Stylized Denial: The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man

The final paper for Writing About Film. Take one of the films we viewed for class (or clip thereof—which threw Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys in as a qualified sources material—and compare it with another film.

This one didn't go where I wanted it to, but it arrived somewhere nonetheless.


~•~


ENG 317
December 8, 2009
Final Essay

Stylized Denial:
The Liminal Journeys in Carnival of Souls and Dead Man


If I go first, I'll wait for you there,
on the other side of those dark waters.
―James Jones

The world of departed souls is said to be to the west—towards the setting sun. The path leads through a dim world of twilight. Another trail intersects this first; used by shamans as a shortcut to encounter the souls in journey to that other world. At some point along its westward travel, the path encounters water—a running stream, a lake, the great black ocean when the soul crosses to the sunless lands. At the brink, before this point is reached, the soul comes upon a lodge or passageway, where the guardians wait. When the soul reaches the lodge, it comes face-to-face with these guardians. Sometimes the guardians welcome the soul with laughter and drumming, and they carry the soul on to where it will ultimately pass alone. Often times the soul is not greeted warmly, fear and denial dominating what transpired in leading the soul to this point on its journey.

In Mary Henry's voyage from the river where the car she rode in plunged—killing all its occupants—she travels westward to Salt Lake City. Once there, she is drawn to a ruined structure on the outskirts of town that to her is hauntingly familiar. This is the Saltair Pavilion, and in Herk Henry's bleak supernatural tale Carnival of Souls (1962), it acts as Mary Henry's ghost lodge, through which she must pass en route to her ultimate destination.

Similarly—and more directly linked to our analogy of the journey of the soul—Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man, shows us William Blake's westward movement from Cleveland to the Pacific Northwest and beyond the reaches of the living. Unlike Mary, Blake is lead by a guide rather than making the trek on his own.

The two films share many semblances. Both are shot in black-and-white, and both have distinctive soundtracks which use only a single instrument performed in a minimalist capacity and employed with deliberate effect to push its constraints. In Carnival of Souls, Gene Moore uses the pipe organ to create the eerie soundtrack which keeps the audience as unsettled as the protagonist, who, incidentally, is an organ player herself. This brings the sense of music into being part of the narrative created by the film and is a vehicle for Mary sense of place within the liminal space of her journey. For Dead Man, the weapon of choice is Neil Young's electric guitar, which fades and rises like a waning heartbeat behind William Blake's travel towards some unknown westward land.

Another trait both films share is their lack of adherence to a single genre. Like their main characters, the films exist in an over-lapping, in-between space of convenient labeling. Carnival of Souls is at once a B-grade horror film, a supernatural thriller, has grown to be seen as an art film, transcending the trappings of its genre. Dead Man is, on its surface, a Western, yet William Blake is no Shane, and the almost surreal Old West town of Mechanic is not a place we're likely to find Clint Eastwood; its theme is far closer to the religious ecstasies displayed in the paintings of the other William Blake—18th century visionary writer and painter who is the namesake of the protagonist.

In Carnival of Souls, the culmination for Mary Henry comes when she walks through the angular curvature of deep shadow at the Saltair, in a north-western direction, passing beneath a framed Arabesque arch. She looks across a barren salt beach, where the jutting piles of decayed docks rise like tombstones, markers of the afterworld. In a reprise of an earlier scene—where Mary played the church organ and fancifully imagined this one—white-faced ghouls rise from the dark water the lake that could as easily be her subconscious. A dozen ghouls amble to the pavilion and, amidst the framework of the decrepit ballroom, they begin to waltz. Circling back and forth, they leer, dancing to the organ music of a malicious merry-go-round.

Mary stands at the periphery, terrified of this totentanz. She has chosen to come to this place, but upon her arriving, denies her own part of this world. Having "seen" this waltz before—while playing the organ at church—she has called this world to her. The organ could be her heart, and she plays it hoping for more life, while all around her evidence of her death dances. When the music stops, the ghouls cease their waltz and turn towards her in sudden pursuit.

They chase Mary out of the pavilion, onto the white salty shoreline of the afterworld. Mary runs beneath the pavilion, among the pylons of the foundation—into the base foundation of her own consciousness—but everywhere she turns she finds a white-faced ghoul waiting. She's returned to her primordial mind and death courts her from every shadow.

The ghouls act as shepherds, herding Mary towards the lake. She runs from beneath the pavilion and out on the featureless salted shore, she stumbles, and the ghouls are upon her. Mary's fall is not so much to the salt and sand of the beach beneath her, but back through a liminal world to the place of her long-procrastinated death.

The denouement is two-fold. Three men, the policeman, the doctor, and the minister—male representation of the Three Fates—follow Mary's path along the beach to where she fell and discover no tracks beyond that point. Following their observations, there is a cut to back east, where the car Mary had been in—and plunged off a bridge into a river—is towed up from the water. Mary's body is, of course, inside.

When it comes to William Blake's moment of passage, he is delirious from his long trek through the dark woods of his own fear and dark night of the soul. Unlike Mary Henry, Blake's journey has had a guide, a psychopomp named Xebeche, a Wakashan who calls himself Nobody. Numerous times along the way, Blake has insisted that he's not dead, but in reaching the gate—both a literal as well as figurative—of a Makah village, he cannot walk through of his own power, his own body allied with his vocal denial of death. Blake leans awkwardly against a section of fallen tree, the rings—its lifespan and evidence of its death—visible around him. Nobody, having lead Blake here, continues his own role as spirit guide, and brokers a deal for Blake to pass through the gate. The solo guitar of the soundtrack pulses in a desultory staccato, as Blake stares up at a carved raven totem and his consciousness fades.

When Blake comes to, more than a dozen Makah stare at him like the faces of ancestral spirits. They appear concerned, confused, menacing. Blake has little choice now, and they seemingly witness his death finally catch up with him. His consciousness fades again.

Blake lays on a shale beach, birds can be heard overhead, the ocean crashing at his head. He is wrapped in funerary cloaks and attempts one last look around, bewildered and uncertain. As his perspective is our own perspective, we are left in this ambiguous state of understanding, having left one world—one film story—but have not yet arrived entirely in another. When he next opens his eyes, Blake is on a canoe laden with, Nobody says, cedar boughs. "It is time for you to leave now, William Blake," Nobody tells him, "Time for you to go back where you came from ... The place where all the spirits come from and to where all the spirits return."

Nobody pushes the canoe into the vast dark waters to the west, but Blake looks back, to the east. He watches helpless as Cole, a bounty hunter who has pursued him, approaches Nobody from behind. In a choreographic death, Cole and Nobody shoot each other—manifestations of Blake's higher and lower ideals; that which wisely guides and that which gives feral chase. William Blake's burial canoe is pulled out to sea by the tides as the staccato guitar pulses and then dies.

Carnival of Souls and Dead Man are cyclic stories which don't so much end where they begin but meander a pre-destined path before finally settling at the conclusion. Upon first-glance Carnival of Souls has a straight-forward understanding at its finish—that Mary died in the car wreck which began the tale, and her spirit continued on a path much the same as if she had lived—Dead Man's ending is left far more metaphysical and ambiguous: At what point did William Blake die? Shot in Thel's room in the town of Machine? In the forest where he fled? On the canoe drifting out to the open ocean?

In both instances the protagonists of these films have made stylized westward journeys through the twilight at the edge of the world to reach acknowledgment of their deaths.

•

Bibliography

Carnival of Souls. Dir. Herk Harvey.

Perf. Candace Hilligoss.

Criterion Collection 63, 1962. DVD.

"Carnival of Souls." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

14 Nov 2009, 12:31 UTC. 1 Dec 2009.

Curnutte, Rick. "Mad Poets: William Blake,

Jim Jarmusch and Dead Man."
The Film Journal 1 (2002).
The Film Journal.
May 2002. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jarmusch.

Perf. Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer.

Miramax, 1995. DVD.

Kawin, Bruce. "Carnival of Souls."

Carnival of Souls
Criterion Collection 63 (2000). Print.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. "A gun up your ass:

An interview with Jim Jarmusch."
Cineaste 22.2 (1996). Print.

Taubin, Amy. "Dead Man Talking."

The Village Voice 14 May 1996, 41.20. Print.

· • ·

Saturday Night at the Speedway

The final paper for Reading Popular Culture is something of a magna opus for me. I wrote this, and the following two final papers for my other English course over the span of about nine hours (fairly continuous span with breaks for a bit of food, more coffee, and less-than-healthy amount of breaks for stretches and peeing; such is the life I signed up for in doing this— I've been in the real world, this stuff is easy).

I'm still waiting to do my paper on musical hijacking of popular culture circa 1990-92, but like that one, the idea for this one has long been germinating.

The date it was due was precisely the fortieth anniversary of the concert.


~•~


ENG 384
December 6, 2009
Final Essay

Saturday Night at the Speedway

Exposing Altamont in a Textural Analysis of
the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie"

"Some things aren't true even if they did happen,"
Ken Kesey once said.
Altamont is like that.

―Ralph J. Gleason

"New Speedway Boogie" was written and recorded by the Grateful Dead two months after the Altamont Free Concert, and appeared in June 1970 on the album Workingman's Dead. Robert Hunter, lyricist and non-performing member of the band, penned the song in in direct response to a series of articles that had been written over the course of the previous summer by the music critic Ralph J. Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle. It was in the column "On the Town" where Gleason first challenged the Rolling Stones to perform a free concert in the Bay Area of California and months later, after they did so, condemned most everyone involved with the event (never acknowledging his own role in antagonizing the Rolling Stones to stage the concert). In this context, "New Speedway Boogie" offers unflinching yet cryptic views of Altamont and—more importantly—the blameful aftermath of it.

Please don't dominate the rap Jack,
if you've got nothing new to say
If you please don't back up the track
this train has got to run today.

In the opening lines, Robert Hunter directly addresses us as listeners, using a proper name in a generic sense, calling us "Jack" just as if we might be called "son" or "friend." But with this use of Jack, Hunter cites Ralph J. Gleason by name, even if it is not his commonly used moniker, and suggests he not continue to use his words to fuel any more fires, unless he has something more useful to impart.

I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
Like some say you better run away,
others say you better stand still.

The mountain, in this case, can be equated with the source of wisdom and understanding, a mythic place of retreat where one can rest a while to accumulate balance and objectivity. But just as quickly as we have ascended that mountain, we are sitting on a hillside, showing that our narrative guide isn't claiming superiority for having been to that mountain where wisdom may be found. In the lore of rock lyric analysis, the Marxist and/or Freudian baseline of measurement can be equated to the Beatles and Bob Dylan, it is difficult to make references to a hill and not come around to Lennon and McCartney's "Fool on the Hill." In this case, Altamont was a hill seated with 300,000 fools.

Now I don't know, but I been told
it's hard to run with the weight of gold
On the other hand I heard it said
it's just as hard with the weight of lead.

Once more—in a recurring theme not only to this song, but in much of Robert Hunter's repertoire—our story-teller assures us that they are not the authoritative voice on the subject, but they might know a thing or two nonetheless. The narrator has never done so, but has heard that being burdened with gold (ill-gotten or freely acquired) makes it difficult to move very quickly. However, a burden carried is still a burden no matter what the substance may be.
With Altamont, there was plenty of blame to go around and yet no one seemed to step forward and pick up any share of it. While it may be true that no one involved toted away sacks of money from Altamont, what weighed on the conscience of anyone who had been there was, in some respects, far heavier than lead.

Who can deny, who can deny,
it's not just a change in style?
One step gone and another's begun
and I wonder how many miles?

These lines offer a pair of rhetorical questions and express uncertainty about purpose and distance to reach what is needed or intended. Both of these factors—viewed with the benefit of hindsight—are easily placed upon the era in which Altamont took place. Following the success of the Woodstock Festival, the counter-culture of the late sixties felt they had achieved what few other cultures had in history, that of staging a libertarian ideal society—albeit, for only a few days in a relatively small location. Altamont would prove to be the undoing of any naïve considerations that such a congregation could be staged at will.

During the summer of 1969, Gleason used his column in the San Francisco Chronicle to harangue the Rolling Stones about exorbitant ticket prices and accused them of having contempt for their audience. Since they had given a free concert in London's Hyde Park in early July, Gleason antagonistically baited the band into offering a free concert in San Francisco. The band responded with plans to perform in Golden Gate Park at the end of their tour.

Logistics and city ordinances prevented Golden Gate Park from being the site of their planned show, and, after a location at the Sears Point Raceway fell through, a last-minute—literally two days before the event was scheduled—the Altamont Speedway was offered as a suitable site for the concert. Even amidst the planning of the concert, Gleason kept his antagonistic attitude in print, "Are the Rolling Stones seriously going to appear next weekend? Your guess is as good as mine" (Gleason, "A Few Guesses").

I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
I saw things getting out of hand,
I guess they always will.

At some point in the process, the Hells Angels were hired to act as security at the concert. The decision to use the Hells Angels remains a source of contention among all parties involved. The Angels had often been present at Grateful Dead concerts around the Bay Area, and having been involved with Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, were considered to be the "noble savages" of the counter-culture movement in California. But Altamont was no Grateful Dead concert, and Ken Kesey's workingman's charisma was far closer to the Angels disposition than the androgyne prancing and preening of Mick Jagger. In the Maysles' film Gimme Shelter, Angel Sonny Barger can be seen glaring at Jagger with an unstoned look that would make contempt and disgust seem serenely pleasant.

In a diatribe heard the day after Altamont on KSAN radio station, Barger claimed that the Angels were asked to sit on the edge of the stage and keep people away from equipment and performers. But Barger also claimed that at one point in the evening he held a gun to Keith Richards' head and told him to keep playing or he'd be killed—a claim that has no corroborating witnesses. Various other stories hold that the Angels were given $500 in beer to police the event, or, as Gleason reported afterwards, a "truckload." Whatever specific arrangements were made between organizers and the Hells Angels, as the day progressed, and beer and other substances were consumed, the Angels seemed less like a security force and more like domineering vigilantes; like outlaw bikers. The pool cues they wielded—as ubiquitously seen in the film Gimme Shelter—were pre-loaded with lead weights, brought along with obvious intention on using them.

In a brief essay written for the Criterion Films release of Gimme Shelter, Stanley Booth shares a first hand opinion of the day. "The violence at Altamont, being completely unexpected, came afterward to seem inevitable." That sentiment is shared by many, regardless of their proximity to the event itself. Forty years later Robert Hughes quotes, "'It was a day that was oppressive and dark,' recalls Chris Hillman, whose Flying Burrito Brothers shared the bill, 'and the ending was the worst scenario you could imagine.'"

Even before mid-afternoon, there was something menacing in the air. "The Stones arrived by helicopter and walked, flanked by their mysterious New York musicians guards, through the crowd, when a long-haired youth ran at Jagger screaming, 'I'm gonna kill you! I hate you!' He slugged Jagger in the face. Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept").

During the Jefferson Airplane's performance, singer Marty Balin jumped off the stage into a melee of Angels and audience members in an attempt to break up the fight. As Gleason recounts, "One of the Angels decked Balin and when Thompson [the Airplane's manager] asked, 'What did you do that for?' replied, 'He spoke disrespectful to a brother Angel.' Paul Kantner, still onstage, asked, 'What's going on? They're beating up on my lead singer!'" (Gleason, "Aquarius Wept"). Upon their arrival, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead were told about the Hells Angels beating up Marty Balin and that the scene was rapidly deteriorating—had gone from terrible to horrid. The Grateful Dead elected not to perform and quickly departed. But they would not remain silent about the event for long.

Now I don't know, but I been told
in the heat of the sun a man died of cold
Do we keep on coming or just stand and wait
with the sun so dark and the hour so late?

Once again citing an unauthoritative stance, our narrative guide offers up another paradox, this time in almost strictly folklore terms, of someone freezing to death as they feel the warmth of sunshine. It calls to mind a line in "Oh Susannah"—"the sun's so hot I froze to death, Susannah don't you cry."

We are also given another question, and even if it is rhetorical, it is asked with a sense of urgency as to what might happen if the question isn't at least addressed, if not answered outright.

Altamont is often cited as being the death of the sixties—the expiration of the ideal that seemed to have reached its epoch with the Woodstock Festival a few months earlier. In this light, the question asked by our nameless story-teller in "New Speedway Boogie" could be just that. Was Altamont the end of an era? Or was it just as likely that it exposed an era for what it really was—stripping away the Day-Glo paint and psychedelic visions for something cold and festering that lurks in the shadows the places sometimes better left unseen? Ethan A. Russell wrote, "Mick Taylor [of the Rolling Stones] responded when asked if he thought Altamont was the end of the '60s, 'Well, it was the end of the sixties, wasn't it? It was December 1969.'"

If, as Wavy Gravy stated numerous times about Woodstock, for a few days a cow pasture became a little piece of heaven (and Jimi Hendrix became the Celestial Gypsy at the summit of the psychedelic era), then for a few hours one dark evening, Altamont became a smoldering pit of hell (with Mick Jagger cast as Lucifer in brimstone).

You can't overlook the lack Jack,
of any other highway you ride
It's got no signs, no dividing lines,
and there's very few rules to guide.
I spent a little time on the mountain,
I spent a little time on the hill
Things went down we don't understand
but I think in time we will.

Regardless of medium—film, essay, radio rant, song—Altamont seemed doomed from the moment it was pressured into conception. It would be easy to formulate the situation as being one of a rape victim giving birth. Ralph Gleason, in this scenario, would be the rapist, the Rolling Stones a willing, if slightly reluctant, accomplice, and Altamont the unwanted child born. The victim would be not only Meredith Hunter, but also everyone who participated, even with the best of intentions. But, since we are discuss myth and folklore, it is fitting to cite the proverb about those intentions—that this road with no signs nor lines to guide, is smoothly paved en route to some infernal place up ahead in the unknown darkness, The experience at Altamont scarred the psyche of people who were there, the era which spawned it, and the history and mythology of rock and roll itself. What "went down we don't understand" and even forty years later, we struggle with the questions it has left us.

"Perhaps Ralph J. Gleason was responsible for Altamont," Norma Coates wrote in an lengthy essay about the event. She doesn't shy away from indicting numerous participants: "Or Mick Jagger? Sonny Barger? Woodstock? All or none of the above? After all, one could, based on the evidence, argue that it was the venerable San Francisco Chronicle music critic [...] who goaded the Rolling Stones into performing a free concert at the Altamont Speedway..." From these cutting remarks, Coates lapses into the dialogue of folklore, and strays from the evidence she so recently cited. "As the story goes, the Stones danced a little too close to the devil, in the form of the Hells Angels, that fateful day. The Angels beat up a lot of people and then killed a young black man, while Mick Jagger callously sang and danced along to 'Sympathy for the Devil'. Thus, the 1960s ended, along with the utopian promise of that decade and the youth counterculture."

Coates condemns Gleason, Jagger, and the Angels, but misses the tiny fact that Meredith Hunter came to the foot of the stage armed with a pistol, which he fired shortly before his grotesque demise. Perhaps that day was fated to be the taint of an era? As was previous quoted, "The violence ... seem[ed] inevitable" (Stanley Booth); "A day ... oppressive and dark" (Chris Hillman); and from Gleason himself: "Jagger wasn't hurt, only bruised; but it was an ill omen for the day."

Now I don't know, but I been told
if the horse don't pull you got to carry that load
I don't know whose back's that strong
but we'll maybe find out before too long...

If a pack animal—or, in modern terms, a motorized vehicle—ceases to haul what it should, the only immediate option is to pick up what is needed and move forward as best as is able. Concerning Altamont, the load to be shouldered is that of responsibility. But as Russell considers, "No one ever really took responsibility for what happened at Altamont. Not the Angels, not the people in the crowd, not the Rolling Stones. Each person involved seemed to conclude, each with their own reason, that somehow what happened had nothing [...] to do with them."

But even as no one wants the responsibility for the collision of cultural history with musical folklore at the foot of the stage in the Altamont Speedway the night of December 6, 1969, more than a few would like to offer their opinions on how it all went wrong and who should take the blame.

In a July 1972 Newsday article, Robert Christgau famously wrote, "Writers focus on Altamont not because it brought on the end of an era but because it provided such a complex metaphor for the way an era ended." But a paragraph later, Christgau gives us more than an apt summation of our interest in the complex metaphor of Altamont, instead of genuine facts in the transpiring of events, he lays a powerful cornerstone in musical folklore—that apocryphal rock and roll history that perhaps should have been but wasn't. "Denouement:" Christgau tells us, "An Afro-American bohemian is murdered by a lower-class white Hells Angel while the Englishmen do a song called 'Sympathy for the Devil.'"

Not that actuality survives long in the midst of rock and roll mythology, but fact of the matter was, when Meredith Hunter was murdered, the Rolling Stones were playing "Under My Thumb." But doesn't the story sounds better—more gruesome and grim; more dire and bleak—if the song being performed was "Sympathy for the Devil"?

When Stanley Booth commented that the violence at Altamont later seemed inevitable, we can place in the confluence of events up to Altamont—and the lingering bitterness of its blameful aftermath—something else that seems more metaphoric than real. In February 1969 the Rolling Stones recorded the song "Gimme Shelter" in which Jagger sings—

Rape, murder, it's just a shot away‚ it's just a shot away . . .

—it's seems only appropriately poetic a year later to hear the Grateful Dead reply in the last lines of "New Speedway Boogie":

One way or another
One way or another
One way or another, this darkness has got to give.

Which brings us back to Ralph Gleason's quote of Ken Kesey. "Some things aren't true even if they did happen."

Even a cursory glance at the matter shows that Altamont was just that.

It happened. But it can't possibly be true.

Bibliography

Altamont Free Concert. By Mick Jagger, Keith Richards,

The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club,
Ralph J. Gleason, Meredith Hunter.

Altamont Speedway, California.
6 Dec. 1969. Performance.

"Altamont Free Concert."

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

1 Dec 2009, 17:51 UTC. 2 Dec 2009.

Bangs, Lester, and etc. al.

"The Rolling Stones Disaster at Altamont: Let It Bleed."
Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 1970. Print.

Booth, Stanley. "The True Adventures of Altamont."

Gimme Shelter

Criterion Collection 99 (2000). Print.

Burks, John. "Rock & Rolls' Worst Day:

The Aftermath of Altamont."

Rolling Stone 7 Feb. 1970. Print.

Christgau, Robert. "The Rolling Stones:

Can't Get No Satisfaction."

Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics.
Robert Christgau. Web.

Coates, Norma. "Chapter 6: If anything,

blame Woodstock - The Rolling Stones:
Altamont, December 6, 1969."
Performance And Popular Music:
History, Place And Time.
Ashgate, 2006. Print.

Dodd, David. "The Annotated "New Speedway Boogie"

The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.
Univ. of Calif. at Santa Cruz,

6 Oct. 2003. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

Gimme Shelter. Dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles,

and Charlotte Zwerin.
Perf. The Rolling Stones.
Maysles Films, Cinema 5,
20th Century Fox, 1970. DVD.

"Gimme Shelter (documentary)."

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

5 Nov 2009, 04:40 UTC. 2 Dec 2009.

Gleason, Ralph J. "Aquarius Wept."

Esquire Aug. 1970. Print.

—. "Bad Vibes for the Rolling Stones."

San Francisco Chronicle 5 Dec. 1969. Print.

—. "A Few Guesses on Rolling Stones."

San Francisco Chronicle 28 Nov. 1969. Print.

—. "More Questions for the Rolling Stones."

San Francisco Chronicle 12 Dec. 1969. Print.

—. "The Rolling Stones Are Right On."

San Francisco Chronicle 5 Dec. 1969. Print.

—. "Stones’ Plans for Free S.F. Concert."

San Francisco Chronicle 24 Nov. 1969. Print.

—. "Who's Responsible for the Murder."

San Francisco Chronicle 19 Dec. 1969. Print.

Hughes, Robert. "Gimme Shelter and The Rolling Stones'

nightmare at Altamont."
The Times Online. The Times,
13 Sept. 2009. Web. 6 Dec. 2009.

Hunter, Robert, and Jerry Garcia.

"New Speedway Boogie." Rec. Feb. 1970.
Workingman's Dead. The Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead, Betty Cantor,
Bob Matthews, 1970. Vinyl recording.

Jagger, Mick, and Keith Richards.

"Gimme Shelter." Rec. Feb. and Nov. 1970.
Let It Bleed. The Rolling Stones.
Jimmy Miller, 1969. Vinyl recording.

Lydon, Michael. "The Decade That Spawned Altamont."

Gimme Shelter

Criterion Collection 99 (2000). Print.

Russell, Ethan Adam. Let It Bleed:

The Rolling Stones, Altamont,

and the End of the Sixties.
Springboard, 2009. Print.

Taubin, Amy. "Rock and Roll Zapruder."

Gimme Shelter
Criterion Collection 99 (2000). Print.

Wood, John "Hell's Angels and the Illusion

of the Counterculture."

Journal of Popular Culture 37.2 (2003):
336-351. Academic Search Premier.
EBSCO. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.

· • ·

Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat

The directions for this assignment were to write a purely textual analysis paper on Miller's Crossing. Then write a critical response paper to your own analysis.

It was an identical assignment I had for Reading Popular Culture class (same professor), the difference is that the film class understood the assignment completely. The pop culture class bumbled and stumbled and fumbled around in the dark looking for comprehension of that vastly complicated instruction for the assignment. Write an analysis paper on a text. Then write a critical response to your own work.

Common sense ain't often common, and for some folks, simple directions ain't so easy to understand.


~•~
(Essay: 2nd/Response 1st draft)


ENG 317
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response 2: Miller's Crossing

Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat

Nothing more foolish than a man chasin' his hat.
―Tom Reagan

Almost an hour into Miller's Crossing (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1990) we encounter the only scene in the film where a hat of some kind is not visibly represented. Yet even in being physically absent within the frame of what is seen, hats—or at least one hat—still play(s) a crucial, an integral, part of what takes place between Tom Reagan and Verna Bernbaum (Gabriel Byrne and Marcia Gay Hardin) at this point.

The scene opens in Tom's apartment. Wearing suspenders over his undershirt, Tom sits hunched forward on the edge of his bed smoking a cigarette. A (presumably empty) flask of whiskey sits on a small stand nearby. Through stain-yellowed lace curtains the sky outside lightens with dawn. The telephone rings and Tom answers it as though he's been waiting for it to ring. His side of the conversation is sparse and seemingly uninformative: "Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Where? Okay." He hangs up the phone and pulls the chain to turn on the bedside lamp next to the telephone. Verna stirs in the bed, asking if he's been up all night and what he's chewing over. Tom replies with a comment about a dream he had once. A dream about his hat.

Tom describes his dream to Verna; it's a scene we've already witnessed. In the opening credits of the film the camera looks up towards the sky through the limbs of a forest of pine trees. Without context as to where this forest is or why there is a sudden—seemingly disconnected—shift from urban gangster film and this rural forest, we move as if walking slowly through the trees. Then, cutting to a view from ground-level, a hat falls to the leaf-covered path. The hat is picked up by the wind and swept further along the path away from us, disappearing from view as the opening credits fade out. Only later do we learn that this forest path is the eponymous Miller's Crossing, a remote place where the criminal henchlings take people to be killed.

Verna's response to hearing Tom's dream is somewhat Freudian in nature, in that she assumes a conclusion that is based on stereotypical ideas of what happens in dreams and that symbolism holds sway no matter what the context. When she hears Tom tell her that, in his dream, his hat blew off his head while he was walking in the woods, she interrupts saying, "And you chased it, right? You ran and ran and you finally caught up to it and picked it up but it wasn't a hat anymore. It had changed into somethin' else—somethin' wonderful."

Tom berates Verna's interpretation, almost as if scolding her for her fanciful ideas, "No, it stayed a hat..." He gets up abruptly and starts getting dressed. His demeanor has quickly shifted —as if at the drop of a hat—from quiet rumination to aggravation. We can deduce that the phone call was asking him to meet someone and now he must go throw his hat into the ring. But in this narrative of gambling against double-double-crosses, Tom Reagan plays all angles. He collects as many secrets as he can (keeping them under his hat) and tells others, like Verna, only as much as they need to know; only sharing enough necessary details to get the information he needs. And in this conversation with Verna, Tom continues his habit of talking through his hat.

He asks her where her brother Bernie is—the double-dealing source of the current downward spiral of trouble between crime bosses in this corrupt town—telling her that since Bernie isn't protected anymore, Tom should warn Bernie to split town. Of course, the reason Bernie isn't protected anymore is because of Verna and Tom betraying Leo with their volatile hidden affair.

The banter between Tom and Verna is filled with sharped quips and untold history. Just the sort of hard-boiled dialogue that distinctly marks the noir genre of gangster films Miller's Crossing mimics, draws itself from, and, in many ways, satirizes and contradicts. This scene can be held as a microcosm of the entire film—of the entire genre in its way—filled with variations on the traits and clichés of film noir. The dingy apartment of a down-on-his-luck boozing gambler who's having an affair with his boss's vampy girlfriend; the constant swirl of cigarette smoke; the barbed witty comments between characters; ambiguous motives that form only certain pieces of the puzzle the viewer is invited to figure out but will never fully understand because of the gaps between the information given and the information withheld. And, of course, the hats.

When watching the archetypical film noir movie, a single line of summary could suffice for the entire genre: "I think the man in the hat did something terrible" (The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasden, 1983). Taking that as being true (at least for Miller's Crossing), it becomes ultimately significant that this scene in the middle of the film is glaring empty of any visual hats is itself centered on the talk of a dream in which a hat is lost. The connection between the opening credits (which evidently portray Tom's dream of his hat blowing away in the woods—down a path he will later walk on two separate occasions—once to kill a man ad then again when he is almost certainly going to be killed; both times the expected murder is avoided by a double-cross) and this scene must not be forgotten, bridged, in a way, by the scene following the opening credits, in which Tom awakens from a drunken stupor with his hat missing.

At the close of this scene, Tom—who is already plotting how to play the next series of angles he's been given via the information Verna gives him about Bernie—stares coldly at Verna as she voices a statement that displays the ethically ambiguous nature that pervades Miller's Crossing, "The two of us, we're just about bad enough to deserve each other." As if rationalizing the nature of his own actions—holding himself to a set of moral ideals reserved exclusively for himself—Tom replies with the opened ended question, "Are we…?" Of course, Verna thinks so and answers the question accordingly. But Tom disagrees, and his almost-righteous certainty leads us as witnesses to this tragicomedy of betrayal to remain unsure of what moral and ethical principals are at work here, and, perhaps, where his hat is.

Response

As in almost any gangster or film noir movie, hats play a significant role in setting the tone, creating atmosphere, and casting a particular style to the visual narrative. In the Coen brothers film Miller's Crossing (1990) this tone atmosphere and style involving hats is taken to the extreme.

The scenes discussed in "Sometimes, A Hat Is Just A Hat" (Barrett, 2009) exemplify how even in missing from visual context, the hat is an integral part of the story being told. This then unequivocally demonstrates the symbology involved in what a hat can represent, as well as the importance of meaning placed upon its presence, even if that is a presence via absentia.

When Verna asks Tom what he's chewing over, he tells her he's thinking about a dream he had once. This comment, follow one about having been up all night, inherently implies that the dream he relates to her was one that happened some time ago. It's still in his head some days, if not weeks, later. Powerful imagery to linger in his conscious mind for so long. Taking visual cues from the story, the dream he describes is a scene we witnessed with the opening credits of the film, and subliminally connects us to the importance not only of hats in general, but more specifically, each individual man's hat as being something crucial of himself.

This idea plays out several times in the film. When Tom visits the boxer Drop Johnson, he finds a hat on a table that is far too small to fit Drop, thus the hat left behind becomes more than a hat on a table, it becomes crucial evidence of a double cross in the works. By Tom discovering it, the hat, being citing as too small for Drop, also comes to represent the emasculation of the hat's owner—most likely Bernie Bernbaum. Later, when Bernie himself shows up for the second time at Tom's apartment, his mere presence being a threat to Tom, hats come to represent power and protection. While Bernie is seated in the apartment, his hat rests on his knee as if it were some sort of shield or royal crest. Tom sits across from him in his long underwear and suspenders, almost naked in his hatless state. When Bernie leaves, Tom—only one of two instances in the film where he's been caught off-guard or is defenseless—leaps into action, grabbing—not his shoes and coat, but his pistol and his hat. He short-cuts his way downstairs trying to get the drop on Bernie, but trips and falls to the floor, losing his firearm and hat in the process. Walking past a prostrate and hatlessly naked Tom, Bernie has all the power in this scene.

Towards the end of the film, when secrets are slipping out from the hats they've been tucked under, Verna meets with Tom strolling along a sidewalk in the rain. She asks him what he's doing. "Walking…" he replies curtly. "Don't let on more than you have to," Verna says, obviously frustrated. Tom deigns to elucidate this one time. "…In the rain." When they pause a moment, the rain pelts his hat, rivulets running off as if it can wash clean the secrets and blood causes by the numerous betrayals, lies, and double-crosses we've witnessed in this film. But of course, there is no absolution for this is gangster film noir, and in this scene Tom's hat merely serves to keep the rain off.

Works Cited

Ayto, John, comp.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

17th ed. London: Collins Reference, 2006. Print.

Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen.

"Miller's Crossing Screenplay."

Screenplays For You.
Kinozol. Web. 2 Nov. 2009. .

Miller's Crossing. Dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.

Perf. Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney,

Marcia Gay Hardin, John Turturro.
20th Century Fox, 1990. DVD.

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