by Mark Foss
AT THE AGE of ascension, I began chanting practice after my voice broke. Joseph, who was just as entranced by Candy as everyone else, took little notice of my development. He had a secret weapon in his daughter, and no need of a son to succeed him. Candy would continue to dazzle patrons for years to come. This was what he thought. We all did.
The first two years of high school were unbearable without the presence of Candy and Rox. Hoss, the prog-rock stoner entered his senior years, acknowledged my presence at school only to hit me up for loose change to cap the munchies. I stopped reproducing Dylan quotes on the ceiling of the bus shelter, and instead stroked off days until the girls’ arrival with a black magic marker.
When the girls started high school, and we all took the same bus again, nothing and everything had changed. The tormentors were two years older, but their underdeveloped imaginations were still mired in schoolyard taunts. “Slut” and “Lezzie” were the best they could do. Candy and Rox responded, if at all, through amplification, cuddling up to each other on their seats.
At the orientation for new students — a mock slave auction — the other grade-nine girls wore low-cut tops and batted eyes at the senior boys, desperate to carry their books around for the day. Candy and Rox stunned the room into silence by arriving in blackface and torn dungarees. The vice principal, whose amateur chant was already a half stutter, lost his good-natured chuckle. Sensing an attack on the school’s hallowed traditions of afternoon exploitation, he coldly proceeded to sell the girls off.
Most potential slave owners seemed worried about the girls’ unruly character. There were only two of us, me and an unknown opponent in the back row. I suspected it was Hoss, eager to punish Candy for her perceived slights against his character all these long years. Not me. I would be a righteous man with a good heart, fair in my demands, respectful of their proud lineage, accepting of their peccadilloes.
Knowing his need for weed would prevail over all other concerns, it was easy to outbid Hoss. I won the girls for seventeen dollars. Except after one look into Candy’s green eyes, I released them unconditionally. Emancipated, they showed no gratitude for my selfless act. Why should they have? They were free spirits.
11
HOSS AND CANDY DEVELOPED A remarkable talent for mutual avoidance, as if they had sat down and mapped each tour around the halls with military precision. I admired their tenacity, single-mindedness, and resolve to have nothing to do with each other. Then there was me, volunteering for self-appointed reconnaissance and spy missions. How often Candy and Rox passed through the corridor of the cafeteria during lunch hour. At what times they stepped out for breaks in the smoking area. When Candy wore jewellery pilfered from our mother’s dresser rather than auction leftovers. It all got stored, this useless intelligence, for the day that more advanced technology could interpret patterns for meaning.
I followed them on their tours through the school, observing the turned heads, the open mouths, the hateful gazes. They passed a group of girls standing by their open lockers. They sniggered, and, putting on their best Cher voices, sang the opening line to “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves.” Candy was the tramp. Her green eyes had grown deeper, her olive skin darker, her curls more seductive, her mouth more immovable, and lips fuller, as if borrowed from the face of a Hollywood starlet. Her slinky houndstooth dress, vintage Bakelite earrings, and saddle shoes were completely at odds with her peers’ factory outlet jeans and t-shirts. Rox, with her calico dress, bohemian shawl, and Gitanes, was the gypsy. I was the thief, flitting unnoticed through the free-for-all of the halls, stealing glances at Candy and Rox. I figured out their schedules, arranged to fall in a few paces behind as they walked to class, never close enough to get caught. It was exhilarating, this game. Better than sitting on the sidelines.
If Candy and Rox were the most outlandishly dressed students in the school, I was the most chameleon-like. My jeans, T-shirts, and checkered lumberjack shirt were perfectly calibrated to disguise me as another tree in the forest. Even so, I didn’t have to steal glances, not really. Candy and Rox were so wrapped up in themselves that I could pass unnoticed between them. Some days I thought Candy and Rox had stolen my life. In truth, I had given it up willingly, and they remained blissfully unaware of the gesture. Nor would they have appreciated it. This was what hurt the most.
I was the Grant with the wrong genes. Instead of living up to my namesake on Bonanza — the hell-bent, impetuous young firebrand — I was pathetically eager to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of my siblings in the eyes of the teachers. Unless he was stoned, Hoss could not hold a pen or peck at a typewriter without risk of third-degree burns. When he showed up in class, he preferred to talk, waving his hands to cool them down. He excelled at seminars and class participation, where he provided both the questions and the answers. The teachers couldn’t shut him up. Candy, they couldn’t get to talk at all. With her otherworldly sense of fashion, she held her tongue firmly in her cheek, relying on the written, typed, and chalked-up word. For unavoidable oral presentations, she worked in tandem with Rox, who altered her voice slightly to indicate when she was speaking for her friend. Stuck between my siblings, in eleventh grade, I strove for the middle ground between too much and too little of anything.
My bland countenance gave the teachers some relief from the extreme states of Hoss and Candy. Behind my controlled exterior, my temperature ran hot and cold, and my vocal chords were knotted with half-finished auction chants, stillborn shouts, and unwanted silence. I was a watched kettle. No one witnessed when my anger boiled over or the self-recrimination that followed.
There is a scene in every horror film where the protagonists are about to do something stupid. We, in the audience, know it’s a mistake. We shout to warn them. We curse. We wring our hands helplessly. Nothing makes any difference. The characters cannot outrun their fate.
Beecroft, the science teacher who ran the photography club, started up a weekly showcase of silent cinema classics. I told Candy, lamented she was too young to appreciate the films, and then waited for her to show up to spite me. Of course Rox joined, and so all three of us saw Mary Pickford in The Foundling playing a character named Molly O.
Molly O
The Seductive cinema of Mickey Nailand
Home Films Suppositions About Me
Going, going, gone
The Auction Films, Part I
Posted by LJ
Payment for goods and services is never simple in Nailand’s films. The cost of everything is always in question, requiring intense negotiations — whether for sex or a loaf of bread — and time is always on the seller’s side. The incessant bartering creates a permanent state of unease in viewers, at least those who have seen more than one or two of his films. We know the moment will arrive in a male character’s storyline where a speedy purchase will be necessary to achieve his aims, and that a woman will thwart his desires.
Arguably, the back-and-forth over money finds its purest expression in Nailand’s two “auction films” where the bang of the gavel announcing a final sale resonates with the moral weight of a courtroom judge. What is Nailand trying to say? That love has no price? Or that sex is always a transaction? One thing is clear: Molly O appears exceptionally comfortable in her roles in the auction films, as if she were born to play them.
In the original version of Daddy Long Legs (1919), an orphan girl named Jerusha placed in a boarding school by an anonymous donor grows up to fall in love with the older man who is paying her tuition. In Nailand’s hands, Jerusha — played by Molly O — quickly discovers the identity of her wealthy benefactor and his nefarious scheme to seduce her, and hatches a plan to milk him for all he’s worth. Exploiting his infatuation with her at Fifth Avenue boutiques, she pushes him to buy expensive items “before the store closes.” She even manages to get him to sign over his deluxe penthouse “to save on taxes.” All the while, he enjoys free access to her body, without recognizing the true cost of the sex.
In the penultimate scene at
an art auction, the man is visibly distressed at the escalating price for a Van Gogh, but seemingly in a trance brought on by the auctioneer’s chant. Seizing the bid card from his hand, Jerusha wins the auction. While she hangs Sunflowers in her new penthouse home, the man barters for an apple at a food stall — a sly evocation of Marlene Dietrich’s “What Am I Bid for My Apple?” sequence in Morocco. With the seller — a woman, of course — closing up for the night, he again pays too much. But Jerusha, having outwitted the naive lover and “won,” is already bored. Jerusha sits naked at the table, her back to us, pulling off the petals of a daisy in a silent “He loves me/he loves me not” ritual. With the answer still in doubt, the film curiously cuts to the auctioneer walking along Fifth Avenue. He stops, looks up at the penthouse, as if aware of Jerusha’s presence, as if it’s his love she wonders about.
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12
MARY PICKFORD, THE INNOCENT WITH the curls who demanded top pay and created United Artists with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. Theda Barra, the original vamp who believed bad girls were never forgotten. Louise Brooks, the manipulative woman-child whose bobbed hairstyle remains iconic. Candy took great pains to imitate her new silent film heroines on the auction stage, leaving behind television characters, commercials, and, essentially, any need for a male narrator to piece it all together.
But still I tried. Despite Joseph’s best evocations of Cecil B. DeMille, a Bolex camera, eight hundred feet of 16 millimetre film, and a Steenbeck editing machine went un-purchased. I saved them from the junk heap, offering to film Candy’s performances. No, she wanted Rox as her director of photography. No male presence sizing her up, deciding on the frame, determining what parts of her to display. The messy bits, no problem, I could do that. In the school’s dark room, under the soft red glow of the safe light, I wound film diligently back and forth through the tank. Not one inch of Candy’s performance would be underdeveloped or scratched. Never mind that Rox’s first attempts turned out to be shaky handhelds and laboured tracking shots.
I started up the Steenbeck at the lowest speed, thinking a slower pace would help me learn how to edit more easily, but the film stuttered through the pulleys and rollers until I blew a fuse. Joseph helped me clean the circuit board and the motor, and we shifted the speeds up and down to get the thing running properly, much like we switched the channel tuner of the Predicta back and forth when we lost the signal from a station. The Steenbeck remained temperamental, which made me feel indispensable. I was the only one who could coax it to life. Once Candy realized how much the editor shapes a film’s outcome, she insisted I pass on my skills to Rox. Why was I so unfailingly easy to get along with? Where was the indignation, the storming off, the bartering? Was I not the son of an auctioneer? No, I was a stray hair on a lens, clinging for purpose until blown off.
Going, going, gone opened with Candy in a short black dress, a feather boa over her shoulders, carrying a wicker basket, evoking Dietrich’s cabaret performance of “What Am I Bid for My Apple?” Holding a Golden Delicious in her palm, Candy played Eve, tempting male auction-goers to discover a new paradise. Much later, Candy appeared in tails to evoke the famous kiss between Dietrich and a woman at the cabaret. This was fuel for the gossip at school about her and Rox. But she went beyond provoking a titter caused by a same-sex kiss to capture, perhaps unwittingly, her true essence. For Candy did not kiss Rox. Instead, she approached a mirror with a knowing look, removed her top hat and stared into her own eyes as she kissed her mirror image. The scene lasted much longer than the viewer’s comfort level.
For years, the crowd scenes bothered me. They appeared almost as still photos with no real connection to what was happening on the stage. I studied them anyway, convinced I could find a clue to Candy’s disappearance amid the nondescript faces. With a magnifying glass, I examined facial expressions for any sign of menace. Unlike Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and its pit filled with grubby peasants, the three sides of Joseph’s stage were surrounded by men of every class. I had pet names for everyone — Gardener, Dealer, Combover, Junkman, Cottager, Bourgeois Cousin, Loser. It was Porky who made me shiver.
The lighting was poor, and his face covered in shadow, but I sensed Porky was an average-looking man, neither handsome nor homely. Too young to be interested in auctions. He crossed his arms against his chest, apparently indifferent. Unlike all the other men who look to the stage and Candy, Porky appeared in all four crowd scenes, standing in much the same way under his pork pie hat — eyes to the camera, blank expression. I didn’t like him and what I took as an imitation of Lester Young’s elegance. Since he was so focussed on Rox and her camera, my suspicions went no further.
Molly O
The Seductive cinema of Mickey Nailand
Home Films Suppositions About Me
The Days and Nights of Molly O
Posted by LJ
Molly O’s Wikipedia biography reports her real name as Sharon O’Riley, “from the small town of Deep River, Ontario.” But Deep River is the home of the wide-eyed blonde played by Naomi Watts in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive — the girl who wins the jitterbug contest and arrives in Hollywood only to become a disillusioned, broken-hearted drug addict stuck in bit parts. Someone is having us on. Molly O’s true identity may never be known, although — like the Lynch heroine — she may well have arrived freshly scrubbed from small-town Canada, perhaps from one of the villages and towns close to Shephardsville, the town in northern New York State where Nailand got his start.
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13
THE GUYS IN OUR HIGH school were weekend squatters in Shephardsville. We were under the influence of boredom and bad taste, longing to escape our country roads and our so very provincial drinking-age laws. The guards at the border waved us through and the bouncers at the bars waved us in. We could not pass for locals — our look was too clean-cut, our gaze too eager, our accent too apparent even against the pounding music. But they accepted our funny money on par with their own greenbacks, and we felt like equals. Superiors, even. Yes, we made friends with trailer-park girls and when one of their fathers went off drinking we stocked up at Jack’s Liquors and hightailed it back to their boxes for even cheaper drunks. We were just passing through, and none of us would have wished for the dreary lives we saw playing out. At the end of a Shepardsville Saturday Night, if no one had slashed our Canadian tires, we could easily leave all the tawdriness behind. When I was designated to drive, I held my breath at the border, fearing the supposedly scentless Vodka would give me away or that like in the celebrated opening sequence of Touch of Evil, the car would explode as soon as we cleared customs. The edge of danger made me feel alive, and I body-slammed our common wall in the hope of convincing Candy that I existed.
I STUMBLED ONTO Shepardsville again in the most unlikely of places: the study room of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York.
Spending my sabbatical looking for Candy at greasy diners across the continent seemed far more interesting than searching for something new to say about Film, Samuel Beckett’s collaboration with Buster Keaton. I leafed absently through filing cabinets, searching for an unfamiliar experimental filmmaker to ignite my old passion. Mickey Nailand, with his Buster Keaton-style pork pie hat, his Shepardsville origin, and his affinity for Mary Pickford, intrigued me. More than that, he looked vaguely familiar. I figured our paths crossed in a Shep bar.
Then it hit me: he is the creepy figure of Porky in the crowd in Going, going, gone. Playing the girls’ film back in my mind, I finally saw what’s not there: Mickey Nailand is not holding a bid card. He did not come to the Wasteland to barter for someone else’s unwanted property. No high bid checked off the foolscap. No American funds accepted at par. He came for Candy, and he would take her from us without payment.
I watched One Hundred Percent American turned slightly in the swivel chair, unable to experience it head-on. Despite all the oblique clues, I was unwilling to accept the obvious. Because, for all the film�
�s cleverness, it shows a young woman engaged in sexual acts; this is not the future I envisioned for Candy. Later, this hesitation was what ultimately convinced me. An intellectual critique of erotica and porn conventions would have been cheap and smug. Instead, Nailand teases us. He opens the peephole and shuts it again. He refuses to let us forget our baser instincts, forcing us to analyze the contradictions between desire and detachment. The actress embodies this vision with a rare force of eroticism, humour, and intelligence, recreating, expanding, challenging, enticing. Her sensibility, on top of the physical resemblance and the imbedded clues in the story and visual treatment, convinced me that Molly O and Candy are one and the same.
Molly O
The Seductive cinema of Mickey Nailand
Home Films Suppositions About Me
Ring them bells
The Auction Films, Part II
Posted by LJ
While M’liss is Mickey Nailand’s most notorious film, One Hundred Percent American is his most accomplished. The Pickford original is jingoistic kitsch, wrapping the flag up in a girl, a ball, and Liberty Bonds. Nailand’s version of One Hundred Percent American depicts a politically incorrect draft dodger — played by the director — crossing the Canadian border for sanctuary.
The draft dodger wants to satisfy the sexual needs of an auctioneer’s daughter, but the girl understands quickly that his attentions are more about his own need to control. They go back and forth, like an auctioneer up against a determined bidder, with the familiar refrain of “going once, going twice, sold!” offset against the idea of “coming” once, twice, and three times.
The sex is both explicit and oblique — intended not so much to tease the audience as to comment on its desire. Black and white, and silent, it uses inter-titles to express dialogue. As if seeing “Oh, Oh, Oh, Yes!” on the screen isn’t absurd enough, Nailand inserts the words at the height of the sexual encounter as a kind of seventh veil — to conceal rather than reveal. They appear in ornate calligraphy, recalling the font used in Pickford’s films, which heightens the strangeness. The inter-titles are uncredited, but the feminine feel clearly suggests a woman’s touch.