by Nathan Rabin
If you think it’s appropriate to tell the audience at your husband’s memorial that your next-door neighbor got a massive boner while trying to console you, then repeat the word “boner” over and over as the crowd of mourners goes into red-faced hysterics … You might be a manic widow raw with grief!
In writing and directing Elizabethtown, Crowe somehow managed to silence his inner censor and cynic, the naysayer in each of us that implores, “Don’t write that. People will make fun of you. Do you really expect a line like, ‘This loss will be met by a hurricane of love,’ to be met with anything other than a tornado of derisive snickers?” That’s both admirable and insane. Crowe never lets audiences forget that they’re watching not just a Cameron Crowe film but the Cameron Croweiest film in existence, a movie so poignantly personal it makes even the autobiographical Almost Famous look like cynical work-for-hire.
But the purest manifestation of Crowe’s need to afflict audiences with a two-hour-long hurricane of self-love lies in the unbearably twee conception of Drew’s love interest, Claire (Kirsten Dunst). Claire embodies a character type I call the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. (See Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example.) The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors, who use them to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl serves as a means to an end, not a flesh-and-blood human being. Once life lessons have been imparted, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl might as well disappear in a poof! for her life’s work is done.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing proposition. Audiences either want to marry her, or commit grievous bodily harm upon her and her immediate family. Claire, for all her overly caffeinated joie de vivre, falls on the wrong side of that divide. She is a prolific disseminator of Crowe’s patented big pop-operatic moments, whether she’s keeping Drew awake and giddy during an all-night cell-phone verbal duet, or sending him on an intricately mapped-out road trip that ends the film on a note of delirious excess.
I once had a Manic Pixie Dream Girlfriend who induced terrifying Elizabethtown flashbacks. We even bonded over a marathon phone call that left us exhausted and exhilarated in equal measure. Not long after we started dating, she began asking if I was falling in love with her, over and over. At the risk of waxing hyperbolic, it was the single most annoying thing in the history of the universe. It was as if she was trying to bully me into falling in love. That’s the essence of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl: She doesn’t ask for our love, she demands it. But love isn’t enough. She also needs to be romanticized, idealized, fetishized, worshipped, and adored. You know, all the stupid shit young men do. She glares impishly in our direction menacingly with a look that says, “You better fall in love with me, fuckface, or I will open up a big can of joy on that ass.”
Elizabethtown shows what happens when a gifted writer-director lets his heart do his brain’s work for him. Yet the film stuck with me in ways genuinely successful films haven’t. I still talk and think about it all the time. The origins of My Year Of Flops began with Elizabethtown. By the time Drew embarked on a Claire-orchestrated road trip set to a mixtape of Crowe’s favorite songs, Elizabethtown was starting to barrel through my formidable defenses. [So I vowed to rewatch it later in the project, to see if another viewing would win me over. Did it? Find out later, when I revisit Elizabethtown as the very last Case File in this here book.]
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
Book-Exclusive Savage In Its Barbaric Intensity Case File: The Conqueror
In his book Citizen Hughes: The Power, The Money, And The Madness, Michael Drosnin quotes extensively from a memo the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes fired off to top aide Robert Maheu, chronicling a glimpse of hell he’d spied on television. Claiming the sight “litterally and actually physically made me nauseated,” Hughes goes on to describe the nightmare vision of “the biggest, ugliest negro you ever saw in your life … covered—litterally [sic] covered from head to foot with Vaseline almost ¼ of an inch thick.”
That image alone was enough to fuel Hughes’ nightmares, but what happened next sent him into a rage. The Vaseline-smeared man-beast lurched savagely over to what Hughes describes as “an immaculately dressed white woman—sort of an English noblewoman type” and subjected her to an obscene, endless open-mouthed kiss with the power to single-handedly destroy civilization and usher in a hellscape of raging, open miscegenation.
The “biggest, ugliest negro you ever saw in your life” in question was James Earl Jones. The “English noblewoman type” was Jane Alexander. And the film was 1970’s The Great White Hope. It wasn’t the only time the terrifying prospect of miscegenation threw the easily excited tycoon into a tizzy. Hughes was so horrified at what he saw as a “sinful interracial assignation” (it was actually a light-skinned black woman dating a darker-skinned black man) on The Dating Game that he fired off another enraged memo to Maheu and put the kibosh on plans to spend $200 million to buy ABC, the network that ran The Dating Game.
What does Howard Hughes’ profound discomfort at a young James Earl Jones fiendishly rubbing his Vaseline-coated body all over the delicate ladyparts of proper white women have to do with My Year Of Flops? Judging by 1956’s The Conqueror, which Hughes produced through his RKO studio, miscegenation obsessed him well before he traded in the high life for television, solitude, and insanity.
One of the biggest, ugliest epics you never saw in your life, The Conqueror is only slightly less obsessed with the carnal possibilities of folks from different ethnicities getting it on than Interracial Gang Bang Sluts Volume 7. The Conqueror offers a mind-bending act of interracial minstrelry, as supercracker John Wayne fused DNA with the great Asian conqueror eventually known as Genghis Khan but known as Temujin here to become an odd creature known, to me at least, as John Wayneghis Khan. Marvel at this strange beast, neither Caucasian nor Asian! Gawk at the unconvincing makeup and silly Fu Manchu designed to transform a top American movie star into the living personification of what old-time folks called the Yellow Peril!
While Wayneghis Khan is not quite white and not quite Asian, the object of his intense erotic fascination, Bortai (Susan Hayward), a goddess with skin the color of bone china, is ostensibly the daughter of a Tatar leader. Yet she’s codified unmistakably as a cross between an icy Southern belle and what Hughes would describe approvingly as an “English noblewoman type.”
Hayward plays her haughty empress of the desert as the Scarlett O’Hara of Central Asia, an ice queen who must be tamed by the calloused hands and hot breath of the right savage. The film’s first half is one long intimation of sexual violence, as Wayneghis Khan violates Bortai with his eyes and defiles her with his crude words before bludgeoning his way into her heart and loins through sheer force.
In that respect, the philosophy of Wayneghis Khan echoes the personal ethos of Hughes, who didn’t court women so much as conquer them. Hughes undoubtedly saw an awful lot of himself in Genghis. Hughes was a fascinating contradiction: He was simultaneously a superhero and a supervillain, Tony Stark as Iron Man and the Mandarin, a comic-book nemesis descended, appropriately enough, from Genghis Khan. Hughes seduced movie stars and crashed experimental planes for fun and profit. It makes sense that he would be drawn to figures as outsized as Wayne and Genghis.
What did Hughes see when he looked at Wayneghis Khan in The Conqueror? Did he see a surrogate for his own boundless ambition and unrelenting determination? Or did he see a terrifying Other that would not rest until it transformed the raging hatred of an idealized White Woman into sweaty, uncontrollable lust? Did he see Genghis as a threat, or as a figure of wish fulfillment? That ambiguity is a big part of what makes The Conqueror equal parts compelling and repellent.
Actor-turned-director William Powell makes the regressive racial politics of his Far East Western apparent in an opening crawl that ushers audiences into a 12th-century Gobi desert that “seethed with unrest,” as “petty chieftains pursued their small am
bitions with cunning and wanton cruelty. Plunder and rapine were a way of life, and no man trusted his brother.” Other than that, though, it was pretty chill.
The filmmakers weren’t kidding about rapine and plunder being a way of life. From the moment Wayneghis Khan spies Bortai—who’s reclining languidly atop a yak-pulled caravan with a bored look that says, “Calgon or a fiery yellow brute, take me away!”—he’s intent on having her, preferably by force.
Thus begins one of cinema’s most rapecentric romances. The purple dialogue is riddled with references to sexual assault. When Wayneghis Khan brings Bortai to meet his hunched-over crone of a mother, she counsels, “Let your slaves have their sport with her!” When Wayneghis Khan checks his internal moral compass/circulatory system to decide whether rape is the right choice for him, he reports back, “My blood says ‘take her.’” He threatens Bortai’s father by vowing, “Your treacherous head is not safe on your shoulders, nor [Bortai] in her bed!” He also warns, “While I live, while my blood burns hot, your daughter is not safe in her tent.”
“He took what he wanted, when he wanted it!” screams the film’s trailer before tastefully promising “Barbaric passions!” and “Savage conquests!” Sure enough, Wayneghis Khan expresses his fondness for Bortai by ripping off her dressing gown and vowing to soil her lady virtue.
The Conqueror’s violence isn’t limited to constant references to rape. At one point, a chieftain describes, with altogether too much relish, what is referred to as the “slow death”: “Joint by joint, from the toe and fingertip upwards, shall you be cut to pieces, and each carrion piece, hour by hour and day by day, shall be cast to the dogs before your very eyes, until they, too, shall be plucked out as morsels for the vultures!” This is seriously nasty stuff, an ungodly cross between a lurid paperback novel (Her Savage Love!) and a porn film with the sex removed.
Powell and Hughes’ film feels dirty and borderline pornographic, and not just because of its loathsome racial politics, its rape-happy hero in yellowface, and its looming threat of sexual violence. Hughes’ millions could buy big stars and big production values, but it couldn’t buy taste or professionalism. Accordingly, an air of amateurishness hangs heavy over the film. Some of the dialogue is so unwieldy it appears to be poorly translated from Cantonese. You have to really ponder a line like, “You know ill the son of Yessugai!” (which is Wayneghis Khan’s convoluted way of saying, “Y’all don’t know me, dog!”), and you have to keep the right punctuation in mind just for it to make sense. Otherwise, it could easily be mistaken for, “You know Ill, the son of Yessugai? He just purchased a lovely new tent! He’s quite the macher, that Ill! Yessugai must be proud!”
Wayne shouts every line through clenched teeth, like an actor in a fifth-grade production whose ambition begins and ends with making sure his parents in the back row can hear him. What Wayne’s acting lacks in competence, it makes up for in volume: He doesn’t deliver his lines so much as declaim them to the heavens.
Wayneghis eventually succeeds in wearing down Bortai’s defenses. But first, they enter into an endless dance of seduction and repulsion, love and hate. In the film’s most memorable sequence, he takes Bortai to a palace where they watch exotic Mongol dancers writhe with sensual abandon. When one of their hosts inquires why Bortai seethes with such barely restrained animosity, Wayneghis Khan jokes, “Lacking the talents of these women, the sight of them irks her.”
Eager to prove him wrong, Bortai indulges in an erotic dance of her own. The untouchable ice princess is revealed to be a carnal creature after all. The sword she flings at him as a crowning gesture is The Conqueror’s idea of foreplay. Bortai can’t resist much longer. She tells his brother, “Tell me of Temujin. I know of him only that on a sudden, my hatred for him could not withstand my love.”
The Conqueror loses much of its creepy power in its second half, as the train-wreck fascination of dialogue like “Not even the mighty Kasar bends iron forged by Sorgan. There’s a secret in the dipping of it” gives way to a bloody, simple-minded, fairly conventional B-Western with Eastern epic trappings.
The Conqueror’s legacy is only partly rooted in the surreal incongruity of John Wayne turning Genghis Khan into a shit-kicking cowboy with ridiculous facial hair and its abhorrent racial/sexual politics. Much of the debacle’s infamy stems from Hughes’ decision to film the movie downwind from a nuclear testing site, a decision that might have contributed to the cancer deaths of Powell, Wayne, Hayward, and costar Agnes Moorehead.
Hughes reportedly felt so guilty about the film and the death of many of its principals that he paid $12 million for every existing print and didn’t allow it to be seen on television until 1974. The Conqueror marked the end of Hughes’ dalliance with filmmaking; he’d never produce another film (RKO put out Jet Pilot in 1957, but it was completed in 1949). The film was predictably eviscerated by critics and ignored by audiences before being embraced as übercamp by bad-movie aficionados.
It could be argued that God delivered a final punishment to the makers of The Conqueror for their transgressions against cinema. But no one deserves to die for making a bad movie, even a film as egregiously awful as The Conqueror. Hughes was lucky enough to avoid cancer. Instead, obsessive-compulsive disorder hastened his descent into madness and paranoia. According to show-business legend, he rewatched The Conqueror repeatedly during the grim final years of his life, dreaming in the dark about a world waiting to be conquered and a legendary warrior whose savage lust for power, women, and glory must have struck him as terrifying yet familiar.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Fiasco
Upside Down And Starting To Like It That Way Case File #58: The End Of Violence
Originally Posted August 14, 2007
Wim Wenders’ 1997 muddle The End Of Violence surveys a United States where the government covertly spies on its own people in the name of protecting them. It anticipates a paranoid national climate of free-floating dread, where citizens are willing to sacrifice liberty for security. The attacks of September 11 and the rise of the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act should lend the film an air of uncanny prescience. So why does Wenders’ moody meditation on violence feel more like the paranoid ravings of a street-corner lunatic than like a profound act of pop-art prophecy? Probably because while Wenders gets a few crucial things right, he gets nearly everything else hilariously, unbelievably, almost inconceivably wrong—particularly violence, movies, American culture, human psychology, and (oh, dear Lord) gangsta rap. Sometimes it takes foreign eyes to discern great truths about our country that are invisible to natives, like when Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita. (I discuss that book and its second film adaptation in a later chapter.) And sometimes it takes a foreigner to craft a portrayal of our culture so bizarrely off base that it borders on bad science fiction. The End Of Violence holds a funhouse mirror up to our culture’s obsession with violence, and the result is a portrait of God’s own USA that’s distorted, grotesque, and borderline unrecognizable.
Wenders’ film asks what it imagines is a deep, relevant question: How do violence merchants like Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver sleep at night? I’m guessing the answer is, “Soundly, and with high-priced, 19-year-old call girls on either side of them.”
The End Of Violence centers on gruff, well-compensated Hollywood superproducer Mike Max (Bill Pullman), who decides he needs to be less like Don Simpson and more like Jesus Christ after a pair of sloppy contract killers nearly murder him. In pretentious death-of-the-soul movies like this, there’s a direct correlation between spiritual emptiness and technology usage. So it’s telling that Mike’s high-powered vulgarian is introduced alternately communicating through video conferencing, a headset, a cell phone, and a football-sized mobile phone. If Mike were even slightly more removed from nature, his feelings, and his family, he’d also be manning a CB radio (“Ten-four, good buddy, looks like the missus got herself a killer case a that, whaddyacallit, existential ennui!”).
While manning his interpersonal battle station, Mi
ke gets distressing news from one of his underlings: Someone has dropped a 400-page file in his e-mail! On the Intern-nets! Using various tubes! Shortly thereafter, a pair of goons nearly murder Mike, and he goes on the lam as an anonymous everyman. After surviving his close call with death, he begins behaving like a hard-boiled gumshoe in a Mickey Spillane paperback. While recuperating, Mike rasps, “There’s nothing quite like a couple of killers with a shotgun to your head to make you pay attention.” So Mike gives up the Hollywood good life to toil as a humble gardener in a Latino neighborhood. He’s like a Hollywood Jesus who came back from the dead solely to finish his work as a carpenter.
Mike continues to dispense bite-sized nuggets of hard-boiled wisdom throughout the film. Here are some other choice selections from my forthcoming book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned From The Narration In The End Of Violence: “There are no enemies or strangers. Just a strange world.” “‘Perversely’: That’s one thing I think I can define now. It’s when things are upside down and you start to like them that way.” “The thing about a sudden attack is, you never know where it’s coming from.” (Also, it happens suddenly, and involves an attack.) “I guess sometimes your friends are really your enemies. Sometimes your enemies are your friends. Sometimes they’re one and the same. Who can you trust? Reminds me of what a prick I was.”
So anyway. The botched Mike assassination is linked to a mysterious FBI program run by sad-eyed ex–NASA man Ray Bering (Gabriel Byrne), who spies furtively on the citizens of Los Angeles from countless unseen electronic eyes scattered throughout the city.
Even before Mike’s mysterious disappearance, his wife, Page (Andie MacDowell), seems to be suffering a terminal case of art-film ennui, a condition she expresses by lurching about in a depressed, vaguely narcotized haze and babbling spacily about how being married to Mike is like being a sentient rocketship with him at the controls. Page stares vacantly into space, mopes, and cries—first a single perfect tear, then a whole stream of them. This is somehow supposed to be distinguishable from MacDowell’s usual performances. The End Of Violence affords ample time to contemplate the enigma that is Andie MacDowell’s face: perfect, icy, remote, empty.