Ornaments hang from ramparts, let me know where to go, but not who's coming
I dreamed I was in Providence last night, visiting friends who don't exist in waking life. There was no particular occasion—I hadn't seen them in months, NecronomiCon notwithstanding. I had brought one of them a ring I had found in a thrift store in Boston. It looked like heavy gold with a blurred device on the signet and chips of emerald down the band; I thought it was costume jewelry. It had been priced accordingly. The girl at the register hadn't been able to tell me where it came from. I almost tossed it to my friend as we walked through Burnside Park, telling him it had looked like his style. He didn't even put it on: he turned it over once or twice and dropped onto the nearest bench like someone had kicked his feet out from under him and burst into tears. I thought at one point he said, "How could you do this to me?" but I didn't have an answer and I wasn't sure he was asking me. When he left without looking at me, he left the ring resting on the bench behind him. I put it back in my pocket. I went back to their house. He was there helping his partner prepare dinner; no one said anything about it. I can do something with this dream, I think. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch asked me months ago if I had ever written Lovecraftian noir and I couldn't think of a way to do it without being cheap or clichéd or ripping other authors off: I might have dreamed myself a way in. I just wish I could think of things that don't require research.
1. Thank you, question mark, Facebook, for pointing me toward this teeth-grinding article: Zoe Willams, "Yes, yes, yes! Welcome to the golden age of slutty cinema." I was a little wary of the opening, but then we reached the following claim—
"On the big screen, we look to the 1930s and 40s – rightly – for an object lesson in how to make a female character with depth, verve, wit and intelligence, but to expect those women to shag around would be unreasonable, anachronistic."
—and I blew a fuse. Can I chase after the author screaming with a copy of Baby Face (1933)? Or the bookstore clerk from The Big Sleep (1946)? Pre-Code cinema in general? A stubborn and sneaky percentage of Hollywood even after the ascendance of the Production Code? "It is a radical act," William writes, "which every film generation thinks they are the first to discover: to create characters who are not good people"—well, apparently every generation of film critics thinks they discovered it, too. I wrote on Facebook that I was reminded of the conversation between an ATS driver and her prospective mother-in-law in Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943), where the younger woman declares proudly that "for the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men" and the older woman quietly lets fall the fact that she served as an ambulance driver on the front lines of the last war. Just because the young women of the rising generation don't know about the social advances of their mothers doesn't mean they didn't happen. Just because the author of this article lives in a retrograde era doesn't mean the onscreen representation of morally ambiguous women is some kind of millenial invention. It's so easy to think that the past was always more conservative, more blinkered, more backwards than the present. It's comforting. It's dangerous. It permits the belief that things just get better, magically, automatically, without anyone having to fight to move forward or hold ground already won. Once you recognize that the past, even briefly, got here first, it's a lot harder to feel superior for just being alive now. We can't afford it and anyway it isn't true.
2. Apropos of nothing except that I was listening to Flanders and Swann, I am very glad that I discovered them before reading Margery Allingham, otherwise I might have thought she invented "The Youth of the Heart." It's quoted in a scene in The Beckoning Lady (1955)—correctly attributed, but her books are so full of fictional artists and musicians that when I read of "Lili Ricki, the new Swedish Nightingale, singing Sydney Carter's lovely song against a lightening sky," I might have easily had the Avocado of Death problem and assumed she made them both up. As it is, I know the song from a recording of Swann performing it solo as part of At the Drop of a Hat in 1957, since he wrote the music. And I was reminded of Allingham because there's a copy of Traitor's Purse (1941) on Howard's bookshelves in Howard the Duck (1986). I assume someone in the props department was a fan.
3. The Somerville Theatre has announced its repertory schedule for October. I am sad that the double feature of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the same night thatrushthatspeaks and I already have plans to see William Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928) at the HFA, but I am looking forward mightily to the triple feature of Psycho (1960), Psycho II (1983), and Psycho III (1986), because it is the Saturday before my birthday and five and a half hours of Anthony Perkins seems like a good preemptive birthday present to me. I have never seen Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), either, or Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), and I always like Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004). I know Brad Anderson's Session 9 (2001) was shot at the derelict Danvers State Hospital before it was demolished for condos, a decision which I hope is literally haunting the developers to this day. Anyone with opinions about the rest of this lineup?
I am off to write letters to politicians.
spatch asked me months ago if I had ever written Lovecraftian noir and I couldn't think of a way to do it without being cheap or clichéd or ripping other authors off: I might have dreamed myself a way in. I just wish I could think of things that don't require research.1. Thank you, question mark, Facebook, for pointing me toward this teeth-grinding article: Zoe Willams, "Yes, yes, yes! Welcome to the golden age of slutty cinema." I was a little wary of the opening, but then we reached the following claim—
"On the big screen, we look to the 1930s and 40s – rightly – for an object lesson in how to make a female character with depth, verve, wit and intelligence, but to expect those women to shag around would be unreasonable, anachronistic."
—and I blew a fuse. Can I chase after the author screaming with a copy of Baby Face (1933)? Or the bookstore clerk from The Big Sleep (1946)? Pre-Code cinema in general? A stubborn and sneaky percentage of Hollywood even after the ascendance of the Production Code? "It is a radical act," William writes, "which every film generation thinks they are the first to discover: to create characters who are not good people"—well, apparently every generation of film critics thinks they discovered it, too. I wrote on Facebook that I was reminded of the conversation between an ATS driver and her prospective mother-in-law in Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943), where the younger woman declares proudly that "for the first time in English history, women are fighting side by side with the men" and the older woman quietly lets fall the fact that she served as an ambulance driver on the front lines of the last war. Just because the young women of the rising generation don't know about the social advances of their mothers doesn't mean they didn't happen. Just because the author of this article lives in a retrograde era doesn't mean the onscreen representation of morally ambiguous women is some kind of millenial invention. It's so easy to think that the past was always more conservative, more blinkered, more backwards than the present. It's comforting. It's dangerous. It permits the belief that things just get better, magically, automatically, without anyone having to fight to move forward or hold ground already won. Once you recognize that the past, even briefly, got here first, it's a lot harder to feel superior for just being alive now. We can't afford it and anyway it isn't true.
2. Apropos of nothing except that I was listening to Flanders and Swann, I am very glad that I discovered them before reading Margery Allingham, otherwise I might have thought she invented "The Youth of the Heart." It's quoted in a scene in The Beckoning Lady (1955)—correctly attributed, but her books are so full of fictional artists and musicians that when I read of "Lili Ricki, the new Swedish Nightingale, singing Sydney Carter's lovely song against a lightening sky," I might have easily had the Avocado of Death problem and assumed she made them both up. As it is, I know the song from a recording of Swann performing it solo as part of At the Drop of a Hat in 1957, since he wrote the music. And I was reminded of Allingham because there's a copy of Traitor's Purse (1941) on Howard's bookshelves in Howard the Duck (1986). I assume someone in the props department was a fan.
3. The Somerville Theatre has announced its repertory schedule for October. I am sad that the double feature of James Whale's Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) is the same night that
rushthatspeaks and I already have plans to see William Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928) at the HFA, but I am looking forward mightily to the triple feature of Psycho (1960), Psycho II (1983), and Psycho III (1986), because it is the Saturday before my birthday and five and a half hours of Anthony Perkins seems like a good preemptive birthday present to me. I have never seen Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), either, or Anna Biller's The Love Witch (2016), and I always like Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004). I know Brad Anderson's Session 9 (2001) was shot at the derelict Danvers State Hospital before it was demolished for condos, a decision which I hope is literally haunting the developers to this day. Anyone with opinions about the rest of this lineup?I am off to write letters to politicians.
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Oddly enough, I just made almost exactly the same point, only about dick jokes.
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I approve! What was the context?
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Are these friends you've dreamed about before?
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No—I don't tend to have dream figures repeat unless they have some external, independent existence, but I get a lot of repeating architecture. A number of my dreams take place in a mix of cities that are real and cities that are elsewhere.
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I'm looking forward to seeing it!
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I have seen any number of random other movies directed by Robert Wise, but not that one! I've been hearing good things for years.
I'm glad you will finally get to see Psycho. (I saw Psycho II in a theater when it came out, but I remember very little about it. I've never seen Psycho III.)
I have no idea what I'll think of the sequels as movies, but I know I'll enjoy Perkins: I've never seen him in anything where I didn't (and I'm months overdue to write about one of them, actually). I am so glad to be finally seeing Psycho on film and with any luck in a context that is not all about the irony.
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Thanks for the info on the upcoming October programming. I want to see May, Army of Darkness, The Monster Club, Psycho, The Love Witch, and Horror of Dracula. Since I have limited time to devote to watching movies in the way that means I actually pay attention to them (as opposed to having one on as background noise), I get into ruts of revisiting the same few over and over. This is all very well with books but less refreshing with movies.
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Thank you. I will try. I am tired of not writing fiction.
Thanks for the info on the upcoming October programming. I want to see May, Army of Darkness, The Monster Club, Psycho, The Love Witch, and Horror of Dracula.
Okay, so I've seen Horror of Dracula and I'm planning on Psycho and The Love Witch. Have you seen the others? If so, what can you tell me about them? (I am aware Army of Darkness is a classic.)
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First off, can we agree to both see the original Psycho by hook or by crook? I must be the only person I know to have watched the 90s remake but not the original. (In about 1997 I was on a bus ride back from New York, and it had TV screens, and one of the crew I went to New York with had bought a VHS of the remake from a sidewalk vendor. It was a very good-quality rip-off, filmed with a hidden camera from the back of the theater. You would only have recognized it as pirated by this one bit five minutes from the end where an audience member got up and walked across the screen.) (Also I was a total lightweight when it came to horror, back then, but I still didn't find it very scary, or very anything, really.)
From what I understand about Army of Darkness, the filmmakers just switched genres so now we're in a medieval apocalypse, with zombies and a guy with a chainsaw hand. I love medieval zombie horror, an underrepresented genre.
The Monster Club is apparently fanservice for the audience members who subscribed to "Famous Monsters of Filmland." A group of ordinary, rude little boys meet Frankenstein (yes, I know), Dracula, the Wolf Man, and probably the Mummy, depending on who's in the public domain. Hijinks ensue. Apparently it doesn't suck and people who saw it in theaters have fond memories of it, so I am willing to be convinced. Contains the line "Wolfman's got nards!" Probably one of the influences for the recent Stranger Things.
May has a horrible female protagonist, who was told in her childhood, "If you can't find a friend, make one," and presented with a creepy doll by her mother. I'm sure that works out fine for everybody. I'm not sure whether I'll enjoy it or find it gratuitous but I want to see it because I can't get enough of women being villainous or monstrous in film.
Is The Love Witch that retro-seventies pseudo-Hammer film? I like its aesthetic already.
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I'm going to the triple feature. I've waited years to see Psycho in a theater I trust.
I must be the only person I know to have watched the 90s remake but not the original.
How . . . was it?
I'm not sure whether I'll enjoy it or find it gratuitous but I want to see it because I can't get enough of women being villainous or monstrous in film.
It has produced some really good gifsets which I have seen on the internet.
Is The Love Witch that retro-seventies pseudo-Hammer film? I like its aesthetic already.
It is, and I am interested in it especially because that aesthetic was created not through clever use of filters in post, but actually shooting in 35 mm with lighting and set dressing appropriate to a Technicolor feature of the right decade. It feels like it could be the film equivalent of a lot of the hauntological music I listen to and I really want to know whether it works as well as the reviews indicate.
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3. Much too scary! heh.
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It's so inefficient! It's not just reinventing the wheel, it's repeatedly noticing there are multiple kinds of thing you could put wheels on!
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We are like goldfish!
Although I should add that after I wrote this, I made a page of collected notes on 18th C Health & Medicine, and there are definitely ways in which I am all for the present day, no matter what our faults!
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Oh, yeah: this is not some kind of Miniver Cheevy nostalgia trip. I would be dead from several different causes if I weren't alive today. I just wish people didn't feel the need to trample the past in order to elevate the present, especially in places where the present doesn't necessarily deserve it.
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*nods* And people do that exact same thing with so many things, not just past-present! Ah, well, humans will be humans and keep on reinventing the wheel etc...
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Agreed. We are surprisingly bad at "This thing is my favorite!" without a side order of "AND EVERYTHING ELSE SUCKS."
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I forget if you read the Shirley Jackson novel (if not, it's spectacular) so I won't spoil one of the movie's and novel's big scare scenes but it happens when the lights GO ON, which I find pretty impressive. Sadly from what I remember the movie doesn't keep any of the novel's humour, or weirdly enthralling domesticity.
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Very strategic thinking!
I forget if you read the Shirley Jackson novel (if not, it's spectacular)
I have, years ago, and enjoyed it very much, although not as much as We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which I adored from its first sentence. (And has been made into an upcoming movie? When did this happen?) I've been warned that The Haunting and The Haunting of Hill House are different creatures, but I am still looking forward to the movie.
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I know about that movie because Sebastian Stan AKA Bucky is in it. /o\ It's one of those books that I don't see how they could make it into a movie, though, the POV is so strong. Altho I Capture the Castle was fairly good, but that was not Hollywood. But part of the amazingness of the Jackson novel is how Merricat slips from eccentricity to madness and how the reader just slips right along with her, and it seems perfectly reasonable especially given the barbarity of the outside world.