The Talkies/To Die in Bed

...Here is one of the great sex-death documents in cultural history made to look like an exercise in Theatre of the Absurd...

...Is this a tic on the aging soundtrack, or just part of the general surreal effect...

...It is in a way a remake of Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim (starring Jeanne Moreau as the most convincing Belle Dame sans Merci ever), a picture I revere...

...in Final Analysis la Belle Dame turned out to be after just money, not Richard Gere's soul...

...Date Signature Name Address City State Zip L .1 49 gangers of each other and the woman they love is really two women, who are also Doppelgangers...

...Either it may not have happened the way we thought it did, but they're not going to tell us, or else the ice pick is going to be a sex-toy so that Michael Douglas can recapture some of the danger-thrill that came with what he calls "the f--- of the century...

...Like Potiphar's wife, she is the image of the sex-danger that is not optional, that gets you just from being around women...

...N Marlowe braves not merely the babe with the ice pick but the God who has said "Thou shalt not...

...The two men are Doppel48 The American Spectator June 1992 LEMLEY, YARLING & CO...

...Instead of allowing Michael Douglas's flirtation with a violent death in bed—something that gives him a real rush—to end in a sweet domestic idyll, the movie's final shot is of an ice pick under the bed of the cutie who, we think, didn't dunit...

...There is an interesting variation on the theme here, though, as Queen Isabella's Dame sans Merci, played by Tilda Swinton, destroys her husband (Steven Waddington) not because he has yielded to her but because he hasn't...

...The spare ice pick means that either the authors are playing with us or the principals are playing with each other...

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...It is too narcissistic on the one hand and too political (the wicked power establishment are all homophobes while the gay king is supported by a real-life demonstration by homosexual activists) on the other to produce a truly Marlovian challenge to the prudishness of the universe...

...The fatal temptress here (Alice Krige) is a sort of vampire that can change shapes...

...We need a Keats or a Spenser to exploit this revived mythic potentiality, but all we have instead are the ham-fisted mythmakers of Hollywood...

...All three of them are children, adults, and old people, yet there is no narrative continuity either to their lives or to the story...

...The American Spectator June 1992 47 it not infrequently does, it does better to stick to the realistic conventions of, say, the police thriller...

...The result of this razing of the context makes Othello's jealous passion nearly as arbitrary as Iago's malevolence...

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...After a few sweet moans, she has spirited him off to her elfin grot, lulled him to sleep, and, next thing you know, the guy's history...

...That is why the film tries to take the association between sex and danger beyond the point at which we discover, we think, whodunit...

...Remember what they did to Beauty and the Beast last year...

...The beautiful woman who murders her lovers with an ice pick at the moment of orgasm comes, I take it, from male brooding upon the Tough Woman myth, to which I have so often had occasion to call readers' attention before...

...The famous scene of bone grinding in a crematorium from the conclusion of Truffaut's masterpiece is reshot a la Dormael, and its emotional impact is completely transformed-from bittersweet melancholy to something approaching hilarity as the dead hero's ashes are scattered (not allowed in Jules et Jim) by a 1930s style pilot in goggles who tears the packet of Toto's remains open with his teeth...

...And the thrill of seeing him pull it off is not unlike that of believing for a moment in non-destructive sexual love...

...His Edward II is, like all of his plays, both repellent and fascinating, and you might expect that in the hands of Derek Jarman, who is himself an AIDS sufferer, there would be some pretty heavy-duty overtones of sex-death...

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...Welles pares the Shakespearean words down to the bone and the unfleshed skeleton does a macabre dance that is more interesting than moving...

...If the idea is to preserve something of the terror that the sex-death juxtaposition has aroused earlier in the film, it doesn't work...

...In Sea of Love it wasn't the girl after all (phew...

...The only thing that frightens them is cats...

...everything's okay...

...Sometimes it seems as if there can never again be a British production of a classic play without some such anachronistic (and stupid) politicization...

...He has taken the basic story line of two men's passion for the same woman and twisted it into knots...

...Hatred is as important here as love, but by the end it is impossible to tell them apart...

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...Today, after the no-fault sex of the sixties and seventies, AIDS has given the sex-death connection a new resonance...

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...But in Basic Instinct they go all the way: it is the girl—maybe more than one of them—and she is a lesbian, or bisexual, who does it for kicks...

...The men are enemies rather than friends...

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...Mama vampire uses her handsome son as a catspaw—you should pardon the expression—to inveigle a young virgin (the generically named Madchen Amick) into what mama hopes will be a fatal love affair...

...No, if Hollywood wants to tackle the sex-death complex, as ("Vi2uerie is the conscrvatives' Voice ofAmcrica...

...Instead of the mythic horror's attaching itself to sex, it is only stipulated of sex with cute, shape-shifting vampires who drive TransAms—something most of us do not find it difficult to avoid...

...s kipping rapidly over Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog, whose appallingly awful pastiche of Bergman and Kafka makes neither love nor death in the least convincing, we come to the Film of the Month: Jaco van Dormael's Toto le Heros, which is full of wit, intelligence, genuine feeling, and utterly captivating performances from all its actors...

...All the night-time scenes, for example, are obviously filmed in broad daylight and no one thinks anything about it...

...Both of James Bowman, The American Spectator's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...Toto le Heros doesn't buy it anymore than Jules et Jim did, but it is somehow a more hopeful and joyous film than it would be if it had: CI The American Spectator June 1992...

...Derek Jarman does not believe in that God anyway, and the fact that he, like other AIDS activists, is looking around for someone else to blame for his predicament is hardly emotionally compelling to the rest of us...

...them feed upon the blood of young virgins...

...Always the film's pervading sense of humanity and genuine compassion is uppermost, as it is in Jules et Jim...

...n case you've forgotten the answer to John Keats's question, the pale knight has fallen for the original femme fatale, the babe-licious Belle Dame Sans Merci...

...they are dogged by cats—otherwise docile animals whose heroic attempts to save people from the vampires look about as natural as Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive a Car, on "Saturday Night Live...

...Keats, who was himself mortally ill and in love with a woman he thought was killing him, found the link between sex and death in his reading of Spenser, but the trope was well established in Western literature and mythology...

...The eternal story of Cupid and Psyche was brutally (talk about beasts...

...This whole scene is accompanied by laughter, that of the late Toto (Michel Bouquet) loudest of all...

...comes before he can get the words out of his mouth...

...In Shakespeare's day, the standard euphemistic verb meaning "to experience orgasm" was "to die...

...her "No...

...Stress falls not on the verbal expressions of emotion but on the weird paradoxes and enigmatic tautologies embedded in the text: "I am not what I am," "he is that he is," "what you know you know...

...But Marlowe is scarcely visible beneath the sumptuous, Caravaggio-like surface of this film...

...This couple may be, right for each other, but the Belle Dame touches not us if we don't even know that she's killed anybody...

...ow that's really scary stuff...

...Instead of the plangently folksy song "Le Tourbillon," which is the leitmotif of Jules et Jim, there is a gorgeous little number by Charles Trenet in the style of a thirties dance band called "Boom" ("When our heart goes boom/Everything goes boom with it:/It's love, love, love")-and of course various things do go boom, with tragic effect...

...That is a sweet illusion and a necessary one if life is to go on...

...Triumphantly...

...If Woody Allen can't get away with making fake Bergman, why should van Dormael get away with making fake Truffaut...

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...Yet it is not at all black comedy...

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...The splendidly nasty Micheal MacLiammOir as lago says to Roderigo "Put money in thy purse," and, without any of the context of Iago's pretending to try to corrupt Desdemona on his gullible friend's behalf, it sounds as if a bit of good advice is being offered, apropos of nothing, to cheer him up...

...I wouldn't have believed it possible, but van Dormael has done it...

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...Yet she is merely trivialized here by association with that tiredest of targets, the homophobic, snobbish, corrupt, imperialist, fox-hunting British upper classes...

...Thelma and Louise are liberating figures for women, but their daughters are the killer broads who haunt the male imagination in films like Sea of Love, Final Analysis, and, now, Basic Instinct...

...I n every frame the love that destroys and the hatred that sustains are present, but they are paired with their opposites, so that the mood is as mixed up as the relationships of the characters and the plot sequence...

...Their make-out session in the cemetery (waggishly called "Homeland") is meant to reduce her to a little shriveled corpse, but before he canget to the really yummy blood they are interrupted by an ultimately ill-fated cop and his trusty cat...

...I have never before seen a film that could treat its characters in this tricksy, ironic, self-referential way and still make us believe in them and love them and laugh with them and weep for them...

...The history in Jules et Jim, and therefore its epic character, is not only cut completely but jumbled up so that our sense of time jams: the kids seem to be growing up in the fifties or early sixties, yet they are seventyish by the end, in a world that is recognizably contemporary...

...reduced to a feminist parable...

...Scary, huh guys...

...When Welles as Othello asks Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) "Are not you a strumpet...

...T his is what Basic Instinct does, and the film should be commended for at least not inventing any para-human creatures who insult our imaginations...

...Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is at least not politically motivated, but it makes just about as much of a mess of the Belle Dame as Disney did of its damned Belle...

...Whichever it is, our involvement has ceased...

...It also taps into a genuine reservoir of potentially mythic male anxiety...

...She sleeps with her vampire son (Brian Krause), and when they perform the act of darkness together they generate lots of blue light...

...Well, okay, it's ridiculous...

...That is one reason why we should be appreciative of such American productions as Orson Welles's Othello, first shown in 1952, which has just been restored and re-released...

...The answer is: I don't know, but he does...

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...Some say that it was an ice pick rather than a dagger that killed the sixteenth-century Marlowe...

...Michael Douglas is more Philip Marlowe than Christopher Marlowe, but the two have in common a taste for danger-ous and forbidden indulgences...

...By rights I should be extremely cross about van Dormael's post-modernist deconstruction of it in Toto...

...But the point is that Tanya the virgin, who is understandably eager to become an ex-virgin, just got unlucky...

...You would think that the association of sex and death would be even more terrifying for being so largely random and unaccounted for, but in fact both the tragic feeling and the mythic resonances of the play are chilled out of it by Welles's almost balletic stylization...

...All she would have had to do was pick a guy who wasn't a vampire and sex would have been what it is to most well-adjusted teenagers: recreational and hygienic...