Waltz with Bashir (2008)

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Director: Ari Folman

Screenplay: Ari Folman

Cast: Ari Folman as Himself; Ori Sivan as Himself; Ronny Dayag as Himself; Shmuel Frenkel as Himself; Prof. Zahava Solomon as Herself; Ron Ben-Yishai as Himself; Dror Harazi as Himself; Mickey Leon as Boaz Rein-Buskila; Yehezkel Lazarov as Carmi Cna'an

Synopsis: Filmmaker Ari Folman is encouraged, after a discussion with a friend about a dream based on his military experience, to investigate his own time serving in the Israeli military during the 1982 Lebanon War, realising that he cannot remember a single memory from the period barring what he believes to be a dream. Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentation of his investigation - interviewing fellow soldiers from the war, psychologist Prof. Zahava Solomon and TV reporter Ron Ben-Yishai, whilst weaving in recreations of both events and dreams experiences - is the result of this search.

With Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman documented his own suppressed trauma, only able to remember a fantastical dream of his time serving in the military only to realise he witnessed the events surrounding a violent massacre, the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982. To document this, he created an animated work which intertwined documentary as he talks with friends, fellow soldiers from the same war, one news reporter who was in the war zone and a psychologist, alongside interpretations of both real events that took place and, the fantasies during and after. Reaching its ten year anniversary, Waltz with Bashir was one of the first world films I ever took interest in, and it still stands out because Folman used animation to vividly depict all the emotions bottled up in himself and others. Whilst this exact animation, which looks like rotoscope (the drawing over of real actor) but is actually carefully put together by other means, struggled with his follow-up The Congress (2013), it felt right here. Appropriate for its personal connection to what Folman allowed to be included in this film.

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The suppression of trauma, and how it grows to overcome this, is an inherently abstract notion which stands one foot between the conscious and subconscious, one which does not exist tangibly yet has incredible potential for physical harm as well as mental for a person who must deal with a traumatising event. It envelopes emotions, based on an experience that takes place, exists in the mind, and can lead to harm for someone. Folman depicts the genesis of his search from a friend recounting a dream of being tormented by a pack of dogs in the streets, the exact number of the guard dogs he had to kill during a night raid as a soldier. Folman's own reoccurring dream, naked in the ocean overlooking the Lebanese city of Beirut, is itself suppression of within the area of the infamous massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese Shiite civilians. One documented in the final chapters as a retaliation by the Lebanese Christian Phalange for the assassination of Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel, Folman one of the unwitting Israeli soldiers around the refugee camp where their allies committed the atrocity within. How the film builds to this discover is of the greatest weight, documenting the war and revealing how black and white morality was a non-entity when, in the position of Folman as a young man alongside other Israeli soldiers, they found themselves in a conflict that made little sense day by day when within the Lebanese conflict.

This becomes more pertinent as an Israeli film. Israel is a country with a very complex military and political history, especially with the controversies with their relationship with Palestine. One however which is oversimplified, one which from outsiders can become pure misguided anti-Semitism and does not reflect that Israelis' own views on their country's history being ambivalent and with regret (such as Israeli documentarian Avi Mograbi's Avenge but one of my two eyes (2005), which directly documents the moral issues of the Occupied Territories between Israeli-Palestinian areas). Waltz with Bashir is not the only film by an Israeli filmmaker who served during the 1982 Lebanese war to look back with critical reflection - Samuel Maoz's Lebanon (2009) depicts events entirely from within a tank - and Folman's film significantly denounces no one on any side barring the Lebanese Christian Phalange for the genocide.

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His and other Israeli soldiers or the Lebanese, through the recollections, are seen within usually chaotic. Israeli soldiers forced into horribly ambiguous scenarios between being killed even if that includes facing a child with a rocket launcher, the kind of scenarios which would traumatise any sane person, and is one of the recollections specifically brought up. Aware of civilian casualties, aware that the nobility of war is merely a presumption rarely with the clearly defined villains and heroes. Even if there were heroes or people within the war who merely wanted to serve their country, as Folman  and the other formers soldiers he interviews were, they still suffered through sights which few would ever want to relive. Even World War II, with clearly defined villains in the Nazis, was steeped in such horrifying mass death that would traumatise many. That reference is not incongruous to this review as, chillingly, one of the fellow Israelis Folman interviews speculates that his own guilt of having witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre had deeper subconscious agony, as a Jew, connecting back to when his own suffered the horror of one of the most inhumane atrocities to ever take place in human history with the Holocaust. There is something in particular, especially as its visualised in the animation, documenting how a patch of field was turned into an abattoir of inhumane mutilation which would have been painful for Folman to depict onscreen, especially as he goes as far as evoke the atrocities committed to Jews, a reference point which could be risky to include but feels like when Waltz with Bashir fully reveals its humanity against the horrors its being honest of.

This is more braver from him as, before he deals directly with his realisation of the genocide that took place, the first three quarters of the film has a very black sense of humour permeating throughout it. It's a humane film, but humanity if spiked with the blackest of humour. Willing to accept the general mindlessness of horror, that the Israeli forces were as likely spending hours sunbathing on Lebanese beaches mindlessly as much as they were being shot at. A punk song spits out how civilian casualties are likely over animated bombs being unable to hit a single enemy car but destroys the rest of the street. Commanders in their own forces spending time fast forwarding through porn films just to get through the best part. Folman briefly includes his moment returning back to his homeland before returning to the front, a sad look of disconnect where his break away from conflict is too short to heal him, merely showing an alienation especially from his own girlfriend.

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Production wise, Waltz with Bashir is stupendous. The moments of pure fantasy themselves are beautiful and eerie. The Congress, Folman's ambitious adaptation of a Stanisław Lem sci-fi novel, felt like a failure which due to the mainly fantastical nature of its narrative showed severe limitations in the same animation style. Bashir in contrast is a realistic document which can use its style to depict the realism, adding to talking head footage a greater weight as a result especially as he weaves in the little details surrounding meeting some of the people he interviewed. It also allows the sight of a giant nude woman carrying a soldier off a boat to safety to become profound in contrast among the other phantastical moments. Animation's virtues, that it can show both real life in incredible detail but also allows reality to be bend to whatever the animators can pull off with their skill, is to be found here. Particularly with a film this personal, it is accomplished perfectly.

The decision to end on real footage of the genocide's aftermath was seen as unnecessary for some film critics back when first being reviewed - Mark Kermode at least criticised the choice - but for me now it's necessary. The suddenly awakening realisation for Folman, when he realises the truth of his suppressed memories, is shown to us in the sudden shock of reality. Away from animation, away from the subconscious, the sudden awfulness of death as the footage does include sight of the bodies of real human beings who did not deserve to die. The clarity is awful, agonising for only a few minutes of a film that is entirely animation elsewhere. But Folman rightly decided to visualise the sudden awakening to what he had to accept and force himself to contemplate decades later as a filmmaker looking back on the incident, forcing us to see real news footage with the same bleak clarity.

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Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Expressionist/Introspective

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

A film which has always stayed with me since ten years or so ago. Even if Ari Folman never made another film, let alone one as good as his debut, he deserves canonisation because of what Waltz with Bashir achieved. Profound, moving, capable of humour whilst never losing its seriousness or the severity of the material, and something which provokes a deeply emotional response to its story. The most personal of projects.

Psyched by the 4D Witch (A Tale of Demonology) (1973)

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Director: Victor Luminera (a.k.a. Lawrence Milton Boren)

Screenplay: Victor Luminera

Cast: Margo as Cindy; Esoterica as Abigail; Tom Yerian as Mark; Kelly Guthrie as Mr. Jones; Tracy Handfuss as Jan Kleinmetz; Keith Erickson (as Dr. Ambrose Kleinmetz)

[USA]

Synopsis: Dabbling in the sinister world of the occult, naive college student Cindy (Margo) is contacted by a 17th century ancestor from the 4D realm, a witch named Abigail (Esoterica) who promises the virginal girl orgasmic joys without any consequences of physical sex. Secretly however she wants to pervert her out of revenge. Even if it means turning her older brother Mark (Tom Yerian) into a sexual vampire.

Since seeing a clip from Something Weird Video's back catalogue, I have been curious about Psyched by the 4D Witch. That and the fake legend of a print of the film being found where the Manson Family camped, all despite this film existing long after their infamy. Well, that's depending on if it actually was released in 1973, or if it was shot in the late sixties and sputtered out in the early seventies. If any film was late the psychedelic boom Psyched by the 4D Witch was one such example, and this is definitely one of the extreme examples of American cinema's exploitation production. It comes from the melting pot of independent American genre films, sandwiched between the two decades and feels like it. A sexploitation film which has more puritanical stains of the sixties, but released in the early seventies (if the case) and needing more bite. All shot in "Transetheric Vision", which feels like a fifties marketing gimmick.

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It is with a fair warning that this review will become crass just having to explain the film in depth, because sexploitation even when it was chaste was entirely about selling sex, even if how and what the stories were about are tasteless or just weird. What actual story to some is as much their DNA and also to be warned about, as you don't try to enter some of these films unless you have the tolerance for very different strain of filmmaking, be it technically inadequate or just on the fringe of culture. The warning, due to this, this is only for a select audience to try to get through. And this is bearing in mind you barely see a lot in Psyched by the 4D Witch. That's the irony with this film, the most sexless of sexploitation films which yet still has a lot that'd embarrass some people to be caught seeing. Inexplicably appearing on Amazon Prime, obscure even for a 4K Blu-Ray restoration, the version matching its haphazard tone cultivates various colonies of grain and age just on the print used for the digitalization, adding to the experience the television was spiked with bad hallucinogens.

The film's split personality is perplexing. On one hand its sixties tinged psychedelic, which was popular in exploitation cinema, reeking of the cautionary films from the same time. Stay for the titillation, but condemn the "perversions" onscreen. Yet this is also a seventies movie and tries to be more scuzzy in connection to its occult plot line. Cindy's friend Jan (Tracy Handfuss), when brainwashed into the occult rituals, writhes with a rubber snake as if in a burlesque nudie loop. Until its claimed in the voiceover she inserted the snake into herself before the ritual in one of the many  bizarre lines. The snake used inappropriately is just hinted at in dialogue, alongside mention of necrophilia and such. Attempts to clearly go further which the structure of the movie is compromised in being caught between both sides.

From http://www.thespinningimage.co.uk/cultfilms/images/8569.jpg

Scenes which seem to cut away from the sex as if they were actual porn sequences, purely softcore of the sixties cut to ribbons until its barely comprehensible at times. These perverse lines merely hinted at in the voiceover when what is onscreen, if viewed mute, wouldn't be perceived in that context. Plenty of nudity, but with sexual words bleeped inexplicably from the soundtrack nonetheless. A sense of the quainter sixties films but reeking of filth just in the plot and the atmosphere of the production. It makes it a confused film in terms of its existence, as its meant to be softcore yet if stuck between the sixties caution and seventies sleaze, all whilst not showing a lot actually onscreen. Especially as actual hardcore pornography briefly became chic in the mainstream, with the likes of Deep Throat (1972), a film like this missed the boat for its audience completely and flounders.

The experience is instead like Kenneth Anger, the legendary occult practitioner and avant-garde filmmaker, if Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) with its coloured gels covering the screen and actresses in quasi-ancient garb was instead made by people on a bad day using horse tranquilisers. A sense this was put together with various pieces of footage, even home movie material, as Psyched by the 4D Witch is all post-dubbed with narration and various scenes. Whilst there is a lot of nudity of both genders, you have a patchwork so extreme it becomes confusing. A scene between Cindy and her aunt - which demonises lesbianism by making it incestuous, but still lusts over an "exhausting three-way lesbian climax" with them and the ancestor Abigail - is so chopped up in structure I had no idea what was going on. A lot of shots are reminiscent of being inside a lava lamp. Superimposition. Quasi-Eastern costuming, which again evokes Kenneth Anger but also Jack Smith. So much pink and purple, due to the print seen as well as the aesthetic, to the point the scenes of the ordinary 3D world are heavily tinted in these colours. Eventually until pink is soaked into your eyes. Events from later in the film are even cut into the structure early on as if premonitions, such as the older brother mid-sex vampire role devouring a victim, all without context until you get to that plot point properly.

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There's little sense of the occultism being anything than just an excuse for the weird titillation. It neither helps how slapdash the film is in being put together. The strangest moment is not the sex. Or when it abruptly switches from Cindy as our narrator to her older brother, unaware despite being reflective of these events having past that he's about to be turned into a cannibalistic sex vampire. Nor the perversity attempted at. No, it's the unexplained and lengthy scenes that feel like home movie footage. In particular the one of a beach, just panning over the local environment and its tourists, which goes one for at least five minutes or so, that is incongruous to the extreme.

Now considering how many times I've said the film is bad, is Psyched by the 4D Witch to just be avoided? For those with an intolerance of the barrel of American exploitation, you stay away as far as possible. For someone like myself, with a tolerance for this type of film, it was something I'm glad to witness. Slithers of very memorable things that made it compelling, and all that was an aghast failure still idiosyncratic. Its luridness coupled yet with a chaste innocence. The gay neighbour who someone is convinced by Cindy to participate in her sexual exploration. That, technically, what she experiences is mystical rather than physical, extended fantasies Abigail is absorbing the energy from for her nefarious ways. That Mark's experience becoming a vampire is slowly built up with using travelogue footage of a seventies games arcade only to never be fully resolved, left to wander in his new life as an inexplicable plot point. Or that the solution to the drama, provided by Dr. Ambrose Kleinmetz (Keith Erickson), which also involves sex but at a significant cost. That even a film this misbegotten has a hummable psych rock title song.

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And if anything, looking at any screenshots of the film makes you aware how utterly perplexing the film must be as moving images. Many will find this painful, but the mix of extreme colour saturation, avant-garde experimentation, and exceptionally low budget sexploitation is a peculiar aesthetic cocktail.  Trying to make sense of Psyched by the 4D Witch is arbitrary. It's simple on paper - an innocence young woman corrupted by an evil ancestor from beyond the grave - but the structure and tone is what causes one to feel in a stupor. Of course since this is sexploitation, one has to ask whether it is actually erotic, which it isn't. It isn't titillating in the slightest. And that in itself, because it's too rambling and unconventional to be, adds to the strangeness as, even without the sexual perversions angle, the film is so fragmented it would undermine any of its original purpose.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychedelic/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

One of the strangest things I've seen in a while. One of the queerest at least. The film will be unbearable for many to suffer through, but for myself witnessing its hot pink tinted mass spew onscreen both made me feel dirty but was also oddly compelling.

Heroic Purgatory (1970)

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Director: Yoshishige Yoshida

Screenplay: Masahiro Yamada

Cast: Mariko Okada as Nanako; Naho Kimura as Jyoko; Yoshiaki Makita as Shu; Kaneko Iwasaki as Atsuko; Tôru Takeuchi as Kiyoshi; Kazumi Tsutsui as Ayu

Synopsis: When Kanako (Mariko Okada) encounters a young woman named Ayu (Kazumi Tsutsui), who survives a lengthy and direct fall onto concrete, she brings her back home to live with her and her husband Shoda (Kaizo Kamoda), who works for the Atomic Agency. A man claims to be Ayu's father, and from there the film switches back and forth in time as Shoda is involved with a communist cell planning an assassination, whilst Kanako and Ayu interweave through the eventual destruction of said cell.

Quite soon into Heroic Purgatory we are unstuck in time, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, transitioning back and forth between 1952 and 1960, where the renewal of the Mutual Security Act ensured the continuing presence in Japan of the U.S. Army, and beyond to the 1980s and the unforeseen future. In-between a paranoid psychodrama takes place where reality is subjective, the slow dissipation of a communist group as a spy is sabotaging them from the inside, one which might not even exist in the first place. As the communist group plan to kill an ambassador, they fall to pieces over time as compromise and paranoia take over, the only ones who stand being Kanako herself and Ayu, who Kanako adopts as a quasi daughter figure despite being close in age.

Whilst it travels far from her and includes various other figures, ultimately Kanako is our closest thing to a protagonist. Even if the film lavishes time over the naked female body in the one aspect that may date the film - obsessed with its beauty in contrast to the ennui inducing environments - the female characters are the ones who drive the narrative. Kanako, staying out of the chaos that dooms her cell eventually , is more concerned her newly adopted daughter is missing at points whilst the communists, constantly charging her husband for being the spy, ignore her or say they cannot see Ayu. Who Ayu is - with her incredibly thin figure and strange manner, such as her desire to kill all potential father figures - is unknown, be she real or a living metaphysical entity. Whatever the case, its significant she bookmarks the film. That even if she's sexualised at points, including a reoccurring film within the film of Shoda touching her nude body in an isolated warehouse, she feels like a silent but dominant figure.

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The only actions of the men in Heroic Purgatory is mindless violence. Shootings. A gang rape of a female member of the communist group, never seen baring the aftermath and with the character yet reappearing to explain her death to her fellow communists. What appears to be death by strangulation in another scene is either botched or a mere act, the woman meant to be the victim nonchalantly dismissing the action as if nothing. Even the nudity, whilst the one thing which could detract from the film is more complicated due to the look and structure of the film. There was a potentially crass edge to older art films made by men from this era which intercut politics and philosophy with distanced titillation, but it drastically stands out here as, within the angular and cold environments, it drastically contrasts with the natural, curved and living figures of the female characters. The contrast is so strong, as the mechanical world around them seems more alien in contrast, especially as these female characters are those who ultimately stand out. They turn out significantly more stronger than their male peers doomed to paranoia and their codes.

The film belongs from the deep well of the Japanese New Wave, experimental and/or idiosyncratic films which fully fleshed out in the sixties into the seventies. Heroic Purgatory was produced by the Art Theatre Guild, formerly importers and distributors  of foreign films who came in this time to represent independent films as their mantra when they produced films like this. Like a lot of these films, they were made with incredible prowess. Director Yoshishige Yoshida is obsessed with the extremes of blacks and whites in the monochrome of the film. Michelangelo Antonioni is felt in his used of manmade locations (warehouses, modernist buildings) which dwarf the cast, but the extreme use of white to the point it drowns the images out is entirely Yoshida's own. These are the whitest of whites, to the point it disrupts the image but bleeding shape away through the blinding use of white light against black.

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Even for a bleak film in tone, the aesthetic is beautiful even if it's meant to show a phantom world in and out of time, characters dead appearing with the living to explain their deaths or conferences with the press playing out in an empty tennis court like an avant-garde theatre performance. The film's dislodging from time evokes author/director Alain Robbe-Grillet, who specialised in this fragmentation out of chronology, especially as characters can suddenly be transported from one environment to another with the same movement (i.e. lay on a bed, only to be transported outside laying somewhere else). The characters are our anchors for events as their world and behaviour change, fluctuates, painting a complex picture between them if the pieces are rearranged.

A dream logic which is yet incredibly precise and, like Robbe-Grillet, structured onscreen with an obsession with composition close to painting and the positioning of figures and environments within them. (This means a lot both for when sexuality does appear, like figures of life drawing figures having entered modernist architecture, or how surrealism manages to slip into the grounded realism of these industrial environments with ease). Like Robbe-Grillet, who liked to play with genre structure, there's a sense even if Yoshida made this film with greater concern for political concerns that he's lapping at the edge, like the sea on a beach, on the paranoia thriller as guns are fired and there is a spy who may not exist, as poignant as when Seijun Suzuki had the mysterious No. 1 assassin in both Branded to Kill (1967) and Pistol Opera (2001) - not quite the type of films to compare to Heroic Purgatory but, with the former from the Japanese New Wave, both obsessed with the idea of a threat which may be a mere fabrication but is still destructive, evoking God knows what subconscious moods of Japanese society at this period thinking of how politically volitile the era was with the likes of the Japanese Red Army eventually coming to be a year after Heroic Purgatory's release.

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The meaning of Heroic Purgatory as a whole is more than likely through mood - the centre of three films by Yoshida about ideologies. Eros + Massacre (1969), his most famous film, was about anarchism through free love advocate and anarchise Sakae Osugi. The last Coup d’Etat (1973) was about nationalism through real life ultranationalist Ikki Kita. Heroic Purgatory is about communism, and whilst not about real life figures it uses real like context to depict such a group eat itself alive. That its English title is "Heroic Purgatory" feels pertinent, these figures doomed in their belief to change the world for the better only to have wandered into these various time frames, dying or afraid of being killed because of spies within their own.

The film ends with Kanako and Ayu at a literal dead end on a train station platform, and whether you fully grasp what happens, it feels like both women walk off having to find new purpose. The film throughout strips away what was presumed before. Where religious beliefs are questioned, science and Shoda's goal to innovate in technology useless and made obsolete the moment its born, and in whatever time frame the film takes place in the communists self destruct. It's both a bleak ending, yet considering how surprisingly dominant the female figures are within this tale, the two most distinct figures are the ones who start the film and end it, making something if not hopeful at least with the concept that new goals are to be found for the mother and adopted daughter beyond the film.

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Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Expressionist/Introspective/Mindbender

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Personal Opinion:

Difficult but with purpose, Heroic Purgatory having been made not so long after the Sixties feels like the dissection of what took place to communism as a principle within that time. A compelling one, one which I openly admit qualifies for the term "pretentious" were it not for the fact that it actually has an incredible sense of intelligence to it. Artistically alone, it's a work of art but also as an entirely constructed work which plays with narrative and logic, the craft's flawless and to be of awe with.

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The Ninth Configuration (1980)

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Director: William Peter Blatty

Screenplay: William Peter Blatty

Based on the novel Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane by William Peter Blatty

Cast: Stacy Keach as Colonel Vincent Kane; Scott Wilson as Captain Billy Cutshaw; Jason Miller as Lieutenant Frankie Reno; Ed Flanders as Colonel Fell; Neville Brand as Major Groper; George DiCenzo as Captain Fairbanks; Moses Gunn as Major Nammack; Robert Loggia as Lieutenant Bennish; Joe Spinell as Lieutenant Spinell; Alejandro Rey as Lieutenant Gomez; Tom Atkins as Sergeant Krebs

Synopsis: In a Gothic castle in the United States, various military personal with severe mental disorders and psychosis are housed together within its walls under care. members of the military or high profile careers who suffer from severe mental disorders and psychosis are placed together under watch of the US military. A new psychologist Colonel Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) arrives at the facility, offering new and very unconventional methods of dealing with their treatment. He is however troubled by memories of his brother, who become psychotic during the Vietnam War murdering any bystander in his path, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders as he broods. His goal for salvation is focused entirely on one patient by the name of Captain Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), a former astronaut and Catholic who has begun to doubt the existence of God and couldn't complete a rocket launch to the moon, Kane deciding that he can help Cutshaw is he can prove that good exists innately in the world.

The Ninth Configuration starts off deceptively. A country ballad plays over a panoramic shot of a Gothic castle, meant to be on US soil but clearly the European location the film was shot at in real life. With William Peter Blatty's pedigree - the author of The Exorcist's source novel and the 1973 film's screenwriter, director/writer of The Exorcist III (1990) - you expect immediately a rich, incredibly well written tale with memorable dialogue. One with a very idiosyncratic take, from his Catholic beliefs, of hope even in the most dire of circumstances. What you get with The Ninth Configuration is this, but also what happens when this first time director/writer, who partially funded the film as its main producer, has to wrangle an already complex premise into a feature. A premise even in the seventies, when very unconventional films were made in Hollywood, which was deemed unsellable and he had to fund himself, grappling with complex ideas in a dense script but also with his own novice position at play. One which plays three-quarters of itself as a bizarre comedy that crashes into deeply serious material later on.

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The moment you get the parade of inmates at the beginning, you are aware that Blatty took the absurd comedy to its fullest. It's not an accurate depiction of mental illness, just a premise which becomes as mad as a box of frogs. How, as a first time director who had full control, he constructed the film is as much why The Ninth Configuration is as good as it is but also why it is difficult, potentially frustration and potentially divisive for many. A layered and frankly messy sound design is the first issue. Fascinating as dialogue is heard of characters off-screen before they even appear, but it is also dense due to how the film was made, especially with the naturalistic acting styles of the cast that means you can easily miss details with ease, distracted or because dialogue is too quiet in the sound mixing. The script itself is as complex, having to juggle elaborate and sometimes incredible artistic dialogue alongside moments of serious humane and theological ideas. It does succeed but I will not understate how much of a challenge it is on a first viewing. That's before the weirdness begins to pile up as well.

It terms of what The Ninth Configuration is, Blatty offered it as the official sequel to The Exorcist. Rather than what we actually got - John Boorman's utterly ridiculous Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) - if The Exorcist was about evil existing in the modern world, The Ninth Configuration is about good in the modern world, especially as Captain Billy Cutshaw is meant to be the same astronaut Regan in the first film confronts when she is first demonically possessed. If The Exorcist is about the Devil existing, The Ninth Configuration is about God existing. How Blatty goes about this is not what one expects, playing at first in pure absurdity at its most extreme with flickers of suddenly moments of introspection with Colonel Kane, a troubled man whose existence is revealed to be a nightmare for himself, literally disconnected from himself.

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Whilst the presentation is coarse and jagged, with a plot structure which will put many off, it does make an interesting choice in depicting the modern world, post Vietnam War, as a literal madhouse of chaos. As Cutshaw denies the existence of God, he yet lingers over Him as a Catholic, Kane ultimately a saint trapped within his own horrifying crimes against humanity, his own redemption (depending on the version of The Ninth Configuration you see) forced by martyrdom or self sacrifice. Whether the theological arguments work for the viewer, or they see them as flimsy, altruism ultimately is the idea central to the film. It still asks in this idea whether mankind is capable of self sacrifice without a need to do so except for good, the kind of material that you cannot help but be impacted by. Even the final scene, where a fully irrational moment happens to Cutshaw, a tiny but profound one, views existence as a complex beast the human species barely grasps on. Even if you find the film an utter indefinable mess, this is the kind of material many film viewers desire to see in their cinema whether your opinion is hopeful or nihilistic of these characters.

To get to this material though, you also have the truly bizarre, evoking Joseph Keller's Catch-22 as taking the absurd to metaphorical delirium tremens. It happens to be acted out by a who's-who of great character actors - Stacey Keach, Robert Loggia, Neville Brand, Jason Miller from The Exorcist - but the density of this writing alongside the tonal shifts keeps you on your toes as a viewing. When Dr. Kane decides to let the inmates indulge in their desires the film reaches its zenith of madness. This was already a film where Loggia's first appearance is in black face, the future star of Innocent Blood (1992) and Lost Highway (1997) imitating an Al Jolson number whilst a black member of  the inmates Major Nammack (Moses Gunn) looks on with bafflement, but when Kane lets them all act out their fantasies it gets weirder from there.

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Whether The Ninth Configuration works entirely or not, you have to admire a film this ambitious. Especially when it includes so much to love and admire. Jason Miller relishing his role as Lieutenant Frankie Reno, not the sombre and lost priest of The Exorcist but an inmate obsessed with re-enacting the complete works of Shakespeare with dogs as the actors, getting most of the best lines from the role. Moses Gunn wearing a Superman costume and even arguing with Miller that Superman should appear in one of the latter's plays to rescue a character. The least expected appearance of a jet pack possible. Ed Flanders' Colonel Fell, who becomes a more tragic and emotionally complex figure played by Flanders incredibly, but begins as a hilarious figure who deals with inmates stealing his trousers and has to relieve himself by combining whiskey with Alka-Seltzer. Dialogue, from suicide pills with laxative qualities to even a shout-out to Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), so ripe and so hilarious at times I will gladly rewatch the film to soak it all up. And then there's the dramatic bar sequence near the end of the film which is the denouement of the film. Strange in itself as Steve Sandor as a bike gang leader is dressed as a glam rock lead singer, (or Gerrit Graham's Beef from Phantom of the Paradise (1974)), with character actor Richard Lynch of all people adding to the cast as his right hand man, but ultimately an important moment for the tragedy that takes place when a certain character snaps. Whilst the film feels of its incredible flaws in structure, so much so there have been many cuts of the film from Blatty before his death, there is still a pertinent and powerful drama in the midst of all its oddness to go with. So much that stands out that it has to be admired.

Abstract Spectrum: Introspective/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Personal Opinion:

Ambitious, ramshackle at points, but ultimately admirable. The Ninth Configuration has stayed with me since seeing it, and I cannot help but think of so much that works within the film and also having gained so much even from the challenge of watching the movie.

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Wild Palms (1993)

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Directors: Peter Hewitt, Keith Gordon, Kathryn Bigelow and Phil Joanou

Screenplay: Bruce Wagner

Based on the comic strip by Bruce Wagner

Cast: James Belushi as Harry Wyckoff, Dana Delany as Grace Wyckoff, Ben Savage as Coty Wyckoff, Robert Loggia as Senator Tony Kreutzer, Angie Dickinson as Josie Ito, David Warner as Eli Levitt, Kim Cattrall as Paige Katz, Ernie Hudson as Tommy Laszlo, Nick Mancuso as Tully Woiwode, Bebe Neuwirth as Tabba Schwartzkopf, Aaron Michael Metchik as Peter Katz, Brad Dourif as Chickie Levitt

Synopsis: In 2007, patent attorney Harry Wyckoff (James Belushi) finds a new career path under senator Tony Kreutzer (Robert Loggia), found of the religion Synthiotics and founder of the Wild Palms group, who are developing both virtual reality television and mimizine, a synthetic drug with allows one to interact with the holograms. Wyckoff's life however becomes a complex spiral not soon after. Caught between the war between The Fathers and The Friends. Discovering that his son Coty (Ben Savage) may not be his own. That Kreutzer is a corrupt wannabe demigod, and his wife Grace (Dana Delany) is suffering from her connections to the Wild Palms group, not least because her mother Josie Ito (Angie Dickinson) is a vindictive, violent person and Kreutzer's sister. And that an old flame Paige Katz (Kim Cattrall), connected to Kreutzer, has re-entered his life and stoked a flame that is eating away at both of them.

Beginning with the first scene - a dream sequence with the older brother of Jim Belushi, James, enters his suburban kitchen only to find a rhinoceros there - one is immediately primed for one of the strangest mini-series made for American television. (Fittingly, the second to last episode screened on May 18th 1993, which would've been my fourth birthday, thus another bizarre project which orbits my life among very curious films). Riding the zeitgeist wave Twin Peaks (1990-1991) created, broadcast on the same station ABC and co-produced by Oliver Stone, the result's a peculiar beast. One where Stone's cameo as himself, being interviewed about secret JFK conspiracy documents proving his theories, is the thing that barely bats an eyelid about what is going on throughout the narrative . That a phone line was set up to explain plot points per episode is a sign of where Wild Palms goes.

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The plot of Wild Palms is not that difficult when set out. But there are so many plot points to juggle, alongside the tone the series took, which brings things to a heightened head. The perils of virtual reality. Child kidnapping. The conflict between the fascist Fathers and the heroic Friends who are nonetheless capable of shady tactics to win. Wild Palms has a lot of ambition, struggling at times to tell it. Significantly this is piece of nineties paranoia of the future. It's an area of cinema and television which can be silly - as Wild Palms exists in an alternative 2007 between realities as a time capsule. But it's also touching upon still relevant topics, a fitting landmark among others of peoples' fears at the time. Using the growing craze in VR, back then it was still disconnected from the reality of basic effects and having to wear one of Daft Punk's helmets, it however touches upon pertinent ideas of reality and our growing addictions to fantasies even into the modern day. Whilst we're not yet at holograms, that we are with both virtual reality again and the dangers of technology like the internet blinding us with artificial simulacra, it still stands strong.

However I will also confess that my love for Wild Palms is for its flawed but distinct weirdness. The cast certainly helps, certain performances an acquired taste and yet appropriate for what turned into a melodrama in sci-fi dystopia costume. For James Belushi, it's the least expected role he could have as he is known for comedies and family films (until, in a nice piece of synchronicity, being cast in the 2017 series of Twin Peaks). As our cipher into this world, an everyman who realise his life is more entrenched in conspiracy than believes, he's the actor playing the most muted role which means he's easy to dismiss, but someone appreciated by me nonetheless. Especially as he's the sane cog in the midst of everyone else, with only the sadness of Dana Delany as his wife, in her tragic plot trajectory, a grounded emotional current.

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Robert Loggia, who described his role as Tony Kreutzer in the context of ancient Greek plays when interviewed about the miniseries, chews scenery appropriate for a character who has had people killed and also starts randomly bursting into song in the final episodes, as if an acid flashback to his Al Johnson impersonation in The Ninth Configuration (1980), obsessed with a McGuffin known as the Go Chip which will give him digital immortality. Angie Dickinson, from the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980), however manages to outdo even Loggia as his sister Josie, channelling both Bettie Davis and Joan Crawford from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) with her pronounced makeup and heightened performance; appropriate for a character with an obsession with kidnapping her former husband and Friends leader Eli Levitt (David Warner), and gouging peoples' eyes out. Among these figures also includes Coty Wyckoff (Ben Savage), Harry's son who is both a new TV star and a child sociopath, Ernie Hudson from the Ghostbusters films as a Friends member who becomes addicted to mimizine and can hear church bells as a result, and even Brad Dourif in a small role. Another smaller role by director Kathryn Bigelow, who also directed one of the episodes, has additional pertinence as this feels like a dry run for Strange Days (1995), her dystopian sci-fi epic which also deals with the dangers of technology through artificial memories.

The script itself is clogged with countless references to keep up with, original author of the comic strip and series creator Bruce Wagner actually having to tone down his original version of Wild Palms for television but still creating a dense narrative. When a glib reference here is calling a cafe in the background "Eros plus Massacre", a tip to the hat to a three and a half hour Japanese experimental film by Yoshishige Yoshida, we're in different territory to most television at the time. Then it proceeds to juggle spirituality, references to anything from films to Walt Whitman, and Wagner's own quirks like his obsession, spoken by the characters, of rhinos being fallen unicorns. I could absorb this plot, but I know I missed details, and am aware alongside its melodramatic, heightened tone why a phone line was put in place to keep viewers up to speed as it zooms along. For television, it's like Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow at points.

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If there are problems with Wild Palms, it's that its mad ambition is too much for its presentation. It has the length a work like Strange Days could never have but doesn't have the budget. That wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for Wild Palms not following the idiom "show, don't tell", especially when instead it descends into talking for the last episodes.  Even if it doesn't have the production of a Hollywood film, it was a major TV production and should've taken more time to elaborate on the plot points. To actually depict them. I admire Wild Palms but I'll confess the final episode squanders dynamic weight with important events, like Loggia's failed attempt with the Go Chip or a revolution against the Fathers and the entire political system, being off-screen or barely shown barring a few extras waving signs. For a series with ambition, even scoring a major skirmish with The Animals' cover of House of the Rising Sun, even having The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter twice in the score, the final episode feels chintzy to an extreme.

In spite of this, and the silliness of some of the material, Wild Palms to me was like catnip. The early nineties aesthetic, coupled with a Japanese influence is distinct despite the Japanese economy bubble having already burst by this point, making the paranoia of Japan being an ambitious global influence out-of-date like it was in films like RoboCop 3 (1993). In lieu of this, I also adore Ryuichi Sakamoto's score. Sakamoto, of Yellow Magic Orchestra and a major film composer, seems at first to have made an overtly cheesy and dated score just in the opening credits theme, only for it to fill out with depth that, for this production, is worthy as cinematic in depiction.

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There is also the general madness on display. In spite of its limitations, Wild Palms is weird in an admirable way. Where swimming pools have secret doors at the bottoms, lairs to the Friends' hideouts. That, as in all dystopian sci-fi of the time, there is a slum district which law enforcement stays out of, a Casablanca of rebels and bootleg holograms. The dichotomy between advanced tech, like virtual reality, against issues like the complete lack of internet, living in a subconscious realm outside of our past or future off the television screen. Something deliriously weird that, even if it came after Twin Peaks' popularity, somehow was bankrolled and exists despite the sense it was never going to succeed even as a miniseries. An instant cult work, not contrived but too weird to live.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Personal Opinion:

Merely a slither of Wild Palms creates many questions which, even when answered, opens up so many new questions of where they came from. Even as the TV presentation sabotages its virtues at times, Wild Palms gets by as a bizarre TV melodrama, a product of its time which thankfully exists.

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