A movie not recommended for that first date.

Madison.

It's nearly November - meaning the start of NaNoWriMo is nigh - and I'm struggling to select a concept. I'd come up with four ideas around mid-October, with the intention of fleshing them out so that I could select one to pursue. It's slower going than expected. I've eliminated two of the initial four options, leaving me to choose between a western-inflected horror story and a Cronenbergian¹ story about people seeking thrills through amateur surgery and self-mutilation.

I'm leaning toward the western, because it lends itself to plugging in simple cliches when necessary. The second story, in order to keep it from being thoroughly unreadable dreck, needs some serious thought and, potentially, time-intensive research. NaNoWriMo doesn't offer that sort of time luxury. That said, the half-formed parts that've been dancing in my head for some time are really the most fascinating of all of the noveling options. Perhaps it's best that I give them a more serious opportunity at a later date.

Alone for the weekend, and without much to fill my schedule, I decided to rent some movies and stay home.² I hadn't really thought too much about it ahead of time, except that I knew I wanted to watch at least one disturbing film. Just about all of the good³ horror films were out - Night of the Living Dead was high on my list - as expected. I ended up with Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa, Fistful of Dollars by Sergio Leone (a Spaghetti Western remake of Kurosawa's film), and Crash by David Cronenberg⁴. Without intending to, I had selected three films that could be quite influential on the upcoming novel.

Also: auteur central.

Yojimbo looks like a Western⁵ in samurai togs; Kurosawa readily expressed the influence John Ford, among others, had on his films. The plot, in brief: Sanjuro, a ronin played by Toshiro Mifune, arrives in a small village controlled by two competing gangs who gamble and fight constantly. The only honest man who can make a living is the cooper who builds coffins. Sanjuro plays both gangs against each other in an escalating series of deadly battles. Full of action, beautifully composed shots - as though one would expect anything else from a Kurosawa film - and humor, it's about as free of complicated morality as any Kurosawa film could ever be. Basically, it's a well-made popcorn film. Note: most of what we now consider cliches, like the wise-cracking action hero in Yojimbo, or pretty much everything about Seven Samurai, was clever and original to Kurosawa's films. (Or else archetypes.)

Sergio Leone, another great director with a love for all things Americana, remade Yojimbo as one of his antihero-based Westerns. The US marketing sold this film - along with For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly - as one about "The Man With No Name", played by Clint Eastwood. He has a name, actually. And is a different character - though he dresses the same, and has many of the same characteristics - in each of the three films. First Joe, then Monco, then Blondie, even though he's got mid-range brown hair. Beats me.

The camera angles - including the juxtapositions of wide-angle landscapes with extreme close-ups - in Fistful of Dollars are pure Leone. Ennio Morricone⁶ did the score, which was his first time working with Leone, and it's fun, even though it's not as memorable⁷ as the themes to The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in The West. As usual, Leone picked actors with very distinctive features; you'd never expect to see faces like those in this movie working in Hollywood today. He also, like in all of his films, had his actors deliver their lines in their native language, then dubbed over it as necessary for different releases. It can make following the dialogue a bit difficult at times, but I've got to believe he did that to get better performances from actors selected, in some cases, more for their wrinkled, sun-toughened looks than their dramatic chops. If nothing else, the films of Sergio Leone can be appreciated purely for their style, long before Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene.⁸

Crash has nothing to do with those films. Okay, there's a brief moment where we see a videotape of a pornographic film titled A Fistful of Bimbos on the floor of James Ballard's car, but that's just Cronenberg humor.⁹

Promotional posters for the film prominently featured the phrase "sex and car crashes" from a critic's review, and that covers the plot territory pretty well. In short, a car crash draws a man suffering from a sort of sexual burnout into an underground group that fetishizes and recreates famous car crashes. James Ballard and his wife, Catherine, can't drum up the interest for sex anymore without telling each other about their extramarital affairs. After the crash, James and Dr. Helen Remington - the other driver, whose husband is killed in the accident - discover Vaughan, the mastermind of the car crash recreators and a man deeply obsessed with celebrities, cars, and death. Also sex: all of this car crashing is very sexually charged, but filmed in such a way - a cool, metallic color palette; an aloofness from the characters that borders on clinical detachment; Howard Shore's creepy score¹⁰; and it's a sexual fetish that's just too far out there to be real - that it's like pornography that's arousing intellectually, but not physically. If you don't feel weirdly conflicted by that while watching, it's probably because you're having a hard time actually looking at the screen. (Or you're focusing on exposed flesh while ignoring the story itself.)

That wouldn't be unusual. Crash was given an NC-17 rating, and it's definitely not the sort of film you'd want to bring your kids to.¹¹ Among other things, it includes: realistic (i.e., not Hollywood-type stylized) car crashes, complete with steady shots of the bloody aftermath; full frontal nudity; and sex - lots of it - both heterosexual and homosexual. And, unlike just about every other film ever made,¹² the sex scenes are integral both to the narrative and to the flow of the film. They're not simply separate scenes that act as a pause or break in the story arc; they're necessary and need to be in the film in their entirety, graphic sexuality and all. And, boy, are they not a turn-on.

I think this film requires that you bring a lot to it; as a result, reviews cover a wide range of emotional ground. You can't watch it without being affected by your own visceral¹³ response, and the film is so detached from its characters that you need to bring some of your own baggage along to start interpreting. At least, that's what I did. Granted, I need some serious digestion time before I can get around to writing up my own impressions of the film, but I can say that I think I actually liked it. I definitely respect it, and would recommend it to anyone not immediately turned off by the premise.

Just don't expect it to go over real well in a crowd.

* * * * *

¹Cronenbergesque? Anyhow, the idea's based on what little I know of David Cronenberg's abandoned script, Painkillers, as well as his film of J.G. Ballard's novel, Crash.

²The riot-inducing Madison Halloween festivities are another good reason to lounge on the couch. I'm guessing that the "tickets-only" restrictions kept the shenanigans to a minimum this year, but it's still not my scene.

³Meaning straight-up horror. Nothing ironic, regardless of quality.

⁴Not the more recent movie that used the same name, which is officially not cool. Really, couldn't they come up with an original name? It's one thing to title a film like an un- or tangentially-related book/song/whatever, but swiping it from another movie? And one that took a Special Jury Prize at Cannes? Cheap.

⁵It was based on a detective novel - Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammet - which is a genre equally as rooted in American individualism, machismo, and the notion that you don't really need to follow up on the bloody aftermath of gunfights.

⁶I just noticed, next to Monday's New York Times crossword puzzle, a brief Arts article noting that Morricone will be directing his first American concert at Radio City Music Hall in February. The program is drawn from his film scores, and features a 200-piece orchestra and choir. So, who'd they get to play the mouth harp?

⁷As in the way Morricone's best stuff just burrows deep into your brain and refuses to leave.

⁸Tarantino has noted Sergio Leone as a strong influence on his films, and it shows, particularly in Kill Bill.

⁹Yes, Cronenberg's full of humor. It's what prevents his films from being unwatchably disturbing.

¹⁰This isn't about Howard Shore, but it occurs to me now. Shore has written the score for just about all of Cronenberg's films; the key exception is The Dead Zone, for which he was unavailable due to other work. Instead, Cronenberg hired Michael Kamen. While writing the piano score in his London apartment, Kamen's neighbors begged him to stop playing it because it was giving them nightmares.

¹¹I say this because, when seeing Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, a zombie film with no shortage of graphic violence, Sharon and I watched with surprise as a young mother came into the theater with her two children, the older of whom couldn't have been more than five or six.

¹²Excepting pornography, of course, which is about sex for the sake of sex. Roger Ebert described Crash as "anything but pornographic" and "a dissection of the mechanics of pornography".

¹³Matthew Dessem makes a good point about the use of the term "visceral" in his review of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma. His blog, The Criterion Contraption, an attempt to review the Criterion Collection DVD releases in spine number order, is worth reading if you're into, well, the sorts of films that Criterion likes to release. Salò is the sort of film that I'd like to have seen; I'm not sure I'd actually like to see it. (My apologies to Mark Twain.)