It's Only a Movie

by Mark Kermode

  As for The Return of the Living Dead, the real joy for me was the fact that I was seen as some kind of expert in this area because I had actually heard of Dan O’Bannon (who was now probably best known as the co-writer of Alien) and was familiar with Romero’s back catalogue, which I had devoured during late nights at the Phoenix. Moreover, I recognised scream-queen Linnea Quigley, who was rapidly becoming a cult star thanks to low-rent slashers like Savage Streets and Silent Night, Deadly Night. In short, I ‘got’ the movie – and therefore I ‘got’ the gig.

  Since my Return review attracted no abusive letters or legal suits and didn’t actively bring the magazine into disrepute, it was considered that I had basically done a good job. A month or so later I was invited to attend a preview screening of Romero’s Day of the Dead (the official sequel to Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead whose thunder Return had sneakily striven to steal) and felt as though I’d been given the keys to the city. Despite the fact that I’d had precious little published I now viewed myself as a fully-fledged film critic, ready to swap pithy cinematic epithets with anyone and everyone. I was sure of my opinions, certain of my judgement, and immutable in my prejudices, both personal and political.

  I thought I was the next Barry Norman-in-waiting.

  In fact, I was a mouthy know-nothing upstart.

  Over the years, very little has changed.

  In the TV Movie of My Life, the Manchester years would be represented by those cod dreamy flashback sequences in which you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is real or imagined but you’re pretty certain that everyone’s wearing a wig. What I remember most is the sheer intensity of it all – the fact that everything seemed like a matter of life and death. The most emotively fraught battles were in the area of gender politics, with American author Andrea Dworkin’s tub-thumping tome Pornography: Men Possessing Women being required reading for concerned gender warriors everywhere.

  Dworkin hung like a dark shadow over the sexual-political landscape of the eighties, a terrifying voice of doom who explained in thunderous Moses-like tones that everything I’d ever suspected about being a worthless piece of crap was essentially true. If you’ve never read Pornography: Men Possessing Women and you like a good scare then believe me you’re in for a treat – it is one of the most upsetting books ever written, and will leave you wanting to kill either yourself or others. It is ferociously argued and hectoringly delivered – Leon Trotsky was a lightweight compared to Dworkin. Its central thesis (as the title pithily suggests) is that pornography is not only rape but also the perfect expression of man’s wide-ranging subjugation of women over the centuries – a weapon of war, an act of violence, a tool of slavery. Over several hundred incendiary pages, Dworkin conjures a history of prostitution, child abuse, torture, imprisonment and mass murder, and relates – not to say attributes– it all directly to the glossy pages of Hustler magazine and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. By the time she gets to the end of the book she is describing her own soul as having become almost possessed by the demonic presence of porn, and being haunted at night by Gothic apparitions of vile and violent sexuality.

  Substantial credence was lent to Dworkin’s polemic in the early eighties by her association with Linda Lovelace, the former star of the seventies porno-chic blockbuster Deep Throat who had since conducted a dramatic volte-face and become a militant poster girl for the anti-porn lobby. Claiming that her husband/manager Chuck Traynor had beaten, threatened, and otherwise violently coerced her into prostitution and porn, Lovelace published hair-raising accounts of her ordeals which Dworkin was now helping to publicise. Together with fellow campaigner Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin even took the battle against porn to the courts, arguing that it violated the civil rights of women, with Lovelace as one of their star witnesses.

  Many argued that Lovelace’s claims were turncoat baloney – that she had been vociferously enthusiastic about making Deep Throat at the time, and that her subsequent renunciations were self-serving and insincere. But as someone who actually met Chuck Traynor (albeit decades later), let me say that he seemed every bit as unloveable as his former wife had suggested. When making the Channel 4 documentary The Real Linda Lovelace in 2002, I interviewed Chuck in a hotel room in Gainesville, florida, having taken the precaution of asking our burly soundman Duncan to sit between Traynor and me in case he tried to thump me – this being a perfectly understandable response when someone asks if you did indeed arrange for your wife to be gang-raped in a Miami hotel room before ordering her at gunpoint to have on-camera sex with a dog, as Lovelace had famously claimed.

  In the event Chuck’s response was far scarier – he never batted an eyelid, never flinched, nor blanched, nor recoiled, nor nothing. He didn’t even deny that much – certainly not that he knocked his wife around, which he seemed to think was perfectly normal. When confronted with the worst of Lovelace’s allegations, Traynor simply looked at me with ‘aw shucks’ amusement, as if the charges against him simply weren’t that remarkable.

  A few months after our interview, Traynor dropped dead, to the dismay of some of Lovelace’s friends and relatives who declared their sadness that they had been denied the chance to kill him themselves. As for Dworkin (who I also interviewed for that documentary, and who turned out to be really nice and not at all frightening) she surely shed no tears for Chuck who had been living proof of her thesis about the very worst aspects of masculinity. Yet whereas Dworkin believed passionately that porn represented an assault upon women, I came to the conclusion that the truth of Lovelace’s life was both more complex and mundane – she wasn’t the victim of porn per se, but of domestic violence. She married a man who beat her up, battered and prostituted her for the best part of two years, and who ironically only stopped doing so when the success of Deep Throat unexpectedly made her a star. Indeed, there were those close to her who insisted that without the celebrity which that movie bestowed, Lovelace could easily have ended up as ‘just another dead hooker in a hotel room’.

  If there is a moral to Lovelace’s unhappy story, it seems to me to be that porn – which is neither inherently good nor bad – needs to be regulated (rather than outlawed) at the point of creation rather than just the point of distribution. That is something that can only happen if the industry remains legalised and open – perhaps even respectable. Having always been innately suspicious of censorship (growing up as a horror fan will do that to you) it seems self-evident to me that banning porn won’t make it go away, it’ll just make it harder to police. Nor will it stop men beating up women.

  It’s worth pointing out that in her 2005 book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, my partner Linda Ruth Williams argued that many soft-core exploitation videos with titles such as Carnal Crimes and Night Rhythms were actually less politically problematic than their more ‘acceptable’ Hollywood counterparts such as Basic Instinct– and often more interesting. My small role in this book was to transcribe the hours of interviews which Linda had conducted with everyone from A-list Hollywood directors to hard-core sleaze-mongers and frankly the latter often came across as more open-minded on the subject of gender equality. Linda’s conclusion (which I have since stolen and passed off as my own – as with so much of her work) was that films which look leerily misogynist on the outside can often be deceptively subversive, while the most pernicious gender stereotyping thrives unchecked in respectable mainstream fare.

  This mirrors my experience of horror movies, the gawdy trappings of which often hide a level of radical intelligence which critics of the genre simply can’t (or won’t) see. But despite my early confidence about the value of gore, in the early eighties I couldn’t see through Dworkin’s arguments about ‘damaging’ depictions of women, and as a result devoted many hours to toe-curlingly earnest ‘Men Against Sexism’ meetings which were every bit as breast-beatingly awful as they sound. We didn’t do very much except sit around and despise ourselves, to which end we were aided and abetted by screenings of feel-bad movies like N
ot a Love Story: A film About Pornography and readings from Dworkin and her ilk. But even in the midst of all our abject angst, we believed fiercely and inarguably that what we were doing was right…

  One of the great things about knowing that you’re right is that it removes inconvenient self-doubt. My mother, who was a GP, once told me that the more she learned about medicine the more she realised just how little we really understand about the human body. This is not an uncommon conclusion – in almost every field of expertise, the actual extent of someone’s knowledge and understanding can be gauged by the degree to which they are willing to accept that they actually know nothing. While expertise has been characterised as the art of knowing more and more about less and less, true learning (it seems to me) is all about understanding and appreciating just how much you will never know. For example, at the age of forty-six, I am just starting to realise how vast and unbridgeable are the gaps in my knowledge of the history of cinema, a medium which has only been around for just over a century. Even if I dedicated every waking moment of the next twenty years to studying the art of silent cinema, the growth of Indian cinema, the canon of Japanese cinema, and the bewildering marketing expanse of the ‘Pacific Rim’, I’d still be only scratching the surface. I recently read that, at a conservative estimate, something like twenty per cent of the films ever made no longer exist, thanks to the tendency of celluloid to disintegrate over time. Yet even with one fifth of all movies wiped out by the helpful degradations of time, there’s still no hope of me ever being able to declare myself ‘across’ the history of movies which stretches like Cinerama beyond the comforting borders of the horizon. Like my mother, the older I get, the less I know I know.

  Yet at the age of twenty-three, with a couple of dodgy horror movies under my belt and a copy of Dworkin’s book in my coat pocket, I knew that I knew everything. And it was with this utter sense of blinkered self-certainty that I walked out of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet– a film which I now recognise to be one of the greatest movies of the eighties – and straight into somebody’s fist.

  How did this happen? Let’s start at the beginning …

  I had seen David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead as a teenager at the Phoenix, where it played on a regular Friday late-night double bill with George A. Romero’s The Crazies. The film was described by Lynch as ‘a dream of dark and troubling things’ and became the quintessential midnight movie hit in the US before slowly spreading its diseased spell around the globe. A surreal nightmare about a terrified man who finds himself in sole charge of a monstrous child, Eraserhead boasted extraordinary monochrome visuals, a hair-raising performance from Jack Nance (‘Henry’, as previously noted), and a disorientatingly powerful soundtrack cooked up by Lynch and his long-time aural collaborator Alan Splet. In an early review, the trade mag Variety described it as ‘a sickening bad-taste exercise’ – which sounded like a recommendation to me.

  Eraserhead took ages to make; Lynch reportedly started work on it back in May 1972 and didn’t lock the final cut until early 1977. During the course of the film’s protracted gestation and birth, the director wrestled with marriage, divorce and fatherhood, supported himself with a paper round, and fuelled his soul with sugary caffeine drinks from the local Bob’s Big Boy Diner. During one hiatus, he completed the short film The Amputee, images from which would later be echoed in his daughter Jennifer’s feature Boxing Helena . Indeed Jennifer, who was born with club feet, has been quoted as saying that Eraserhead ‘without a doubt … was inspired by my conception and birth, because David in no uncertain terms did not want a family. It was not his idea to get married, nor was it his idea to have children. But … it happened.’

  Exactly what Eraserhead is about remains a mystery. Lynch himself has proven consistently unwilling to explain the film, becoming particularly evasive on the subject of the creation of the ‘baby’ (some reports suggest that it is an animated bovine foetus).The director has, on occasion, claimed that it ‘could have been found’. All we can be certain of is that the film’s primary register is nightmarish and symbolic – it is not to be taken literally.

  Obviously.

  The first time I saw Eraserhead was with my friend Nick Cooper, a schoolmate and jazz pianist whom I would enlist to play drums in an earnest post-punk sixth-form school band called the Basics. When I first met Nick he had a disastrous flyaway haircut and wore flares – an unforgivable crime. After three weeks in the Basics he had a killer crew cut and was sporting skintight Sta-Prest trousers and cool-as-nuts Harrington jackets of varying colours. It was an amazing transformation, for which I would like to take full credit. The truth, however, is that Nick’s straight-legged butterfly emerged from the chrysalis of his eighteen-inch flapping cocoon after he and I went to see TheWanderers at the Barnet Odeon. The film, which was set in the Bronx in 1963, had such a profound effect on both of us that after the screening we opened up the palms of our hands with a rusty penknife and became blood brothers there and then. Nick promptly went home and sorted out his fashion mojo, and remains to this day one of the best-dressed men I have ever met. God bless Philip Kaufman.

  Dress sense aside, Nick’s judgement on movies was not always on the money. Admittedly he was so scared by The Exorcist (which we both saw for the first time together at the Phoenix) that he had to come back to my house and sleep on the floor, for which he will always retain a special place in my affections. And he’d been pretty open to most of the early Cronenberg canon, including Shivers and Rabid, both of which were fairly freaky films full of creepy latex mutations and twisted sexuality. The latter starred porn queen Marilyn Chambers in one of her few ‘straight’ dramatic roles as a woman who becomes infected by a phallic parasite which lives in her armpit and bites people during sex. Chambers had teamed up with Cronenberg at the suggestion of producer Ivan Reitman and had worked on the movie under the watchful gaze of our old friend Chuck Traynor, who was by then her manager/husband, and whom Cronenberg significantly described as ‘not my favourite kind of guy …’

  Anyway, Nick coped with the sexual monsters of Rabid OK, but when it came to Eraserhead and its journey into the dark heart of man’s most deep-set Freudian nightmares, he just didn’t get it at all.

  It was easy to tell when Nick wasn’t ‘getting’ a movie because his left leg would bounce up and down in a state of hyper-caffeinated agitation. The more his left knee trembled, the worse his experience of the film. It was like watching someone review a movie in real time, but from the waist down – even if his mouth said nothing, his fidgeting calf muscles spoke volumes. The leg trembling began about fifteen minutes into Eraserhead, at around the time that Henry first returns home with the mutant baby whose existence is never explained beyond a general sense of creeping guilt about everything.

  As Henry laid the baby on the table, Nick muttered loudly, ‘Well that would never happen.’ At first, I thought he was making some sort of profound surrealist joke, and laughed – it was like looking at a painting of melting watches by Salvador Dali and declaring that ‘they’ll never be very effective timekeepers’. But Nick wasn’t joking. He was seriously doubting that someone would find themselves in the position of having fathered a bizarre alien baby, and then being required to tend to its needs in a small room which contained little other than a bed and a radiator in which lived a hamster-cheeked woman who sang to you at night whilst squishing extraterrestrial sperm beneath the heel of her tap shoes. It just wouldn’t happen.

  My only comparable experience of this sort of overly literal film criticism came when I took my sister Annie to see Lucio Fulci’s entertainingly revolting City of the Living Dead at the ABC in Edgware. She was training to be a doctor, and during one particularly gruey scene in which a demonically possessed young woman vomited up her internal organs, Annie turned to me and whispered, ‘Well that’s not scary – they’re all in the wrong order .’ Apparently the offal spewing from the poor actress’ mouth was not biologically accurate and was therefore failing to send a shiver down m
y sister’s hospital-hardened spine.

  As for Nick, he expressed his belief that Eraserhead ‘just wouldn’t happen’ in increasingly irritated tones, his pulsating left leg throbbing to the rhythm of his growing impatience, causing an entire row of chairs to quiver and quake like jelly on a plate. It was like watching the movie in Sensurround.

  A year or so ago, whilst broadcasting on BBC 5 Live, I described Nick’s declaration that ‘that wouldn’t happen’ as being the stupidest thing I had ever heard anyone say in a cinema. Nick promptly texted me to take full credit for the comment and to assert that he still stood squarely behind his original assessment. This is one of the reasons that I like Nick so much: not only was he the person with whom I had the electrifying experience of watching The Exorcist for the first time, not only was he living proof that a good haircut and a Harrington could turn you from zero to hero overnight – over and above all these things, he was as forthrightly mad and assertive in his opinions of everything as I was. This was a man who, when everyone else was sporting sunny ‘Nuclear Nein Danke!’ stickers had ‘Peace Through NATO!’ proudly emblazoned upon his windshield. Politically we were worlds apart. But personally we really were blood brothers.

  Anyway, back to Manchester. My respect for David Lynch had grown with The Elephant Man, which I took as proof that Nick had been wrong wrong wrong about Eraserhead (after all, John Merrick really did happen) and I’d even had a bash at embracing the dismal Dune, which I remember largely for containing a scene in which Sting comes out of an interstellar steam shower with nothing but a pair of silver wings on his knackers. I could go back to the movie to check whether this scene really happened or whether I’m just making it up but frankly I can’t be bothered – considering Sting’s recent adventures with a lute and his outpourings about tantric sex (not to mention the rotten music he’s made since ‘Roxanne’) I think he deserves to come in for a little un-fact-checked stick. Oh, and for the record, I thought he was crap in Quadrophenia too. Ace Face my arse!