Il Nostro Vigilante

“I didn’t ask myself whether it was a fascist film or any crap like that,” Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis purports to have said in response to criticisms of 1974’s Death Wish: “I understood it was a story the public could identify with” [1]. Eight years after making that film, De Laurentiis returned to the vigilante genre with Fighting Back, a less successful effort directed by Lewis Teague, whose previous feature credit was 1980’s Alligator. Despite its disappointing box-office performance, Fighting Back pleasantly evinces the same concern as Death Wish with “a story the public could identify with” and rivals it as an exemplar from the heyday of the citizen-avenger action movie. Re-released on Blu-ray by Arrow Video last year – appropriately enough, on the Fourth of July – Fighting Back is a quintessentially American film deserving of rediscovery.

Opening with a montage of violence-related news reportage inspired by Sheldon Renan’s 1981 documentary The Killing of America, Fighting Back’s plot takes its inspiration from Newark vigilante Anthony Imperiale’s North Ward First Aid Squad and New Yorker Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels, imagining the genesis of a similar group in the City of Brotherly Love. Whites are moving out of the Italian South Philadelphia neighborhood where John D’Angelo (Tom Skerritt) operates a deli advertising “The Best Italian ‘Hero’ in Town”. The local park has become a playground for vice merchants and violent crime is spiraling out of control. D’Angelo’s wife (Patti LuPone) is desperate to move after a harrowing encounter with a black pimp (Pete Richardson) causes her to have a miscarriage, but this incident, coupled with another in which a robber cuts a finger off his mother (Gina DeAngeles) to steal her wedding ring, sends D’Angelo over the edge and determines his quest for street justice.

Vince Morelli (Michael Sarrazin), a friend on the largely ineffectual police force, sympathizes and helps D’Angelo set up the Peoples Neighborhood Patrol, which promptly introduces itself to the community by busting up a sleazy bar that caters to the criminal element. Support for D’Angelo is overwhelmingly white, and the film makes no secret of the disproportionately black nature of the crime problem. Like the Reagan era itself, however, Fighting Back is both racist and embarrassed about it, resulting in somewhat muddled messaging. Jim Moody appears as Lester, a token black member of the vigilante group who serves as an alibi of sorts for D’Angelo. Clashing with this storytelling decision is the inclusion of Ivanhoe Washington (Yaphet Kotto), a black community organizer (possibly inspired by Amiri Baraka) who opposes the mission of the Peoples Neighborhood Patrol on the grounds that it victimizes impoverished blacks. For the target audience interested in vigilante action, Washington is an unlikable character whose social argument is uncompelling and whose refusal to help the Peoples Neighborhood Patrol presents him somewhat antagonistically. Nevertheless, the script does lend some credence to Washington’s critique of D’Angelo’s unconscious racism when the flawed hero is demonstrated to be overly hasty in assuming black responsibility for every crime. The resulting synthesis suggests that conscientious whites and select good blacks need to cooperate to get rid of the bad blacks and other criminals, regardless of race, who ruin things for everyone. Even so, the fact that Fighting Back’s crowd-satisfying climax is D’Angelo’s incendiary revenge against the black pimp who caused his wife’s miscarriage pretty well speaks for itself.

Typical for boutique home video purveyors these days, Arrow invited a pair of nakedly anti-white commentators – the sorts of assholes who capitalize “Black” and lower-case “white” – to offer their insights into the film in the form of essay contributions to the booklet included with the Blu-ray. For Rob Skvarla, for example, D’Angelo’s vengeance is “an act of domestic terrorism without consequences” and “Fighting Back is an effective film because it understands the people who make the streets unsafe – those who vote men like Frank Rizzo into power” [2]. The “Paul Kerseys and John D’Angelos of the world fight crime not through pursuing the unseen forces of capital that drive violence through white flight and disinvestment,” Skvarla complains, “but instead by killing the rapists, drug dealers, and muggers on the lowest rungs of civilization” [3] – because capitalism forces blacks to rob, rape, and murder after whites brutalize them by moving away, apparently. “Of course John denies he’s a bigot and to be fair, I think he’s not so much a bigot as he is conditioned by his culture to compartmentalize his racism,” writes the second essayist, Walter Chaw, with some perceptiveness: “Fighting Back in other words is more complicated than it appears to be as it struggles with its racism in exactly the same rationalizing, equivocal way as John” [4]. “The film ends with John winning the 5th Councilman District and a triumphant image of a gaggle of white kids having a snowball fight in the park recently cleared of its ‘undesirable’ elements,” Chaw continues his over-the-top assessment:

It’s a fascist outcome that suggests that power is self-righteously aligned in the manifest gentrification of minority spaces. You could say that showing something is advocating it, but I think Fighting Back is actually pretty clear about its message. John is repeatedly identified as a narcissist, a megalomaniac who makes other peoples’ pain his rationalization, and a full-blown violent racist with impulse control problems. He takes every offense as further justification for his worldview, and because he’s a white man, he’s rewarded for it. He’s Travis Bickle but now fully assimilated into polite society. He is the prototypical Reagan-era mainstream protagonist: emboldened by perverse religiosity and drunk on his own victim complex. He’s the monster. You can’t say we weren’t warned. [5].

What Chaw neglects to notice is that the movie was not made for him. D’Angelo’s hot-headedness and propensity to violence, while character flaws if judged by the standards of more conventionally upright movie heroes, are still relatably human qualities that endear him to the core audience of wronged and rightfully pissed-off white Americans whose cities had been trashed by integration. “You know how journalists are,” Fighting Back camera operator Daniele Nannuzzi confides:

One way or another, they want to attach a label to films. Sure enough, these films were also labeled to the point that the press called them ‘fascist films’. Films that promoted taking justice into one’s own hands. But they were nothing but films, actors, stories. So, what can you say? I’d say that what they [i.e., the vigilantes] were doing was right. Those people tried to clean up those places by themselves. But that’s against the law, I guess. At least if done by yourself. Still, it’s only a film. [6]

Given the collaborative and cumulative nature of its creation, it is difficult to assign individual responsibility for meanings in the film, but it is interesting to observe that, while Jews were not uninvolved, Fighting Back expresses a fundamentally Italian-American character. The screenplay, credited to Tom Hedley and David Z. Goodman, originated with Striking Back, a script by George Gallo that was explicitly about Newark vigilante Anthony Imperiale [7]. Arguably the most interesting aspect of the story is its celebration of an Italian-American solidarism transcending propriety and law. In addition to Morelli, the police officer who risks his career to join D’Angelo’s vigilance group, D’Angelo receives the blessing of mob don Donato (Peter Brocco), a pious Catholic, to go after a restauranteur who traffics heroin to the area’s youth. Dino De Laurentiis “liked to work with Italians,” recalls director Lewis Teague, who notes that Fighting Back’s cinematographer, Franco Di Giacomo, was Italian [8]. In addition to Di Giacomo and Nannuzzi, other notable Italian or Italian-American names among the crew are composer Piero Piccioni and producers Alex De Benedetti and Dino Conte, who, Teague reveals, “was connected in New York and New Jersey and at one point, especially when we were thinking we might shoot some of it in Newark because the Tony Imperiale story took place in Newark, it was felt Dino Conte would be very helpful with unions, like Teamsters and stuff” [9].

Fighting Back’s crime-induced miscarriage plot point is especially ironic in view of Conte’s 1965 conviction in connection with Genovese crime family associate Salvatore Granello’s attempt “to muscle into the juke box business in Nassau” by threatening “juke box czar” Irving Holzman and demanding $25,000 and a quarter of Holzman’s profits. “According to authorities, they threatened Holzman with a beating, broke into his home June 8, 1964, and pistol-whipped his wife,” New York’s Daily News reported: “They are also accused of telephoning his pregnant daughter and threatening to ‘kick her stomach in’” [10]. Nassau County District Attorney William Cahn described Conte as “basically nothing but a hoodlum worshiper who likes to hang around in the privy of the underworld” [11]. Conte, who purports to have been Granello’s bodyguard prior to the latter’s murder in 1970, was convicted again in 1972, this time for his involvement in an airport theft ring [12]. Styling himself “D. Constantine Conte” when he embarked upon a new career as a film producer with 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, he protested that he was not the same person as the Dino Conte with mob connections when he came under investigation by the LAPD’s organized crime intelligence division in 1983. “I’m not part of no Mafia,” he told a reporter: “Ask anybody you want in this town; I haven’t done nothing to nobody” [13].

Anthony Imperiale, meanwhile, whose defiance of black radicalism and violence during the sixties inspired Fighting Back, was unimpressed by the finished film, as he disclosed to Yvonne Chilik of the Associated Press not long after its release:

Imperiale, who began the AP interview by sprinkling holy water around his office to get rid of “bad omens”, said he has a newly strengthened Roman Catholic faith that makes him more reserved and more compassionate.

“I got religious a few years ago,” he said. “I go to church every morning and I read the Bible. But I didn’t become one of those super holy-rollers … Christ’s disciples were tough guys.”

Compassion, says Imperiale, is what separates his life from that of John D’Angelo in Fighting Back, a movie on vigilantes that Imperiale originally thought would be based on his life. But he only appears in a brief film clip […]

“That’s not Tony Imperiale’s story,” he said, adding that the movie “lost the concept of what my life is all about.” […]

New Jersey’s perennial political candidate says he bought back the rights to his story and is working toward a movie that will accurately portray his political career.

In 1971, Imperiale was elected as an independent to the [New Jersey General] Assembly. In 1974, he was elected as an independent to the state Senate. He lost a re-election bid to the Senate in 1978, but was elected again to the Assembly in 1979 as a Republican. He ran unsuccessfully for the Republican gubernatorial nomination last year.

Always, he has been controversial.

“I have dynamite in my car, people have shot at us … and I get threatened about three times a month,” he said.

His Park Avenue home is surrounded by a 6-foot high fence, an electric gate and a patrolling German shepherd. Inside the house, which is wired with two burglar alarm systems, two Siberian huskies roam the hallways. A 300-piece gun collection, including 150 rifles, is guarded by yet another barrier: if anyone breaks into the den through the window, tear gas cannisters would explode automatically.

Imperiale says he installed the system, patterned after the way German officers protected themselves during World War II, to “protect my family.” [14]

AP’s 1999 obituary for Imperiale indicated a softening of his demeanor late in life:

Suffering from kidney failure in 1995, Mr. Imperiale said he saw the Virgin Mary kneeling beside his hospital bed and decided to change his ways.

“All my life, I had teeth and a heart, but I only showed my teeth,” he said in a published report describing the incident. “I told her, from now on, I was going to show the gentleness of my heart.”

In the remaining years of his life, Mr. Imperiale did work to mend division in Newark, said Mayor Sharpe James. [15]

Today non-Hispanic whites make up only about 10% of Newark’s population [16], and last year the city’s current mayor, Ras Baraka – son of Imperiale’s old nemesis, Amiri Baraka – welcomed a new Harriet Tubman monument to replace a statue of Imperiale’s fellow Italian, Christopher Columbus, that was removed in 2020 [17]. The fate of Imperiale’s Newark justifies Daniele Nannuzzi’s assessment that the innocuous vigilante genre of the seventies and eighties consisted of “nothing but films, actors, stories.” The real and effective “fighting back” has yet to materialize on a significant scale.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Ditum, Nathan. “Remembering Dino – The Key Films of Producer Dino De Laurentiis”: https://archive.ph/V283B

[2] Skvarla, Rob. “To Live and Fight in Philadelphia: Crime in Lewis Teague’s Fighting Back and the Vigilante Film”. Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023 [collector’s booklet], p. 12.

[3] Ibid., p. 8.

[4] Chaw, Walter. “Fear and Loathing in Philadelphia”. Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023 [collector’s booklet], p. 22.

[5] Ibid., pp. 22-23.

[6] “Danny-Cam” (special feature). Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023.

[7] “Enough Is Enough!” (special feature). Fighting Back [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2023.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “Juke Box Plays Jail Jive for 2”. Daily News (December 11, 1965), p. 1B.

[11] Pollock, Dale; and Ellen Farley. “Film Producer Denies Link to Mafia”. The Buffalo News (June 5, 1983), p. A-14.

[12] Ibid.

[13] “Moviemaker Is Under Investigation”. The Charlotte Observer (June 4, 1983), p. 20A.

[14] Chilik, Yvonne. “State Guns Down Imperiale’s Job”. The [Central New Jersey] Home News (July 13, 1982), p. 4.

[15] “Former State Senator, Newark Councilman Anthony Imperiale”. [Morristown] Daily Record (December 28, 1999), p. A14.

[16] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newarkcitynewjersey/PST045222

[17] Kersey, Paul. “They Will Tear Down Every Statue to White Men in America: Columbus Statue in Newark, NJ Replaced with Harriet Tubman Monument”. The Unz Review (March 12, 2023): https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/they-will-tear-down-every-statue-to-white-men-in-america-columbus-statue-in-newark-nj-replaced-with-harriet-tubman-monument/

Parked under an Evil Star

Based on Australian writer Peter Carey’s 1972 short story “Crabs” and written for the screen by Peter Smalley, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1986 film Dead End Drive-In is a post-apocalyptic satire with layers of national meaning that will be lost on most American viewers, but with which many Americans will no doubt sympathize. The protagonist, Crabs (Ned Manning), is an aspiring tow truck driver fascinated by the nighttime world of automobile accidents and confrontations with the marauding, crash-cannibalizing Karboys. His pursuit of thrills takes an unexpected detour, however, when he and girlfriend Carmen (Natalie McCurry) visit the reputedly sketchy Star Drive-In only to find themselves its captives after police steal two of his wheels. High walls topped by electrified fencing surround the lot, and Crabs will spend the remainder of the movie figuring out a way to escape.

Carmen and most of the other residents of the Star, however, see no reason to leave. The drive-in’s manager, Thompson (Peter Whitford), is “very fatherly” in Carey’s words [1] and administers the Star paternalistically as a microcosmic junkyard socialist utopia, rationing concession food. In Carey’s story, he “explains the meal ticket system – the government will supply them with ten dollars’ worth of tickets each week, these tickets can be spent at the Ezy-Eatin right here on the drive-in” [2]. “Australia itself was once considered what we now call a Democratic Socialist society, until the Howard era [i.e., 1996-2007] brought in both the two-party system and 100% capitalism,” Matty Clarke explains in his article “Australian Socialism: Unique and Proud”: “We were 50% socialist and 50% free market which, through regulation and national industry, allowed us control to heat and cool our economy” [3].

Dead End Drive-In can be interpreted as a reflection of the changing attitude of the Australian state and of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) toward the Australian nation. In “Crabs”, Carey depicts the safety net of the socialist system negatively, noting that Carmen “has got fatter” and that her face “is older” from living confined in the drive-in, being inactive, and eating its greasy food [4]. Echoing the restrictive and European-oriented immigration regime that prevailed in Australia until the seventies, “the drive-in is closed to visitors,” Carey notes [5]. “After all, from its inception, the ALP and the mainstream union movement championed the ‘White Australia policy’, which excluded Asians and other nonwhite migrants from the national community,” writes Jon Piccini: “The powerful, rurally based Australian Workers Union (AWU) represented the mainstream of the Australian labor movement and stood at the head of the ALP’s right. They regarded antipathy toward Asia as central to the maintenance of high living standards” [6]. “A major aspect of ‘Crabs’ was the conflation of cars in mid-20th-century Australia with notions of (white) masculinity, freedom and even Australianness,” Claire Corbett holds forth somewhat obnoxiously:

“Crabs” conveyed a sense that the car both expressed and denied an essential (white) Australianness. Part of being a white Australian was in a sense to be nowhere, to operate in a liminal space, to be insulated inside the interior of the car. There was no reality to the country outside the boundaries of the car, which were the boundaries of the (male) body. [7]

The status quo at the Star changes with the arrival of a truckload of foreigners, however. In Carey’s story, these range from Indians to “children, black, with swollen bellies”, who “run past shouting, chased by a small English child with spectacles” [8], while in Dead End Drive-In the newcomers are overwhelmingly Asian. Whereas Arthur Calwell, who led the ALP during the sixties, had supported the White Australia policy, the ALP’s position shifted with the ascendancy of Gough Whitlam, who served as prime minister from 1972 to 1975, the year that the system of race-based immigration restriction was finally abolished.

Carmen worries that she may be raped by one of the Asians, and a contingent of the white men at the drive-in – including Mickey (Murray Fahey), who wears a swastika pin, and Dave (Dave Gibson), whose hairstyle marks him as a Teddy Boy throwback – attempt to win the protagonist over to the cause of racial solidarity, but Crabs remains unmoved and only desires “to be free” as Carey puts it [9]. Contented in their tolerably comfortable concentration camp, the whites have been insufficiently vigilant, with the men smoking dope and the young women taking the birth control pills dispensed by the Star’s seemingly benevolent management, unwittingly facilitating their own demographic replacement. The birth control angle is not mentioned in “Crabs”, although Carey does observe that Carmen’s “sweater is covered with small ‘pills’ of wool” [10]. “The whole place stinks of filthy wogs,” Carmen gripes in Carey’s story [11], but Crabs, like Carey, is sympathetic to the non-whites. (The author has bemoaned “the murderous history of our country” [12] and that his ancestors “invaded the land, slaughtered many of its occupants, did their best to destroy the culture and to breed out, in one way or another, blackness” [13].) Crabs, as indicated by his Bundeswehr shirt in the film, is a product of the postwar order, the Bundeswehr being the NATO-aligned incarnation of Germany’s army, its antifascist founding principles extolling “the conduct displayed by members of the military resistance against Adolf Hitler, especially the attempt of Claus von Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow to assassinate him” [14]. In welcoming immigrants and rejecting nationalism, Crabs can be viewed as Dead End Drive-In’s Gough Whitlam figure.

Gough Whitlam

The matter of the drive-in’s name, the Star, also warrants attention. “The Star Drive-in was across the road from Monash University,” Carey recalled in 2017: “Those roads were my roads. I recognised them later in Mad Max.” [15]. Advertising itself with a six-pointed neon star not unlike a distended Magen David in the movie version, however, the drive-in evokes both Jewish media power and Zionism – an association reinforced elsewhere on the lot by graffiti of a Star of David crossed out and a swastika rendered beside it. On the gate of the security road leading to the drive-in is another six-pointed star, with the system of gated roads “splitting the community into sections and controlling avenues in and avenues out, you know, rather like Israel and the Gaza Strip,” director Brian Trenchard-Smith observes in his audio commentary [16]. (Notably, Jewish names are absent from the list of producers, one of whom, Damien Parer, is the son of a famous photographer of the Second World War, also named Damien Parer, who purports to have been anti-Semitic [17].)

If Crabs is a Gough Whitlam figure, then his desire to extricate himself from a Zionist tyranny makes sense, as Whitlam broke with the ALP’s traditional support for the Jewish state in asserting “a more independent and progressive foreign policy” at the time of the Yom Kippur War, writes Grace Brooks: “Then Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam criticized US arms shipments to Israel while refusing to publicly condemn Syria or Egypt for their attacks on Israel.” “Indeed, there is evidence that Whitlam’s independent stance motivated the CIA’s partial involvement in his dismissal,” she continues: “In particular, the CIA was worried that Whitlam was about to inform Parliament about the secret US intelligence presence in Australia via their spy base at Pine Gap” [18]. Carey, who wrote “Crabs” before Whitlam’s prime ministership, “has no doubt the US government, under Republican President Gerald Ford, was suspicious of Australia’s Labor government and reacted against Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s threat to reconsider the lease on the Pine Gap satellite tracking station,” relates Susan Wyndham [19]. In keeping with such concerns over espionage, Dead End Drive-In depicts surveillance monitors and a mysterious computer system in the manager’s office at the Star. Significantly, just before Crabs makes his escape, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1975 film The Man from Hong Kong appears on the drive-in screen, establishing an implicit link between the events in Dead End Drive-In and the period of Whitlam’s radicalism.

Texturing, sometimes reinforcing, and sometimes at odds with the closed, socialistic dystopia – the Ezy-Eden – suggested by Carey’s short story is the set of meanings and embellishments Trenchard-Smith and his collaborators bring to the adaptation. For Trenchard-Smith, the Star and its sister drive-ins in a near-future gulag archipelago are a reactionary project of “the haves” to imprison potentially rebellious youth, the impoverished, and assorted undesirables, including foreigners. The objections raised by the Star’s white internees to the arrival of the Asians parallels “many of the sentiments expressed by Australians as regards immigrants from Vietnam who were coming in, in some numbers, from […] various refugee camps across Asia,” explains Trenchard-Smith, who acknowledges that Dead End Drive-In received government funding through the New South Wales Film Corporation due to its anti-racist messaging:

Indeed, social problems did occur when a little bit of ghettoization was allowed to happen, and one whole suburb of Sydney, Cabramatta, is predominantly a Vietnamese suburb and […] I’m a believer in immigration, myself. Immigration is what made America what it is, immigration made Australia what it is, and we are all citizens of the same planet. There is only one race, the human race, and eventually I do believe we’ll all come to accept that and embrace it. [20]

Dead End Drive-In vastly improves upon Carey’s original story, not least by the inclusion of a great deal of action and excitement not present in the unprepossessing source material, but in some ways it is also less honest. Fleshing out Carey’s spare delineation of the near future, Dead End Drive-In opens with captions giving a sense of the global scope of economic and ecological collapse, one of which reads, “CAPETOWN, April 1st. 1989: The great white massacre, 103,000 die.” This factoid, alluding to the Apartheid system still in place in South Africa, establishes the potential stakes for Australians. If they do not want to be slaughtered by the racial others they despise and antagonize, it is implied, they should learn to live with them as equals. It is against the xenophobic instinct in his countrymen, therefore, that Crabs rebels. In “Crabs”, by contrast, Carey is less flattering toward his protagonist, whose progressivism is more abstract and nihilistic. Having “forgotten Carmen”, his countrywoman, he determines that his “situation has become such that no progress is possible,” Carey continues: “Crabs is now formulating a different direction. Movement is essential, it is the only thing he has ever believed” [21]. Society, like the immobilized cars at the Star, has ceased to rumble and move. He is impatient to be free – but to what end? Crabs, who in Carey’s story was bullied as a child, is motivated by antisocial resentment. The drive-in for him “is like the beach when he was a kid. Everybody is doing something. He would like to blow them all up” [22]. In Dead End Drive-In, Crabs’s escape is a moment of crowd-pleasing triumph, but in Carey’s version he “has no sense of direction” [23]. He is, in other words, lost.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 44.

[2] Ibid., pp. 42-43.

[3] Clarke, Matty. “Australian Socialism: Unique and Proud”. Independent Australia (June 13, 2019): https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/australian-socialism-unique-and-proud,12802

[4] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 46.

[5] Ibid., p. 45.

[6] Piccini, Jon. “Australian Labor and the ‘Color Line’”. Jacobin (March 1, 2020): https://jacobin.com/2020/03/australian-labor-party-alp-white-australia-policy-bill-shorten/

[7] Corbett, Claire. “Peter Carey Navigates Australia’s Past”. The Monthly (February 14, 2018): https://web.archive.org/web/20180423121238/https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/claire-corbett/2018/14/2018/1518564143/peter-carey-navigates-australia-s-past

[8] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 48.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., p. 46.

[11] Ibid., p. 48.

[12] Mills, Jennifer. “Talking ‘Crabs’”. Overland (Spring 2017): https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-228/interview-peter-carey/

[13] Haas, Lidija. “Peter Carey on Facing Australia’s Original Sin”. Financial Times (January 5, 2018): https://www.ft.com/content/a795d98c-f0be-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974e9f

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeswehr#Founding_principles

[15] Mills, Jennifer. “Talking ‘Crabs’”. Overland (Spring 2017): https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-228/interview-peter-carey/

[16] Trenchard-Smith, Brian. “Audio Commentary”. Dead End Drive-In [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2016.

[17] Aitken, Ian, Ed. The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013, p. 703.

[18] Brooks, Grace. “The Australian Labor Party Has Always Been Loyal to Israel”. Jacobin (January 22, 2024): https://jacobin.com/2024/01/australian-labor-party-israel-palestine

[19] Wyndham, Susan. “For Peter Carey the Whitlam Dismissal Is More Than a Memory”. The Sydney Morning Herald (October 20, 2014): https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/for-peter-carey-the-whitlam-dismissal-is-more-than-a-memory-20141020-118seh.html

[20] Trenchard-Smith, Brian. “Audio Commentary”. Dead End Drive-In [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2016.

[21] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 49.

[22] Ibid., p. 46.

[23] Ibid., p. 50.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel: An Anti-Semitic Feminist Thriller

Screenwriter Eric Red and director Kathryn Bigelow, collaborators on the 1987 vampire film Near Dark, reunited on another bloodsucker outing of sorts with 1990’s Blue Steel, which stars Halloween’s Jamie Lee Curtis as Megan Turner, a recent police academy graduate whose first night on patrol with the NYPD brings her to the attention of Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a psychotic stock exchange trader who will pursue and torment her over the course of the story.

When Megan shoots an armed robber (Tom Sizemore) in a grocery store, bystander Hunt serendipitously makes away with the criminal’s weapon before she notices, inspiring him to initiate a very strange courtship. Contriving to meet her soon thereafter in a seemingly chance way, Hunt introduces himself and begins an aggressive wooing campaign, with Megan, still unaware that he was the one who removed the gun from the crime scene, quickly falling for the well-heeled and superficially well-mannered Wall Street wolf. Also unknown to her, Hunt embarks upon a series of random murders in tribute to Megan, carving her name on the bullet casings.

Foreshadowing the mutual pursuit that will preoccupy the film, a street montage that occurs early on establishes the theme of the game of skill with shots of pairs of men playing chess and basketball. The basketball scene also offers the first hint that the film will be concerned with Jews, as play occurs in front of a mural in “remembrance of all the people who believed in the Big Lie” – a reference to Hitler’s assessment of the Jewish penchant for telling libelous whoppers.

Then, as she makes her way to the scene that will set the plot in motion – as will be repeated before her final confrontation with Hunt – Megan passes sex shops advertising a “live nude revue” and 25-cent “private fantasy booths”. This male commodification of women serves as a stark contrast with Megan’s virtue and desire to serve as a helpful member of society, but also alludes to a specifically Jewish form of exploitation of women. The notion of prostitutes as victims of Jews, moreover, receives an unsubtle visualization when Hunt, after murdering a hooker (Toni Darling), rubs her blood-soaked clothing on his face and chest as if to bathe in her gore.

Decades before Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein became the ugly Jewish faces of the twenty-first-century apex sex pest, Ron Silver embodied an earlier variation on the archetype in Eugene Hunt, whose name, while not obviously Jewish, hints at his search for better genes. “I like your bone structure,” he tells Megan. Jamie Lee Curtis, though half-Jewish, reads fairly goyish in her screen presence, and scenes of them kissing, with noses in proximity, unpleasantly emphasize the Jew-gentile physiognomical dichotomy. The most anti-Semitic decision taken in the production of Blue Steel, without doubt, was the casting of Silver, with his malevolently hairy and predatory Levantine features, as the villain. Megalomaniacally, the antagonist hears voices that tell him, “You are God, Eugene”, and – just in case any viewers have not yet caught on that he is Jewish – he also invokes the rise of a “sun of righteousness” mentioned in chapter four of Malachi, which in context promises Israel rewards for following Yahweh’s laws as well as destruction for those who disobey.

Halfway through the movie, when Megan realizes her too-good-to-be-true rich boyfriend is the serial killer, her troubles are far from over. The privileged Hunt, with his wealth and prestige, is able to forestall justice with the help of his attorney (Richard Jenkins) – a character the audience is immediately inclined to despise. Indeed, though he ought to have been the prime suspect from the beginning, Hunt’s ill-gotten stature and self-assurance have insulated him from punishment – which does, however, eventually come. Taking quite a beating but still as unrelenting as Michael Myers in his pursuit of the heroine, Hunt undergoes a humorous physical transformation during the denouement, going from the slickly groomed Wall Street operator to a disheveled and wounded but still dangerous mess, at one point hiding behind a pretzel vendor’s cart as he continues to limp toward his prey, as if having devolved into a more primitive, fresh-off-the-boat, and more rodent-like manifestation of Jewry after his true nature has been discovered.

Recently released on Blu-ray by Lionsgate, Blue Steel is thrill-loaded and due for unholstering, even if the de rigueur feminist content – the it’s-tough-being-a-tough-woman stuff and an annoying subplot about spousal abuse – prevents it from being an unmitigated classic.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.  

Caballero Control and the Kids

Millennials who ever collected eighties cartoons like ThunderCats, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Inspector Gadget, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on VHS may be acquainted with the brand Family Home Entertainment, which had distribution rights to these titles. They may, however, be less familiar with Family Home Entertainment’s proprietor, Noel Charles Bloom. Prior to his foray into children’s programming with the formation of that company in 1980, Bloom, following in the footsteps of his father Bernard Bloom, had made a niche for himself in the distribution of pornography through his California-based Caballero Control Corporation, which has been dubbed the “General Motors of Porn” [1].

In 1970, Bloom and his father were indicted by a federal grand jury for “distribution of unsolicited pornography through the mails” along with fellow smut-peddlers Ruth Linetsky, Murray Pernstein, Edward Goldstein, and others, all of whom were responsible for pornographic materials being “received by juveniles.” [2]. In 1974, the two Blooms again found themselves defendants in the US District Court in Roanoke, Virginia, on similar charges in connection with their company Cal-Mail, Inc. [3].

In 1980, the same year in which he started Family Home Entertainment, Noel Bloom made the news in connection with Georgia racketeer Mike Thevis, who, as The Atlanta Journal reported, “was accused of attempting to control a large segment of the nation’s porno business through murder, extortion and arson.” Noel and Bernard Bloom, who were partners with Thevis in a film production venture called Cinema Classics, were arrested in an FBI sting but managed to extricate themselves. Thevis was also in business with Robert DiBernardo, an East Coast pornography wholesaler and, according to law enforcement officials, “a member of the New Jersey syndicate family of Simone (Sam the Plumber) DeCavalcante.” [4]

A retired FBI agent, Homer Young, disclosed the following in a 1986 letter to the Thousand Oaks News Chronicle:

Any knowledgeable vice investigator knows the identity of Noel Charles Bloom, his background, associates, he and his father’s (Bernard Bloom) relationship with Michael George Thevis of Atlanta, Ga. Thevis is currently serving three life sentences, to run consecutively in the federal penitentiary. Thevis had eight federal convictions on obscenity violations alone, along with Federal Escape Act, extortion, killing of a government witness, obstruction of justice, etc. I personally have known Bernard Bloom and Noel Charles Bloom since 1968 through my official duties as a special agent of the FBI.

The citizens of Thousand Oaks have been sold “a pig in a poke” when Noel Charles Bloom is represented as a legitimate businessman who is “clean”. [5]

Young was working with a local group, Citizens Against Pornography, that objected to the presence of Bloom’s videotape reproduction operation Creative Video Services in their community [6].

Also in 1986, Bloom’s name appeared in the Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography or “Meese Report” in connection with the “key organized crime figure involved in production and distribution of pornography in California, and possibly the entire nation […] Michael Zaffarano, capo in the Galante [i.e., Bonanno] LCN [La Cosa Nostra] Family.” [7] The report states:

Zaffarano has also been largely associated with Noel Bloom […] Noel Bloom, doing business as California International Distributors and Cinema Classics, is a major Los Angeles based distributor of 8mm films. He has been arrested several times on local misdemeanor obscenity charges and has one Federal arrest for Interstate Transportation of Obscene Matter (ITOM) charges which resulted only in a guilty plea by the corporation. [8]

Most scandalously, Bloom was complicit in the exploitation of underage Nora Kuzma, thrust into notoriety in pornographic movies under the stage name Traci Lords. Bloom’s Caballero Control Corporation produced the 1986 release Traci’s Fantasies late in 1985, several months before Kuzma’s eighteenth birthday, and an article published in the Victorville Daily Press – ironically titled “For Adults Only” – depicts the close of the film’s California desert production:

Blonde and blue-eyed Traci Lords, 23 and looking 17 [she actually was 17], slouches deep in an armchair, staring hard at the wall. […]

Lips moving, she’s memorizing dialogue, and from time to time she frowns and looks down at a thin script. […]

Except for the frown, which could be cynicism as easily as concentration, Lords seems merely a sensual version of the girl next door. [9]

“Among the cars in the graveled parking area sits the video recording truck, a cab and a 25-foot gray box with the words, ‘Caballero Control Corporation, Canoga Park,’ lettered in black on the doors,” the article continues:

It looks like it might haul parts for an aerospace company. Cables run to it from the house.

Doors at the back of the truck are open, but a heavy black curtain is pulled closed. Two or three workers cluster there, peering in at the edges.

Inside is Ira, the video man. Like a technician monitoring a launch at Cape Canaveral, he is seated in semi-darkness before an array of video tape recorders and color television screens.

“There is a lot of homosexuality in and around the business, of course,” the article notes, citing a black cameraman and quoting him, “They don’t talk about it [i.e., AIDS] that much, but I think they’re worried.” Indeed, Paul Vatelli, the director of Traci’s Fantasies, who “prances through the rooms” during the shoot in the words of the Daily Press reporter [10], died of AIDS a few months later [11].

After Kuzma’s age was discovered and her movies were removed from availability, Bloom’s Caballero Home Video released Traci, I Love You in 1987. “A company spokeswoman said the film was made after Lords turned 18,” San Pedro’s News-Pilot related, “however, Lords suggests the film was shot before she turned 18.” The article continues:

“There are people out there who are trying to sell films of mine saying they’re legitimate, when I was of age. But let me tell you, I would never do another X-rated film … there aren’t any.” […]

Lords said her mother knew about her career as an underage porn star and went to police in an effort to put a stop to it. But the police did nothing, Lords said. [12]

Officially, Traci, I Love You is Kuzma’s only legally available sex film, but Kuzma continued to object to Bloom’s profiteering on the video and in 1999 a federal jury “found that Caballero violated Lords’ rights and awarded her $128,753 in damages for the movies.” [13] Notwithstanding federal scrutiny, Bloom avoided prison. His Family Home Entertainment, meanwhile, spawned Artisan Entertainment, International Video Entertainment (IVE), and other mainstream video labels that lined Blockbuster Video shelves and continued into the DVD era.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caballero_Home_Video

[2] “10 Persons, 4 Firms Indicted by US Jury”. [Pomona] Progress-Bulletin (December 23, 1970), p. A3.

[3] Reed, Ray. “Pornography Trial Scheduled for Dec. 9”. The Roanoke Times (October 12, 1974), p. 2.

[4] Green, Cliff. “3 in Porno ‘Sting’ Tied to Thevis”. The Atlanta Journal (February 15, 1980), p. 2-A.

[5] “Alerting The Conejo About the Pornography Threat”. News Chronicle (March 13, 1986), p. 32.

[6] “Former FBI Agent Arrives Home to a Case of Déjà Vu”. Los Angeles Times (April 20, 1986), Part II, p. 4.

[7] Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. Final Report. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, 1986, vol. 2, p. 1212.

[8] Ibid., pp. 1213-1214.

[9] Couey, William. “For Adults Only”. Daily Press (December 31, 1985), p. A1.

[10] Ibid., p. A12.

[11] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0890910/bio/?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

[12] Broersma, Dirk. “‘Easy Money’ Lured Lords into Sex Films”. The News-Pilot (August 12, 1987), p. A3.

[13] “People in the News”. The Napa Valley Register (December 8, 1999), p. 7C.

Apocalyptic Bliss

Conspiracy-oriented pop culture was big in the nineties. Before Alex Jones was a household name, William Cooper peddled paranoid patriotic rotgut on his Hour of the Time radio program, and writers like Jim Marrs, Kenn Thomas, and Jim Keith published such schlocky volumes as Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us, NASA, Nazis, and JFK, Saucers of the Illuminati, and Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness. On television, there were The X-Files, Dead at 21, and Dark Skies, and movies like JFK, Fire in the Sky, Conspiracy Theory, and Pi further did their part to keep the strange and conspiratorial alive and deliberately stupid in the minds of the public.

Made for a mere $30,000 [1], the now-forgotten, independently produced 1998 black comedy Stuart Bliss parodies the misdirected paranoia and millenarian angst that were propagated with the approach of the year 2000. To date, it is the only feature film written and directed by Neil Grieve, whose credits mostly consist of work as an editor, and it was co-scripted by actor Michael Zelniker, who stars in the title role as a man whose peaceful and prosperous life at first seems to live up to his happy surname. Stuart has a pretty wife, Janet (played by Zelniker’s actual spouse, Dea Lawrence), owns a home, and his career in advertising is going places. Skies start to darken, however, with the occurrence of a series of unusual events and coincidences that herald a change in the protagonist’s understanding of the world around him.   

Early on, he encounters his own double disseminating alarmist flyers and wearing a sandwich board bearing the ominous message “THE END IS COMING”. His next-door neighbor claims to be losing his hair because of a “top-secret” CIA chemical plant that has altered the atmosphere, and people notice that birds have fallen into an aberrant migration pattern. Hitting closer to home, Janet abruptly announces that she is “going away for a while”, only citing Stuart’s cream soda consumption when he demands to know why she is leaving him. Shortly thereafter, he sees his wife in a Mexican cream soda television commercial, and when the company he works for is tasked with marketing a supply of military surplus Geiger counters, he discovers that the cream soda he has been drinking is radioactive.

Concerns about workplace espionage, environmental degradation, and government secrets mingle with apocalyptic fears after “Jehovah’s Unite” canvassers appear at his door and ask him, “Do you realize that Satan is alive and well and working through the liberal media to spread his message?” Initially unconcerned with the spiritual, Stuart begins to consider otherworldly designs after watching a televangelist, Reverend Walmsley (Mark Fite), whose broadcasts seem to be speaking directly to him. “Radioactive gas – it’s everywhere,” Stuart rants to the “Jehovah’s Unite” proselytizers in one scene: “It seeps into our homes, apparently from natural sources – or so they say – and it goes undetected. […] Because of the buildup of greenhouse gases, the ozone layer is thinning. Ultraviolet rays aren’t being filtered out. Radiation. The earth is losing 24 billion tons of topsoil every year from over-tilling. The oceans – the oceans are being fished out.”

When security cameras are installed in the workplace and one of his colleagues (Derek McGrath) emerges as both a professional and sexual rival, Stuart’s awareness of “the size and scope of the conspiracy” intensifies – to the point that he even hacks a hole through one of the walls in his home in his search for clues. It may be, however, as Reverend Walmsley suggests, that Stuart’s “own morbid dreams are putting ideas into the minds of everyone he meets. He reaches a point where he believes that everything and everyone is against him.” Then again, Stuart Bliss might be interpreted more simply as the story of one man’s mental deterioration and descent into madness after the breakup of his marriage. Despite its condescending perspective, the film is frequently funny and the cast is consistently fun to watch, making this obscure relic of nineties conspiracy kitsch culture worthy of excavation.

Appropriately enough, co-screenwriter and star Michael Zelniker wanted to be a nuclear physicist as a boy, when he took an interest in the Manhattan Project [2]. “If nothing else […] the film’s warm reception internationally has made Zelniker less paranoid. A little less, anyway,” wrote Bill Brownstein in Montreal’s Gazette at the time of Stuart Bliss’s premiere:

“With prosecutor Kenneth Starr jumping all over the president and subverting the democratic process based on hearsay and innuendo, you start believing in all sorts of conspiracy theories,” says the soft-spoken Zelniker. “It’s no surprise paranoia has become so ingrained in the North American psyche.” [3]

Ironically, given the film’s depiction of a crazed conspiracy theorist with ecological preoccupations including ozone layer depletion, Zelniker would later be “trained by former Vice President Al Gore” and elected Co-Chair of the Los Angeles Chapter of Gore’s “Climate Reality Project” [4]. Also appearing in Stuart Bliss in a small supporting role is Jim Uhls, who would achieve major recognition the following year with his Fight Club screenplay. Previously, Uhls had worked as a playwright, stage actor, and journalist – “and I don’t mean in mainstream media,” he told an interviewer, confessing that he had written for “new age publications – weird investigations of, uh, things like lucid dreaming” [5].

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Sheffield, Skip. “Film Festival Finale; Salma Hayek Encounter”. Boca Raton News (April 16, 1999), p. 16E.

[2] King, Susan. “Man of Moment Michael Zelniker Is Science’s Loss and Acting’s Gain”. The Los Angeles Times (August 15, 1992), p. F2.

[3] Brownstein, Bill. “Blissful Success”. The Gazette (August 31, 1998), p. B7.

[4] https://dceff.org/filmmaker/zelniker-michael/

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuJIKPT7r90

Last Sentinel ***1/2

From Beau Geste (1939) to Zulu (1964) to Silent Running (1972), Saturn 3 (1980), The Thing (1982), Day of the Dead (1985), and 400 Bullets (2021), the isolated outpost movie rarely fails to entertain. Last Sentinel (2023), though not the best the genre has to offer, does make a worthy contribution to the paranoid, small-cast variation on the theme with its story of four soldiers manning an ocean watchtower in post-apocalyptic 2063, when melting icecaps have submerged all but two countries that remain at war with each other after decades. The film envisions a comparatively low-tech dystopian future in which the remains of civilization have been reduced to twentieth-century technologies, from walkie talkies to cassette tapes, but weapons of mass destruction remain a constant threat. The production design is strong, and the script, though unremarkable, takes some unexpected turns. The performers, led by Kate Bosworth, do their best with the material, but Last Sentinel is ultimately undermined by the lack of a charismatic protagonist.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Last Sentinel is:

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

Pro-miscegenation and anti-white. Out of a crew consisting of white men Hendrichs (Thomas Kretschmann) and Baines (Martin McCann), white woman Cassidy (Bosworth), and neck-tattooed mulatto Sullivan (Lucien Laviscount), the latter comes across as the most normal and well-adjusted as well as the most physically fit, and is naturally the white woman’s choice for a lover. The two white men both appear to be unhinged. Expressing the racist and anti-democratic menace represented by white masculinity, meanwhile, commander Hendrichs explains to his subordinate, “You don’t get to vote, Sullivan.”

Misogynist! Demonstrating her sense of duty to be clouded by emotionalism, Cassidy is reluctant to follow an order when she fears it may result in her yellow stud being killed. Reinforcing the implication that the woman is the military unit’s weakest link, she is finally revealed to be a spy working for the enemy power.

Racist! Though Sullivan, the mulatto, is portrayed sympathetically, he is also consistently depicted as the least capable and professional of the soldiers. One of his responsibilities is hoisting up nets full of fish driven toward the outpost by huge climate-change-generated storms, and in one early sequence he loses the catch by failing to act quickly enough. “Oh, I fixed your [broken] mug,” he tells Cassidy in a later scene. The glued-together mug, however, is then shown to be leaking, revealing the shoddiness of his craftsmanship. In still another scene, he carelessly risks his own life when he ventures out to board and investigate a mysterious boat, turns off his walkie talkie and remains out of contact, dawdling and enjoying a candy bar as his compatriots worry that he may have been killed and consider whether or not to fire on the vessel.

Nihilist. “Don’t make like this is some heroic national duty,” Sullivan scoffs: “‘Truth, Loyalty, Sacrifice’, that shit belongs on a toilet wall. We didn’t come here to die. We came for the cash.” In a world in which “national” identities are a matter of formal citizenship or residency in arbitrarily delineated zones on maps, patriotism has no value and money becomes the only motivation for service to the state.

Green. Endorsing the theory of world-destroying anthropogenic global warming, the screenplay comes to this conclusion, spoken by Cassidy: “The only way to unfuck the world is to wipe out the humans.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

God Is a Bullet ***

An adaptation of a 1999 mystery novel, this gloomy, gory, rain-drenched, and generally unpleasant thriller’s claim to be “based on a true story” appears to be approximately 100% bullshit. Whatever inspired it, God Is a Bullet is one of the less noteworthy entries in the subgenre of action movies about fathers out to retrieve their kidnapped daughters that includes Commando (1985) and Taken (2008), the story centering on the efforts of sheriff’s deputy Bob Hightower (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to track down his daughter Gabi (Chloe Guy) after her abduction by a drug-trafficking gang comprised of heavily tattooed “Followers of the Left-Handed Path”. Assisting the naïve Christian hero on his odyssey down the dark desert highway into the devil-worshipping demimonde of American satanism is foul-mouthed recovering addict Case (Maika Monroe), herself a former abductee and member of the gang who escaped and now hopes to save another girl from the same degrading life.

Extremely bloody, the film includes a difficult-to-watch scene of Bob supergluing and stapling a belly wound shut, another of a man’s jaw being blown off during an elaborate gun battle, and still another of a woman being shot repeatedly in the face until nothing but mush remains. If God is a bullet, then God Is a Bullet is nothing short of fanatical in its devotions. Unfortunately, this movie’s violence is not matched by the vigor of its intellect, and the storytelling is about as dumb as a shotgun-blasted cranium. Coming across a hideout where the gang has performed satanic rituals with underage girls, for example, the deputy prefers to “send […] a message” by burning the house down rather than preserve the evidence of the violent crimes that took place there. Then there is the scene in which Bob, after being bitten several times by a rattlesnake, immediately takes off at a mad sprint like a macho cretin to chase a cultist, which would only cause his heart to pump the venom through his body all the more rapidly. Luckily for him, heroes get to do things like that and survive in non-essential movies like God Is a Bullet.  

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that God Is a Bullet is:

Pro-gun, with firearms bestowing the closest possible thing to godliness.

Anti-racist, i.e., anti-white. In the course of kidnapping Gabi, the evil cult crucifies Sam (Kola Olasiji), Bob’s ex-wife’s new black husband. In one of the movie’s lamest scenes, Bob grapples with his own latent racism. “I always thought she married him in part because he was black – to point out the differences between us,” he confesses: “Thinking about that says an awful lot about who I am. I’m not sure it’s the man I set out to be.” Confirming the satanism-racism connection, cult leader Cyrus (Karl Glusman) mocks a half-Cherokee underling as “a piece of shit from the reservation.”

Anti-Christian. Until now, Bob has mistakenly believed his family to be safe because of their membership in “a small Christian community. We don’t have much in the way of deviant behavior.” “We [devil cultists] all came from family-oriented communities,” Case informs him, however. “Just thinking maybe if you’d had a stronger moral compass as a child, like a religious foundation, that you’d possibly be better equipped to deal with what happened to you,” he observes in another moment, earning her rebuke: “I got snatched, asshole, just like your little girl.” Events will prove Bob to be uninformed on the level of deviancy in his community. Taking a relativistic tack, the script has Case explain to Bob that he will need to get tattooed before he can effectively approach and investigate the kidnapping because the cult, her church, is “just as bigoted as yours.” “I used to believe that my faith protected me,” Bob reflects as his confidence wanes and he loses his certainty that “God was good and everything would work out.” “We’re just not ready to accept the bad news,” Case tells him pessimistically: “So we fight it with God and the Devil and this new age bullshit […] When it comes down to it, we all know that it’s X amount of years and then the ground.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Earth Mama ***1/2

The first feature film from “London-born, Bay Area-raised”, “British-American” writer-director Savanah Leaf is a bizarre portrait of life among Oakland’s perpetually pregnant single black women with neck, arm, and butt tattoos and “uncontrollable impulse reactions” as they “keep multiplyin’ the household.” Inspired by Leaf’s own family experience with adoption, Earth Mama centers on unmarried mother Gia, played by rapper Tia Nomore, as she struggles to make ends meet, contends with Child Protective Services, and grapples with the dilemma of whether to add a third child to her brood or give the baby up for adoption. The Los Angeles Times dubbed Earth Mama an “ode to Black motherhood” [1], but viewers may find themselves experiencing it as an urgent call for racial segregation and the immediate implementation of a eugenics program, so repellent is the “community” depicted in the film. Earth Mama opens on a shot of a fat black woman with a facial piercing as a voice from offscreen asks, “Why should we care if you make it?” “I don’t care if y’all do care if I make it,” she sasses in reply, more or less capturing the spirit of the film.

Gia, the protagonist, is an utterly contemptible and revolting person who “don’t trust nobody”, alienates her friends with her rude behavior, and professes to have had “no choice” but to become a single parent. Whenever Gia seems about to redeem herself or to become humanized, the script calls for her to do something self-destructive and off-putting, like slapping paperwork out of a social worker’s hands and rebuking her, “I don’t need no fuckin’ gold star to tell me I’m a good mom” – or, in the film’s most appalling moment, smoking crack not long before giving birth. One is left wondering about the intended audience of this A24 production with its clashing ghetto setting, somber string soundtrack, art house feel, and strong elements of realism, thrown off by occasional fancifulness like the inclusion of a Cronenbergian body-horror fantasy sequence involving an umbilical cord – as if the mere sight of a gestating hood mama had been insufficiently body-horrific in itself. The script also offers moments of unintentional humor, as when Gia, after giving birth, asks, “What [basketball] position you think she’ll play?” Fittingly, when The Los Angeles Times asked Leaf to name “creative inspirations that have informed your approach to storytelling”, the director name-dropped Kobe Bryant, whose “dedication and mental approach to the game has always been really inspiring for me” [2].

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Earth Mama is:

Anti-drug. Gia attends classes with other mothers whose drug abuse has endangered their relationships with their children. Also worrisome is that CPS might discover that Gia’s sister is a drug dealer: “If they find out how she make a living I might never see my kids again.” Exhibiting astounding stupidity, however, Gia finally smokes crack in a moment of weakness before walking out into a forest to commune in the nude with nature. Gia’s use of crack during pregnancy is rightly described as child abuse, but Earth Mama still seems to expect viewers to sympathize with her for some reason.

Gay. Gia has a gratuitous dyke friend in Mel (Keta Price). More alarming, however, is the casual appearance of what appears to be a trans black woman working as a nurse in a clinic.

Agnostic. Gia’s friend Trina (Doechii), “obsessed with God”, is given to saying things like, “God was just lookin’ down and wanted to bless yo’ ass. But he need to be blessin’ you with a new car. This shit raggedy as hell.” On the prospect of Gia giving her baby up for adoption, however, Trina “be on some you-signin’-with-the-devil shit” to the point that Gia stops taking Trina’s calls. Mel, however, puts no stock in “man-made” religion and prefers to identify as “just spiritual.”

Anti-white, lending credence to trendy hokum about intergenerational trauma and institutional racism. “G, listen to me. It’s a lotta people expectin’ us to fail,” Trina exhorts her friend: “My whole life, I had shit taken away from me. They try to take our culture. They try to take our homes. They try to take our freedom. And you know they’ll try to take our babies, too. Same shit is happenin’ to us right now that happened to yo’ mama, happened to my mama, and it happened to dey mamas. That’s exactly why we can’t stop fightin’ for our kids, G. It’s our God-given right to have our kids.” A well-meaning black social worker (Erika Alexander) explains that black women live at the mercy of “a system [i.e., CPS] that was created to hurt people like us.” It must be especially humiliating for Gia, for example, to have to give a urine sample as a white woman in a position of authority stands and watches. As lead actress Tia Nomore told an interviewer, “Having conversations about the politics around being a Black body was really helpful. Talking about the struggles we have as Black women and what it means to always feel like we have to be put together, even when we’re down bad – it’s a thing, to be excellent all the time.” [3] Far from indulging in strictly academic considerations of racial politics, however, Earth Mama is unafraid to depict realistically blacks’ strong aversion to whites. “There’s nothin’ like a ramblin’-ass white bitch to piss me off,” Gia reflects after hearing a white woman speak during a support group session. The protagonist also sees nothing wrong with stealing restoratively expropriating diapers from a white family’s stroller in a public park. In another scene, shown a binder full of families looking to adopt babies, Gia objects, “They all white?”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Yamato, Jen. “How Savanah Leaf and Tia Nomore Personalized Their Ode to Black Motherhood, Earth Mama”. Los Angeles Times (July 14, 2023): https://archive.is/L7qRJ

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

Tubular 2023

Since people seem to enjoy these year-end lists of my favorite time-wasting YouTube musical discoveries, here is the heavily Russophilic installment for 2023.

[1] “I Live with My Grandmother” by Verasy

This funky and unusual 1981 pro-natalist heart-tugger from Belarusian ensemble Verasy is sung from the perspective of a lonely child who lives with a grandparent in a house full of candy but no other children for playmates. What will the world be like in a hundred years, the singer muses, if people stop having children? Also highly recommended is Verasy’s touching “First Date”.

[2] “Rain” by DDT

One of the great Russian rock groups to emerge from the late-stage Soviet Union, DDT has enjoyed a decades-spanning career with songs ranging from gritty guitar-oriented bangers to gentler light-rock fare. The cathartic “Rain”, first released in 1982, showcases the sensitive, whimsical side of singer Yuri Shevchuk, and can be heard in other versions here and here.

[3] “White Panama” by Alla Pugacheva

This 1986 TV lip-syncing gig finds the Soviet Union’s premier female vocalist of the seventies and eighties vamping it up for a studio audience that appears less than wholly enthusiastic. Interestingly, another lip-syncing performance of the same song finds her giving an entirely different emotional interpretation of this synth-and-saxophone workout.

[4] “Tovarisc Gorbaciov” by The Midnight’s Moskow

This gloriously retarded 1987 Italo-disco novelty classic is as frivolous as it gets, with a bunch of lasagna scarfers spouting faux-Russki gibberish, getting operatic and funky, and having a homoerotic mock-Politburo hoedown. Infectious and guaranteed to get stuck in your head!

[5] “Stop for the Rolling Stones” by Egor Letov

Egor Letov, whose confrontational band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) gained notoriety during the eighties with a series of noisy, nihilistic punk albums, was also heavily influenced by British and American countercultural music of the sixties, an era to which he pays homage with this abrasive ballad about an American hippie who brings the music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones to the USSR, only to be drafted and forced to abandon his message of peace and love. Credited to Letov’s side project Kommunizm, this track appears on the 1989 album Let It Be.

[6] “Lucifer” by Blue System

German pop cornball Dieter Bohlen’s strangely tender and brittle vocals furnish a striking contrast with his grinning forebodings about damnation in the afterlife in an outrageous 1991 production number that has a pair of shirtless black dudes getting down to a C+C Music Factory era dance beat as a dwarf in a devil costume spits and swallows fire. Those who enjoy “Lucifer” will also want to check out Blue System’s even more decadent video for 1988’s “Under My Skin”.

[7] “Motherland” by Grazhdanskaya Oborona

This rousing anthem comes from Grazhdanskaya Oborona’s 1997 album Solstice, the recording of which coincided with Egor Letov’s engagement with patriotic themes and association with Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party. Footage featured here dates from Russia’s constitutional crisis of 1993. The entire album is great, but “The Dead” in particular is another recommended track.

[8] “The Sky of Slavs” by Alisa

Alisa’s stomping thunderstorm of nationalistic machismo can be found on the group’s 2003 album, It Is Later Than You Think, but makes the perfect soundtrack for Russia’s present confrontation with the proxies of Globohomo, pumping up the listener to rally to the motherland’s defense and take the battle to the decrepit West – although Alisa frontman Konstantin Kinchev’s attitude toward the Ukraine war is rather more nuanced, according to Wikipedia’s account. Interestingly, Kinchev is an openly Christian rocker and of course has also been accused of “antisemitism”.  

[9] “Guerra civil de El Salvador – Twin Crimes”

Some mad genius decided to pair Maximum Love’s evil synth track “Twin Crimes” with footage from El Salvador’s 1980s civil war, and for whatever reason the match makes aesthetic magic.

[10] “Laborwave [-Y U G O S L A V I A 1 9 8 0-]”

An instant classic of the Sovietwave/laborwave genre of socialism-nostalgic pop music appropriation, this video takes a somewhat generic 1988 Yugoslavian synthpop track, Salt-1’s “Allj Ember”, gives it the slow-motion distorted vocals treatment, and imbues it with an intimidating majesty in the process, creating a potent and inspiring vision of retrofuturistic European communism to pleasantly brainwash viewers. Enjoy!

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Hank’s Christmas Wish **1/2

This wholesomeness overdose from Christian production company JC Films boasts 90s Superman himself, Dean Cain, as the flummoxed mayor of Buckhannon, West Virginia. Mayor Dean harbors old-fashioned ideas about how Christmas ought to be celebrated, but his colleagues on the City Council see these as “boring” and instead propose an “alternative approach to Christmas” complete with newfangled notions of yuletide robots, meatball pudding, and candy canes with green stripes. Fulfilling the role of Scrooge-lite, meanwhile, is Kevin (Danny O’Brien), the stingy and gloomy young proprietor of a retirement home who takes on the optimistic Bella (Arabella Weaver) as his assistant. Bella and her brother Liam (Brody Hull), recently orphaned, are befriended by Hank Graham (Michael Sigler), a retired elf who now works as an “independent North Pole toy contractor” and hopes to influence the mayor to restore Buckhannon’s festivities to their proper quaintness. Writer-director Jason Campbell’s try-hard quirkiness is less than hilarious but does keep this fairly threadbare Christmas ornament hanging by a flimsy twig.

2.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Hank’s Christmas Wish is:

Green-skeptical. Ecological concerns are made to seem foolish when a member of the City Council proposes a Christmas tree made out of balloons, arguing that, “Technically, this tree could be safer for the environment.”

Ageist! More than one instance of humor derives from the senility of the residents in the retirement home. “They try to feed us checkers disguised as Oreos,” a confused old man complains. There is also a woman who wears her bra on the outside of her blouse and is given to saying things like, “Well, in 1914, when I was a little Italian boy, we used to like to put the grapes together and make snowballs out of ‘em and, like, throw ‘em at people, but that’s what I did when I was a little boy, I don’t know about y’all.”

Sexist! The laughable “revolutionary” element on the City Council is spearheaded by an opinionated woman with a short, non-traditional haircut.

Luddite. “I don’t understand this email and texting stuff, but if you really care about somebody and you wanna let ‘em know how you feel, write ‘em a letter.”

Pro-gun. “This is gonna make so many kids so happy!” exults Hank as he handles a toy machine gun: “If I could just get it to work!”

Conservative. “Christmas needs traditions,” Hank explains: “Using silly themes and pop culture to promote Christmas can in fact change the meaning of Christmas. The message of Christmas is the traditions: one Santa, one tree, red candy canes. You need to stop this madness.” After hearing a pitch for a “drone parade” next year, Mayor Dean finally puts his foot down and takes the elf’s advice, explaining to the “revolutionary” contingent: “I love your enthusiasm, I love all your ideas, but Christmas is about tradition […] Can’t compromise on that.” Though Hank’s Christmas Wish is mostly very, very tame, there is an uncomfortably awkward scene in which Bella, on first meeting Hank, appears to suspect that he may be a sexual predator, announcing that she has pepper spray to defend herself. That the elf comes across as “creepy” for innocently offering hospitality carries an implicit rebuke not of Hank’s behavior but of a state of societal decay in which deviance is assumed.

Aryanist, featuring a pure-hearted blonde heroine and with Hank Graham the elf likening his surname to “the really good cracker”. “You know, Christmas cards were invented in Germany, just like the candy cane,” he also enthuses. The insistence on “one Santa”, moreover, implies a rejection of Black Santa decorations’ uppity cultural appropriation.

Anti-Semitic! “They’re not cattle,” Bella rebukes Kevin when he complains about how much it costs him to feed the retirees. The incipiently Judaic nature of Kevin’s narrow-minded cost-cutting economism is furthermore signified by his use of the Seinfeldian expression “yada, yada, yada”.

Christian. This being a JC Films production, Jesus is naturally “the whole shebang”.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.