Jubilee

Jubilee (1978)
Dir. Derek Jarman
Starring Jordan, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Richard O’Brien, Nell Campbell

Here’s a funny little bit of 70s pop art, an early attempt at capturing the punk aesthetic on film before punk had even really crystallized into a genre of music. It probably doesn’t have as much to say about society and philosophy as it thinks it does, but on the other hand it’s probably saying a lot more about 70s England than it thinks it is, too. So, you know, give a little, get a little. And as far as pretentious self-consciously arty 70s anti-narratives go, it’s pretty entertaining. So given that Paul McCartney etc just wished the Queen a happy diamond jubilee, I figure it’s only fair to remind the world that Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Jordan, and the guy who played Riff Raff in ROCKY HORROR beat them to the punch by 30 year and a lot of nudity.

The framing device for this story finds queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre, small parts in THE LADY VANISHES, THE PASSENGER, and THE WITCHES and also playing a dual role here) being brought forward in time to the late 70’s by her advisor, occultist John Dee (Richard “Riff Raff” O’Brien, who Adam Carolla once described as the most obnoxious guest he ever had on his show). The queen wanders around what appears to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun by bored, violent, nihilistic punks and expresses some concern over the direction her country has taken. Her criticism has a certain amount of support, because, for example, the current queen has just been killed in a arbitrary street mugging. Not necessarily a sign of a stable, prosperous society in my book. Take it from a Political Science major.

Seriously, teachers. Leave those kids alone.

But maybe we’re better off, because it must be said that the queen is super boring, but the various punks, arsonists, anarchists, nihilists, musicians, and sexual deviants that overrun the film are mostly a colorful and amusing lot. Much has been made over the film’s inclusion of early punk staples like Adam Ant, The Slits, and Souxie and the Banshees, but mostly the film is populated by cult actors and early punk scene kids (for instance, Malcolm McLaren protege and Sex Pistols’ muse Jordan) so don’t expect a big parade of cameos. They’re playing exaggerated, absurdist versions of their already exaggerated, absurdist personas, so there’s a kind of mordantly funny parody of the apocalyptic concerns expressed by most of straight society at this new generation of deviants.  

On one hand, it’s kind of a pretentious art film, where people might say things like, “In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art.” or maybe out of the blue we’ll watch a naked ballerina dance around a bonfire in the middle of a bombed-out wasteland in slow motion for the entire duration of a classical piece. Oh my, look, they’ve juxtaposed classic British high culture with profane modernity, however did they think to do that. But on the other hand, director Jarman isn’t entirely above indulging in the more pulpy aspects of his punky Mad Max London, so a reliable stream of orgies and murders keeps things nicely visceral.

The movie is clearly a reaction to 1970s British malaise, as the economy crumbled, the Empire waned, and British cultural identity suddenly came into question. Jarman cleverly shoots the whole thing on location, using the bombed-out WWII era husks which are still around to remind us that this is an England which is caught between a past that it can’t let go of and a future which it can’t seem to build towards. So even though I think Jarman is over-reliant on trying to shock you with his nihilist characters, their reactionary lifestyle does feels truthful on some level -- emotionally, anyway. It’s not such a far cry from listening to the Sex Pistols articulate their own frustrations with the decaying ruins of classist English society in the excellent Julian Temple doc THE FILTH AND THE FURY. You can see that these kids were not just lashing out pointlessly: they were making an (admittedly crude) calculated political statement about the pathetic future that their society was offering them. The deliberately modeled themselves as a chaotic inverse to repressed, regressive postwar British culture. ‘You expect us to just shut up and accept a pathetic half-life of stuffy mannerisms and fading empire? Well fuck you, we quit. We’re not playing your game. We’re making up our own rules.”

Condescending Jordan is condescending.

As with most movements which are purely reactionary, I’m not sure their philosophy holds up quite as well out of context. I mean, I’m for mayhem, pretty theft, nudity, androgyny, unprotected casual sex, pyromania, and punk rock as much as the next fellow (and actually, probably a lot more, now that I think about it). But these days, I’d say idealism is more revolutionary than nihilism. Perhaps because we needed the prickly rejectionism of the early punk movement to break us out of the 70’s doldrums before we could move into ironic postmodernism, and finally, some kind of new perspective which is possibly just peeking into the public consciousness today.

But even if not, it’s at least intermittently fun to watch these freakos do their thing. In particular, Toyah Willcox and Jack “The Incredible Orlando” Birkett are mesmerizing as a sociopath pyromaniac and insane record label executive, respectively. Birkett is apparently primarily a dancer and mime, and completely blind to boot (I guess that explains his Borgnine-level crazy eyes) but he’s playing an already outrageous character with both the crazy and the charisma turned up to 11. He’s a side character in this one, but ends up feeling like the central hub around which the movie rotates -- and although their criticism of media conglomeration and corporate opulence is somewhat passe now, you gotta remember that it’s pretty impressive (and still trenchant) in a movie from fuckin 1978. It also sounds the death knell to punk maybe 3 years after it came into existence. It would be amoral corporate interests like Birkett’s “Ginz” character (and of course, Jordan’s own boss Malcolm McLaren) that would ultimately reduce punk to a safe, predictable, mass-marketable hollow shell. Those equally reactionary right-wing types who used to spit on John Lydon everywhere he went? They didn’t win. But the money did. The money always does. 

The seductive face of evil.

Anyway, an interesting little time capsule which falls somewhere between HOLY MOUNTAIN and REPO MAN. In a few years, the punk aesthetic would becomes commercialized and conglomerated and be sold off globally in little chunks until it was meaningless. By the early 80s, it became shorthand for a hostile, dispensable “other” that folks like Charles Bronson could blow away in an effort to restore a decent society. But here, for an occasionally irritating but memorable 103 minutes, it’s nice to have a reminder of how it is we got there in the first place. If Queen Elizabeth I really did travel through time to the present, I’m sure she’d have some major issues with what she saw. But I think she might like the movie. Like its protagonists, it can be longwinded, vacant, and ugly. But there’s an essential germ of genuine truth and bruised humanity in there, and as a snapshot of a turbulent and dismal time for Old England, I think it’s just about right.

God Save the Queen.

We mean it, Maaan.

TRANCE aka THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY

 
Trance aka The Eternal Kiss of the Mummy, aka The Eternal (1998) 

Dir. Michael Almereyda

Starring Alison Elliot, Jared Harris, Christopher Walken, cameo by Jason Miller

During the late 90’s and Early 2000s, I had the great honor and privilege of serving with distinction in that most noble of all professions, clerk at an independent video store. That job may have been more independently instructive to my future than any other single incident in my life, and of course dramatically helped shape the breadth and depth of my film knowledge. It was a fantastic time to be in the business, because screeners – free copies of films which had not yet been made available to the public – were still common (before video piracy threatened the very foundation of a free society etc, etc.). We’d get between 5 and 15 free copies of movies per week to review and see if we wanted to purchase them. Some of these were big studio films which we, by all rights, ought to have made a decision on already, but that was all well and good. The real excitement, thought, was the onslaught of weird indie fare put out by smaller studios. This was the last days of Cannon video; Orion video; United Artists; Triton; Lion’s Gate. They were all trying to capitalize on the lucrative video market with cheapie genre titles. Heady times.

It’s funny to think about, but until Tarantino made RESOVOIR DOGS and Kevin Smith made CLERKS, there weren’t a lot of dorky amateurs making hip genre-friendly indie films. Studios kept their B-movie factories cranking, and that was were most genre fare emerged. But with the advent of those two films it suddenly seemed possible to more or less bypass the studio system altogether and make your own films. Throw some cash together from private sources, hire your friends as actors, put on a show. Out of this rich stew of new talent came a flood of aggressively amateurish dream projects which might have had a very minor theatrical or festival release somewhere but mostly went straight to video. And I watched ‘em

These bold pioneers quickly proved that studio films did not have a monopoly on sucking. The new wave of indie films were shot for cheap, they were generally ugly, confusing, poorly acted, and rife with pretensions of daring but deficient in skill to back it up. You know what I mean. Shit like THE MINER MASSACRE, MURDER 101, TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES NM, THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU’RE DEAD. Many painfully attempted to imitate the hip patois of Tarantino and Smith’s films. Many failed disastrously. Most are at best fitfully interesting, and at worst unwatchable.

But. They were also kind of labors of love. Young people trying to do something daring and unique that they couldn’t sell in the studio system. Interesting ideas by people not talented enough to pull them off. In other words, genre buff catnip. You know somewhere deep inside that you’re going to have to grind through dozens, maybe hundreds, to find one which even qualifies as frustrating. But something compels you to try anyway. Maybe because you’re a stoned teenager without a girlfriend, who knows, just guessing.

Anyway, TRANCE AKA THE ETERNAL AKA THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY (renamed several times for video release in the hopes of tricking innocent civilians into thinking it was something they’d be even remotely interested in) fits that category pretty well in most places. From the late 90s (1998) released by a tiny studio called “Cinema Club” (which, let’s be honest, sounds like a mob front), awkwardly paced, amateurishly shot and lit, and replete with the kind of stunning bad judgment which undoubtedly seemed daring to young artists free from the watchful eye of studio suits who might know better.

TRANCE AKA THE ETERNAL AKA THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY is slightly different from others in that field because the guy making it should also have known better. Michael Almereyda already had a good bit of experience under his belt, writing unused scripts for David Lynch and TOTAL RECALL and directing the excellent low-budget vampire softcore nightmare NADJA. This film represents a significant step back in terms of quality, but it does have some goofy charms.

The plot concerns New York socialites Nora and Jim (Allison Elliot and Jared Harris) who are obviously doing well for themselves despite the fact that they’re stunningly low-functioning drunks. They head to Ireland in order to dry out when Nora falls and hits her head (also they’re parents of a young kid, but no one seems too concerned about that).

They head out to the big scary Irish house owned by Nora’s Great- Aunt, and populated by a creepy 11-year-old servant girl and a robe-wearing Christopher Walken, Nora's uncle. Well, they don’t really dry out too well; they’re mostly in varying states of drunkenness the whole movie (which seems to have been sponsored by Jameson’s Irish Whiskey. Not only are they constantly drinking it and commenting on how good it is, it turns out their Great Aunt has like 100 cases of it in her basement, which, I shit you not, they will eventually use to try and get the evil reincarnated “mummy” drunk. More on that later). In a movie which was either worse or better, the alcoholic angle would probably have something to do with something. Here, it just kind of happens without comment or impact on the plot.

This is exactly the kind of thing which gives it that distinct 90s-indie-film vibe. It’s the sort of thing you could never put in a studio movie, and for reasons which I hope are fairly obvious. But its easy to imagine the filmmakers going, “We should make them just terrible, drunken parents and never have it go anywhere at all! Wouldn’t that be great?” and somewhere along the line “tee hee, wouldn’t that be great??” turned into the actual film, where it just sort of sits there, making everyone feel awkward like the only drunk guy at the wedding (he’s drunk on Jameson, I bet).

Speaking of weddings, this is the only movie I’m aware of which has an occasionally Irish Christopher Walken in love with the desiccated corpse of a ancient immortal pagan tribal leader which he keeps in a bathtub in his basement, is one thing I noticed. Walken is on weirdo autopilot here, letting his nifty pentagonal octogonal rose-colored glasses do most of the acting, but he’s still the most interesting thing anywhere in sight. Every fifth line or so he’ll even throw in a couple of words in an Irish accent in what I'm assuming is an homage to Peter Cushing's German in SHOCK WAVES. His wandering Walken cadence is in such strong effect here that he can actually be a little hard to understand. He has a long bit of exposition which is boldly unbound by the usual rules of American English tonal inflections, and after a while it looses so much focus that you forget about the exposition and just get lost in the oddly soothing waves of abstract, formless quasi-Irish Walkenisms.

Like most of this film’s ilk, it’s painfully clear they could only afford their one actual star for a day or so and hence he’s pretty much just awkwardly shoehorned in there as a minor side character. Notice how I keep coming back to awkwardly?

Yeah, the whole thing is pretty awkward. There’s a scene near the climax where a charming Irishman tries to seduce our heroine to the sultry tones of… Stiff Little Finger’s cover of Marley’s immortal “Johnny Was.” Admittedly a great song (and on vinyl, too!), but it would be difficult to find anything less sexy outside of a Captain Beefheart album. If it were possible to seduce women with the dulcet tones of the 70’s Irish punk rock, I wouldn’t have time to write this blog. So it just sits there, self-consciously hip but totally failing to work on any actual artistic level. Which pretty much sums up the preponderance of films of this sort.

I do fundamentally like the idea behind this one, though. It’s a unique idea for a monster movie. There’s no trance, no mummy, and while there is a kiss it’s pretty brief. But I guess SORT OF POSSESSED : BRIEF KISS OF THE DRUNKEN IRISH MOM didn’t market test as well. Basically, the villain here is an ancient immortal druid priestess who died temporarily and got tossed in a bog (preserving her body, sort of like a mummy, I’ll give them that). Not too many mummified druid movies, so it’s always nice to have another.

The body’s respectably icky, but we only see it in the bathtub – the rest of the time, its just our drunken heroine being halfway possessed. There’s your typical struggle over who gets control over the body, but it’s made a little less interesting because the mom’s such an irritating character anyway and the priestess actually seems like kind of an improvement. She does kill a few people (including one with the shattered pieces of a vinyl record, awesome, although done better in that episode of the X-Files Stephen King wrote) but mostly she just kind of wanders around trying to get her bearings. Not especially cinematic. More interesting is the weird little servant (slave?) girl they have in the house who seems to be supernaturally aware of where people are and what they need. So of course it goes without saying that nothing comes of it. It does get enjoyably ludicrous towards the end. My memory is a bit fuzzy but Jared Harris definitely tries to trick the mummy thing into getting drunk on Jameson and sexy dancing as a means of distracting it, and then bonks her over the head with the bottle, which in my opinion is not a very gentlemanly thing to do.

If this seems like a disjointed review which randomly picks at various unrelated things and didn’t even get to the plot until 1,271 words in, I can’t really argue otherwise. But I would like to point out that its reflective of this style of movie. If I had an editor and a paying public, I could never get away with writing about obscure and much-derided indie DTV horror films from the 90s, and even if I did I would have to focus and write something concise and penetrating. Since I don’t, I can indulge myself and write semi-coherent rambles which are mostly for my own benefit and my own interest in exploring weird ideas that don’t have much traction with anyone else. All well and good, but it makes you remember that there’s often a good reason that artists have editors and write with their readers in mind.

Artists complain about the suits ruining their vision, and no doubt that's often the case. But to pull off something as complex as a full-length feature on just one person’s vision – well, you gotta have a lot more vision than most people do to make it work. You gotta be able to take that vision and hone it, focus it.You and the people working with you need to have mastery of the tools it takes to visually and narratively communicate that vision. You have to get it out of your own head and into the head of the person watching. I'm convinced director Almereyda had something cool in his head – its a shame he wasn't able to communicate it to me. But for a film about a bunch of stumbling, irresponsible drunks trying to keep control of their bodies from being possessed by a far more powerful, amoral entity I guess it may work as a suitable metaphor for the film culture of it's time. If the young indie film community could get through its awkward teenagers years and go on to make the kind of excellent work we frequently see today, maybe there's hope for these drunken possessed neglectful parents and their goofy ginger kid as well.

This review is dedicated to Patrick McConnell, who loaned me his VHS copy of this film which he apparently paid real US currency for at some point in his younger, wilder days.

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