CREATURE FEATURES & THE IMPERFECT BODY: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946)

Director + Writer: Jean Cocteau
Music: Georges Auric

Il était une fois...
         Ok, this creature feature won my heart as soon as Belle wanders into a dark castle full of disembodied arms holding candles aloft. Aesthetically, I got everything I needed in that one sequence. Some of the narrative camera-work in Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast looks closer to the theatre than cinema, but Cocteau’s poetic sensibilities are also sharp to the art historical moment. Cocteau kept company with the Surrealists, Pablo Picasso, and Gertrude Stein, so there’s plenty of formal dazzling. The set designs were modeled after the engravings of Gustave Dore, while Belle’s scenes with her family draw more from Vermeer.
         The Beast is deliciously gaudy in his attire, his costume jewelry glittering in black and white. The glass ornaments that hang from his waist resemble something between icicles and shards of broken mirror, so that he cannot fail to look on himself—though it can only amount to a fragmented sum. There is the necessary cast of magical objects (a glove to transport the wearer; a white horse named Magnificent; and a key whose misuse could kill the Beast) and dark suggestions. Belle occasionally finds mauled animals on the estate, presumably her captor’s doing. We see the Beast staggering around his enormous home with smoking hands, our evidence that he has killed.
         Both the beautiful, arrogant Avenant and the powerful-but-ashamed Beast are played by the same actor, Jean Marais. This visual double underscores a shared trait: both are too possessive, too flowery in their need of Belle, as if their love follows mysterious laws and has little to do with her. It's telling that Avenant's impassioned speech to Belle on her father's doorstep is a straight shot on his (admittedly flawless) face as he moves through moods and realizations, needing no answer from her. When we finally get a countershot of Belle's reaction, she is weeping with her gaze downcast, as he says, "Belle, I assure you, if that monster suffered as I do, he would rush to your side and carry you off with him. I assure you, he's forgotten you." For what it's worth, the Beast at least extends a gesture of trust when he allows Belle to leave the castle for a week—even if it is a remote rite with strings attached, as the laws of fairy tales always are.

         Avenant and Belle's brother Ludovico steal Magnificent and take off for the Beast's castle intent on killing him. Belle’s miserable sisters give Avenant the magic key, and only as they gallop away does the younger sister cry out for her brother. Have we sent them to their deaths? she asks her sister uneasily. The older sister calls her a fool and inspects the enchanted mirror sent by the Beast. When the younger sister looks at her reflection, she sees herself as an old maid, sad and surprised by the failure of her beauty. When the older sister looks, she sees herself as a rhesus monkey. When they give the mirror to Belle, she rubs against it like a twitterpated housecat before it shows her an image of the ailing Beast.
         There are moments of BDSM subtext to this movie (and, one could argue, to its fairytale of origin) that don’t require a total pervert to say, “Wait...what?” Painted broadly, it has to do with the negotiation of power exchange between Belle, the smart and powerful captive, and Beast, her devoted captor. Sure, some of the suggestive dialogue could be due to translation issues, wobbly fairytale logic, or the need to cloak more straightforward dirty talk from studios and sensors. (Did France even have sensors, those kinky libertines?) Anyway, I hit pause when the Beast snapped, Don't call me Sir! I'm called the Beast. I don’t like compliments. Don’t try to understand why. Later, Belle will urge the Beast to cling to life and chase death away (any doctor’ll tell you death is largely a matter of will power) and the Beast will say, If I were a man, perhaps I could do as you say. But poor beasts who wish to prove their love can only grovel on the ground and die. Those French really know romance.
         When Belle returns to the castle, she finds the Beast dying (of thirst? of love? of hate?) on the riverbank like a hairier, subverted Narcissus. Two nearby swans hiss at Belle as she approaches. I can’t prove this was an accident, but I suspect working with the constraints of early cinema allows for beautiful accidents of its kind. I don’t want to bore you with the math but, basically, More live beasts – control = an art of chance and decisive moments. I’m probably preaching to the choir given that the French gave us Henri Cartier-Bresson and Jean Vigo, but I am more impressed by the hunt for symbols through film than those manufactured with a computery sheen.
         Cocteau’s film is lucky that it is so charming, because the “special effects” employed are very dated. In the end, Cocteau’s most poetic moments are his least fussy. Similarly, we remember and watch film adaptations of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s rewritten “Beauty and the Beast” over Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s original because de Beaumont pared down the tale to a simpler cast of characters and transgressions, lending the story an archetypal spareness. Cocteau adds a layer of myth to poetic justice when Avenant is killed by a statue of Diana (moon-goddess, huntress, and protector of wild animals) as he tries to break into the Beast’s treasure. Upon receiving Diana’s arrow in his back, he turns into a beast himself. In the same moment, the dying Beast is revived and healed. What is it, Belle? the transformed prince (played by Jean Marais, again!) asks, It's almost as if you miss my ugliness.

         She explains that he looks like someone she used to love.
         Did he know? The Not-Beast asks her.
         No.
         But you did love the Beast? 
         Yes, she says. He is cheered, though no real jealousy ever broke through. This strikes me as relatively progressive for 1946 given that one-true-love narratives are still abundant in our understanding of happily ever after, not to mention the princess-factories of the movie industry. Prince, um, Not-Beast is very willing to leave Belle’s past to her, which is more than I can say for a lot of my exes.
      The act of looking is central to Cocteau’s film. Receiving a look and being seen is often intolerable to the Beast. I identified with this feeling not only as a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, but also as someone who has been, at times, grotesquely unwell. Suffering is taxing enough without the addition of shame. Belle’s father is welcome to all the Beast’s riches, until he picks a rose for his daughter. The Beast loves the roses more than anything (is this for their beauty, which must torment him? or because they are beautiful things that cannot reject him?) and the price for their theft is death.
         When Belle takes her father’s place at the castle, the Beast’s resolve is weakened. In a pivotal scene, he tells Belle that her look burns like fire while his body is, itself, burning. Plenty of the film's symbolism is less decipherable, such as Belle crying diamonds as her father plucks them from her eyes. I suspect the underlying message is that self-loathing is ugly and a barrier to love, though I prefer the surreal moments when metaphors become opaque. The familiarity of the story makes it easy to forget the extent of the Beast’s pain, that when the Beast is calling Belle’s name he is also crying BEAUTY, BEAUTY, BEAUTY.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• French stepsisters must be the worst of evil stepsisters. Fiction-wise I haven’t wanted to punch a haughty bitch this badly since Joffrey.
   
• Yes, the Beast is more cat-like than monstrous. Overall, I'd say the Beast’s fearsome demeanor earns him "bobcat" at best.
   
• I keep thinking about the mirror that allows the Beast and Belle to see one another. It is an easy leap for us in the digital age as we are used to texting, facetime, and all sorts of willful surveillance. But where did this image come from that it reached Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740? In art historical hindsight, cinema looks like a logical extension of the invention of photography (~1827) but this magic mirror and mythical objects like it would suggest the moving image existed in our literary imagination before the still photograph ever captured it.

CREATURE FEATURES & THE IMPERFECT BODY: A GHOST STORY (2017)

Director + Writer: David Lowery

“The Ghost has to live out the meaningless plodding of time just like us, only it can’t deceive itself into holding onto any of it. ”

         I couldn’t have chosen a film less like From Dusk Till Dawn than the patience-testing stillness of A Ghost Story. The film is an exercise in understatement, with a blanket-covered ghost waiting through all the grief and loss we can’t see behind his eye-holes. The simplicity of Casey Affleck’s classic Halloween costume lends a built-in nostalgia that tells us right away that we’re heading into poignant indie territory.  Add in appropriately sciencey constraints (the ghost can move through time but he is anchored in place) and we have an artful meditation on existence. Specifically, the difference between existing and living. We can’t see anything the ghost doesn’t, so we inherit its claustrophobia and, at times, its despair.
            That said, not much else is handed to the viewer. The ghost’s bedsheet hides any emotional cues from us, leaving us with a blank stand-in for what used to be a life. I would argue that this film knowingly moves against clarity, choosing instead to meditate on waiting and not-knowing. This much is certain: Casey Affleck’s character dies in a car crash, leaving his girlfriend (played by Rooney Mara) to grieve in their house. Before she moves away, Mara tucks a handwritten note into a crack in the wall and paints over it. The Ghost spends the rest of the movie waiting, watching, ignoring or terrorizing subsequent inhabitants, returning to the wall every so often to scratch at the message hidden within.
           I’ll admit, I’m a bundle of hypervigilant nerves so A Ghost Story seemed like a good way to pace my amygdala for October’s marathon of monster movies. It was perhaps too good a choice. Critics and fawners alike remarked that director David Lowery’s project felt like it belonged in a museum instead of a movie theater—its minimalism testing the edges (and necessities) of narrative. It is lonely in its surrealism, and frustrating in its refusal to outline meaning. The Ghost has to live out the meaningless plodding of time just like us, only it can’t deceive itself into holding onto any of it. The Ghost moves on a geologic timescale compared to the living, scratching at the note painted in the wall as years and homeowners pass.
            The Ghost watches everything it longs for fade away, a shining futuristic city rising up in the Dallas suburbs it once knew. When the Ghost has had enough, it dives off a skyscraper only to land in the nineteenth century. The Ghost witnesses a settler girl hide a note under a rock before her family gets slaughtered by Native Americans (is there an emoji for “disgusted yawn” ?) and has to cycle back through time before finally catching up with its lost life.

            People love to give movies credit for being difficult to watch, but there is something to be said for movies that make you think about everything happening onscreen. At times, I felt like I was reading the screen rather than watching it, scouring the mise-en-scene for possible clues. Yes, there are emotional moments but mostly there is a lot of emptiness. Apparently the smallness of Affleck’s movements was a response to the bedsheet itself. Rather than obscuring the human beneath, Lowery found that the sheet exaggerated a lot of Affleck’s acting. As a result, the movements became smaller, the blocking more contained. Sure, Affleck’s non-ghost scenes were competent in his usual mumbly way, but the Ghost felt more like a prop than the barometer of the film’s feeling. If anything, the audience mostly relies on cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo to communicate the ghost’s state through a cascade of day/night/city lights and flickering bulbs.
            When I was deeply depressed and living in New Orleans, I once ate an entire King cake in a day. I was so bored and emptied out that sugar was the only thing that tapped into something resembling a sensory life. Since I inevitably ate the slice with a plastic baby in it, I went out and bought a second King cake. What I’m trying to say is Rooney Mara eats an entire pie in one take and I do not understand why the internet thinks it is hot. In this ninety-two minute ghost story, it was the one scene I found “too real.” You know, as we contemporary living humans say.
               I was honestly annoyed with this film in the theater. I thought it could have accomplished everything it did in one-third of the time without losing any impact. However, I like thinking about this film much more than I liked watching it. Recent events also have me thinking differently about stillness and loss. I work in a very busy, very public place. Today was a quiet day and more than one person admitted that the massacre in Las Vegas made them reluctant to go out. I had conversations with almost-strangers where we admitted our helplessness to each other. A lot of people are waiting to feel better, or at the very least, for something to change.
            I found myself wondering, What is waiting made of? It can feel quiet, furious, like the least reliable measure of time. In particular, waiting to “get better” feels a lot like grief. There’s numbness, hot and cool rage, a remote resignation. National traumas and personal losses alike leave us waiting around for answers, wondering, What’s the point of a body if you can’t hide inside it?
           

FINAL THOUGHTS
 

• In truth I am a little baffled that everyone keeps talking about how “profound” Affleck’s performance is, as it’s impossible to read nuance into his form. I’d even argue this mutedness is kind of the whole point? Some of his scenes were even reshot with a different guy under the blanket. Remembering the famous actor in costume only struck me as hilarious.
   

• I think it's bullshit that the Ghost frightened off that Latinx family while tolerating Will Oldham's (yes, that Will Oldham) goofy nihilist monologue.

• I spent some time arguing with myself today whether a ghost counted as a “creature.” My instincts tell me corporeal forms go against ghostliness, and that a lack of a body is a different horror than deformity. Weighed against pain and sickness, the idea of life without a body is almost a relief. Let’s see if my thoughts evolve on this one.

CREATURE FEATURES & THE IMPERFECT BODY: FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996)

Director: Robert Rodriguez
Writer: Quentin Tarantino  

            Let me start my October series on monster movies by saying I am a human with a conflicted relationship to my own body. I am sick a lot. I was born premature and have never experienced robust health. Sometimes I think my body queered itself, constantly subverting the possibilities of wellness, but then again, it’s hard to extricate a body from things that have happened to it. The body is an unstable house even before people—be they doctors, rapists, lovers, or politicians—start breaking in. To say nothing of the stories we ingest.
           I joke about my nineteenth-century constitution and melancholic humors, but I’m also a gender-nonconforming writer living in San Francisco at a very fractured time in the body politic. Watching a film from 1996 had me thinking a lot about 2017, not just about the siege of Trump’s “law and order” fascism (the film's Mexican biker bar, the Titty Twister, may be full of vampires but at least there are no nuclear codes) but about style and content, and the evolving ethical contracts between filmmakers and their audience. A prime example is the film’s opening scene in a gas station, where a Texas Ranger goes on a needless rant about the “Mongoloid” cooking hamburgers at a nearby diner. Tarantino, as usual, thinks shooting this asshole in the head is sufficient penance.
           While I don’t believe in censorship, I know a cheap laugh and a low blow when I see one. At the same time, my project is about analyzing the human body through the non-human and subhuman, the infected and “turned,” the malformed and monstrous—imminently physical but nonetheless symbolic representations of what I will term the creaturely. While racism, ableism, and sexual predation are not outwardly readable traits, I tend to think our interest in the monstrous stem from those buried flaws rather than counter them. This is an admittedly Dorian Gray hypothesis, though I’d also argue that Frankenstein could have only been written by a woman. That’s a future blog post, though.
          As for style, camp and debauchery have never been more relevant than under our orange fuhrer, as America casts a shadow that is as tragic as it is absurd. A circus is different from a fallen world, and their stories unfurl accordingly. I knew two things going into this film: (1) vampires show up (2) it is a genre hybrid that feels distinctly like two films in one. The threshold between Tarantino and Rodriguez' visions is the Mexican border, whereupon the film switches from an on-the-run American crime drama to a supernatural Mexican gore-gy. For now, I'll just say there's something nice about the simplicity of slaying our demons instead of having to reeducate-and-maybe-sorta-possibly-forgive them.
            One of my leading interests in the creaturely is its use of the body as a site, not a vessel. American culture is not unique in thinking that the body is a house for the individual (make your own health care, wimps!) but our cinematic exports sure emphasize that the body is the place where everything happens. In an early scene, Tarantino peers at Clooney through a hole in his palm. Tarantino’s character, Richie, is a dangerously delusional sex offender and rapist, but those technicalities take a backseat to his paranoid-neurotic tics, borrowing more from Woody Allen than they knew in ’96. The eye-through-hand image stood out, visually telling us that here is a character who can only interface through the unreliable "knowledge" of his body. We are no different, of course, though it takes a show of deviance for us to notice.
            Repulsion is one possible metric of a horror film’s efficacy, and both auteurs like to put humanity’s basest instincts at the center of our gaze, though I did find myself hoping Rodriguez was trying to beat Tarantino’s worst sensibilities out of him every time Richie was brutalized. Neither Tarantino nor Rodriguez pretend that Richie is Humbert Humbert, but they seem far too comfortable letting a young Juliette Lewis play the unwitting Lolita. For what it’s worth, Salma Hayek appears as the reversal of naive Lewis, playing a vampire-stripper whose hypnotic dance number picks up where Salome left off.

         Hayek offers a potent dose of knowing female power (she "kills" Tarantino and promises to make Clooney her dog) but Tarantino’s dying words (“Fucking! Bitch!”) are not a pathetic enough end for my tastes. After all, he resurrects as quite possibly The Least Sexy Vampire Ever™ only a few minutes later. This is a special accomplishment in a movie where no two vampires look or die alike. Hayek’s vampiric form is more snakelike than pale succubus, whereas Danny Trejo mostly looks like a pit bull version of himself. There are laughs folded into the gore, but its relentlessness—no matter how creative—has the effect of baroque wallpaper: there’s simply too much to process. It’s as Boschian a hellscape as I can recall in cinema (that corpse-guitar, anyone?) and its sadism shines brightly even as camp tries to soften it.
            My partner has not seen From Dusk till Dawn but he raised an interesting point about Tarantino’s oeuvre, arguing that he “knows how to make a scene but not a movie” and ends up compensating with style. I agreed that Tarantino’s prime unit is the scene rather than the plot (I suspect this is why his craft is so often nonlinear) but I think he is preoccupied with style rather than using it as a bandage. That is, I think he is in love with style rather than cynically applying it. At the same time, I can admit that I found Tarantino’s “half” of the movie to be despicable at many moments, with most of its redemption coming from Rodriguez’ hand.
             I don’t see these style/content and form/function tensions going away as I dive into more creature flicks. I am writing and watching as someone who does not love camp for camp’s sake. I feel ungenerous toward “so-bad-they’re-good” films, with a real blind spot for schlock. This is strike one against a lot of monster movies, the other being that I am a little bitch when it comes to suspense. Here’s hoping my tolerance for both will increase, or else this is going to be one frightful October.

LAST THOUGHTS:

L-R: Tarantino, Hayek, Trejo. It's almost enough to make a teenager swear off vampire boyfriends.

• The scariest part of From Dusk till Dawn is the sound of all the batwings outside the building, perhaps the only part in the whole movie whose strength comes from restraint.
   
• When thinking about sickness and health, I inevitably start wondering about beauty. There’s an uncomfortable dynamic between George Clooney’s protection of Juliette Lewis and Tarantino’s predation toward her. Maybe I’m just a bitter sick person, but something in this film is asking us whether we might forgive Richie’s trespasses if he looked more like Seth. I was even annoyed by Clooney’s neck tattoo, given that he was already born with such a disproportionate amount of sex appeal.
   
• I found myself wondering a lot about all the poor folks who have to clean up horror movie sets between takes. Lord.
   
• Quentin Tarantino’s foot fetish is well-documented, but he must have a comorbid fixation on car trunks. Among eleventy other self-references in the first hour, you'll see the same trunk-open POV shot you've seen in Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, etc.
   
• I think of myself as pro-vampire but dang Harvey Keitel’s character had me rooting for Christianity. I’ve been an atheist my entire life but he looked so cool with his cross’o’guns.
   
• I know neither Tarantino nor Rodriguez invented deus ex machina, nor Chekhov's gun, but damn it I draw the line at Chekhov's disco ball.