The Polanski Triad

"The reality of her terror is made palpable by our shared experience. The audience  is given insight into her deteriorating world and cannot help but identify with her."--Julia Ain-Krupa, Roman Polanski: A Life in Exile, p.41

There are very few films which actually deal with tenement predicaments as a central motif, and Polanski only succeeded at it, in his attempts, by making his movies into a horror trilogy. When I am well enough, if the dowager has any true resurgence left, nursing a head cold in these leonine winds, a head cold apparently days in the making, I'll buy The Tenant, if necessary, and then bread my meats in a shake-n-bake. I saw the film many times, and know that, as the last in his series, it was about a man desperately attempting to warn himself about losing who he thought he was, after skirting the edges of where he shouldn't have ventured, but I can't remember the entire narrative, just the nail polish scene, the body cast (and don't we know a thing or two about skin yellowing after a year in plaster paris) and Shelley Winters behaving like a fatalistic concierge, which leads us to the issue of gentrification and a basic liberal anger.

Sure, I have the rage of many a disabled activist; I wrote as much in earlier posts, but an overweening level of classification is as evil as too much austerity on the other end of the spectrum, which is why Congress needs to revisit public housing. Like many other Americans, once I was screwed over by former supervisors and a paradigm into which I was indoctrinated with contradictory platitudes, I faced the same problems as the rest of you who lose jobs: harassment by debt collectors, particularly after default, the breakdown of my medical equipment, and months, literally months, of what felt like hostile captivity. Between 99 and 08 my life was almost a living hell, excepting my wedding plans, and now, eight years later, how in god's name am I supposed to find the strength of will to remain competitive, returning to substantial gainful activity? I can't ignore it. Federal law is punitive, regardless of my age and symptoms, and Treasury will, eventually, garnish what little I subsist on. This is why my fury is enough to dissuade Councilmen, even those designated as "special needs," because we do end up feeling like Catherine in Repulsion, protecting our body from scavengers of our innocence, or Mia and Roman overwhelmed by an entrapment conspiracy. We may not have the solution to the problem of stacking ourselves up on top of one another, a plate of pancakes, but it is a living hell when we're shackled to confinement against our will. It did not cost Presbyterian Homes anything to allow me to change my mind, leaving the unit in Diamond Park, right off Temple University's campus, for Riverside's internecine back bite, but it cost me; a career, an extension of a hostile environment, my confidence, self esteem. Any public housing lawyer would say how lucky that is. Yep.

Morning de clef

Within the annoying habit of tiring oneself out for absolutely no reason, brief observations may be made: We all know Rosemary's Baby is a scathing send up of liberal pretensions, and we all know it has the distinct signature of an auteur who like Mr. Allen after him, got caught up in a grandiose self-importance. (I struggle with the rape and the artistic genius and we'll say fuck it and leave Jacob wrestling the angel on the precipice in perpetuity.) Beyond that, we may get frustrated with the finesse of the satire and finding a language for it. Richard Fleischer offers a sharp contrast to Polanski's invidious mission creep with See No Evil (71), a fast paced thriller that dispenses with analogy-- if Polanski's Satanism is a representative stand in for urban stratification-- and has a dialectical argument which dispenses with the dynamic allure of masochism. Fleischer adamantly keeps his feet on the ground. Mia is still the damsel, but merely an unwitting one, as opposed to Polanski's inimical manipulation of a heroine who has few tools with which to alter her destiny as a modern Pandora.

We'll hold this conceit for a significant length.

Catherine Deneuve

I could not meet the demands of working at The Washington Post, whatever standards remain, but I study the special bylines, the one timers-- that I hope to break; if I can do it with the Inquirer I can do it with Wapo, one day, but if I am going to bounce, cancel my digital access and move on, I am ambivalent, reluctant, and familiar with contempt. I've not made up my mind, and cancellation would not be a total blackout-- and yet, elongating  hyper sigh, I like my comfort zone of being part of its community, as long as I keep a check on running the comments (the moderators, those almighty arbiters of online speech, did not grant me a comment badge; sniff, but then again, I am a guppy competitor, and a sociopathic blogger who hasn't quite quite truly lain it out on the mat since then again I am a quite vulnerable sociopath, and vengeance killings have been done by better lesbians than I am ever going to be-- does a sardonic jibe diminish my serious hostility to the gay community?) I've held my fire, and we'll see what happens when I go to target practice. I will be honest, however. I know I cannot roll back the social acceptance-- but what I am going to do is leave a warning for the future-- and when ape men cloning leads to recombinant disaster a futurist will pull me out of archive with smug reverberation. Highsmith aged quite awfully. She is an unsettled factor in my personal canon. I did one novel in group, the rest, well, of course-- through the studio filter. I just had an unpleasant picture, a vomit lurch, of Highsmith meeting Josie Byzek, pushing my limit on nauseating visuals and digestion. A tired superego, well. I know. What revolts, this is entirely irrelevant in the progressive pantheon. I regret not having studied Roman Polanski with an expert. What the motifs are beneath the surface of his claustrophobic spaces. Repulsion doesn't  have the ruthless upper cut of Rosemary's Baby, but I've now seen the trilogy. Hopefully I'll find the language I'm looking for, beyond his brilliance with repression. Is an auteur's signature merely a matter of style? Should women always expect to be pin cushions, fatuous with hatreds?

Men still make me happier, on the whole, despite the fact that I was a bloody fool. I almost wish Jerry had struck me across the face, shook me violently, though he did, as such, kick my ass in the process of his migratory journey and final placement.

Rosemary's Thistle

#3:  Soon-Yi was Woody and Mia’s adopted daughter. False. Soon-Yi was the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow and André Previn. Her full name was Soon-Yi Farrow Previn. -- Robert B. Weide

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What authenticates The Burrowers isn't Petty's underlying condemnation of what forged the last, now doddering, superpower. Any polemic in narrative can do that; it is his real appreciation for hands on tactile sensation. The soil, and foolish human primates roaming about on it until they forget themselves and become carcasses. Ulee's Gold, more than a decade older with subtly different aims, nonetheless has a similar physicality. The curious thing about Peter Fonda's poignant swan song, I might add, is, despite my displeasure with Easy Rider as a self-conscious farce, it provides Ulee with a textually richer undercurrent that would have been lacking otherwise. Derivative pleasures like this become somewhat complicated, always improving on older origin concepts.

To indulge my underlying misogyny, my loathing for Jane Fonda, which is visceral, doesn't spill over to Peter. He is quieter, less of a chameleon flitting across the screen, to quote from Jane's daughter with the delightful cruelty of an accurate observation (and yes, I give Jane credit for giving Charlie Rose this gem), and I'm more in sympathy with his center of gravity. Ulee's Gold was my life with my mother and her raucous lovers. The film gives viewers a sense of resolution: Ulee relents, realizing his son and daughter-in-law aren't beyond reform. This is a gravely wounded family, but one that doesn't quite break once the avarice of the white punks is harnessed and contained. The industry has to be placated, but we all know that addiction doesn't work that way. My dead brother can't be walled off in my bereavement as a monster. Yet he was indifferent to any number of things: the shame he brought to my family, committing felony rape, infecting himself with AIDS, not because he had any experience with sodomizing men, but because he blithely used dirty needles. The end of his life in 1995 was agonizing. "We had a brother who was a bit of a shyster." This is how my sister summed up little Nicky for my ex, the Nicky who passed HIV onto his girlfriend without my mother deigning to interfere. She was afraid of possible litigation.

The engine of the freight train has been idling on track a quarter mile off from my window since Thursday morning, giving me palpitations. I'd do anything to get out of Riverside, anything, except there is little use in exploring other public housing options within the city. I already know I couldn't expect to find creative and safe solutions networking online, so I research Woody and Mia, condemning sexual liberalism. What no one is willing to say directly is the price Allen made Mia Farrow and her children pay for his trophy happiness with Soon-Yi. He sounds like John Updike's failed little boy with his thumb stuck up his ass. I do not know if Dylan's memory of molestation is true or false, but that she did not like Woody's thumb in her mouth, that felt real to me. My stepfather sneak fondled my breasts that way.

I started writing my own piece on the scandal. Because of Roman Polanski, what I relearn reviewing his mastery of repression, of what he intimates about sadism. More than that; yet as to Farrow herself, I never saw myself as a fan, not in terms of her performances. The poem never leaves me, the one in my head with wombs and spawn, the World Trade Center, the Empire State building, through her eyes. A few years ago, I caught the revision of the piece in hand, then lost it with the Vista driver crash. I have to redo all that research once again as well. Hypothetically, if I get it published, tweet her a link, how would I react if she thanked me for the tribute?

I'm unsure. If Woody had done to me what he did to her, he'd be dead; I'd be a cause celebre in prison, so in terms of being aggrieved, I have picked a side. That does not necessarily mean, as a disability journalist, I need access to her. I am not Orth, the Vanity Fair journalist who reignited old rivalries.

Would a mutual interaction be beneficial? Ambivalent about that, what she's like beneath the pixie damsel of Roman's coaxing, or Allen's irony.

Squibs

The Dickensian Christmas, with its cozy homes, hearty dinners, and festive pleasures, is the embodiment of the Victorian Christmas.-- Tom Pold

Why the mostly antithetical relationship to the voice of Dickens? It goes back early, to the guilty imposition of presence on my academic adviser. Michael had a soft spot for Dickensian caricature, exaggerations of type. I had not yet read Casamassima, not between 82 to 85, but the Jamesian attack in this flagging middle years novel embodies some of my hostility to Dickens and type. Do you believe the modern world is any less brutal than what Oliver Twist conveys about the welfare state in the Victorian era? 

My appreciation of Polanski's distinctions as an auteur come late. I did not know before 2009 that I would be setting up this topic, failing, remaining stubborn, but his interpretation of the famous tale seems uneasy. Jump cut to pastoral abstraction. By a certain hour, my temperature belies my artistry and legacy and though I hope NBC or another network runs the film again to save me the trouble, I stopped viewing after the caning. Perhaps a reflection of my intolerance for the genius of Dickens himself. I have ground to a halt in the opening chapters of Our Mutual Friend. It is the giant's voice slightly muted. I started it for a reading group thread on TLN, before the owner banned me for life (isn't this shit silly?), and trying to get through it is analogous to slicing lethargy for lard substitution. The decline of Christmas itself may be tied to the waning influence of Dickensian sentimentality. his over the top melodrama for the death of figurines like Dora, his horrific grief for prostitutes. Defenders would argue he did clear the brambles for progressive social justice.

One could also look at the family tree of influences and turn away, dismayed. 

Bronchial Nitrates

"Like all eighties kids, I was so busy being told how special I was I didn't get that went for everybody else."-- a lift from @TBlackford3

The prosthetic finger was a shock, and if I remember nothing else from The Piano, vaguely recollected as having run on network, but not overkilled, remembering that finger, remembering an inchoate grunt of protest, this is sufficient in inimical effervescence, the recognition of Anna Paquin raven haired, with that cherubic mouth she carries over to Darkness (a film which aired three times at least after my initial viewing, a film which I need to sit still for a fourth try, which in euphemistic terms means pushing the Quickie switch down. It emits a chirp which sounds cut off in mortal peril, a fragile Easter chick snapped like a wishbone, then making sure bladder remains pacified). Enigmatic images. I was not haunted like our avuncular ghost who spent so much money reconstructing a jaw and a mouth he could not use. I wrestled slightly about continuing to follow Chaz, but that would have been an act of fetishistic supersize fawning. I respected Ebert, but he played to audience catering in ways I'd refuse as a critic. A mechanized finger, elegant imperfection in a moving and vivid visual poem leagues removed Westworld, yet the props evoke each other, hinged digit and silver contacts of an ethically ambiguous chameleon casting directors can't utilize on the cheap that way ever again. Bynner played every type except starched bread: Indians, Asians, mulattoes, Russians, Christ knows what I've missed besides the robot, not nearly as sophisticated as the nightmare that kept Asimov up at night as he sequeled his Foundation trilogy, but Asimov might have appreciated Yul's last death stance as the  living Yoda turned gollem in his notorious service announcement. I may have also seen Polanski's swan, the haunted survivor threshing out America's narcissistic victimology. This is the universal thread binding all Americans. Emotionalism flows outward from us like liquid gold. The majority of us aren't worth a great deal as a matter of tort, regardless of self interest. This is the reason I tweaked Troy's tag, aside from copping to denominators along the subtle distinctions among networking aggregates, as the inflated Americanism that makes the United States insufferable, a repetitive chase after cotton candy, the best drug to slurp at the zoo.

I applied for my first online job, a freelance two bit perhaps ethically dubious, but too busy with my schedule to work during these few days of a break. Sanguine however, about Blogger post time consumption, as I have a book and a few articles buried in here, even if my portrait from Drinker's West inexplicably vanished. Perhaps it was data usage.

Human Automata

The modern concierge's daughter who fulfills her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. --George Bernard Shaw

It disappoints that the classic facial beauty Faye Dunaway emanates on screen leads with few exceptions to mere dilatory satisfaction. It may be the limitation of her range and roles operating off of each other, or that she never again had a director like Polanski, since Polanski seemed able to illicit a vulnerable tigress, a predatory feline who leaps forth as her hauteur fractures under pressure. The raging porcelain never quite delivers the suggestion of her intensity and emotional investment, once you look beyond Chinatown, except for her supporting role as Yolande fourteen years ago. She was a tour de force of conviction as a queen mother under duress in the face of the dissimulation of Franco national identity, despite the fact that The Messenger disserviced both the legend and the veracity of Joan d'Arc, a film of minute ensemble moments which could not carry the whole affair. Dustin Hoffman comes late in the day to post-modern fragmentation.

This does not detract from Dunaway's glamour; it only points to the juxtaposition between the promise of a glamorous figure and the expectations of catharsis within a performance. Marilyn Monroe had the same problem but conveniently overdosed into hagiography. Dunaway outlasted herself into the contempt of the familiar figure always on the verge of ferocious histrionics, devoid of climax and exhausted pleasure. She barely fakes it with Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. There is the glimpse of her breast, a diminutive curve in a room festooned under studio lighting, yet the erotic tension, repressed to the imagination, is nearly unbearable. Her contemporary stills evoke the octogenarian Mae West of my childhood, the capped teeth now garish, skeletal, somehow still beautiful. "I have completed a work," I wonder if this is how she settles her accounts with the residual impact of her rise during the decade of America's militant radicalism, a decade neither all that anarchist nor as transformative as is supposed among popular sentiment.

Two Jakes

I went to Beirut in June of 2010 because my father was dying.-- Claire Messud

There is a scene toward the climax in Chinatown, brilliantly staged by Polanski. Mrs. Mulwray drives Jake to the sanitarium which Noah Cross utilizes for his cover up, and in the foreground we see a resident of the sanitarium sexually harass a nurse who looks like a horse's scrotum, and the nurse, care worn and world weary, bids the octogenarian to have a seat and finish his meal. It is nearly a Shakespearean moment. The Nicholson Dunaway Huston trifecta bisected by the lewd romper room antics, antics which offer cues about Roman fucking nubile adolescents in puberty, and yet, Polanski's entitlement with his alleged victim is a footnote, an inconvenience, even as he might have been my psychotic stepfather, in my poem "Broken China" I am crying out daddy daddy help me, wishing my father had killed my mother's second husband, fearful of the reverse but unsure. Stuart was brutal, but my father had a more calculated Roman menace. Should this woman be a footnote due to Polanski's genius? That woman in India, I have to close my mind to her trauma. Many of us would; many of us do. What that must have felt like, gang raped and then internal hemorrhaging, an iron rod to violate her. Violate is too nuanced for her agony. Her uterus was likely perforated. A footnote.

My father will never know how much hatred I feel that I failed him, that the IRS my mother and his son destroyed the life he deserved. He never talks to me but now that his third wife is dying, now he speaks. He made me almost wealthy in an invalid's barren and bleak institutional environment and this is my evil, created my evil, that human life is so expendable. The veterinarian whom Moyers filmed openly discussed euthanizing  himself with horse tranquilizer during the brief time he could operate a power chair. In the last segment, he pleaded with his wife to let him go, recumbent, shrunken, clothed in a polo shirt. We do not realize the profound impact of the photographic medium, the saturation of prognosis, treatment, the mechanized technology with which we contain disease. The majority of my life was spent in a hospital, and then I force myself to watch it in a teleplay funded by Congress to educate the American public on the brutality of modern medicine.

Insidious Possession

Satan's three faces are a grotesque counterversion of the three Persons of the Trinity.
--Allen Mandelbaum, note to Canto 34, Inferno


All western countries make bad television series better than the America that gave the world the technology for television, gave the world the technology that makes some of us diffident about the digital age, in fact, not that this is not good. I labored and starved and threw my impassioned energies into the small presses for years, which, just outside of the relative security of small presses in academia, was a small club of loons, alcoholics, mental cases, and hippies reading out of notebooks. By the eighties, nearto the death of Bukowski, a man with whom I have published, and disdain, beatniks were already an anachronism, much like my mentor's late life poetry readings. Listening to his aging YouTube voice, I allowed Jerry too huge an imprint on my life, but am yet able to step out of the narrative, and observe that his pathway ossified, even as mine has stalled, and dwindling into sterility. Where his ambition has settled disappoints me, and my own, we have been over that, my weakened frame hanging in the balance. How we allegorize evil in contemporary tropes has been much more dynamic. My accidental viewing of the Roboticist episode of The Collector reinforces this sensibility. Here Lucifer seems to be an ironic moral arbiter. In a show like Supernatural, he is an angry existentialist. What did he represent to Polanski in Rosemary's Baby? Polanski's genius takes us closer to the truth about the banality of moral corrosion, and most other commercial films do a terribly bad job of actualizing horror to make us take a step back and take measure of the autonomic amoralism we're hurling ourselves through. If I am an atheist, I am one who carries a huge Roman, Catholic chip, at least when I am not looking at the murdered mice of my pets.

I was going to deconstruct the episode in this post, before I spent three hours uploading this blog for Amazon kindle, but let me also step back, since this insipid Canadian production triggered the links between evil and acquisition, a steady diet in which Henry James luxuriated and Fowles updated. The Fowles novel is on my wish list, but I am cool to it at present, over taxed, to the point that I foreshadow what we know now about Obama's mandate. He did not need me. I was busy leaking urine on my poor ancient history hard copy reference guide, stressed, apoplectic that I still do not know how to find the print screen key to take screen shots when I need them. How long have I been online now? Would you like to guess?

Farrow and Allen Show My Age

This is the snapshot of Elaine's as it is today, shuttered. When I lived at Rusk Institute I might have whined to my medical student dorm mates about spying out the upper end Manhattan socialites. Pit the lower East Side against North Philadelphia and use your imagination. This is a thread you can pick up from Henry James and trace straight through to Husbands and Wives, although for those of you in your 30's, 20's, Woody is an emaciated pervert and Mia is the old rerun starlet when nothing else is on. It is not for me to judge her over compensating.

As rapidly as online technology is changing, it still frizzles my brain waves that I have tweeted to Mia Farrow at the same time that I am using her persona for my own literary powers. Would you just submit your work using the traditional submission routes, or when finished, post it where she'd be able to read it? I was never a huge fan of Woody as an auteur, though Husbands and Wives is surreal, so painfully ironic it could kill, and what Allen coaxed out of Pollack touch on my own interpersonal tensions. Mia's career baffles me more, preoccupies me more as a peculiar feminist problem, given the history of the men around her, since Polanski has his own nymphet issues. Where Polanski is concerned I am more ready to equivocate.

Even if Woody and Soon-Yi are happy, even if their affair technically is in the realm of the legal, and even if his relationship with Mia became moribund, what he did is unforgivable, regardless of his influence and stature in cinema. Most of us realize, even today, that there are certain boundaries. My younger sister and I may never reconcile, but I would never allow a romance with her husband. My stepmother (em) did the same thing to my mother, marrying my father after she and my mother finished nursing school. My lover once objected, "Your parents were divorced?" and they were, just as I was also by default invading the terrain of my lover's wife, but there is a difference between a fling and using friendships to steal. Allen committed a crime, imploded a stability of the sort that made our species successful. No wonder we enjoy seeing high society as a morally corrupt contract with resonant forces not to be trusted.

Key Largo Aside

The thought occurred to me and I thought I'd note it anyway as I am winding down toward my presleep reading, that John Huston is my favorite film director, and that because he is a pessimist, if not downright misanthropic as I am myself. Chinatown is a very dark film not just because the incest leads to inbreeding, but because it signifies a basic truth about those with real power. They win, and this is true whether or not you see a Gandhi or a Cassie James rise to the surface. I know Polanski directed, but Huston had some influence on the price we pay that Polanski exposes, and the film is rare for me in that I like Faye Dunaway and Nicholson both, which is not always the case in other venues, and by the way, for those of you familiar with my anti-CIL stance, I mean what I say about spending the rest of my life to fight to dismantle them, and if necessary, I will use Adapt's tactics, and break the law to get this ball rolling. I am not their only critic, but I am a zealot in my belief that they represent the worst aspects of socialist corruption, and I want this removed as a stain on the American soul. I hope the right will join with me on this.