Long version: If you haven’t already seen Belladonna of Sadness, the 1973 anime about eroticism and witchcraft in medieval France, I might not necessarily recommend it outright. If it’s the kind of movie you’d need to see, you’d probably already have seen it. There’s no question that Belladonna is beautiful; it truly is a work of art. However, it may lean more toward art than entertainment, because in many sections of it, there’s not actually any animation happening. You’re just watching the camera pan over a beautiful drawing or watercolor rendering of Jeanne, the film’s central character.
I decided to take the film’s most colorful and most animated parts and edit them into a kind of Belladonna of Sadness supercut, and as soon as I did that, Goldfrapp’s “Hairy Trees” just kind of suggested itself as the ideal musical pairing. What you see below is something I find aesthetically pleasing but also a really misleading trailer for the film, as I purposefully excluded many of the still frame scenes, all the scenes where the sentient penis of Satan is a character and then also the scenes of sexual violence. Like I said, this movie is not for everyone. And yes, I see the irony in taking a work of erotica and essentially spaying it. However, as far as this video being a first in a little series I’m doing about weird animation, I think I’m off to a decent start.
Heads up: This video is NSFW as a result of animated boob.
In case you’re curious about the racier aspects of this film, I’m including below two of its big sex sequences: one represented Jeanne’s induction into witchcraft and the other the effect Jeanne’s liberation has on the villagers in her town. If the video I cut was a soft NSFW, I’d say these two sequences are an incredibly hard NSFW, not just for nudity but also for psychedelic, grotesque imagery the likes of which you may have never seen anywhere else.
Enjoy or also maybe just watch it concernedly, depending on your disposition.
More to come. See previous video art projects here.
Still not in the habit of writing much, but hey — here’s a video thing.
This was for a project that is now on hold, but I decided to finish this one segment anyway. It’s a montage of a few different camcorder videos of mall antics back in the day, set to Sylvester’s “Rock the Box,” even though I’m pretty sure the kids featured wouldn’t have heard of Sylvester. Here’s hoping I get to make the remaining segments should the project resume.
And here are the videos I used in this compilation:
You can also see all of my more “finished” projects on a special page on my Vimeo account, should you be bored today. And maybe in the future… writing?
Because nothing should get you into the holiday spirit better than the rapid approach of August, the hottest and least-holiday-filled month of all, here is a Christmas video.
I spent the last two weeks cobbling this together for Drink Special’s Christmas in July event last night at Bar Mattachine in downtown L.A. And while it was cool to see something I’d stitched together projected onto the wall, probably bigger than anything else I’d had a hand in making, I’m also putting the video online, just because a few people have enjoyed my past videos. And who knows? Maybe this will come in handy in a few months, when you’re planning your own holiday party and you want to play some wallpaper video that encourages people to point and say, “Hey, I also remember this thing!”
The Drink Special party had its own soundtrack, so while VHSmas was playing on a loop you couldn’t hear the soundtrack I included with it. That’s okay. The music in the video is really just placeholder music anyway, and I feel like anyone playing this at parties will probably just mute it and put on their own Christmas music instead.
In case you’re wondering, here is a list of the TV shows and movies I included, in order of when each first appears in the montage.
The 1964 Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special
The Nutcracker Fantasy (read more about this high-octane nightmare fuel here)
1974’s other Rankin/Bass special, The Year Without Santa Claus
Gremlins
A Muppet Family Christmas
Black Christmas (1974 version)
A fairly unknown 1984 slasher movie called Don’t Open Till Christmas
1984's Christmas Top of the Pops, featuring Baltimora
1977’s The Carpenters at Christmas
The Star Wars Holiday Special
The “Tendo Family Christmas Scramble” episode of Ranma 1/2
The finale to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
Ann-Marget on an unidentified Christmas special from 1981
The Joan Collins sequence from the 1972 Tales From the Crypt movie
The video for “Christmas in Hollis,” by Run–D.M.C.
The video for “Last Christmas” by Wham
“Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” the show’s original Christmas special
“Christmas at Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”
A Charlie Brown Christmas
“The Bird! The Bird!” — the premiere episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show
“Koopa Klaus,” the Christmas episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super
“Miracle at the Teen Club,” the Beverly Hills Teens Christmas special
“Christmas Memories,” the holiday special for Heathcliff and the Cadillac Cats
A Christmas Story
A 1980 clip of Kate Bush performing a Christmas version of “Babooshka”
The video for Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” which it should be noted was originally written as a Christmas song
The Christmas Toy (1986)
A Claymation Christmas Celebration (1987)
(Sorry, no ALF.)
I’m not listing all the commercials separately because there are simply too many of them and I found them all in these treasure trove YouTube clips of old broadcast commercials broadcast around the holidays. But ask if there’s something you want identified. And feel free to use this montage as you will.
It’s not that I’m neglecting this blog; it’s that I’m more often engaged in creative ways that are not writing, and I’m simply using the shell of this blog as a platform to promote these other things.
I started Singing Mountain, a podcast about video game music a few weeks ago. It’s an experiment, and I’m not sure exactly what form it will take. It may change episode to episode, based on my whims and availability, but I can tell you at least that it will always be about why the background music from whatever game you barely remember is actually more important than you might have realized.
I posted the fourth episode of Singing Mountain yesterday. It’s actually a remake, of sorts, of a post that went up here back in 2012. Once I started this thing, I realized that a podcast actually was the better medium through which to tell the story, just because you can exert a little more control over your audience than you can with just text. Topics discussed in this fourth episode include Earthbound, the closet where my mom would hide Christmas presents, The Cars, Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory,” the actual persistence of memory, the litigiousness of Beatles and, finally, Janet Jackson. It will likely prove to be the exception more than the rule, as far as future episodes go, as this one is also about me. I was interested if I could use this sort of podcast as a means to make creative nonfiction, I guess, and I’m eager to hear what you think of the result.
In case you’re wondering, the logo art uses a slightly re-colored version of the Dragon’s Hole dungeon background art from Seiken Densetsu 3. And please — if you’re so inclined, write me a review on iTunes. As a podcast person, I’m required to ask you that.
Eight episodes into the new season of Twin Peaks, we’ve seen some scary stuff. However, the single most lingering image, for me, nightmare-wise, appeared back in the second installment. It was our first glimpse of the horrifying, soot-covered woodsmen. The camera pans from Matthew Lillard’s character, grief-stricken as he waits in his jail cell, to another one a few doors down, where there’s this man who is painted black, sitting motionless and contorted. Then he vanishes. Then his head floats away like a balloon. No explanation given.
I made a video in case you need a refresher.
Even though the woodsman has appeared again — and done more horrifying things than just vanish — it’s this one that has stuck with me, and I wanted to take the piss out of it. That’s why I acted on the suggestion that it could be greatly improved by the addition of a slide whistle.
It was, in fact.
That’s why I asked Tony (Tony!) to further improve the sequence with voices.
Here is that.
See? Not scary anymore. I fixed it. I think you will agree. You’re welcome.
David Lynch doesn’t want me to write this. He didn’t say so, exactly, and I have no personal relationship with the guy. But over the years, he’s made it clear that he does not want to explain his work — and he’d rather you and I didn’t attempt a single, encompassing explanation for it either.
“When something is abstract, the abstraction is hard to put into words, unless you’re a poet,” he told an audience during a 2007 Q&A that might mark David Lynch at his most self-explanatory. “But these [are] ideas you somehow know, and cinema is a language that can say abstractions. I love stories, but I love stories that hold abstractions. And cinema can say these difficult-to-say-in-words things.” Lynch goes on to say that he often doesn’t understand the meaning of his ideas, and he didn’t even understand the meaning of Eraserhead, perhaps his most abstract work, when he was making it. But it doesn’t matter, because he’d rather you found an “inner knowingness” — a sort of idiosyncratic translation of his own idiosyncratic system of symbols.
All that said, I think Lynch lets on more than some people might guess. Perhaps as a result of him opening up his unconscious mind and letting all that mind goop flow out uninhibited, he’s revealing more substantial, meaty bits than even he may realize. Now, I’m aware of the arrogance involved in taking an artist’s work and claiming to perceive his or her true intent, especially when you haven’t asked about it directly, so I’m simply going to leave this here with the following note: “Hey, isn’t this a neat way to look at David Lynch’s work?”
My thesis is this: In several works, David Lynch would seem to be suggesting a critique on interpretation, and in each of them he does this using the metaphor of a performance or other such viewed entertainment.
Lil the Dancing Girl
My first example of this is a brief scene from Fire Walk With Me, in which regional FBI director Gordon Dole (Lynch himself) greets Agent Desmond (Chris Isaak). Rather than explain the specifics of the case for which Desmond has flown to Oregon to investigate, Lynch introduces Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole), his “mother’s sister’s girl,” who performs a bizarre dance.
Later, Desmond and Agent Stanley (Keifer Sutherland) are driving away, and Stanley asks what was up with Lil. Without hesitation, Desmond explains away each unusual facet of Lil’s appearance and dance as meaning something important to the case.
Lil’s sour face = problems with local authorities
Lil’s blinking eyes = “trouble higher up”
Lil keeping one hand in her pocket = authorities hiding something
Lil’s other hand being clenched = authorities would be belligerent
Lil walking in place = legwork
Cole’s reference to Lil being his “mother’s sister’s girl” and placing four fingers over his face = the sheriff’s uncle is in federal prison
Lil’s dress being tailored = a code for drugs
Lil wearing a blue rose pinned to her dress = “I can’t tell you about that” (and indeed, in the new series, we are still left wondering exactly what the blue rose might signify)
Even in the world of Twin Peaks, it seems improbable that Desmond was able to interpret all these things so quickly and clearly. I suppose it’s possible that Cole might have instructed him in his own personal language of signs, but I think it’s maybe also true that Lynch is having some fun with the viewer, especially the type of viewer who watched and re-watched the original series and attempted to read meaning into every loose end, every abstract detail. In the absurd world of the show, every aspect of Lil’s dance does mean something — and, in the end, most of what Desmond deduces from the dance turns out to be correct, it should be noted. And while this moves the plot along, I also think Lynch is perhaps making a joke about the way some people might scrutinize every little detail as opposed to taking in the whole of a given work, more like you’d take in a painting, less like you’d take in a traditional narrative.
No Hay Banda
I feel like Lynch could be making a similar comment with the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Drive. Whereas Lil’s dance comprises only a small part of Fire Walk With Me, the Club Silencio sequence may be the most pivotal in all of Mulholland Drive. And whereas I think the Lil scene is mostly meant as a joke, I think Lynch is talking the idea a bit further and saying, “No, don’t do this. Instead, do this.”
A quick and dirty recap: Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring) attend a late-night show at jazz club where they are repeatedly made to watch performances then are reminded that the thing they think they’re seeing is not actually happening. The host (Richard Green, credited as “The Magician”) keeps introducing different instruments and then telling the audience that there is no such instrument, no actual band, no orchestra. Betty and everyone else is only hearing a recording, no matter how real it may seem. Eventually the host vanishes, and Rebekeh Del Rio (credited as herself) steps onstage to sing a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Midway through the song, she collapses, yet the song continues. It’s implied that she was only lip-syncing.
Again, I’ve always interpreted this as David Lynch’s way of telling the audience not to get hung up on the details. Just as it’s absurdist comedy for Agent Desmond to read such specific details into Lil’s dance, the Club Silencio sequence discourages you from thinking that the bare components of the performance — the one Betty is watching onstage, the movie you are watching in real life — should be taken at anything more than face value. Betty and Rita don’t follow this advice, however; they are both moved to tears by “Llorando,” and at one point Betty starts shaking violently, maybe as a result of intense emotion she’s feeling. In fact, when they arrive back home after the show, both cease to exist, and the movie enters its bizarre, plot-bending final third.
There’s a lot more to consider in this scene. Perhaps most notably is one of the film’s final images: the blue-haired woman watching from the opera box speaking the word “silencio” one last time. It’s been theorized in various analyses that this could either represent “Quiet in the theater,” because you’re about to begin the “real” performance of piecing together your own interpretation of Mulholland Drive, or “Quiet on the set,” because you’re about to begin making the “real” movie of living your life. We don’t know, even all these years later. It’s worth mentioning, I feel, that the DVD printing of Mulholland Drive includes ten clues to unlock the film’s mystery, but I’m not sure they would lead anyone to any singular, concrete understanding. I think Lynch wants us to sit with it, think about it, consider and then re-consider it. This should not be a thing that is quickly processed.
Tracey Has Two Lattes
And then we have the new Twin Peaks. Probably the most talked-about scene from the four episodes occurred in the first episode. It features two characters, Tracey Barbarato (Madeline Zima) and Sam Colby (Benjamin Rosenfield) in New York, in a strange, living room-like setup situated around a mysterious glass box.
Quick and dirty again: Sam is paid to watch the box and adjust cameras around it. He’s not allowed to bring anyone else in, but when the security guard on duty apparently leaves, Sam agrees to show the contraption to Tracey. They only watch for a few seconds. Very quickly, they begin making out. Tracey takes off her clothes and they begin to have sex, oblivious to the fact that some abstract humanoid shape (possibly female?) materializes in the box. Before they can react, the creature bursts through the glass, killing both in a spectacular and bloody fashion. A lot of people have interpreted the scene as a metaphor for watching TV, watching a film at home or the experience of Twin Peaks in general. (It’s relevant to the last interpretation that episode two features Agent Cooper appearing in the box, getting enlarged and reduced, and then being spat out, which you could take as Agent Cooper and the show in general escaping the confines of traditional network TV.)
I think these are valid interpretations, but my first reaction to the scene was David Lynch’s 2008 condemnation of the way so many people experience movies today: distractedly and on an iPhone or other such handheld device. “You will never in a trillion years experience the film,” he says of watching cinema in this format. “You’ll be cheated.”
Tracey and Sam keep their smart phones in their pockets, but they sure seem like the kind of people who’d be tethered to their iPhones — that is, you know, young people. They also do a very bad job of paying attention to the show in front of them, and you might say that Lynch punishes their inattention with death. (Or maybe he’s punishing sex with death, but come on: This is the guy who had the Mulholland Drive DVD printed as one long chapter. He wants you to sit patiently though his films, start to finish.)
Listening to Jeff Jensen’s Twin Peaks podcast about this episode, I heard another decent theory. Starting around the 35:10 mark, Jensen says, “You kind of wonder if it’s the show talking to us about how to watch the show, or maybe even talking about itself and our relationship to the show and to TV in general and the changing nature of our relationship to TV in the twenty-five years since Twin Peaks has been on the air.”
There’s more at 39:20: “What I got from this almost immediately… is this weird allegory for TV-watching. A couch potato sitting on his couch, staring into this box, waiting for something to materialize, something that might come through that portal window. We have a complicated metaphor for Twin Peaks itself — a vision from outside of the world that’s about to materialize inside this box.
So in that sense, we’re encouraged to identify with Sam, as a viewer who’s unsure what he’s about to see at the same time as we embark on this eighteen-hour odyssey through the new Twin Peaks. So what happens next? They literally get their heads blown off, but this is maybe meant as a metaphor as well as a literal death. Again, from the podcast (and starting at the 48:06 mark): “You get the sense that it’s just whipping their faces, just shredding their faces, just blowing their minds against the wall. And they’re not screaming. They’re almost just passive as their doing it. You can read it in so many ways, including this visceral metaphor for a show that wants to get in your face and get in your face and blow your mind.” And because the lead-up to Tracey and Sam’s violent end is slow drawn out, you can take it a bit further: “If it’s the show talking about itself, it’s instructing us that it’s a show that you’re going to have to be patient with, that you’re going to have to watch, that it’s going to take its time taking shape and form, much like the thing in that box.”
This all seems plausible enough, but if it’s the correct interpretation, then it would mark a break from similar scenes in previous David Lynch works, in that the details do matter. As it turns out, Jensen himself got to ask Lynch about this theory directly in a May 26 interview.
JJ: Were you trying to give the audience an allegory for TV-watching or how to watch the show? DL: No. But that’s an interesting way to think about it. JJ: Do you think in terms of allegory or meta? DL: Not really. Ideas just come, you think about them, and you figure out their meaning. Then, how they fit into the whole is another thing completely. It’s not finished until it’s finished, and you don’t really know until further down the road how one thing relates to another. It’s just like a magical thing. I also always say the whole thing exists in another room as a complete puzzle, all the parts are together, and someone from that other room is sort of a rascal and randomly flips parts over into this room. And then you to have to put the puzzle together, but one is from the end of the story, one is from the middle, and a couple from the beginning, and you won’t know until it’s more formed what it could be.
That’s Lynch being evasive, yet again, but it’s also him not directly pooh-poohing the theory outright. However, let’s step aside for a moment and assume that Lynch wouldn’t change up his running theory of how to watch his work. I think there’s maybe an analysis that incorporates a bit of my gut reaction to the scene as well as the podcast theory.
Tracey and Sam die, and before they do they’re so taken with the vision of this creature in the box that they stand utterly still once it breaks out and kills them. As it’s noted in the podcast, they don’t resist; they just sit there while Mrs. No Face slashes away at them. What if this is David Lynch, consciously or not, giving us the same message as I think he’s giving, in different ways, in Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive? “No one thing you’re seeing is that important. Don’t obsess over the details. Stay for the whole thing and take it all in.” Our ill-fated latte lovers don’t do this. They get rattled by the first scary thing they see — and, really, the people watching these new episodes see — and they literally lose their heads. (There’s a pic of the end result, as we see in the third episode, but be forewarned it’s graphic.) If we’re going to appreciate the new Twin Peaks for what it is, we’ll need to be in for the long haul, and we’re should prepare ourselves for some seriously scary shit. But endure, faithful viewers, because it’s all going to add up to something big: what it means to us as individuals.
I’m trying to think of other scenes of performances in Lynch’s work. There’s the Lady in the Radiator scene in Eraserhead, there’s Julee Cruise singing in the Roadhouse, and there’s even the curious Twin Peaks end credits scene showcasing Gersten Hayward on the piano. I don’t know if there’s a way that these scenes also support my theory, and I don’t even know if my take on David Lynch will even make sense to anyone else. But I do know I can’t stop thinking about this scene, and I’d love to hear what you all have to say about it.
I just this week realized that I neglected to post and share a video I made late last year. It’s nothing major—just a silly thing I cranked out while at home for the holidays. I strung together a bunch of vintage workout clips and then paired them with the theme to the Dario Argento slasher movie Tenebre.
The song may be more familiar to you as “Phantom,” a remake by Justice.
I’d intended to use this footage as part of my horror movie video project, but in the end that veered in a different direction, and I didn’t have a place for this. In any case, I think the idea came to me while working out at the gym and watching one of the TVs play an episode of Bones in which this poor guy was reduced down to the smallest possible human fragments. Something about exercising my own body while being confronted by the inevitable conclusion of all human bodies seemed funny, so here you go: slasher music + workout videos.
In scouring YouTube for any usable footage from the right era and in a high enough resolution, however, I realize I may have included some segments that aren’t actually design to instruct you how to exercise. I think they may actually be gay softcore. You can see the segments at 0:59, 1:30, 1:51 and a lot of other places.
Am I crazy? Or am I revealing more about myself in how I don’t see any eroticism in this and not in any of the footage of women bending and flexing in their leotards? (Guys, I think I might be gay…?)
Here are the original clips in full.
Like, this is basically porn, right? It lacks frontal nudity or actual sex, but it’s designed to titillate more than it is to get the viewer into any kind of physical shape. Right? Aside form erect. Right? Also is it gay, necessarily, or is it just the style of the time, which reads as gay today? I am totally unable to tell.
In trying to identify what these videos might have been called, I did find one more that I hadn’t seen before. It’s exactly as ambiguously gay and porny as the others.
