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Category Archives: Art
Saturday Matinee: Taking Liberties
“Taking Liberties” (2007) is a British documentary directed by Chris Atkins. Using a mix of animation, news footage and interviews, it examines how Labour has overreacted to the terror threat, using it as an excuse to weaken civil liberteis including the right to protest, right to freedom of speech, right to privacy, right not to be detained without charge, presumption of innocence until proven guilty, and protections against torture. In short, it’s a cinematic chronicle of the origin of the modern British surveillance state under the Blair ministry.
Two for Tuesday
The End of Reality?
By Edward Curtin
Source: Behind the Curtain
In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols:
We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well.
So, if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life, where real is unreal but realer than real, the apparent is cryptic, and up is down, true is false, and what you see you don’t, it has a history. One hundred and thirty-two years ago, Nietzsche added that “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” We know it did, and the bloody butcher’s bench known as the twentieth century was the result. Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since, straight through to 2020. Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods:
Here we are, announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice. We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world. And instead everything has gone back to being a ‘fable’ again. How are we to get our bearings … This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced.
Obviously, we haven’t gotten our bearings. We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life has been replaced by the digital, and “truths” like numbers click into place continuously to lead us in wrong, algorithm-controlled directions. The trap is almost closed.
Of course, Nietzsche did not have the Internet, but he lived at the dawn of the electric era, when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace. Inventions such as photography, the phonograph, the telephone, electricity, etc. were contracting space and time and a disembodied “reality” was being born. With today’s Internet and digital screen life, the baby is full-grown and completely disembodied. It does nothing but look at its image that is looking back into a lifeless void, whose lost gaze can’t figure out what it’s seeing.
Take, for example, the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1878. If you could record a person’s voice, and if that person died, were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead? If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and was miles away, you had also compressed earthly space. The phonograph suppressed absence, conjured ghosts, and seemed to overcome time and death as it captured the flow of time in sound. It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine, an early example of downloading.
“Two ruling ambitions in modern technology,” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book, Speaking into the Air, “appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.”
Many people started to hear voices, and these people were not called deluded. Soon, with the arrival of cinema, they would see ghosts as well. Today, speaking ghosts are everywhere, hiding in hand-held devices. It’s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture.
This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche’s thought. His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well, where theologians and philosophers were discovering that knowledge was relative and had to be understood in situ, i.e., within its historical and social place or context.
Without going into abstruse philosophical issues here, suffice it to say, Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him, but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction. All knowledge, not just science, had to be taken “as if” it were true. This was a consoling mental trick but falsely reassuring, for most people could not accept this, since “knowledge” was a protection racket from pain and insanity. It still is. In other words, not only had people murdered God, but they had slain absolutes as well. This left them in the lurch, not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true, or sort of true – maybe, perhaps. The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought.
While the average person did not delve into these revolutionary ideas, they did, through the inventions that were entering their lives, and the news about Darwin, science, religion, etc., realize, however vaguely, that something very strange and dramatic was under way. Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity.
It is similar to what so many feel today: that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement. An inhuman, trans-human, on-line electronic life where everything is a parody of everything that preceded it, like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell’s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps repeating itself. All this follows from the nineteenth century relativization of knowledge, or what at least was taken as such, for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement. That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma.
This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold’s 19th century poem, “Dover Beach”:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
But that was then. Today, the Joker’s sardonic laughter would suffice.
***
I am sitting outside as I write, sipping a glass of wine before dinner. Although New England fall weather is approaching, a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head. I hear it. I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me. This is real life. If I went into the house and connected to the Internet on the computer screen – news, social media, anything – I would be entering another dimension. Screen life, not real life. The society of the spectacle. No real mosquitoes, no wine, no trees swaying in the evening breeze.
In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, written between Nietzsche’s time and now, Ernest Hemingway, a man who surely lived in the physical world, writes of how Robert Cohn, the boxing champion from Princeton University, wants Jake Barnes, the book’s protagonist, to take a trip with him to South America. As they sit and talk in Paris, Barnes says no, and tells Cohn, “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”
Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not, or simply visionary, I don’t know. For in the 1920s, before passports and widespread tourism, there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures, while today there is almost no place that is not available to view beforehand on the internet or television. So why go anywhere if you’ve already seen it all on a screen? Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been? Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra put it and everyone laughed. Now the laugh is on us.
***
This is neither an argument nor a story. It’s real. I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation. Call it a compass, a weather-vane, a prayer. You can call me Al or Ishmael. Call me crazy. Perhaps this writing is just an “as if.”
***
About fifteen years ago, I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email. I was, as they say, out of the loop since I didn’t do email. I was often asked why I didn’t, and I would repeatedly reply, like Melville’s Bartleby, because “I prefer not to.” Finally, in order to keep my job, I succumbed and with the laptop computer they provided me, I went “on-line.” There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years. In those three years, I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn’t missed a beat. Someone showed me how to delete the emails, which I did without reading any, but I had entered the labyrinth. I went electronic. My reality changed. I am still searching for Ariadne’s thread.
***
But I am not yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one. It’s a very insistent invitation, almost an order. Neil Postman (Oh such a rich surname!) sums it up well in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:
The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines – thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it ‘thinks’ better than we can…John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence’…claims that ‘even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs…What is significant about this response is that it has redefined the meaning of the word ‘belief’ … rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that ‘belief’ means only what someone or something does … rejects the idea that the mind is a biological phenomenon … In other words, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad.
Postman wrote that in 1992, before the computer and the internet became ubiquitous and longer before on-line living had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19.
There is little doubt that we are being pushed to embrace what Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), calls COVID-19:The Great Reset, that involves a total acceptance of the electronic, on-line life. On-line learning, on-line news, on-line everything – only an idiot (from Greek, idiotes, a private person who pays not attention to public affairs) would fail to see what is being promoted. And who controls the electronic life and internet? Not you, not I, but the powers that be, the intelligence agencies and the power elites. Goodbye body, goodbye blood – “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in support of human estrangement.
Peter Koenig, one of the most astute investigators of this propaganda effort, puts it this way:
The panacea of the future will be crowned by the Pearl of the Fourth Industrialization – Artificial intelligence (AI). It will be made possible by a 5G electromagnetic field, allowing the Internet of Things (IoT). Schwab and Malleret [Schwab’s co-author] won’t say, beware, there is opposition. 5G could still be blocked. The 5G existence and further development is necessary for surveillance and control of humanity, by digitizing everything, including human identity and money.
It will be so simple, no more cash, just electronic, digital money – that is way beyond the control of the owner, the truthful earner of the money, as it can be accessed by the Global Government and withheld and / or used for pressuring misbehaving citizens into obeying the norms imposed from above. You don’t behave according to our norms, no money to buy food, shelter and health services, we let you starve. No more travel. No more attending public events. You’ll be put gradually in your own solitary confinement. The dictatorial and tyrannical global commandeering by digital control of everything is the essence of the 4th Age of Industrialization – highly promoted by the WEF’s Great Reset.
***
Like everything, of course, this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history, one that deifies the machine and attempts to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom. Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa. Brain research has received massive government funding. Drugs have been offered as the solution to every human problem. So-called diseases and disorders have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs (or the revers) for scandalous profits. And the mind has been reduced to a figment of deluded imaginations. People are machines; that’s the story, marvelous machines. They have no freedom.
If one wishes an example of techno-fascism, there is one from the art world. Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism. Its leader proponent was an Italian Fascist, friend of Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine, that the machine was god, that it was beyond human control and had to be obeyed. They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones. Patriotism, militarism, strength, method, and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state. The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine’s dictates.
Now we have cyberspace, digital machines, and the internet, an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini, Fascism, and Hitler. That this online world is being pushed as the new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising. If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens, those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented. That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale. Surveillance will be complete.
Yes, there are places on the internet where truth is and will be told, such as this site where you are reading this; but as we can see from today’s growing censorship across the web, those power elites and intelligence forces who control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices. Such censorship starts slowly, and then when one looks again, it is a fait accompli. The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late. Free speech is now being strangled. Censorship is widespread.
The purpose of so much internet propaganda is to confuse, obsess, depress, and then repress the population. The overlords accomplish this by the “peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism – [which] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.” One look into one’s life will suffice to see how the overlords have set people against each other. It’s a classic tactic. Divide and conquer. Trump vs. Biden, Democrats vs. Republicans, whites vs. blacks, liberals vs. conservatives. Pure mind games. Contradictions every day to create social disorientation. Orwell describes Doublethink as follows:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary…If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. [author’s emphasis]
Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well. Digital online life has accomplished that. It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the magicians who serve them – to create counterfeit news and doctored videos at will, to present diametrically opposed points of view within the same paragraph, and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows. Nietzsche obviously didn’t foresee this technology, but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in.
***
The popular 1990s term “Information Superhighway,” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications, was the perfect term to describe this lunacy. Get on that highway and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning of all the information flashing past you as you speed to nowhere. For not only does censorship, propaganda, disinformation, mixed messages, and contradictions line the road you are traveling, but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam, there is too much information to comprehend. And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway, think again, for the cost is high. No one puts out their hand and asks you to pay up; but the more you travel down this road you’ll notice you are missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there. And without a speed pass, you are considered road kill.
To make matters much worse, they say we need 5G to go much faster.
Paul Virilio, who has devoted himself to the study of speed (dromology), puts it this way in Open Sky:
The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world’s very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.
***
And yet I don’t have a simple answer to the internet dilemma. You are reading it on-line and I am posting it there. It is very convenient and quick. And yet…and yet….
Can we just walk away from it? Maybe. Perhaps like those few who, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excruciating story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “progress” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency. Others, us, our children, all children, who are reaching out not for speed and machines, but for the human touch that the on-line propagandists hope to destroy. In Le Guin’s story, the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child. Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world’s children and their futures.
My friend Gary recently sent me this letter. I believe it sums up what many people feel. There is a vast hunger for reality and truth. The analog life. How to live it – the question hangs in the air as the artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines.
Although apparently it isn’t clear if Twain ever said this, it’s still a great quote: (“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”) To which “amen” is the only appropriate response.
I continue to daily stay abreast of events through the web, and these days much of what passed for “progressive media” simply regurgitates the covid madness as if it had been delivered on stone tablets – rather than by the same MSM that lie to us daily about literally ANYTHING of any importance.
There are days I wonder “why” I continue to bother to follow the unfolding madness as if it made some “difference.” I could certainly play guitar more, and I might even get it together to write a few pieces on the nature of our collective madness, for which I have studiously assembled copious notes. I really don’t need any more information or examples – I think I have things covered on that front.
Instead I find myself daily doing the little dance we’re all familiar with – uncomfortable with being “uninformed” – yet at almost every turn finding myself being routinely – “misinformed” – and so having to sift through the endless debris to have any chance at developing any coherent understanding of the world.
So yes, I totally get the draw of just saying to hell with the internet. After years of shifting through the endless propaganda operations our generation has been subject too, I have no doubt you and I see through most the nonsense for what it is before we even have the proof in hand. Once the rose-colored glasses of ‘American exceptionalism’ are off, one can almost sense and see through the lies in real time even as they are being uttered.
Reading Gary’s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s definition of the Unspeakable:
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…
Yes, real time, real life – as we do our little dances.
Can we do our little dances and preserve reality? I’m not sure.
Saturday Matinee: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
No Matter Where You Go, Here It Is
By Peter Sobczynski
Source: RogerEbert.com
Practically from the moment that I first saw it at the age of 13 during its very brief run at the long-defunct Golf Mill Theaters (thanks for the ride, Mom) in the fall of 1984, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension” has been my all-time favorite movie. And yet, it occurs to me that while I’ve been lucky enough to write at length about any number of favorites over the years, I’ve never had the occasion to do so for that particular film. Oh sure, I’ve proclaimed it as a favorite many times and have made reference to it every now and then—I even gave “Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens” an extra half-star for nodding to it—but I haven’t had the opportunity to properly explain my love of the film. Happily, it is now making its long-awaited Blu-ray debut in a package from Shout! Factory that includes all the bells and whistles that members of its ever-widening cult could possibly ask for. Even more happily, it gives me a chance to sit down and once and for all explain why I love this film so much.
Of course, that is easier said than done because, as anyone who has seen it can attest, it’s not exactly the kind of movie that can be summed up in a sentence or two. Even the most basic, no-frills explanation of it will send many heads reeling, either out of excitement or confusion. Perhaps the best place to start is to look at its hero, the one and only Buckaroo Banzai himself. The Japanese-American son of a pair of brilliant scientists, he first studied medicine and became a brilliant neurosurgeon. However, he chose to become a modern-day Renaissance man and soon branched out into particle physics, designing high-powered automobiles, occasionally saving the world with the aid of his band of Blue Blaze Irregulars and performing with his other band, the hard-rocking Hong Kong Cavaliers, a group made up of geniuses from other scientific endeavors. (All of this is summed up for viewers in an opening roll of text not dissimilar from the ones that kick off the “Star Wars” films).
As the film proper opens, Buckaroo (Peter Weller), along with his men and mentor Dr. Hikita (Robert Ito), are ostensibly preparing to test a new Jet Car with the capacity to drive at the speed of sound. The real experiment, however, involves the Oscillation Overthruster, a secret device that they hope will let them drive through solid matter. This is not the first attempt to make a go of the Overthruster. In 1938, Dr. Hikita was working for the eminent physicist Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) when he tried to pass through—the experiment was a botch that lodged him partway through a wall, and landed him in the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane. In 1955, an attempt by Hikita and Buckaroo’s parents was sabotaged by crime lord Hanoi Xan via a bombing that killed his parents. (A flashback to this scene was cut from the original release but can be seen in the deleted scenes, where we discover that Buckaroo’s mother was played by Jamie Lee Curtis.) Buckaroo, however, succeeds and not only manages to drive through a mountain with nary a scratch, he has returned with some kind of alien organism attached to the Jet Car. Upon hearing this news, Lizardo breaks out of the asylum, claiming that he is going home. (Get ready because now things are about to get a little confusing.)
As it turns out, when Lizardo was trapped in the eighth dimension all those decades ago, he had his mind taken over by Lord John Whorfin, a fearsome Red Lectroid who was banished there alongside many of his followers after an unsuccessful attempt to take over their home world of Planet 10 from the more peaceable Black Lectroids. Before being locked up, he managed to bring many fellow Red Lectroids to Earth, where they have been living in plain sight and are now running a defense contracting company based in Grover’s Mills, New Jersey that is currently in charge of building a new bomber for the US Air Force. What they have really been doing with the government’s money is building a spaceship that will allow them to rescue their comrades still trapped in the 8th Dimension and return to take over Planet 10 once and for all. Now that Buckaroo has perfected the necessary Overthruster, all they need to do is steal it and they are home free.
After receiving a mysterious electric shock that allows him to see Lectroids as they really are and prevent the attempted theft of the Overthruster during a press conference, Buckaroo learns of the existence of Yoyodyne. But when the Hong Kong Cavaliers hack into their computer database, they discover that every single employee has the first name of John, a bizarre surname and an application for a Social Security card dated November 1, 1938. Around this time, a Black Lectroid emissary arrives with a message from their leader stating that if Buckaroo is unable to stop Whorfin/Lizardo from using the Overthruster to return to the eighth dimension, they will protect themselves by faking a nuclear attack that will start World War III. With the fate of the world now in his hands, Buckaroo and his team, including new Hong Kong Cavalier recruit Sidney Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum), a neurosurgeon and piano player who dresses up in full cowboy gear (including chaps) and calls himself New Jersey, and Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), a mysterious woman who meets Buckaroo after being accused of trying to shoot him during a concert (she was actually trying to kill herself but was accidentally bumped by a waitress at the key moment), set off to do battle with the Lectroids, recover the Overthruster, save humanity and if time permits, explain exactly what that watermelon is doing there.
In other words, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” is your typical sci-fi/action/comedy/rock&roll/kung-fu/political satire/neo-western/guys-on-a-mission extravaganza. The film was the brainchild of writer Earl Mac Rauch, who had written a couple of novels and co-wrote the screenplay to the Martin Scorsese musical “New York, New York,” and W.D. Richter, who had already established himself as a writer of quirky screenplays through such films as the goofy action comedy “Slither” and the masterful 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” One day, Mac Rauch dreamed up this character that would eventually be called Buckaroo Banzai and Richter encouraged him to write a screenplay involving his adventures. Supposedly, Mac Rauch would start one, get about fifty pages into it and then abandon it to try again with a new story. Eventually, Richter and producer Neil Canton formed a company to make “Buckaroo Banzai” and got Rauch to write a new treatment, using material from his previous attempts, that was then called “Lepers from Saturn.” Although it was rejected by many, it got noticed at MGM and studio chief David Begelmen agreed to finance it. Unfortunately, the project was then delayed for nearly a year because of a writers strike and Begelmen left MGM after a number of his expensive projects died at the box-office. However, Begelmen formed his own production company, bought the script back from MGM and made a deal with 20th Century Fox to produce it.
This would prove to be good news and bad news for the project. On the one hand, it was Begelmen’s enthusiasm that eventually got the film up and running. On the other hand, he apparently saw it as a straightforward action film in the mold of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and either overlooked the weirdo humor in the screenplay or just assumed that Richter and Mac Rauch would dump all of that nonsense somewhere along the way in order to ensure that it would be a hit. Once it became evident that the weird stuff was not going by the wayside, Begelmen began battling with Richter, Mac Rauch and Canton over the most inexplicable things in a misguided attempt to exert authority and make the film that he wanted. For example, Richter has hired the great cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, whose credits included such titles as “Brewster McCloud,” “Altered States” and, perhaps his most famous work, “Blade Runner.” The story goes that Begelmen agreed to his hiring as long as he didn’t make the film look in any way like “Blade Runner” but after several weeks of shooting, he decided that it was indeed looking like “Blade Runner” and had Cronenweth replaced with Fred J. Koenekamp, who had shot such epics as “Patton” and “The Towering Inferno.” At another point, he threatened to shut down the production over a pair of red-rimmed glasses that Buckaroo wore in a couple of scenes on the theory that heroes don’t wear red glasses.
The struggles to make the film were equaled only by the struggles to get it released and find an audience. Perhaps realizing early on that trying to sell the film to a mainstream audience at first might not be a wise idea, Fox decided to promote it at sci-fi conventions in the months leading up to its release by stressing that it was a cult movie in the making. Unfortunately, this approach wound up backfiring as the sci-fi audience was understandably wary of anything announcing itself as a cult movie before anyone had actually seen it—in their eyes, a cult movie is one that is discovered and nurtured by a loyal audience, not one that arrives in theaters proclaiming itself as such right from the get-go. “Buckaroo Banzai” was originally scheduled for a wide release on June 8, 1984 (which would have pitted it against the opening weekends of “Ghostbusters” and “Gremlins”) but was bumped at the last minute to a much-reduced opening in a few cities in mid-August that barely made any impact, though it did receive good reviews from the likes of Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. Over the next couple of months, it opened in a few more cities before finally disappearing from theaters altogether.
And this is the point where the film and I finally crossed paths. Back in the prehistoric days before the Internet, a kid obsessed with the world of film would have to get himself down to the local bookstore or newsstand to purchase magazines that contained articles about upcoming releases. One such magazine was Starlog, which was dedicated to new and classic films in the sci-fi/fantasy genres and even though they were not necessarily favorites of mine, there were usually enough items of interest in each issue to make it worth the purchase. Now, 1984 provided a bumper crop of titles for genre fans—this was the year of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Ghostbusters,” “Streets of Fire,” “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” “Gremlins,” “2010,” “The Last Starfighter,” “Dune” and the proverbial many more—and while not all of them may have lived up to the hype, they sure looked tantalizing at the time. As good as most of those looked, it was this “Buckaroo Banzai” thing that looked most intriguing to me. Even at the borderline precocious age of 13, I had already fancied myself as someone who knew more than a thing or two about movies but I had never seen or heard of anything like this before. Needless to say, that June release date couldn’t come quickly enough and even though the August delay was frustrating, my enthusiasm did not wane. However, it was devastating to discover that Chicago was not a part of that August release and that when it did finally open locally a month or so later, it was only in a couple of theaters with the nearest one located about 40 miles away. Thanks to a supremely indulgent mother, I made it to that theater during its opening weekend and sat down in what was, aside from myself, my mother and maybe five other people, an almost totally empty house to finally bear witness to the film that I had been obsessing over for months. I must admit that as the lights went down, the pessimist in me was thinking “What if this isn’t that good after all?”
Fat chance of that happening. Not only did “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” live up to all of my insanely inflated expectations, it somehow managed to exceed them. I loved that it took any number of film genres and slammed them all together into one crazy-quilt narrative. I loved the idea of a hero who was valued more for his brains than for his ability to beat the bad guys into a pulp. I loved the funky New Wave aesthetic. I loved the decidedly offbeat humor, especially since one of my problems with science-fiction has always been its tendency to occasionally take itself a little too seriously at times. I loved the idea that all of the spaceships on display looked more like seashells or rotting fruit than the gleaming craft that whizzed through space on “Star Trek.” I loved the jaw-dropping performance by John Lithgow as Emilio Lizardo, a hilariously audacious turn that saw him using “frothing mad” as a mere stepping-off point to a level of pure craziness that at times seems more like a possession than a performance. I loved the sight of Ellen Barkin in that slinky pink dress. (Hey, I was a 13-year-old boy.) I even loved the end credits sequence that found Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers traipsing through an empty L.A. aqueduct to the tune of the film’s jaunty theme music while the titles breathlessly promised that they would return in “Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League,” despite sensing (correctly, as it turned out) that the lack of people in the theaters meant such a prospect was unlikely at best. Watching this film, it was almost as if someone was tapping directly into my mind’s idea of a great movie and projecting it before my eyes. (For those of you who are curious, venerable Mom wound up enjoying it as well, though the few other patrons seemed more than a little bewildered when the lights went up afterwards.)
However, unlike a lot of things that seemed cool back in the day and eventually look fairly silly with the wisdom of age, my admiration for “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai” has only grown over the years as I have been able to appreciate just how innovative and groundbreaking it was. For example, while genre mash-ups are a relatively common occurrence these days, they were fairly non-existent back then—the fear being that such things would be impossible to market to people who preferred a undiluted take on their preferred genre over one that mixed up with with several others—and it is amazing to see how well Richter and Mac Rauch juggle the various generic tropes in ways that clearly have fun with them without crossing the line into overtly making fun of them. Additionally, I love the way it dropped this bizarre and complicated mythology in the laps of viewers without any elongated explanations and assumed that they would have the intelligence to figure things out as it went along. Now this wasn’t a completely unheard-of approach—“Star Wars” began in much the same way—but it was taken to such a level here that it almost felt like you were watching chapter five of a serial where you had already missed chapters one through four. Admittedly, this approach may have alienated as many viewers as it enchanted—some reviewers complained that they felt as if they were watching someone else’s private in-joke that made no effort to let them in on the fun—but to these eyes, the notion of creating this oddly detailed world (with stuff practically bursting out of every jam-packed frame) and then immersing viewers in it was an audacious approach that paid off beautifully. If you ever wondered what might have resulted if Robert Altman had ever been given the reins of a large-scale science-fiction project (not counting “Quintet”), this film may be the closest that we ever come to answering that question.
Another aspect of the film that may have bewildered viewers but now seems startlingly prescient is how it depicts a world in which popular culture has extended its tendrils into all areas of life in unexpectedly goofy ways. No matter where one goes in the film, there is an odd cultural reference there to comment upon it. During the Jet Car experiment, we see a scientific gauge labeled “Sine” that is eventually followed by ones marked “Seeled” and “Delivered.” When it is announced that Dr. Lizardo has escaped from the asylum, he is mistaken by one person for Mr. Wizard. During Whorfin’s manic speech rallying his men as they prepare to leave for Planet 10, he sort-of quotes the Beach Boys cover “Sloop John B” by exhorting “I feel so broke-up, I want to go home!” Orson Welles (“The guy from the old wine commercials?”) is the basis of a couple of gags, one fleeting (when we get a glimpse of the President of the United States, played by Ronald Lacey, he is made up to look exactly like Charles Foster Kane) and one that inspires one of its funniest conceits. As it turns out, the infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast was not fiction at all—it was Lectroids landing in New Jersey, not Martians, and they hypnotized Orson Welles into broadcasting that it was all made up. Even Buckaroo himself is often depicted as a pop culture hero just as much as he is a regular hero—we see his face plastered upon comic books and video games and he is, to be sure, the rare hero who tops off a day of derring-do by playing a sold-out concert with his band that finds him belting out an especially soulful cover of the classic “Since I Don’t Have You.”
And yet, the oddest and perhaps most arcane cultural reference is the odd connection the film shares with the works of legendary author Thomas Pynchon. Not only does it share a certain thematic similarity with the dense narratives and weirdo humor prevalent in Pynchon’s work, his cheerfully surreal novel The Crying of Lot 49 was largely centered around an shadowy aerospace manufacturer known as Yoyodyne Systems. In fact, one could argue the case that long before the arrival of “Inherent Vice,” “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” at least in a metaphorical sense, was the first real stab at bringing the Pynchon perspective from the page to the screen. (The plot thickened when Pynchon published his 1990 novel Vineland, which itself contained a couple of not-so-subtle references to “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai,” leading to speculation that either Richter or Mac Rauch actually were the reclusive novelist.)
As for the performances, all of the actors clearly found just the right way to connect with the admittedly quirky tone of the material. Some have slagged Peter Weller for being a little stiff at times but they are missing the point—this is a character who is so cool and above the fray that he doesn’t have to be constantly calling attention to himself. More importantly, he serves the necessary duty of being the anchor of the film that keeps it from flying off amidst all of the other oddball characters—it is a smart piece of underplaying from an actor who has never quite gotten his due despite starring in two all-time genre classics (the other, of course, being “Robocop”). Jeff Goldblum had already proven himself to be a more-than-reliable supporting player by the time he did this film and his ability to put a unique and often hilarious spin on even the most seemingly mundane bit of dialogue never shone brighter than it did here. (He also deserves credit not only for donning one of the goofiest Western outfits ever seen but somehow making it work against all odds.) As Penny Priddy, the one female character of note (perhaps the one aspect of the film that does not date very well today), Ellen Barkin more than holds her own with the guys. Christopher Lloyd turns up as John Bigboote, who has been in charge of the goings-on at Yoyodyne over the past few decades and whose name inspires a great running joke involving Whorfin repeatedly mispronouncing it as “big booty,” and he is a blast throughout. However, the scene-stealer of the bunch—indeed, one of the scene-stealing performances of all time—is unquestionably John Lithgow as Emilio Lizardo. Given the rare opportunity to play a character where going too far over the top is simply impossible, Lithgow pulls out all the stops with his astoundingly flamboyant turns in which everything from his accent (which genuinely sounds like an alien trying to approximately an Italian dialect) to his wardrobe (which finds him wearing two of everything) is cranked up to maximum effect. And yet, even though he is playing a character who is clearly out of control, the performance never is—Lithgow knows exactly when to go for laughs or menace and hits those beats perfectly every time. He also gets many of the film’s best lines as well and I guarantee that after you see it, you too will be quoting (no doubt in your best approximation of the accent) such classic lines as, “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!” and “Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife/Doomed is-a your soul and damned is your life!”
Although the film tanked in theaters, it eventually began to develop a genuine cult following once it hit cable and home video and brave viewers were given the chance to experience it for themselves. The promised sequel never emerged (due in part to a tangled situation involving the rights and the bankruptcy of the original production company), but “Buckaroo Banzai” has continued to live on in the pop culture firmament in odd and unusual ways. A couple of installments of the “Dick Tracy” comic strip made arcane references to the film and the finale of Wes Anderson’s “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” paid homage to the end credits sequence (and, of course, included Jeff Goldblum in the mix). After a long delay, the film came out on DVD in 2001 in an edition that deepened the meta-textual joke, positing that Buckaroo Banzai was indeed a real person and that the film was actually a docudrama depicting real-life events. Strangely enough, in 1998, Fox attempted to develop a TV adaptation that was to be titled “Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets and New Mysteries” that never got off the ground save for a brief bit of test computer animation that can be found as an extra on the new Blu-ray. Even more strangely, it was announced earlier this year that another attempt to bring it to television was being attempted by none other than Kevin Smith and that Amazon Studios might be producing it.
Whether or not this particular endeavor pans out remains to be seen. However, until it happens, the new Blu-ray should more than tide over fans of the film. The two-disc package contains all the material from the original DVD release—the original commentary with Richter and Mac Rauch maintaining the illusion that what they are presenting is fact, deleted scenes, the alternate opening with Buckaroo’s parents, a short featurette and the trailer—along with a new commentary from sci-fi experts Michael and Dennis Okuda. More importantly, there is “Into the 8th Dimension,” a full-length documentary that chronicles every possible aspect of the film from its strange beginnings to its occasionally tortured production to its long and fruitful afterlife that is packed with fascinating tidbits of information. For example, we learn that when Richter first found the actor he wanted to play Buckaroo, Begelmen refused to cast him on the belief that he would never become a movie star—so long, Tom Hanks.
Of course, the best feature of all is the film itself in all its crazy, one-of-a-kind glory. For decades, I have loved this movie beyond all others. Watching it again, I realized that love had not been misplaced in the slightest. Now, those of you who have never seen it before may not react in quite the same way as I did, but I can pretty much guarantee that you have never seen a film quite like it—maybe the one that came closest to approximating its wild mixup of genres and strange humor was “Big Trouble in Little China,” on which Richter served as a co-writer—and that if you are able to accept its offbeat nature, you are in for the cinematic ride of your life. And when it is all over and you begin to delve into the special features, you will even finally learn exactly what that watermelon was doing there.
Watch the full film on Hoopla.
Two for Tuesday
Saturday Matinee: Trust Machine
TRUST MACHINE is the first blockchain-funded, blockchain-distributed, and blockchain-focused documentary. It explores the evolution of cryptocurrency, blockchain and decentralization, including the technology’s role in addressing important real-world problems, such as world hunger and income inequality.
Watch the full film on Kanopy.
After the Crash 