Forbidden Fruit

Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Back in the 70’s there was a strip club located in the garment district, on 35^th off Eighth called Forbidden Fruit. That was back in the days when New York was a far more dangerous and wide open city. New York was on the skids and anything went (or goes), It was years before there was money for the kind of development that was the modus operandi behind Rudy Guiliani’s clean up of Times Square. But even by the standards of the time, Forbidden Fruit lived up to its name, with totally naked often inebriated sylphs populating what was essentially an adolescent wet dream. But the name is the point. There were other strip clubs but they had more prosaic names like Diamond Lil’s and Legz Diamond (which still exists). But who ever named Forbidden Fruit was inspired by the biblical story of temptation which led to the Adamic “Fall.” In l990, MoMA would present High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, an exhibit curated by the then New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik in collaboration with Kurt Varnedoe, the director of the museum’s department of painting and sculpture.  But it’s nice when the conjunction of two impulses takes places in a truly underworld, or underground setting. Forbidden Fruit was a far cry from today's Gentlemen’s lap dancing clubs (like say Scores) where sex is highly regulated, expensive and accompanied by fine food and wine. Forbidden Fruit—its name conveying a biblical jeremiad—could have been the second circle of Dante’s Inferno where sinners as varied as Paris, Semiramis and Helen were punished for their desires. It also resembled the lust scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, minus of course the murderous rape device. Forbidden Fruit was painted in chiaroscuro and the action that transpired on the premises called to mind Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.”

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night or Un Chat Andalou

What is Iranian noir? Like The Blair Witch Project it’s shot in black and white and maybe recalls 60’s B movies like Succubus with a little bit of Rebel Without a Cause, thrown in.  Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night stars a vampire in a chador (Sheila Vand) who rides a skateboard. She sucks the blood out of Saeed, a drug dealer and pimp with “sex" tattooed on his Adam’s apple. Saeed has a stuffed antelope over his bar and modern art on the walls of his pad. She tells Atti, a prostitute  (Mozhan Marno), “You’re sad. You don’t remember what you want. You don’t remember wanting.” And she falls for a James Dean look alike, Arash (Arash Marandi) who drives a Thunderbird and pierces her ears with a safety pin at night in the front of the bilging smoke- stacks of the local power plant. As you may be able to tell A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is totally over the top. Like its heroine, it sucks blood-- this time out of a number of genres rather than people--including that of the morality tale. But it’s the settings of the movie, the oil fields, the domiciles of Arash, who lives with his father Hossein (Marshall Manesh), a heroin addict, of the vampire herself, of the prostitute and of a wealthy prima donna, Shaydah (Rome Shandaloo), who is recovering from a nose job, that tell the story. Though this vampire is an avenging angel, you may have to search in vain for political allegory, despite the fact that the movie takes place in, yes, Bad City, Iran. Amirpour, is obviously in love with film style and particularly the haunting postmodern surrealism found in filmmakers like David Lynch and David Fincher. Looking for a message in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night would be like trying to analyze the politics of Un Chien Andalou and with the film’s resident cat perched enigmatically between the vampire and her lover in the film’s final scene, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night might also have been called Un Chat Andalou.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

In the Dirty Harry films Clint Eastwood established a dynamic by which retribution is justified by the degree of the crime being avenged. Harry Callahan was the best argument there is for terrorism as a response to oppression and his .44 Magnum is curiously prescient of escalating cycles of vengeance and reprisal not only on an individual level but in troubled parts of our present world. In David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larrson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a similar dynamic is working. The over the top vengeance that Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) engineers is directly proportionate the traumas she’s experienced both in the present, as a victim of a brutal rape, and in the past by virtue of her abusive upbringing. She's the spokes person for all the mutilated women in the movie, the equivalent of a walking class action suit against a world of serial murders and sexual abusers. The novel and the movie on which it’s based, whatever one may think of them, are, however, beyond good and evil, since they are cultural phenomenae and significant as products of their times. And what makes them unique? Firstly, on the broadest level, to quote George Santayana, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The film is mired in repetitions, beginning and ending on an accident, perpetrating a family line of sexual predators and propagating the notion of a never ending cycle of revenge. Beyond this, every era produces its own private eyes and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo presents a social misfit, threatened with institutionalization, who is a master of bisexuality, hacking and self-mutilation (to the extent that she is pierced and tattooed). As private eyes go, Lisbeth is about as far from the cool elegance of  The Thin Man as they come, yet she’s an acute observer and up there with the best shamuses.  Archaic forms of  Christianity permeate the plot and also recall the kind of nightmarish form of Christianity that raised its head in, in The Exorcist  and more recently in The Da Vinci Code. Most of the movie takes place on an island and one can’t help thinking about another island in contemporary Swedish folklore and that’s Bergman’s Faro where sadism, familial agony and a God that was both haunting and silent were also portrayed, albeit with eons greater profundity and a total lack of the kind of emotional manipulation that both Larsson and Fincher excel at.

The Social Network

Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." "Style is content" is another shibboleth of the modernist movement, which began to recognize that context—the way in which the images and text that make up so-called content are ingested and regurgitated—is as important as the content itself. Think about what you remember when you recall a movie or television show and it will soon become apparent that style outweighs the message. You may not remember the plot of The Manchurian Candidate or Psycho, but you will surely remember the paranoiac style. This emphasis on cultural context is at the heart of the deconstructionist view of literature, in which texts are value-free products of the psychosocial moments that produce them. Thus it is a curiosity that The Social Network, which purports to deal with the latest revolution of the Internet medium, a revolution which some experts believe is tantamount to the invention of email itself, is such an anachronism. The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, whose Seven was one of the most terrifying essays of style of its decade, approaches its subject almost entirely in terms of gossipy content of the litigious variety (the plot is structured around the suits that have been filed against Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, by three of his Harvard classmates, the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin, who helped found the company). Facebook may have been started as a dating site (with gossip correctly identified by Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the screenplay, as the grist for its mill), but its implications have phenomenological consequences that far exceed any of the intentions delineated in Fincher’s movie, which is full of girls at parties in Cambridge and Palo Alto drinking too much and taking off their clothes. Not the least of the concerns is the nature of personality itself. The concept of transparency, which Facebook introduces into the cyber universe, runs in direct contradiction to the previous anonymity of Internet life, with its avatars and screen names. Facebook presents human personality as a series of surfaces defined by preferences that become apparent from the consuming habits of its members. The comparison between the view of personality that Facebook espouses and that of modern depth psychology, with its notion of unconscious life, is equivalent to the comparison between the kind of language philosophy advocated by a different set of Cambridge thinkers, almost a century ago, and the metaphysics propounded by German idealist philosophers in places like Freiberg, Marburg and Heidelberg centuries before that. Sadly, The Social Network totally trivializes the significance of the revolution it heralds.