 2 in “Once Upon A Time.” Over her dad (Caan, who tried to shoot her for being arrogant!), over the town, over us.
After their conversation…
…and what about James Caan? Sonny Corleone having survived the 612 bullets at the toll booth, now choosing method over instinct. But I sat there and knew what my instinct was.
And it’s the same as yours will probably be.
Namely that you want her to tell the hoods to wipe the fucking dump off the face of the earth, and all its worthless citizens with it.
“They tried their best…and it wasn’t good enough.”
You INSTINCTIVELY don’t want her to politely say no to her dad and return back to the community for…for what? More windows broken? More mud thrown in her bed? More chains? More SLAVERY? She’s served her 12-month sentence anyway, she might as well have been in prison…
She gets out of the car and looks around. Everyone is now actively frightened of her. She stares, not quite at the camera, in a close-up which states quite categorically that I am free to do whatever I fucking want with Dogville. I RUN the place.
Does she choose to return and run it, to lead the people, to show them something better?
Consider the plea of the Judge to Number 6 in “Fall Out,” partially cribbed from Ibsen’s Brand (it was McGoohan’s award-winning stage portrayal of Brand in 1959 which got him the ITC contract). Number 6 can stay and run the Village, or he can destroy it.
Grace/the audience comes to the same conclusion. And it’s a brutal one. And it’s the one the audience explicitly wants.
She decides, as she is already corrupted by view of her conception, to destroy. The relief in the audience is virtually orgasmic, and we hate ourselves as a result. She returns to consult with Caan as to how they should go about it. It is like Himmler planning the elimination of the village of Lidice as “punishment” for the assassination of Heydrich.
Did I say something about a parable about the tragedy of fascism?
Because you now have to accept that Grace is the real fascist, and worse, much worse than that, you want her to be.
She orders the execution of all the inhabitants of Dogville and the burning of all its buildings.
Lauren Bacall, looking skeletal, finally getting offed by the gangsters in her 60th year in cinema.
“Do the children first,” she orders, the mother in question, Patricia Clarkson’s Vera, having previously “killed” her figurines.
My God, is von Trier fucking going to show us the children being shot?
Yes he does. Jason, filthy pervy fucking Jason, pleading for his fucking life, and being blasted away. Even Michael Powell never went that far. Nor Peter Greenaway.
Revenger’s tragedy? The baby – Achilles; how appropriate – unseen throughout the rest of the film, now caught in one shot, as brief and horrific as the equivalent shot in Elephant.
And this is infinitely more disturbing and frightening than the slaughter scenes in Elephant, because of its rapid onset and because the perpetrators are not randomly jerking off over blood and gore. It has been rationally planned.
Dogville plays like the last film ever made. When “Dogville” and its cast have been destroyed, it is down to Grace to eliminate the biggest target, Tom Edison Jr, who knows that he and only he sealed his doom by summoning her from his virginal rat-trap of an imagination. They approach each other, and all, all there is left, is this bloody red light filling an empty studio, as if cinema itself had outlived its use and been destroyed, or made extinct. A couple of actors wondering “what are we going to do now?” in the Spike Milligan Q style. IF THIS IS ALL THERE IS, Tom Jr seems to demand, then exterminate me too. As Grace does, deliberately paraphrasing the most important paragraph in Revolutionary Road – as if April Wheeler had finally found the guts to turn the gun on Frank and alleviate him of his hopeless misery.
Because in a cleansed society, the writer will always be the first sacrifice, being its biggest parasite. Destroy, deny life to others, and then try to turn it into art. Maybe we – and I mean we – should just keep our fucking mouths shut, because every time we open them we tell lies, as Johnny Dyani once said. Tom Jr never shuts up when onscreen; you beg him to shut up, to stop wasting words…
Yes, the wasting of words. Not as catastrophic as the deliberate wasting of lives.
Yes, you might think the final shot of Moses too much of a crass acknowledgement of the OTHER “Elm Street.”
But you can’t go yet. Not before you see the closing credits. And, as I said above, just as you cannot hope to understand The Manchurian Candidate if you miss its first 30 seconds, just as you will never comprehend Mulholland Drive if you don’t catch the jivey opening titles, then you will only be superficially relieved by the final carnage if you don’t stay for the closing credits of Dogville.
Because they turn the whole fucking film around.
How?
By giving you, by SHOWING YOU THE WHOLE PICTURE.
Because you see, ladies and gentlemen, Lars von Trier has deliberately been concealing something throughout the entire film, purposely hiding something. Would you have reacted to the film in anything approaching the same way if a full and proper set had been constructed, if it had just been made like, oh, Breaking The Waves, or at least your average Douglas Sirk avant-weepie? There is a deliberate reason for the minimalism of the sets. Because you are being encouraged to imagine something other than “reality.”
The closing credits take the form of a series of photographs of communities and people in the Great Depression, succeeded by a series of images of poverty in contemporary America, soundtracked by Bowie’s “Young Americans”…
…the only explicit usage of music in the entire film; note Martha’s silent organ keyboard throughout – only Grace has the ability or the courage to articulate actual notes from the bellows…
…some of whom eerily resemble the characters whom we have just seen. Living in abject and brutal poverty. THIS was the reality…thus the amateur anarchist’s take on Dogville would be that this is actually the story of a privileged and moneyed gangster’s moll, defeated by the impossibility of reinventing herself or imposing her idealistic view of the world on an unwilling community, destroys a town of sharecropper shacks. These poor people were just not GOOD ENOUGH
to live.
Because then you would have to admit the opposite possibility; that Grace was a capitalist captured by a community of socialists, TRYING TO DO THEIR BEST BEFORE SHE CAME ALONG, and they had their sport with her. But she had the manpower and the guns when it came to it.
How would you have reacted if the film had been shot with the snazzily-dressed Grace wandering into this poor, plain but honest township? Wouldn’t you perhaps have seen her as the people of Dogville clearly saw her? As a shyster, an ambulance chaser, a con artist?
If that’s how you want to interpret it, of course.
DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR PRESIDENT NIXON?
That shot of Nixon, dead centre in the closing credits.
Dogville, therefore, is a parable about the failure of American foreign policy and the invariable progression, or regression, to war and slaughter. Grace and her father in the back seat of the car are Bush and Rumsfeld, are Nixon and Kissinger, discussing how best to choreograph the slaughter. We went in there without being asked, we tried to impose our ideals on the ignorant natives, and how do they thank us? Well, if THAT’S the way they feel about democracy, then our democracy, and by extension the world, would be better off without them.
Thus the riddle might read:
Question: Was the world better off without Dogville?
Answer: The Gulf Wars happened anyway.
Because all that’s left when you try to explain or analyse human behaviour through art is an indeterminate mess. So we – and by we I mean the audience – are left with the responsibility of responding to art as only we – and by we I mean we as individuals, each and every fucking one of us, for there is no community – can do. No grave remorse as with the end of Citizen Kane, no hearty funny-old-world laughs as with Our Girl Friday, no losing ourselves in films within films as with Celine and Julie Go Boating – but such facile analogies do grave disservice, especially to the latter film, which, much like Dogville, dares to challenge us to decide every second whether what you are watching constitutes reality, whose side you are really on, which side of the screen.
Watching Dogville is a remarkable and unforgettable experience – do not be put off by the initially offputting aerial view of what seems to be a glorified Monopoly board; as I’ve said, you soon forget that you’re watching a bare-ish stage and you also forget that the film lasts nearly three hours – but it is something I feel I only want to do once. I don’t want to go back and revisit it, and perhaps diminish some of the original shock at my own gut reactions which I experienced while watching it. I wonder whether the same premise wouldn’t work with music – I recall Derek Bailey’s comments on what would happen if you could only play a CD once – but I know that there is no work of music at the moment to which I would physically wish to devote as many words and thoughts as I increasingly want to do to other forms of art. Which I intend to do.
While there is still time left.
“He will awake no more, oh, never more! –
Within the twilight chambers spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law
Of change, shall o’er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.”
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, Etc.”, stanza VIII, 1821)
Shantih, shantih, shantih
great
small
?
There may not be that much time left, so it’s imperative to get everything in order, some kind of order, whatever order, however ordered. Orders are orders after all, as both Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers knew. On any stage it’s vital to know exactly where one stands.
So I have watched the 178 minutes of Dogville and thought about it for considerably more minutes. At this moment I think it to be the greatest achievement in cinema, as well as the film which may ultimately destroy cinema, or at least leave its rubble behind for others to reconstruct.
The reasons for this can be itemised and sectioned as follows:
Dogville plays like the first film ever made. The significance of calling father and son Thomas Edison cannot be overstated – the film feels as though the real Thomas Edison had proceeded to beat the Lumiere brothers to inventing the art, or at least the show, of the moving picture. Thus the entire film is played on the extended stage, lit alternatively by stark black or starker white light, with houses only suggested by chalk marks and offstage sound effects of doors opening, keys turning and dogs barking. We, as an audience (as opposed to an extended Wyndham Lewis first person), are invited into the darkness and encouraged to make our own way towards visualising the reality which Lars von Trier is attempting to communicate to us. It’s exactly as if a travelling group of Victorian actors have quickly knocked up a make-do-and-mend stage on which this entertainment will be enacted, as if no one quite knows yet how to make a film (think of Miles’ instructions to John McLaughlin while recording In A Silent Way – “Play like you don’t know how to play the guitar”). It recreates the electric excitement which must have flowed through the veins of everyone alive and active at the dawn of cinema. The rules haven’t been set down yet.
This can also be interpreted as starting again – although if you stay for the closing credits (and to understand this film, you must) you will discover precisely why von Trier’s stage is so deliberately empty.
Because what are we visualising in this portrait of what we take to be a small Depression-era Rocky Mountain community? Do we still instinctively imagine the warm, cosy Waltons template?
It is a tribute to von Trier’s maturing as a filmmaker that we soon forget that we are looking at a bare-ish, chalk-marked stage.
Yet it is also important to remember that this is not merely filmed theatre. The zoom-ins and camera dips – particularly whenever Nicole Kidman’s Grace reacts to yet another insult or humiliation – could not have been achieved by stage means alone. Though distantly influenced by Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle – stretch a point for Grace as Azdak, the shyster who ends up the judge – and perhaps indirectly by some of Peter Brook’s enterprises, by the film’s end – maybe the most apocalyptic end of any film – you are sorely and starkly reminded that this is, and can only ever be, a work of the cinema.
Dogville is a parable about the tragedy of socialism. Grace is sent to test the proportion of selflessness to arrogance of the inhabitants of the village (in his last act of humanity, Tom Edison Jr. whimpers at the Mission House gathering: “I asked you to forgive her, and all you have done is defend yourselves” – just as the nuclear snow begins to fall) or their proportion of humanity to self-defence. She offers herself at the service of the village as “payment” for their protection of her, as she is on the run from gangsters. As their enclosed world is repeatedly intruded upon by the same bumbling sheriff quietly disclosing more information about her, their “community” is inevitably ruptured by capitalistic self-protection. Quite apart from having nothing for her to do when she first arrives, they soon impose more work duties upon her, and more hostilely. Apart from a brief and blissful initial spell where the community miraculously works together and coalesces – acting as a unit – the citizens soon realise that the worker will do any work, is willing to work longer for less pay, and start to patronise her before slowly destroying her. After all, she is a captive in a buyer’s market – they are buying her services, and she is in no position to negotiate terms and conditions, as she can be shopped to the police at any time (for the gangsters from whom she is fleeing have circulated stories about her being responsible for a series of bank robberies). Thus is she imprisoned in the capitalist machine, more or less from the 4th of July (dependence day!), and once imprisoned she is free to be humiliated, bartered with, regularly raped and treated worse than Moses, the dog in sound and chalk only.
Nor can she expect to keep any of the consumerist trinkets which the community decides she is allowed to have – she can buy the seven figurines (the seven deadly sins) but they can be taken away from her and destroyed at the slightest excuse. When the three women visit her to demolish her figurines it is as if the bailiffs have paid a visit; shift ever so slightly out of synch with what we demand from you, and we’ll take everything away from you.
For why is she imprisoned? Because she is running away from the community’s concept of original sin – note the crucial importance of the apple throughout the film; as her escape is faked, she is filmed through the transparent tarpaulin of the truck, lying surrounded by apples – it is as if she is already in her coffin, the maggots in the apples about to break out and eat her. She has committed an unspecified crime and therefore cannot be fully allowed to restart as a new and more human being – the town can’t really afford it (there is repeated talk of “financial perspective” and “business perspective” as pretexts for not letting her go).
So the citizens feel it is nothing other than their due bargain to obtain sexual relief from her, against her will. Ironically it is her fellow city-deserter Chuck who is the first to violate her – frightened by the mirror of his previous life which he sees in her, he has to deny her choice or independence, insists that harvesting is indivisible from carnality.
So she can effectively be brutally raped in broad daylight (the houses only being imagined) while the rest of the town blithely and blindly goes about its business.
Or it may be that Grace is the manifestation of what we demand from a film star. In this scenario, the townfolk are merely the audience, exercising their whims, wanting her to suffer, insisting that she be subjected to the most utter humiliation, sexual or otherwise. We imagine how everyone in the town would fuck her and beat her, and our darkest dreams are made manifest. Suffer just like Mildred Pierce did! Or like Judy did!
On that Judy aside, note the comment early on in the film, when things are still going well, and she is described as variously bringing heart, sight, brains, etc., to various of the citizens. Thus the Good Witch ends up being indistinguishable from the Wicked Witch, at least in wicked eyes. And is Moses indistinguishable from Toto?
Because either way I, as a spectator, am being asked how I want to acknowledge and perceive an actress on the screen; thus do I become an active participant in the film.
Does Dogville offer the least sentimental view of children in cinema? What does young Jason want other than to get off on Grace putting him over her knee and spanking him, knowing that he has the power, by virtue of his youth, to aid in her destruction? Of course he wants Grace to fuck him, and this Lolita in reverse is quite astounding when one considers the usual polite burial of puberty onset sexuality presented to us in cinema – consider, for instance, the unspoken stimulation that Jamie Bell’s Billy Elliot and Julie Walters’ dance teacher are giving each other; that whole “I Love To Boogie” routine is virtually a rehearsal in foreplay, reminding us that 14-year-old boys are usually more interested in losing their virginity to their teachers than to their classmates.
But Dogville also offers the most brutal and unforgiving view of children, in view of what ultimately happens to all the children in the film.
Of which, more later.
Dogville is a parable about the tragedy of fascism. Because Grace covets these figurines – the same figurines, we are told, at which she would have laughed just a few weeks earlier. So she is hardly free of capitalist desires. Although these may simply be acquired as a means of identity, as evidence that there is some bond, however untenable, between her and the community. Faced with this level of disruption, the supposedly socialist community are quick to turn fascist, if only to keep themselves alive.
But to finish this explanation of why Dogville is a parable about the tragedy of fascism, the film also has to end.
And think about how the film begins. No fanfare or overture; over an antiquated-looking “U” certificate we are baldly told in white type that this is “the film of Dogville as told in nine chapters and a prologue.” The most undramatically dramatic opening titles since Citizen Kane? But, given how it ends, also the most ironic and misleading opening titles in cinema?
Think also about the role of John Hurt’s narrator. Who exactly is this narrator? Is he the older Tom Edison Jr, making this “reality” into a fiction? Is he the voice inside our head, trying to make sense of what we are seeing?
On a very elemental level Hurt’s narration works on an Edwardian slideshow basis – come and see these moving figures, hear me tell what story there is to tell.
But, as the final shot of the stage implies, Hurt could well be the voice of the dog.
A dog’s daydream.
Everything on one stage is not unprecedented in film. Although Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit had full-scale, proper sets. And Coppola’s One From The Heart was a deliberately opulent world in itself which ended up bankrupting Zoetrope Studios for real.
There is also, and inescapably, Welles’ The Trial, filmed in what would one day be the Musee D’Orsay; made to look vast with minimal design, compensated for by the maximal presence of Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau and Welles himself, hastily depping for an indisposed Jackie Gleason. All they are doing is helping Joseph K to his death with less fuss and bother.
What was that about a dog’s daydream?
Or Citizen Kane as the final event in the dying mind of Charles Foster Kane, demanding that he make some sense of his life?
There is, of course, more inescapable than any of these, The Prisoner:
Of Grace’s climactic speech we hear not a word; it is drowned out by Edison’s voiceover. In the final episode of The Prisoner, Number 6’s climactic speech is drowned out by the cheers and chants of “Aye, aye, aye” of his audience. Kenneth Griffith’s judge stares at him with what may well be either contempt or awe, reminding us of how close quarters the two qualities inhabit.
That penultimate episode of The Prisoner – “Once Upon A Time” – a fairy story which, in true Grimm Brothers tradition, can only end in death. A ballet for three – two speakers and a third silent observer (if we do not choose to make it a quartet with the addition of the viewer) – performed mainly in a semi-derelict studio with chalk marks to represent stages in Number 6’s life, and otherwise the accoutrements of a nursery – the seesaw, the enlarged cot –
Because this is of course The Village. This cage is all The Village has ever been. One retired spy, captured and drugged until he spills the beans.
An episode which we now know was performed and directed with the partial help of Orson Welles, utilising some of the dialogue which Welles and McGoohan, as Ahab and Starbuck, had worked out a decade previously when in Welles’ stage production Moby Dick Rehearsed.
It remains the most terrifying 60 minutes of television ever made.
Why does Grace change?
“Sometimes they [the doctor and the patient] change places.”
“If the doctor has his own problems.”
“I do.”
The episode where Grace attempts to escape under cover of apples and finds herself back where she started can be interpreted as an amalgam of the plotlines of the Prisoner episodes “The Chimes Of Big Ben” and “Many Happy Returns.”
But “Once Upon A Time” was also influenced directly by Beckett’s Endgame – up to the present, many repertory companies perform both as a double bill.
The tradition of the mummery players of the 14th and 15th centuries (why do you think McGoohan called his production company Everyman Films?) with its resolute, stoic morality has also to be taken into account when watching Dogville.
And Beckett reappears in Dogville – most obviously with the barren tree, which even when laden with fruit still looks bare, straight out of Godot.
But the terrible red light through the window which provides Endgame with its electricity also materialises here when Grace pulls back the large curtain drapes of Ben Gazzara’s blind old lecher Mr McKay.
It is only an awesome view because Grace says so and it suits Mr McKay to agree.
It is better than admitting the possibility that there is nothing out there but this terrible redness – the red light which will reappear horribly at the film’s end.
In terms of rape, consider Grace’s provoking of Mr McKay until he confesses his blindness.
In terms of rape, consider that there are no excuses for rape.
Consider also why Ben Gazzara. He speaks in detail of what he could see when he could still see. His travels – or did he get it all out of books? Is that what made him blind?
Consider the role of the light of day, and how the ultimate light comes at the dead of night, or in the cool, cool cool of the evening.
Consider that it’s a shame that Jimmy Stewart wasn’t still alive to play Mr McKay, for this is George Bailey, the Good Man who read about places all his life and never went to any of them.
Consider Philip Baker Hall’s matter-of-fatal-fact doctor, Thomas Edison Senior, as Mr Potter.
Consider the relationship of the roles of Jimmy Stewart and Ben Gazzara in Anatomy Of A Murder. Jimmy’s attorney’s just trying to do his job, even if that job is revealing Gazzara’s killer to be a slimy old ham.
Consider that, for a blind man, whenever Gazzara’s Mr McKay is onscreen you can never take your eyes off his eyes. They seem to fill the screen.
Consider just how fucking important John Cassavetes really was.
Exactly how socialistic was this community before Grace came? Not very. “We only shovel the snow off our own paths” – “Sshh!” Chuck already bored shitless by Tom Jr’s “lectures” – “but you’ll pester me until I say yes.”
But is this out of complete necessity?
Who is the worst villain in Dogville? Thomas Edison Junior, of course, Grace’s one true lover, and the only person in town with whom she doesn’t, can’t, do it.
Has there been quite as mechanical a representation of love as Tom Jr and Grace’s “love affair”? (when Grace first intimates that she loves him too, Tom Jr responds “That’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?”)
On one vaguely elemental level, it’s as if the people in this town, in this film, are learning to talk. Grace’s dialogue always sounds as if she’s just about done learning English; slightly stilted, if willing to learn. But then they all come across like that.
As if they were Martians, newly landed on a decimated Earth, trying to make sense of the coded language left behind (cf. Bowie’s “Subterraneans”).
As if they were silent movie actors coming to terms with the onset of the talkie (cf. Singin’ In The Rain).
As if they were starting again.
As if Tom Edison Jr really were just one of the real Thomas Edison’s patented machines.
Because he has no capacity to love. He shows no evidence of understanding the concept of love. He can write endlessly about it (even if the only actual lines he has written are listed near the top of this article) or at least wants to write endlessly about it but he understands nothing of it when faced with it.
As a result he is the biggest bastard in the film because he is supposed to know better.
As a result he is the biggest bastard in the film because he made her come.
Because when faced with committing himself to a proper human relationship he sacrifices it as ruthlessly as Michael Corleone slamming the door in Diane Keaton’s face. The business has to come first.
He is the biggest bastard in the film because he invented her.
He is the stupidest bastard in the film because he knew immediately that inventing her would ultimately kill him and everything else.
Because he invented her.
Dogville is a parable about what happens when a neurotic virgin has too much time to daydream. He falls asleep on a park bench and she materialises. He makes her exist to test his theories of socialism in practice.
Dogville may ultimately be a warning about what may happen when someone chooses writing over life.
But more about that later.
Consider that Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk could be construed as a dream, or a nightmare, that Christine McVie has one night. Lindsey’s guitar nagging away at the end of “Over And Over,” virtually willing her to shut up so his craziness can take over. She then dreams of a tripolar world populated by a neurotic involuntary celibate (“That’s All For Everyone”), a visionary beyond rational description (every time Stevie opens her mouth) and an altered version of herself. The brass band of the title track fades out (the Chilean stadium massacres?) and McVie wakes up. “We’ll never forget tonight” she reassures herself/us. But those drums are Lindsey’s Kleenex boxes, and what’s that weird electronic whooshing going on around her? The ghost ends up infiltrating the machine.
Or ends up having been the machine all along.
Because Tusk was not what they were supposed to do!
Because Grace ends up taking over the dream. She falls asleep after Tom Jr has decided to reject her, and Dogville ends up the dreamt.
Because you think you have it all sussed out. The community will suffocate her one way or another in the end, and she has to get out of it somehow. Though Tom Jr, by not burning the card Udo Kier gives him at the film’s beginning, by utilising it to bring the outside world back into Dogville, ends up doing it for her. Selfless as only he could never be.
At times you worry that if the players wander too far to the edge of the set, they will fall off the edge of the world.
The Flat Earth Society continues to prosper.
And then there is James Caan.
Who appears at the eleventh hour (or in the ninth chapter) just when he’s needed, or summoned. Because this film has to end somehow.
You momentarily worry that the film will end up deconstructing itself too far (cf. the end of Blazing Saddles). Alarm bells sound when Tom Jr starts talking about turning the story of Dogville and Grace into a book.
Instead of which it turns, sneering, to face you.
Nicole Kidman and James Caan in the car are:
THE FRONT ROW OF THE AUDIENCE!
Debating how the picture should end (cf. Lanark’s conversation with the author in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark). What do YOU want to happen to these people, this rotten town, if rotten a town it is?
The star demanding of the scriptwriter that he give her a good and worthy ending. But what is worth worth?
Because she has all the power now, and she knows it, just like Number 6 slamming the cage door on Number 2 in “Once Upon A Time.” Over her dad (Caan, who tried to shoot her for being arrogant!), over the town, over us.
After their conversation…
…and what about James Caan? Sonny Corleone having survived the 612 bullets at the toll booth, now choosing method over instinct. But I sat there and knew what my instinct was.
And it’s the same as yours will probably be.
Namely that you want her to tell the hoods to wipe the fucking dump off the face of the earth, and all its worthless citizens with it.
“They tried their best…and it wasn’t good enough.”
You INSTINCTIVELY don’t want her to politely say no to her dad and return back to the community for…for what? More windows broken? More mud thrown in her bed? More chains? More SLAVERY? She’s served her 12-month sentence anyway, she might as well have been in prison…
She gets out of the car and looks around. Everyone is now actively frightened of her. She stares, not quite at the camera, in a close-up which states quite categorically that I am free to do whatever I fucking want with Dogville. I RUN the place.
Does she choose to return and run it, to lead the people, to show them something better?
Consider the plea of the Judge to Number 6 in “Fall Out,” partially cribbed from Ibsen’s Brand (it was McGoohan’s award-winning stage portrayal of Brand in 1959 which got him the ITC contract). Number 6 can stay and run the Village, or he can destroy it.
Grace/the audience comes to the same conclusion. And it’s a brutal one. And it’s the one the audience explicitly wants.
She decides, as she is already corrupted by view of her conception, to destroy. The relief in the audience is virtually orgasmic, and we hate ourselves as a result. She returns to consult with Caan as to how they should go about it. It is like Himmler planning the elimination of the village of Lidice as “punishment” for the assassination of Heydrich.
Did I say something about a parable about the tragedy of fascism?
Because you now have to accept that Grace is the real fascist, and worse, much worse than that, you want her to be.
She orders the execution of all the inhabitants of Dogville and the burning of all its buildings.
Lauren Bacall, looking skeletal, finally getting offed by the gangsters in her 60th year in cinema.
“Do the children first,” she orders, the mother in question, Patricia Clarkson’s Vera, having previously “killed” her figurines.
My God, is von Trier fucking going to show us the children being shot?
Yes he does. Jason, filthy pervy fucking Jason, pleading for his fucking life, and being blasted away. Even Michael Powell never went that far. Nor Peter Greenaway.
Revenger’s tragedy? The baby – Achilles; how appropriate – unseen throughout the rest of the film, now caught in one shot, as brief and horrific as the equivalent shot in Elephant.
And this is infinitely more disturbing and frightening than the slaughter scenes in Elephant, because of its rapid onset and because the perpetrators are not randomly jerking off over blood and gore. It has been rationally planned.
Dogville plays like the last film ever made. When “Dogville” and its cast have been destroyed, it is down to Grace to eliminate the biggest target, Tom Edison Jr, who knows that he and only he sealed his doom by summoning her from his virginal rat-trap of an imagination. They approach each other, and all, all there is left, is this bloody red light filling an empty studio, as if cinema itself had outlived its use and been destroyed, or made extinct. A couple of actors wondering “what are we going to do now?” in the Spike Milligan Q style. IF THIS IS ALL THERE IS, Tom Jr seems to demand, then exterminate me too. As Grace does, deliberately paraphrasing the most important paragraph in Revolutionary Road – as if April Wheeler had finally found the guts to turn the gun on Frank and alleviate him of his hopeless misery.
Because in a cleansed society, the writer will always be the first sacrifice, being its biggest parasite. Destroy, deny life to others, and then try to turn it into art. Maybe we – and I mean we – should just keep our fucking mouths shut, because every time we open them we tell lies, as Johnny Dyani once said. Tom Jr never shuts up when onscreen; you beg him to shut up, to stop wasting words…
Yes, the wasting of words. Not as catastrophic as the deliberate wasting of lives.
Yes, you might think the final shot of Moses too much of a crass acknowledgement of the OTHER “Elm Street.”
But you can’t go yet. Not before you see the closing credits. And, as I said above, just as you cannot hope to understand The Manchurian Candidate if you miss its first 30 seconds, just as you will never comprehend Mulholland Drive if you don’t catch the jivey opening titles, then you will only be superficially relieved by the final carnage if you don’t stay for the closing credits of Dogville.
Because they turn the whole fucking film around.
How?
By giving you, by SHOWING YOU THE WHOLE PICTURE.
Because you see, ladies and gentlemen, Lars von Trier has deliberately been concealing something throughout the entire film, purposely hiding something. Would you have reacted to the film in anything approaching the same way if a full and proper set had been constructed, if it had just been made like, oh, Breaking The Waves, or at least your average Douglas Sirk avant-weepie? There is a deliberate reason for the minimalism of the sets. Because you are being encouraged to imagine something other than “reality.”
The closing credits take the form of a series of photographs of communities and people in the Great Depression, succeeded by a series of images of poverty in contemporary America, soundtracked by Bowie’s “Young Americans”…
…the only explicit usage of music in the entire film; note Martha’s silent organ keyboard throughout – only Grace has the ability or the courage to articulate actual notes from the bellows…
…some of whom eerily resemble the characters whom we have just seen. Living in abject and brutal poverty. THIS was the reality…thus the amateur anarchist’s take on Dogville would be that this is actually the story of a privileged and moneyed gangster’s moll, defeated by the impossibility of reinventing herself or imposing her idealistic view of the world on an unwilling community, destroys a town of sharecropper shacks. These poor people were just not GOOD ENOUGH
to live.
Because then you would have to admit the opposite possibility; that Grace was a capitalist captured by a community of socialists, TRYING TO DO THEIR BEST BEFORE SHE CAME ALONG, and they had their sport with her. But she had the manpower and the guns when it came to it.
How would you have reacted if the film had been shot with the snazzily-dressed Grace wandering into this poor, plain but honest township? Wouldn’t you perhaps have seen her as the people of Dogville clearly saw her? As a shyster, an ambulance chaser, a con artist?
If that’s how you want to interpret it, of course.
DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR PRESIDENT NIXON?
That shot of Nixon, dead centre in the closing credits.
Dogville, therefore, is a parable about the failure of American foreign policy and the invariable progression, or regression, to war and slaughter. Grace and her father in the back seat of the car are Bush and Rumsfeld, are Nixon and Kissinger, discussing how best to choreograph the slaughter. We went in there without being asked, we tried to impose our ideals on the ignorant natives, and how do they thank us? Well, if THAT’S the way they feel about democracy, then our democracy, and by extension the world, would be better off without them.
Thus the riddle might read:
Question: Was the world better off without Dogville?
Answer: The Gulf Wars happened anyway.
Because all that’s left when you try to explain or analyse human behaviour through art is an indeterminate mess. So we – and by we I mean the audience – are left with the responsibility of responding to art as only we – and by we I mean we as individuals, each and every fucking one of us, for there is no community – can do. No grave remorse as with the end of Citizen Kane, no hearty funny-old-world laughs as with Our Girl Friday, no losing ourselves in films within films as with Celine and Julie Go Boating – but such facile analogies do grave disservice, especially to the latter film, which, much like Dogville, dares to challenge us to decide every second whether what you are watching constitutes reality, whose side you are really on, which side of the screen.
Watching Dogville is a remarkable and unforgettable experience – do not be put off by the initially offputting aerial view of what seems to be a glorified Monopoly board; as I’ve said, you soon forget that you’re watching a bare-ish stage and you also forget that the film lasts nearly three hours – but it is something I feel I only want to do once. I don’t want to go back and revisit it, and perhaps diminish some of the original shock at my own gut reactions which I experienced while watching it. I wonder whether the same premise wouldn’t work with music – I recall Derek Bailey’s comments on what would happen if you could only play a CD once – but I know that there is no work of music at the moment to which I would physically wish to devote as many words and thoughts as I increasingly want to do to other forms of art. Which I intend to do.
While there is still time left.
“He will awake no more, oh, never more! –
Within the twilight chambers spreads apace
The shadow of white Death, and at the door
Invisible Corruption waits to trace
His extreme way to her dim dwelling-place;
The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface
So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law
Of change, shall o’er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.”
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, Etc.”, stanza VIII, 1821)
Shantih, shantih, shantih
Monday, February 02, 2004
ELEPHANT
One of the saddest sights in cinema occurs at those moments in Laurel and Hardy films where, for the longest of times, everything goes without a hitch and happiness and contentment reign. Particularly poignant is the opening of Busy Bodies (1933) which finds Stan and Ollie driving happily on a lovely summer morning to the sawmill where they work as carpenters, a gramophone fitted under the bonnet of their car and playing danceband tunes as they travel to work. “It’s great to have a good job to go to,” muses Ollie. “It just makes everything complete.” An idyll made the more poignant by the foreknowledge that, this being a Laurel and Hardy film, the idyll will by film’s end be demolished beyond repair. Another such moment – and a surprisingly long moment – can be found in the following year’s Them Thar Hills, where, having taken to the hills with a trailer, Stan and Ollie happily go about preparing breakfast – “a plate of beans and some steaming hot coffee.” Again it is heartbreaking because of the glimpse it offers of a perfect world wherein nothing would ever go wrong, with no misunderstandings or incompetencies to wreck the dream.
And no malevolence, either. Something of this feeling can be found in the first half of Gus van Sant’s Elephant; for its opening 30 or so minutes, the camera is content to trail the paths of various schoolkids as they go about their separate business, or merely wander down unending corridors which seem to act as barriers against any form of “community.” Saying hello to each other, but never ever connecting. Indeed, the school “community” is quick to ostracise any one of its members who dares to show the slightest independence of thought or manifestation of individuality. There’s the gawky, awkward Michelle, told off by her teacher for not wearing shorts like everyone else, talked about in the shower room behind her back (the word “loser” shoots out from the conversation like a bullet), dressed in as much red as she can tolerate.
Or there’s the uncertain, vaguely Oriental-looking Alex; picked on in physics class, steered clear of outside it, someone awkward in a deadlier way. Eventually he and his best friend Eric, the latter looking like an unfinished cross between Rodney Trotter and Eminem, will return to the school with internet-ordered weapons of warfare and “pick off as many people as we can as we traverse the East Wing” (note that “traverse” – a direct yet misunderstood pilfering from Bushspeak, the type of word uttered by someone who watches television but hasn’t quite worked out how to absorb it).
Even the more conventional Beverly Hills 90210 types can hardly be said to constitute an ideal of youth – John with his alcoholic father (a nice little performance from Timothy Bottoms, revisiting his rôle in The Last Picture Show 33 years on), the deliberately insufferable trio of girls who alternately pretend to be friends and anorexics (the choreographed tripolar throwing up in the toilets), and Elias, the budding photographer, who is presumably the nearest thing there is to van Sant himself in this film; getting a pair of passing punks to pose, directing them across the park. He methodically develops his pictures in the darkroom…and when he encounters the gunmen, his immediate instinct is to grin an awful grin and photograph them for posterity. That implies a moral blankness, maybe even an inherent careerism (which we have already seen manifested in him), which is perhaps more terrifying than anything that Alex or Eric say or do.
It is unclear whether Elias dies in the film – indeed, this is a catharsis of which van Sant purposely denies us. At crucial moments the camera blurs; a figure who looks awfully like Elias falls to the ground, but we cannot be sure that it is him. Alex encounters the three girls (and a fourth, someone who is apparently a good singer but may well also be pregnant); we do not get to see their presumed fate, but they immediately choreograph panic as if they were auditioning for Scary Movie 4.
The film is not shot in sequence; several events are repeated from different perspectives. Thus everything remains uncertain, apart from the film’s one brief, genuinely shocking moment of manifest violence. In the long build-up to the shooting, where we observe Alex and Eric in their “bunker” (it’s noticeable that all the adults in their scenes – Alex’s parents, the delivery man bringing them their weapons of mass destruction – are heard but never seen, just as in Peanuts cartoons), we know that, if there’s a subliminal trigger point for what they are about to do – their out-of-place angsty resentment notwithstanding – it’s their problematic relationship with art. We hear Alex at his piano practising some Beethoven – “Für Elise,” “Moonlight Sonata” – and he cannot quite pin the music down. As the camera traverses his room, his playing becomes more passionate and angry as it becomes less accurate. Finally, he gives up and gives the score the finger. He cannot access art. Similarly, when we see the extended Nazi documentary excerpt, with its emphasis on burning books (“Hitler hated intellect and intellectuals”), we are made aware that they can never grasp the idea of art as salvation, or the idea of other opinions being as or more valid than their own. So we can guess that their first and bloodiest port of call will be the school library.
The one moment of pronounced violence occurs in the library; it lasts maybe half a second but its blood spreads out in both directions to colour the rest of the film, and it in itself is one of the most genuinely shocking moments in the last 30 years of cinema, not least because, again, van Sant refuses to take the easy route to placation – the victim here is the last person you would have wished to be killed, and if Alex and Eric hadn’t been such tunnel visionaries they would have known this too; but then perhaps they saw a mirror of themselves, and it was the first thing they had to get rid of. They could not watch themselves doing this, and we can barely do so either.
The problem is that van Sant deliberately constructs the film to ensure that, after this half-second of explicit brutality, there is literally nowhere else for the film to go. So another character, seen for the first time, wanders dazedly towards his doom for no good reason, and the blood and smoke become partners in an abstract ballet of evil. There is no “ending” as such, either, though there is a third, unseen gunman in the film’s last five minutes. Instead, we are left suspended in the walk-in freezer like Bob Hoskins’ rivals in The Long Good Friday; back to those drifting, ominous clouds (cLOUDDEAD?), forced to make our own choices, decisions and opinions.
Elephant was inspired by the late Alan Clarke’s similarly-titled 1989 abstract ballet. Yet it is clear that Clarke’s is the superior film; in the procession of eighteen Northern Ireland sectarian killings which Clarke records – always in long or medium shot, and always with one tracking shot per killing – no effort is made to explain the characters of the various victims and assassins. There is no set-up and thus no sentimentality; without a refuge, Clarke forcibly glues our eyes to the screen to witness What Happens When You Choose To Ignore The World Around You. But despite his pretentions to abstraction, van Sant sadly cannot resist joining the dots; it would have been braver for him to jettison all dialogue and character explanations, perhaps just to leave the camera running. For van Sant’s film is constructed as solidly as any two-bit ‘50s Our Parents Don’t Understand teen B-movie; the groaningly over-obvious signifiers in the dialogue (Brittany, or is it Jordan, or was it Nicole: “I just wanna live to get my licence,” etc.), and indeed the entire Alex/Eric set-up scenario could have easily been taken out; it explains too much too facilely (Nazi fixation equatable with gayness?). By the time Eric corners the cowering school principal, we are virtually back in the world of Sal Mineo and Jim Backus (Eric’s climactic manifesto of “there will be more of us if you fuck with them like you fucked with US!” is embarrassingly corny and comes close to derailing the film completely. One expects a grieving Natalie Wood to storm in and demand the gun, one bullet for Chino, another for herself – although I was more reminded of Arthur Lowe in the film of Dad’s Army solemnly proclaiming to his Nazi captor that “if you shoot me, there are another 500 to take my place”).
Nevertheless the film, if just for that one moment of bloody ballet, has stayed in my mind these subsequent 24 hours, and the reaction of the cinema audience was as mute and shellshocked as any I can recall since the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. My feeling, though, is that van Sant would do well to continue tracking these abstract worlds of the individual and stop trying to explain so much (for that way ultimately lies Kubrickian overkill and pomposity) – and the more localised killing built up to and depicted in Larry Clark’s Bully is more radical and genuinely shocking because the murder is never an event which is likely to make the headlines or change the viewpoint of a nation; it is sordid and slight, and therefore indicates the more commonplace evil which usually ends up being the deadlier. And in such a way would van Sant get rid of the really rather clichéd parable which underpins his Elephant and learn from the 63-year-old Citizen Kane the art and consequently greater profundity of simply showing events from different points of view.
As I left the cinema and re-emerged into Shaftesbury Avenue, the rain and wind hit me like a fresh punch in the face. That’s it – forget the lot, forget the bloody lot of them; get back to life. And in such ways do we ensure that the elephant in the corner of the living room continues to be blithely and complacently ignored – or, much, much worse, glorified and deified (the Hutton Report). As long as we ourselves are happy in ourselves, nothing else – literally – matters.
One of the saddest sights in cinema occurs at those moments in Laurel and Hardy films where, for the longest of times, everything goes without a hitch and happiness and contentment reign. Particularly poignant is the opening of Busy Bodies (1933) which finds Stan and Ollie driving happily on a lovely summer morning to the sawmill where they work as carpenters, a gramophone fitted under the bonnet of their car and playing danceband tunes as they travel to work. “It’s great to have a good job to go to,” muses Ollie. “It just makes everything complete.” An idyll made the more poignant by the foreknowledge that, this being a Laurel and Hardy film, the idyll will by film’s end be demolished beyond repair. Another such moment – and a surprisingly long moment – can be found in the following year’s Them Thar Hills, where, having taken to the hills with a trailer, Stan and Ollie happily go about preparing breakfast – “a plate of beans and some steaming hot coffee.” Again it is heartbreaking because of the glimpse it offers of a perfect world wherein nothing would ever go wrong, with no misunderstandings or incompetencies to wreck the dream.
And no malevolence, either. Something of this feeling can be found in the first half of Gus van Sant’s Elephant; for its opening 30 or so minutes, the camera is content to trail the paths of various schoolkids as they go about their separate business, or merely wander down unending corridors which seem to act as barriers against any form of “community.” Saying hello to each other, but never ever connecting. Indeed, the school “community” is quick to ostracise any one of its members who dares to show the slightest independence of thought or manifestation of individuality. There’s the gawky, awkward Michelle, told off by her teacher for not wearing shorts like everyone else, talked about in the shower room behind her back (the word “loser” shoots out from the conversation like a bullet), dressed in as much red as she can tolerate.
Or there’s the uncertain, vaguely Oriental-looking Alex; picked on in physics class, steered clear of outside it, someone awkward in a deadlier way. Eventually he and his best friend Eric, the latter looking like an unfinished cross between Rodney Trotter and Eminem, will return to the school with internet-ordered weapons of warfare and “pick off as many people as we can as we traverse the East Wing” (note that “traverse” – a direct yet misunderstood pilfering from Bushspeak, the type of word uttered by someone who watches television but hasn’t quite worked out how to absorb it).
Even the more conventional Beverly Hills 90210 types can hardly be said to constitute an ideal of youth – John with his alcoholic father (a nice little performance from Timothy Bottoms, revisiting his rôle in The Last Picture Show 33 years on), the deliberately insufferable trio of girls who alternately pretend to be friends and anorexics (the choreographed tripolar throwing up in the toilets), and Elias, the budding photographer, who is presumably the nearest thing there is to van Sant himself in this film; getting a pair of passing punks to pose, directing them across the park. He methodically develops his pictures in the darkroom…and when he encounters the gunmen, his immediate instinct is to grin an awful grin and photograph them for posterity. That implies a moral blankness, maybe even an inherent careerism (which we have already seen manifested in him), which is perhaps more terrifying than anything that Alex or Eric say or do.
It is unclear whether Elias dies in the film – indeed, this is a catharsis of which van Sant purposely denies us. At crucial moments the camera blurs; a figure who looks awfully like Elias falls to the ground, but we cannot be sure that it is him. Alex encounters the three girls (and a fourth, someone who is apparently a good singer but may well also be pregnant); we do not get to see their presumed fate, but they immediately choreograph panic as if they were auditioning for Scary Movie 4.
The film is not shot in sequence; several events are repeated from different perspectives. Thus everything remains uncertain, apart from the film’s one brief, genuinely shocking moment of manifest violence. In the long build-up to the shooting, where we observe Alex and Eric in their “bunker” (it’s noticeable that all the adults in their scenes – Alex’s parents, the delivery man bringing them their weapons of mass destruction – are heard but never seen, just as in Peanuts cartoons), we know that, if there’s a subliminal trigger point for what they are about to do – their out-of-place angsty resentment notwithstanding – it’s their problematic relationship with art. We hear Alex at his piano practising some Beethoven – “Für Elise,” “Moonlight Sonata” – and he cannot quite pin the music down. As the camera traverses his room, his playing becomes more passionate and angry as it becomes less accurate. Finally, he gives up and gives the score the finger. He cannot access art. Similarly, when we see the extended Nazi documentary excerpt, with its emphasis on burning books (“Hitler hated intellect and intellectuals”), we are made aware that they can never grasp the idea of art as salvation, or the idea of other opinions being as or more valid than their own. So we can guess that their first and bloodiest port of call will be the school library.
The one moment of pronounced violence occurs in the library; it lasts maybe half a second but its blood spreads out in both directions to colour the rest of the film, and it in itself is one of the most genuinely shocking moments in the last 30 years of cinema, not least because, again, van Sant refuses to take the easy route to placation – the victim here is the last person you would have wished to be killed, and if Alex and Eric hadn’t been such tunnel visionaries they would have known this too; but then perhaps they saw a mirror of themselves, and it was the first thing they had to get rid of. They could not watch themselves doing this, and we can barely do so either.
The problem is that van Sant deliberately constructs the film to ensure that, after this half-second of explicit brutality, there is literally nowhere else for the film to go. So another character, seen for the first time, wanders dazedly towards his doom for no good reason, and the blood and smoke become partners in an abstract ballet of evil. There is no “ending” as such, either, though there is a third, unseen gunman in the film’s last five minutes. Instead, we are left suspended in the walk-in freezer like Bob Hoskins’ rivals in The Long Good Friday; back to those drifting, ominous clouds (cLOUDDEAD?), forced to make our own choices, decisions and opinions.
Elephant was inspired by the late Alan Clarke’s similarly-titled 1989 abstract ballet. Yet it is clear that Clarke’s is the superior film; in the procession of eighteen Northern Ireland sectarian killings which Clarke records – always in long or medium shot, and always with one tracking shot per killing – no effort is made to explain the characters of the various victims and assassins. There is no set-up and thus no sentimentality; without a refuge, Clarke forcibly glues our eyes to the screen to witness What Happens When You Choose To Ignore The World Around You. But despite his pretentions to abstraction, van Sant sadly cannot resist joining the dots; it would have been braver for him to jettison all dialogue and character explanations, perhaps just to leave the camera running. For van Sant’s film is constructed as solidly as any two-bit ‘50s Our Parents Don’t Understand teen B-movie; the groaningly over-obvious signifiers in the dialogue (Brittany, or is it Jordan, or was it Nicole: “I just wanna live to get my licence,” etc.), and indeed the entire Alex/Eric set-up scenario could have easily been taken out; it explains too much too facilely (Nazi fixation equatable with gayness?). By the time Eric corners the cowering school principal, we are virtually back in the world of Sal Mineo and Jim Backus (Eric’s climactic manifesto of “there will be more of us if you fuck with them like you fucked with US!” is embarrassingly corny and comes close to derailing the film completely. One expects a grieving Natalie Wood to storm in and demand the gun, one bullet for Chino, another for herself – although I was more reminded of Arthur Lowe in the film of Dad’s Army solemnly proclaiming to his Nazi captor that “if you shoot me, there are another 500 to take my place”).
Nevertheless the film, if just for that one moment of bloody ballet, has stayed in my mind these subsequent 24 hours, and the reaction of the cinema audience was as mute and shellshocked as any I can recall since the first 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. My feeling, though, is that van Sant would do well to continue tracking these abstract worlds of the individual and stop trying to explain so much (for that way ultimately lies Kubrickian overkill and pomposity) – and the more localised killing built up to and depicted in Larry Clark’s Bully is more radical and genuinely shocking because the murder is never an event which is likely to make the headlines or change the viewpoint of a nation; it is sordid and slight, and therefore indicates the more commonplace evil which usually ends up being the deadlier. And in such a way would van Sant get rid of the really rather clichéd parable which underpins his Elephant and learn from the 63-year-old Citizen Kane the art and consequently greater profundity of simply showing events from different points of view.
As I left the cinema and re-emerged into Shaftesbury Avenue, the rain and wind hit me like a fresh punch in the face. That’s it – forget the lot, forget the bloody lot of them; get back to life. And in such ways do we ensure that the elephant in the corner of the living room continues to be blithely and complacently ignored – or, much, much worse, glorified and deified (the Hutton Report). As long as we ourselves are happy in ourselves, nothing else – literally – matters.
