35. One &...

Lyrics

I can't remember anything
Can't tell if this is true or dream
Deep down inside I feel to scream
This terrible silence stops me

Now that the war is through with me
I'm waking up, I cannot see
That there is not much left of me
Nothing is real but pain now

Hold my breath as I wish for death
Oh please God, wake me

Back in the womb it's much too real
In pumps life that I must feel
But can't look forward to reveal
Look to the time when I'll live

Fed through the tube that sticks in me
Just like a wartime novelty
Tied to machines that make me be
Cut this life off from me

Hold my breath as I wish for death
Oh please God, wake me

Now the world is gone, I'm just one
Oh God help me
Hold my breath as I wish for death
Oh please God, help me

Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cell

Landmine has taken my sight
Taken my speech
Taken my hearing
Taken my arms
Taken my legs
Taken my soul
Left me with life in hell


During its first minute or so, this is a pretty great song. Then the actual singing starts and it is all pretty much downhill from there. As I wrote in my piece on Nothing Else Matters, I am no fan of Metallica or heavy metal. I am glad though that they have made it so easy for me to link a movie to their song. Metallica has incorporated scenes from the 1971 movie Johnny Got His Gun in their official video clip for this pro-euthanasia song. This makes sense, since the lyrics are basically a short plot summary of that movie.

The Movie: Johnny Got His Gun (Dalton Trumbo, 1971)

As you may have guessed by now, this is not a particularly cheery, upbeat movie. It is about Joe, a patriotic soldier, who on the last day (That's what IMDB says, but I don't remember the movie mentioning that it was the last day) of WWI gets hit by a mortar shell. He does not die, but he loses his arms, legs, nose, eyes, ears and mouth. He is basically just a brain with a chest. What makes it even more horrific is that he has a conscious brain. So he can still think, remember and dream stuff. He is pretty intelligent, so he deduces pretty quickly that he has nor arms or legs. The scenes in which he does this are rather weird. They are pretty horrific, because we can hardly bear to imagine how horrible it would be if this would happened to us. The problem is though that the scene in this movie is 'acted' rather clumsily by Timothy Bottoms, who plays Joe. Of course he can do only voice acting; the movie wisely doesn't show his destroyed body, or his face, keeping him under a blanket during the scenes in which he is his horrible state. This was Timothy Bottoms' first role and it is one of the hardest acting debuts one can imagine. So it is rather understandable that he 'overacts' (overscreams?) quite a bit when he has to find out that he has no arms or legs. But while it is understandable, the effect is unfortunately that his screaming sounds a bit like it belongs in a Monty Python sketch. The scene is thus unintentionally (though maybe thankfully) less horrific then it could/should have been.

That is not the only scene in which Bottoms seems to have some trouble with his voice acting. Luckily for him though he also gets to act 'normally' in the movie. The movie visually shows Joe's memories, dreams and thoughts. It is during these scenes that the movie is really great and interesting. While watching the scenes involving Joe's memories of his childhood, I realized that I cannot remember ever seeing a movie dealing realistically with the life of American teens/children at the beginning of the twentieth century. It actually felt quite astonishing to see, in an American movie, a kid bathing itself in a wooden barrel, because there was no shower at home. And there is one scene which is so utterly unimaginable in a modern movie, that it is simply astonishing to see it existing. It starts when on the last day before Joe goes to war he is kissing his girlfriend Kareen. They are kissing in Kareen's living room, until Kareen's father sends them away to Kareen's bedroom. As modern movie watchers, we now think we pretty much know what's going to happen. Well, it doesn't! And it doesn't in what seems, to us moderns, the most awkward way possible. Kareen goes to bed, hides under the sheets and pulls out her clothes. With her blanket covering her breasts she asks Joe (her 20-year old long time boyfriend, remember!) to give her, her nightgown. He does so, protesting a bit  unconvincingly that, he can't see her breasts. Since it is their last night, before Joe goes to war Kareen tells him, he can see her naked if he wants. He says that if she is feeling uncomfortable doing it, she doesn't need to do it. She doesn't feel that uncomfortable though and stands naked in front of him, only to return to bed, and under the sheets immediately. She does tell Joe, that since she showed her nude body, he has to do it too. So he does this for a moment and then he too returns to bed and under the sheets. They now simply lay naked on he bed, each on their own side, with the sheets over their interesting parts. They talk something and after a while finally decide to do something. So they gently let their heels touch each other. After a while of touching heels, they finally decide to kiss, without ever getting rid of the blankets. Now I didn't write this to make fun of this scene, the movie, or the norms and values of that time. I just wanted to show how completely unnatural this scene (and some other scenes too) feels. It's utterly unimaginable that we would ever see such a scene in a modern movie. It feels not only from another time, but also from another world.

In the previous entry I complained that Terry Gilliam failed to make the hallucinatory, unreal scenes very interesting or imaginative. That cannot be said of this movie. But besides besides being quite imaginative during its dream scenes, through his dreams and memories the movie also manages to make clear how horrific and sad Joe's fate is. Not only could he have had a wonderful life, he also realizes he could have had a wonderful life and that there is absolutely nothing he can do to have a normal life again. It is also worth noting that I've never seen a movie convey so precisely how we dream.  Dreams do not follow a logical pattern, they don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. There is also no clear sense of time and place in dreams. The best example of this comes when Joe is told by his nurse that it's Christmas. She does this by spelling 'Merry Christmas' on his stomach. When she leaves he starts dreaming. We see him in a bakery, where he worked before he went to war. There all kinds of people waltzing together. And in the corner there is some rich man repeating constantly 'Merry Christmas!, champagne!' There are other weird people in the scene including a black woman looking for her son. We find Joe dancing with Kareen, only to see Kareen go and dance with someone else. Eventually Joe goes out of the bakery and into same sort of cave, which seems in no way to be connected to the bakery. He meets his father (who died even before Joe went to war) there. They talk a bit and then Joe leaves the cave. We now see him running through some fields he obviously remembers from his childhood. It's day, but it suddenly becomes night. He also suddenly hears and sees Kareen, goes after her, but loses her. He then suddenly meets his father again, seemingly forgetting that he was searching for Kareen. His 'father' gives him the idea to communicate through Morse code with his doctors. He can do this by banging his head against his pillow.

Before I discuss this, it is worth noting that two of Joe's weirdest and most unexplainable dreams involve Donald Sutherland playing a hippie version of Jesus. I never used to think much about Sutherland, but he actually is one of the most interesting actors of the 70's and 80's. He was choosing interesting, slightly odd movies and always played interesting characters. In 1971 alone he was Jesus in this movie, a hippie priest in Little Murders (one of the weirdest and most anarchistic American movies I've ever seen) and Klute in Klute (I haven't seen that one, but it considered one of those classic American 70's conspiracy movies). Furthermore he has been in movies like MASH, The Dirty Dozen and Don't Look Now. I haven't seen these three movies, but based on what I know of them I really hope I'll see them some day. (Of course. due to my studies, I've had to watch/analyze the famous opening scene of Don't Look Now at least three times). Despite all this Sutherland seems often a bit overlooked. He has never been nominated for an Oscar, but he should have been for his great role in Ordinary People.

After Joe finds out through his dream that he can communicate through Morse code, he tries to tell his doctors what he wants. At first he is unsuccessful, but eventually his doctors realize what he is doing. And what he wants is to be exhibited outside so that he can fresh air and people can see him and learn from him. Naturally the army doctors refuse this. So he requests to be killed. The army refuses this too. Now in the last 10 minutes, the movie suddenly turns into a anti-army, anti-war film. While I can quite agree with these sympathies, these scenes don't really fit this movie. This was a movie about the horrific fate of a single individual, not a movie trying to make any grand statements, or trying to expose the hypocrisy and stupidity of war, nationalism and armies. Besides, the fate of Joe, was quite enough to make us understand that war and nationalism aren't very good thing. These extra scenes feel a bit tacked on. Just like the final quote we see in the credits: 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.' This means 'it is sweet and proper to die for one's country.' Of course this quote is intended as cynical and ironical, but the Joe we saw being portrayed in the movie would agree unironically with this quote. Of course, it is quite probable that exactly because of these last scenes Dalton Trumbo wanted to make this movie. This is the only movie he has directed, but he has written several other great movies. Unfortunately he could never really revel in the successes of those movies because he was blacklisted. So Dalton Trumbo had quite good reasons to make an angry movie about the hypocrisy of American patriotism. Especially in 1971. While the war portrayed in the movie is WWI, Trumbo of course had the Vietnam War on his mind. 





    

    

34. Comfortably Numb &...

Lyrics

Hello,
Is there anybody in there
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone at home
Come on now
I hear you're feeling down
I can ease your pain
And get you on your feet again
Relax
I'll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb

O.K.
Just a little pin prick
There'll be no more aaaaaaaah!
But you may feel a little sick
Can you stand up?
I do believe it's working, good
That'll keep you going through the show
Come on it's time to go.

There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown
The dream is gone
And I have become
Comfortably numb.


To me, this song combines the best and worst of Pink Floyd. I don't like the first and third couplet, with the semi-mysterious recitation. Everything else about the song is pretty brilliant though. It is also interesting that while many rocks songs of the 60's and 70's make veiled references to drug use, Comfortably Numb isn't interested in hiding anything. This song pretty openly says that drugs are fun and make you feel wonderful. So the movie I chose to link it to is a movie which intends to have the same message.

The Movie: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam, 1998)

There is a reason I said that this movie intends to have the same message, and not that it has the same message. While it is indeed very open about using drugs (pretty much nothing else happens in the movie), it completely fails to make it seem like a wonderful experience. As I said in my piece on Riders on the Storm & Pulp Fiction, I have never tried and probably will never try drugs. I am quite terrified by them. But I have no moral objections against them and It is a fact that people can really have wonderful experiences using drugs. It's probably hard to study in Amsterdam and think otherwise. That also means that I don't have anything against movies promoting drug use and showing that it can be really fun. Pulp Fiction of course comes to mind, but also the great comedy Pineapple Express, by David Gordon Green. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas wants very much to make us believe that drug use is great fun, but fails miserably and almost convinces of the opposite. I think pretty much the same of Easy Rider, which I find to be very dull. There are probably many people who can function great on drugs, but Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper aren't one those people. Every second of that movie, when Jack Nicholson isn't on screen, is a lifeless drag. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro certainly don't lack any energy. They act like a bunch of manic idiots. For both of them this is their worst performance and especially Depp's is one of the most ridiculous performances I've ever seen. But at least their performances are bad without being dull. Which cannot be said of the rest of the movie.

The movie mostly consists of scenes in which a miserable Del Toro and Depp take drugs, feel miserable and yell boringly at each other. In between there are some scenes that are interesting and some scenes that are weirdly uncomfortable. It makes sense that a plotless movie about people hallucinating drug addicts should be directed by Terry Gilliam. He is a director who is not very much concerned with plot and mostly want to create wonderful images and scenes. I had seen only two other movies of him before this one: Twelve Monkeys and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Both of them are very good. Unfortunately Gilliam doesn't do very much here with his visual imagination. A couple of times we see a face changing shape, at one point we see the floor bubbling. And once we see a shot from Depp's POV, and we see that he temporarily sees other people in the shape of a (pretty boring looking) reptile. We get lots of weird close-ups of high faces. They are a bit funny, especially because Depp constantly has a joint in his mouth. Gilliam also tries to makes scenes more interesting by filtering color, so everything that happens in a scene is seen through red or green light. That is a nice trick, but in most scenes nothing really happens. There are small cameo's by other famous actors, including Cameron Diaz and Tobey Maguire. But they are on the screen for such a short time that they don't really have a chance to shine. Ellen Barkin is only in the movie to be humiliated by del Toro. Which wouldn't be that bad if she was humiliated in an interesting way. Only Gary Busey has some fun with his role as a rather weird policeman.

Admittedly, as I wrote earlier, there are some interesting scenes. The reason Depp is in Las Vegas, is because he is a journalist who has to report a motor race in the Nevada desert. In order to this, the journalists have to ride jeeps, so they can follow the racers. Because of the sand though no one can see anything and the journalists mostly follow each other around in their war jeeps. The scene becomes a nice parody of a typical scene in a war movie set in the desert. The two best scenes come near the end though. There is a scene in which Gilliam finally lets his imagination go for an extended period. Depp is hallucinating again and we see him having a large lizard tale and roaming through his utterly and absurdly broken down hotel room. But my favorite scene was a scene in which Depp and del Toro attend a conference of narcotics agents. Sitting in the back row they happily smoke their joints. That contrast alone makes the scene pretty funny, but it gets better. One of the agents gets up to speak and talks about the dangers of drugs. He poses as an expert who has charted the phases a drug addict goes through. The attendees are clearly impressed, asking him silly questions in a serious manner, even though he is talking utter nonsense. He ends with a hilarious movie about the dangers of drugs, that is modeled on those propaganda movies in the 50's that warned Americans about the dangers of communism. The scene's point isn't very subtly made, but it is made well and it it is funny. Which unfortunately cannot be said of most of the rest of the movie.

33. School &...

Lyrics

I can see you in the morning when you go to school
Don't forget your books, you know you've got to learn the golden rule,
Teacher tells you stop your play and get on with your work
And be like Johnnie - too-good, well don't you know he never shirks
- he's coming along!

After School is over you're playing in the park
Don't be out too late, don't let it get too dark
They tell you not to hang around and learn what life's about
And grow up just like them - won't you let it work it out
- and you're full of doubt

Don't do this and don't do that
What are they trying to do?- Make a good boy of you
Do they know where it's at?
Don't criticize, they're old and wise
Do as they tell you to
Don't want the devil to
Come out and put your eyes

Maybe I'm mistaken expecting you to fight
Or maybe I'm just crazy, I don't know wrong from right
But while I am still living, I've just got this to say
It's always up to you if you want to be that
Want to see that
Want to see that way
- you're coming along!


The studio version of Supertramp's School cannot be found on YouTube. It can be heard on this site though: http://mp3skull.com/mp3/school.html. While School is the most popular Supertramp song among the Dutch, I cannot remember ever hearing it before now. This despite the fact that I quite like Supertramp, especially Breakfast in America and The Logical Song. After hearing School, those previous two are still my favorite Supertramp songs. School is quite weird though. It feels like a mix of what I expect from Supertramp and some poor version of Pink Floyd. The lyrics are also pretty interesting. There are many songs (and books and movies), which criticize a school for being old-fashioned or too collectivist. But most of them imply that the particular school could change for the better. This song on the other hand seems to imply that the whole institution called 'school' is bad. That there simply cannot be a good school. So the movie I chose to link it too is a movie I knew not much about, only that it was a pretty insane 80's comedy that looked very irreverently at a high school. I expected it to be a funny, very raunchy comedy. It turned out to be so much more.

The Movie: Heathers (Michael Lehmann, 1988)

I haven't often been so pleasantly surprised by a movie as I was by Heathers. This is not only an incredibly funny film, full of great dialogues and great scenes. It is also quite wonderfull stylistically and has a truly great performance by Winona Ryder. But what I liked most is that this is quite a vicious satire. And it actually satirizes two things at once, both eqully brilliant and succesfull. It not only satirizes high school life, but also our media's (and culture's) tendency to sensationalize death and destruction. And the satire is really vicious. I mentioned that the movie is funny, but the humor is some of the darkest I've ever seen in an American mainstream movie. I am now also quite fascinated by the director Michael Lehmann. I've seen two movies of him now, Heathers and Hudson Hawk. In both of these movies he is doing Tarantinian things, before Tarantino. Both of these movies were ahead of their time. By sheer coincidence I saw Heathers just a couple of days after the horrible shooting in the primary school in Newtown, Connecticut. It really felt like Heathers could just as easily have come out in 2012 without changing much. At one point a character is even encouraged to tweet(that's the exact wording!) her frustrations.

Heathers is brilliant from the opening shots. It starts like some David Lynch movie. On the soundtrack we hear a slightly odd version of Que Sera Sera. We see three perfectly groomed young women play a game of croquet in a perfectly cultivated garden of an obviously wealthy family. All these three women call each other Heather. First we think that it is some sort of a weird cult they are in. It turns out that they simply really all are called Heather. During this game of croquet we see them at point hit Veronica's (Winona Ryder) head with a croquet ball. This wouldn't be very weird if it wasn't for the fact that Veronica has her body underground, with only her head sticking out. This makes it seem like this is a dream sequence. But it is never presented that way. After this scene, the movie simply goes on without acknowledging the weirdness of the scene. Besides there is a dream sequence later on in the movie. And in that case it is explicitly made clear that it is a dream sequence.

These Heathers and Veronica are the most popular girls at high school. This fact is acknowledged and respected by everyone at their high school, even though no one seems to really like them. Being popular as Veronica says is their job. One of the funniest things in this movie is how everybody in this high school seems to have a role assigned to them that they have to play. Now, most movies set in a high school/college have geeks, tough guys, popular girls, fat kids, etc. But I have rarely seen a movie in which these roles are made so explicit. And in which everyone behaves so much as if the role they play is completely natural and unchangeable. The high school in Heathers seems to have a natural hierarchy that can olny be changed by doing something radical. All of this is made clear near the beginning of the movie in one wonderful and funny scene in the school cafetaria. Everybody working on the film is on the top of his/her game in this scene.

Veronica is tired of her job as the popular girl and is afraid that the only way to quit it is to kill the leading Heather (yes, there even is a hierarchy among the popular girls). She befriends (and more) J.D. (Christian Slater, who tries to imitate Jack Nicholson, but is ufortunately completey outacted by Winona Ryder). J.D. is a complete outsider at the high school, because he seems, at first, to be the only normal three-dimensional person in the high school. But he doesn't have a role, which makes him a threat and an outlier. In his first appearance, in the cafetaria scene, he is threathened by two senior football jocks. Before threathening him though, they first discuss what they should do as senior football jocks. The very much want to beat the shit out of him, but they can't do that because they are too old. Their current role only allows them to scare him. This doesn't end up well for them, as J.D. shoots blank bullets at them. He is suspended for a week, but Veronica is smitten. So she teams up with J.D. to do some small harm to Heather. J.D. has bigger plans though. So he cons Heather into drinking cleaning chemicals and she dies. From here on the movie becomes really great.

Veronica and J.D. are shocked by Heather's death, though they are more shocked because of the consequences her death might have for them. So they make it look as if it is a suicide, complete with a suicide note in which Heather claims to have a 'myriad of problems.' The use of the word myriad here provides one of the best jokes in the film. Another great joke in the film is the use of mineral water as a connotation for homosexuality. That's how J.D. and Veronica make their second murder in the movie look like a suicide. They now kill the two senior jocks who previously tried to humiliate J.D. Though the reason they are killed is because they were annoying Veronica. While all these scenes are pretty funny, the movie is really great because it is not really about J.D. and Veronica doing bad things and trying to get away with them. Though it is quite successful in doing that too. When they are nearly caught after killing the two jocks, the movie manages to achieve quite some suspense, because we are actually rooting for J.D. and Veronica to get away. But to get back at what I was saying, the movie is really great because it uses this murders/ 'suicides' to viciously satirize the tendency in our media and culture to sensationalize tragedies, for all kinds of reasons.

 While J.D. and Veronica go to pretty great lengths to make their murders seem like suicides, they really don't have to. As J.D. says 'Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager can think upon itself. Nobody is going to care about exact handwriting."  In the film, everyone's reaction to the deaths of the teens serves only to achieve personal gain. The media are very eager to interview crying teens. Emotion sells. Most teens crying for their dead  'friends' here only do so to show that they were mingling with the popular crowd and that they are really decent, caring people. For the hippie teacher these deaths are a good opportunity to sell her ideals to the school and the rest of the world. 'Eskimo' a word J.D has randomly underlined in the Moby Dick copy of one of his victims, is being used by the priest to explain the (mental) state of the dead teen and the world as a whole. Hereby of course sounding very intelligent and powerful. And the editor of the high school newspaper sees the suicides as a great opportunity to make his newspaper popular. He is quite elated that not only did Heather commit suicide, but she committed it during a time that the song 'Teenage Suicide, Don't Do It, is a hit on the radio, making his story even more relevant. A story on food shortage in Africa will have to go for his story on Heather. In the process the dead teens are glorified. Even though no one really liked them alive, as Veronica writes in her diary, their 'suicides' have given them a heart, a brain and depth. And this is dangerous, because it may lead to truly troubled teens committing suicides. In the most daring and somehow darkly funny sequence, the only decent person in the movie, a really fat girl without friends who is being bullied by everyone tries to commit suicide, by walking on the road hoping to get hit by a car. The suicide fails (apparently, we don't see this) because she is too fat and the car didn't have to much power to run her over. It is a testament to the greatness of the movie that this works as a joke and not as a very tastefulness scene. After hearing about this the teens come together excitedly to inform each other what happened. And afterwards nothing really happens. The fat girl is completely forgotten. Everyone is too busy paying attention to the dead people. That is the easiest way to show that we are deeply caring good people.

Lastly, I was looking at what other movies came out in 1988 and it turns out that was a great year for comedy. Besides Heathers, Coming to America, The Naked Gun, Bull Durham, Midnight Run and A Fish Called Wanda (probably my favorite comedy) were released.





  

32. Goodnight Saigon &...

Lyrics

We met as soul-mates
On Parris Island
We left as inmates
From an asylum.
And we were sharp
As sharp as knives
And we were so gung ho to lay down our lives.

We came in spastic
Like tame-less horses
We left in plastic
As numbered corpses
And we learned fast
To travel light
Our arms were heavy but our bellies were tight

We had no home-front
We had no soft soap
They sent us Playboy
They gave us Bob Hope
We dug in deep
And shot on sight
And prayed to Jesus Christ with all of our might

We had no cameras
To shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe
And played our Doors tapes
And it was dark...
So dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers we'd write

(Chorus)
And we would all go down together
We said we'd all go down together
Yes we would all go down together

Remember Charlie?
Remember Baker?
They left their childhood
On every acre
And who was wrong?
And who was right?
It didn't matter in the thick of the fight...

We, held the day,...
In the palm of our hands
They, ruled the night
And the night, seemed to last as long as six weeks
On Parris Island
We held the coastline
They held the highland
And they were sharp
As sharp as knives
They heard the hum of the motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive

(Repeat chorus)


I am a fan of Billy Joel. Both this song and Piano Man (his best) are some of the most unironic and shamelessly sentimental songs ever made. But Billy Joel makes them work. And he is also great when making more conventional pop and rock, like She's Always a Woman or We Didn't Start the Fire. There have been made many movies about Vietnam, but there cannot be any doubt which movie should be linked to this song about the experiences of a soldier in the Vietnam War.

The Movie: Platoon (Oliver Stone, 1986)

I once followed an elective called 'Vietnam as a political analogy'. My final paper for this course was an analysis on how Oliver Stone's Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July represented America's experience in Vietnam. (Unfortunately I can't find this essay). During this course I had seen Platoon twice, after having already seen it once before. Seeing Platoon three times, means that I have seen Platoon once, or perhaps even twice too many times. As you can see, I am not really a fan of the film and I chose not to see it again before writing this piece. I actually am a fan of Oliver Stone. Born on The Fourth of July is a really great film, and JFK is only slightly less. And I think that W, Stone's film about George W. Bush is really underrated.

Coincidentally, I followed this elective on Vietnam around the time that Charlie Sheen had his famous meltdown (I am a rock star from Mars!). Watching Platoon around that time, I had the feeling that you could make one of those silly quizzes in which you make people guess which line is said by Charlie Sheen during his meltdown, and which line is said by Chris Taylor, Sheen's character in Platoon. Some of the dialogue and narration (Sheen is the narrator) in Platoon is simply insanely and incredibly pretentious and meaningless. Some examples:
 "Maybe I finally found it, way down here in the mud. Maybe from down here I can start up again. Be something I can be proud of without having to fake it, be a fake human being".
"I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there".
"Day by day, I struggle to maintain not only my strength but my sanity. It's all a blur. I have no energy to write. I don't know what's right and what's wrong anymore. The morale of the men is low. A civil war in the platoon. Half the men with Elias, half with Barnes. There's a lot of suspicion and hate. I can't believe we're fighting each other when we should be fighting them" These lines are even more unconvincing, because Charlie Sheen just isn't a very good dramatic actor. (I actually do think that he is a pretty great comic actor). Thus the movie sometimes comes very close to becoming a parody of itself.

But the lines aren't the only problem. It often seems as if Oliver Stone somehow thinks he is making very subtle points about the Vietnam war. But there is no subtlety in this movie. Almost every shot is filled with incredibly obvious symbolism. This is most obvious in the famous death scene of Sgt. Elias. Neither Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) or Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger) are ever really presented as normal human beings. They are the epitomization of respectively good and evil. And Chris Taylor, who is torn between them is of course America. Although to be fair, that is slightly less obvious and he is a bit more of a human being. Thus when Elias dies, at the hands of Barnes, it is very obvious that Stone wants to say that goodness died and evil prevailed in America during the Vietnam war. But this seems to be not obvious enough for Stone. So he makes Dafoe strike a Jesus-like pose when he dies. And it still isn't enough for Stone. So he ramps up the sentimental music and shows Dafoe's death repeatedly and in slow motion. It must be said though that the constant struggles and fighting between Elias and Barnes (good vs. evil!) did provide the most entertaining parts of the movie. Dafoe and Berenger are good actors and it is quite enjoyable to see them go at each other. It is quite unfortunate that both of them are a bit forgotten now.

Besides all this Oliver Stone's message here is quite questionable. He doesn't actually say that the Vietnam war was bad, because it was morally wrong, and because many Vietnamese and Americans died. This movie hardly cares about the Vietnamese. Stone claims the war was wrong, because it divided Americans and made America lose its apparent innocence. I do not think that this was his intention, but it seems a bit as if he is saying that America killed a lot of Vietnamese for the wrong reasons. But if the reasons for killing the Vietnamese had been good, the Vietnam war would have been a good war. And that the highest cost of the war, wasn't the fact that many people died, but the fact that it made some Americans mad at each other.

31. Nights In White Satin &...

Lyrics

Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters I've written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can't say anymore.

'Cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.

Gazing at people,
Some hand in hand,
Just what I'm going thru
They can understand.

Some try to tell me
Thoughts they cannot defend,
Just what you want to be
You will be in the end,

And I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

Nights in white satin,
Never reaching the end,
Letters I've written,
Never meaning to send.

Beauty I'd always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can't say anymore.

'Cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

'Cause I love you,
Yes, I love you,
Oh, how, I love you.
Oh, how, I love you.

(+ in the extended version)

Breath deep
The gathering gloom
Watch lights fade
From every room
Bedsitter people
Look back and lament
Another day's useless
Energy spent

Impassioned lovers
Wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love
And has none
New mother picks up
And suckles her son
Senior citizens
Wish they were young

Cold hearted orb
That rules the night
Removes the colours
From our sight
Red is gray and
Yellow white
But we decide
Which is right
And
Which is an Illusion 


This is a good time for movie fans to live in. There is more access to more movies than ever before. Besides that, there are more possibilities than ever before to read, write and talk about movies. There are countless of interesting blogs with interesting articles about movies. And let's not forget IMDB. Many movies I discuss in my blog I found through IMDB and these blogs. I am quite certain that I wouldn't have known of some of this movies if it weren't for the internet. One of these interesting websites/blogs is www.murielawards.org. Each year on this site several bloggers come together to rank their top 10 movies the year, the top 10 actors, top 10 actresses, etc. All these votes are then accumulated and you get a definitive list, based on the lists of all these bloggers. It's not very complicated and there are probably dozens of other sites where such things happen. I just happen to know this one. In 2011 the particpants chose The Tree of Life as the best movie of that year. But the reason I'm writing all of this here is an interesting result in the category 'best cinematic moment.' The winner was the creation sequence in The Tree of Life, but in 8th place was something called 'the Nights in White Satin dance' in House of Pleasures, a movie I didn't know anything about.
Before starting my piece on the movie it is worth noting that I've hardly wrote anything about the song itself. There is not much I can write about it. I don't like this song and I don't know anything about the Moody Blues.

The Movie: L'Appolonide (House of Pleasures) (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

I was quite interested to see this movie. I had found the 'Nights in White Satin' scene on YouTube and I found it an interesting, intriguing sequence. I also found Roger Ebert's 3,5 star review of the film, so I had some high hopes. Unfortunately though I must say that I didn't like this movie at all. Perhaps I should've seen it coming. This is a, what one would call, arty-farty French drama about a high class brothel in 1900. That is not really my cup of tea. But I believe that this wouldn't be a good movie in any case. The director doesn't seem to have an idea of what kind of movie he wants to make, or what to do with the characters and the setting.

The 'Nights in White Satin' scene is indeed the best and most interesting scene in the movie. The mood of the song does actually seem to fit the movie, at least when the movie is blurring the lines between reality and dreams and intends to be a melodramatic story about the melancholy, sometimes romanticized lives of the prostitutes and their clients. Sometimes though the movie wants to be a realistic, stark portrayal of life in the brothel. These two approaches don't mesh at all. But, back to the sequence. We see the prostitutes dance with each other mysteriously, while on the soundtrack we hear Nights in White Satin. They are mourning because one of their 'colleagues' had just died of syphillis. The sequence has a surrealist feel from the start and becomes only weirde. After a while we cut to a woman in a another room and the music stops. We assume a new scene has just started. But then we follow this woman as she goes to the saloon, where all the women are dancing. And as she approaches the saloon we hear Nights in White Satin clearer and clearer. And when she finally enters the saloon, we hear the song as well as at the beginning of the scene. This implies that the song is diegetic, meaning that it comes form within the world of the film. This is obviously weird considering that the song is from 1967 and the movie takes place in 1900. After this sequence the movie goes into full surrealist mode and becomes quite interesting and absurd. Unfortunately this is too little too late. All of this happens in the last 15 minutes of the film. And the movie manages to ruin even this by ending on a completely false note. I'll talk later about this.

Before this sequence the movie is incredibly dull and dreary. The problems start with the depiction of the brothel. The movie wants to present the brothel as a claustrophobic, mysterious place. Thus for the first hour or so, we never get a sense of the geography of the brothel. Scenes take place in seemingly random rooms and we hardly have an idea what the purpose of most of these rooms is, or how big the brothel really is. This is quite disorienting, but to not much effect. Besides that we hardly see the rooms where we are in. The characters inside the rooms are often the only ones who are well lit. The rest of the room is usually in darkness. This invites us to focus mostly on the characters, but they are quite uninteresting. The movie has an often weirdly romanticized view of prostitution, while at the same time making both the prostitutes and the clients so uninteresting, that it almost makes you wonder how anyone ever could go to a brothel for pleasure. The prostitutes talk uninterestingly and repetitively about their daily lives in the brothel. They are sometimes unhappy, but the prostitutes are mostly presented as living quite happily. They love each other and their madam, and sometimes they do enjoy pleasuring their clients. We only exit the brothel once. The prostitutes are on a day out near some lake. And while I was grateful, that the movie finally cut away from that darkness, that scene exemplified exactly what's wrong with the movie. Like many other scenes, this scene follows another scene, in a completely random way. Besides that the scene seems to have no clear purpose or reason to be in the movie. It's just plain pointless and dull.

There are scenes that are even more problematic. One of the prostitutes, Madeleine, has been the victim of a masochist, who cut her face during one session with her. The movie seems quite unimaginative in showing her afterwards. She is basically made to look like the Joker from The Dark Knight. This resemblance is at times so enormous, that it seems that the movie did this deliberately. I find it hard to believe that no one involved in this movie could have been oblivious to this resemblance. Her appearance therefore often seems like some kind of sick joke. But it gets even more problematic. Due to her appearance Madeleine now can't get any clients, but the madam still lets her work in the brothel, doing the laundry, making breakfast, etc. After a while though the brothel has financial problems. So the madam sells Madeleine to some wealthy French aristocrat who has some sort of brothel for freaks. Here Madeleine has to have sex with people who aroused by her disfigurement. The movie seems to condemn this, yet it pays lots of (loving) attention to this sex scene. This is quite an exploitative scene. Now, I don't have a problem with exploitative scenes. I just found it strange that the director doesn't see that he is doing exactly what he condemns.

I did really dislike the final scene. In the last seconds of the movie, we suddenly cut to the present time. We see an unhappy, utterly unglamorous prostitute walking on the street. Then we see a car drive by and stop. Out of this car comes another unhappy, unglamorous prostitute. This feels like an elaborate attempt to make some sort of stupid point about our current times. This scene is totally unsupported by the movie that preceded it. Besides what exactly is the point the point that it wants to make? That prostitutes now are treated like trash and have horrible lives? As opposed to, what, the great lives they had in the 1900 when prostitution was all fun and games, and they were all treated with respect? Really? That's quite possibly the most stupid and idiotic point the movie could make.